Empires of the Sea

by Crowley, Roger

  No army in the world could match the Ottomans in the art of siege warfare; through espionage they came to Rhodes quite well informed about the defenses, and had made a realistic assessment of the task. The Turks accordingly placed their ultimate confidence less in their siege guns than in subterranean devices: the use of explosive mines. To this end, a substantial portion of the men unloading onto the bright beaches were armed only with picks and shovels. Suleiman had scoured his Balkan territories for skilled miners, mainly Christians, to tunnel under the walls. Inflated figures suggested sixty thousand—a third of the total army. They would dig their way under the cunningly designed Italian bastions yard by painstaking yard.

  On July 28 the defenders could see the Ottoman ships draping celebratory banners from their tops: Suleiman had crossed the straits in his galley. Once the sultan had established his camp and ceremonial tent beyond the reach of gunshot and overseen the arrangements, the siege could formally begin.

  INITIALLY IT WAS a contest for the ground beyond the walls; later for the walls themselves. The miners were put to work constructing trenches parallel to the town’s defenses and erecting wooden palisades in front of them; a second phase involved the digging of saps—deep narrow trenches—spidering forward to the walls themselves. From the start it was a brutal affair. The wretched miners, digging in the open, were massacred by Tadini’s pinpoint gunfire; unexpected sorties killed more. It was of little import to the Ottoman commanders—men were plentiful and expendable. Trenches were established, guns dragged into position behind the protective screens, and the firing began. Heavy cannon pummeled the walls night and day for a month; mortars bombed the town with flaming missiles and “falling to the ground they broke and the fires came out of them and did some harm” sharpshooters with arquebuses—matchlock muskets—attempted to sweep the battlements clean of defenders. One eyewitness noted that “the handgun shot was innumerable and incredible.” The immense supply of human labor enabled prodigious feats of excavation. The miners brought “a mountain of earth” from half a mile away to construct two huge ramps that overtopped the walls, on which they mounted five cannon to fire into the town.

  So large was the army that it encircled the landward perimeter in a Turkish crescent that stretched from shore to shore, a distance of one and a half miles. An extensive network of trenches started to inch forward day by day, their open tops covered with screens of wood and skin, while the miners worked below.

  Tadini mounted energetic countermeasures. As the tunnels advanced, he constructed ingenious listening devices: skin membranes were stretched tight across frames to which bells were attached. These were so sensitive that even the minutest vibrations from beneath the ground set the alarm tinkling. He dug countermines to intercept the tunnels and killed the intruders in the dark, blasted the miners out of their covered saps with gunpowder, and set up elaborate traps to catch the advancing enemy in a murderous cross fire. In case a tunnel should be missed, he bored spiral vents in the walls’ foundations to disperse the force of explosive charges.

  The newly constructed Italian bastions resisted the pummeling of the guns well, but some of the older sections, particularly the English zone, were more vulnerable. And the miners were indefatigable. By early September, Tadini had neutralized some fifty tunnels, but on September 4 the whole town was rocked by an explosion under the English bastion. An undetected tunnel had allowed the Turks to detonate mines and blast a thirty-foot hole. Infantry poured forward; for a while Suleiman’s men established a bridgehead and planted banners on the walls, before being beaten back with great loss of life. Successive days saw the bloodshed escalate. Mines exploded—mainly with little damage, because of Tadini’s system of vents—direct attacks were mounted and repulsed, unknown thousands of Ottoman troops perished. Suleiman’s master gunner had his legs blown off by a cannonball—a loss said to have been more grievous to the sultan than that of any general. The men became reluctant to attack; on September 9 they had to be driven to the walls “with great strokes of the sword.” Casualties within the city were far fewer but much more serious—each man killed was an irreplaceable loss. On September 4 alone, the knights lost three leading commanders: the captain of the galleys, the standard-bearer Henry Mansell, and the grand commander Gabriel de Pommerols, who “fell from the walls as he went to see his trenches…and hurt his breast.”

