Palace of the Grand Master Rhodes: Hospitallers, Ottomans and Italian Restoration

The Palace of the Grand Master in Rhodes is the great fortified building at the top of the medieval walled town, the residence and headquarters of the Knights of St John during the two centuries they ruled the island, from 1309 to 1522. It looks like a perfectly preserved Gothic castle, with twin towers at its gate and a vast courtyard behind. In fact much of what you see is a reconstruction of the late 1930s, built by the Italian authorities who then governed Rhodes, on the ruins left by an explosion in the nineteenth century. Reading the palace means reading all of these layers, Byzantine, Hospitaller, Ottoman and Italian, in one building. On our Santorini, Crete, Rhodes and Cyprus tour we visit it on Day 10, our first afternoon on Rhodes.

The palace within the fortified medieval city

The medieval town of Rhodes is one of the most complete fortified cities of its age in Europe, and has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1988. It is divided into two parts. The upper town, the Collachium, was the district of the Knights, containing their palace, their hospital, their churches and the inns where knights from each nation lived. The lower town, the larger part of the walled city, was where the Greek, Jewish and other inhabitants lived and traded.

The palace stands at the highest point of the upper town, at the top of the Street of the Knights. It was not built from nothing. The site had been the citadel of the Byzantine city since the late seventh century, and some scholars believe that it stands over the remains of an ancient temple of Helios, the sun god and patron of the ancient city. When the Knights arrived, they took over the Byzantine fortress and converted it into the residence of their Grand Master and the administrative centre of their order. The building is roughly square, about 80 by 75 metres, arranged around a courtyard of about 50 by 40 metres, with its main entrance on the south side between two towers.

Who were the Knights of St John?

The Knights of St John, or Knights Hospitaller, began as a religious order caring for pilgrims in Jerusalem and became one of the great military orders of the crusades. After the fall of Acre, their last stronghold in the Holy Land, in 1291, they moved first to Cyprus and then to Rhodes, which they took from the Byzantine Empire after a campaign lasting several years, completing their conquest of the city in 1310. Rhodes gave them a base close to the Anatolian coast, from which their galleys could patrol the sea routes of the eastern Mediterranean.

The order was international, made up of knights from across Catholic Europe, organised by “tongues” according to their language and origin. The inns of several of them, including those of France, Auvergne, Provence, Italy, Spain and England, still stand on the Street of the Knights, a straight, stone-paved street leading up to the palace. The order was ruled by a Grand Master, elected for life, whose residence and seat of government was the palace.

Hospitaller administration and defence

Under the Knights, Rhodes became one of the most heavily fortified cities in the Mediterranean. Its walls were repeatedly strengthened as gunpowder artillery made older defences obsolete, with thicker walls, wider ditches and bastions designed to resist cannon. The palace was part of this system: at once a residence, a government building and a last stronghold within the walls, with underground storerooms that may have sheltered part of the population during attacks.

The Knights’ defences were tested several times. In 1480 the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II, the conqueror of Constantinople, besieged Rhodes and was driven off by the Knights under Grand Master Pierre d’Aubusson. The palace was damaged by an earthquake the following year and repaired. In 1522, Suleiman the Magnificent arrived with a far larger army and fleet. After a siege of some six months, the outnumbered Knights negotiated their surrender and were allowed to leave the island with honour. They eventually settled on Malta, where they became known as the Knights of Malta.

The Ottoman centuries and the explosion of 1856

After 1522, Rhodes was part of the Ottoman Empire for almost four centuries. The palace lost its role as the seat of government and was used as a fortress and, for much of the period, as a prison. The lower town continued as a living city, with mosques, baths and fountains added to its streets, many of which still survive.

The decisive blow to the palace came in 1856. Lightning struck the nearby Church of St John, where gunpowder had been stored, perhaps since the siege of 1522, and the explosion destroyed the church and much of the palace. The upper floors collapsed, and only the ground floor, with its vaulted rooms around the courtyard, survived in anything like its original form. For the next eighty years the palace stood largely as a ruin.

Is the Palace of the Grand Master in Rhodes original?

Only in part. The ground-floor rooms, the plan and much of the lower masonry belong to the medieval building, but the upper floors, the grand halls and much of the outward appearance are a reconstruction carried out between 1937 and 1940. Italy had taken the Dodecanese islands from the Ottoman Empire in 1912, and in the 1930s the Italian authorities set out to rebuild the palace as a showpiece of the Knights’ legacy, to serve as an official building. The architect Vittorio Mesturino cleared the later Ottoman structures and rebuilt the palace with little surviving evidence for how its upper parts had looked.

