"The early decades of the sixteenth century were a time of hunger in the Eastern Mediterranean, and food supplies for the capital were critical. "The said Rhodians are inflicting great losses on the sultan's subjects," noted the Venetian diarist Sanudo in 1512, the year the knights captured eighteen grain transports bound for Istanbul and forced the prices there up 50 percent."

"Italian military engineers developed their discipline as a science. They mapped geometric angles of fire with compasses and used knowledge of ballistics to design radical solutions. At Rhodes, the engineers developed prototypes of this new military engineering: massive walls, angled bastions of immense thickness that commanded wide fields of fire, slanted parapets to deflect shot, mountings for long-range guns, splayed gun ports, inner defensive layers with concealed batteries, double ditches excavated to the depth of canyons, counterscarps that exposed an advancing enemy to a torrent of fire."

"He had given everything to warfare in the name of Christ - he had been badly wounded in a fight with Barbary corsairs, been captured and spent a year as a galley slave, served as captain general of galleys, and as governor of Tripoli."

Charles was seventeen years old. Through the complexities of dynastic succession, he was the inheritor of the largest domain in Europe since the time of Charlemagne. His realms were the mirror image of the Ottoman Empire, and he claimed a litany of titles to equal Suleiman's. It took two long-winded pages to record them..."

"The two brothers Oruch and Hizir, whom the Christians called the Barbarossas - the Redbeards - were adventurers from the Eastern Mediterranean. They had been born on the island of Lesbos on the fragmenting maritime frontier between Islam and Christendom before the seige of Rhodes, and they spanned both worlds. Their father was an Ottoman cavalryman, their mother a Greek Christian. Their commitment to piracy in the name of Islam had been shaped by the Knights of Saint John. Oruch was captured by the knights in an encounter that left another brother dead. He toiled for two years as a shackled slave on the new fortifications at Rhodes and as an oarsman in their galleys, until he filed off his chains and swam away."

"Crucially, the dynamo of maritime war was human labor; in all the motivations for slaving in the sixteenth century, snatching men for the rowing benches assumed an important role. In the heyday of Venetian sea power in the fifteenth century, galleys had been rowed by volunteers; by the sixteenth, the muscle power was generally conscripted. The Ottoman navy relied heavily on an annual levy of men from the provinces of Anatolia and Europe, and everyone employed chained labor - captured slaves, convicts, and, in the Christian ships, paupers so destitute they sold themselves to the galley captains."

"On August 28 an Italian soldier, Lorenzo Puche, was talking to the grand master when he was hit in the head by an arquebus shot. His plate helmet took the full force of the blast. The man fell to the ground stunned, picked up his dented headgear, and asked permission to carry on with a sortie - under the circumstances it was refused."

"The leader of this tiny force was an Italian knight called Vinceno Anastagi, a man of intelligence and enterprise, destined to a small immortality after the siege in a portrait by El Greco - and a violent end, murdered twenty years later by two of his fellow knights."

"On the 'Marquesa', the Spaniard Miguel de Cervantes, twenty-four years old, bookish and desperately poor, was a volunteer; on the morning of the battle he was ill from fever but tottered from his bed to command a detachment of soldiers at the boat station."