Knights Hospitaller in the context of "Bodrum"

Rhodes (/roʊdz/ ; Greek: Ρόδος, romanized: Ródos [ˈroðos]) is the largest of Greece's Dodecanese islands and their historical capital; it is the ninth largest island in the Mediterranean Sea. Administratively, Rhodes constitutes a separate municipality within the Rhodes regional unit, which is part of the South Aegean administrative region. The principal town of the island and seat of the municipality is the city of Rhodes, home to its 50,636 inhabitants according to its 2011 census. By 2022, the island’s population had grown to 125,113 people. Located northeast of Crete and southeast of Athens, Rhodes is often referred to by several nicknames: the "Island of the Sun" after its patron sun god Helios; "The Pearl Island"; and "The Island of the Knights", a reference to the Knights of Saint John of Jerusalem, who ruled the island from 1310 to 1522.

Historically, Rhodes was famous for the Colossus of Rhodes, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. The Medieval Old Town of the City of Rhodes has been declared a World Heritage Site. During the early 21st century the island was one of the most popular tourist destinations in Europe.

A tributary state is a pre-modern state in a particular type of subordinate relationship to a more powerful state which involved the sending of a regular token of alliance, or tribute, to the superior power (the suzerain). This token often took the form of a substantial transfer of wealth, such as the delivery of gold, produce, or slaves, so that tribute might best be seen as the payment of protection money. It might also be more symbolic: sometimes it amounted to no more than the delivery of a mark of alliance such as the bunga mas (golden flower) that rulers in the Malay Peninsula used to send to the kings of Siam, or the Tribute of the Maltese Falcon that the Grand Master of the Order of St. John used to send annually to the Viceroy of Sicily in order to rule Malta. It might also involve attendance by the subordinate ruler at the court of the hegemon in order to make a public show of submission.

The modern-day heirs of tribute hegemons tend to claim that the tributary relationship should be understood as an acknowledgement of the hegemon's sovereignty in the modern world, whereas former tributary states deny that there was any transfer of sovereignty.

Libya, officially the State of Libya, is a country in the Maghreb region of North Africa. It borders the Mediterranean Sea to the north, Egypt to the east, Sudan to the southeast, Chad to the south, Niger to the southwest, Algeria to the west, and Tunisia to the northwest. With an area of almost 1.8 million km (700,000 sq mi), Libya is the fourth-largest country in Africa and the Arab world, and the 16th-largest in the world. The country claims 32,000 square kilometres of southeastern Algeria, south of the Libyan town of Ghat. The capital and largest city is Tripoli, located in the northwest and contains over a million of Libya's 7 million people.

Libya has been inhabited by Berbers since the late Bronze Age as descendants from Iberomaurusian and Capsian cultures. In classical antiquity, the Phoenicians established city-states and trading posts in western Libya, while several Greek cities were established in the East. Parts of Libya were variously ruled by Carthaginians, Numidians, Persians, and Greeks before the entire region became a part of the Roman Empire. Libya was an early centre of Christianity. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the area of Libya was mostly occupied by the Vandals until the 7th century when invasions brought Islam to the region. From then on, centuries of Arab migration to the Maghreb shifted the demographic scope of Libya in favour of Arabs. In the 16th century, the Spanish Empire and the Knights Hospitaller occupied Tripoli until Ottoman rule began in 1551. Libya was involved in the Barbary Wars of the 18th and 19th centuries. Ottoman rule continued until the Italo-Turkish War in 1911, which resulted in Italy occupying Libya and establishing two colonies: Italian Tripolitania and Italian Cyrenaica, later unified in the Italian Libya colony from 1934 to 1943.

The Great Siege of Malta (Maltese: L-Assedju l-Kbir) occurred in 1565 when the Ottoman Empire attempted to conquer the island of Malta, then held by the Knights Hospitaller. The siege lasted nearly four months, from 18 May to 8 September 1565.

The Knights Hospitaller had been headquartered in Malta since 1530, after being driven out of Rhodes, also by the Ottomans, in 1522, following the siege of Rhodes. The Ottomans first attempted to take Malta in 1551 but failed. In 1565, Suleiman the Magnificent, the Ottoman Sultan, made a second attempt to take Malta. The Knights, who numbered around 500 together with approximately 6,000 footsoldiers, withstood the siege and repelled the invaders.