  Suleiman watched from a safe distance beyond the reach of gunshot and recorded the unfolding battle in a series of laconic entries in his campaign journal. For the end of August he simply noted: “26 and 27, combat. 28, order given to fill in the ditch with branches and rocks. 29, the batteries of Piri Pasha, which the infidel had knocked out, start firing again. 30, the ditch is filled in. 31, bitter combat.” A sense of Olympian detachment pervades these pages; the sultan speaks of himself only in the third person, as if the man who was the Shadow of God on Earth were too elevated to admit to human emotions, but in the journal it is possible lightly to trace a trajectory of expectation. His general, Mustapha Pasha, had told the sultan that the siege would take a month. As the town was shaken by a succession of explosive mines during September and breaches widened, it seemed likely that a final assault was not far off. On September 19, Suleiman recorded that some troops managed to get inside a sector of the walls. “On this occasion, certain knowledge was acquired that inside there was neither a second ditch nor a second wall.” On September 23, Mustapha Pasha decided the moment had come. Heralds went among the army to announce an imminent all-out attack; Suleiman addressed the men, stirring them to deeds of valor. He had a viewing platform erected from which to follow the final push.

  In the predawn of September 24, “even before the hour of morning prayer,” a massive bombardment opened up. In the concealing smoke, the janissaries, Suleiman’s crack troops, began their advance. The defense was taken by surprise. The janissaries established themselves on the walls and planted banners. A furious battle ensued. The ground was contested for six hours, but the grand master managed to rally the defenders, and a hail of cross fire hit the intruders from the bastions and concealed positions within the outer wall. Eventually the Ottomans wavered and fell back. No threats could return them to the breach. They fled the field, leaving the rubble smoking and bloody. Suleiman wrote just one sentence in his journal: “The attack is repulsed.” Next day he declared his intention to have Mustapha Pasha paraded in front of the whole army and shot full of arrows. The following day Suleiman reversed the decision.

  MUFFLED NEWS OF THE SIEGE was relayed across the Mediterranean world. Though they did nothing, the potentates of Europe understood how much Rhodes mattered. It was the dam holding back the Ottoman maritime advance. The Holy Roman Emperor Charles V foresaw that the island’s loss would open up the central seas; the Ottomans would proceed to a seaborne assault on Italy, “and finally to ruin and destroy all Christendom.” Unfortunately for Rhodes, this brilliant strategic insight had no material consequences. During October just a couple of small ships broke the blockade, bringing a few knights. In Italy the Order had raised the cash for two thousand mercenaries, who made it to Messina on Sicily but no farther; without armed escorts they dared not sail. In faraway Britain, some English knights prepared an expedition. It departed too late in the season and foundered with the loss of all hands in the Bay of Biscay.

  The attacks went on. The walls were repeatedly undermined and assaulted; five attempts on the English sector were beaten back in ten days; by early October most of the English knights were either wounded or dead. On October 10, events took a more serious turn. The Spanish wall was breached and the intruders could not be dislodged; they were contained by a hastily constructed inner wall, but the Ottomans were there to stay. “It was an ill-starred day for us,” wrote one of the knights, “the beginning of our ruin.” Further bad news next day: a marksman spotted Tadini studying the defenses through an embrasure and shot him in the face. The ball smashed his eye socket and exited out of the side of his skull. The doughty engineer, tho
ugh grievously wounded, proved too tough to die. He was out of action for six weeks. In the meantime the number of serviceable cannon was dwindling by the day, and powder supplies were running so low that the grand master ordered no gun to be fired without permission.

