The Great Siege of Malta

by Allen, Bruce Ware

  The siege of Malta was over.

  26

  FROM THE ASHES

  CATHERINE DE’ MEDICI: Was it really the greatest siege? Greater even than Rhodes?

  ANTOINE DE LA ROCHE, KNIGHT COMMANDER OF THE HOSPITALLERS: Yes, Madame, greater even than Rhodes. It was the greatest siege in history.

  The French knight Anthoine de Cressy agreed at least with the first half of this statement, writing to the grand prior of France on September 11, 1565, that “this siege was even more grueling and perilous than that of Rhodes, according to those who had been present in both.”1

  The Ottoman fleet left behind hundreds of dead and parts of the dead to drift onto the water’s shallow edges. In the days to come, more corpses floated to the surface as body tissue decomposed and the cavities filled with gas. Unseasonal heat quickly made the stench unbearable, and for some time afterward, the only creatures that would approach the area were scavenging birds in search of carrion.

  Perhaps fifteen Muslims, men too dazed or exhausted or unlucky to have made it out with their comrades, were left to be taken prisoner.2 They were booty as much as the abandoned weapons, armor, and clothing that lay scattered on the field, and were treated as such. An old captain of the spahis was sold to Della Corgna, who, given the ransom he had just paid to get out of jail, must have been grateful for the odd investment opportunity. The spahi was lucky. Balbi writes: “Very few Turks were taken as slaves because through either weariness or cowardice, not a man among them would get up from the ground where they lay, and so they were killed without mercy.”3 Another survivor claimed to be a refugee and told a story that Mustapha in his last moments on the island had torn his beard and cried out, “Allah, Allah, I have today lost two thousand of my men!”4

  Now that the island was free of the enemy invaders, members of the Gran Soccorso became little more than tourists. Those with no more business on the battlefield wandered toward Grand Harbor to see what they, and more particularly, the knights, soldiers, and Maltese people, had been fighting for. They eventually reached the once-high walls of Senglea and Birgu, now reduced to a height more suitable to penning up livestock than to keeping marauding soldiers at bay. Inside these walls were shattered wrecks of buildings. The men of the Gran Soccorso, relatively fresh, even invigorated by their one-day slap-down fight, met the exhausted, scarred survivors of the siege at Senglea and Birgu.

  (The great irony of Don Garcia’s strategy was that the arrival of the Gran Soccorso had the unintended effect of encouraging the Ottomans to make one last stand, a stand that, given their superior numbers, they should have been able to win. It was, in fact, the men of the Piccolo Soccorso who made all the difference. The numbers tell the story: as of September 9, Birgu and Senglea were defended by no more than six hundred able-bodied men—a hundred fewer than the Piccolo Soccorso.5)

  The following day, Valette wrote to the pope and to Philip with news of the victory, thanking God and Spain, and not mentioning Don Garcia at all. Three days later, Don Garcia’s viceregal galley and the troops of the duke of Urbino swept into Grand Harbor. The grand master, various knights, and representatives of the Gran Soccorso hurried down to Fort St. Angelo to meet them. Whatever recriminations Valette may have voiced for Don Garcia’s delay, at this single moment, the two men appear to have been genuinely moved by each other’s company, tears streaming down both their faces—though it was the young Gianandrea Doria whom Valette first embraced.6

  Don Garcia explained that this secondary squadron might have arrived sooner, but when they had first set out, towing barges of soldiers and matériel behind them, they had spotted the Ottoman fleet heading home. He took this as proof that the siege was won, and immediately ordered a return to Syracuse to lighten the load before he rejoined the Gran Soccorso. The last thing Malta needed was a few thousand extra hungry and thirsty soldiers.

  It did, however, need food. A chicken at that time could fetch two gold ducats (a soldier’s gross pay for one month), where chickens could be found. A single egg went for a real and a half.7 All of which made the feast that Don Garcia underwrote for knights and nobles that much more appreciated.

