But La Valette was not the only commander to be troubled. Mustapha had lost valuable time—a rigid coordinate in the whole plan—and at least four thousand men, conservatively a sixth of his whole force, including a large part of his crack janissaries. He had fired eighteen thousand cannon shots, and no matter how ample the military planning had been in Istanbul, gunpowder was not inexhaustible. The death of Turgut was another blow. Mustapha ordered the corsairs to transport his body to Tripoli and to return with all the gunpowder they could find. He also hurried a galliot off to Istanbul with some cannon from the fort as trophies; it was a wise move. Instinctively he could sense that lack of positive news was starting to make Suleiman frown with displeasure. It was essential that Mustapha move the final assault forward. In Istanbul meanwhile, a bloodless revolution was taking place in the imperial administration. On June 27, the chief vizier died. He was replaced by the second vizier, the Bosnian-born Sokollu Mehmet Pasha, who would prove to be one of the ablest of Ottoman viziers and a statesman worthy of his great master. It was Sokollu who would largely steer the Ottoman ship in the years ahead.
ON BIRGU, La Valette was confronting the consequences of defending Saint Elmo to the last. Proportionately, the fifteen hundred dead Christians were an even heavier loss—about a quarter of all his fighting men—but the lives had at least bought time to strengthen the flimsy defenses on the two peninsulas. However, behind the resolute public face, there was something approaching despair. A string of urgent letters was dispatched to Mdina in the center of the island, then on by small boat to the wider world. To Philip in Spain he wrote immediately, “I had put all our forces to defend St Elmo…We are now so few we can’t hold out for long.” To Don Garcia, the man on the spot in Sicily, he begged repeatedly for an immediate full-scale rescue fleet, “without which we’re dead.”
Both the grand master and the pasha had fought at Rhodes as young men, and the lessons of that encounter had not been forgotten. Even as Ottoman engineers surveyed the harbor, mapping angles of fire and siting gun platforms for the inevitable bombardment of Birgu and Senglea, Mustapha decided to try to cut the knot of his difficulties. On June 29, “at the hour of vespers,” a small posse of horsemen approached the walls of Senglea, carrying a white flag. The leader, richly dressed in a brilliantly colored caftan, fired a gun in the air indicating that he wanted to parley. He was answered by a blast of cannon fire, which forced him to dodge smartly behind a rock. A single man was pushed forward and ran blindly for the walls, hoping not to be shot dead; this unfortunate was an old Spaniard who had been an Ottoman slave for thirty-two years and spoke Turkish. The knights took the man, blindfolded him, and led him to the grand master. He had been sent to repeat the offer made by Suleiman forty years earlier—that they could avoid inevitable death by accepting the offer of free passage to Sicily, “with all your people, your property and your artillery.” La Valette promptly replied “in a terrible and severe voice,” “Hang him!” The old man fell on his knees in terror, “saying that he was only a slave and that he had been forced to come with this message.” La Valette let the wretched man go, with a word to the pashas that he would accept no envoys; the next man would be killed.
Behind this lay a clear lesson from Rhodes. La Valette understood that the low morale of the townspeople had been a crucial factor in the outcome in 1522. Any hint of negotiation could undermine resolve. Defeatist talk would be met by death. When a Maltese renegade started to call over the wall to his compatriots a few days later, La Valette forbade any response. There would be only silence and gunfire. In any event, Mustapha had already lost any last chance of detaching the sympathies of the Maltese at Saint Elmo, with the decapitated and crucified body of their priest floating in the bay. The whole civilian population, down to the women and children, was ready to tear their prisoners to bits.
