The Great Siege of Malta

by Allen, Bruce Ware

  As the defenders of Senglea were now fully occupied with the ongoing assaults along the western shore and at the landward walls of St. Michael, ten Ottoman vessels quietly appeared on the water. These were headed not into the chain that had stopped the earlier boats, but farther north, to the tip of the peninsula, just at the point where the chain began. Ten galleys of eighty men each, Janissaries and Levantines, advanced against a position with little to no immediate defense and almost no chance that further reserve troops could be sent there in time, if indeed there were reserve troops on hand. This squadron’s successful arrival would open a third and decisive front on an already hard-pressed position, and had every chance of winning the battle then and there.

  (Balbi suggests that this ancillary attack was improvised, based on the other boats’ difficulties in getting past the chains.13 It is possible, however, that one or the other of the Ottoman commanders planned the move from the outset. Hold one area while striking a second is an ancient tactic; to hold two and strike a third is not a great stretch.)

  The progress of this flotilla did not go wholly unnoticed. Below the stone walls of Fort St. Angelo, just at the waterline, well removed from any of that day’s fighting, Chevalier Francisco de Guiral was at his post, looking out through a set of five embrasures. His post was a recent creation, designed to protect the chain that protected Dockyard Creek, and therefore vital to the defense. That it was vital to the defense was small comfort to Guiral. As he and his men sat behind this low wall, the two greatest assaults of the siege were going on, and he was as far away as possible, forbidden to take part, unable even to know how the battle was going. His only view was of the gentle lapping water of the Grand Harbor and the far shores of Sciberras. The one thing he could not have expected to see was this small flotilla coming across the water and directly into his line of fire.

  Guiral knew his business. His view was clear; he had his gunners sight the oncoming squadron, gauge distance, and prepare their guns. Oars rose and fell, dipping into the water and moving briskly toward their goal. He watched, waited, and the boats, ignorant of the danger they were in, pressed forward until they were perfectly aligned in his sights. Guiral gave the order to fire. Gunners lay slow matches onto touchholes, which sputtered briefly; then four of five cannons let loose a single volley of stones and iron and scrap, which billowed across the water.14

  The manmade storm crashed into the vessels—so carefully shaped and joined back in the shipyards of Constantinople—which now exploded into a gale of splinters, killing and maiming the better part of the passengers. Hundreds of men, many of them injured, most unable to swim, flailed in the water, grasping at any piece of floating wreckage they could reach. Nine of the ten ships were now sinking, and the commander of the tenth, quick-witted and recognizing a mismatched fight, ordered his boat to withdraw as quickly as possible, leaving the bobbing survivors to whatever fate they could manage.15 In most cases, this was an acceptance of death by drowning. One by one, the struggling heads slipped beneath the water’s surface and cries for help diminished to silence.

  Guiral’s men immediately reloaded and fired again, but the process was long and the surviving ship was quick. There Muslim command was in brief disarray. When Uludj Ali rallied his boats for a second attempt, not only was he met by Guiral’s, but according to an official report, they were helped by a battery “from the Castle of St. Angelo whose artillery sank I do not know how many boats and killed many soldiers.”16 By then it didn’t matter. No other vessels would dare to attempt that landing, not on that day. Guiral, confined to a secondary position, had his one shot; and by this one action, he and his men almost certainly saved the peninsula.

  Back on the western shore, the fighting grew hotter, and the numbers of dead grew larger. Don Jaime de Sanoguera and Faderigo de Toledo, recovered enough from his facial burns to fight, had together and against orders crossed the pontoon bridge from Birgu to get closer to the front line. The two had been standing on the wall and taking in the scene when a single cannonball tore through them both. Back in May, Melchior d’Eguaras had written to Don Garcia that Faderigo was “full of virtue and will make a fine knight”17

  At least it was a quick death. Others were not so lucky. One soldier had three fingers torn off by a flying piece of armor. The wound turned septic, and he died ten days later. And if imams had the luxury of encouraging their coreligionists from a distance, Christian prelates often did not. A monk stood on the wall of Senglea, cross in one hand, sword in the other, a single breastplate covering his brown monk’s robe, shouting at the men to hold the line. He was shot from below and died at the top of the wall.

