Empires of the Sea

by Crowley, Roger

  As fort guns fired their three warning shots, drums and trumpets sounded and the watchtower fires sped the news across the island. There was panic among the civilian population. People streamed toward Mdina; those closer to the harbor crowded into the tiny fort at Saint Elmo or toward Birgu, “bringing with them their children, their cattle and their goods.” So many converged on the town gates that La Valette ordered out a detachment of knights to divert part of the human stream toward the adjacent peninsula of Senglea.

  By midday the defenders could understand how vast the Ottoman fleet was. By all accounts it was an extraordinary sight: “At fifteen or twenty miles from Malta the Turkish armada was clearly visible, all in sail, so that white cotton sails covered half the horizon to the east,” recorded Giacomo Bosio, the Order’s historian. The spectacle took the breath away: hundreds of ships in a vast crescent drawing forward across the calm sea—one hundred thirty galleys, thirty galliots, nine transport barges, ten large galleons, two hundred smaller transport vessels, thirty thousand men. As the invasion fleet filled the whole field of view, the three colorful flagships became clearly visible, their standards fluttering in the breeze. Each was rowed “five to a bench and was superbly decorated; that of the sultan with twenty-eight benches had red-and-white sails; that of Mustapha flying the general’s flag given to him by Suleiman with his own hands, sailed by the general himself, with his two sons with him, and that of Piyale sporting three lanterns—all three had poops carved with crescent moons and intricate gilded Turkish lettering and were individually and richly adorned with silken ornings and sumptuous brocades.”

  There were men watching from the battlements of Saint Angelo, and others sitting upright in the galleys, for whom this moment framed their lives. Forty-four years before, a world and a lifetime back, La Valette had stood on the ramparts of Rhodes and seen this sight, and there were old Greeks with him on Malta who could remember the young Suleiman’s invasion fleet rowing in from the Asian shore with the rising sun. Mustapha Pasha too had been at Rhodes and had watched the knights sail away on a winter’s morning. For nearly half a century the battle for the Mediterranean had been pushing west; now it had reached its literal center. On a fine May morning the turbaned warriors in the gently rocking galleys stared up at the limestone heights of the harbor; the knights in their steel armor and red surcoats stared back. It was a climactic moment in the long rhythm of this contest, as organic and inevitable as the winds that pushed ships around the sea in preordained patterns according to the seasons of the year.

  The planners and leaders of this conflict were astonishingly old by the standards of the time. The contest for Malta brought together the collective experience of an enduring generation of potentates, admirals, and generals, literally hundreds of man-years of voyages, raids, and wars. Suleiman, La Valette, Don Garcia, and Mustapha Pasha were all in their seventies; Turgut, preparing to sail from Tripoli, was reckoned to be eighty. Their lives stretched back into the fifteenth century. It was as if all the experience and all the wars in the trackless sea had shrunk to a single spot. The fates of the protagonists were interwoven like the wakes of ships crisscrossing in the water; they shared common experiences and memories of victory and defeat, capture and ransom. La Valette and Turgut had met before, when the corsair, captured by Andrea Doria’s nephew, was serving in the Christian galleys awaiting ransom; and Piyale, triumphant at Djerba, would again be confronted by its defeated Spanish commander, Don Alvare Sande. For Turgut especially, Malta was a place of destiny. He had raided the island seven times, and his brother had been killed on Gozo; failure to obtain release of the body from the island commander had led to Turgut’s extraordinary act of vengeance, enslaving the whole population. A fortune-teller had once told him that he would also die on Malta.

  La Valette dispatched a fast cutter to Don Garcia in Sicily and called a council of war. The galleon of the chief eunuch, captured by Romegas the previous summer, lay at anchor in the knights’ inner harbor like a taunt.

  CHAPTER 9

  The Post of Death

  May 18 to June 2, 1565

  AS THE OTTOMAN FLEET SWUNG SOUTH around the island, its progress was tracked from point to point by warning shots and fire signals along the chain of watchtowers. A force of a thousand men was dispatched from Birgu to shadow its progress toward the bay the Maltese called Marsaxlokk—the harbor of the south wind—a wide anchorage ideal for landing. However, the sight of the Christian troops drawn up on the shore dissuaded Piyale from the attempt and the fleet pressed on around the western side of the island under the sheer limestone cliffs. By nightfall the fleet had dropped anchor in the translucent waters off a series of small bays. Sentries on the headland watched all night as the boats rocked ominously at anchor. In the darkness men started to come ashore.

