The elderly Suleiman
It was against this background that the violations of the Knights of Saint John reached his ears in the late summer of 1564. It became the belief of Christian chroniclers that the ailing and henpecked sultan was goaded into the invasion of Malta by the personal grievances of the harem circle—the loss of the chief eunuch’s ship, the abduction of Mihrimah’s former nurse, the governors of Alexandria and Cairo held to ransom—but the inner workings of Ottoman strategy were largely hidden from foreign eyes. Romegas’s brazen raids were not the reactive cause of Suleiman’s decision to wipe the knights off the face of the earth. They were simply the last straw.
There was certainly hurt pride for the pious sultan if the emperor of the White Sea was unable to guarantee the safety of pilgrims to Mecca; Mihrimah never ceased to present the capture of the infidel rock as a pious duty for the sultan, but there were far deeper reasons why Malta had to be taken, and taken now. The certainty of a strike on the island had been predicted by every Christian naval strategist for years. Barbarossa had dreamed its capture in 1534. Turgut went to plead for it before the sultan in person in 1551: “You will do no good,” he told the sultan, “until you have smoked out this nest of vipers.” Malta was simply too central, too strategic, and too troublesome to be ignored indefinitely. It represented both an opportunity to control the heart of the sea and a permanent threat to Suleiman’s hold on his North African possessions; year after year the knights whom the sultan had imagined to have sailed away from Rhodes into dusty oblivion mocked his power more tauntingly. Spies informed the sultan that the knights had plans for massive new fortifications within the secure harbor. Suleiman’s previous experience at Rhodes taught him that once they had become firmly established in their new home, the knights might prove impossible to dislodge.
There were large strategic issues at stake on both sides in the summer of 1564. The Ottomans had failed to capitalize on the success at Djerba; the unexpected breathing space had allowed Spain to regroup. Philip’s eyes were now firmly fixed on the Mediterranean as the crucial theatre of war. He was building galleys as fast as he could. In February 1564 he appointed a wise and experienced seaman, Don Garcia de Toledo, as his captain general of the sea. In September, while Istanbul was digesting news of Romegas’s latest raids, Don Garcia crossed the straits from southern Spain and seized back a fortified corsair base on the African shore, Peñón de Vélez. This small victory was talked up by the Spanish across Europe, to the fury of Suleiman. Behind the claims and counterclaims to imperial prerogative in the great sea, it was clear that Philip and Suleiman were blindly groping toward some definitive contest.
Both sides grasped that Malta was the key to the central Mediterranean. In the autumn of 1564, Don Garcia wrote to Philip analyzing the Ottoman maritime threat to every Spanish base in the sea. Malta was at the top of his list. Held, it would enable Spain to secure the southern shores of Europe and ultimately exclude the Ottomans from the western seas. Lost, it “would redound to the harm of Christendom.” Malta would become the launchpad for deeper and deeper strikes into the belly of Europe; Sicily, the shores of Italy, the coasts of Spain, Rome itself would be vulnerable to the Ottoman advance.
At a meeting of the divan on October 6, 1564, Suleiman made the decision to go for Malta; in the words of the Christian chroniclers, “to enlarge the empire, and to reduce the power of the king of Spain, his rival…. With his fleet or at least a large squadron of galleys in this most secure position, all the surrounding kingdoms in both Africa and Italy would be forced to pay him tribute, as well as all Christian shipping both commercial and private.” It was to be a strike at the heart.
A month later, the sultan named his commanders and gave more explicitly religious reasons for this operation: “I intend to conquer the island of Malta and I have appointed Mustapha Pasha as commander of this campaign. The island of Malta is a headquarters for infidels. The Maltese have already blocked the route utilized by Muslim pilgrims and merchants in the Eastern part of the White Sea, on their way to Egypt. I have ordered Piyale Pasha to take part in the campaign with the Imperial Navy.” The Ottoman war machine started to swing into action. The phony war was over.
SULEIMAN WAS ABOUT TO COMMIT the resources of his empire to the most ambitious maritime venture in the Mediterranean since the early Crusades. It was a long-range operation of enormous complexity with lengthy supply lines. Malta is not Rhodes. Where Rhodes hugged Suleiman’s own lands, Malta lay eight hundred miles west, close enough to be visible from Christian Sicily, at the outer strike range of a large galley fleet. Rhodes was fertile and well watered, large enough to support an invading army and worth the risk of an extended campaign over the winter. Malta offered nothing. Lying in the channel between Africa and Italy, flogged by the wind and the unforgiving sun, the island and its smaller neighbor Gozo are the barren remnants of eroded mountaintops, separated from Sicily and the Italian peninsula by cataclysmic flooding at the end of the Ice Age. It is a terrain of neolithic severity—a bleak, parched, stony place of immense antiquity. There are no rivers and few trees. The winter rain had to be collected in rock-cut cisterns; wood was so scarce it was sold by the pound weight. The summer climate is intense; humid winds pick up water vapor from the sea and envelop the island in an equatorial heat ferocious enough to kill a man in armor. The miniature size of the place—only twenty miles long and twelve wide—increases the difficulties. There are few landing places: the western side is defended by high cliffs, leaving a handful of small bays on the eastern flank in which to land troops, and one magnificent deep-water harbor, unequaled throughout the whole sea, that the knights commanded. An invading army must take everything with it for the whole duration of its stay: food, shelter, timber, siege materials. Though the Ottomans could rely on limited support from the corsairs of North Africa, they were materially dependent on a long and fragile supply line. Timing was critical: they must neither sail too early nor stay too long. The window of opportunity was just a few months.
