Roger de Flor attends a banquet offered…

The collapse of Constantinople's power in western Anatolia and the Aegean Sea in the late thirteenth century, as well as the disbandment of the imperial navy in 1284, had created a power vacuum in the region, which had been swiftly exploited by the Turkish beyliks and the ghazi raiders.

The Turks, utilizing local Greek seamen, began to engage in piracy across the Aegean, targeting especially the numerous Latin island possessions.

The feuds between the two major Latin maritime states, Venice and Genoa, aid the Turkish corsair activities.

The Turks of Menteshe (and later the Aydinids) had captured the port town of Ephesus in 1304, and the islands of the eastern Aegean seemed about to fall to Turkish raiders.

The Knights Hospitaller occupied Rhodes to forestall such a calamitous event, in about 1308, the same year the Genoese occupied Chios, where Benedetto I Zaccaria had established a minor principality.

These two powers will bear the brunt of countering Turkish pirate raids until 1329.

The Order, under the leadership of Foulques de Villaret, had launched a successful attempt at the conquest of Rhodes in the years 1308 and 1309.

Other islands were also taken, including Kastellórizo and Bodrum.

The Hospitallers then moved their headquarters to Rhodes.

However, despite the huge benefits to his Order from the suppression of the Knights Templar (the Templars' assets had been assigned to the Hospitallers by the Pope in 1312), Villaret's campaigns of territorial expansion have run the Order heavily into debt (these debts will not be paid off until the mid-1330s.

Villaret seems to have been a difficult and overbearing man, and eventually alienated his Order.

Allegations were made of increasingly arrogant, even tyrannical, behavior, although none of the allegations are specific, and one Italian account of the lives of the Grand Masters claims that he was treated unjustly.

The Order had attempted a coup against Villaret in 1317.

A group of knights had gone to assassinate him at his residence at Rhodini, but his chamberlain had aided his escape to the Hospitaller castle at Lindos, where he was besieged by his own Order, ...

...who meanwhile chose Maurice of Pagnac, who had been a draper in his early life, as the new Grand Master.

The dispute was then brought before the Pope, who in early 1319 had rejected Pagnac's election, mostly due to Villaret's continuing popularity in Western Europe, but soon after, Villaret was pressured to resign, and in June 1319 he is replaced by Hélion of Villeneuve.

The Aydinid fleet, comprising eighteen galleys and eighteen other vessels under the personal command of the Aydinid emir Mehmed Beg, sets sail from the port of Ephesus in July 1319.

It is s met off Chios by a Hospitaller fleet of twenty-four ships and eighty Hospitaller knights, under Albert of Schwarzburg, to which a squadron of one galley and six other ships had been added by Martino Zaccaria of Chios.

The battle ends in a crushing Christian victory: only six Turkish vessels manage to escape capture or destruction.

This victory is followed up by ...

...the recovery of Leros, whose native Greek population had rebelled in the name of the emperor in Constantinople, and by another victory in the next year over a Turkish fleet poised to invade Rhodes.

Pope John XXII rewards Schwarzburg by restoring him to the post of grand preceptor of Cyprus, whence he had been dismissed two years earlier, and promised the commandery of Kos, if he could capture it.

Efforts begin to form a Christian naval league to counter Turkish piracy, but the defeat off Chios cannot halt the rise of Aydinid power in the immediate future.

The Zaccarias will soon after be forced to surrender their mainland outpost of Smyrna to Mehmed's son Umur Beg, under whose leadership Aydinid fleets will roam the Aegean for the next two decades, until the Smyrniote crusades (1343–1351) break the Aydinid emirate's power.