By pure happenstance, my wife and I took a tour of the Eastern Mediterranean and ended up in both Rhodes and then Malta where we learned about the Knights of St

By pure happenstance, my wife and I took a tour of the Eastern Mediterranean and ended up in both Rhodes and then Malta where we learned about the Knights of St. John, the seiges by the Ottomans and the rest. The fortress of Rhodes, now much restored by the fascist regimes of the early 20th century as a showpiece, is indomitable. The recorded histories say that Suleiman the Magnificent brought nearly a quarter million men to take the island. The defense was 700 knights, 500 archers and about 5,000 lower units. After six months, as the story goes, the fortress was much battered, but still had not completely fallen. The Knights of St. John had lost the bulk of their men, but were still defending. Suleiman's forces on the other hand had suffered massive casualties -- depending on the source somewhere between 5,000 to several tens of thousands. One of the local stories says that after the six months of siege, Suleiman communicated with the Knights something along the lines of "I am in awe of the defenders of this fortress. I have lost half my men, and you no doubt have lost half of yours. If you lay down your arms, you and any who wish to leave will be granted safe passage off of Rhodes." Other histories I've looked into have different, but similar terms along those lines. The Knights accepted and moved to Malta. The locals of Rhodes thus count the Fortress at Rhodes to have been surrendered but never to have fallen. We toured that fortress and it's one of the most obviously formidable fortifications I've ever seen. Ever single square meter of it was designed to trap humans and place them into undefendable positions where they could be caught in an easy cross fire and slaughtered. It almost looks like something from science fiction in parts: layers of walls with straight line shots between them, approaches to gates with multiple overlapping fields of fire. This approach in particular has really stuck with me - http://l450s.alamy.com/450s/cx91gf/knight-fortress-in-rhodes-greece-cx91gf.jpg http://l450s.alamy.com/450s/cx91gf/knight-fortress-in-rhodes... Nearly every hole you see there at ground level was designed for cannon with support fire from above by archers and other small arms. A person trying to breach this gate would be consumed by shots from nearly a dozen positions. The alternative approaches along the wall were all clear cut open spaces that could swallow thousands of men and set them up for easy pickings. http://static.panoramio.com/photos/large/115461818.jpg http://static.panoramio.com/photos/large/115461818.jpg https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/x/greece-rhodes-july-fortress-walls-old-city-july-rhodes-greece-town-entered-register-heritage-unesco-knight-65461277.jpg https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/x/greece-rhodes-july-fortress-... Succeed in that, and you get another layer of walls with more places to get killed. And more and more and more. If you look down this corridor, you'll see some stone spheres. Those I was told were representations, and perhaps even some original, canon balls. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/ba/Rhodes_old_town_Greece_2.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/ba/Rhodes_o... Imagine scaling the wall to the right in the picture, making it across that open shooting range, then setting up ladders or something to scale the wall on the left.