Having failed to achieve a quick win, Mustapha pressed urgently forward. A decision was taken to seal off both peninsulas but to tackle Senglea first, the weaker of the two, then to crack the knights’ main stronghold on Birgu. Senglea consisted of a fort at its landward end, Saint Michael, that defended the peninsula from the land and sheltered a small town. The promontory beyond was barren; there was a hill with two windmills on it, and where it tapered to a point in the harbor, there was a beaked fighting platform, called the Spur. Almost all of Senglea’s defenses were unsatisfactory; the Saint Michael bastion with its unfinished rock-cut ditch was as deficient as Saint Elmo in the finer points of fortress design. The western, seaward side of the promontory around to the Spur at the end, which could easily be bombarded from the shore, contained no serious fortifications; only the eastern side was reasonably secure. It faced into the inner harbor and was protected by Birgu on the other side; the mouth of the harbor between Senglea and Birgu was sealed by a massive chain. But if Mustapha could find a seaborne way of attacking the westward side, the peninsula’s doom would quickly be sealed.
IN FACT THE PASHA had conceived a bold strategy for taking Senglea, called by the Turks the Fortress of the Mill. Unfortunately, details of the plan were quickly leaked by a curious defection. The Ottoman forces contained a substantial number of Christian renegades—either voluntary or forcible converts—and the durable loyalty of these men, in such close proximity to their coreligionists, was to prove a continual problem. On the morning of Saturday June 30, Francisco Balbi, looking from the Spur on the end of Senglea across the harbor, saw a lone figure in cavalry armor waving furtively from the foreshore opposite. He indicated that he wanted a boat to come and collect him. No vessel could easily be dispatched without attracting attention; he was gestured to swim across. The man stripped off his armor, tied his shirt around his head, and struck out inexpertly across the water. Three sailors dived into the water from the Spur to help him across. They reached the exhausted man at the same moment that the Turks raised the alarm and ran down onto the beach. Covering fire from the Christian side pinned the Turks back until the fugitive was dragged from the water, more dead than alive.
The defection was something of an intelligence coup—and a serious blow to Mustapha. The man’s name was Mehmet Ben Davud but he had been born Philip Lascaris, the son of a noble Greek family from the Peloponnese. He was fifty-five years old and had been taken as a child by the Ottomans and converted to Islam; now, seeing the heroic defence of Saint Elmo, “his heart touched by the Holy Spirit,” according to the pious chroniclers, he was resolved “to return to the Catholic Faith.” Mehmet had been a soldier of some standing in the Ottoman camp and party to the pasha’s innermost councils. He unfolded the details of Mustapha’s plan to La Valette, point by point. In order to attack the westward flank of Senglea without having to sail ships into the harbor past the Christian guns, the pasha was planning to have his smaller boats dragged overland across the base of Mount Sciberras into the top of the creek beyond Senglea. This was invaluable information; the defenders set about planning energetic countermeasures. And while Mustapha was busy preparing his gun platforms for a furious bombardment of Senglea, he suffered a further indignity.
On the night of July 3, a long column of dark figures was making its way furtively across the Maltese landscape. They moved through the warm summer night without talking; just the occasional snort of a horse, muffled footsteps, the faint clink of armor; they picked their way through the maze of dusty lanes behind the Ottoman camp.
These seven hundred armed men were a small relief force dispatched in four galleys from Sicily by Don Garcia and put ashore secretly on the north of the island a few days earlier. The operation had been carefully planned with an elaborate system of fire signals and messages conveyed by Maltese runners dressed as Turks. In thick fog the force had been conducted to Mdina and secreted in the walled city. Their presence was successfully kept from the enemy, but only through lucky chance. A child looking out of a window on the ramparts spied a ghostly figure slipping away through the fog, and called out “Turks! Turks!” Horsemen hunted down the fleeing figure and dragged
him back; a Greek slave, hoping to win his freedom, had set out to the Ottoman camp with the news. He was chopped to pieces.
The relief column reached the coast beyond Birgu before dawn for a prearranged rendezvous with boats sent by the grand master. The twenty-mile march had entailed a huge semicircular detour to avoid the Ottoman lines, but passed almost without mishap. Only one knight, Girolamo of Gravina, “heavily armed and very fat,” had got detached from the party, along with a dozen soldiers laden with baggage. They were captured and hauled before Mustapha. The rest made a triumphant entry into Birgu by boat. It was a cheering moment for La Valette; the new contingent consisted mainly of professional soldiers from the garrison of Sicily under their commander Marshal de Robles. Among those who also came were La Valette’s own nephew, and two English adventurers, the exiled Catholics John Smith and Edward Stanley.
