Turkey still suffered the annoyance of the Rhodian Corsairs, and till they were removed her naval supremacy was not complete. Genoa and Venice had been humbled: the turn of the Knights of St. John was come. Selīm had left his son, the great Suleymān, the legacy of a splendid fleet, prepared for this very enterprize. One hundred and three swift galleys, thirty-five galleasses, besides smaller craft, and 107 transports, "naves, fustes, mahones, tafforées, galions, et esquirasses,"[20] formed a noble navy, and Rhodes fell, after an heroic defence, at the close of 1522. For six months the Knights held out, against a fleet which had swollen to four hundred sail and an army of over a hundred thousand men commanded by the Sultan in person. It was a crisis in the history of Europe: the outpost of Christendom was at bay. The Knights realized their duty nobly, but they had the best engineers in the world against them, and all the resources of a now mighty empire, wielded by a master-mind. Suleymān surrounded the city with his works, and made regular approaches for his advancing batteries and mines; yet at the end of a month not a wall was down, and the eight bastions of the eight Tongues of the Order--the English, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, German, Provençal, and Auvergnat--were so far unmoved. Gabriel Martinego of Candia superintended the countermines with marked success.[21] At last the English bastion was blown up; the Turks swarmed to the breach, and were beaten back with a loss of two thousand men. A second assault failed, but on September 24th they succeeded in getting a foothold, and the destruction of the Spanish, Italian, and Provençal bastions by the Turkish mines and the consequent exposure of the exhausted garrison rendered the defence more and more perilous. The Ottoman army too was suffering severely, from disease, as well as from the deadly weapons of the Knights, and in the hope of sparing his men Suleymān offered the garrison life and liberty if they would surrender the city. At first they proudly rejected the offer, but within a fortnight, finding their ammunition exhausted and their numbers sadly thinned, on December 21st they begged the Sultan to repeat his conditions, and, with an honourable clemency, Suleymān let them all depart unmolested in his own ships to such ports in Europe as seemed best to them.[22] The fall of Rhodes removed the last obstacle to the complete domination of the Ottoman fleet in the eastern basin of the Mediterranean. Henceforward no Christian ship was safe in those waters unless by the pleasure of the Sultan. The old maritime Republics were for the time reduced to impotence, and no power existed to challenge the Ottoman supremacy in the Aegean, Ionian, and Adriatic Seas.