  The next morning before dawn a detachment of cavalry was dispatched from Mdina under a French knight, La Rivière; their mission was to ambush the intruders and take prisoners. The exercise went disastrously wrong. La Riviere and a few men were well hidden, watching the advance guard and biding their time, when another knight broke cover and galloped toward him. Confused, La Riviere emerged from his hiding place and was spotted by the Turks. With all surprise gone, the Frenchman had no option but to charge the enemy, but his horse was shot down and he was seized and dragged off to the galleys; the defenders knew the implications. In war, all useful captives were tortured for information. It was a bad start.

  It was a Sunday morning; the Christian population was hurrying to church in the fortified settlements to pray for deliverance when the Ottoman fleet sailed quietly back to Marsaxlokk and started to land in force. For those watching distantly from the shore, it was quite an extraordinary sight, by turns terrifying, magnificent, and alien—as if all the flamboyant spectacle of Asia had erupted onto the European shore. There were unfamiliar clothes, brilliant colors, outlandish hats: impressively mustachioed janissaries in trousers and long coats, cavalrymen in light mail, religious zealots in white, pashas in robes of apricot and green and gold, semi-naked dervishes in animal skins; enormous turbans, helmets shaped like onions, conical caps in duck-egg blue, white janissary headdresses with flickering ostrich plumes—and an array of equipment. The janissaries carried long arquebuses inlaid with arabesques of ivory. There were circular shields of wicker and gilt brass; pointed shields from Hungary; curved scimitars and pliant bows from the Asian steppes; flags of shot silk decorated with evil eyes, scorpions, and crescent moons; devices in flowing Arabic; bell tents; music; and noise.

  Janissary with arquebus

  By the following day the Ottoman fleet had unloaded the majority of their stores and heavy guns and pushed forward to establish a camp above the knights’ forts at Birgu and Senglea. The spectacle filled the Italian Francisco Balbi with eerie wonder. “A well-ordered camp was now set up on the heights of Santa Margarita, and was bright with flags and banners. The sight of it aroused great wonder amongst us, as did the sound of all their musical instruments, for—as is their custom—they brought with them many bugles, trumpets, drums, bagpipes, and other musical instruments.”

  The tumultuous throng probably numbered between twenty-two thousand and twenty-four thousand fighting men supported by eight thousand noncombatants, though the knights’ chroniclers would always put the figure much higher. The core troops were the six thousand janissaries—the sultan’s own men—each armed with the long-barreled Ottoman arquebus, unfamiliar to Europeans and slower to load but more accurate, designed for sniping and capable of penetrating medium-weight plate armor. With the janissaries came a large consignment of sipahis, cavalrymen largely fighting on foot, volunteers attracted by the lure of booty, marines, and adventurers. There was a gunnery corps, and the support resources: armorers, engineers, sappers, standard-bearers, carpenters, cooks, and hangers-on, including, apparently, Jewish merchants hoping to acquire Christian slaves. These men were drawn from across the Ottoman Empire. There were riflemen from Egypt; cavalrymen from Anatolia,
the Balkans, Salonika, and the Peloponnese; many were renegades, converted Greeks, Spaniards, and Italians, freed Christian slaves taken in battle, or mercenaries attracted by the opportunities under the crescent banners of Islam. Some were not Muslims at all. The Ottoman Empire was a melting pot of loyalties and motives. Some had come to fight for Islam, others out of compulsion or hope of gain.

  Within the knights’ citadel at Birgu, religious fervor engulfed the population. The grand master and the archbishop of Malta organized a penitent procession through the narrow streets, with the priests and the people “devoutly imploring divine aid against the furious attack of the barbarians.” Robert of Eboli, a Capuchin friar who had once been a slave of the corsairs at Tripoli, astonished and inspired the people with a fervent oration, standing before the altar of the conventual church dispensing the sacraments for forty hours.

