The Hospitaller Castle Built on the Bones of the Mausoleum

The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus — one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, built between approximately 353 and 350 BC as the monumental tomb of the Carian satrap Mausolus and his sister-wife Artemisia — stood substantially intact on the southwestern Anatolian coast for approximately 1,700 years. A sequence of medieval earthquakes (probably in the 12th, 13th, and 14th centuries) progressively collapsed it. By approximately 1400 the building was a substantial heap of carved marble fragments lying around the foundation platform on the small hill above the harbour of the Greek-Turkish town then called Halicarnassus.

In 1402 the Knights Hospitaller — the Catholic military religious order that had established its headquarters on Rhodes after the loss of the Crusader Holy Land in 1291 — landed at Halicarnassus with a substantial royal-papal commission to build a fortified Anatolian outpost. They needed substantial quantities of cut stone for the construction. The Mausoleum was sitting in front of them in pieces. The Hospitallers carted the marble away and built it into the castle walls.

The construction

The castle that the Hospitallers built — the Castle of Saint Peter (Castrum Sancti Petri) — was constructed in successive phases between 1402 and approximately 1437 under the direction of the Hospitaller Grand Masters Philibert de Naillac (1396–1421) and his successors. The castle occupied the small peninsula of Zephyrion at the south end of the Halicarnassus harbour, the location of an earlier classical-period fortification of the same name.

The construction used three principal sources of building material: locally-quarried limestone from the surrounding Anatolian hills; recovered carved marble from the Mausoleum site (the substantially-major source); and a smaller quantity of marble from other classical-period Halicarnassus structures (the theatre, the agora, the residential quarter). Approximately 80% of the recovered carved Mausoleum marble identifiable in the modern Castle of Saint Peter inventory was used as substantively-anonymous building stone — cut, recut, and incorporated into the walls without regard to the original artistic significance. Approximately 20% was preserved as recognisable architectural fragments and was substantially incorporated into the castle’s decorative scheme: marble lions on the southern gate, carved friezes around the chapel doorway, several relief panels built into the inner courtyard walls.

The Hospitallers were aware that the Mausoleum had been a famous classical building. Several of the early-15th-century Hospitaller chronicles record the reuse explicitly: the chronicle of the Knights’ archivist William Caoursin (writing around 1480) describes the Mausoleum stones as “the marble of the wonder of the ancients, now in service of the cross.” The reuse was substantively understood in the Hospitaller framework as a substantively meritorious transposition of pagan material into Christian-military use — a common medieval Catholic practice that applied also, for example, to the reuse of Roman temple material in early Christian church construction across the Mediterranean.

The Ottoman capture

The castle served as a Hospitaller forward base for approximately 120 years. Its primary military function was as a offensive operational platform for Hospitaller naval-piratical operations against Ottoman shipping in the eastern Mediterranean; the Hospitaller fleet based at Rhodes and Bodrum was, through the 15th and early 16th centuries, the principal Christian naval presence in the eastern Mediterranean Sea.

The Ottoman tolerance of the Bodrum-Rhodes Hospitaller presence progressively decreased through the 15th and early 16th centuries. The Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent’s decision in 1522 to remove the Hospitaller order from the eastern Mediterranean produced the six-month Ottoman siege of Rhodes in 1522. The Hospitallers surrendered Rhodes on 22 December 1522 under generous terms; they were permitted to evacuate to the European mainland with their archives, their movable property, and their Hospitaller chivalric tradition intact.

The Castle of Saint Peter at Bodrum surrendered to the Ottoman commander Sinan Pasha on substantially the same terms in early 1523 — substantively without combat, the Hospitaller garrison having been evacuated to Rhodes in the months before the Rhodes siege began. The Hospitaller order then proceeded under substantially Holy Roman Imperial protection through eight years of diplomatic negotiation, eventually accepting the 1530 grant of the island of Malta from the Emperor Charles V — the Maltese Hospitaller phase that would continue until Napoleon’s 1798 displacement of the order.

After the surrender

The castle continued as a Ottoman military installation through the subsequent four centuries — substantially a coastal-defence position, substantially a small naval base, substantially a periodic prison. The Ottoman occupation did not significantly modify the Hospitaller architectural fabric; the castle that survives today is substantially the early-15th-century Hospitaller structure with minor Ottoman modifications.

The town below the castle was renamed Bodrum under Ottoman administration — the Turkish version of the Greek-Anatolian Petrium / Petronium / Bodrum — and developed as a small coastal fishing and trading port. The Ottoman population of Bodrum was substantially mixed Greek-Turkish through the 19th and early 20th centuries; the Greek-Turkish population exchanges of 1923 after the Greco-Turkish War substantially eliminated the Greek population. The modern population of Bodrum is approximately 175,000.

The museum

The modern role of the castle is as the Bodrum Museum of Underwater Archaeology — Turkey’s leading underwater-archaeology research institution and museum, opened in 1964 under the direction of the American maritime archaeologist George Bass. The museum collection focuses on recovered cargo and structural material from ancient shipwrecks along the southern Anatolian coast — particularly the Bronze Age Uluburun wreck (recovered 1984–1994, dated to approximately 1305 BC) and the late Roman Yassıada wreck (recovered 1961–1964, dated to approximately 625 AD).

The museum’s exhibits occupy the castle’s interior chambers, including the chapel (now the Glass Wreck Hall), the English Tower, and the dungeon. Annual visitor traffic is approximately 750,000 — making it one of the most-visited archaeological sites in Turkey.

The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus stood for approximately 1,700 years. The Castle of Saint Peter built from its stones has now stood for approximately 620 years. The Bodrum Museum of Underwater Archaeology that occupies the castle has been operating for 60 years. The sequence of monumental structures on the Bodrum site has been continuous from the 4th century BC to the present — one of the longer-running continuously-monumental inhabitation sites anywhere in the eastern Mediterranean.