The Great Siege of Malta
Page 33
He died quietly in Naples in 1577.
A Note on the Sources and Acknowledgments
Europe followed the siege of Malta closely in the summer of 1565, and reports of greater or lesser accuracy spread across the continent with remarkable speed, and were translated, pirated, retranslated, and eventually and for the most part discarded. The market was proven—sixteenth-century Europe had a fascination with all things Ottoman—and more substantial printed accounts followed soon after the last Muslim ship had left the island. The Frenchman Pierre Gentile de Vendôme published his Della Historia di Malta in Italian in 1565, a work that suffers from the haste of its execution. Anton Francesco Cirni (aka Cirni Corso), a prolific author and a member of the Great Relief, based much of his book (Comentarii d’Antonfrancesco Cirni Corso, 1567) on his own experiences and on interviews with veterans. Giovanni Antonio Viperano, a Sicilian cleric and literary critic living in Messina during the siege, made his tour of the postsiege island and published De Bello Melitensi Historia in 1567. The Genoese spy Bregante appears to have followed the Ottoman fleet and observed events from the Ottoman side, reporting his findings in five crabbed pages for his spymasters in Genoa. His account ends abruptly in July (he would live until 1571) and generally corroborates Western accounts. The most exhaustive near-contemporary account comes from Giacomo Bosio, brother of the influential knight Antonio Bosio, with whose help he gathered the raw material that bolsters the monumental Dell’Istoria della Sacra Religione et Illustrissima Militia di San Giovanni Gierosolimitano (1602). The most compelling of accounts, however, is without question by Balbi di Correggio, an Italian mercenary who cobbled his personal experiences and observations into La Verdadera Relación de todo lo que el año de M.D. LXV ha succedido en la Isla de Malta (1566 and 1568). There are two English translations, one by Major H. A. R. Balbi (1961) and one by Ernle Bradford (1965).
Ottoman accounts are few, in part because no one likes to dwell on a defeat, in part because the Ottomans were not a print culture (printing presses were banned until 1729). Selaniki and Peçevi, two historians, wrote years after the fact, and Malta was only a portion of their overall work. Both authors are long overdue for translations in full, though happily, relevant sections have made it into Italian.
The siege was the subject of the moment, and as such, mention of it can be found in archives across Europe. Much of the writing is trivial, redundant, or just plain wrong, but there are still small, and perhaps large, gems to be found. Many of those already unearthed have found their way into the secondary literature. Two modern works that have taken great advantage of these nuggets are Fernand Braudel’s The Mediterranean and the World of Philip II and Kenneth Setton’s The Papacy and the Levant. In addition to making for compelling reading in their own right, they have provided a treasury of source notes enough for a respectable library of new books. For the siege of Malta in particular, no serious student can ignore Stephen C. Spiteri’s encyclopedic account, The Great Siege: Knights vs Turks, MDLXV—Anatomy of a Hospitaller Victory. Add to these the many and varied explorations and observations of other scholars, and it quickly becomes clear that the siege of Malta is a story still open for retelling.
For fueling the current effort, I owe thanks to the staff of the New York Public Library, most especially the Rare Book Room; New York University; Butler Library of Columbia University; Rockefeller Library of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Frick Art Reference Library; Library of the Museum of Natural History in New York; Newberry Library of Chicago; Bibliothèque Nationale de France; the Library of Congress; Falvey Library of Villanova University; Alexander Library of Rutgers University; Northwestern University Library; Firestone Library of Princeton University; Walsh Library of Seton Hall University; the staff of Westport (Connecticut) Public Library; Leighann Cazier of Millburn (New Jersey) Public Library; and most particularly, Patrice Kane and Vivian Shen of special collections in the William D. Walsh Library of Fordham University. For help in tracking down and forwarding some hopelessly obscure material, Fausto Amalberti and Prof. Giuseppe Felloni of Genoa; Stewart Tiley of St. John’s College, Oxford; Trent Larsen of Brigham Young University; William Thierens (whose website, http://melitensiawth.com, provides a wealth of Maltese material from rare scholarly journals); Maria Smali and Irini Solomonidi of Gennadius Library, Greece; Thomas Jabine of the Library of Congress; Mary Paris of Amherst, Massachusetts; Barry Lawrence Ruderman of BLR Rare Maps (La Jolla, California); and Pierre Joppen of Paulus Swaen Old Maps (St. Petersburg, Florida).
