The Great Siege of Malta

by Allen, Bruce Ware

  Their timing was perfect. In 1492 Ferdinand and Isabella had completed the reconquista of Spain, defeating Boabdil, the last Muslim sultan of Granada, and undoing seven hundred years of Muslim rule. Jews were expelled entirely, Muslims allow to remain for the time being under ever stricter rules, culminating in 1505 with the total prohibition of Islam. Many Spanish Muslims, dedicated to their faith, abandoned their native land and washed up on the North African shores. There, combining their need for income with the knowledge of the Spanish coast, they would go on to raid Christian shipping, becoming the nucleus of the Barbary corsairs. Profits were large enough to attract others from the eastern Mediterranean, including the brothers Aroudj and Khairedihn, known to Europe as the Barbarossa (Redbeard) brothers.

  In 1505 they settled in Tunis. This prosperous if somewhat rough trading city was Islam’s answer to Venice, an essentially neutral port that served the material needs of all comers. The twin forts of Goletta flanked the wide harbor and permitted no more than a handful of ships in at one time. In exchange for the safety of the harbor, men such as Aroudj and Khairedihn paid a share of their takings to the sultan.

  Through diligence and hard work, the brothers went from three eighteen-oared vessels to a fleet numbering in the dozens. Tired of sharing the fruits of their labor, they set up independently on the island of Djerba, just off Tripoli and close to the shipping lanes of Sicily. From here they swept the coasts of Italy and Spain, hauling away goods and people and leaving ashes behind.

  In 1516 the rulers of Algiers, impressed by their reputation for violence, invited the brothers to help out in a spot of trouble. The entrance to the Algiers harbor was commanded by a Spanish-held peñon, or offshore fortress. Aroudj, they felt, would be perfect for getting the Spanish to leave. He did succeed in kicking out the Spanish, but also drowned the rightful monarch in his bath, took the crown for himself, and then offered fealty to Suleiman’s father Selim.7 A bemused Selim, for whom Algiers was just another title to add to a growing list, dispatched a handful of troops to help put the Ottoman stamp on the place and essentially gave Aroudj a free hand to do as he liked.

  Aroudj then began to target Spanish holdings in North Africa, albeit with less success. His attempt to take them saw him lose an arm to a Spanish cannonball. He took a year off to recuperate, and when he returned to fighting, he did so with a prosthetic replacement said to have been made of silver. But Aroudj had overreached himself, and perhaps counted too much on fellow Muslims supporting him simply on the basis of their shared religion. In 1519 a young Charles V, allied with the sheik of Oran and some Bedouins, marched on the city of Tlemcen in northwest Algiers. Aroudj fled to the desert. The soldiers followed. Aroudj cast a small cloud of gold coins behind him to distract his pursuers. The tactic failed. He was overtaken, outnumbered, and unwilling to surrender. With a sword in his one good hand, he cut and parried to the end, suffering repeated small wounds until finally he was brought down, fighting “to the very last gasp, like a lion.”8 A Spanish alverez, lieutenant, administered the coup de grace, and forever after his family emblazoned the dead man’s head on their coat of arms. The body itself was carried back to Iberia, a grisly trophy that spent some time on display, presumably to reassure Spanish Catholics and intimidate Spain’s remaining closet Muslims.

  Younger brother Khairedihn may have grieved, but he also knew he must consolidate his position. He did so by threatening to leave Algiers: “Hitherto I have given you every assistance and I have fortified your castle by placing in it four hundred pieces of cannon; now appoint whom you please as your governor, and I will proceed by sea to some other place.”9 Tone is everything in political speech. The Algerians, frightened of Spain and of anarchy, begged him to stay, and he allowed himself to be persuaded, but only if he could arrange a stronger connection with the Ottomans. Within weeks, ships arrived from Constantinople with two thousand Janissaries, four thousand militia, and a declaration that Khairedihn was now beylerbey, governor, of Algiers.10

  For Selim and later Suleiman, the corsairs were a means of hectoring Spain at little cost to themselves. Beyond that, both sultans were happy to leave the western Mediterranean to itself. Or at least, they had been up until now.