  The day dragged on, and both sides exhausted themselves on the walls of Fort St. Michael. Slowly Hassan’s Algerians began to withdraw for good to the safety of their camps. They at least had the option. On the western shores of Senglea, the Muslim attackers had nowhere to run except to the waterline and the boats that had carried them into battle. Of these boats, however, some had foundered, others had withdrawn, and none seemed in any hurry to rescue the desperate soldiers. Christian writers claim this was done deliberately to ensure that the men would fight.18 It briefly had that effect, but the final Muslim assaults could not overcome the guns from St. Angelo, Senglea, and Sanoguera. The space between Senglea’s walls and the water became a killing ground, and Christians had the upper hand. The onetime defenders now launched a counterattack, filing out of the bastion through a sally port and firing into the enemy at point-blank range. Candelissa’s Muslims, exhausted by fighting and trapped in the narrow strip of land, had no choice but to push back or throw themselves on the mercy of their opponents. “A buona guerra, o Christiani!”19

  Mercy was not a quality easily found in that parched season. The fate of Fort St. Elmo was too recent, and the Christians were not in a forgiving mood. They began to scream, “Ammazza, ammazza, pagate St. Elmo, pagate St. Elmo, canaglia!” “Die, die, pay for St. Elmo, pay for St. Elmo, bastards!”20 A few Muslims were spared, but found little to celebrate. Fra Federico Sangiorgio, whose brother had died at St. Elmo, somehow managed to seize two Janissaries alive and brought them back to the Borgo, where he thrust them into a crowd of “peasants and women.”21 The mob tore them to pieces. Valette’s timid Maltese had become accustomed to war.

  Meanwhile, desperate men forced back to the water flailed wildly in an attempt to reach the far shore. “Dressed like women” in various fashions and colors, living and half-living bodies stained the water pink and sank beneath the waves.22 Turkish gunners on the far side of the water, unable to help their comrades, did the next best thing—they fired indiscriminately at the melee. If the Muslims were going to die anyway, there was no reason not to take out as many Christians as possible. God would welcome His own.

  Among the Christians, the commercially minded stopped fighting and began plundering. Some of the more foresighted carried ropes with which to tie up slaves—useless planning, as only four Muslims survived the bloodbath. More plentiful were the Algerians’ gold clothes, scimitars, and gold and silver embossed arquebuses, worth thirty and forty scudi each, now scattered the ground, rich rewards for anyone with stomach enough to take them. Christian commanders gathered the six enemy standards. Less sentimental men hacked off and saved Muslim heads. Maltese, swimmers by birthright, crossed over the strewn battlefield, leapt into the bloody water, and swam down among the sunken boats and bodies to see what they could find. Besides the jeweled weapons and clothes, they found supplies of food—proof, Balbi infers, that the enemy had every intent and expectation of camping on Senglea that night. More bitter, they found coins that had lately belonged to the men of St. Elmo—St. Elmo’s pay, blood money now returned with some interest.

  There were also quantities of afion, which the contemporary historian Salazar notes “gives one unaccustomed zeal, and causes one to feel no wound, however serious, nor to fear any grave situation or danger.” Some modern historians identify the drug as hashish, but this seems unlikely.
Persian physician Avicenna (980–1037) notes that patients come to doctors for two reasons: “One is pain. The other is fear . . . Afion may relieve both.” Welcome stuff for any soldier heading into battle. High-grade opium is not the soporific that its processed cousin morphine (Morpheus, bringer of dreams) is; people lightly intoxicated with opium can function quite well. This was Dutch courage for the attackers, much like the amphetamines German soldiers were issued during World War II, and a partial explanation for the insane fury and bravery of some of the suicidal attacks.23

  Five hours had passed from the time of the first signal from Sciberras to the final Muslim withdrawal in front of Fort St. Michael. Four hundred Muslims had died and two hundred Christians. At least that many had been wounded. Four Turks were allowed to live and be questioned by Valette.24 The Ottomans let their surviving soldiers rest and heal and returned the burden of attack to the artillerists, who kept a steady stream of cannon fire on Fort St. Michael. They worked alone. The boats that had failed to take Senglea, those that Christian guns had not destroyed, were now dragged back over the ridge of Sciberras. There would be no more naval assaults on Senglea.