  The town succumbed to a witch hunt for spies. In a mixed population of Latins, Greeks, and Jews, supported by a sullen gang of enslaved Muslims, everyone could imagine a fifth column of enemy sympathizers. Early in the siege, a plot by the Turkish women slaves to set fire to the houses had been foiled and the ringleaders put to death. Despite being closely guarded, the male slaves continually escaped; they dropped over the wall at night or slipped into the sea and swam out of the harbor. Suleiman learned from a deserter that the attack of September 24 had cost the lives of three hundred men and the significant loss of key commanders. The same month a Jewish doctor, a deep mole planted in the town by Suleiman’s father years earlier, was caught firing a crossbow bolt over the wall with a message attached to it. The jittery population started to imagine spies everywhere; rumors of treachery and prophecies of doom spread like wildfire. In late October a second Jew was caught preparing a crossbow message; he was the servant of the chancellor of the Order, Andrea D’Amaral, a surly, unpopular figure who had been passed over for the office of grand master. The knights were now prepared to believe anything. D’Amaral was arrested and tortured. He refused to confess to aiding the enemy but was found guilty and hanged, drawn, and quartered. The head and dismembered body parts were spitted on pikes on the walls. Fear stalked the camp.

  AS THE LIKELIHOOD of relief slipped away, the knights had one last hope: the weather. Campaigning throughout the Mediterranean basin was a seasonal affair. By late autumn, once the rains start, soldiers dream of a return to their barracks, conscripted men of their villages and farms. The seas become too rough for the low-slung war galleys—disaster awaits the fleet that outstays its welcome. No one observed this calendar as prudently as the Ottomans; the traditional campaigning season began each year on the Persian New Year’s Day—March 21—and was over by the end of October. On Rhodes it began to rain on October 25. The trenches filled with water, churning the ground to mud. The battlefield resembled the Somme. The wind swung east, whipping the cold straight off the Anatolian steppes. The miners found it difficult to grip their shovels with frozen fingers. Men began to die of disease. It became harder to urge them on. The attackers were losing heart.

  Any Ottoman commander left to his own devices would now cut his losses. With the fear of having his fleet smashed on the rocks and his army murmuring and weakened by disease, he would turn for home and risk the sultan’s wrath. With Suleiman in attendance, this was not an option: the sultan had come to win. A failure so early in his reign would severely dent his authority. At a council on October 31, the fleet was dispatched to a secure anchorage on the Anatolian shore; Suleiman commanded a stone “pleasure-house” to be constructed to provide his winter quarters; the siege would continue.

  It straggled on through the whole of November. The knights were now too few to guard every sector of the wall, nor did they any longer possess sufficient slave labor to repair defenses or move guns. “We had no powder,” wrote the English knight Sir Nicholas Roberts, “nor [any] manner of munitions, nor vittles, but…bread and water. We were as men desperate.” No substantial help arrived by sea, and the Ottomans were securely lodged in the Spanish breach. By now the gap was wide enough for forty horsemen to enter side by side. Further attacks were made, but the bitter weather and slashing rain dampened morale: “insistent and interminable downpours; the raindrops froze; large quantities of hail fell.” On November 30, the Ottomans made their last major assault. It failed, but they could not be pushed back. The contest had reached an impasse. Realists within the town “could not think the city any longer tenable, the enemy being lodged forty yards one way and thirty yards another way within the city, so that it was impossible for them to retire any further, nor for the enemy to be beaten out.” Suleiman, on the other hand, was watching his army being decimated by the day. Modern fortress design had been remarkably effective in evening up the contest. He knew his soldiers’ endurance was finite. He had to find a solution.

  On December 1 a Genoese renegade appeared unexpectedly at the gates, offering to act as an intermediary. He was chased away but returned two days later. It was the start of a cagey attempt to broker negotiated surrender, in which the sultan could not be seen to be involved. It was beneath the dignity of the most powerful ruler on earth to seek peace. Mysterious letters repeating the terms were delivered to the grand master, which Suleiman denied sending, but gradually a pattern of diplomacy emerged. The knights debated the issue at length in closed council. L’Isle Adam would have preferred to go down fighting; so distressed was he at the prospect of surrendering the island that he collapsed in a faint. But Tadini knew that militarily their case was hopeless, and the citizens of the town, remembering the fate of the civilian population at Belgrade, made tearful supplications. The defenders were surprised and initially suspicious of the terms: the knights could depart with honor, taking with them their possessions and arms, with the exception of artillery. The freedom and religion of the remaining townspeople would be respected; there would be no forced conversion to Islam, nor would the churches be turned into mosques. No tribute would be required for five years. In return the knights were required to surrender all their islands and fortresses, including the fort of Saint Peter the Liberator on the mainland. The generosity of the terms suggested that Suleiman also needed an end to winter warfare: he had been fought to a standstill. He even offered to provide the ships for the knights’ departure.