  It was another two days, to September 14, before Don Garcia ordered the fleet to chase the Ottoman armada, not so much with the intention of destroying it—the armada was too far away by then—but of perhaps taking some of the slower-moving cargo vessels. Certainly the Ottomans saw him as a threat. A message (presumably from Mustapha) was sent on September 19 to the kadi of Modon that things should be prepared for his arrival and that all “should be aware of the danger coming from the enemy side.”8 No ships were found—possibly none were left—and weather forced Don Garcia to spend a week at Venetian-controlled Kythira (between the Peloponnese and Crete) and to return to Messina on October 7.9 He might have done better to head westward in pursuit of the fleeing corsairs. De Fourquevaux, the French ambassador to Spain, wrote on November 5, 1565, that “the Barbary corsairs have not six weeks past descended on the lands of Granada and sacked the lands of the Duke of Sesse, some six leagues from the sea.”10 The corsairs were fundamentally businessmen. Malta hadn’t panned out—life goes on.

  Valette’s immediate problem was to rebuild Malta. His concerns were justified. Valette considered the damage to the island’s defenses so extreme that the Order might have to abandon the island (or at least, so he said).11 By December, he threatened to remove his men from Malta to Sicily if more help was not forthcoming. This seemed to do the trick. Toledo, irritated by the Frenchman’s ingratitude, had already written to Philip and argued that “even one Frenchman is too much for Syracuse, never mind more than that.”12 By the end of the year, Philip sent Valette fifty thousand ducats, and he promised troops the following year should the putative attack come.13 More heartening was the sudden rush of those eager to defend Europe from Islam. Applications to join the Order rose substantially.

  On the streets of Constantinople, there was grief and outrage directed against any Europeans who happened to be on hand: “I am constrained,” wrote Petremol, “by the anger of the people to contain myself and my family in my house.”14 Ominously, Suleiman ordered a headcount of all Christians and Jews, “a thing that had never been done in that city.”15 Suleiman rewarded his soldiers for brave service with promotions and cash, despite their not having taken the island. He did fully intend to try again, and alarmed spies in Constantinople sent reports about the sultan’s fury and plans for sending out an even larger force the next year.16 In the spring of 1566 Suleiman wrote an open letter to the people of Malta, widely translated, demanding surrender and threatening that “yf you will not yeald your selves as wee have said we will roote out the foundacion of your castell upsid down, and make you slaves and to die an evell death according to our pleasure as we have donn to manny others and this be you rightly well assured.”17

  It didn’t happen. Piali Pasha set out in 1566 with 130 ships, fewer than the year before and unaided by the Algerian fleet, which had been told that its presence was optional.18 All spring and summer Europe waited for reports of the armada’s progress. Malta, not yet recovered from the siege, braced itself. Piali cruised the Adriatic and made a few raids; the only substantive action he took was to seize Chios from the Genoese. This was no great achievement. The island had been weak for decades, a tribute payer to the empire and of small economic or military importance. A contemporary Ottoman historian claims that the Chians passed on intelligence concerning the disposition of the Ottoman fleet, but as a practical matter Chios was no threat to the Ottoman Empire.19 Taking the island was more a petulant gesture than a respectable military action, and Piali Pasha is said to have been almost apologetic to the locals he was displacing (as well he might be—Chios had taken care of the wounded and ill after they had left Malta). By August, Valette ordered the defenders of Malta to stand down.

  Why was Malta spared? Possibly Suleiman had no generals he felt he could trust. Possibly he worried that the Barbary corsairs who followed Turgut might not
have come a second time—a potentially catastrophic loss of face for the self-styled caliph of Islam. Possibly he worried that, were he to take the island, he might not be able to hold it. (Mustapha’s guns had been remarkably thorough. The engineer Francesco Laparelli, who came to rebuild what the Ottomans had destroyed, considered Senglea so far gone that it could only be razed to the ground.)20 Moreover, Malta was simply more valuable to Europe than Rhodes had been. It was the pathway to Sicily, breadbasket to Italy and Spain, as crucial then as oil is today. Europe had shown itself willing and able to mount a rescue of the island in a way they had not done for islands in the eastern Mediterranean.

  More likely it was simply a matter of priorities. In its shattered state, Malta almost certainly could have been taken in 1566. But by the same thinking, it probably could have been taken a year after that. In the meantime, Suleiman had unfinished business in Hungary. This (to his mind) vassal state was now under the rule of the new Holy Roman emperor, Maximilian II, who was less accommodating to the Ottomans than his predecessor had been. The Malta summer of 1565 also saw Maximilian waging war on Suleiman’s Balkan territories and failing to pay their annual tribute.21 This kind of insolence, especially after such a great failure as Malta, needed immediate correcting. Malta could wait.

