Knights Hospitaller (of Rhodes), Order of the
Years: 1309 - 1530
After the fall of the Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1291 (Jerusalem itself had fallen in 1187), the Knights Hospitaller had been confined to the County of Tripoli and, when Acre was captured in 1291, the order had sought refuge in the Kingdom of Cyprus.
Finding themselves becoming enmeshed in Cypriot politics, their Master, Guillaume de Villaret, had created a plan of acquiring their own temporal domain, selecting Rhodes to be their new home, part of the East Roman (Byzantine) empire.
His successor, Fulkes de Villaret, executes the plan, and on August 15, 1309, after over two years of campaigning, the island of Rhodes surrenders to the knights.
They also gain control of a number of neighboring islands and the Anatolian port of Halicarnassus and the island of Megiste.
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The military orders in the East can no longer offer a standing nucleus of troops.
The Hospitallers of St. John of Jerusalem, having taken Rhodes in 1308 and established their headquarters here, become known from 1309 as the Order of the Knights of Rhodes.
The Hospitalers move from Cyprus to Rhodes in 1310, rebuilding the city of Rhodes and ruling the island as an independent state.
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 succession to the throne of the Kingdom of Hungary had become contested, after the senior line of the Árpád dynasty died out in 1301, by several foreign monarchs and other runners-up, among them Charles Robert of Anjou, the Pope's champion.
Over several years Charles Robert has driven his foreign opponents out of the country and installed himself on the Hungarian throne.
Hungary at this time is a confederation of small kingdoms, principalities and dukedoms.
Angevin rule remains nominal in many parts of the Kingdom, however, because several powerful magnates, local kings, dukes and princes still do not recognize him as the supreme king.
Charles Robert's chief adversary initially is Máté Csák, who controls several counties in western and northern parts of the Hungary.
He allies himself eventually with the Aba family, which rules the eastern Hungarian Kingdom.
Charles Robert besieges Sáros Castle, (now part of Slovakia—Šariš Castle) controlled by the Abas, in 1312m but after the Abas receive additional reinforcement from Máté Csák (according to Chronicon Pictum almost Máté's entire force as well as seventeen hundred mercenary spearmen), he is forced to retreat to the loyal Szepes county (Spiš), whose German inhabitants subsequently reinforce his own troops.
The Abas' benefit from the his retreat.
They decide to use the gathered opposition forces to attack the town of Kassa (today Košice) because of its strategic importance, and partially due to the fact that just few months before Charles had had Amadeus Aba assassinated by the Kassa's German colonists, who comprise the ruling classes of most cities in present-day Slovakia.
Charles Robert marches on Kassa and engaged his adversaries.
The opposition forces abandons the siege of Kassa and position their troops on a hill near the Tarca (Torysa river).
Charles Robert is forced to position his troops in flat agricultural land under this hill.
Although the numbers are uncertain, the king's army consists of his own men, an Italian unit of Knights Hospitaller, and a one thousand-men strong infantry unit of Carpathian Germans.It is not clear to what extent the Aba family was helped by Máté Csák's forces, as there are contradicting versions in contemporary chronicles.
The battle commences when the rebels make a surprise attack during or just after the Mass in the king's camp.
A bloody mêlée follows, causing heavy casualties among knights on both sides.
Even the king's battle standard is lost at one point, and Charles Robert himself has to fight under the standard of the Knights Hospitaller.
A reinforcement from Kassa comes in the crucial moment of the battle and saves the king's cause.
The rebel army, after it loses its commanders in the battle, is routed.
Part of the Aba domain is divided between the King and his loyal followers.
Máté Csák's loss of his key ally is also an important blow to his cause.
He will manage to control much of his territories until his death in 1321, but his power starts to decline just after the battle and he will never again be able to launch any major offensive against the king.
The immediate consequence is that Charles Robert gains control over the northeastern part of the country, but the long-term consequences of the victory are even more important.
The battle drastically reduces the magnates' opposition against him.
The King extends his power base and prestige.
The position of Charles as King of Hungary is now secured militarily and resistance against his rule comes to its end.
The Knights Hospitaller had quickly assumed military action in the waters of the Aegean Sea following their conquest of Rhodes, which they have made their base of operations.
Their targets are not only Turkish ships, but also a Genoese vessel carrying out trade with Mamluk Egypt in defiance of an embargo on such activities by the Pope, even though the Genoese had assisted the Hospitallers in their capture of Rhodes.
The Genoese had sent an envoy to Rhodes to demand the ships' release in 1311, but the Knights refused.
In retaliation, the Genoese have given fifty thousand gold florins to Mesut, Bey of Menteshe, to attack the Knights.
Mesut had seized several Rhodian merchants in the mainland, and Genoese and Turkish galleys had begun attacking Hospitaller shipping.
The Hospitaller fleet managed in 1312, however, to intercept the fleet of Menteshe at the island of Amorgos.
The Turks having landed on the island, the Hospitallers burn all twenty-three Turkish ships, and proceed to attack the Turks.
Over eight hundred Turks are killed, according to a fifteenth-century chronicle, but the Hospitallers too have heavy losses, with fifty-seven Knights and three hundred foot soldiers being killed.
A contemporary letter by an Aragonese ambassador to the Council of Vienne, however, mentions fifteen hundred Turks and seventy-five Knights killed.
The Hospitallers capture Kos and castles on the mainland, probably the coast of Menteshe, in the aftermath of the Battle of Amorgos.
King Philip IV of France, after years of persecution of the Knights Templar that he had originally colluded in starting in 1307, finally succeeds in having Clement suppress the Templars by papal bull, though outside the Council of Vienne, on March 22, 1312.
Furthermore, Clement is obliged to dissolve the Templars himself so as not to leave their extinction to Philip and to erase from the papal registers all apostolic letters against Philip and his agents.
The order's property throughout Europe is transferred to the Hospitalers or confiscated by the state.
Many Templars are executed or imprisoned.
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, ...
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.