The Palace of the Grand Master stands at the upper end of the Street of the Knights within medieval Rhodes. Earlier Byzantine defenses occupied the site before the Knights Hospitaller established their headquarters on the island in 1309. During the fourteenth century they developed a fortified palace for the grand master, combining residence, audience chambers, administration, storage, and defense. The complex formed part of walls and institutions that enabled the military-religious order to govern a diverse port linking Latin Europe, the Byzantine world, the eastern Mediterranean, and crusading warfare.

Rhodes endured major attacks, including an unsuccessful Ottoman siege in 1480 and an earthquake soon afterward. Repairs and alterations followed. In 1522 Sultan Süleyman I's forces besieged the island and compelled the Hospitallers to depart. Under Ottoman rule the palace lost its original governing function and was used in part as prison and military space. Houses and service structures accumulated around it. In 1856 an explosion in a nearby gunpowder magazine devastated much of the palace and surrounding district, leaving fragments and foundations rather than the complete medieval building now seen.

Italy occupied the Dodecanese in 1912. Colonial authorities cleared later buildings and reconstructed the palace during the 1930s and around 1940 under architect Vittorio Mesturino. The work created a monumental official residence intended for Italy's king and Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, although neither used it as a normal home. Designers relied on surviving masonry, drawings, comparison, and creative interpretation, imposing a severe medieval image that also served colonial propaganda. Floors incorporated ancient Roman and late antique mosaics transferred from Kos, not discovered in their current palace rooms.

After the Dodecanese joined Greece in 1948, the palace became an archaeological museum and ceremonial venue. It contains original medieval wall sections, carved stone, architectural fragments, and site foundations, but much of the standing mass, roofs, stairways, interiors, battlements, and room arrangement is Italian-era reconstruction. Displayed sculpture, furniture, and mosaics are curated or relocated objects. Later conservation has repaired stone, roofs, surfaces, services, and exhibition systems. Calling the whole complex an intact Hospitaller residence would obscure both the 1856 destruction and the political purpose of its modern rebuilding.

The Hellenic Ministry of Culture manages the palace within the UNESCO-listed Medieval City of Rhodes. Entry is ticketed, and rooms may close for exhibitions, ceremonies, crowd control, or conservation. The site is most meaningful when its multiple regimes remain visible: Byzantine defense, Hospitaller government, Ottoman adaptation, catastrophic explosion, Italian colonial reconstruction, and Greek museum use. Clear labels should distinguish in-situ medieval work from twentieth-century fabric and transferred mosaics. That material honesty does not diminish the palace; it reveals how architecture was repeatedly used to claim continuity, authority, and ownership over Rhodes.