For help in disentangling some of the more clotted sixteenth-century Spanish, French, Italian, and Turkish, Prof. María Antonia Garcés, Prof. Gretchen van Slyke, Prof. William J. Connell, Prof. Nicola Melis, Adela Jabine, and Andreas Bacalao; for answers to obscure questions, advice, criticism, and general encouragement, Judge Giovanni Bonello, Prof. Steven C. Spiteri, Prof. Geoffrey Parker, Prof. John Guilmartin, and Prof. Helen Vella Bonavita. Particular thanks are due to Niccolò Capponi and Prof. Emrah Safa Gürkan, whose close reading of the manuscript caught any number of errors of fact and challenged a few interpretations. Any remaining errors of detail or of translation are my fault entirely.
For the transformation of the manuscript into a book, thanks must go to Stephen Hull and Susan Abel at UPNE, to the copyeditor Elizabeth Forsaith, and to my agent, John Rudolph of Dystel and Goderich.
Finally, for living alongside the entire project for far too long, all gratitude goes to my wife, Blacknall Allen.
Notes
INTRODUCTION
1. Porter, Knights of Malta (London: Longmans Green, 1883), 340–41.
2. Mustafa Gelal-Zade, in Rossi, “Assedio e conquista di Rodi nel 1522,” 26.
3. Lütfi Paşa, Das Asafname (Berlin: Mayer & Mueller, 1910), 27.
4. Ibid.
5. Giovio, Commentario de le cose de’Turchi (Rome, 1541), 43.
6. Suleiman had wanted to send the grisly object to the doge of Venice, but the Venetian ambassador assured him that Venice, at least, was already quite impressed with him.
7. The Serbian prisoners were especially appreciated for their presumed skills at maintaining waterworks. To this day, that region outside Constantinople is called Belgrade Forest.
1. THE SIEGE OF RHODES, 1521
Epigraph: Brockman, Two Sieges of Rhodes, 115.
1. Iacomo Bosio, Dell’Istoria della Sacra Religione, pt. 2 (Rome: Stamperia Apost. Vaticana, 1594), 543.
2. Marino Sanuto, I Diarii di Marino Sanuto, vol. 33 (Venice: Visentini, 1892), 417.
3. Ibid., 419. Venice seized his goods and charged him in absentia with treason.
4. Iacobo Fontano, De Bello Rhodio (Rome: Francesco Minizio Calvo, 1524), 17.
5. Patrick Balfour Kinross, The Ottoman Centuries (New York: W. Morrow, 1977), 176.
6. Numbers on the Ottoman side vary wildly. See Kenneth Setton, Papacy and the Levant, vol. 3 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1984), 205.
7. Luttrell, “The Hospitallers of Rhodes,” 88–89.
8. Ludwig Forrer, Die Osmanische Chronik des Rüstem Pascha, (Leipzig, 1923), 63.
9. Ibid.
10. Bosio, Dell’Istoria, 543.
11. Sanuto, I Diarii, vol. 33, 419. (He claims it was 490 ducats.)
12. Jacques de Bourbon, La Grande et Merveilleuse et très cruelle oppugnation de la noble cité de Rhodes prinse naguères par Sultan Seliman à présent Grand turcq, ennemy de la très sainte foy catholique rédigée par escript par excellent et noble chevalier Frère Jacques Bastard de Bourbon, Commandent de Sanct Maulviz, Doysemon, et Fonteyne au prieure de Paris (Paris: Pierre Vidoue, 1526), 21r.