The assault on the walls of Saint Michael (I) and Senglea. The windmills are at the end (G); the spur is just to the left of them. Also shown: Saint Elmo (H); the boats being hauled into the harbor (X); the pontoon bridge (L) connecting Senglea to Birgu (B); the chief eunuch’s galley (K); just to the left, the hidden gun battery; Fort Saint Angelo (A); chains at E and M closing the inner harbor
When Mustapha learned the truth from Gravina, he was both stunned and furious. A row broke out with Piyale over culpability for this humiliating relief right under their noses. Mustapha thought it prudent to get his explanation to Suleiman in first; another ship was dispatched to Istanbul on July 4. The army was put to frantic work, finally sealing off Birgu and Senglea from all contact with the outside world. Henceforward the dispatch of messages became a risky business; Maltese swimmers slipped into the night sea with coded letters scrolled into cows’ horns and stoppered with wax.
Meanwhile the inhabitants of Senglea were being subjected to all the measures they had witnessed at Saint Elmo. Wooden gun platforms were established in an arc around the two promontories; the guns were laboriously dragged back around from the high ground above Saint Elmo by teams of men and oxen, and were then sited and prepared to fire. The cannon fire that opened up in earnest on July 4 pounded the land walls of the Saint Michael fort and the exposed western shoreline; it was accompanied by sniper fire from the arquebusiers designed to pick off soldiers and laborers working to strengthen defenses against the coming attack. The bombardment was ceaseless. La Valette countered by sending the Muslim slaves out to work in exposed positions, chained together in pairs. It made no difference; Mustapha pressed on regardless—felling the reluctant workers from the heights above. Balbi found their plight pitiful. “These poor creatures became so exhausted by sheer fatigue from the continual toil that they could hardly stand. They cut off their own ears and even preferred getting killed to working any longer.” A few days later a pair of chained slaves, caught in the firing line, called out in Turkish to their comrades over the walls to stop firing out of pity for their plight. The intent of their words was misunderstood by the Maltese, who guessed they were directing the gunners to the weak sections of wall. A mob of yelling women fell on the slaves, dragged them through the city streets, and stoned them to death.
On Friday, July 6, the intelligence of Philip Lascaris was proved correct. As if from nowhere, six boats appeared in the upper reaches of the harbor: they had been dragged the one thousand yards across the peninsula of Mount Sciberras on greased rollers by ox teams and floated into the upper basin. The next day there were six more. By July 10 there were sixty; by July 14 there were eighty. Mysteriously the boats in the bay also seemed to be getting bigger: somehow the sides were being built up to provide a protective superstructure against arquebus fire.
Both sides were engaged in ceaseless preparations: the Ottoman bombardment and skirmishing were unceasing—with just an eerie lull on July 8 for the Sacrifice Festival. On July 10 Mustapha’s undue haste resulted in a spectacular accident. The barrels of the guns were not allowed to cool sufficiently between rounds. One of the guns cracked; a tongue of fire set the gunpowder store alight. “With an enormous flash and smoke, it blasted forty Turks into the air, and killed them.”
In the workshops and smithies of Senglea and Birgu furious countermeasures were in process. Smiths and carpenters were busy making small shot and fuses for arquebuses, repairing guns, forging nails, constructing wooden defensive structures. Forewarned by Lascaris of the coming attack, La Valette had instigated two major engineering projects. A pontoon bridge of airtight barrels was assembled, ready to be floated into position in the inner harbor between Birgu and Senglea; it would connect the two settlements and allow troops to be quickly transferred from one to the other. Meanwhile Maltese shipwrights had come up with an ingenious defense for the vulnerable shoreline against shipborne attack. Wading out into the warm sea in the dark—the only safe time to work—they drove a long line of stakes constructed from ships’ masts into the seabed about a dozen paces from the shore. Iron rings were attached to each stake and a chain passed through them to form a sturdy defensive barrier stretching the entire western shore of Senglea as far as the Spur, with the aim of stopping boats from riding up onto the beach.