  It was a situation to arouse the deepest crusading instincts of the knights. For nearly five hundred years they had been hunkering down behind stout bastions they could defend to the death against Islam. This was the chivalric myth they had made for themselves at Crac des Chevaliers, Hattin, Acre, Rhodes—the glorious last-ditch stand against impossible odds, massacre, martyrdom, and death. The existence of the Order was justified by this roll call of defeats in the cause of Christendom. For La Valette, however, it was clear that Malta was the last redoubt. Defeat would not only expose the heart of Christian Europe; it would also sweep the Order of Saint John away forever.

  There were somewhere between six thousand and eight thousand fighting men on Malta. Of these the aristocratic knights of Europe in their stout plate armor and peaked helmets, who looked like conquistadors and wore the red surcoat marked with a white cross as a pledge to Christ—and which was useful as a target for enemy snipers—accounted for just five hundred at most. Alongside them were the professional Spanish and Italian companies sent by Don Garcia. These were the king of Spain’s men, well armed and motivated, but they had not come to Malta for glory. They had the expectations common to most soldiers; they fought for pay and rewards and to live for another day. In this respect they were little different from many of their Muslim counterparts. Among those who enrolled was the Italian Francisco Balbi, sixty years old and down on his luck, who fought as an arquebusier and survived to write a firsthand account of the siege.

  Over and beyond the professionals there was a handful of gentleman adventurers who had come to the defense of Malta for the glory of the thing, some Greeks from Rhodes, released convicts, galley slaves, and unreliable converts from Islam. The conflict at Malta brought all the diverse peoples of the Mediterranean to a central point. It was a trading place of destinies and motives, where loyalties might suddenly reverse; both sides were to be bedeviled by defectors motivated by a desire to escape slavery, to revert to the faith of birth, to hedge bets against the final outcome, or to vie for better rewards. But the bedrock of the Christian defense rested on three thousand irreducible Maltese militiamen in their crude helmets and padded cotton tunics. Alongside the knights, they would prove to be unflinchingly loyal to Christ’s cause; ardent in their Catholic faith, the Maltese population would fight to the last child for their homes and stony fields.

  On May 20 the Ottomans started to push inland from the harbor at Marsaxlokk, toward the grand harbor. As they did so, La Valette sent out skirmishing parties to ambush them in the broken landscape of walled fields and dusty lanes. The temper of the conflict was set down in these early exchanges. The young knights, fired with dreams of glory, played hide-and-seek with the trudging army on its way to collect water. They returned to Birgu like Apache braves with staring heads swinging from their saddlebows, and banners and jewelry hacked from the dead. One brought in a finger with a gold ring; another stripped an engraved gold bracelet from the richly dressed corpse of an officer that read “I do not come to Malta for wealth or honor but to save my soul.” Any hope that the local population might be detached from the aristocrats’ cause was also quickly dispelled. The Maltese set about preparing contemptuous ambushes. Having killed one Turk, they found a pig nearby and slaughtered it, then arranged the dead man at a convenient spot with the animal’s snout inserted into his mouth. Then they retired behind a wall. When fellow Muslims saw the body, they rushed forward with cries of horror and rage to rescue their fallen comrade from this final indignity—and were shot down.

  Despite these local successes, the weighty advance of the army was unstoppable. Camps were established and guarded; flags fluttered from pickets and tents; guns and supplies were dragged up by oxen the Maltese had left in the fields, small-scale Christian operations pushed back. Mustapha set up his headquarters on the heights overlooking the grand harbor and seized the watering holes at Marsa, which the defenders had attempted to poison with bitter herbs and excrement. Within a few days the whole of the south of the island was in the hands of the invaders and on fire. Having gathered all the usable materials they could glean from the landscape—food, cattle, brushwood—the Ottomans torched the fields, so that from the ramparts of Birgu and Senglea, “that part of the island seemed to be completely in smoke and fire.”

