Not enough speed on this occasion. Just off the Bay of Naples, the vessel and its treasure chest was seized, its crew held for ransom (three hundred scudi a head), and at a stroke Valette’s hopes for an independent stronghold in North Africa were at an end.
The man leading the attack was Turgut Reis, without question the greatest disciple of Khairedihn.
There is a story, possibly true, that Valette and Turgut met face-to-face while the corsair was a captive of the Genoese. The knight greeted the prisoner with the hardheaded observation that captivity was merely usanca da guerra, the “custom of war”; to which the old corsair replied, Y mudanca de fortuna, “and change of fortune.”19
Turgut, sometimes called Dragut, was born of Muslim peasants in 1485 near Bodrum, then as now a port city in southwestern Turkey (then held, ironically, by the Knights of St. John), and while still a boy, joined some itinerant pirates. He grew into a man of “less than average stature but extremely able-bodied”; he showed a talent for gunnery and was soon recruited to the army, in which capacity he took part in Selim the Grim’s 1517 siege of Alexandria.20 He preferred a life at sea and along with other ambitious young men headed west, where he fell in with Khairedihn, who quickly took Turgut as his protégé. They served together at Preveza, and soon he was outshining the master in daring, cruelty, and sheer encyclopedic knowledge of the Mediterranean’s innumerable nooks and crannies. What Turgut’s raids lacked in individual drama they more than made up for in number. He was dubbed the Drawn Sword of Islam, a title first given to Mohammed’s finest general Khalid ibn al-Walid, and in his own way, Turgut was as troublesome to his enemies as al-Walid was to his. Small wonder Khairedihn paid his ransom to the Genoese.
The Knights of St. John held no terror for him—Malta and its sister island Gozo were sheep to be shorn like any other, and his many trips there each yielded intelligence that would be useful in the coming showdown. Nor was he much intimidated by the power of the Ottoman Empire. His relationship with Constantinople was at times fraught; he did not take orders well and resented Suleiman’s tendency to favor men connected at court.
Nevertheless, he had Suleiman’s blessing when in 1550 he gathered a small force of corsairs and with them seized three Spanish-held subsidiaries of Tunis: Susa, Monestir, and Sfax. None was much to speak of; they could be taken, they also could be retaken. What Turgut really wanted was a strong, centrally located port city, and he found one in Mahdia, halfway between Tunis and Tripoli. Mahdia’s walls were high and thick, her guns clean and functional, the harbor large and sheltered. It was, like Tripoli, surrounded on three sides by water—hard to take, even for Turgut. And so he took the easy route: he suborned a greedy man in a position of power. A dark night, a purse of gold, an unlocked gate, a small spot of quick violence, and by morning Turgut was master of the town. More to the point, he had kept the defensive walls intact.
This was too much for Charles, who just a few years before had thought to take the city for the Knights of St. John. He called for men and munitions—Andrea Doria for starters; Don Garcia de Toledo, with twenty-four galleys and many men; the viceroy of Sicily; and the Knights of St. John. Whether by chance or by design, they arrived while Turgut was raiding the coasts of Italy. His absence did not make the work any easier. Over the course of some days, their cannon chipped away Mahdia’s outer defenses and in due course brought a section down. It was long, slow work, however, against determined opponents, and possibly more than could be done in a season. Worse, Turgut returned in August and attacked their rear.21 He retreated, but no doubt he would return, soon and in force. The Christian commanders met in conference that evening to discuss their next steps. Besides the renewed threat of Turgut and possibly others, autumn was coming and the expedition was ill-placed for a winter siege. It would be the better part of wisdom to cut their losses and withdraw.
And so they might have done, had not Don Garcia risen to speak. Doria might be in overall command, but as a son of the viceroy of Naples and veteran of numerous fights, Don Garcia commanded respect. He had, he said, learned from a deserter from the city that the seaward part of the wall was weaker than other parts, and that the original architects had counted on a sandbar to keep any large vessel from getting near enough to exploit this fact. He suggested that two stout galleys, each drawing very little water, might be bound together, with a platform fixed between them and a heavy battery mounted on top. The work of the cannon would be brief, the attack unexpected, and victory a strong possibility.
