Original subtitles

At the end of the Middle Ages,

the island of Rhodes is the scene of a bloody clash

between soldier monks and the Ottoman army.

Defending the fortress, a small band of knights

on the eastern edge of Christian Europe.

Rhodes was the first line of defense

against the Ottoman Empire.

They faced the largest army in the world,

led by a young sultan determined

to take the island at any price.

He was ambitious to show his presence

in the Mediterranean, as a strong rival

to the European sovereigns.

He took all his strength to Rhodes

because he wanted Rhodes.

For almost six months the world city

will fight one of the toughest battles in history.

It seemed almost impossible to capture,

and it had a reputation of being impregnable.

A bloody struggle for territory,

marked by courage and betrayal.

He was cut into four pieces, and the four pieces hung

on different bits of the wall.

In a harrowing siege,

in which east and west, rival empires and religions,

clash in a merciless struggle for control

of the Mediterranean Sea.

June 1522, nearly 200 Ottoman ships from Constantinople

hove into view of the port of Rhodes.

There, in the Aegean Sea a few miles from the Turkish coast,

a 100,000 men prepared to land on the island.

They have come to snatch Rhodes from the hands

of the Knights Hospitallers, who have ruled the island

since the beginning of the 14th century.

To do so, they'll have to conquer their fortress,

which many have deemed impregnable.

But for the Ottoman's young sultan, Suleiman,

anything seems possible.

He's thirsty for conquests.

He's 26, and ascended to the throne in 1520,

upon the death of his father.

The kings of Europe all, mistakenly,

think of him as rather shy.

He's keen to show that he's a force to be reckoned with.

And they thought he would not be a warrior

like his father.

Well, they were wrong.

Any new and young sultan is expected

to win some victories to prove himself to the people.

His adversary on Rhodes

is Philippe Villiers, grand master

of the Order of the Hospitallers.

At 57, descended from a family of aristocrats,

he's considered a skilled diplomat, but he's new to power.

The grand master was certainly perceived by the knights

as a man of great courage, great determination,

and great skill, and a man who was prepared

to die for his cause.

He's taking charge of an order known

for its fanaticism.

The Hospitallers are a community of soldier monks

that were very active at the time of the Crusades,

but they were driven out of the holy land

in the 14th century.

Now, they've settled on the island of Rhodes.

The Order is going to set up a religious state,

where as an order, they will be the sovereign of the place.

They have all authority, and the place belongs to them.

They've established a Catholic outpost

in the east, but now it's highly coveted by Suleiman.

They're in the forefront of Christianity,

it has been several decades now

that they're the only ones to be so advanced towards

the east, towards the orient.

At the time of the siege, Rhodes was the first line

of defense against the Ottoman Empire.

It was like the cornerstone

of holding back the Ottoman tide.

In 1522, the Ottoman Empire is the

most powerful political and military force in the world.

Suleiman's empire stretches from the southern Danube

to Egypt, to North Africa.

But Rhodes is a thorn in the sultan's side.

Not only is it run by Catholic infidels,

but the knights are using it as a base

to raid Ottoman shipping in the Mediterranean.

Rhodes is very tiny next to the Ottoman Empire,

but it threatens the economic aspect

of the empire too firmly that it can no longer tolerate

this Hospitallers presence.

And there's another reason

for Suleiman's urge for war.

The Hospitallers have enslaved hundreds

of Turks, Suleiman's subjects.

And this is unsupportable, really,

to the authority and the dignity of the sultan.

That was a matter of shame for the Ottomans.

It was really almost an obligation

to attack Rhodes to release them.

But Philippe Villiers and his knights

believe they can stop Suleiman and hold Rhodes.

The two men will fight for the Mediterranean

and for their ideals.

Suleiman for the east and Philippe Villiers for the west.

Who will prove to be the fiercest,

and which one of them will win the battle?

On June the 10th, 1522, two weeks before the beginning

of the siege, the grand master receives a letter

from the sultan, ordering him to hand over

the island and its fortress immediately.

The letter in which the Hospitallers are called upon

to surrender is a declaration of war.

Actually, I'm coming, and you better just watch out.

You are an evil man, you attack our fleet,

you attack my subjects, so we want you out.

Villiers doesn't respond to the letter.

Instead, he starts his preparations for an inevitable siege.

He's confident for a reason.

The knight at Rhodes have already beaten the Ottomans once,

40 years earlier.

It was a famous victory,

but they knew that the Turks would return.

