Empires of the Sea

by Crowley, Roger

  By the morning of June 3, following a night of intense bombardment, Ottoman troops had established sheltering positions close to the ditch and only tens of yards from the ravelin’s protecting walls. It was, by irony, the saint’s day of Saint Elmo—the patron saint of seamen.

  Ottoman engineers, intent on assessing the effect of the night’s barrage, slipped into the ditch in front of the fort and approached the ravelin. There was silence from the position—no challenge, no shots from a lookout. They got up to the foot of the fortification unnoticed. In all likelihood, the assigned sentry had been silently felled by a single arquebus shot, and lay on his stomach on the parapet looking “as if he were still alive.” His comrades, only forty in all, assumed he was still on guard. Other versions give a more cowardly version of the sentries’ behavior.

  The engineers stole away and informed Mustapha. A force of janissaries with scaling ladders crept forward and stealthily climbed the parapet. They burst into the small fortress with ululating cries and shot to death the first men they saw. The remainder turned and fled, too panic-stricken to raise the drawbridge into the main fort behind them. Only a determined sally by a small group of knights stopped the rush of the janissaries into Saint Elmo. A spirited counterattack was mounted to force the intruders out of the ravelin; two or three times they seemed to have succeeded, but more men were flooding the ditch, and the defenders were forced to withdraw. With lightning speed the Turks seemed able to consolidate their position in the ravelin, bundling in sacks of wool and earth and brushwood to construct a rampart against counterattack from the fort. Flags—the critical markers of possession—started to flutter from the makeshift defenses. It was just the prelude to a berserk, impromptu assault by the men in the ditch, who propped ladders against the walls with the hope of finally storming Saint Elmo. They felt certain of success, but the attempt was suicidal. The defenders hurled down rocks and liquid fire on the Turks’ unprotected heads. The din of the battle was extraordinary; according to the Christian chroniclers, “with the roar of the artillery and the arquebuses, the hair-raising screams, the smoke and fire and flame, it seemed that the whole world was at the point of exploding.” After five hours of havoc, the Turks were forced to withdraw, leaving five hundred crack troops dead in the ditch. The defenders claimed to have lost sixty soldiers and twenty knights, including the French knight La Gardampe, who crawled away into the fortress chapel and died at the foot of the altar. Despite the huge Ottoman losses, the ravelin was now in enemy hands.

  The serious consequences of the loss were felt almost at once. The Ottomans worked furiously to consolidate their command of the ravelin, using goatskins filled with earth to raise the platform until it was level with the wall. They now occupied an offensive position within yards of the fort; they were soon able to bombard its very heart with two captured guns. In the ditch below, men could work their way up to the base of the walls without being attacked.

  Toward dawn on June 4, while the Turks were still fortifying the ravelin, a small boat was seen approaching the rocky promontory below the fort; the sentries on the rampart tensed themselves, ready to fire, when a cry rang out in the dark: “Salvago!” It was a Spanish knight, Raffael Salvago. He had been dropped by galley from Sicily with messages from Don Garcia, and had run the blockade around the harbor. With him was an experienced captain, Miranda. The two men clambered ashore and briefly inspected the fort in the dark, then climbed back on board. By now the crossing between Saint Elmo and Birgu was under threat from sharpshooters. Boats could no longer make the journey in broad daylight; even night crossings were fraught with danger. As they rowed quietly across the harbor, a volley of shot struck the boat and killed one of the crew.

  La Valette listened to their report in gloomy silence. It was devastating to have lost the ravelin so negligently. Hardly more reassuring was the news from Sicily: Don Garcia was struggling to gather forces but he hoped for relief by June 20. The question was simply how long Saint Elmo could be kept alive. Miranda was dispatched back again to make a more detailed appraisal of the defenses and the men’s morale. His second report was emphatic: “The fort could not be held for long if the Turks were persistent, because the lack of traverses meant that the defenders’ fire had little effect. Furthermore, there was no strongpoint to which the defenders could retire.” Yet again La Valette wanted to test this information. Another commission was dispatched specifically to study the feasibility of retaking the ravelin, with the same conclusion: “It was impossible to get the ravelin back; they should shore up the defenses for as long as they could.” From now on Saint Elmo was living on borrowed time. A nightly transfusion of men and materials slipped across the harbor, dodging the enemy guns, keeping the doomed fort alive. It was on life support.

