Empires of the Sea

by Crowley, Roger

  The bombardment of Birgu (B); a troop of janissaries in their plumed headdresses (O); Mustapha (L) and Piyale (N) watching from horseback

  Despite the capability to reduce the fortifications to mountains of rubble, Mustapha was beset by difficulties, not least by the miniature scale of the battlefield. The front at Birgu was one thousand yards wide; that at Senglea less. No matter how many thousand men he had, only a fraction could be deployed at any one time. A small number of defenders, well armored and protected by makeshift walls and ramparts, could fight at no particular disadvantage. He was worried too by muffled reports from spies and captives of the buildup of men and ships thirty miles away in Sicily. And by the height of summer, he had sickness in the camp. No army of the time took such care with the hygiene and organization of its encampments as the Ottomans, but Malta was unfavorable terrain. The army had had to camp in low-lying marshy land around the available water sources, which the knights had taken care to contaminate. In the sweltering summer heat, in a landscape strewn with unburied corpses, the men started to succumb to typhoid and dysentery. Time was pressing down on the Ottoman commanders.

  Mustapha proceeded with all speed to try to break the defense. In the first few days after defeat at the Spur, attempts were made to cross Senglea’s ditch with a bridge of masts. The defenders made several attempts to burn it—the grand master’s nephew, hideously visible in rich armor, was shot dead in one incautious assault—but ultimately they were successful. Undeterred, Mustapha put his miners to work tunneling through the solid rock to lay explosives charges, covering the noise of the work with gunfire. Only luck saved Senglea; on July 28 “by the will of God,” the miners were probing with a spear to see how close they were to the surface, when the men on the wall spotted the spear tip protruding from the ground. They dug countermines and burst into the tunnel, hurling incendiaries and chasing the miners out. The shaft was blocked up. Mustapha was visibly discouraged by this failure—it had represented a huge effort, but the battle of wits went on. When the Ottomans bombarded the streets, La Valette had stone walls built across them. When the arquebusiers started to pick off laborers repairing the ramparts, Marshal de Robles screened his men with ships’ sails that forced the marksmen to shoot blind. Attempts to fill in the ditches were countered by night sorties to clear them out. As the outer defenses collapsed under cannon fire, the defenders responded by constructing retrenchments—makeshift fallback barriers of earth and stone—to staunch the crumbling front line, demolishing houses for building materials. In the rubble-strewn wasteland each side attempted to maintain positions of cross fire and to build barriers to protect their own men. Siege warfare required huge quantities of human labor, but the Ottomans had the resources to work on an immense scale: digging tunnels, erecting walls, snaking forward covered trenches, moving earth, and repositioning cannon. And Mustapha drew on a wide vocabulary of stratagems: he moved his guns from place to place, mounted sudden attacks at mealtimes or in the dead of night, inflicted nerve-shredding bombardments in irregular patterns, sometimes targeting precise sectors of wall, sometimes randomly shelling the town behind to frighten the civilian population, repeatedly attempting to distract or undermine morale with requests to parley.

  There seemed no limit to these variations. When the Ottomans launched a concerted attack on August 2 it was accompanied by a heavy bombardment. While the defenders were forced to keep their heads down, the enemy troops mysteriously advanced unhindered by their own gunfire and started to climb the walls. It took some time for the hard-pressed defenders to realize that the guns were firing only blanks. They regrouped and repulsed the assault.

  La Valette maintained an iron grip on the organization of the defense. Determined not to be surprised, he instructed the morning Angelus bell to be rung two hours before sunrise, rather than the usual one; men were summoned by drumbeat and stood down by the ringing of bells; stockpiles of ammunition were maintained at all critical points; ad hoc incendiaries—sacks coated with pitch and filled with cotton and gunpowder—were kept at hand; sacks of earth were gathered for making running repairs, pots of pitch kept bubbling. The grand master was seen everywhere, accompanied by two pages carrying his helmet and pike, and by a jester whose duties included informing him of what was happening at various posts and “trying to amuse him with his quips—although there was little enough to laugh about.”

