After 1306 Rhodes was a major cosmopolitan seaport in which numerous languages were spoken; the Greek of the indigenous population mixed with that of immigrant Greeks. The occupying Hospitallers from the West, few in number, were mostly divided by their country of origin into separate langues but they had to communicate with brethren of other langues. Their documents were largely in Latin with their statutes and other normative texts in French, but many Hospitallers belonged to the predominant Priories of Auvergne, Provence and Catalunya and so spoke some form of Occitan; some of them did not necessarily understand French.