Top Tweets for #NEWCRUSADE

On this day in 1319, a small band of warrior monks paid for a war out of their own pockets, sailed out to meet a Turkish fleet with no help from anyone, and won so completely that they announced themselves as the new naval power of the Mediterranean. Here is the backstory. The Knights Hospitaller were a crusading order, holy warriors, and they had just a few years earlier seized the island of Rhodes to make it their fortress home. But the Aegean was a dangerous neighborhood. The rising Turkish sea emirates, especially a coastal power called the Aydinids, were sending out fleets to raid Christian islands and shipping. Somebody had to check them, and the great kings and the Pope back in Western Europe were not lifting a finger. So the Hospitallers did it themselves. Teaming up with a Genoese lord named Martino Zaccaria, who ruled the island of Chios, they scraped together a fleet of a couple dozen ships and about eighty knights. The Aydinid emir Mehmed Beg came out from the mainland with a force of around thirty vessels, galleys and smaller craft, to face them off the coast of Chios. The fight was a massacre, and not for the Christians. The Hospitaller and Genoese ships tore into the Turkish fleet and shattered it. When it was over, only about six Turkish vessels managed to escape. The rest were captured, sunk, or destroyed. What makes historians single this one out is not just the lopsided result, it is who did it and how. This was not a grand crusade funded by kings and blessed with papal gold. It was two local powers, an order of knights and an island lord, acting entirely on their own initiative and their own money to defend the sea lanes. That is the moment the Knights Hospitaller really began their centuries long career as the naval shield of Christendom, the role that would eventually make them famous as the Knights of Malta. It started here, off Chios, with warrior monks who decided that if no one else would guard the sea, they would do it themselves.