The Order of Hospitallers, which has been preparing

for a siege since the previous one,

which took place 42 years earlier,

knows that the attack will be imminent.

As chief of the Armies,

Villiers has personally trained his troops.

He has 16,000 men, with 600 fanatically devoted knights

at their core.

A mixed army of mercenaries and 6,000 Rhodians

also fight at their side.

He has lived through sieges,

and therefore he is a formidable opponent.

And he done everything that he could

to prepare for this event.

They have 18 months of food supplies buried

in enormous silos.

They have huge amounts of gunpowder.

Hospitallers are always ready.

They ensure the Ottomans

will get a hostile reception.

The main aim was to leave the attackers

with as few resources as possible.

So they scorched the land.

Villiers knows that the Ottoman fleet

will begin by blockading the port.

The first thing to do is to prevent their ships

from getting too close to the fortress.

So the Hospitallers unrolled two huge defensive chains

to block access to the sea.

The shorter of the two runs between the Niallac Tower,

which today no longer stands,

and the St. Angels Tower.

The other runs between the St. Angels Tower

and the St. Nicholas Tower.

Chains like these are a traditional deterrent of the time.

The chain is not necessarily an element

that would stop a fleet, but the ships

that will come against this chain

will be suffering real damage.

Wood against metal, it's a relatively bad survival.

With the port barred,

the Ottomans land on the beaches

and position their camps just 440 yards from the walls.

They too are preparing for a siege.

For more than a month, soldiers, servants

and slaves come ashore.

As well as powerful, new artillery weapons,

such as culverins, bombards, arquebus',

and dozens of cannons capable

of firing 600-pound stone balls.

Which, obviously, it was a very big operation,

out of sight of the fortress.

We think of the Ottomans of great fighters,

but they are also incredibly good at the logistics of war.

The Ottoman army is so big

that it can hold the city in a pincer grip

over a distance of two miles,

from one shore of the island to the other.

It was a military tactic to encircle

the knights behind the fortress.

The defenders are looking out at this vast panorama

of human activity, awe-inspiring sound,

the call to prayer, the sound of animals.

A sea of tents, because every soldier

had to bring their own tent.

The besieged, inside the fortress,

if they could see the tent, this would demoralize them,

they could see how huge besieging army was.

A great human spectacle if we're not about

to be attacked by an Ottoman army.

To further tighten their grip,

the Ottomans dig a gigantic circular trench around the city.

It will both protect their camps from attack

and prevent the Hospitallers from leaving the perimeter.

It protects a little, and above all,

you have to be out of range of enemy guns.

If you want to camp in peace,

you have to avoid getting cannonballs to the head.

The port's locked down, the city surrounded,

the total blockade that Suleiman wanted

is perfectly in place.

Up till now, the sultan hasn't yet been there, at the scene.

From now on, though, his presence will be decisive.

At the end of July, Suleiman, himself, arrives in Rhodes,

accompanied by a 100,000 additional troops,

joining the 80,000 already in place.

He took all his strength to Rhodes.

He took his army to Rhodes, he took all the power he had

to Rhodes, because he wanted Rhodes.

His arrival was celebrated with gunfire from the ships.

Any siege in which a sultan takes place

is one that you have to win.

It's looking like an uneven contest.

Suleiman knows he's up against some dangerous knights.

After all, they've already defeated the Mamelukes here,

in 1440 and 1444.

As well as the Ottomans themselves, in 1480.

They just might be able to repeat those victories.

They're monks, thus their only concern

is to pray and fight.

There aren't many of them,

but inside the fortress, their reigns

and their esprit de corps that has seen them through

the most violent wars.

They've come from all Western Europe

to fight in eight national groups,

with each group defending an area

of the fortress that it knows by heart.

From west to east, the first sector speaks French.

Followed by the German sector

and the French province of Aven.

Then comes Spain, England and Provence,

and finally, Italy and Castile.

Everyone is responsible for their area,

and everyone is responsible to hold.

2000 men were placed at four different points

on the walls.

There was also a fairly large contingent

of 6,000 men around the grand master.

And a contingent of soldiers who had to be able

to quickly defend this or that part of the walls

that were threatened,

so that their defense was still mobile.

Villiers is in command

of less than 20,000 soldiers.

He knows that, statistically, he has little chance

of winning a battle against an army five times larger.

But the Hospitallers have another major card to play.

The Fortress of Rhodes is a house, a refuge,

and a homeland for the knights

and the people of Rhodes who live in it.

It's a citadel they know how to defend.

Its design is revolutionary for its time.

