The fight for the Holy Land - Knights of St. John - how and when did it become important that the Holy Land was in Christian hands. The Crusade a human construct - people want and need something to believe in and fight for.
The inevitability of conquest once you have an empire - Mehmet could not allow Rhodes to survive and claim to be a great Sultan.
Knights of St. John - fundamentalists? In a way - they could have come to an arrangement with the Sultan and he would have been happy to let them be.
A tragedy for both sides.
The toughness of the men.
Yet another great little narrative history written in the 1960s - no fuss, no bother, no obvious ideological or theoretical barrow to push. I think after a break, these sorts of histories are creeping back, although unfortunately along with other more partisan publications, from either end of the spectrum.
Books read: The two sieges of Rhodes 1480-1522 by Eric Brockman
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