A few nights later, the makeshift destroyer was towed to the sandbank and stabilized with four anchors.22 Dawn broke, the cannons fired, the wall crumbled. The knights boarded skiffs and headed toward the breach, and soon the French knight Giou reached the shattered wall and planted the flag of the Order. An arquebus bullet struck him down. Coppier, another Frenchman, took his place and the knights scrambled up beside him, targets for the Muslim cannon and arquebus fire that now clustered the breach. Guimeran, the third commander, glanced about and noticed a path to a gallery connected to a stone bridge that in turn connected to the city itself. He shouted for his men to follow, and together they opened a new phase in the attack. The knights now passed into Mahdia and advanced street by street and building by building. The untrained locals soon broke off any general defenses and ran to their homes, wives, and children, or out of the city altogether, shifting the bulk of the work on Turgut’s men. The corsairs fought bravely, but the pressure was too great. Within hours the Christians had taken the city and with it all that Turgut had stored there.
It is a testimony to Turgut’s reputation that this victory occasioned “a public demonstration of joy . . . throughout the city [of Rome].”23 For Suleiman, the attack was an excuse to quash the truce with the emperor and formally demand the return of Susa, Sfax, Monastir, and Mahdia. Charles replied that they were dependencies of Tunis, an ally of the empire, and that besides, Turgut was a pirate and therefore outside the protection of law. Suleiman changed that soon enough by commissioning this pirate as an admiral of the Ottoman navy and sanjak of Santa Maura (Leucadia, Greece). Charles refused to back down. He ordered Doria to seek out and take down the new admiral once and for all.
What followed was farce. Doria was able to track down and bottle up Turgut’s small fleet inside a well-defended bay at Djerba. Cannon kept him at a distance, but Doria was content to wait, confident that supply ships would keep him supplied as long as it took. Meanwhile, all Europe was captivated and eagerly read updates on the situation. An English envoy wrote home that “Dragut must either break through by force, or else escape by land, losing his galleys.”24
Turgut had other ideas. The guns at the head of the bay kept Doria at a distance while the corsair, unseen, had his men to dig a narrow channel across the sandy soil of the island to a small river giving out on the far side of the island.25 Within days he and his fleet had slipped away eastward. To add to the insult, the corsair’s squadron ran into and captured two vessels carrying provisions to Doria, who was still waiting patiently on the far side of the island.
News of the incident spread quickly, and Spain provided ready excuses to anyone who would listen: “[Members of the imperial court] say that a great storm arose, and that Doria, seeking shelter for his navy, did harbor where hope appointed him, and in the mean season Turgut stole away.”26 Later chroniclers say nothing of a storm, only how Turgut had made Doria a laughingstock.
Turgut eventually arrived back in Constantinople to confer with Suleiman. Of course Monastir and Mahdia should be taken back, they could agree on that. But Turgut wanted more. He suggested that a better target would be the Knights of St. John, famously arguing that “unless you are rid of this nest of vipers you can accomplish nothing.”27 Turgut’s motives were at once commercial—the knights interfered with his work—and personal. His brother had been killed and dragged off by the people of Gozo after a 1544 raid, then deliberately burned in Turgut’s sight. If the island was to be punished, he wanted to be there.28
The sultan, however, preferred to reclaim Mahdia. It had, after all, been lost on Turgut’s watch, and Suleiman wanted to retake his old holdings before seeking out new ones. Turgut would accompany the new Kapudan-ı Derya, Sinan Pasha, and see about taking the city back. Sinan’s brother, as it happened, was Grand Vizier Rüstem Pasha, and his sister-in-law was Mihrimah, Suleiman’s favorite daughter, and so his position was assured.29 Unfortunately for Turgut, Sinan Pasha was a man with no sailing experience, no army experience, and some bad attributes. The Venetian envoy described him as “ill-mannered and quick to shoot his mouth off, irascible, or rather, vicious,” and Muslim accounts call him “viciously contentious, impetuous with words, dreadful and tyrannical.” At the end of this expedition, his own men elected to abandon him in North Africa and follow Turgut instead; they were dissuaded by Turgut.
