The Great Siege of Malta

by Allen, Bruce Ware

  Piali Pasha saw all this, but was momentarily constrained by the need to finish morning prayers. Once he was finished, he didn’t hesitate. Piali ordered the sails unfurled. He judged the risk of Christian artillery bringing down the yards on his men to be negligible, the advantage of extra running speed against the disordered enemy enormous. So eager were some captains for battle that they ordered the cables to be cut rather than take time to weigh anchor.21

  The sea battle was short and furious. A crescent of eighty-five Ottoman ships bore down on a confusion of forty-eight Christian vessels.22 Nineteen Spanish galleys and a dozen other Christian ships were destroyed.23 Five thousand Christian prisoners were taken, among them, La Cerda’s son, Gaston.24 Those not captured, including much of the army, were beaten back to the fort. A few Christian vessels had managed to get out, but Piali Pasha, “who slays lions and dispatches dragons,” ordered twenty-six galleys to chase them down, seizing, among other prizes, the commander of the papal forces.25 “In sum,” reports Çelebi, “on that day the infidel fleet suffered total destruction—never before had there been a defeat of this magnitude.”26

  Night fell. Inside the fort, La Cerda recognized at last his own limits as a military man and turned the responsibility for evacuating the surviving soldiers over to Doria, who replied that, as fleet commander, he was responsible only for getting word back to Sicily. The young admiral planned to sail a small boat through the Ottoman fleet to “rally the sad remnants of our defeat.”27 La Cerda included himself among those who would sneak out that night in one of the five vessels, first for Malta, then to Sicily.28 They left behind the sounds of riotous Ottomans savoring victory, and the silence of those men ordered to remain within the fort that the viceroy had hoped would make him a great man.

  Piali’s victory over the Christian fleet, spectacular as it was, would not necessarily translate into victory over the army. Turgut arrived some days later, as did some mainland Arab horsemen.29 Because the waters were shallow near that part of the island, his ships lay a good way offshore, while his cannons and men were on land. Should the Spanish send a relief force—and Valette had gotten a letter to Sande suggesting that help was coming—those ships would be at risk, the Ottoman forces stranded. Djerba was far from Constantinople, and not all of Piali’s coreligionists on the island could be relied upon.

  Sande would have come to the same conclusion. The sailing season was still young. Much of the Spanish fleet was intact, and Malta and its knights were not so very far away. Moreover, the fort was by now reasonably strong. Contemporary pictures show the fort as a rectangular affair surrounded by a sea-fed moat, and an irregular four-pointed star also surrounded by a moat, and with good cross-fire capabilities. There were some seventy guns of varying sizes, a good supply of ammunition, and food enough for four months, food being grain and biscuits, salted meat, and a few living horses.30 Of water, there was less.

  With a weather eye on the horizon, Piali ordered his guns drawn up outside the fort and had them pour a steady hail of stone and iron ball. It was slow work, as the guns were relatively small bore, not the large bombards or mortars that a proper siege would have demanded. Nevertheless, with each strike, another piece of stone and mortar chipped, cracked, or shattered and tumbled down into the moat. The defenders did what they could to repair the damage, and each side tried to calculate who would come to the end of his resources first.

  By now, the grim news had reached Europe, and Philip’s initial instinct was to order Don Garcia de Toledo to mount a rescue operation. The urgency abated somewhat when both La Cerda and Andrea Doria were back in Sicily, and Philip began to take a more measured view. The men in the fort, he noted, were professionals. De Sande, after all, had endured the 1554 siege of Valsenieres by eating “cats, dogs, rats, and anything else he could get his hands on.”31 The enemy would have to abandon the siege eventually. If Sande could hold out for the summer—and there was no reason to suppose he could not—then time would have done the Christians’ work for them. Come September, bad weather would force Piali Pasha home. Senseless to send good ships after bad. Let time and God’s favor sort these problems out.