The original walls, built in the Middle Ages,

were high and thin.

But succeeding knights have used the last 40 years

of peace to upgrade them.

The walls stretch along all 2.5 miles at the city's edge.

And they're built at an angle, to thwart cannonballs.

Imagine, you would have the vertical wall,

and in the lower part, you have some sort of counterbalance,

which makes the cannonball tend to rebound on it a bit.

And also, they were built of a kind of soft sandstone.

If the cannon fired at the walls,

the sandstone would just absorb the cannon ball,

and it would get stuck in the walls

without actually knocking the wall down.

Rhodes is now considered

the most modern stronghold of its time.

Which means, we already have, for the defense,

something that is physically very strong,

and even without any defenders,

we're already on a very complicated path.

Rhodes have really become a laboratory

for the development of a city,

and it was really about as modern as you could get.

The whole game have changed.

We have seen the development

of gunpowder weapons, of cannon.

To stop this new threat, the curtain wall,

the outer rampart that connects the various towers,

has been reinforced along its entire landward side.

The walls are twice as thick now,

and they're filled with rubble.

The sections that have previously been most exposed

to attacks are now three times wider, almost 40 feet thick.

The entire city has two, and in some cases,

three rings of walls with ditches on either side

to create a bottleneck, to trap any soldier who enters it.

They describe the ditches are terrifying,

like a hell, because they were very wide and deep.

Just across the deep ditch,

to get to the walls, looked impossible.

Designed by Italian engineers,

the fortress is a killing zone.

It is a complex defensive maze of 11 gates,

arrow slits, a drawbridge, dry moats,

and underground passages.

But the most innovative technology is the bastion.

This construction is designed

to defend against new artillery and mines.

It enhances and strengthens the existing towers,

which still offer the ideal defensive position.

To even get to the main tower,

you'd first have to manage to take over this bastion,

which is something fortified,

that we don't dare to imagine it.

Soldiers almost shoulder to shoulder,

with firing positions at almost every meter.

They built five bastions,

which are sort of diamond-shaped defenses,

quite sharply angled to deflect shot.

One of the functions was to be able

to do crossfire along the line of the walls,

So that if, for example, somebody got into the ditch,

they could be shot at from all angles.

A few days before the beginning of the siege,

Philippe Villiers continues to refine his defenses

with the help of the military architect, Gabriele Tadini.

Adjusting layouts, measuring distances and fields afar.

Will this be enough to protect the Hospitallers

and the entire population of Rhodes

against 160,000 soldiers?

In his headquarters on the hill outside the city,

Suleiman is getting impatient.

The time for confrontation has come.

At the beginning of August, the knights open fire.

Villiers oversees the volleys from the widest ramparts,

which serve as an artillery platform for about 50 cannons.

The feature about August is that we don't have

a very intense fight.

You have to imagine a shot every 30 minutes,

a cannon shot every hour.

As the Ottoman's fire back,

each shot exposes their position.

At first, the Rhodian artillery systematically destroys

the Ottoman's artillery.

But Suleiman is only probing

his enemy's defenses.

The Ottomans, when they fired their small cannon

against the walls, they were immediately killed

and the cannon destroyed by the defenders on the wall.

They were doing this just to test how far

the cannon could be from the wall.

In early September Suleiman gives the order

to bombard at will.

His gunners deploy a battery of dozens of cannons along

the entire arc of the Ottoman's defense trench.

The Ottomans did not concentrate the cannon aid

on one particular area.

Actually, Ottoman siege tactics are based

on the quick knockout blow.

The cannons are providing cover

for a creeping threat.

For the Ottoman gunners to bring down the walls quickly,

they have to get as close as possible to the fortifications.

Suleiman designs a complex network of four trenches,

built parallel to the wall by 60,000 miners,

armed with shovels and pickaxes,

all hidden behind screens covered with animal skins.

They dig a zigzag of linking passages between the trenches.

Why do they do this?

They do this because if you are a rifleman,

standing on a wall, and there's a trench directly

in front of you, you just keep your gun fired on that point.

They could kill everybody who was in the trench.

If it was zigzag, they couldn't fire straight round it.

And from these narrow ditches,

we can imagine, that from 100 meters to 100 meters,

new trenches are gradually being made closer

to the wall area.

The purpose of all these successive trenches is to be able

to install highly protected soldiers closer to the walls.

Work on the trenches continues through August.

The Ottoman miners also dig hundreds of yards

of underground tunnels.

