While the Christians with their galleys are at repose, [the Abbot writes] sounding their trumpets in the harbours, and very much at their ease regaling themselves, passing the day and night in banqueting, cards, and dice, the Corsairs at pleasure are traversing the east and west seas, without the least fear or apprehension, as free and absolute sovereigns thereof. Nay, they roam them up and down no otherwise than do such as go in chase of hares for their diversion. They here snap up a ship laden with gold and silver from India, and then gain another richly fraught from Flanders; now they make prize of a vessel from England, then of another from Portugal. Here they board and lead away one from Venice, then one from Sicily, and a little further on they swoop down upon others from Naples, Livorno, or Genoa, all of them abundantly crammed with great and wonderful riches. And at other times carrying with them as guides renegadoes (of which there are in Algiers vast numbers of all Christian nations, nay, the generality of the Corsairs are not other than renegadoes, and all of them exceedingly well acquainted with the coasts of Christendom, and even with the land), they very deliberately, even at noon-day, or just when they please, leap ashore, and walk on without the least dread, and advance into the country, ten, twelve, or fifteen leagues or more; and the poor Christians, thinking themselves secure, are surprised unawares; many towns, villages and farms sacked; and infinite numbers of souls, men, women, children, and infants at the breast dragged away into a wretched captivity. With these miserable ruined people, loaded with their own valuable substances, they retreat leisurely, with eyes full of laughter and content, to their vessels. In this manner, as is too well known, they have utterly ruined and destroyed Sardinia, Corsica, Sicily, Calabria, the neighbourhoods of Naples, Rome and Genoa, all the Balearic Islands, and the whole coast of Spain: in which last they feast it as they think fit, on account of the Moriscos who inhabit there; who being all more zealous Mohammedans than are the very Moors born in Barbary, they receive and caress the Corsairs, and give them notice of whatever they desire to be informed of. Insomuch that before these Corsairs have been absent from their abodes much longer than perhaps twenty or thirty days, they return home rich, with their vessels crowded with captives, and ready to sink with wealth; in one instant, and with scarce any trouble, reaping all the fruits that the avaricious Mexican and greedy Peruvian have been digging from the bowels of the earth with such toil and sweat, and the thirsty merchant with such manifest perils has for so long been scraping together, and has been so many thousand leagues to fetch away, either from the east or west, with inexpressible danger and fatigue. Thus they have crammed most of the houses, the magazines, and all the shops of this Den of Thieves with gold, silver, pearls, amber, spices, drugs, silks, cloths, velvets etc., whereby they have rendered this city [Algiers] the most opulent in the world: insomuch that the Turks call it, not without reason, their India, their Mexico, their Peru.
Later critics of the Order, contemplating its decline in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, have not been slow to brand them as no better than the Moslem Corsairs. The truth is quite different. The Order of St John, while it certainly preyed on Moslem shipping, was basically concerned with stabilising the trade routes in the central Mediterranean, and with imposing some form of law and order upon a sea that had become utterly lawless.
Determined to eradicate the Moslem threat to his kingdom, Charles V finally managed to drive Barbarossa and his men out of Tunis. Inflated by his success, he next attempted to capture the city of Algiers, even nearer the Spanish homeland, and an even greater threat to Spain’s communications with her possessions in the New World. An additional reason for Charles’ desire to clear the corsairs out of Algiers was that, with Tunis now safely in his hands, it was possible to envisage a North African coast in which all the principal harbours from Algiers to Tripoli would be held by Christians. And the condition of Tripoli was a very unhappy one, as Grand Master Homedes kept reminding him. Built upon shifting sand, and surrounded by hostile tribes, the city was proving a drain upon the Order’s resources which they could not possibly meet at a time when they were diverting all the money they could into making Malta secure. To a further request that Charles V either provide additional resources for strengthening the city, or else permit the Knights to abandon it, he replied that he was already preparing an expedition against Algiers. If the Knights would lend him their assistance in getting rid of the main root of the trouble, he was confident that Tripoli could be held.