  Spring shimmered into summer and with it arose the appalling heat of the southern Mediterranean. The Ottomans kept at their labors and managed to create a small breach in the outer wall. This was disconcerting, but it was not enough to allow an army through, not as long as Sande was in charge. Sande did what he could to keep up morale. He ordered a few sorties from behind the walls from time to time, but although one came close to taking Turgut himself, these expeditions accomplished little more than adding to the death toll. (“Their heads were struck off and stuck on the ends of halberds, then planted in the trenches under their very eyes.”)32 On the plus side, fewer men meant more provisions for those who remained.

  In late June, Piali Pasha reported to Constantinople that the siege would probably have to be cut short, as they could not storm the fort and could not starve the defenders out. In truth, the problem was not food, but water. The fort’s two large cisterns normally were filled by seasonal rains. Rain was slight that season. Worse, one of the containers was located between the fort’s central keep and its outer walls. On July 21, the Turks broke through the outer wall, and at a stroke slashed the Christians’ water supply.33 Sande immediately put the men on half-rations.

  Nothing will concentrate the mind like thirst. Busbecq, who became closely acquainted with Sande, described the scene as it was told to him:

  “Many of them were to be seen stretched on the ground on the point of death, with their mouths agape and continually repeating the single word, ‘water.’ If anyone took pity on them and poured a little water into their mouths, they revived and sat up and remained in that posture until the effect of the water wore off, when they fell back again and eventually expired from thirst. Many died in this manner every day in addition to those who perished fighting or from disease and the complete lack of medical stores in that desolate spot.”34

  Soon men were slipping out of the fort and surrendering just to get a drink. Even slavery was preferable to this sort of death. Sande, alarmed, called for a solution, and a Sicilian engineer was able to oblige. From the material at hand, he managed to jury-rig an alembic, and through boiling and distilling was able to turn salt water into a limited amount of fresh. Imitators with a view toward quick money soon followed. Extra water could be had for a piastre a cup. The price doubled, then fell to nothing once Sande caught on.

  By July 27, wood to fire the alembics gave out. Only three days’ worth of water remained. That night Sande rallied the remaining force for one last battle. Under a thin sliver of a moon, the Christian men rushed the Ottoman trenches and fought for two hours with considerable cost to both sides. At the end of that time, the Christians split into two parts, one falling back to the fort, the other, headed by Sande, heading for the shore, hoping to grab a boat and escape the island. He didn’t make it. In the garbled version of the English ambassador from Messina, “Don Alvaro de Sandi, the General, after making a sally to obtain water, was taken in the said fort, after having fought bravely for two days.”35

  The Ottoman account was less generous: “[Sande] threw himself into the water apparently either to drown or, if taken prisoner, to pass unrecognized. Some warriors from among those who themselves had been prisoners recognized that accursed one, saying ‘This is the one who was the leader of the troublemakers, and the source of stubbornness and mischief!’”36 Senior Ottoman officers prevented his being lynched.

  Soon after, the final holdouts still inside the fort finally surrendered, though quickly regretted doing so. Piali’s own report states that “the champions of the faith, without compassion or pity, raised the Muslim war cry, penetrated the fort, and put all its wicked infidels to the sword.”37

  The half-broken fort on which La Cerda had pinned his hopes had lasted less than three months. Djerba was back in Muslim hands, and by August the Ottoman fleet could sail home in victory. In a del
iberate snub at their enemies, the fleet breezed past Malta and stopped for water at the neighboring island of Gozo. Unable to take Piali Pasha on in battle, Valette apparently tried to ransom some prisoners, and failing that, to provide Sande with some biscuit, wine, cloth, and other provisions.38 (The king of France was also informed that, despite the excellent relations between the Ottomans and his country, it would not be possible to release French captives who had “fought with the enemy.”)39

  The shame of his nephew’s defeat was said to have killed Andrea Doria. He was ninety-three. Whether blame attaches more to Gianandrea Doria or La Cerda can be argued. Doria lost the battle; La Cerda made the battle inevitable. Whatever the result, it was Doria’s name that continued into history in years to come, generally as less than heroic or effective. They each wrote their accounts and made their excuses; and some years after this affair, La Cerda was made viceroy of Navarre, then later served in the Lowlands, where he resigned after less than a year of ineffective work. His position as viceroy of Sicily was taken by Don Garcia de Toledo, hero of Mahdia. Gianandrea Doria would get a second, and even a third chance to prove himself worthy of his great-uncle.