  IN THE WAKE OF THE LOSS, La Valette was desperate to sustain the fort’s morale; with this in mind he appointed Miranda as de facto commander of Saint Elmo. The Spaniard was not an aristocratic knight, but an experienced and practical field commander who understood his men. It was not the consolations of religion that would stiffen their resolve but tangible rewards. He asked for money, “for nothing pleases soldiers more than money,” and barrels of wine. He paid the men and set up gaming tables and a bar in the covered arcades around the parade ground. In the short run it was effective.

  The Ottomans, however, felt that the end must be near. They kept raising the ravelin to overtop the fort and peppered the interior with shot. The men worked furiously to fill up the ditch with brushwood, earth, and bales of wood. At the same time, the Ottomans hauled up masts from some of the galleys and constructed a scaffolding bridge across the ditch and adjacent to the ravelin, from which the workers were protected by arquebusiers: any defender who showed his head above the parapet was immediately shot down. A second bridge was built farther down the wall. The bridge building, however, provoked a furious response: a sortie was mounted to burn the first bridge with only partial success—and “by Vespers they had repaired it again.” Bridge work continued: a causeway was laid, wide enough for five men to walk abreast, and covered with earth to proof it against incendiaries. The defenders were compelled to crouch beneath the parapet, so that it was impossible to hinder this operation; the whole fortress was being probed by gunfire so that “there was not a safe place in St Elmo.” Seeing the hopelessness of their situation and the likelihood of another assault, morale in the fortress snapped again.

  The whole body of men, including the Knights of Saint John and Captain Miranda, agreed to dispatch another captain, Medrano, to Birgu to put the case to La Valette and his council. It was a unified response. Medrano declared that the fort could not be held much longer; “because their defences had been levelled, the enemy’s bridge was nearly completed, and that, owing to the height of the ravelin, which commanded the whole fort, whence the Turks were bombarding them, it was not possible to defend themselves.” La Valette somehow persuaded the concerned Spaniard to return to the fort with vaguely reassuring words, but they failed to assuage the growing panic inside. While the bridge building continued apace, the chink of pickaxes working at the foot of walls convinced the garrison that the Turks were about to plant mines. Meanwhile the bombardment went on night and day without stopping, “so that it seemed as though they wanted to reduce the fort to dust.” It was clear an all-out assault was near. On June 8 the council on Birgu received a second letter from Saint Elmo: the end was nigh, they were expecting to be blown sky high at any moment, they had withdrawn to the church in the center of the fort and would prefer to sally out and die straightaway. This letter was signed by fifty knights.

  La Valette’s response was again to play for time: he sent across another commission. When the three knights arrived, they found the fort in uproar. The defenders’ nerves were in shreds. Panicky preparations were being made to abandon the fort; cannonballs and trenching equipment were being thrown down wells; work was in hand to blow up the fort from within. When the commissioners declared that Saint Elmo was still defensi
ble—and that it was impossible to mine a fortress built on solid rock—rage boiled over. An open mutiny erupted in the parade ground; they taunted the commissioners to show them exactly how the fort could be held. The gates were closed to detain the visitors inside. Only when someone had the wit to sound the alarm bell did the men disperse back to their posts, and the commissioners slipped back across the water. On Birgu the council met to discuss the matter; the rebellious garrison dispatched a swimmer across the harbor in quick time to reiterate their fears. In camera, the council was deeply undecided about how to proceed; some wanted withdrawal to preserve the men, others were for holding out, but in practice there was no choice; it would be impossible safely to evacuate such a large body of men now that the harbor was monitored by Ottoman guns. The defenders had to be persuaded to go on buying time.