  That Suleiman needed a world-class fleet and a commander for it was not in dispute, but as to whom that admiral should be among the sultan’s courtiers, there were doubts. Barbarossa was still no better than a peasant, a self-made man who had not attended the same palace school (the Enderûn) that proper courtiers had done.11 And he was late.

  This peasant, however, knew just how long a delay was enough, and when he did arrive, on November 21, 1533, it was with forty vessels of his own fleet, rich in decoration, powerfully armed, and weighed down with gold and silver, slaves from Europe, beautiful women, exotic animals from inland Africa—all of this not so much tribute but as the trifling gifts of one powerful leader to another. Endorsed by Suleiman’s most trusted confidant and grand vizier, Ibrahim Pasha, Khairedihn was appointed as Kapudan-ı Derya, Admiral of the Sea.12 He immediately headed to the shipyards at Galata, the navy yard of Constantinople, and began the process of creating the sultan’s fleet. By the spring of 1534, sixty-one new galleys quietly bobbed in the waters of the Golden Horn, impatient as a line of young schoolboys waiting to be let out to play. He did not keep them waiting long.

  The West had endured small-scale sea raids for years, often part-time merchants or fishermen doing a sideline in high-seas robbery or landing near isolated coastal villages to do a bit of robbery or kidnapping for the slave trade. The frequency and extent of these practices had grown significantly in the years after 1492, but the arrival in the West of men such as Khairedihn brought the threat to a whole new level. Backed by the full weight of the Ottoman Empire, Khairedihn sailed up the Italian coast as far as Sardinia, targeting simple villages too small to defend themselves, but also cities as large as Reggio and even Naples, where the Spanish viceroy, Don Pedro de Toledo, scrambled to fortify what he could and evacuate what he could not. The dramatic high point was Khairedihn’s nocturnal arrival at Fondi, a town of small importance except that Giulia Gonzaga, the most beautiful woman in Italy and a fine gift for the sultan, was there at the time. Dressed only in a nightshirt, she fled on horseback, disappearing into the mountains just minutes before the admiral’s men reached the house. Khairedihn consoled himself by sacking the town.

  The raiding, however, was merely an overture to the admiral’s real objective, the taking of his old stomping ground of Tunis.

  Muley Hassan, the current ruler, had come to the throne by patricide and fratricide, and passed his days with “pleasures so vicious that they cannot be described.”13 His people did not love him, and many longed for a return of the rightful heir whom Muley Hassan had usurped. Hassan was therefore an uneasy man who daily examined the horizon, searching for enemies. When Khairedihn’s ships appeared, Hassan’s nerve broke. He fled, and Tunis was in Khairedihn’s iron hands.

  No matter; the ex-ruler was less important than the city itself. As Khairedihn observed to Suleiman, “If the harbor of Goletta were taken and protected by the Ottoman sovereign, the imperial fleet could be stationed in it most of the time. In that case, with the help of God the Sublime, it would become feasible to conquer and subdue Spain from there.”14

  Eventually, perhaps. In the meantime, Khairedihn busied himself with local mischief. He sent agents provocateurs into Tripoli to keep the Knights of St. John stationed there busy. These interlopers fomented riots, which the knights were able to quell, but the expedition rattled the new Grand Master Piero del Ponte wrote to Charles asking for help in taking on Khairedihn. The exiled Muley Hassan also had written the emperor and received a favorable reply—Charles addresses him as a fellow king and refers to Khairedihn as the “enemy of all nations and peoples.”15

  Charles was generally slow to expand his empire—he had a hard enough time with what he already had—but this was something special. Tunis was a relatively small thorn for Charle
s, but a Tunis under the Ottoman rule was unacceptable. Charles’s first thought was to send an envoy either to engage Barbarossa in a separate alliance (as he had Doria) or, failing that, to assassinate him. The envoy was unpersuasive and the assassin was discovered (and executed), leaving Charles with no choice but to gear up his military and try to seize Tunis back by force.

