The Great Siege of Malta

by Allen, Bruce Ware

  Certainly the news did not go down well in Constantinople. The French ambassador to the Grand Porte wrote home to say, “I will only tell you that the death of Torgut Reis has brought great sadness to Suleiman and even taking Malta would not bring him pleasure, if it comes at the price of so valiant a captain. Yesterday morning, by the arrival of a courier, we wanted to believe that Malta had been captured.”22

  Nevertheless, Suleiman’s next letter to Mustapha was an order to “encourage the army and the Janissaries to fight against the enemies and you should conquer the island of Malta. I trust that you and everybody else will succeed in this feat.”23 From now on, it would be uphill work for Mustapha to regain the respect of his men.

  Valette moved out of the grand master’s palace. Common gossip held that he could not bear to see the Muslim banners flying over St. Elmo, though it is just as likely that he wanted to be closer to the next phase of the operation. A new hardness came to him. The dead would not be allowed to undermine Christian resolve, and so long as the enemy was still on the island, grief was a luxury. Valette ordered no public mourning for the husbands, brothers, or sons who had died. Instead all Christians were to mark the feast of St. John, which occasioned the weird phenomenon of two enemies engaged in twin celebrations, since the Ottomans as good Muslims also held St. John in “great reverence” and noted the occasion with “large bonfires and great firing of artillery.”24

  After three weeks of almost constant cannon blast, the sudden quiet the following day must have been both welcome and eerie. Any psychological respite, however, would be short-lived. Valette’s injunction to leave the dead unmourned was about to be put to the test. The morning after the fall of St. Elmo, watchmen on the walls of Fort St. Angelo saw four pale objects floating in the water. Eyes can play tricks on even the most farsighted, especially where water is concerned, but as the currents brought the objects closer, there was no doubt as to what the watchmen were seeing. They called for Valette. Gently bobbing like so much driftwood toward the tip of Senglea were four large wooden crosses on which were nailed the supine remains of as many dead Christians.

  The pallid, sea-washed bodies, skin white as marble, had had their chests slashed twice in a grisly imitation of the red cross on their order’s uniform (possibly as a subtle suggestion that Mustapha had no quarrel with the Maltese, only with the knights). The corpses were gently pulled ashore with the reverence due to martyrs and brothers, and where possible, identification was made by those who knew them best. It was a ghastly and wholly unnecessary excess, “contrary to all law of war and all humanity.”25 Piali Pasha himself is said to have protested the action, and Mustapha reproved him for doing so.26 Mustapha had a point to make, both to his own men and to the holdouts across the bay.

  The sight of their butchered comrades was distressing even to the hardest veteran, and Valette spoke at some length to the soldiers, seeking to calm their fears and reinvigorate them for the rest of the siege. The fall of Fort St. Elmo, he said, should not dismay them, but rather should cause them to redouble their courage. Death comes to all men, but those who died at Fort St. Elmo exited life gloriously, sacrificing themselves nobly and of their own free will in the name of Jesus Christ, than which there was no finer or more desirable death. They were Christian soldiers fighting against impious barbarians, valiant warriors fighting against ignoble brutes, skilled soldiers fighting against undisciplined hordes.

  Even for an accomplished public speaker, his was a weak response, and no words could really measure up to this horrid action. Outrage must answer for outrage. Valette, his speech done, went to Fort St. Angelo and ordered all Muslim prisoners to be brought out of their cells. When they emerged from the dark, blinking at the bright sunshine, he gave the order that they were all to be executed and their heads thrown over the wall in front of Birgu. He ordered the same to be done at Mdina.

  Modern historians starting with Vertot have embellished the story by having Valette stuff the heads into cannon and fire them into enemy lines.27 Contemporary records, when they mention the affair at all, state only that heads were cut off and thrown at the enemy camp (capita versus hostium castra iactata sunt).28 The story seems excessive on the face of it. Aside from the question of how well a human head might weather that kind of treatment, there is Valette’s need to husband powder, exacerbated by the recent explosion of his powder factory. (There is no record of what happened to the bodies; their treatment is unlikely to have been in accordance with Islamic law or tradition.)