Nor could they expect any support from the indigenous population. The Maltese are the Basques of the Mediterranean, a unique micro-people formed by the particular position of their island at the center of every invasion, migration, and trading enterprise in the history of the sea. They comprise a genetic summary of the sea’s past. Grafted onto an ancient rootstock, successive waves of Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Normans, and Sicilians had shaped a people of original identity—“a Sicilian character with a mixture of African,” a French visitor simplistically called them in 1536. The Maltese had strong affinities with the Islamic world and spoke an Arab dialect, in which the word for God was “Alla,” but they were fervent in their Catholic faith, proudly traced back to the biblical shipwreck of Saint Paul and the early conversion of the islands. These hardy people, scratching an impoverished living from the thin soil, endured a life as destitute as any in the Mediterranean, but the likelihood that they could be detached from the ruling knights had been severely reduced by the Muslim corsairs who kept the island in a state of unrelieved wretchedness. Turgut, who gloried in the honorific title “the Drawn Sword of Islam,” was particularly feared. His raid of 1551 enslaved five thousand people and completely depopulated Gozo. The knights seemed the best protection against such terror.
All this the Ottomans were largely aware of. No Ottoman campaign was undertaken without thorough preparation. Despite the promptings of the harem, the invasion of Malta was not a snap decision. It came off the back of years of reconnaissance and espionage. Malta had been mapped and described by the Ottoman cartographer Piri Reis in The Book of Navigation, and Turgut’s detailed knowledge of the islands from a dozen raids was widely shared. Shortly before the siege, Ottoman engineers, disguised as fishermen, visited Malta; using their fishing rods to measure the walls, they returned with reliable plans of the fortifications. Suleiman was said to possess accurate models of the forts. The Ottoman high command knew where the water sources and secure anc
horages were, the strengths and weaknesses of the defenses. In Istanbul they tailor-made a strategy based on this information: a secure harbor was a first priority to protect the all-important fleet, then control of wells; the knights wore stout armor so a good number of arquebusiers—musketeers—were essential. The shortage of wood meant that all the timber for siege works would have to be imported by ship. As for the siege itself, the limestone terrain was too rocky for successful mining; they would have to blast their way in, so emphasis must be placed on cannon. It was hoped that heavy bombardment might rupture the knights’ water cisterns and force a quick surrender in the summer heat.
The task of collecting and coordinating men and materials required sophisticated planning and logistical support, but in the backroom organization of campaigns, the centralized Ottoman administration was unsurpassed. Peremptory orders went out across the empire. Soldiers were detailed to present themselves at collection points around Istanbul and in southern Greece. There is an insistence in the campaign registers that emphasizes the sheer scale of the task, an anxiety too in the litany of curt orders to provincial administrators and governors: “The question of grain is very important…. There is a shortage of gunpowder…. If because of your neglect, cannon shells, gunstocks and black gunpowder do not reach us very quickly, by God’s name you will not save yourself…you should not even lose a minute…. Whatever kind of fruit and other types of food are to be found there, you should assist the traders to bring them to the fleet…. When my command arrives have the ship’s biscuit baked urgently, have it loaded carefully and send it…beware of any neglect…. You must muster volunteer captains in the area who are willing to participate in the Malta campaign.” The whole empire was abuzz with activity.
Within Istanbul itself, foreign agents and spies were soon aware that the Turk was at last stirring himself for war. The evidence was literally in front of their eyes. All foreigners were barred from living in the main city. Instead they resided within the small walled town of Galata across the Golden Horn, the narrow creek that provided Istanbul’s deepwater harbor. Situated on a steep hillside above the bay, Galata afforded commanding views of the comings and goings in the basin below and overlooked, just three hundred yards upstream, the complex of wooden hangars and slipways clustered around a small bay that comprised the city’s arsenal.
Shipbuilding is a slow, noisy, labor-intensive activity, and observers could scarcely miss the telltale signs of a major military enterprise: lumbering sailing barges rounded the point into the harbor with bulky cargoes of timber from the forests of the Black Sea, with rope, sailcloth, pitch, and cannonballs. Vats of tallow for greasing galley hulls rumbled down the rutty tracks on oxcarts. Hundreds of temporary workers flocked through the arsenal gates to swell the core teams of carpenters, caulkers, oar makers, and blacksmiths. During the winter of 1564–1565, the air rang with the incessant rasping of saws, the ringing of hammers, the blows of axes, the battering of iron on anvils. Smoke rose from the cauldrons of bubbling pitch, mingled with the odor of rancid animal fat and sawdust.