This device instantly irritated the Ottoman high command, and the next day it became the focus of an extraordinary contest. At dawn four men armed with hatchets walked into the sea from the Ottoman shore, and swam underwater to the boom. Climbing up the poles, they managed to balance on top and started to hack away at the chain. At the same time, arquebuses put up a blanket of fire to prevent the defenders from shooting down the swimmers. The situation called for a swift response. A band of Maltese soldiers and sailors, stimulated by the promise of rewards, stripped off their clothes and struck out into the water. They were naked apart from their helmets and carried short swords clenched between their teeth. A furious swimming battle ensued; the naked men inefficiently thrashing and jabbing at each other, paddling with one hand and trying to land blows with the other. The blue water began to run pink with blood. One of the intruders was killed; the others retired wounded to the opposite shore. Another batch of swimmers returned that night to try a different strategy. They attached ships’ cables to the stakes, which were run back to capstans on the shore. Teams of men strained to tighten the capstans and drag the stakes out of the water; again Maltese sailors swam out and chopped the cables.
Impatient and frustrated, Mustapha decided to press ahead with a final assault. The impetus had been accelerated by the arrival of Hasan, Turgut’s son-in-law, the governor of Algiers, with twenty-eight ships and two thousand men thirsting for the fight and contemptuous of the army’s efforts. The gunfire continued all day and all night, opening breaches in the land walls. La Valette had the pontoon swung into position between Senglea and Birgu; despite furious attempts, Ottoman gunfire failed to destroy it. Ammunition and incendiaries were distributed to the men waiting at their posts. There was no surprise about the impending assault. Mustapha’s explicit plan was simply to mount a simultaneous attack by land and sea to overwhelm the defense—though the plan contained hidden details. Deserters from the Ottoman camp had also conveyed to the Christians Mustapha’s intention to kill them all; only La Valette was to live. He would be delivered to Suleiman in chains. The grand master’s response was a public vow never to be taken alive.
It was an uneasy night for the defenders, tensed at their posts. The moon shone brightly; Balbi waited with other men at the Spur with his arquebus. Across the harbor, he could hear the voices of the imams, rising and falling in the darkness, endlessly chanting the names of God.
SUNDAY, JULY 15, an hour and a half before dawn. A fire was lit on the hill behind Senglea; another answered from Saint Elmo across the water. The Algerians massed in the ditch beyond the land walls; Ottoman arquebusiers filed into trenches on the shore facing Senglea and sighted their guns; the artillery crews primed their cannon. Marshal de Robles and the fresh consignment from Sicily mustered on the walls. At the Spur, Francisco Balbi and his colleagues, commanded by the Spanish captain Fra
ncisco de Sanoguera, crouched behind their low earthworks ready to repel a seaborne attack. Over the bay in the dark, men were clambering noisily into invisible boats. The name of Allah rang out three times. Oars dipped and splashed as the small armada pushed off from the shore.
As dawn broke, the defenders on the shore could see the mass of ships moving slowly forward across the calm water. The low morning sun lit an extraordinary sight: hundreds of men packed into the boats bulwarked with bales of cotton and wool—janissaries with tall headdresses and flickering plumes, splendidly dressed Algerians in scarlet robes, “in cloth of gold and silver and scarlet damask,” wearing exotic turbans and armed with “fine muskets of Fez, scimitars of Alexandria and Damascus, and magnificent bows.” In the vanguard came three boatloads of turbaned holy men, “strangely dressed” according to the Christian accounts, “wearing green caps on their heads and many holding open books and chanting imprecations.” They were reciting verses from the Koran to inspire the men to battle. The boats were adorned with a huge number of multicolored pennants and flags fluttering in the morning breeze; the sounds of castanets, horns, and tambourines floated ahead across the water. The whole incredible effect was being directed by the Greek corsair Candelissa, seated high up in a small caïque, waving a small flag like the leader of an orchestra. To the defenders it was an extraordinary sight, a scene of unearthly beauty, “if it had not been so dangerous.”
Empires of the Sea Page 17