  After setting up camp, Mustapha had La Rivière, the French knight taken in the first encounter, brought out onto the hill overlooking Birgu. He had probably already been tortured. The Frenchman was asked to show Mustapha the weak sectors of the defenses and promised his liberty in return. La Rivière indicated two positions: the posts of Auvergne and Castile. The pasha determined to test the knights’ defenses.

  On the morning of May 21, the whole army rolled forward. From the ramparts, the spectacle assumed an unearthly beauty: “The Turkish army covered the whole countryside in one complete formation arranged like a crescent moon; seen from Birgu it was a quite spectacular sight, with men in splendidly rich and ostentatious clothes. Besides their shining armaments and principal standards and banners, they carried other triangular flags in a rainbow of colors, which glimpsed from a distance looked like an immense shimmering field of flowers, that delighted the ear as much as the eye because one could hear them playing various strange musical instruments.” Up close, these impressions were drowned out for the onlookers by “the horrible explosions of our guns—and theirs—and the rattle of our muskets.”

  As the Turks drew near, the defenders beat their drums and unfurled the red-and-white standard of Saint John. La Valette saw that his men were straining to get at the invaders, and determined to test their morale. Waiting until the enemy was in range of his fortress guns, he unleashed seven hundred arquebusiers from the gates with drums battering and flags unfurled, and a detachment of cavalry. He had to stand lance in hand to prevent the reserves from joining in the fray; had he not done so “not one man would have remained in the Birgu, so great was their ardour to fight the Turks.” After five hours of fierce fighting, the Christians withdrew into the gates, having killed a hundred and lost ten, according to their own accounts. It was a sign of redoubtable intent from the defenders. And from the posts of Castile and Auvergne there was such a torrent of fire that Mustapha’s own life was in danger. The pasha concluded that La Rivière had lied. He was marched off to a galley and beaten to death with excruciating and exquisite skill in full view of the Christian slaves.

  The next day, May 22, the Ottomans mounted a similar reconnaissance in force against the adjacent peninsula of Senglea. This time, La Valette, remembering Don Garcia’s advice, forbade any skirmishing beyond the walls. (Another injunction—to guard his own person—the grand master had already ignored; standing on the battlements of Birgu, bullets whistling around him, he had seen two men drop at his side.) Henceforth the defenders would put their faith in fortifications. Despite the impression left by La Rivière’s disinformation, the defenses were perilously weak. According to Francisco Balbi, the scarp of the ditch “was so low at one point that it presented no obstacle to the enemy.” Men worked round the clock to shore it up.

  Meanwhile, in the newly established camp at the Marsa, the O
ttoman high command was considering its options. Even for experienced campaigners, Malta posed a problem, or rather a set of interlocking problems with many variables. There was much to contemplate: the conundrum of the intricate harbor complex, the unfamiliar Maltese winds, the barrenness of the terrain, the demands for water, the length of the supply chain from fleet to camp. It was not that the invaders were confronted by one impregnable fortress as at Rhodes; rather they had to consider a variety of weaker but dispersed objectives, all of which required attention.

  There were the two linked promontories of Birgu and Senglea that made up the nucleus of Christian resistance, but these were interlinked with the fortress of Saint Elmo across the water on Mount Sciberras that provided the key to the best harbor. The main Ottoman camp at Marsa was six miles from the fleet anchored at Marsaxlokk, and the early skirmishes had revealed the need to guard the supply chain from ambush along its entire length. There were also the two forts in the hinterland to consider, that at Mdina and the other on Gozo, which provided potential centers of guerrilla warfare and rallying points if left unattended. One of these targets had to be chosen first; the others had to be managed. It would be necessary to split the army into sections. Perhaps twenty-two thousand fighting men was not so large a force after all.

  Other things were concerning the commanders too. Piyale was edgy about the winds, less predictable in summer than those in the eastern half of the White Sea. The imperative to keep the fleet safe was his absolute priority. Shipwreck or a daring raid by enemy fire ships would commit the expedition to lingering but certain collective death at the hands of an enemy with reinforcements uncomfortably close at hand. Malta, lying under the eagle wing of Christian Sicily, was the king of Spain’s domain; sooner or later a counterattack was certain. The long lines of communication, the finite time frame, the inability to remain on Malta over the winter—all these things were weighed in the balance.