University of Malta

Venice rejoiced at the news of the fall of Hospitaller Rhodes on 21 December 1522. On 4 March 1523, the Venetian Senate elected Pietro Zen the Republic's special envoy to the Ottoman Porte. He would convey their felicitations to Suleyman the Magnificent on his recent conquest of Rhodes and the adjoining Dodecanese islands, together with their happy hopes for the suppression of piracy. The Sultan's possession of Rhodes would herald a boon to seaborne trade, as the Senate was convinced that he `would sweep the sea clean of the corsairs who were as great a nuisance to the Porte as to the Republic.' On 1 January 1523, the Knights, led by Philippe de Villiers de l'Isle Adam, sailed out of the harbour - `swift, silent, and at night',¹ accompanied by some three hundred Rhodiots - Latin and Greek - who freely followed them on their travels around Europe. The courtly l'Isle Adam, formerly Grand Prior of France, had been elected Grandmaster on 22 January 1521, barely eighteen months before the siege. With them too departed the island's importance and prosperity. For more than two centuries, his predecessors `had ruled like doges in the southeastern Aegean'. From Rhodes, they sailed to Crete, and thence to Sicily, entering Rome in September 1523. It is the purpose of the present paper to provide a brief, introductory overview of aspects of the eight-year odyssey within the constraining context of

Contemporary developments in Europe and the Mediterranean, and focusing in particular on Charles V's donation of Malta to the Hospitallers. It is precisely only a thorough knowledge of the prevailing conditions in Europe during the early decades of the sixteenth century that can perhaps explain with any modicum of plausibility why the Knights of St John had had to wait for nearly eight whole years to find a decent, agreeable space for themselves in Europe. This delay may be attributed in part to forces independent of the Order's crisis and which helped to worse confound an already tense and astoundingly complicated situation. There were three major problems confronting Christendom at this particular point in time - the first was the internecine warfare provoked by the enmity which Charles V and Francis I entertained for each other (the latter desparately trying to break his encirclement by imperial possessions), with the Pope and most of the minor princes getting unavoidably embroiled in the conflict. It turned Italy into the battlefield of Europe. The second was the Lutheran revolt. In 1517 Martin Luther had nailed his famous 95 theses to the church door of the Wittenburg Cathedral. From the Diet of Worms (January 1521) to the Second Diet of Speyer (1529), his dramatic opposition to Rome drew Europe into the `vortex of religious strife'. He threatened the dominance of the Holy See, while `German evangelicalism threatened Latin Catholicism'.