  For both sides it was critical to maintain morale. The Ottomans ran all their campaigns on a well-understood system of rewards and punishments. The naval registers for the Malta campaign clearly documented the bravery of the men and their rewards: “Omer has performed outstanding service by capturing one of the infidels of the Mdina fortress during the night…. Mehmet Ben Mustapha captured the banner of the infidels in the battle of the St Elmo fortress and chopped off some heads…. Pir Mehmet has rendered outstanding service by cutting off many heads…. It has been decreed that a post should be given to him.” The knights gave prizes in a more ad hoc way for acts of courage. Andreas Muñatones, who had led the charge down the tunnel to repel the miners, was rewarded with a gold chain; three arquebusiers who had distinguished themselves during the attack on August 2 were granted an extra ten scudi above their pay; Romegas offered a hefty hundred scudi out of his own pocket for any man who could capture a Turk alive out of the trenches.

  Man-taking was critical; gathering intelligence was an endless preoccupation for both sides. Under torture, a captured Turk revealed on July 18 that there was now genuine apprehension in the Ottoman camp about the gradual buildup on Sicily. A few days later Piyale slipped a light sailing vessel into Syracuse manned by Italian renegades to try to confirm the story. Discord broke out between the two Ottoman commanders about how to proceed. Piyale, renouncing responsibility for the land siege, put the fleet to sea to scour the approaches for signs of a gathering armada; this caused a ripple of fear among the army that they were being abandoned. It was several days before the differences were patched up. Piyale returned to the siege at Birgu in an increasingly competitive atmosphere; it became a question of honor among the two pashas who could breach the walls first. Behind this lay a long catalogue of mutual grievances about personal honor, tactics, and use of the fleet. Piyale considered himself to have been snubbed while Turgut was alive, and held the general to favor his own troops over the fleet when it came to rewards. Niggling disputes affected group morale, according to the chronicler Pechevi: “When the admiral was firing his cannon, his gunners were told, ‘Don’t fire now, the general’s having his siesta.’” The sailors’ response was to shrug. How much care and effort should they bother to put in? They blamed Mustapha for creating these disagreements.

  The news of these ruptures and the faltering Ottoman morale was extremely valuable to La Valette, but he had problems of his own. The people had been reassured that help was on its way; it was widely believed that relief would come on July 25, the feast day of Saint James, the patron saint of Spain. When nothing materialized, La Valette felt compelled to make a ringing speech to the people, urging everyone to put their faith in God. He had worries about water supplies too; there were riots in the streets. His letters to Don Garcia had by now taken a more pessimistic turn: “He doubted that the water would hold out, they were being led to ultimate and irreducible ruin.” As it transpired, the water shortage was providentially solved; a flowing spring was discovered in the cellar of a house in Birgu that met the needs of a large part of the populace. The grand master gave his public thanks to God, as he did for every successful skirmish or battle won, but the constant bombardment, “like a moving earthquake,” was taking its relentless toll. In this atmosphere the two pashas redoubled their furious assaults; the defenders continued to retrench and snipe.

  Outside the beleaguered forts, there was a second, guerrilla war in play. Daily a small band of cavalry rode out from Mdina to ambush stragglers and spy on the Ottoman camp. The leader of this tiny force was an Italian knight called Vincenzo Anastagi, a man of intelligence and e
nterprise, destined to a small immortality after the siege in a portrait by El Greco—and a violent end, murdered twenty years later by two of his fellow knights. Anastagi snatched up stragglers from the camp for interrogation and planted Turkish-speaking spies inside it. From a distance he studied the daily activities of the huge tented encampment and came to the conclusion that it possessed no defenses in its rear. “These we found in the same condition as have been described many times,” he wrote in a letter to Sicily, “that is, built only to defend themselves from the gunshots of our forts, without trenches behind them or at the sides, and that they sleep without sentinels.” At the same time he realized by late July that the Ottomans were planning a final massive assault to end the siege. For seven nights in a row, the Mdina cavalry holed up in a dry valley a mile from the camp and watched. On the eighth night, August 6, they could hear a large body of men leaving the camp in the dark. Anastagi’s men reined in their horses and waited.

