A Knight of the White Cross: A Tale of the Siege of Rhodes
1895
A Knight of the White Cross: A Tale of the Siege of Rhodes
1895
A boy pulled from the chaos of England's civil wars finds his destiny on a tiny Mediterranean island where the last knights of Christendom make their stand. Gervaise Tresham, son of a loyal knight, leaves behind the murdering factions of the Wars of the Roses to join the Order of St. John, that strange fellowship of warrior-monks who have traded their healing robes for armor and their hospitals for fortress walls. But nothing has prepared him for Rhodes in 1522, where Sultan Suleiman's vast army gathers on the shore and the knights must hold the line between Europe and the Ottoman Empire. This is historical adventure at its Victorian finest: a tale of cannon smoke and crusade, of young men tested in siege warfare, of the moment when the old chivalric orders faced the rising power of the East. Henty renders the Siege of Rhodes with vivid tactical detail and genuine tension, while Gervaise's journey from English boy to battle-hardened knight carries the heart of the story. The novel pulses with the romance of a lost world, where faith and steel were intertwined and a handful of men believed they could hold back an empire.