  He was well placed to do so. That year had seen a particularly rich windfall of Peruvian gold, enough to pay off old debts and finance a new fleet .16 On June 13, 1535, Charles’s armada of seventy-four galleys and three hundred other vessels sailed from Sardinia with Doria in command. The Knights of St. John sent five galleys, one of them commanded by the thirty-six-year-old veteran of Rhodes, Jean de Valette. Also present was Don Garcia de Toledo, son of the viceroy of Naples and veteran of Doria’s service. Four days later, the two hundred knights and the imperial forces landed near the ruins of ancient Carthage, some two miles from La Goletta, twelve miles from Tunis proper. Siege guns—“large, very beautiful, and in great number”—were carted down the coast and aimed at the northernmost of La Goletta’s twin strongholds, which guarded the narrow entrance to the port.17 A few weeks of slow demolition created two serious breaches, one on the landward side, one facing the bay. On July 14, Charles was master of the twin forts and prepared to head inland for Tunis itself.

  Khairedihn’s lieutenants advised him to leave immediately and head back to sea. He refused, dismissing the Spanish as cowards: “If the infidels see my turban on a hilltop, they’ll run for a month.”18

  They didn’t. Despite the fact that the trek to the city was long, the sun high, and water scarce, Charles’s men kept on coming. Khairedihn was outnumbered, but counted on the fact that his men were well rested. He would defeat the enemy while they were on the march—tired, hot, thirsty, and relatively disorganized. Confident in his position, he roused the soldiers and the citizens, and ordered Moorish cavalry and foot to attack the invaders. He was out of his league. During the Italian campaign, and especially the battle of Pavia in 1525, the Spanish had perfected the military formation of the tercios.

  The foundation of the tercio was a throwback to ancient military structures, updated to take advantage of modern firearms. At its simplest, the tercio was a formation of rank-and-file squares comprising up to three thousand specialists, armed either with pikes, swords, or guns. Seen from above, the square units were arrayed like a three-by-three checkerboard, four outer units (mangas) of arquebusiers and musketeers meeting at the corners of a central block. Musketeers and arquebusiers manned the outer edges of these blocks; pikemen, their tall, thin weapons pointed upright like so many steel-tipped, unbranched trees, filled up the center. Each block could march in any direction required and re-form in short order to answer the changing needs of the battlefield.

  The formation succeeded in large part because the individuals who made up the whole were not short-term volunteer mercenaries, but full-time, professional soldiers with the cohesion and pride that come from months of drilling and marching and fighting under familiar and trusted officers. Amateurs and romantics had no place inside this modern army, and individual dash and bravery were useless against it. Should infantry approach the formation, a musketeer in the outermost rank of gunmen could fire at the enemy, then step back and relinquish his place for the next gunner while he himself reloaded. Should cavalry threaten it, musketeers could count on pikemen to lower their poles, creating what amounted to a metal bramble hedge that no horse would dare to charge.

  Between them, the men of the tercios could effectively counter any force both up close and at a distance. They were equally good on offense. The sight of these highly disciplined units marching forward in machinelike unison would unnerve the looser formations of any less well-organized or trained soldiers. The arrangement was so successful that it would remain more or less intact (and widely copied in Europe) for the next one hundred years.

  Berber horsemen and Khairedihn’s corsairs had never experienced anything like the disciplined volley that Spanish tercios could lay down. In a letter to his sister Mary, queen consort of Hungary and Bohemia, Charles described what happened next: “They fired their artillery. We responded in kind. They fired their arquebuses. We fired back in equal measure. They charged and we did as well. They fell back. We did not stop going until we had reached their guns and taken them for ourselves.”19

  The key to victory, however, came from a single Italian knight of St. John named Paolo Simeoni. He, along with hundreds of other Christians, was being held prisoner in the dungeons of Tunis. Once the battle outside had gotten underway, these men, either by force or with help from a sympathetic local, managed to break out of their captivity and into the city’s armory. With Simeoni in command, they took up positions on the city wall. Khairedihn, caught between two armies, had no choice but to flee into the desert.

  The soldiers thought their duty done and turned to pillage. “They looted shops and mosques, from which they tore apart and ruined many beautiful books . . . decorated and written in Arabic script, in gold and azure. They prized gray jasper and other precious stones from the pillars in mosques, though they did not touch a small Christian church.”20 Charles dined that night with the knights on the deck of the Santa Anna.21 There might, he suggested, be time to head up the coast and take the port city of Mahdia on the return voyage. It could be a new home for the Order, he suggested; the knights could have free access to whatever provisions Sicily had to offer, and tax free. Next year, possibly a new crusade.