  20

  ENDURANCE

  The noise of the shot of the ordnance and battery of Malta not having been heard in Italy for three days, it is thought that all is lost.

  Phayre to Cecil, August 6, 1565

  Even before the assault, Mustapha was writing desperate, even threatening, letters to the governor of the Ottoman-held port of Modon, insisting that he send more gunpowder as quickly as possible.1

  Supplies were not his only problem. His troops were now falling ill with “bloody flux, putrid fever [typhus], and illnesses of great mortality.”2 The hospitals were filling with “as many wounded (of which there was already a good number) as sick,” a curious departure from the norm, as the Ottoman military was famous for its clean and orderly camps.3 Rank determined which of three locations a casualty ended up in. Soldiers were sent to hospital at the Marsa, support personnel to the rear ends of ships. Christians and slaves were put between the banks of oars on the galleys, an area notorious for filth. (Between washing decks and benches every two days, the standard method for deep-cleaning a sewage-laden galley was to scuttle the hull for a few days and let seawater drift over and dissipate the waste.)

  Conditions behind the Christian lines were significantly better. Even before the invasion, the knights had built a sizeable working infirmary, two stories covering nearly a third of an acre, an area that expanded during the course of the siege as adjacent buildings were requisitioned and repurposed. There was also considerable space carved into the earth below, in anticipation of a siege like this. The halls were large and airy, the linens washed regularly, and tableware for even the lowest patient was of silver.

  Moreover, the Order’s physicians had refined medical practice over the centuries. They were familiar with battle wounds and what contemporary weapons could do to a body and what human ingenuity could do to hurry the natural healing process. Blade wounds, where a limb was not wholly severed, might be clean and if so could often be repaired. A lead bullet could shatter bone, requiring amputation; cannon firing scattershot or rubble could lacerate a man, carve out large sections of flesh, or simply cut him in two; Greek fire caused severe burns.

  If military technology had created more horrific wounds, medical science had done its best to keep up. Prior to battle, surgeons and orderlies cleared tables and prepared the tools of their trade. Long, thin, dramatic probes, clamps, and retractors enabled them to search deeply for arrowheads and bullets and whatever else might wind up inside a combatant’s body. Boiling pitch was used to cauterize open wounds, herbs and medicines to dull pain and promote healing. The Order’s medicine jars carried a wide assortment of curative herbs and unintentional placebos, ranging from mallow to St. John’s wort. The Order also kept a good supply of a moss peculiar to the island of Gozo that was remarkable for its antiseptic qualities. Onion and salt was a popular sixteenth-century treatment for gunpowder and other burns; salt water was for immediate relief.

  As far as they could, both sides followed prudent basic steps where the dead, and body parts of the maimed, were concerned. They buried their own men as decently as they could, which after some battles could only mean mass graves hurriedly dug and filled in. The enemy dead were burned as befitted their degraded status, with the occasional exception made for heads, better employed in gracing the ends of pikes. Even so, in the latter days there were body parts and whole corpses abandoned to the swirl of sun, smoke, dust, and flies.

  By July 18, Ottoman engineers were all but finished with a bridge across the ditch to Fort St. Michael. It would have to be destroyed by hand, and Valette’s nephew, Henri Parisot, volunteered to lead an attempt. Engineers chipping away from inside the stone wall opened a small sally port through which he and several others rushed out in the hope of setting the structure afire. His uniform, gold-chased armor, marked Parisot as worth a bullet, and Turkish snipers killed him before he or his men could even begin the job. With some difficulty his comrades managed to bring the body back inside the walls. Valette came to view the body, and when someone tried to console him for the loss of a family member, he replied that all knights were equally as precious to him as his nephew.4

  True or not, it was a wise statement. Nearly every family on Malta had lost a relative, or a home, or a livelihood, or all three, and Valette could not allow his charges to give in to despair. Civilian resolve had cracked at Rhodes with disastrous results, and he was not going to let that happen here. If this meant containing his own grief, then so be it. He encouraged rumors if that would buy his people a few days’ strength. July 25 is the feast of St. James, patron saint of Spain. Don Garcia was a member of the Order of St. James. Clearly Don Garcia would choose this day to bring relief. An anonymous diarist notes, “On that day we all waited for the armada to arrive.”5 When it did not, Valette directed the people’s attention to a higher power. God had preserved them thus far and would ever do so. All present were Christians and should remember that they were fighting for their faith, and could expect no greater mercy from a victorious Ottoman army than had the defenders of St. Elmo.