  Cannons or not, later writers, Porter chief among them, have tut-tutted Valette for this act, “unworthy of his character as a Christian soldier,” which shows little appreciation of just how desperate his situation was.29 In addition to the need to prove his own ruthlessness to a ruthless enemy, there is the plain fact that these prisoners were, like horses, cows, and dogs, useless mouths whose presence required valuable food, water, and the manpower needed to keep an eye on them. They were, moreover, a potential danger. Hostile prisoners (led by a Knight of St. John) had, after all, broken out of their prison and guaranteed the 1536 conquest of Tunis. To chastise Valette for this act, given all that had gone on before, is to ignore the utter barbarity of war in general. Unquestionably, the gesture sent a strong message to the Ottomans. Until now, the invaders could assume that capture did not mean certain death. It’s a comforting thought in war, where comforting thoughts aren’t all that thick on the ground. Piali, objecting to the slaughter in Fort St. Elmo, seems to have realized this. With all assurance of chivalry gone, the Muslim foot soldier had one more incentive to leave, and one more reason to doubt his commander’s ability. Conversely, as Mustapha hoped, they might have one more reason to stay and exact revenge from the infidel knight Valette.

  Regardless, both sides had shaken off the trammels of tiresome humanity in order to expedite a fight. The devil had pitched a tent on Malta.

  Map of Malta and Gozo, by Chris Erichsen.

  Map of Grand Harbor, by Chris Erichsen.

  Map of the Mediterranean, 1565, by Chris Erichsen.

  Philippe de Villiers de L’Isle-Adam. Anonymous etching.

  Suleiman the Magnificent. Anonymous Venetian woodcut in two blocks, ca. 1532, in William Stirling-Maxwell, Examples of Engraved Portraits of the Sixteenth Century (London, 1872).

  Charles V of Spain. Oil portrait by Juan Pantoja de la Cruz, El Escorial, Madrid.

  Khairedihn Barbarossa. Engraving from André Thevet, Les vrais pourtraits et vies des hommes illustres (Paris: Kervert et Chaudière, 1584).

  Sinan Pasha. Etching by Giacomo Franco, Effigie naturali dei maggior prencipi et più valorosi capitani (Venice: Giacomo Franco, 1596).

  Jean de Valette. Etching in M. Manger and J. Praetorius, Atrium heroicum Caesarum regum, (Augsburg: Custos, 1600).

  Philip II of Spain. Oil portrait after a painting by Alonso Sanchez Coello, Pollok House, Glasgow.

  Gianandrea Doria. Etching in M. Manger and J. Praetorius, Atrium heroicum Caesarum regum (Augsburg: Custos, 1600).

  Don Garcia de Toledo. Etching in Cesáreo Fernández Duro, Armada española: Desde la unión de los reinos de Castilla y de Aragón, vol. 2 (Madrid: Sucesores de Rivadeneyra, 1896).

  Ascanio Della Corgna. Etching in William Stirling-Maxwell, Don John of Austria (London: Longmans, 1883).

  Vicenzo Anastagi. Oil portrait by El Greco, Frick Collection, New York.

  The Death of Dragut. Oil portrait by Giuseppe Calì, National Museum of Fine Arts, Valletta, Malta.

  Fort St. Elmo. Rendering courtesy of Stephen C. Spiteri, Fortresses of the Knights (Malta: Book Distributors, 2001).

  Fort St. Elmo after the loss of the ravelin on the left. Rendering courtesy of Stephen C. Spiteri, The Great Siege: Knights versus Turks, MDLXV: Anatomy of a Hospitaler Victory (Malta: Gutenberg Press, 2005).

  Fort St. Angelo. Rendering courtesy of Stephen C. Spiteri, The Great Siege: Knights versus Turks, MDLXV: Anatomy of a Hospitaler Victory (Malta: Gutenberg Press, 2005).

 
Tripoli. Anonymous etching, 1567, courtesy of Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps.