The stages in constructing a galley
In the arsenal, hulls were growing on the slipways from the keel up; carpenters were installing decks and masts and planing oars; riggers were fitting sails. The logistics of the operation spread throughout the city and far beyond. In foundries and smithies, weapons—cannon, swords, javelins, and gun stocks–were being cast or forged, ovens were turning out batches of double-baked biscuits, imperial agents were crisscrossing the provinces to enforce the manpower levy. In due course gangs of men would arrive in Istanbul and Gallipoli, skilled sailors from the coastal plains, and sturdy peasant boys from the Balkans or Anatolia who had never glimpsed the sea, to provide raw muscle power for the oars. Christian slaves waited in the pens to be chained to the oars again.
The work hurtled forward with a bristling urgency, “furiously,” a Spanish observer reported in February. Turgut had stressed the need to sail early to catch the spring wind. The Venetians reported that the sultan was personally inspecting the ships; he “wanted more than once to go…around the arsenal to see with his own eyes how his affairs are getting along, and he has been urging on the expedition with much insistence.” The cost was phenomenal—perhaps 30 percent of the treasury income—and military aid was denied to other campaigns. Yet no European observer could be sure of the objective. Malta was guessed at, but so too was a strike against Sicily. The Spanish feared for La Goletta, their strategic toehold near Tunis. Even neutral Venice prepared to strengthen Cyprus. The Turks held their cards characteristically close to their chest and kept building.
In December, Suleiman decided on the command structure. He would not go himself; he would be represented in proxy by Mustapha Pasha, a veteran of campaigns in Persia and Hungary, who had fought the knights at Rhodes as a young man. The pasha was an experienced general but possessed an explosive temper and a streak of cruelty—and a particular hatred of Christians. Assisting him, with responsibility for the fleet, was the hero of Djerba, Piyale Pasha; according to the Christian chroniclers, Suleiman commanded Mustapha “that he should treat Piyale like his own son; and ordered Piyale to honor and revere Mustapha like his father.” Also summoned to Malta from Tripoli was Turgut, who with his firsthand knowledge of the island was given a watching brief to help and advise both men. “I am relying on you because of your military experience,” the sultan wrote to the old corsair. “You must help Mustapha Pasha at sea and you should protect our navy against the enemy’s navy, which could set out from other countries to help Malta.” This division of power between the three men would later be held by Christian chroniclers to be the source of great trouble for the campaign, though it seems clear that Mustapha was the overall commander.
During March, the galleys, galliots, and barges were launched and loaded. Everything that was required for the siege had to be anticipated: sixty-two cannon were lugged aboard, including two giant basilisks that fired enormous stone shot; one hundred thousand cannonballs; two thousand tons of gunpowder; arquebuses and musket balls; arrows and helmets; tools for trenching and mining; “lead, rope, spades, picks, shovels, iron bars, wood” preformed wooden frames to serve as breastworks to defend the men; “large numbers of hides, woollen sacks, old tents and old sails for making defences” prodigious quantities of double-baked biscuits and other food, tents, gun carriages, wheels—all the paraphernalia of a major campaign, listed, checked, and counted by imperial bean counters who formed the backbone to any venture.
ON THE DAY OF DEPARTURE, March 30, in one of those displays of imperial theatre at which the Ottomans excelled, Mustapha Pasha received his standard and general’s sword and stepped aboard his galley, the Sultana, in a tumult of noise. The vessel was a personal gift of the sultan, constructed out of fig wood, with twenty-eight benches of oarsmen rowing four or five to the oar, flying a red-and-white standard. Piyale, as admiral, had his own flagship, a vessel of great beauty, whose stern was marked out by the symbols of maritime authority—three stern lanterns, a green silk banner, and a beaten-silver plaque ten feet square, crested by a crescent moon and a golden ball trailing the horsehair plume of imperial power. The sultan himself was also there in proxy, represented by a third flagship—the imperial galley, whose stern was decorated with moons and verses from the Koran in gold lettering “and different pictures in the Turkish style.” It was by all accounts an extraordinary spectacle. The armada set sail after morning prayers. Multicolored banners bearing verses from the Koran, crescent moons, and pictures of scimitars fluttered in the breeze. Oars dashed the still waters of the Golden Horn. Cannon fire thundered from the shore forts; cymbals and pipes crashed and brayed. The soldiers sat upright in the boats, still as stones—janissaries in white headdresses topped by flickering ostrich plumes, holy men in green turbans, levied men in white. To the murmuring of prayers from the assembled imams and the timekeeping drums of the galley masters, the huge armada pulled away under the lee of the palace point, west toward the Whi
te Sea. The greatest amphibious venture in Ottoman history departed, according to one account, “in an atmosphere of triumph.”
Empires of the Sea Page 11