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From a theological and spiritual protest, Lutheranism
had been allowed to grow into `organized Churches'. The Order's
years of vagrancy coincided by and large with the moderate
progress of the Reformation, whose devastating effects on
Hospitaller estates would be experienced in their fullest
magnitude after 1530.
The third factor was the challenge
offered by the formidable power of an expanding Ottoman Empire.
On 28-29 August 1521, Belgrade, the `outer wall of Christendom',
was treacherously forced into surrender by the young sultan's
large and well equipped army on his first campaign. The débâcle
extinguished at one stroke the false perceptions hitherto
entertained of Suleyman by the Western Powers (including Venice)
as an unwarlike and peace-loving ruler.2
Having reconfirmed peace with Venice by treaty of 11 December
1521, Suleyman's next target was the strategically-placed
island of Rhodes. It simply lay in the logic of the empire's
expansion. Although Mehmed II had failed in a vast attempt
upon the fortress forty years earlier, its conquest had now
become `both easier and more necessary' in view of the Ottoman
establishment in Syria and Egypt since their prestigious conquest
of 1516-17. The western powers were too fully occupied with
their own affairs to assist the Hospitallers. In the winter
of 1522, therefore, Europe watched the Rhodian fortifications
quake and shake slowly towards destruction by the Ottomans,
as it would by `the young king (Louis II) and the unruly nobility
of Hungary' in 1526. On 26 August that year, the battle of
the Mohacs stretched the Ottoman front to the very domains
of the Habsburgs. In 1529 Vienna was under siege.
In a sense, these three factors
mutually re-inforced one another. While the Lutheran revolt
and the ensuing struggle which it provoked within traditional
Christian unity invited Charles's `unrelenting hostility'3,
Suleyman's attacks upon central Europe and the attitude of
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certain German princes helped foster Lutheranism. Added to these,
the Venetians' fear of conflict with the Grand Signore, who
most uncomfortably shared with them some two thousand miles
of borderland, was an insuperable obstacle to the crusade
as envisaged by Hadrian VI or by his wavering successor Clement
VII. This spirit of dissension, so widespread and pervasive
throughout Europe, could not spare leaving its evil effects
on the internal affairs of the Order of St John too.
A crisis of the highest calibre
The experience of 1522 constituted
for the Order not only a profound crisis, but one of the highest
calibre. It was a crisis of identity in the first place, one
which questioned the institution's relevance to contemporary
Christendom; indeed, its material and physical capacity to
continue to realize its traditional raison d'être. The
Pope's fear of the extension of imperial power in Northern
Italy forced him to take sides in the struggle and in December
1524 he concluded a treaty with Francis I against Charles
V, seriously damaging the papacy's traditional neutrality.
It shook one of the most delicate principles which the Order
had so religiously endeavoured over the years to observe.
It was this threat to its neutrality which gradually began
to promote dissension among the `national' constituent elements
within the Order, later also evident in the narrow streets
of Birgu. It was a crisis which witnessed the debilitating
trend of having Hospitaller estates in various parts of Europe
confiscated, their sources of revenue exploited for the warlike
ends of kings, popes, and princes - as happened, for example,
with some of the Order's property in Portugal, Naples, Savoy,
and elsewhere. It was a crisis which paralysed the generally
smooth functioning channels of administration, breaking up
the necessary ties of communication between the central conventual
authority and the peripheral prioral organization. Once such
vital organs stopped functioning, the crisis
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