  MONDAY, AUGUST 6, had not been a good day for La Valette. During the dinner hour, when all was relatively quiet on the Birgu ramparts, a Spanish soldier called Francisco de Aguilar sidled up to the post of Aragon, close to the sea. He was wearing the plumed upturned steel casque of an arquebusier and carried his gun over his shoulder. He had come, he said, to snipe at the enemy. He lit the slow-match of the weapon and studied the terrain for targets in the trenches below. “I can’t see any of these dogs!” he called back to the sentry. Then, while no one was watching, he suddenly jumped down into the ditch and started to run at full speed for the Ottoman lines. There was a warning shout, volleys of shot from the walls behind, but the man was already in the enemy’s advanced trench, where he was welcomed with joy, and immediately taken to Mustapha Pasha.

  This defection was extremely serious. Aguilar was a highly rated and trusted man. He was well informed. He had often been present at discussions between Marshal de Robles and La Valette: he had heard a great deal of confidential discussion about the plight of the defenders—frank talks about the fortifications, details of the guards’ daily routines, weapon supplies, and tactics. All this was now in Mustapha’s hands.

  La Valette immediately set about preparing the defenses against an attack, aware that Mustapha could target the weakest sectors of wall with precision. Incendiary devices were stockpiled at key points; planks with studded nails positioned; cauldrons of pitch readied. The grand master planned to wait with a mobile relief force in the city’s square to confront whatever dangers arose.

  During the following night, the Ottomans bombarded Birgu and Senglea with fury and mustered their men for the attack. They had emptied the camp and ships of all their fighting men. Columns of men were ferried around from the harbor and landed to the east of Birgu. Anastagi’s cavalry, two miles away, waited with their horses in the dark, listening to the pounding of the guns, and watched the camp.

  An hour before dawn, Mustapha and Piyale launched a simultaneous massed attack on the two promontories. Eight thousand men converged on Senglea, four thousand on Birgu. The assault opened with the accustomed procedures: the chanting in the dark, the beating of drums, the terrifying shouts. The blackness was lit by the roar of arquebus fire and the flash of incendiary devices, fire hoops, flamethrowers, and cauldrons of boiling pitch. There was confused shouting, church bells clanging, the crashing of cymbals. In the growing light, the defenders could make out a figure brilliantly dressed in red silk scrambling over the ruined parapets, banner in hand. It was Candelissa the Greek, roundly accused by the Turks of cowardice at the Spur, leading the attack with the vow to plant the first banner on the ramparts. He was too visible to miss. The defenders quickly felled him with an arquebus shot; there followed the usual furious scrap for the body. Despite this setback and a terrible casualty rate, the weight of Ottoman numbers gradually began to tell. The defense became more ragged.

  On the adjacent front at Birgu, Piyale’s men were battling their way into the post of Castile, whose outer defenses had been reduced to hills of rubble by days of concerted gunfire. The Ottomans established themselves on the ramparts and began to plant flags. Word reached La Valette in the square that the situation had turned critical. Taking his helmet and pike from his pages, he hurried to the scene with the mobile relief force, shouting “This is the day to die.” The captains at Castile tried to hold him back; they forcibly restrained him from climbing onto the cavalier, where the enemy was already established. Moving to another position, “pike in hand, as if he were a common soldier,” he grabbed an arquebus from a soldier and started firing.

  By this time, the Ottomans had succeeded in planting the sultan’s own royal standard on the walls; the white horsetail surmounted with a golden ball became the center of a furious contest. “Seeing it,” wrote Francisco Balbi, “we hurled hooked lines to try and get hold of it, and at last managed to do so. As a result of our pulling one way, and the Turks pulling the other, the ball on top of the shaft fell off, which enabled them to save the sultan’s standard, but not before we had burned many of its silk and golden tassels with incendiaries.”

