DOI: 10.36253/979-12-215-1117-8.07 ISSN: 2704-6362

Networks that Cannot Match: Managing Crusade and Trade in 15th- Century Rhodes

Georg Christ
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Hospitaller Rhodes was a networked polity, territorially based on a string of islands in the Dodecanes. To survive, it needed to generate resources and channel them to the islands. To that end, it harnessed the energy of three networks: the fundraising power of the chivalric-monastic Hospitaller establishments across Latin Europe, the revenues generated by transregional trade in the Eastern Mediterranean, and the plunder skimmed off the predatory-commercial system of crusading piracy. Yet these three networks were officially at odds with one another if not utterly incompatible. It will be argued that Hospitaller Rhodes managed to combine them all by prioritizing the first, crusading, and the third, commercial, while significantly curtailing the second, piracy. While the Order chiefly achieved this by keeping the networks separate, it could not prevent their clashing in the harbour of the city of Rhodes. The Order mitigated this clash by deploying frontispiece architecture to divert travellers’ and, through the respective propagandistic writing and artwork, the public’s view away from trade and piracy and draw attention instead toward the harbour of Rhodes as the last bastion of Christianity, as crusade in action.

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