13. Eric Brockman, “D’Amaral: Martyr or Traitor?,” Annales de l’Ordre Souverain Militaire de Malte 24, no. 1 (1966): 18–25
14. Sir Nicholas Roberts to the Earl of Surrey, May 15, 1523, Messina, in Whitworth Porter, A History of the Knights of Malta (London: Longmans, Green, 1883), 712–13.
15. Forrer, Die Osmanische Chronik, 65.
16. Bour
bon, La Grande et Merveilleuse, 37v.
17. Sanuto, Diarii, vol. 29, col. 391.
18. Hafiz, in Porter, Knights of Malta, 378.
19. Ettore Rossi, Assedio e Conquista di Rodi nel 1522 secondo le relazioni edite ed inedite dei Turchi (Rome: Libreria di scienze e lettere, 1927), 40. General in Chief Ahmed Pasha held various sacred relics, notably the mummified arm of St. John, for a ransom of other goods worth thirty thousand ducats. Sanuto, vol. 34, 9–11. Even the Ottoman historian Gelal-Zade called him “a bad character” (Rossi, Assedio e Conquista di Rodi, 29).
20. Suleiman, in Joseph Von Hammer-Purgstall, Histoire de l’Empire Ottoman depuis son origine jusqu’à nos jours, trans. J. J. Hellert (Paris: Dochet, 1841), 41.
2. THE ROAD TO MALTA, 1522–1530
Epigraph: Desiderius Erasmus, Opera Omnia Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami: Recognita et Adnotatione Critica, pt. 3, vol. 5 (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1969), 48.
1. Sanuto, vol. 33, 74.
2. Ernest Charrière, Négociations de la France dans le Levant, vol. 1 (Paris: Imprimerie Impérial, 1848), 96–102; Setton, Papacy and the Levant, vol. 3, 216.
3. Sanuto, vol. 34, 98. See also Victor Millia-Milanes, Venice and Hospitaller Malta 1530–1798 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate/Variorum, 1999), 2.
4. Jean Quintin d’Autun, The Earliest Description of Malta (Sliema, MT: De Bono Enterprises, 1980), 30.
5. Ibid., xv. This was partly by choice, Malta having opted in the fourteenth century for the cash crop of cotton rather than wheat. See John M. McManamon, “Maltese Seafaring in Mediaeval and Post-Mediaeval Times,” Mediterranean Historical Review 18, no. 1 (June 2003): 40.
6. Quintin d’Autun, The Earliest Description of Malta, 40.
7. Nicholas de Nicolay, Dans l’empire de Soliman le Magnifique (Paris: Presses du CNRS, 1989), 76. Nicolas de Nicolay, “Navigations, Peregrinations and Voyages Made into Turky by Nicolas Nicholay Daulphinois,” in A Collection of Voyages and Travel, Consisting of Authentic Writers . . . , trans. T. Washington the Younger (London: Thomas Osborne, 1745), 565. Before gaining its independence, Malta would be ruled by both France and England.
8. Bosio, Dell’Istoria, vol. 2, 29. See also Victor Mallia-Milanes, “Charles V’s Donation of Malta to the Order of St. John,” in Peregrinationes: Acta et Documenta: Carlo V e Mercurino di Gattinara suo Gran Cancelliere, vol. 2 (Malta: Accademia Internazionale Melitense, 2001), 22–23; and Ettore Rossi, Storia di Tripoli e della Tripolitania (Rome: Istituto per l’Oriente, 1968), 126.
9. Royall Tyler, The Emperor Charles V (Fair Lawn, NJ: Essential Books, 1956), 20.
10. Rawdon Brown, Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts Existing in the Archives and Collections of Venice 1520–1526, vol. 3 of Setton, Papacy and the Levant (1204–1571), no. 956, 413 n. 229.