  Fortress near Humt Suk, Djerba. Wood engraving, 1886, by Fortuné Louis Méaulle, from a drawing by T. Taylor.

  Djerba fortress. Anonymous etching, 1599.

  The Tower of Skulls (Djerba). Steel engraving, 1841, by E. Benjamin, from a drawing by Sir Grenville T. Temple, Bart.

  Sixteenth-century galley. Anonymous etching.

  Galley of Knights of St. John. Etching by Jacob Custodis in Joseph Furttenbach, Architectura Navalis (Ulm: J. Saurn, 1629).

  PART THREE

  Honor Bought with Blood

  17

  PICCOLO SOCCORSO

  The men of St. Elmo have shown the Turks what we’re made of.

  Valette

  Since early spring, knights and soldiers and adventurers had been gathering from all over Europe at Messina. Once arrived, they sat. The waiting was made all the worse by the knowledge that just over the horizon fellow Christians were engaged every minute of every day in a hard-fought battle that they looked all too likely to lose. The men had come this far; it was maddening to have to stop now.

  The man holding them back was Don Garcia, and if he was holding them back, it was with good reason. As overall military commander, he had to weigh the strength of the Turks already on Malta against the strength of his own fleet. He repeatedly had told Valette that he would send a force when, and only when, there were sufficient soldiers to overwhelm the enemy. Valette, in a letter of June 29, downplayed the threat, dismissing the enemy ships as “the trifling guard that the enemy is putting up.”1 Don Garcia would not be moved. The Ottoman armada was formidable and circled the island like a jealous dragon, watchful, dangerous.

  Nor was Malta the only battleground that summer. In July, Don Garcia was reported to have “fought with forty galleys, and taken twenty-five and sunk the rest.”2 Algerians were, according to rumor, again laying siege to Spanish-held Oran, due south of Cartagena (unsuccessfully in the end).3

  Always, Don Garcia had to consider the wishes of his king, who, like Suleiman, above all wanted to preserve the fleet. Suleiman was generally more aggressive than Philip, in part because he had no one else to answer to. In Philip’s case, the concern over his ships was stronger both because he had lost so much at Djerba and because his current fleet was largely funded by the generosity of the pope, who expected results. A navy was hideously expensive, and having recently borrowed two hundred thousand ducats from his Genoese banker Nicolò Grimaldi, “il Monarca,” he could not afford to lose another.4 If Philip’s galleys should be lost, the situation would be suddenly and drastically worse for Malta, Italy, and Spain, a point his father had taken some pains to drum into him.5 Philip said outright that his ships’ “conservation was more important than the relief.”6 (Giovanni Battista Adriani, court historian to the Medici, makes an offhand comment about Spain’s “customary slowness” (l’uso loro tardissime).7

  There was also the question of tactics. Amphibious landings have always been a difficult business. Attempting one against a strong opposing force, and factoring in the sixty galleys patrolling the island, would be disastrous.8 What success Don Garcia had enjoyed in the past—and he was more successful than not—had been due to meticulous planning and a precise calculation of the odds.

  The knights, understandably, didn’t want to hear any of this. Their position was simple. Their brethren were dying. They wanted to fight. This man was preventing them. In consequence, they hounded him. They reminded him of the service the knights had performed when he, Don Garcia, had taken the Peñon de Velez de la Gomera. They questioned to his face his strategy and his nerve.

  It was not, however, as if Don Garcia had done nothing. Two other relief efforts had been sent out earlier, only to turn back in the face of Piali’s fleet.9 Moreover, the viceroy was dealing with a somewhat skittish monarch and had to convince him that the situation of Malta in general and Fort St. Elmo in particular might be worrisome, but not so dire that they should give up entirely: “And even if San Telmo [sic] were lost, I do not consider that loss the worse for Malta so long as the other [forts] are retained, because any fleet that [the Ottomans] will put in the port that lies under San Telmo is still subject to whomever is master of the island.”10 Philip meanwhile kept coming back to the situation at La Goletta. Did it have enough men, should they send more, had Don Garcia considered the thoughts of the locals?11 Don Garcia had repeatedly assured him that La Goletta was relatively safe, a “part of the world most difficult to attack, and easiest to defend, and if the Ottomans do go to that island I am certain that they will leave with little honor and a great deal of harm.”12 The king continued to fret, and Don Garcia replied with a tact that at times gave way to impatience: “If Your Majesty only knew how our enemies were now engaged on Malta.”13

