The city was founded under the name of Halicarnassus by the Dorians.
Excluded from the Dorian hexapolis, it becomes the center of a small kingdom before passing under Achaemenid rule.
She sees the birth of the historian Herodotus, then becomes the capital of the Persian satrapy of Caria. On the death of the satrap Mausolus, his sister and wife Artemisia built a huge cenotaph, the Mausoleum, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, which makes the city famous.
Besieged by Alexander the Great, the city was burned and in struggling to recover.
In the fourteenth century, the destruction of the mausoleum was completed by an earthquake.
In 1402, the Ottoman Empire was disrupted by Tamerlane's attacks, especially after the defeat of Ankara. The Hospitallers of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem took the opportunity to build a sturdy castle, to which they gave the name of St. Peter, from the materials of the mausoleum. For over a century they kept improving the site's defenses. The castle was besieged in vain in 1453 and 1480
In 1522, the Ottomans, under the leadership of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, entered Rhodes at the end of a siege of six months. The sultan, sensitive to the austerity of life of the "soldier monks", and to the courage they had shown during the siege under the direction of their grand master, Philippe Villiers of Isle-Adam, let them leave Rhodes in all freedom after being given all the possessions of the Order of Hospitallers in the Dodecanese, as well as the castle Saint-Pierre. The village of Bodrum then developed thanks to the trade of sponges.
The name of St. Peter, Petreum in Latin, will be deformed in Bodrum by the Turks1.
The first mention of the shipyards dates from 1727, but it was in 1770, after the destruction of the Ottoman fleet in the port of Çeşme, that the yards were enlarged. An imperial decree imposed the construction of a new fleet. The difficulty of maintaining a supply of wood precipitated the decline of these sites, a decline sealed by a decree of 1833 that prohibits the construction of large vessels in Bodrum.