The expedition which was mounted in 1519, the first year of Barbarossa’s rule in Algiers, was a remarkable example of European co-operation in what almost amounted to an international armada. With the exception of France, a country which ‘led an uneasy life with most of its Christian neighbours’, nearly all the states with any interest in the Mediterranean contributed all or part of their naval forces. The attack was to be spearheaded by fifty war galleys, while somewhere between 300 to 400 transports were available for the troops. The Pope provided a squadron of galleys, as did Naples, Monaco and Spain, while Fernando de Gonzaga and Andrea Doria also brought twenty ships between them. The Order sent a contingent of 500 Knights, each with two attendants, a corps d’élite designed to form the vanguard in the attack on the city. Unfortunately, as so often happened in those days when the problems of logistics were imperfectly understood, the armada did not get under way until much later than had been planned, and it was not until August 24th, St Bartholomew’s Day, that the fleet came to anchor in the Bay of Algiers.
What followed was a disaster of the first magnitude. Two days after the army had landed, a heavy swell, nearly always the forerunner of bad weather in that part of the world, was succeeded by a terrible northerly of the type for which this coast has always been notorious, and which has made it the graveyard of ships ever since the Phoenicians first opened up the trade routes to the west.
Charles V, unfortunately, did not have the meteorological knowledge available to modern navigators:
Off the coast of Algeria [with the passage of a depression], the winds set in from westward as a rule, increasing to gale force with the passage of the cold front of the depression and the accompanying shift to north-westerly or north-northwesterly; in those parts the gales are frequently preceded by a heavy swell from northward, and their onset is accompanied by characteristic cold-front cloud and thunderstorms, with heavy rain. From time to time, after the gale has moderated, the north-westerly winds back again towards westerly with the approach of secondary cold fronts, and the gale is renewed…
Charles’ fleet and army—and all his hopes—were ruined by just such a classic weather situation. Anchors dragged, ships drove ashore, ships collided as cables broke, and the heavy transports—difficult to manage even at the best of times—were either wrecked or scattered up and down the coast miles distant from one another. Over twenty ships were totally wrecked and many hundreds of men were drowned. The Knights of St John, who had been promised the honour of the vanguard and who had hoped to see their eight-pointed Cross waving above the battlements of Algiers, were now assigned an equally honourable, but far less happy, position—that of forming the rearguard to cover the army’s retreat. Their losses during the retreat were immensely heavy, and it has been estimated that less than half the Knights who had set out for Algiers ever returned to Malta.
The disaster at Algiers, coupled with the loss of life that the Order had sustained, meant that the situation at Tripoli became more acute than ever. It could only be a matter of time before the city fell, and it was quite clear that, after his failure at Algiers, Charles V would be in no position to render the Knights any effective help in garrisoning this isolated outpost in the near future. Tripoli, however, was not destined to fall for some years yet, years in which, while the Knights consolidated themselves in Malta, the power of the Ottoman fleet under Barbarossa practically turned the Mediterranean Sea into a Turkish lake.
In the autumn of 1538 a sea battle took place which marked the high tide of Ottoman fortunes in the Mediterr
anean. After 1538, and up until the siege of Malta in 1565, the Crescent of Islam was dominant over the Cross from one end of the sea to the other. It is true that in isolated pockets, such as Malta under the Knights and Crete under the Venetians, the Moslems had to navigate with caution. Elsewhere, throughout the length and breadth of that sea (which had never been unified since the fall of the Roman Empire), sheer anarchy reigned. It was in an attempt to clear the sea of pirates, and to secure the safety of the Christian territories in the west, that Charles V appointed that outstanding seaman and condottiere, Andrea Doria, to overall command of the imperial navy. The Venetians, concerned more than any other for the safety of Crete and for their trade route with the East, provided eighty-one vessels—both galleys and sailing ships, while thirty galleys came from Spain, together with a papal squadron and the small navy of the Order of St John. The object was to check Barbarossa, to shatter the Turkish fleet once and for all or, at the very least, to administer such a drubbing upon him, that the Turks would henceforth confine their operations to the Aegean and the East.