  This was in the future. For now, Piali Pasha was in his glory. Early word of his initial victory reached Constantinople in June. The man himself returned in triumph that September, his galleys filled, if not with treasure at least with some interesting captives, many of them suitable for ransom. Busbecq, who was present at the time, describes the scene—the exuberant crowd, the local Christians being cheerfully abused on the streets, the prisoners marching in chains through the ancient streets of Constantinople. Suleiman watched it all, betraying no emotion of any kind. Busbecq would soon find himself as the de facto intermediary for these men, supplementing their diet of black bread and water with lamb broth and their sleeping quarters with blankets; many died regardless. The high ranking among them appear to have largely recovered from their ordeal. Men who weeks before were parched for water now expected comfort and deference, and ordered the long-suffering Busbecq to find them decent clothing, food, and wine.40

  Suleiman, who always had an eye for talent, took a personal interest in Sande. Never one to gloat over a defeated rival, the sultan tried to bring the Spaniard to the side of the faithful. Perhaps he could lead troops against the Persians? Would he like to be bey of Egypt? Sande refused and was put in a single room overlooking the Black Sea in the Tower of the Dog, tantamount to a death sentence. Two years later, Emperor Ferdinand bought his freedom for eighty thousand escudos and the return of twenty-five Turkish prisoners.41 Sande and Busbecq, who arranged the matter, traveled together overland to Vienna, Sande in high spirits, Busbecq paying his meals and lodging.

  Back on Djerba, the Christian dead had one more role to play. With the battle won, the bones of the dead of the garrison were gathered and placed in a pyramidal structure twenty-five feet high and sixty feet in circumference, plastered over and known thereafter as the Burj er Roos, the Tower of Skulls. This grisly rebuke remained in place, slowly deteriorating and revealing its contents, for nearly three hundred years until 1848, when local Christians had it dismantled and the bones interred in the Catholic cemetery.

  6

  AN ALMOST-PEACEFUL INTERIM, 1561–1564

  May God see fit, for the good of Christendom, to appease the heart of this lord, and divert his forces elsewhere, for it is impossible that this great naked fury will fall on any place without leaving a pitiful spectacle and testimony of cruelty.

  French ambassador to Catherine de’ Medici, January 20, 1565, Constantinople,

  Djerba may have been a pyrrhic victory. Soon after the fleet returned home, plague broke out in Constantinople: “On his death bed [Grand Vizier Rüstem Pasha] besought the Turk to deliver such prisoners as were taken at Gerbes; for he thought the pestilence at Constantinople was caused through their detention, and he left forty thousand ducats to buy slaves with, in their stead.”1

  Djerba was a blow to the West, and a personal disappointment to Gianandrea Doria—the island seemed determined to embarrass members of the Doria family—but it was not the utter catastrophe for Spain that some historians have made it out to be. By 1561 Philip had rebuilt most of the ships he had lost, and though, as John Guilmartin points out, he lost a good number of maritime experts at Djerba, Aguareles notes that Spanish prisoners were ransomed quickly, if at great cost.2 Doria was quickly replaced as admiral-in-chief by his adopted son, Marco Antonio Carretto Doria, who “hoist[ed] his flag at Naples where he will sail with the whole fleet in search of Dragut.”3 That same year we read in passing that “Spain has thirty-one galleys, and four of the Duke of Savoy’s had gone towards Naples from Civita Vecchia to join the twenty-two which are there. Marc Antonio Carretta [sic] is general of all the army, having aboard the galleys three thousand Spaniards, which will be employed against Tunis.”4 (It didn’t happen, and Philip was to lose these ships the following year at Herradura to a sudden hurricane—such was life on the Mediterranean—and they would again be rebuilt.)