11. In June 1525, the pope felt it necessary to send an emissary to Spain “a persuaderlo fazi Guerra contro Turchi,” to persuade Charles to make war against the Turk. Sanuto, vol. 39, 102, cf. 130, 157.
12. Ibid., 130. The assumption that this would be Malta, as earlier promised, was alluded to in another letter of June 1525. Sanuto, Diarii, vol. 39, 115. Elsewhere it was suggested that L’Isle-Adam asked to go to Spain; Sanuto, Diarii, vol. 39, 128–29.
13. Porter, Knights of Malta, 14.
14. Sanuto, vol. 34, 9–11.
15. Forrer, Die Osmanische Chronik, 67.
16. Minting was a privilege of the Jews of Cairo, and the master coiner Abraham de Castro refused to comply. He instead escaped to Constantinople with the news of Ahmed Pasha’s treachery. When Castro’s absence was noted, other Jews were taken hostage and would have been executed had not Ahmed been overcome and killed shortly afterward. Ever since, Egyptian Jews have celebrated the Purim of Cairo.
17. Shai Har-El, Struggle for Domination in the Middle East: The Ottoman-Mamluk War, 1485–91 (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 120.
18. Porter, Knights of Malta, 385.
19. Ion Ursu, La politique orientale de François I, 1515–1547 (Paris: H. Champion, 1908), 31. Cf. Sanuto, vol. 58, 96. Francis’s position was, in the best French tradition, both totally logical and utterly contradictory. During the siege of Rhodes, he had been one of the few crowned heads who actually had attempted to relieve the knights. And when, as Charles’s prisoner, he was told of the conquests of Granada, he reportedly said, “And these Musulmans? They were not driven out? Then everything is still to be done!” Perhaps he was sincere. Louis Bertrand, The History of Spain, 2nd ed. (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1956), 147.
20. Charrière, Négociations, vol. 1, 117.
21. Ibid.
22. Ursu, Politique Orientale, 33–35.
23. Charles V to J. Hannart, Rome, April 17–18, 1536, in Karl Lanz, Correspondenz des Kaisers Karl V., vol. 2, no. 428 (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1544), 223–29.
24. Pietro Bragadino, Pera (Beyoğlu), Constantinople, December 29, 1525, in Sanuto, Diarii, vol. 40, 824.
25. Judith Hook, The Sack of Rome, 1527 (London: Methuen, 1973), 155.
26. Judith Hook believes he knew in advance and even approved of the affair, perhaps without guessing just how far out of hand it would get (ibid.). He disclaimed responsibility for what happened, but appears to have been genuinely shaken. See also, however, Ferdinand Gregorovius, Geschichte der Stadt Rom im Mittelalter, vol. 8 (Stuttgart: J. Cotta, 1872), 522.
27. Bosio, Dell’Istoria, vol. 2, 54.
28. H. A. R. Balbi, “Some Unpublished Records on the Siege of Malta, 1565,” Institute of Historical Research, Malta, no. 6 (1937), 16. Bulletin.
3. IN SERVICE TO THE EMPIRE, 1531–1540
Epigraphs: Brantôme, Œuvres complètes, vol. 2: Grands Capitaines Estrangers (1866), 41; ibid., 67.
1. Jérome Maurand, Itinéraire de J. Maurand (Paris: Ernst Leroux, 1901), 153.
2. Bosio, Dell’Istoria, vol. 3, 105.
3. English reaction was that the raid would be “either a very great good or a very great evil for Christendom” depending on whether they could keep the city. Chapuys to Charles V. Henry VIII, October 24, 1531, London, in Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, vol. 5: 1531–1532 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1880), 228.
4. Edouard Petit, André Doria: Un amiral condottiere au XVIe siècle (Paris: Maison Quantin, 1887), 119. Petit claims that Doria was only in it for the money (sixty thousand écus annually) and ignored Francis’s assurance that he would return to Genoa all its ancient rights and privileges. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), 500ff.
