The Glory of the Crusades

by Steve Weidenkopf

  On May 29, Mehmet ordered a general assault. The Byzantine clergy prayed, blessed the city, and carried icons along the walls for help and protection. The Ottomans kept coming, and at one point, a stone from one of Mehmet’s big guns opened a breach in the inner enclosure.

  Almost immediately, 300 Muslim warriors poured in through the gap, but were met with fierce Byzantine resistance. The defenders had been fighting for nearly four hours and were exhausted, but the Turks were unyielding as Mehmet ordered 5,000 Janissaries forward.592 The crack troops gave out such a yell that it was heard five miles away.593

  Once more the beleaguered Byzantine defenders beat back the Ottoman attack, and the tide appeared to turn in their favor. Constantine could sense it, and urged his warriors: “Brave soldiers, the enemy’s army is weakening, the crown of victory is ours. God is on our side—keep fighting!”594

  In war, however, victory can be elusive and defeat sudden. Some Ottoman troops found a postern gate near the Blachernae Palace unguarded. In a repeat of the action that led to the Crusader victory in 1204, they opened the gate and tore into the city’s defenses. Soon they infested the wall and tore down the Christian banner and replaced it with the Ottoman standard.

  Ottoman troops poured into the city surging past the defenders. Within fifteen minutes, 30,000 Muslim warriors were in the city.595 Horrified at the sudden change in the situation, Constantine rushed to the wall:

  Constantine XI, last of the Roman emperors, tore the purple cloak from his back and raised his sword to catch the morning sun upon its blade … he plunged into the melee at the breach, to die fighting as a common soldier against the triumphant infidel. Turbans and scimitars overshadowed him. He vanished from sight. He was never seen again. His body was never recovered.596

  The sultan had triumphed; the emperor was dead and his empire with it. “A Constantine, son of Helena, had built this city more than 1,000 years ago; another Constantine, son of another Helena, had now lost it forever.”597

  The Sack

  The Muslim troops ran through the undefended city slaughtering the inhabitants, stopping just long enough to take the pretty women and children for slaves before dispatching the rest. Women (including nuns) and boys were savagely raped.598

  A large group of citizens trying to escape the Ottoman horde ran to Hagia Sophia, the sixth-century church built by Justinian the Great and the largest church in Christendom. When news reached Mehmet that his troops were in the city, he rode straight for Hagia Sophia, entered, and declared it a mosque. It would remain a place of Muslim worship until 1935, when it was turned into a museum.599

  In the end, 4,000 Christians were killed in the sack and 50,000 seized, of which 30,000 became slaves.600 The Queen of Cities was now in the hands of Islam. The “bone in the throat of Allah” had been dislodged.601

  The Crusader-Pope

  Five years after the loss of Constantinople saw the election of a new pope who would play a central role in “shaping the character of Crusading against the Ottoman Turks.”602 Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini took the papal name Pius II at his election in 1458. He was completely dedicated to the Crusading ideal and made his primary papal goal the liberation of Constantinople.

  Pius II called the temporal rulers of Western Europe to gather at a congress in Mantua in 1459 to discuss plans for the new Crusade. This idea of an international meeting to discuss the Turkish threat preceded Pius, but he implemented it. Unfortunately, the response was less than enthusiastic. None of the major rulers—more concerned with their national interests—came to Mantua. Pius II gave a speech at the congress in which he blamed the conquest of Constantinople on the lack of Western response to the city in her hour of need, and he reminded his listeners of the savagery of the Turks.603 Pius also recalled the heroes of the First Crusade in an effort to shame and motivate the absent secular leaders to take up arms in the cause of Christ: “Oh, that Godfrey, Baldwin, Eustace, Hugh, Bohemond, Tancred, and those other brave men who re-conquered Jerusalem were here! Truly they would not need so many words to persuade them.”604

  While exhorting the warriors of Christendom to awake from their slumber and take back Constantinople, Pius also engaged in evangelization in the hope of converting the Ottomans. In 1461, he sent a personal letter to Mehmet the Conqueror urging him to abandon the false religion of Mohammed and to embrace the true light of Christ. His request was denied.