  And so the sultan (allegedly at the urging of his daughter Mihrimah) personally led his invasion into Hungary, this time, in deference to his failing health, in a covered panquin rather than on horseback.22 It was Suleiman’s thirteenth campaign, and his last. Aged seventy-six, he died on the outskirts of Szigetvar in Hungary, succeeded by Selim, his remaining son by Hurrem. For the Ottoman Empire, it was the end of their ambitions for the northern Mediterranean.

  Selim, called “the Sot” by Westerners because of an alleged taste for wine, had no appetite for Malta. Unfortunately, he also had a reputation to build, for which he would need a contest he could not possibly lose. Genoese-held Chios had been a walkover. Perhaps Venetian-held Cyprus would be the same. Venice was, after all, disliked and distrusted by her fellow Christians, and even if taking the island required breaking a solemn treaty, treaties with infidels could be broken if doing so helped the spread of Islam.

  He miscalculated. In defense of Cyprus, Venice joined the pope’s new Holy League against the Ottomans, the first since Prevesa thirty years before; and in 1571 this coalition of Spain, the Papal States, the Knights of St. John, and Venice met the sultan’s fleet at the battle of Lepanto. (Among the participants were Uludj Ali, Gianandrea Doria, Ascanio Della Corgna, and Romegas. Piali Pasha was absent, temporarily in disgrace.) It was a resounding Christian victory with absolutely no follow-up whatsoever.

  For his part, Selim’s grand vizier Sokollu Mehmed Pasha tried to dismiss the defeat as inconsequential, and he wasn’t entirely wrong:

  “In wresting Cyprus from you we deprived you of an arm; in defeating our fleet you have only shaved our beard. An arm when cut off cannot grow again; but a shorn beard will grow all the better for the razor.”23

  It did grow back, but slowly, more sparse, and with gray streaks. Uludj Ali was deputed to rebuild the fleet, but the ships he was able to build were shaky affairs built of green wood, suitable primarily for show.24 By now, Philip had lost interest in the Mediterranean, and when Selim dispatched 240 galleys to lay siege to La Goletta, Philip forbade his half-brother, Don John of Austria, hero of Lepanto, from taking any action. After five weeks, Tunis, the site of Charles V’s greatest victory, fell to the Ottomans, giving Selim the opportunity to boast of his accomplishment in a lengthy poem of praise typical of that time.25

  It was all but the last hurrah for a struggle that had begun nearly sixty years earlier at Rhodes. Mutual exhaustion and other priorities led Spain and the Ottomans to sign a peace treaty in 1580. This one held. With this matter settled and the quest to reconquer the Holy Lands a dead letter, the Knights of St. John had lost their relevance; at best they were a counterweight to the Barbary corsairs, useful as auxiliaries in the suppression of French Huguenots; but absent a strategy of geographic conquest or ideological persuasion, they were, for survival, left with the increasingly anachronistic role of corsairs.

  Anachronistic, but comfortable. Sciberras was built upon and became the city of La Valletta (inexplicably spelled with two l’s), “a city fit for gentlemen.” The islanders erected storehouses and markets for merchandise, both legitimate and not, that began to find its way to Malta on a scale unimaginable beforehand. Over time, the Order was reduced to a near parody of its former crusading self. Men would join, serve a few years to learn the ropes, resign, obtain a letter of marque from their former brothers, and like mercenaries who build their skills in the French Foreign Legion, set up in business for themselves. (The less ambitious hoped that a few years’ service abroad might be rewarded by the sinecure of a commandery at home.)26 By the eighteenth century, the more adventurous of Europe’s Grand Tour set, young men seeing the classical world before settling down to lives of domestic boredom in their home countries in England or Germany, could sign on to a knight’s vessel and go a roving on the Mediterranean Sea. Small risk, enough to create a frisson and material to embroider for the folks back home, and who knew? Perhaps one could pick up some booty in the process. On the downside, such voyages could also get them killed or earn them a lengthy stay in a Barbary prison.27

  The Barbary corsairs, their ties with Constantinople ever looser, continued on in their entrepreneurial fashion, raiding places as far away as Ireland and menacing honest traders from any country, including a young United States, unable to stand up to them. Certainly it wasn’t the knights who finally put them down.