  A combination of promises and blackmail eventually quelled the mutiny. Don Constantino, one of the knights’ commissioners, offered to raise volunteers to go to Saint Elmo. In Birgu’s main square drums summoned recruits to the standard. The council then calmly informed the mutineers at Saint Elmo that they could return if they wished: “For every one who came back, there were four begging and imploring to take their place.” Meanwhile La Valette wrote to the knights in the fort, reminding them of their vows to Christ and their Order. A new commander was appointed, Melchior de Monserrat; there was an upsurge of zeal; the Christians were impressed that two converted Jews volunteered for the cause, and the inspirational preacher Robert of Eboli went across. Captain Miranda made a stirring speech to the men “in the language that soldiers understand” to the effect that “they should fight bravely and sell their lives to the barbarians as dearly as possible.” A second swimmer came back from the fort, announcing that “all said with one voice they did not wish to leave the fort, but that reinforcements and munitions should be sent to them; that they all wished to die in St Elmo.” The nightly transfusions of men and materials continued; a hundred men were ferried over with a great number of banners to plant on the ramparts to give the impression of a large relief force. There was no more talk of dissent.

  The attack on Saint Elmo (E); Mount Sciberras (Y); Mustapha Pasha’s tent, in the foreground (Q); Turgut’s gun battery (O); Senglea (D); Birgu (B); the fort of Saint Michael (A)

  The battle that raged day after day over the small fort was being conducted with all the evolving weapons of the age of gunpowder. The Ottomans certainly had—and used—deadly companies of archers, but it was the sound of explosions echoing around the stricken fort that gave the impression of Armageddon. From a distance it was a conflict of sniper fire and artillery bombardment; a man could be smartly felled by a single bullet or dismembered by an iron ball, but in the close-quarters struggle for the walls, an ingenious range of small-scale incendiary devices came into play. The Christians had primitive hand grenades and flamethrowers, pots of Greek fire and barrels of pitch, as well as swivel guns and heavier arquebuses that fired stones the size of pigeons’ eggs and chain shot for slaughtering close-packed charging men. The Ottomans responded in kind with bursting grenades that hurled clinging fire at the heavily armored defenders. All these weapons were crude, experimental, and unstable. The risks in using them were considerable. Accounts of the siege ring with the accidental deaths of the weapons’ handlers: barrels of gunpowder exploded; grenades ignited the stock around them before they could be thrown; men were regularly maimed and burned to death by their own weapons. When these weapons worked, they could be devastating.

  In this laboratory of flame warfare, the Christians decided to test a new device. On June 10, La Valette sent over a stock of fire hoops, an innovation said to have been invented by the knight Ramon Fortuyn. “These consisted of barrel hoops well covered with caulking tow and well steeped in a cauldron of boiling tar. They were again covered with tow and once more immersed in tar. This process was repeated until they became as thick as a man’s leg.” The aim was to hurl them over the parapet into a mass of charging men.

  They were soon pressed into service. On that day the Ottomans launched another fierce attack; the janissaries in their loose robes poured over the bridges and set ladders to the walls. As the charging, scrabbling men pressed forward, torches were set to the hoops; they were levered over the parapet with iron tongs and set bouncing and spinning down the slope like demented circles of fire. The effect was devastating. The clothes of two or three soldiers at a time would get entrapped by the giant wheels. Balls of flame now, the men would turn and run, robes and turbans alight, scattering terror and fire in their wake as they headed for the sea. The psychological impact of the wheels was profound. The janissaries pulled back, but only for a while. Mustapha was determined to finish off the fort. After dark the men came again. The whole sky was illuminated by the flash of cannon and the flare of incendiaries—fire hoops, flamethrowers, and pots of Greek fire rained over the walls; the onrushing Muslims hurled back exploding fire grenades that burst on the parapets and illuminated the defenders in an incredible and ghastly light. There was no darkness; from across the water Saint Elmo looked like a volcano of fire. It was bright enough for the gunners on Birgu, trying to disrupt the Turks with cross fire, to prepare their guns without torches. The screams and shouts, the explosions and the violence of the light, convinced the grand master that Saint Elmo had fallen. Yet somehow it held. Again the Turks drew back.