  After several years of fruitless cajoling, exhorting, and pleading with the secular rulers of Christendom to take the cross, Pius decided to take the cross himself. He addressed his reason for taking the cross, an unprecedented action for a pope, in a letter:

  Our cry, Go forth! Has resounded in vain. Perhaps if the word is, Come with me! It will have more effect. That is why we have determined to proceed in person against the Turks, and by word and deed to stir up all Christian princes to follow our example. It may be that, seeing their teacher and father, the Bishop of Rome, the Vicar of Christ, a weak and sickly old man, going to war, they will be ashamed to stay at home.605

  Pius believed his personal example of taking the cross would be the impetus for others to do likewise. He knew that “zeal for the faith will bring some, greed for glory others, that and curiosity to see great events.”606 Pius’s plan began to come to fruition as the rulers of Hungary, Venice, and Burgundy entered into an alliance with the Papal States to fight the Turks. The pope traveled to the muster site at Ancona in August of 1464 to await the arrival of other Crusaders.

  Unfortunately, the pope’s expectation for large numbers of Crusaders did not materialize, and those troops who did show quickly broke into quarrels along national lines. As was common with large groups of soldiers gathered together in close quarters during the summer, disease broke out, and many Crusaders died. Pius II, too, contracted the plague and died, and so ended his Crusade.

  Ultimately, Pius’s Crusade failed not because of his death, but because the political realities of Christendom had radically changed. Although it was true that “Christian Europe shared certain religious and cultural values, it was no longer possible to translate these into collective military action under the papal aegis.”607 Despite this reality, popes continued to try, because the very survival of Christendom depended on it.

  Suleiman the Magnificent

  When Selim I (1512–1520) died, the sultanate passed to his surviving male heir, Suleiman. Signs marked Suleiman’s ascendancy: He was the tenth sultan in the history of the empire; he was born in the tenth year of the tenth century of the Muslim era. Ten is considered the number of perfection in Islam as there are ten parts to the Qur’an and there were ten disciples of Mohammed.608 There was great expectation placed on the shoulders of Suleiman.

  This grandson of Mehmet the Conqueror was a very effective, and at times, cruel ruler—he had one of his sons strangled in his presence. He also had a dream. Every sultan was required to add a new piece to the Ottoman Empire, but Suleiman was not content to add one or two territories—he wanted to rule the entire world. During his forty-six-year reign the Ottoman Empire achieved the height of its power. Suleiman’s forces conquered Baghdad, Belgrade, Budapest, and Rhodes.

  Naturally, the sultan desired control of the Mediterranean Sea as well. During his reign, the Ottomans controlled the eastern end, but the Hapsburgs of Spain controlled the western. For the next fifty years, a vicious fight would ensue for control of this strategic body of water. “On this terrain was played out one of the fiercest and most chaotic contests in European history: the struggle … for the center of the world.”609

  Malta—the Ravelin of Europe

  As Suleiman the Magnificent neared the end of his life, one regret from his youthful days still haunted him: letting the Knights Hospitallers leave Rhodes in 1522 instead of annihilating them when he had the chance. It was a mistake he wanted to rectify.610 Revenge was not the only reason to attack Malta, as the Knights used the strategic island in the middle of the great contested sea as a base of operations to hamper Turkis
h shipping, including pilgrim traffic to Mecca. Suleiman knew that “Malta was simply too central, too strategic, and too troublesome to be ignored indefinitely.”611

  He assembled an army of 40,000 warriors, 100 artillery pieces and 100,000 cannonballs to attack the little island in the middle of the Mediterranean.612 He was certain of victory, but once again the Knights proved their mettle by pushing back against the Ottoman horde.