  So Christian galleys continued to sail, and if they did not venture much farther east than the waters around Sicily, they hadn’t done so in years anyway. This is not to say that Christendom was complacent. Far from it. Turgut and other Barbarossa protégés were still very active along the Italian and Spanish coasts, and in 1561 “the corsairs have done much harm, especially in Puglia where, landing three or four hundred at a time, they took a great number of persons.”5 Rumors came west that Suleiman’s daughter had offered to finance four hundred ships to invade Malta. The same year Pope Clement, “fearing for Malta, has sent thither Ascanio Della Corgna”—not for the final time, as we shall see.6 Invasion rumors were credible enough again in early 1564 for Valette to order all knights in Europe to report to the island and for all noncombatants to leave. False alarms, in both cases.

  Why nothing? Suleiman was again distracted by local problems of increasing population, decreasing food, rising inflation, riots, and plague, which killed off an estimated eighty thousand, including a large number of slave oarsmen, whose absence would make it impossible to dispatch “as many slave [powered] ships as in prior years.”7 A Venetian envoy adds to this list, curiously, love of peace and fear that his son Selim might attempt usurpation just as his namesake, Suleiman’s father, had done.8 Suleiman also was troubled by age—he was now sixty-five. He had outlived his great rivals. Charles V had abdicated in 1556 and died in 1558, Francis I in 1547. There was also the matter of his succession.

  The process of ensuring a stable Ottoman dynasty was ruthlessly pragmatic—there must be sons, and once a new sultan was named, there must not be living rivals to the throne. The first part was easy: when the urge struck the sultan, one woman was chosen, bathed, clothed, and brought to his bed chamber. Rewards came to those who bore sons, but once they had done so, they were retired from the harem. Suleiman’s good fortune had been to be an only child. His own sons were not so lucky. They knew the winner-take-all tradition—and the fate of the losers. So did their mothers. Foremost among this number was Hurrem, a Circassian Russian, better known to the West as Roxelana.

  The French diplomat Nicolay describes her as not classically beautiful but possessing a lively nature and the ability to entertain the sultan with chitchat.9 Suleiman, still in his twenties, was beguiled. He allowed her to be seen with him in public. She was said to give him political advice. She was believed to “retain his affection by love charms and magic arts.”10 It was all very scandalous, and worse followed. She provided him a son, and though by custom Suleiman should have discarded her, he did not. She, however, refused to sleep with him unless he married her, and in time she got her way.

  If she was merely conniving, she played her part remarkably well. She poured out letters to him at his every absence, letters by turns formal, playful, pleading, loving. Over the years, she bore him four more sons and one much-favored daughter, Mihrimah.

  As to his successor, Suleiman tried to be scientific about t
he selection process. He appointed each of his sons as governor of a province, where they could learn the craft of government. Mustapha, his eldest son (but not Hurrem’s), proved very capable indeed as sanjak-bey of Magnesia, modern-day Manisa on the east coast of Turkey. By charm, by efficiency, by looks, and by character, Mustapha achieved the loyalty of his soldiers and his subjects. Hurrem’s sons did not measure up. Of course, he would have to go.

  This took time and careful planning, and Hurrem worked long and hard. Pillow talk alone would not be enough. Pressure must come from outside. Alliances must be cultivated. She arranged for her daughter Mihrimah to marry Rüstem Pasha, a rising official and soon to be the grand vizier. Once he was family, he must become an enemy of Mustapha.

  Mustapha’s excellence was used against him. Rumors were planted. Why did his mother prefer Magnesia over Constantinople? What did she and her son talk about? Could he be cut from the same cloth as his parricide grandfather Selim?

  By 1552, Roger Ascham, writing from the court of Charles V, reports that Mustapha was “given to all mischief, cruel, false, getting he careth not how unjustly and spending he careth not how unthriftily, whatsoever he may lay his hand on; wily in making for his purpose and ready to break for his profit, all covenanants . . . ; he is a seeker of strife and war, a great mocker of mean men, a sore oppressor of poor men, openly contemning God and a bent enemy against Christ’s name and Christian men.”11 In 1552 Mustapha was to lead an army against Persia, and the rumors grew louder. What was the son doing at the head of such a large army, an army that Suleiman himself had commanded with such skill in the past? What would the masses think?