  The Orders’ tenure on Malta ended, as did so many things, with the French Revolution. Napoleon stopped by the island in 1798 on his way to Egypt, and almost as an afterthought, accepted the bloodless surrender of the current grand master. He also liberated some two thousand Muslim slaves—a nice gesture and a positive selling point to the Muslim world he was about to invade.28 The American navy fought the good fight against the Barbary corsairs, but it was the French government of 1830 that invaded Algiers and put it under colonial rule, shutting down the slave market for good.

  The Order of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem of Rhodes and of Malta still remains, headquartered in Rome, dedicated now, as nearly a thousand years ago, entirely to the relief of suffering and to healing the sick.

  Ultimately, however, the Mediterranean was a small stage, too small for a rapidly shrinking world. The Ottoman Empire was doomed to lose its stranglehold on East-West trade. By the end of the sixteenth century, the empire along with Venice had begun their long decline, a pair of fading divas, their time past, soon to be living on memory.

  Did they know? One Ottoman writer did: “The Europeans have discovered the secret of oceanic travel. They are Lords of the new world and of the gates to India. The people of Islam are without the latest information in the science of geography and do not understand the menace of the capture of the sea trade by the Europeans.”29

  This was in 1580, year of the peace. History had already turned and had done so with one of those coincidences that mock human ambition. In October of 1565, while Europe exhaled and Constantinople rioted, a Spanish merchant galleon ship glided into the bay at Acapulco on the western coast of Mexico. This was the first of the Manila galleons, vessels packed with porcelain and lacquerware, spices and silks, originating in Philip’s other holdings in the Philippines, as well as China and beyond. Teamsters would unload the cargo, carry it overland, and load other ships bound for Spain.

  This route would flourish for the next two hundred and fifty years, exploiting the Pacific winds and the economic advantage of ocean vessels for cargo, altering trade patterns and in so doing, enriching those able to adapt and dismaying those who were not.

  27

  VERDICT

  Rien n’est plus connu que ce siège, où la fortune de Soliman échoua. (Nothing is better known than this siege, where Suleiman’s fortunes ran ag
round.)

  Voltaire

  The first half of Voltaire’s quote crops up in just about every history of Malta, the almost wistful point being that now, five hundred years on, the Siege of Malta is anything but well known. This take on Malta’s fleeting fame is milked entirely for irony, which, given the source, is not remarkable.

  What is remarkable is that the second clause is invariably left out. Yet it is this apparent throwaway line that goes to the very heart of the matter. What fortunes is he talking about, how far-reaching were the consequences of the siege? Were the events of that summer no more than a curtain-raiser for the naval battle at Lepanto six years later? Clearly Voltaire sees Malta as the high-water mark of Suleiman’s career. That entire phrase stands alone and with no further context. What exactly did the loss mean to the Ottomans? What was the point of the expedition in the first place?

  Did any of it matter?

  Certainly it did to the Maltese. They fought for their homeland and for their faith. Rule by the Order might be oppressive, but the knights were at least fellow Christians, soldiers of the pope himself and as such far preferable to those practicing the false religion of the Ottomans.

  The knights, by contrast, were fighting not only for their faith, but also for their self-respect, and their possible existence. The failure at Rhodes was humiliating, that at Tripoli alarming. Losing Malta would prove the knights to be three-time losers; and even if Valette survived and avoided being dragged to captivity in Constantinople, would he or anyone else have been able to reprise L’Isle-Adam’s role as rebuilder of the Order? Would the knights even have received another offer? Philip was in no great shape financially and far less bold than his father, Charles. The knights’ power depended on corsairing and on the rents of their lands throughout Europe. Without a grand master and an independent headquarters, the Order could easily have seen those holdings appropriated by nearby lords and principalities. It had happened in 1307 to the once-powerful Knights Templar, whose fortunes were stolen by Philip IV of France with the connivance of Pope Clement V.