Dieudonné de Gozon
Grand Master of the Knights Hospitaller
Dieudonné de Gozon was the Grand Master of the Knights of Rhodes from 1346 to 1353. He was born to a noble family in Languedoc, France. He carried the nickname Extinctor Draconis, which means "The Dragon Slayer" in Latin.
In 1347 and 1348, Gozon led his order in a march to aid King Constantine V of Armenia, who was threatened by the army of the Sultan of Egypt.
The Dragon of Rhodes
A story tells of a dragon in the island of Rhodes, Greece, hiding in the local swamp and killing the cattle of the local farmers. Despite the orders of the previous Grand Master not to disturb the beast, Gozon slew the dragon and hung the head on one of the seven gates of the medieval town of Rhodes. The head was on display until around 1837, when it was disposed of by workers responsible for repairing the castle.
The Museum of the Order of St. John, in a 2015 article, states that there is no mention by any author of such a trophy on display before a 17th-century travelogue, which was written centuries after the head was supposedly hung on a gate at Rhodes. Historian Frederick William Hasluck suggests that Gozon's participation in a then-common Rogation festival, in which a facsimile of a dragon was "slain" to represent defeat of a symbolic "Spirit of Evil," may have evolved over time into a story where Gozon slew an actual, living dragon.
“Dieudonné de Gozon” enters the record as grand Master of the Knights Hospitaller. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Dieudonné, Gozon and Grand can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1224296. VIAF identifies the subject as 1169441. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1346, 1353, 1347 and 1348.
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This entry incorporates text from “Dieudonné de Gozon” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.