  Whatever the troops badgering him at Messina might think, the viceroy’s primary concern was with the island, and he had sent a long and detailed letter to Philip explaining the various risks of confronting the Ottomans on Malta (“putting people on the ground there is a lot of work”) or fighting the armada at sea.14 Curiously, Don Garcia’s brother-in-law Cosimo de’ Medici had taken upon himself to write directly to Philip, regretting that the knights had failed to prepare for this siege years earlier, but then suggesting that a few small relief forces sent in sooner rather than later could do good service while the larger relief for later that summer was being prepared.15 Whether this was done with or without Don Garcia’s knowledge or approval is impossible to know.

  In the end, however, he did act. A small force of some forty-two knights and six hundred men, dubbed by history as the Piccolo Soccorso, the “Small Relief,” was slated to try where two other attempts had failed. It was still a risk—any force that reached the island could easily find itself caught between Piali’s ships and Mustapha’s army—but less a risk than sending everyone who wanted to go. Don Garcia, still unaware that Fort St. Elmo had fallen, was under no illusion that such a small number of soldiers would make much difference; at best, these men could be a temporary boost to morale, a show of good faith, and a means of disarming his critics.16

  The boats would be commanded by Don Juan de Cardona, the land forces by Melchior de Robles, a highly charismatic Spanish knight of the Order of St. James and Maestro de Campo for Sicilian Tercios. In the past he had served as a soldier in Hungary and less dangerously as Gentilhombre de Boca for the Emperor Ferdinand.17

  Don Garcia set down one condition—if they learned that Fort St. Elmo had fallen, the expedition was to be called off. The logic is clear enough. Their chances of reaching Birgu were better if Mustapha was still occupied with St. Elmo. If St. Elmo had fallen, the Ottomans most likely would target Birgu, making it impossible to reach. In that event, the relief could only be safe at Mdina, where they could do little good while eating and drinking stuffs that the locals could ill afford to lose. Don Garcia’s strategy all along had been to avoid any relief that was not overwhelming, and this exception needed exceptional justification. Bolstering Birgu and only Birgu was justified; bolstering Mdina, at this stage, was less so.

  The Piccolo Soccorso arrived at Malta on June 29, too late to help Fort St. Elmo.18 There was, somewhat surprisingly, no interference from, or even sightings of, Muslim ships along the way. The galleys anchored most of the day a few miles offshore and behind the small island of Fifla. They sat there bobbing in the water for the better part of the day and night and only at dawn headed toward the western shore, where the lookouts saw the dull light of a nearly exhausted campfire. It could belong to Maltese fishermen; it could just as easily belong to Ottoman sentries. If the boats were discovered now, either from sea or from land, the expedition would be over before it had even begun.

  Cardona brought his ships as close to shore as he felt prudent, then had a skiff lowered onto the water. Robles and two others climbed in and rowed toward the island. Among the party was Quincy, a French knight who spoke both Maltese and Turkish. Once the
boat was dragged on shore, Quincy approached the fading campfire, around which was gathered a small group of Maltese peasants. He called out to them, explained who he was, and asked about Fort St. Elmo. The islanders regretted to inform him that the great fort had fallen with serious losses to his fellow knights and other brave soldiers. A tragic day for Christendom, and they prayed that the Turks could still be repulsed. The word also was that Valette, unlike Don Garcia, was eager to have any men regardless of the state of Fort St. Elmo. Quincy thanked the men for the information, got up, and returned to his comrades. His duty was clear and he did not hesitate. Fort St. Elmo, he said, still held out.