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Even in makeshift camp, Suleiman overawed.

    The aging L’Isle Adam

    The treaty was finally signed on December 20. Four days later L’Isle Adam went to make his submission to Suleiman in a plain black habit, the garb of mourning. The meeting was almost gentlemanly. Suleiman was apparently moved by the bearded melancholy figure who stooped to kiss his hand, and by the knights’ gallant defense. Through an interpreter, he consoled the visibly ageing L’Isle Adam with sympathetic words on the vagaries of life—that “it was a common thing to lose cities and kingdoms through the instability of human fortune.” Turning to his vizier, he murmured, “It saddens me to be compelled to cast this brave old man out of his home.” Two days later, in a further remarkable gesture, he made a visit to view the city he had captured, almost without guards and trusting to the knights’ honor. As he left, he raised his turban in salute to his adversary.
    Not everything went so smoothly. On Christmas Day, a detachment of janissaries entered the city, ostensibly to guard it, and indulged in some looting and desecration of the churches. Far away in Rome, the imminent loss of the Christian bastion was marked by an ominous coincidence. During the Christmas Day service in Saint Peter’s, a stone detached itself from the cornice high up in the arch and crashed at the feet of the pope. The faithful saw in this a clear sign: the cornerstone of Christian defense had collapsed; the infidel’s way into the Mediterranean lay open. And for the Muslims, there was the triumphant entry into the city to cries of “Allah!” The janissaries’ standard—one of the victorious flags of Islam—was raised, and the imperial drums and music sounded. “In this way, the city that had been subjected to error was incorporated into the lands of Islam.”
             
     
    AS AFTERNOON FADED into winter dusk on New Year’s Day 1523, the knights still left alive—those able to walk and those who had to be carried, one hundred eighty in all—boarded their great carrack, the
Saint Mary,
and their galleys, the
Saint James,
the
Saint Catherine,
and the
Saint Bonaventura.
With them they took the records of their Order and their most holy relics: the right arm of John the Baptist in its jeweled casket, and a venerable icon of the Virgin. Tadini, whom Suleiman had been eager to retain for his army, had already been spirited away.
    As the ships put off from the embracing harbor, the knights could look back at the snowy mountains of Asia Minor and four hundred years of Crusader history, emphatically ended now with the fall of Rhodes and the surrender of Bodrum. Rhodes would remain for the knights a kind of paradise in the following decades; nostalgic dreams of regaining it died hard. Ahead lay an uncertain future and night running toward them over the Sea of Crete. Among those watching from the rail was a young French aristocrat, Jean Parisot de La Valette. He was twenty-six years old—the same age as the sultan. Among those on the shore was a young Turkish soldier called Mustapha who had distinguished himself in the campaign.
             
     
    SULEIMAN RETURNED TO Istanbul in triumph. In just eighteen months, the taciturn young ruler had laid down an emphatic statement of imperial intent. Belgrade opened up Hungary and central Europe; Rhodes stripped the Eastern Mediterranean of its last militant Christian stronghold. Ottoman ships, “agile as serpents,” were poised to sweep the central seas. These were the opening shots in a huge contest that would stretch from the gates of Vienna to the Gates of Gibraltar.
    The reign that sprang from these conquests was destined to be the longest and most glorious in Ottoman history. The man the Turks called the Lawgiver and Christians the Magnificent would wage war on an epic scale and lift his empire to the summit of power. None would equal the tenth sultan for majesty, justice, and ambition. Yet Suleiman’s