For all his bad qualities, Sinan Pasha did seem shrewd enough to defer to the expert, though he was quick to shift blame if things went badly: “Letters from Malta mention that some of the Turkish prisoners have confessed that their General had orders to attack Corfu, but perceiving how well it was fortified, he durst not meddle therewith. He blames Torgut, upon whose representation that it was easy to be had, he attacked Malta.”30 Unnerved by the high walls at Mahdia, and taking the order to do nothing without consulting Turgut as an excuse, he allowed himself to be talked into Malta instead.
Certainly their timing was fortunate. As of 1536 the knights had a new grand master, and a controversial one. Portraits of D’Homedes show a cadaverous-looking Spaniard with a triangular head ending in a pointed white beard and marked by hooded eyes, one blinded at Rhodes, which fact he often worked into conversation. He was now in his late seventies, and if he had possessed martial ardor in the past, it was gone by the time he reached his new office. Generally placid, but truculent when defied, he might have been a saint had he served a more gentle order. He was free with alms for the poor, and his remaining eye appreciated beauty. Beginning in 1546, he took charge of Birgu’s twin peninsula in Grand Harbor, called l’Isola because of the narrow moat that separated it from the mainland, and rather than building fortresses, he created a personal garden paradise. Here the grand master housed exotic animals and cultivated a wide assortment of excellent fruits—“Paradise” apples, dates, apples, pears, plums, peaches, figs. He could stroll over mosaic-tiled pavings, pass by freshwater fountains, and gaze on a stone equestrian statue “colored green, much larger than le Rustique in Rome.”31
As the garden flourished, the defenses of Malta and Gozo and Tripoli were allowed to decay. D’Homedes treated any suggestion in the spring of 1551 that there was a threat from Constantinople with “an admirable calm and firmness of spirit.”32 The arrival in July that year of Sinan Pasha and Turgut with 137 galleys was his comeuppance.33
They did not arrive without warning. Official dispatches and general rumor reported the presence of the armada forming in the eastern Mediterranean in May. Wrote Roger Ascham from Charles’ court: “The Turks navy is come so big, that they and the French rule all mare Mediterraneum. This great navy brought such terror with it that the Venetians were fain afresh to double man and victual Corcyra. Sicily was afraid, Naples was afraid, Rome was afraid, Genoa was afraid, all mare Mediterraneum did tremble whither this great navy would go.”34 D’Homedes dismissed the reports, claiming that any Muslim galleys would be headed to Provence, since it was Spain and France that were at war, not the trifling island of Malta. Only the July 18 arrival of one hundred and fifteen ships, ten thousand men, and various siege guns in St. Paul’s Bay north of Grand Harbor changed his mind.
If D’Homedes was not the best defender of Malta, Sinan Pasha was not the man best suited to take it. Much to Turgut’s disgust, the pasha’s considered opinion was that Fort St. Angelo was too difficult a target, and after a few of Sinan’s men died of heat exhaustion, Sinan ordered his men to set off to surround the old capital city of Mdina. A contemporary described it as “distant six miles from [Fort St. Angelo], situated upon the top of a mountain, environed on three parts with great valleys full of gravel and large stones very painful to walk on.”35 That city too seemed daunting, though in fact its defenses were largely a matter of local citizens lined up on the ramparts dressed as soldiers. This Potemkin village, all fraudulent make-believe disguising genuine weakness, combined with the lateness of the season and new rumors that Doria was headed toward Malta, was enough to convince Sinan to pack up and leave.
Perhaps to assuage Turgut and his corsairs, perhaps uneasy that he had failed in taking Mahdia, or Fort St. Angelo, or Mdina, Sinan Pasha did agree to one last gesture. Gozo, sister island to Malta, was ripe for the taking. What followed was tragedy.
When the invasion fleet was first sighted, Governor Fra Galatian de Sesse had sent Gozo’s women, children, aged, and infirm to Malta proper, thinking it the safer place. D’Homedes ordered them back, saying that their presence would stiffen the resolve of Gozo’s men. He was mistaken. The walled castle of Gozo into which all had taken refuge resisted for three days of furious bombardment; some civilians took to sliding down ropes to escape, which was sign enough for Sesse to open the gates. The Ottomans ransacked the town. Six thousand islanders, mostly women and children, including Sesse, were carried off into slavery, save forty whose safety he had negotiated—people too old to be worth much on the rowing bench or slave block. It wasn’t all that Turgut had wanted, but it was a victory, and in any event, the campaign was not over. The next stop, and the last chance for Sinan Pasha to show his mettle, was Tripoli.