The action took place off Preveza Strait, just north of the island of Levkas in the Ionian, at the very place—Actium Point—where the forces of Antony and Cleopatra had been defeated by Octavian in 31 B.C. Barbarossa, who had been engaged in harrying the islands of the Aegean for slaves and loot, hurried northwards on hearing that the Christian fleet was assembling in the port and roadstead of Corfu. Like Antony all those centuries before, he was determined that his enemy should not be allowed to strike unhindered at the west coast of Greece, so he took his fleet up to Preveza and anchored in the Ambracian Gulf, just as Antony had done. But Barbarossa was a far abler sea captain than his famous predecessor, and he had no intention of being bottled up in his retreat. He merely waited there to see what his enemy intended to do and—if they headed south—to sweep out and engage them before they could attack the Sultan’s territory.
The action that followed, spread over three days from September 25th to 28th, was mainly inconclusive, although, if anything, it must be said that the advantage lay with Barbarossa. (Certainly it was later celebrated in Constantinople as a triumph of the first magnitude.)
The main reason for the inconclusive showing of the Christian forces under Andrea Doria was the fact that his fleet was almost equally divided between large sailing galleons and typical Mediterranean galleys. As L’Isle Adam had discovered at Laiazzo some years before, a mixed fleet was extremely awkward to handle—the one part being at its best in windy weather and the other under conditions of calm. After an ineffectual engagement off Preveza Strait, Doria’s fleet headed south past the island of Levkas, clearly bent on raiding or making a landing in the Sultan’s Grecian territory. Barbarossa immediately came out of his lair and gave chase.
The main action took place in the vicinity of Levkas, where Barbarossa succeeded in capturing two Venetian galleys, one papal galley, and five Spanish sailing ships. As against this Doria’s forces could not claim a single Turkish ship captured or sunk. A number of Barbarossa’s galleys had, however, been disabled and compelled to withdraw from the action by the gunfire of the great Galleon of Venice, the flagship of the Venetian fleet, under the command of the most able Venetian seaman of her time, Alessandro Condalmeiro. Built somewhat on the lines of the Great Carrack of Rhodes, she was very heavily constructed, metal-sheathed below, and carried a great weight of cannon. With her, and with the Great Carrack, was sounded the death-knell of the galley.
Although galleys would still be used until the close of the eighteenth century, and the Order itself would still have one or two galleys in commission until the end of their days in Malta, the coming of the large stable fighting platform that could accommodate a heavy weight of guns meant that the lean greyhounds which had dominated these tideless waters since the dawn of naval history were at an end. The Battle of Lepanto in 1571 was to be the last naval action in history in which the oared galley predominated. Although the galley remained, until the Age of Steam, the most efficient vessel for the long calms of the Mediterranean, it was impossible—because of the limitations laid upon it by its method of propulsion—to build galleys of sufficient size to provide large floating gun-platforms. The Knights in their windy island of Rhodes had been among the first to perceive this. Although they long continued to build galleys for their ‘caravans’ against the Moslems, sailing frigates and galleons became increasingly the main arm of their fleet.
Twelve years after the battle of Preveza, a battle which, inconclusive though it may have seemed to the European powers, was in fact a Turkish victory (for it left the Ottomans and their allies still dominant in the Mediterranean), Charles V determined upon another action to erase the memory of his failure at Algiers and to help the Order maintain its hold upon Tripoli. The target this time was to be the town of Mahdia, often referred to by contemporary chroniclers as Africa, a port half way between Tunis on the one hand and Tripoli on the other. Situated in the dangerous Gulf of Gabes, where every northerly piled up mountainous seas, and protected by shifting sandbanks and by variable and tricky currents, Mahdia was an ideal home for the corsairs. From it they posed a threat to both Tunis and Tripoli, and from it they could launch themselves northward towards Sicily and the main current of east-west trade flowing through the central Mediterranean. It was immediately apparent to Grand Master Homedes and to his Council that, unless Mahdia was reduced, they could do comparatively little to protect Christian shipping from Malta, let alone maintain an effective supply route between Malta and Tripoli.