  Harsh justice to the enemy helped. One of Anastagi’s lieutenants had captured five Turks and one Christian renegade and dragged them to Mdina. Bad luck for them: “On Friday, the twentieth day of July, [the Turks] were cut into pieces by our people in revenge for the cruelties inflicted at St. Elmo. And the renegade, having been strung up on the gallows by one foot, was given a miserable death by having a small fire set beneath him.”6 It wasn’t just active participants against the siege who were at risk. Robles tried and hanged a Genoese soldier for calling the siege “hopeless.”7 On June 1, Marietta de Modo, wife of a onetime captain of the garrison of Fort St. Angelo, was dragged before the Inquisition, accused of having prayed for a Turkish victory. Her son, it happened, was possibly the third man in a robbery masterminded by two knights the year before. The knights were executed; this man escaped to Alexandria, converted to Islam, and sold his intimate knowledge of Maltese defensive works to the Ottomans.8

  There was also good news. Before they were cut to pieces, the Turkish prisoners said that the two pashas were again at odds, with Piali sleeping aboard his ship at night (this for three consecutive nights). Better still, they reported that rebellion had broken out in Tripoli and that Uludj Ali had been forced to return there to deal with it.9

  Best of all, and closer to home, the water managers Geofrè de Loaysa and Iacomo Coloroti had found a spring (una vena d’acqua sorgente) in the house of Doctor Cadamosto, “putting to an end our fear that we should die for lack of water.”10 Clearly God was once again smiling on the Christians.

  Valette slept little and only in snatches. His waking hours he spent in a round of inspection, constantly moving from one position to another, encouraging here, advising there, always making himself known to the people defending the island, and by the force of his own
willpower forcing them to bear up. He lengthened the workday. Until now, reveille had been blown an hour before sunrise. Hereafter, it was two hours; Valette wanted no surprise attacks. Whether the new routine prevented any such attacks is unknowable, but the Christians were able to see off a few predawn scouting parties that otherwise might have caused trouble. Any victory, however small, was a further boost to morale.

  Physical labor was a distraction, and there was plenty of it. In places, notably around Fort St. Michael, the defenses were crumbling faster than they could properly be restored—not surprising when a single basilisk (and the Ottomans had four of them) could pound a hole through twenty feet of earth. This mattered, as the walls were not solid blocks or true concrete, but rather loose agglomerations of small stones connected with mud. All kinds of makeshift work were brought to bear against the problem. Carpenters dismantled ships so that their timbers could be recycled for defensive works. Tailors and seamstresses turned cloth from dead slaves and awning material into sandbags. In the armory, iron bullets and cannonballs were still being forged; powder was still being mixed. New incendiaries were being devised, one of which involved cotton sacks of powder covered in pitch. Even the stone houses half-broken by Ottoman cannon were further broken down to be hurled on the enemy.

  Back in Sicily, Don Garcia understood that the Small Relief had disobeyed orders in landing at Malta. If this bothered him, there’s no record of it. His next move, in fact, was to send more men and ships. Plans were made for Don Juan de Sanoguera to join his uncle Don Francisco and brother Don Jaime and other family members on Malta. By chance, Gianandrea Doria had arrived at Messina, where there was little for him to do other than to read Valette’s letters. The younger man, whose respect for the grand master went at least as far back as events at Djerba, and who perhaps felt obligated to make up for that disaster, was very moved by what he read. He approached the viceroy and offered to go to Malta with his own three galleys. He would, he said, underwrite the cost of the galleys himself, and would even take two more companies of Spaniards and chosen papal troops. The galleys, he declared, would carry only Christian crew, who then might trade oars and benches for swords and shields. In a final dramatic gesture, he requested that Don Garcia see that his debts were paid in the event he died.