  Muley Hassan, said to have approved the destruction of his city, was put back in charge, but as a vassal to Spain. Charles demanded that privateers should never again trouble Christian shipping, imperial subjects should not be enslaved, and a thousand Spaniards would garrison Goletta, at Muley Hassan’s expense. The sheik agreed. What choice did he have? Other than Charles, he lacked any influential friends.

  Charles’s reasoning for restoring such an unpleasant man to power was less obvious. Perhaps he was bound by his own sense of loyalty to Muley Hassan. Perhaps he thought a Muslim figurehead would demonstrate Spanish goodwill toward the local population. It scarcely mattered; after what his men had done, there was little chance that Tunis would ever love Spain.

  As to Khairedihn, he managed to lead his men across the desert to the coast and retake the galleys that one of Doria’s underlings was charged with guarding. The guard blamed his own cowardice, but there were rumors of collusion, never confirmed. Regardless, Khairedihn knew that he had to offset the loss of Tunis. While Charles was still in the full flush of victory, Khairedihn gathered his men at Algiers and set sail north to the island of Minorca, where Spanish subjects were celebrating with music and dancing and a pantomime involving the killing of a Moor, for which part a condemned prisoner played the all-too-realistic lead role. The locals cheered as they saw ships with Italian and Spanish flags enter the harbor. Only after the ships spewed forth a stream of cutlass-welding corsairs did they realize their mistake. Khairedihn “fired unexpectedly at the Spanish fortress at Minorca . . ., conquered it, made all young men and girls prisoners and took property and provisions.”22 It was enough that, despite losing Tunis, Khairedihn was able to sail into Constantinople with eighteen galleys and still be received as a hero.

  Seasons change, and in time the events of Tunis faded. In 1538 Charles managed to cobble together a pan-Christian alliance against the Ottomans, even succeeding in seducing the always reluctant Venetians (whose Balkan territories Suleiman was now attacking) with a promise to restore their holdings throughout the Aegean, and even the taking of Constantinople itself. The enterprise was a mare’s nest of bad planning, bad communication, and bad seamanship. Charles did not tell Venice that he was negotiating once more with Khairedihn to abandon Suleiman (the hope came to nothing). Doria as naval commander failed to support the Venetian fleet at the naval battle of Prevesa, thus alienating the Venetians from any Christian coalition for the next thirty years. The few pieces of real estate that D
oria managed to take were trivial and lost again in the following year, and Khairedihn and his followers continued to launch devastating raids against Spain, Italy, and Sicily. As the decade drew to a close, Charles decided that it would be better to pacify his own part of the Mediterranean, in particular Algiers. The campaign would, he thought, be another Tunis, quick and painless and glory for all.

  In the summer of 1541, forty ships from Charles’s armada dropped anchor at Sardinia for supplies. The locals, desperate to impress these important guests, scrounged the countryside for a suitably remarkable gift. What they came up with was a two-headed calf. Some took this as a bad omen.

  Indeed, the entire Algiers expedition was plagued by difficulties from the outset, endless delay not the least of them. A campaign that normally would have begun in early spring was delayed as Charles attended to the empire’s other business. His lieutenants were becoming progressively more nervous; but Charles, perhaps recalling Suleiman’s success at Rhodes, declared September, despite its unpredictable weather, as “the best time of year” for a naval invasion.23 This might have been wishful thinking. Charles had considerable sunk costs—the perishable foodstuffs, the soldiers and sailors and bankers who were expecting to be paid. By this point, he needed to invade and more important loot Algiers simply to straighten out the empire’s account books. The men were ready now, delay was risky, and God was on their side. (Then too, it was always possible that Charles might convince the governor of Algiers, Hassan Agha, who had been born a Christian, to switch his alliance to the empire.)24

  Despite serious misgivings, Doria agreed to command the fleet. His doubts were immediately justified by sudden storms. Heavy seas barely allowed the men, among them Tunis veteran Don Garcia de Toledo and rising Spanish commander Don Álvaro de Sande, ashore; the siege guns could not be landed and had to remain uselessly at sea. Charles, still convinced that he had God’s favor, called on Hassan to surrender Algiers, but Hassan only laughed. Years earlier, he said, an old enchantress had predicted devastation by land and by sea for any Christian emperor who would attack the city “out of season.”25