5. Charrière, Négociations, vol. 1, 234; Setton, Papacy, vol. 3, 36.
6. Jean Pierre Edmond Jurien de la Gravière, Doria et Barberousse (Paris: Plon, 1886), 209.
7. There are other accounts of how Aroudj came to Algiers, accounts involving treachery and murder. See Svatopluk Soucek, “The Rise of the Barbarossas in North Africa,” Archivum Ottomanicum 3 (1971): 240–51; Andrew C. Hess, Forgotten Frontier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 63ff.
8. Francisco López de Gómara, “Cronica de los muy nombrados Omiches y Haradin Barbarrojas,” in Memorial Histórico Español, vol. 6 (Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, 1853), 487–88.
9. Kâtip Çelebi, The History of the Maritime Wars of the Turks, trans. J. Mitchell, ed. Svatopluk Soucek (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 2012), 79.
10. John B. Wolf, The Barbary Coast (New York: Norton, 1982), 10.
11. Gürkan, Center of the Frontier, 147–48.
12. The finer distinctions of this title are discussed in Elizabeth Zachariadou, ed., The Kapudan Pasha; His Office and His Domain (Rethymno, Crete: Institute for Mediterranean Studies, Crete University Press, 2002).
13. “Basta decir que él teien cinquenta mancebos y sesanta mancesbas.” Our source is Captain Ochoa d’Ercilla, a visitor prior to the siege, who also mentions that he was mas blanco que negro (the legitimate heir’s mother was a black woman, making him, all else being equal, less desirable as ruler
than Muley Hassan) and “effeminate.” “Mémoire du capitaine Ochoa d’Ercilla sur les affaires du Roi de Tunis,” in Documents inédits sur l’histoire de l’occupation espagnole en Afrique (1506–1574), ed. F. Élie de La Primaudaie (Algiers: Jourdan, 1875), 67–71. Also in Revue Africaine: Société historique algérienne (Paris: Challamel Aine, 1875), 268–72.
14. Peçevi, quoted in Svatopluk Soucek, “Naval Aspects of the Ottoman Conquest of Rhodes, Cyprus and Crete,” Studia Islamica, no. 98/99 (2004): 228. See also Çelebi, History of the Maritime Wars, 139.
15. Charles V to Muley Hassan, November 14, 1534, Madrid, in Memorial Histórico Español: Colección de documentos, opusculos y antiguedades, que publica la real Academia de la Historia, vol. 6 (Madrid: Imprenta de la Real Academia de la Historia, 1853), 516.
16. Most, alas, already spoken for. Howard J. Ehrlichman, Conquest, Tribute and Trade: The Quest for Precious Metals and the Birth of Globalization (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2010), 198–99.
17. Guillaume de Montoiche, “Voyage et Expédition de Charles-Quint au Pays de Tunis de 1535,” in Collections des voyages des souverains des Pays-Bas, ed. Louis Prosper Gachard (Brussels: Hayez, 1881), 337.
18. Forrer, Die Osmanische Chronik, 93–94.
19. The Emperor to His Sister the Queen, July 26, 1535, Tunis, in Documents inédits relatifs à la conquête de Tunis, ed. Emile Gachet (Brussels: F. Hayez, 1848), 35.
20. Montoiche, Voyage et expédition, 359.
21. The Santa Anna was the wonder of her age. Built in France in 1522, just before the surrender at Rhodes, she was an ironclad carrack, possibly the first of her kind, and was large enough to accommodate five hundred marines as well as the crew needed to sail her. Fifty cannons defended her. On board were three smithies, several bread ovens, and even a windmill to grind flour. She was decommissioned in 1540 by order of Grand Master D’Homedes, possibly out of jealousy over her captain’s many successes. Bosio, Dell’Istoria, vol. 3, 150.