The result is impressive but not historically reliable. The official museum leaflet describes the Italian interventions as major and frequently arbitrary, and scholars have been sharply critical of the work. The Italians also laid ancient floor mosaics, brought mainly from buildings on the neighbouring island of Kos, in many of the first-floor rooms. The palace served as a holiday residence for King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy, and a plaque bearing Mussolini’s name still survives near the entrance.

That history is itself worth seeing. The palace is not a medieval building preserved by chance, but a medieval building interpreted and rebuilt by a twentieth-century regime that wanted to present itself as the heir to the crusading knights. After the Second World War, the Dodecanese were transferred to Greece in 1948, and the palace became a museum.

What is inside the palace today?

The ground floor houses two permanent exhibitions. One, on the north side, traces the city of Rhodes from its foundation in 408 BC through the Hellenistic and Roman periods, with finds that cover government, trade, domestic life, art and burial customs. The other covers Rhodes from the fourth century AD to the Ottoman conquest of 1522, the Byzantine and Hospitaller centuries. Together they make the palace a good introduction to the whole history of the city, not only to the Knights. A marble staircase leads up to the first-floor halls, rebuilt in the Italian period, with the mosaics from Kos.

What to look for on a visit

A few questions help you separate the layers. At the entrance, look at the twin towers and the gateway, and remember that the outward appearance you see is largely the work of the 1930s. In the courtyard, notice the vaulted ground-floor rooms around the edges: these are among the parts that survived the explosion, and they are the oldest fabric you can easily see. On the first floor, look down at the floors. The mosaics are genuinely ancient, but they were made for buildings on Kos, many centuries before the Knights, and were brought here only in the Italian period. They tell you more about how the palace was furnished in the 1930s than about how the Grand Masters lived.

Then step outside and look back down the Street of the Knights. The inns of the order’s national groups, with their carved stone doorways and coats of arms, are a reminder that the palace was the head of a community of knights from across Europe, living and working within a few hundred metres of each other in the upper town. The palace makes most sense not as a single monument but as the crown of that whole fortified district.

How the palace records changing authority

Few buildings show so clearly how a monument can be used by each new power to make a statement. The Byzantines built a citadel. The Knights turned it into the seat of a crusading order on the edge of the Islamic world. The Ottomans made it a fortress and prison, a sign of a conquest completed. The Italians rebuilt it as a symbol of their own claim to Rhodes and to a Latin, crusading past. Greece made it a museum. The building in front of you is the sum of all of these choices, and it is more interesting for being so.

Reading the palace alongside the Archaeological Museum and Old Town

The palace is one part of the tour’s first day on Rhodes. The Archaeological Museum, a short walk away, is housed in the Knights’ former hospital, a large fifteenth-century building around a courtyard, and holds finds from across the island. The ancient acropolis of Rhodes, outside the medieval walls, shows the city of the classical and Hellenistic Greeks. Seen together, the three sites cover more than two thousand years of the city’s history.

Walking through the medieval town is part of the experience. Its streets are paved with cobbles and stone and include some steep sections, and the palace itself has a broad staircase to the first floor, so comfortable shoes with a good grip are worth having. The tour as a whole is rated Level 2, Moderate: three to five hours of activity a day, the equivalent of walking up to eight kilometres on uneven ground.

From the Knights to Lindos and beyond

Two days later, we visit the acropolis of Lindos, where an ancient sanctuary of Athena and a castle of the Knights share a single rock above the sea, a second chance to see how the Hospitallers built on the remains of earlier civilisations. For the classical and Hellenistic history of the island, including the Colossus, see our guide to ancient Rhodes. The days before Rhodes, on Crete, end at Phaistos and the Mesara Plain, more than three thousand years earlier; how the whole route connects is set out in our Eastern Mediterranean islands itinerary.

The Palace of the Grand Master rewards a visitor who knows what to look for: Byzantine foundations, Hospitaller vaults, Ottoman absence and Italian ambition, all in one building. To see it with a guide, as part of four days on Rhodes, in a small group of 6 to 14 travellers, explore the Santorini, Crete, Rhodes and Cyprus small group tour.