Here he was in luck. Physical structures had again been allowed to deteriorate, and Gaspard de Vallier, the commander who succeeded Valette at Tripoli, had been allotted only three hundred knights and two hundred soldiers, mostly peasants and criminals from Calabria with little to no military experience.36 The armada had been expected and the noncombatants of Tripoli evacuated, with unfortunate results: “His navy has summoned Tripoli to surrender; letters say the inhabitants have prayed a respite till they may send to the Grand Master of Malta, and have sent out two ships laden with women, children, and old folks, which are reported to have fallen into the Turk’s hands.”37 The guns could be heard back in Malta, which must have unnerved D’Homedes.
Meanwhile, Gabriel de Luetz, Baron et Seigneur d’Aramon, the French ambassador to Constantinople, and his secretary, Nicholas de Nicolay, chanced to stop at Malta on their way home. D’Homedes, desperate for help, asked them to head south and try to persuade Sinan to bargain. D’Aramon made no promises, but agreed to make a detour and do what he could.
What he could do was very little. As a Frenchman and therefore an ally, he was politely received by Sinan. Gifts were exchanged: twenty-five sheep for the ambassador, fine cloth and a small clock for the pasha. D’Aramon nevertheless was unable to dissuade Sinan from his purpose in taking Tripoli. Until the knights surrendered, the game was on. D’Aramon was, of course, welcome to remain as an honored guest to see the outcome.
The outcome was a foregone conclusion. The Calabrians, who had not been told that they were going to Tripoli in the first place, demanded that Vallier surrender in the touching hope that, once having surrendered, they could go home. Even the Spanish knights concurred. Vallier put the matter to a vote, the motion carried, and on August 13, two Spanish knights went to negotiate terms.
The terms were diabolical. All allied Muslim soldiers were killed outright. All Christian mercenaries and volunteers (a good number of them Maltese) were to be enslaved. All the surviving knights were free to return to Malta. The terms were accepted, and, according to reports, rapidly broken; two hundred of the strongest soldiers were put to galleys, and the remaining men, women, and children killed without mercy.38 True or not, Sinan Pasha had, at a stroke, both humiliated the Order and ruined its future credibility.
His action also threw the Order itself into turmoil. D’Homedes, faced with the twin failures of Gozo and Tripoli, needed a scapegoat. Once D’Aramon had, out
of courtesy, escorted the knights back to Malta, the grand master not only had Vallier and two Spanish knights arrested, unfrocked, and charged with cowardice and treason, but also jailed the diplomat himself on a charge of inciting the Turks and, illogically, favoring the French. It was both a contravention of diplomatic immunity and a slap in the face of a man who had gone out of his way to help. Dubious witnesses were hauled in—a convicted forger, a Muslim convert who had sold his children into slavery, and a gunner who had been caught (and been forgiven for) trying to surrender at Tripoli. D’Homedes also arranged for a tame secular judge who had the power to decree a death penalty. It eventually would take the combined intervention of the kings of France and Spain to get D’Aramon released (neither monarch wanted a fight over such trivia as this); Vallier and the two Spaniards were not so lucky and were imprisoned for some years, and bitter feelings between the langues remained.
The whole affair was a scandal, and Pope Julius III clearly was concerned with the state of the Order. Although it had been trouble for the knights from the outset and its loss a great weight off them, nevertheless, “Tripoli, from whence the Turk may easily and suddenly, whensoever he list, set upon Siciliy, Naples, or any coast of Italy or Spain, so that the gain of Tunis is thought nothing comparable with the loss of Tripoli.”39 The pope suggested to D’Homedes that the knights might feel safer in Syracuse or Messina, that perhaps Malta was too great a burden for the knights and might be defended better by Spanish troops. The offer was declined, but the sting of it was considerable. If even the pope had lost faith in the knights, what purpose could they possibly serve?
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DJERBA, 1551–1560
The Great Siege of Malta Page 7