How could an engineer stop the Ottoman sultan, Suleiman the Magnificent, and his huge army from conquering the Knights Hospitallers on their island of Rhodes? By being a superb underground warfare tactician, Edoardo Albert explains. This is the story behind his new book, The Man Who Stopped the Sultan.
The drum began to chime.
This was unusual. Drums don’t normally chime. But this was no ordinary drum. Set into its rim was a series of silver bells, attached by an ingenious mechanism to the drum skin so that when the skin vibrated the bells would ring. One after another, the bells began to sound, making an incongruously bright and cheerful peal in the quiet dark of the tunnel.
Gabriele Tadino, the Italian military engineer holding the drum to the wall of the tunnel, looked to the boy crouched beside him. The boy’s eyes were fixed upon the bells sending up their silvery peal.
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Tadino held his finger to his lips. They must be silent. The Turks were near.
This was war underground and Gabriele Tadino was right in the thick of it.
He had arrived on the island of Rhodes in 1522 just as the Ottoman siege was closed on the stronghold of the Knights Hospitaller
Rhodes lies just a few miles off the coast of Anatolia, right across the sailing route from Constantinople, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, to the trading centres of the Levant. For the Ottomans, the Hospitallers were pirates, raiding their shipping and terrorising their coasts.
The Hospitallers saw things a little differently. They had survived the loss of Outremer, the Crusader kingdoms of the Holy Land, by ensuring that Rhodes was their own sovereign territory – something the Grand Master of the Knights Templar must have earnestly wished for when King Philip IV of France put him to the question.
The Templars were destroyed but the Hospitallers endured, intent on one day winning back the Holy Land. They had survived one attempt to conquer them in 1480, turning back the Ottoman siege.
But now the Ottomans had a new young sultan to lead them. Suleiman had come to the throne in 1520 at the age of 25 and he was intent upon making a name for himself – as well as legitimising his rule by conquest. He had taken Belgrade the year before. Now Rhodes was his target, and he had arrived on the island in person to oversee the Hospitallers’ defeat.
The Hospitallers, for their part, had called for aid from the princes of Christian Europe but to no avail. Even Venice, the state most immediately affected by the rise of the Ottomans, refused to help for the Republic had signed a treaty with the Sublime Porte and was determined to sit out hostilities. But one Venetian servant decided to disobey the orders of his employers.
Hearing the Hospitallers’ plea for help, Gabriele Tadino, who was the commander of the fortifications on the Venetian possession of Crete, disobeyed the orders of the Venetian governor and smuggled himself off the island to go to the Knights’ aid. In doing so, Tadino lost his position, all his wealth was confiscated, and he was exiled from Venetian territory.
For 14 years, Tadino had served Venice faithfully during the Italian Wars. In that time, he had become one of the most skilled among a new breed of soldier, the military engineer.
But now, the romanticism of the Middle Ages overrode Tadino’s self interest: he would go to help the Knights even though the odds were terrible. Some 700 Hospitallers, and a few thousand men-at-arms and mercenaries, against an Ottoman army that was probably 100,000 strong.
Yet Tadino went. He had become skilled in all the new arts of war. He could place cannons and defend against them, he could build retrenchments to cover breached walls – and he had learned how to detect enemy miners trying to tunnel in under walls.
One of the most effective techniques to break walls was to dig a tunnel under the moat to the wall, then pack the end chamber with gunpowder and blow it up.
To counter the Ottoman miners, Tadino employed listening devices, such as the tightly skinned drum with bells hinged onto its surface described above, to detect enemy miners. He then either dug counter tunnels under the Ottoman miners, packing these in turn with gun powder so that he could blow up the attackers, or dug straight into the tunnels. In these cases, the fighting was brutal, bloody and close range.
Through six months, Gabriele Tadino led the defence of Rhodes. The Hospitallers threw back the Ottoman assaults, above ground and below ground. But then, on 11 October, while looking through a gun slit, Tadino was hit in the eye by the ball from an arquebus. He fell back, his left eye gone, the ball having blasted out of the side of his head just in front of his left ear.
But, extraordinarily, Tadino survived. Six weeks later, he was well enough to lead a sally from one of the concealed postern gates against the Ottoman sappers in the moat.
It was now November. Normally, the Ottoman campaigning season ended by October. But this time, the Ottomans had not gone home. Despite the onset of winter, the sultan himself remained on Rhodes.
Neither side could properly defeat the other. The Ottomans had suffered too many losses; their soldiers would no longer rush forward to assault the walls. But the Hospitallers’ reserves were almost gone too. They were like two exhausted boxers, staggering around the ring, neither with enough strength to finish off the other.
In the end, Suleiman offered the Knights a way out – and in doing so, gave himself a way out as well. The Knights Hospitaller would be free to leave the island with their weapons and their holy relics – the sultan would even supply ships if they did not have enough – and the residents of Rhodes would have three years to decide whether they wished to live under his rule, and would be free to leave in that time. He would get the city, with the promise to rule its people well.
The Knights accepted. But before they sailed away on 1 January, 1523, carrying their weapons and their holy relics, they smuggled Gabriele Tadino off Rhodes. Suleiman, always eager to employ the best talent, had been inquiring about the military engineer who had defied his army.
Gabriele Tadino left Rhodes and went into the employment of Emperor Charles V, ruler of Spain, the Low Countries, the Holy Roman Empire and the lands in the New World, becoming superintendent of his artillery. Through this posting, Tadino’s knowledge of the new ways of war spread throughout Charles’s armies.
As for the Hospitallers, they found a new home on the island of Malta. When, in 1565, Suleiman, by this time an old man, sent his army to deal with the Knights again he must have rued how they had defied him 33 years earlier.
The Man Who Stopped the Sultan by Edoardo Albert is published on 29 January, 2026.
Find out more about this book.
Edoardo is a Sinhala/Italo/Tamil writer specialising in Anglo-Saxon and Islamic history. He’s published a number of books, both fiction and non-fiction.
He’s written a couple of other pieces for Historia: A life of war in Anglo-Saxon Britain and a review of the British Library’s Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War.
You may also enjoy Matthew Harffy‘s review of Warrior by Edoardo Albert with Paul Gething.
Other Historia features on related topics include:
Greek Fire, the early medieval weapon of mass destruction by Matthew Harffy
Sultana Isabel: Elizabeth I and the Ottoman Empire by Jerry Brotton
Ten fascinating facts about the Knights Templar by Boyd and Beth Morrison
The strange death of the Levant company (and how a clock taught me about it) by Sean Lusk
Images:
- Emperor Suleiman at the Siege of Rhodes, watching his engineers mining the fortifications: detail from Topkapi Palace Museum MS Hazine 1517 fol 149r via Wikimedia (public domain)
- Portrait of Gabriele Tadino, workshop of Titian, 1538: Art collection of BPER Banca via Wikimedia (public domain)
- Sultan Suleiman in profile, workshop of Titian, 1530s: Kunsthistorisches Museum via Wikimedia (public domain)
- Tunnel warfare, detail from the Codex Manesse: UB Heidelberg, Cod Pal germ 848, fol.229v: Der Düring via Wikimedia (public domain)
- Emperor Suleiman at the Siege of Rhodes; the Knights Hospitaller defend their fortifications: detail from Topkapi Palace Museum MS Hazine 1517 fol 149r via Wikimedia (public domain)
- Palace of the Grand Master of the Knights of Rhodes: Burkhard Mücke for Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