  The Knights Hospitallers had used Malta as their base of operations for almost forty years when the great Ottoman invasion fleet arrived. The island’s defenders were meager, with only 500 Knights and 8,000 Maltese militia and mercenaries from Spain and Italy.613 As in previous engagements with the Ottomans, the Knights were woefully outnumbered. The master general of the order, Jean de La Valette, a veteran of the siege of Rhodes, knew the situation was desperate, so he sent a summons to all the Knights in Christendom to come to the island’s defense.614

  Jean de La Valette had been elected master general in 1557 and was a very pious and resolute warrior. Captured by the Ottomans in 1541, La Valette had suffered a year in horrible conditions as a galley slave chained to the oars. At the siege of 1565, the master was seventy years old and had spent fifty of those years as a Knight. He was “one of the greatest warriors in Christian history … a man tough as nickel steel.”615 He was “the rarest of human beings, a completely single-minded man.”616

  His singular vision in 1565 was the defense of Malta. He knew the island must hold out and defeat the Ottomans. Failure to do so would give the Muslims a strategic base to launch an invasion of Sicily and ultimately Italy, threatening Rome and the very heart of Christian Europe.

  The Turks Arrive

  Although the defenders of Malta were outnumbered, they took solace in their brilliant and formidable leader, and at the news that Pope Pius IV had granted a plenary indulgence to anyone who died in the defense of Malta.617 They were fighting in the great Crusade to stop the advance of the Ottomans, and to save Christendom.

  The Ottomans arrived on Malta in May of 1565, but from the beginning their time on the island was marked by division and difficulty.

  Suleiman had divided command of the operation between two commanders, Mustapha Pasha and Piyale. Mustapha Pasha commanded the army. He was a veteran of the Persian and Hungarian

  campaigns, and as a young officer participated in the siege of Rhodes. He was “an experienced general but possessed an explosive temper and a streak of cruelty—and a particular hatred of Christians.”618 Piyale was admiral of the 180-ship fleet, and was an inexperienced commander. The commanders did not like each other, and their competition for glory and the sultan’s favor caused friction in their relationship and handicapped the campaign.

  The Ottoman landing was unopposed, and forces soon arrived at the main harbor where La Valette had placed his troops in several forts. Mustapha Pasha arranged his camp in a crescent shape per Ottoman custom.619

  The Christian defense of the harbor centered on two linked peninsulas named Birgu and Senglea, which jutted into the Grand Harbor. Birgu was home to the main Hospitaller fort of St. Angelo and contained La Valette’s command post. Senglea was home to Fort St. Michael the Archangel. The largest peninsula contained Mount Sciberras along its length and ended with Fort St. Elmo at the tip. Ft. St. Elmo controlled the harbor passes, and was the most strategic place on Malta.

  Mustapha Pasha and Piyale agreed on the need to capture Fort St. Elmo, since no Ottoman ship was safe attempting to sail into the harbors as long as the Knights controlled the fort. If the “key to Europe was Malta, the key to Malta was Saint Elmo.”620

  The Fight for Fort St. Elmo

  La Valette was pleased that the Ottomans had planned a focused assault on St. Elmo. That fateful decision bought him time to finish his defensive preparations at Birgu and Senglea, and, he hoped, time for a Spanish relief army to arrive.

  The fight for Fort St. Elmo began on May 25, 1565. Ottoman engineers believed the fight would be short: four or five days.621 But Christians held their ground and made the Ottomans pay dearly for every inch; by May 29, the date the Turkish engineers believed the fort would be in their hands, the Ottomans had only captured the outer trench.

  As the fight for Fort St. Elmo slogged into June, both sides engaged in intense hand-to-hand combat and heavy sniper activity. Turkish artillery continued to pound the fort, lobbing 6,000 cannonballs per day. On June 18, the Ottomans once again launched a major attack that, over six hours, resulted in the deaths of 1,000 Turks and 150 Christians.622 Although the defenders fought bravely, it was only a matter of time before the fort would fall into Ottoman control. The defenders knew that time was near when on the twenty-sixth day of the siege a cannonball decapitated the fort’s commander.