Once again the overall command was put in the hands of Andrea Doria, the Order of St John sending a picked force of Knights, brethren-at-arms, and hired soldiers. The attack against Mahdia was launched in the summer of 1550. Despite the awkward nature of the place, it was entirely successful. Dragut—Barbarossa’s successor (for the latter had died at Constantinople in 1546)—had relied too much on the inaccessibility of his chosen base. Mahdia was captured and, since it was impossible to garrison it adequately, the city and port were reduced to ruins. In the siege and the sacking of the town the Knights had the lion’s share. Their part in the expedition—while it seemed for the moment to secure for them their tenure of Tripoli—was in fact to lead to the loss of that city. It was a loss which, though the Knights may openly have bewailed it, was in fact the very best thing that could have happened.
One year later, in July 1551, Dragut, bent on revenge, brought up the fleet under his command to Malta, anchored in the southern harbour of Marsamuscetto, and prepared to lay waste the island. Surprised by the apparent strength of the Knights’ two townships, Birgu and Senglea, he reconnoitred the whole position round Grand Harbour and came to the conclusion that the Knights could certainly be driven out—but only by a far greater number of men than he had under his command. Moving north, he laid siege to the old city of Mdina but even here he was frustrated. Weak though the defences were, he found that the city’s position on its angled peak of rock required more men and more armaments to storm than he could bring against it. At the same time, alarmed by a completely false report that Andrea Doria was preparing to sail for the relief of the island, Dragut decided to abandon Mdina and the rest of Malta for a future occasion. He crossed the narrow strait to Gozo and ransacked the small island. Ill-defended, and ill-prepared for anything other than a casual corsair raid, Gozo fell easily to Dragut, nearly all its inhabitants being carried off to slavery.
Not content with this minor success, and aware that the Knights of St John were fully preoccupied with strengthening their defences in Malta, Dragut turned back to Tripoli. If the Christians had deprived him of his base at Mahdia he was determined to secure another upon the North African coast—and one from which he could cause the maximum amount of harm to the Order of St John. The Governor of Tripoli at this time was the Marshal of the Order, a Frenchman, Gaspard la Vallier, who, despite the inadequacy of the defences and the forces under his command, was certainly not prepared to treat with this Turkish ‘Pira
te’, He might well have saved himself the trouble of his heroic attitude. Once Tripoli was invested by a powerful naval force (with no hope of assistance reaching the city from Malta) its fate was a foregone conclusion. Tripoli fell to Dragut and the Moslem power was now firmly entrenched to the south of Malta. The survivors of the siege, who were accorded honourable terms of withdrawal, looked their last on the pale sandy coast, home of the scorpion and the hateful south wind of spring and autumn. They made their way northward to the last home in the Mediterranean that still remained to the Holy Religion, to the Order of St John and of Rhodes—so soon to be known as the home of the Knights of Malta.
Chapter 19
OPPONENTS
Jean Parisot de la Valette who became Grand Master in 1557 was worthy of L’Isle Adam and d’Aubusson before him. ‘Entirely French and a Gascon,’ as he was described by the Abbe de Brantôme, ‘he was a very handsome man, speaking several languages fluently—including Italian, Spanish, Greek, Arabic and Turkish.’ Born in 1494 he had been twenty-eight when he had served throughout the last siege of Rhodes. He was twenty when he had first joined the Convent, and from that day to the end of his life he stayed entirely devoted to the Order, never as far as is known revisiting his family estates in Toulouse, even during the period when the Order was in exile at Nice. A totally dedicated man, a Christian of the old crusader breed, he would allow no backsliding among his Knights. He was as ardent in his religious practices as he was upon the field of battle. He had for a time been Admiral of the Order’s fleet. This was a distinction in itself, since most Admirals came from the Langue of Italy—something which had been among the terms required by Charles V when he had granted Malta to the Knights.
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