Their goal is to reach the foot of the fortress

and blow up the base of its walls and bastions

with explosive charges.

And they would fill it with sacks of gunpowder,

then they would make a fuse and lead it back.

If a mine was successful, it could bring down

a larger portion of the wall.

This undermining is Suleiman trump card.

It is said that 1/3 of the Ottoman army were miners,

silver minors from the Balkans.

And these men, who are skilled miner,

they are actually the key weapon of Ottoman siege warfare.

The miners try to work in secret,

but the knights are on the lookout

for the slightest movement, and they soon spot

the Turk's strategy.

They had to act quickly, before the mines explode

and bring down the fortifications.

So the grand master calls on Tadini, the engineer.

The Italian comes up with an ingenious solution.

He builds drums, wooden frames covered in skins,

places them on the ground and scatters dirt on them.

Any underground movement vibrates the dirt

and tells him the enemy must be digging nearby.

The miners make quite a lot of noises,

they're picking away.

The ground sends back a lot of sound,

so there's a way to anticipate that something is going on.

And these allowed the defenders to detect mines

and get a reasonable idea of the position.

The Hospitallers gunner's

then dig counter tunnels to meet up with their enemies.

The ground under Rhodes becomes an anthill.

If they can dig a tunnel under or near the Ottoman's mine,

they can put gunpowder in it and blow up both tunnels

at the same time.

So, there's a kind of cat and mouse game going on

during the month of August,

but there are always more mines being created.

Philippe Villiers is happy,

Tadini has managed to neutralize several dozen tunnels,

preventing Suleiman's armies from advancing

at the sustained pace the sultan demands.

As August ends, the knights are keeping

their attackers at bay.

But events will soon remind the great master he

should always remain wary of the sultan.

Philippe Villiers de L'Isle-Adam

does not have enough soldiers to consider an attack,

and he won't.

So the pace of the Siege of Rhodes is set by Suleiman.

On September the 5th,

with the siege already a month old,

the inhabitants of the fortress are surprised

by a huge explosion.

The Ottoman artillery have just detonated two mines under

the English bastion, opening a breach in the building

more than 30 feet wide.

Suleiman reckons its high time he took the city,

and he orders his Janissaries,

his elite infantry men, into the breach.

It's a violent attack, but Philippe Villiers

and his knights manage to repel the enemy.

So, despite the success of the mines,

they were not successful in entering the fortress.

This is the first real test of the defenses of the city.

With this first breach,

the impregnable fortress suddenly seems vulnerable.

The grand master knows it.

And, of course, the knights and their slaves, indeed,

had to work day and night, once the mines exploded,

to rebuild what had been knocked down.

When you have to urgently repair a collapsed wall,

and when you have to bring food or hurry

to bring gunpowder where it's lacking,

then the entire population is involved,

so the whole city of Rhodes is defending itself.

For several weeks the Hospitallers

and the Ottomans carry on exchanging cannon fire.

The Turkish miners tunnel relentlessly,

increasing the number of explosive charges under

the walls of the fortress.

Two weeks later, in mid-September,

a second powder attack rips open the bastions

of Provence and Spain.

Once again, the Hospitallers has put up a fierce defense.

The Ottomans will succeed in gaining a foothold.

For a full day, they fight inside the bastion.

The Spanish stronghold changes hands twice during the day,

taken, recaptured, retaken, and finally freed

by the Knights Hospitaller.

The grand master knows that this new blow

to the fortress irreparably weakens both the city

and its army, which loses several hundred men

in a single day.

We can feel that it is the first time

that it is almost collapsed, as the Hospitaller Knights

are just far too heavily outnumbered against the Ottoman's.

Sensing the blow to his enemy's morale,

the sultan orders his artillery

to increase its bombardments tenfold.

But this means advancing his cannons

to within 650 feet of the wall.

It's a complex maneuver.

The heaviest guns weigh two tons

and must be moved in separate parts,

it takes days for each unit to move into position.

But the Ottomans do it efficiently.

They were experts in moving cannon.

A group of men in the Ottoman army,

who were permanently employed,

were called the gun carriage men,

who were responsible for transporting cannon.

The Ottoman bombardments pound the fortress,

but by the end of September, Suleiman is losing patience.

The head of his army, Mustafa Pasha,

promise to take Rhodes within a month.

Yet, after two months, victory's still not within sight.

Under pressure, Mustafa Pasha decides on what he hopes

will be a final, bold attack.

His troops will simultaneously assault

the strongholds of Spain, England, Provence and Italy.