  By now it was dawn; the early sun was rising; the defenders were exhausted, dead on their feet, and Mustapha knew it. He called for one more frenzied attack. Fresh men surged forward again with ropes and grappling hooks, which they attached to the barrels of earth and makeshift barricades on the parapets that screened the defenders from rifle fire. Hauling themselves up, they managed to establish a position on top and plant their flags. Sensing the danger, the commander of the bastion, Colonel Mas, loaded a light gun and blasted the janissaries off the wall with a enormous crash “and hurled them into the ditch again, with great terror to the others.” The attack collapsed. The Turks withdrew with great losses. Silence fell over the battlefield. The Muslims spent the day collecting and burying their dead in mass graves. But the defenders were also hemorrhaging men at an unacceptable rate. La Valette ferried across another one hundred fifty men together with ammunition and “baskets, mattresses and unravelled rope” for building barricades. The four-day siege was now in its fourteenth day.

  Bad news was starting to leak out of the Ottoman camp. Christian deserters and captured Turks drip-fed encouraging scraps of information about the assault on Saint Elmo to La Valette and the army council in Birgu. Ottoman losses the previous night had been considerable; many seasoned troops had been killed. There was disease in the camp and the wounded were dying; rationing had been instituted—laborers were limited to ten ounces of biscuits a day. There was ill will between the pashas and the janissaries: “The pashas were reproaching the janissaries for calling themselves the Sons of the Sultan and for their many other brave boasts, yet still they had not got the spirit to take a small, weak and ruined fort, against which a bridge had already been laid.” At the same time an atmosphere of intense competition between Mustapha and Piyale, between the army and the navy, was further straining the morale of the camp. Two opposing forces propelled Mustapha forward: the fear of disgrace and a desire for glory. Whispers reached the pashas that Don Garcia was gathering ships and men in Sicily; Piyale dispatched a fleet of galleys daily to patrol the Malta channel.

  However, if morale inside Saint Elmo had been raised, it was by no means rock solid; and on June 13, Mustapha received information that seemed to promise a final solution. An Italian soldier, no doubt reckoning that the end was nigh, slipped over the walls and presented himself in the Ottoman camp. He told Mustapha to raise the ravelin even higher, to prevent any movement around the fort and to cut off all relief from Birgu. One last assault would then finish off the few remaining men. The following day the defenders could hear a voice calling to them in Italian. Mustapha was making them an offer
, “on the promise of his head.” The pasha would give them free passage out of the fort to wherever they wanted to go. The alternative was a horrible death. The voice was promptly answered by a volley of arquebus fire and a succession of spinning fire hoops. The defenders were resolved to fight to the last. They prepared themselves for one more attack.

  Mustapha began what he hoped would be the final preparations with the time-honored Ottoman tactics: continuous bombardment day and night, skirmishes, localized attacks, and innumerable false alarms—all designed to leave the defenders sleepless and exhausted ahead of the last push. Labor corps worked incessantly, trying to fill in the ditches with earth and bundles of brushwood, while arquebus fire rattled the parapets. The defenders hampered these attempts as best they could. They set fire to the brushwood and shot dead the brilliantly attired aga (commander) of the janissaries, which caused great disturbance in the Ottoman camp. The night of June 15 saw another thumping artillery barrage under a bright moon. Then silence.

  IN THE PREDAWN of June 16, a lone voice broke the stillness. The mullahs summoned the men to prayers; for two hours the priests called and the men responded in a gathering rhythmic crescendo to psych them up to fight and die. The defenders crouched behind their makeshift barricades, listening to the eerie chants rising and falling in the darkness beyond. La Valette had sent further reinforcements across, and the defenders, if already weary, were well ordered. Each man had his duty and his post. They were grouped in threes: one arquebusier to two pike men. There were men assigned to drag away the dead and three mobile troops to reinforce wherever the need was greatest. Large quantities of fire weapons had been stockpiled, rocks gathered, and quantities of bread soaked in wine. Barrels of water stood behind the parapets into which men torched by adhesive fire could hurl themselves.