The Cretan War (Greek: Κρητικός Πόλεμος, romanized: Kritikós Pólemos; Turkish: Girit'in Fethi), also known as the War of Candia (Italian: Guerra di Candia) or the fifth Ottoman–Venetian war, was a conflict between the Republic of Venice and her allies (chief among them the Knights of Malta, the Papal States and France) against the Ottoman Empire and the Barbary States largely fought over the island of Crete, Venice's largest and richest overseas possession. The war lasted from 1645 to 1669 and was fought in Crete, especially in the city of Candia, and in numerous naval engagements and raids around the Aegean Sea, with Dalmatia providing a secondary theater of operations.

Although most of Crete was conquered by the Ottomans in the first few years of the war, the fortress of Candia (modern Heraklion), the capital of Crete, resisted successfully. Its prolonged siege, "Troy's rival" as Lord Byron called it, forced both sides to focus their attention on the supply of their respective forces on the island. For the Venetians in particular, their only hope for victory over the larger Ottoman army in Crete lay in successfully starving it of supplies and reinforcements. Hence the war turned into a series of naval encounters between the two navies and their allies. Venice was aided by various Western European nations, who, exhorted by the Pope and in a revival of crusading spirit, sent men, ships and supplies "to defend Christendom". Throughout the war, Venice maintained overall naval superiority, winning most naval engagements, but the efforts to blockade the Dardanelles were only partially successful, and the Republic never had enough ships to fully cut off the flow of supplies and reinforcements to Crete. The Ottomans were hampered in their efforts by domestic turmoil, as well as by the diversion of their forces north towards Transylvania and the Habsburg monarchy.

Rhodes (/roʊdz/ ; Greek: Ρόδος, Ródos [ˈroðos]) is the principal city and a former municipality on the island of Rhodes in the Dodecanese, Greece. Since the 2011 local government reform, it is part of the municipality Rhodes, of which it is the seat and a municipal unit. It has a population of approximately 56,000 with nearly 90,000 in its metropolitan area. Rhodes has been famous since antiquity as the site of Colossus of Rhodes, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. The citadel of Rhodes, built by the Hospitallers, is one of the best-preserved medieval towns in Europe. The Medieval city is designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Today, the city of Rhodes is an important Greek urban center and popular international tourist destination.

The siege of Rhodes of 1522 was the second and ultimately successful attempt by the Ottoman Empire to expel the Knights of Rhodes from their island stronghold and thereby secure Ottoman control of the Eastern Mediterranean. The first siege in 1480 had been unsuccessful. Despite very strong defenses, the walls were demolished over the course of six months by Turkish artillery and mines.

The fortifications of the town of Rhodes are shaped like a defensive crescent around the medieval town and consist mostly of a fortification composed of a huge wall made of an embankment encased in stone, equipped with scarp, bastions, moat, counterscarp and glacis. The portion of fortifications facing the harbour is instead composed of a crenellated wall. On the moles, towers and defensive forts are found.

They were built by the Knights Hospitaller of Saint John by enhancing the existing Byzantine walls starting from 1309, the year in which they took possession of the island after a three-year struggle.

Alimia (Greek: Αλιμιά) or Alimnia (Αλιμνιά) is a Greek island of the Aegean Sea, located in the sea area between Rhodes and Halki, in the complex of the Dodecanese. The surface of the island is 7.4 square kilometres (2.9 square miles) and it has a coastline of 21 kilometres (13 miles). The island had a small population until the period of the Second World War, and in recent decades has remained uninhabited.

The island is mentioned in ancient texts as Eulimna (Ancient Greek: Εὔλιμνα) and by Pliny the Elder under the name Evlimnia and associated with two large bays of the island, Emporio and Saint George, in the eastern and western side of the island that are safe natural harbors. Their use in antiquity is confirmed by the impressive, carved into the rock, dockyards, dating to the Hellenistic period when it belonged to the Rhodian state. In the Hellenistic period, flourished when the Rhodian state, the island was fortified with the construction of the fortress and used as anchorage and observatory for the Rhodian fleet. The Hellenistic castle survived until today in the highest peak east of the island. A department of a Hellenistic castle was used for the construction of a medieval castle in 1475, when Rhodes and its surrounding islands were occupied by the Knights Hospitaller. On the coast of Emporio found Roman tombs and visible ancient walls and the foundation of an early Christian basilica.