Pasha knows hundreds of his men will die in the attempt,

but he can wait no longer.

In the morning of September the 24th,

the Ottomans are set to seize the fortress of Rhodes.

This is the moment for a mass attack.

Already, you can see the morale

of the Ottoman troops under pressure.

Preachers went among the Ottoman troops

to tell them that you are fighting for Islam

and for your faith, and you must

be proper warriors for religion.

But the Ottoman maneuver,

faced with a besieged people for whom defeat

is not an option, is a disorderly

and suicidal tactical error.

And there's six hours of bitter fighting,

at close quarters.

This would all be with swords and pikes

and men hacking and slashing at each other.

The knights were remarkably good soldiers.

They obviously knew the fortifications extremely well,

and what are the best points for defending.

And then they're driven by a faith,

which is also extremely strong,

which means that when they're in the fight,

they're individually huge war machines.

For the first time the Ottoman's retreat,

leaving behind hundreds of dead.

In his diary, a humiliated Suleiman writes

a single sentence, "The attack attack has been repulsed."

Mustafa Pasha, after this assault,

has lost all credibility.

He was not enough decisive,

and he just returned back with a defeat.

This is a kind of a humiliating moment.

The next day Suleiman sentences Mustafa Pasha

to death for his failure.

In the end though, he spares his brother-in-law's life,

but he replaces him with the head of his army.

At the beginning of October, the siege begins

to take its toll on both sides.

Despite their numbers, the Ottomans are struggling,

but now the resistance of the Hospitallers

is beginning to weaken.

And they have a serious problem,

the gunpowder is running out.

They've used too much of it to counter

the work of the Turkish sappers.

The Ottoman maritime blockade

means there's no hope of resupply.

They start counting the jars of powder

to see how much is left.

Hospitallers have almost stopped shooting,

the grand master is forced to take a drastic decision.

No one shoots with gunpowder anymore, on the Rhodes site,

without his personal go-ahead.

More isolated than ever,

Philippe Villiers calls for help from the Christian world.

There was very little help from Christian Europe.

His best hope is Venice,

then an independent republic

with territories around the Mediterranean.

Venice had already just made a treaty with the Ottomans,

so for those reasons could not help.

Venice's power is built on sea trade,

the knight's raids on Ottoman shipping are bad for business.

Venice has no interest in it,

Venice wishes to remain at peace with the Ottomans,

and because Venice does not like the Hospitallers much,

because it doesn't like the privateers much anymore.

The Hospitallers has found themselves quite alone,

they were not supported by the Christian world.

By the end of October,

the grand master has to face the facts.

His army can only look on helplessly

as their fortifications crumble one by one.

The logistical problems of the besieged city

embolden Suleiman even further.

He moves his cannons closer still,

to within less than 60 yards of the walls.

The gunners ramp up their shelling

of the already weakened parts of the fortress.

The Spanish and English defensive strongholds

verge on collapse.

But when you put 50 gunshots in a square

of 10 meters by 10 meters,

the wall behind it will be nibbled away.

You need to nibble eight meters, but it will happen.

By early November, most of the English knights

are either wounded or dead.

Then the grand master suffers another blow.

His engineer, Gabriele Tadini,

is studying the city's defenses when a sniper...

Shoots him...

In the head.

Incredibly, the engineer doesn't die,

but he's out of action for several weeks.

Still the Hospitallers fight on.

The mentality of the knights is they're really tough,

they've given their lives to this.

He comes from a long tradition of people who have fought

and died in siege warfare.

He is not going to be the man who surrenders,

who drops the ball.

The siege of Rhodes has become

a war of nerves for both sides.

It's a test of composure, endurance and bravery.

Four months into the siege,

the efforts of the now exhausted Turkish siege forces

have still not paid off.

They're ravaged by dissentry,

and everyone wants the siege to end,

especially since it's the rule

in the Ottoman professional army to wage war

from January to October, and then return home.

But that's not what Suleiman is planning.

He never thought returning back without taking Rhodes.

He wants to wipe out

the knights more than ever.

Even the Ottoman soldiers sometimes wanted to stop,

and they believed that they are going

to return back to Istanbul.

And Sultan Suleiman never allowed them to think in this way.

Everyone knows that this siege will carry on.

And winter is coming.

The weather has turned cold by the end of November.

It's alright for Suleiman,

he has built a stone winter quarters

where he can live and manage the siege.

Philippe Villiers expected the Turks

to flee at the first sign of cold weather.

Now he knows they're not going to back down.