  The battle raged on. As each wave of Ottoman soldiers fell back, it was replaced with another. Key people on both sides were taken out of the fight. Munatones, the hero of the tunnels, was wounded in the right hand and died later. Ali Portuch Bey, the governor of Rhodes, was killed. La Valette was hit in the leg and was finally persuaded to withdraw. “The assaults on this day were most daring and well fought on both sides with great bitterness and much bloodshed,” wrote Balbi. The scene on the battlefield was ghastly; there were many “without heads, without arms and legs, incinerated or with their limbs torn to bits.” Sensing that the battle was reaching its height, Anastagi’s cavalry picked their way stealthily across the fields toward the Ottoman camp. As they drew near, they broke into a charge.

  NEITHER OF THE PASHAS had any intention of quitting the field without victory. There was intense competition to win the day. If the men faltered from the killing field, they were cudgeled forward again by military police. Within the walls, the defenders were weakening. They had been fighting unrested for nine hours. Though La Valette had ensured supplies of bread and watered wine to fortify the men, and the civilian population, both women and children, joined the fray, the situation was deteriorating. The Ottoman commanders could sense the end was near.

  And then quite suddenly, and for no visible reason, the attack faltered. The men in the ditch at Castile suddenly turned tail and fled; those at Senglea joined them. They streamed away from the battle, being shot down from behind. No threats or blows from their officers could prevent this sudden flight. If the men on the ramparts were baffled by this turn of events, Mustapha Pasha was even more so. Mounted on his horse, he struggled to get control of the army and to draw it up again out of rifle shot. The word got around that Don Garcia’s relief force had landed on the island and fired the camp. There was a muffled uproar, and smoke could be seen rising from the tents. Panic spread throughout the Ottoman army; every man, woman, and child in the beleaguered citadels climbed onto the ramparts and stared down at the deserted trenches in disbelief. Then they started to shout: “Victory and relief!”

  Both sides were wrong. It was not a powerful Spanish army from Sicily. Anastagi’s small force of cavalry—perhaps no more than a hundred, a mixed force of knights and Maltese militia—had swept down on the unguarded camp. Only the sick and wounded had been left behind, with a limited band of sentries and supply staff. The horsemen swung into camp, sabres swinging, with the force of vengeance. They rampaged through, massacring the sick, cutting down sentries, burning tents, ruining supplies, spreading a blind panic that infected the whole army. Then they were gone again back to Mdina before Mustapha could react, leaving the Ottoman high command furious and humiliated. Another bitter row broke out between Mustapha and Piyale.

  Malta survived on August 7 purely through Anastagi’s lucky strike. The island was hanging on by the skin of its teeth. A Te Deum was sung in the church of Saint Lawrence
, followed by a procession. There was weeping in the streets. But when the defenders saw the state of the walls, there was deep concern that the end could not be far off. To scotch rumors that the knights would retreat into the fortress of Saint Angelo at the tip of Birgu and leave the civilian population to their fate, La Valette took decisive action. The flinty old man had all the precious icons of the Order carried to the fortress and the drawbridge raised. The whole population would fight on together at the ruined walls; the icons could make a last stand on their own.

  The next day, Mustapha decided to deal with the Mdina cavalry. It was a decision he should have taken at the start of the siege, and failure to do so had cost him dearly. Piyale was tasked with wiping them out. A careful ambush was prepared; a detachment of troops was sent out to raid cattle grazing on the plain outside the city. When the Christian cavalry rode out to see the raiders off, they found their return barred by large formations of Ottoman infantry. It took a fierce fight and the loss of some thirty men and horses for the men to scramble back to the city, some on foot making it back only the next day. Piyale’s men then advanced on the city. As they drew near, they were surprised to see a large number of soldiers on the battlements. The Ottomans had believed the place to be weak and poorly defended; instead the walls were crawling with troops who unleashed a torrent of gunfire, beat their drums, and rang the church bells. Piyale’s advance may have been opportunist rather than planned—they had brought no heavy cannon with them—but they decided to withdraw. The Ottomans were running out of time; there was little spare energy to attend seriously to Mdina. They marched back to camp. The “army” on the walls breathed a sigh of relief; a large part of it was composed of civilians—peasants and their wives, even children, dressed in spare uniforms and parading on the ramparts.