  Stop-start talks dragged on for a fortnight. L’Isle Adam tried to play for time and had to be brought back to negotiation by another attack. In the end he accepted the inevitable. Suleiman was firm: he would have the fortress, even if “all Turkey should die,” but he convinced the Christians of his good faith. To create a climate of trust, Suleiman withdrew the army a mile back from the city, and hostages were exchanged. Among these was Sir Nicholas Roberts, the first Englishman to record a meeting with a sultan. The experience left a deep impression: “The Great Turk is very wise, discreet…both in his words and deeds,” he wrote. “We were brought first to make our reverence unto him, we found…a red pavilion…marvellous rich and sumptuous.” Here he made obeisance to Suleiman, who was “sitting in a chair, and no [other] creature sat in the pavilion, which chair was of fine gold.” Even in makeshift camp, Suleiman overawed.

  The aging L’Isle Adam

  The treaty was finally signed on December 20. Four days later L’Isle Adam went to make his submission to Suleiman in a plain black habit, the garb of mourning. The meeting was almost gentlemanly. Suleiman was apparently moved by the bearded melancholy figure who stooped to kiss his hand, and by the knights’ gallant defense. Through an interpreter, he consoled the visibly ageing L’Isle Adam with sympathetic words on the vagaries of life—that “it was a common thing to lose cities and kingdoms through the instability of human fortune.” Turning to his vizier, he murmured, “It saddens me to be compelled to cast this brave old man out of his home.” Two days later, in a further remarkable gesture, he made a visit to view the city he had captured, almost without guards and trusting to the knights’ honor. As he left, he raised his turban in salute to his adversary.

  Not everything went so smoothly. On Christmas Day, a detachment of janissaries entered the city, ostensibly to guard it, and indulged in some looting and desecration of the churches. Far away in Rome, the imminent loss of the Christian bastion was marked by an ominous coincidence. During the Christmas Day service in Saint Peter’s, a stone detached itself from the cornice high up in the arch and crashed at the feet of the pope. The faithful saw in this a clear sign: the cornerstone of Christian defense had collapsed; the infidel’s way into the Mediterranean lay open. And for the Muslims, there was the triumphant entry into the city to cries of “Allah!” The janissaries’ stand
ard—one of the victorious flags of Islam—was raised, and the imperial drums and music sounded. “In this way, the city that had been subjected to error was incorporated into the lands of Islam.”

  AS AFTERNOON FADED into winter dusk on New Year’s Day 1523, the knights still left alive—those able to walk and those who had to be carried, one hundred eighty in all—boarded their great carrack, the Saint Mary, and their galleys, the Saint James, the Saint Catherine, and the Saint Bonaventura. With them they took the records of their Order and their most holy relics: the right arm of John the Baptist in its jeweled casket, and a venerable icon of the Virgin. Tadini, whom Suleiman had been eager to retain for his army, had already been spirited away.

  As the ships put off from the embracing harbor, the knights could look back at the snowy mountains of Asia Minor and four hundred years of Crusader history, emphatically ended now with the fall of Rhodes and the surrender of Bodrum. Rhodes would remain for the knights a kind of paradise in the following decades; nostalgic dreams of regaining it died hard. Ahead lay an uncertain future and night running toward them over the Sea of Crete. Among those watching from the rail was a young French aristocrat, Jean Parisot de La Valette. He was twenty-six years old—the same age as the sultan. Among those on the shore was a young Turkish soldier called Mustapha who had distinguished himself in the campaign.