To make matters worse, and in a sign that morale

is at its lowest, the knights are starting

to find traitors all over the fortress.

There are obvious links between some of the inhabitants

and the Ottomans.

After all, there are enslaved Turks working for the knights.

You wonder if the person next to you

is not a Turkish spy giving information,

or if it's not someone who's waving at the Turks

to try to negotiate something.

There is a witch hunt hunting for spies.

It certainly shows a lot of nervousness

among the defenders.

Fear of espionage in the city definitely affects the morale

of the knights, and it takes a worse turn.

Andrea d'Amaral, a rival of the grand master

is accused of wanting Rhodes to fall.

His servant is caught sending a message to the Turkish camp.

Andrea d'Amaral is accused of having given positions

to the Turks, and as a result,

of promoting attacks in certain strategic places.

And he's an important figure in the Knights of St. John,

so this is really starting to scare the people.

The Order is beginning to tear itself apart.

D'Amaral doesn't talk under torture, doesn't say anything,

and he dies, he's decapitated.

He was then cut into four pieces,

and the four pieces hung on different bits of the wall.

His memory is marked by the seal of treason.

This is it for Andrea d'Amaral.

But today, we don't know if he really betrayed or not.

By the end of November,

the Hospitallers are exhausted.

They still have bread and water,

but they have no ammunition at all,

and are thus incapable of resistance.

The world that the Hospitallers have overseen

for two centuries is collapsing around them.

After months of bombardment, the Spanish tower falls.

Then, the helpless Hospitallers must look on

as the England, Provence and Italy fortifications crumble

under the ceaseless cannon fire.

The walls are severely battered by this stage,

there are huge holes in them,

almost all the large bastions had been either ruined

or severely damaged.

But fighting on whatever the cost,

is at the core of the knights beliefs.

The grand master still refuses to lay down his arms.

Philippe Villiers wants to go all the way,

and wants to fight to the end,

even if it means sacrificing his Order

and the inhabitants of the island.

By early December, three quarters

of the Christian soldiers, and a large number

of civilians have died.

And the stakes are getting higher.

So the risk is a loss of the walls, a general assault,

an invasion of the city and a massacre of the city.

In secret meetings, Villiers asks his advisor,

Tadini, if their resistance can continue.

Tadini says, "Actually, it's hopeless, we cannot win.

It is hopeless, we have to find a way out of this."

Either we decide that everyone will perish

in a great fireworks display that will make martyrs

and saints, or we give in.

The grand master relents, he will try to negotiate

for an end to the fighting, with satisfactory conditions

for both sides.

He will have to hope that the sultan is merciful.

Despite Suleiman's gunners already opening a final breach

at the main entrance to the city,

the sultan agrees to hold talks,

mainly because he himself could no longer afford

to lose more men.

Suleiman knew that winter conditions will be

very difficult for his troops as well.

So he was in a position to look for a solution.

He needs to find a way to get the defenders to surrender.

Negotiations between the two sides begin

on the 10th of December.

Delivering the fortress, home to the knights

for two centuries, to the Ottomans

is a cruel blow to Philippe Villiers.

But the Order itself doesn't fare too badly.

Suleiman, in his leniency as a young sultan,

happy to have won, leaves them the honors of the war.

They would not be killed, they could simply depart.

The knights can leave with all their possessions,

apart from their heavy cannon.

Philippe Villiers even secures the freedom

of his 160 surviving knights,

as well as the citizens of Rhodes who fought alongside them.

On December the 19th, they reach an agreement.

Accepting the conditions for the surrender

was a solution for both sides.

After five months of heroic defense by 650 knights,

the city falls into Ottoman hands.

It's not a clear and overwhelming victory for Suleiman,

his troops have never actually managed

to get into the fortress.

But he comes out of it the winner,

and it adds to his glory as a young sultan.

In the early days of 1523,

the knights sail out of Rhodes aboard their ships.

The Order of the Hospitallers will wander

for seven years, until the king of Spain,

Charles V, entrust them with Malta,

an archipelago south of Sicily.

With the fall of Rhodes, Suleiman is now free

to control trade in the Mediterranean.

Suleiman won the siege, really.

Firstly, through his own willpower.

Philippe Villiers de L'Isle-Adam lost,

because he faced Suleiman.

Under Ottoman rule,

the island of Rhodes resumes its peaceful life.

In the Renaissance it becomes an essential maritime stop

between Turkey and Egypt, for traders selling their silks,

perfumes and spices.

The fortress, a perfect example of the military genius

of its day, is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.