  The remaining Knights and soldiers knew they could withstand only one more attack, and it came on June 23, the vigil of the Feast of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist, the patron of the order. Only sixty defenders were left, and the senior officers in charge were unable to stand due to their wounds. They sat in chairs in the breach to fight, and were both shot dead in the final assault.623 As the Turks poured into the fort, they made quick work of the remaining defenders. Only five Maltese soldiers were known to survive the final assault, by running down to the shore and swimming across the harbor.624 Some soldiers tried to surrender to the Turks to save their lives, but they were lined up on a wall and shot. The bodies were then hung upside down where the heads and chests were split open and their hearts ripped out.625

  The thirty-one-day siege had paid a heavy price to the Grim Reaper, with 4,000 Turks and 1,500 Christians killed.626 Although the Turks could absorb the losses better than the Christians, it was still a heavy price to pay for such a small (albeit strategic) fort. Mustapha Pasha, while looking across the harbor to the main fortress of St. Michael the Archangel on Senglea, remarked, “Allah! If so small a son has cost us so dear, what price shall we have to pay for so large a father!”627

  Mustapha Pasha hoped to demoralize the remaining Christian troops across the harbor so he ordered some of the bodies of the Knights stripped of their armor, their hearts ripped out and heads cut off. Each headless corpse was then marked with a cross cut into its chest and finally nailed by the hands and feet to a wooden crucifix that was placed into the water to float across the harbor to the Christian defenses.628 La Valette responded to the Ottoman atrocity by beheading captured Muslim soldiers, loading the heads into his cannons, and firing them into the Muslim camp. This nasty exchange illustrates the fact that both sides knew this was a fight with enormous stakes for both Islam and Christendom, and a fight to the death.

  The Fight for Birgu and Senglea

  Those who died at Fort St. Elmo had given the other defenders of Malta time to consolidate and reinforce their positions, but the reprieve was now over. Mustapha Pasha ordered the attacks on Birgu and Senglea to begin on July 15.

  The siege dragged on, and in early August, Mustapha Pasha ordered a heavy artillery bombardment that could be heard in Sicily.629 The defenders kept their heads down in the trenches and on the walls as the Turkish infantry advanced.

  Eventually the Christians noticed something odd about the artillery attack; they were suffering no damage. They soon realized the Turkish guns were firing blanks in the hopes of keeping the defenders hunkered down long enough for the infantry to reach the defenses. It did not work, and the assault was repulsed.

  On August 7, Mustapha Pasha once more ordered a general assault, a combined attack on both Birgu and Senglea. The fighting was very intense at Birgu, and it appeared the Christian line might break. On hearing the news, the aged La Valette grabbed a helmet and pike and shouted, “Come, my knights, let us all go and die there! This is the day!”630 He ran into the breach, grabbed a fallen arquebus, and began firing. A Turkish grenade exploded near him, and shrapnel wounded his leg. He refused to leave the line, telling those who were urging him to get to safety, “How can it be possible for a man of my age to die more g
loriously than among my brethren and my friends in the service of God, in defense of our holy religion?”631

  The hour was so desperate that even Maltese civilians, including women and children, manned the walls to push back the Turks. With victory almost in reach, something odd happened in the Turkish assault. Rumor quickly spread that the long-expected Spanish relief force had finally arrived. Although this was not true, the Ottoman soldiers thought it was, and their attack faltered. In reality, what had occurred was a small Maltese militia cavalry force had swept into the unguarded Turkish camp stealing away with supplies and killing rear echelon soldiers. This very timely disruption caused the panic that stopped the Turkish assault, which had been on its way to securing victory.

  The remaining days of August were filled with intense trench combat that produced a stalemate. Disease broke out in the Ottoman ranks, further thinning Mustapha Pasha soldiers. Casualties on both sides throughout the month were heavy. La Valette tried to keep morale high by praising “the dead so as to put courage into the living.”632 As the calendar turned to September, the Christian defenders received the blessing of great news on the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary as 10,000 Spanish troops, the long awaited relief force from Sicily, arrived in eighty ships.633

  The Spanish reinforcements began their march toward the harbor to relieve La Valette’s troops on September 11, 1565. Mustapha Pasha knew defeat loomed on the horizon, but in order to stave it off, he tried a risky attack against the Spanish army. The fresh Spanish forces easily routed his troops, who were weary from four months of heavy fighting. The Ottomans retreated full bore to their awaiting ships in St. Paul’s Bay, the famous site of Paul’s shipwreck 1,500 years previously. They boarded their ships and sailed home.

  Malta was saved. It had “survived through a combination of religious zeal, irreducible willpower—and luck.”634