The Great Siege, Malta 1565

Clash of Cultures: Christian Knights Defend Western Civilization Against the Moslem Tide

Ernle Bradford

• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781497617308
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

The indispensable account of the Ottoman Empire's Siege of Malta from the author of Hannibal and Gibraltar. In the first half of the sixteenth century, the Ottoman Empire was thought to be invincible. Suleiman the Magnificent, the Ottoman sultan, had expanded his empire from western Asia to southeastern Europe and North Africa. To secure control of the Mediterranean between these territories and launch an offensive into western Europe, Suleiman needed the small but strategically crucial island of Malta. But Suleiman's attempt to take the island from the Holy Roman Empire's Knights of St. John would emerge as one of the most famous and brutal military defeats in history. Forty-two years earlier, Suleiman had been victorious against the Knights of St. John when he drove them out of their island fortress at Rhodes. Believing he would repeat this victory, the sultan sent an armada to Malta. When they captured Fort St. Elmo, the Ottoman forces ruthlessly took no prisoners. The Roman grand master La Vallette responded by having his Ottoman captives beheaded. Then the battle for Malta began in earnest: no quarter asked, none given. Ernle Bradford's compelling and thoroughly researched account of the Great Siege of Malta recalls not just an epic battle, but a clash of civilizations unlike anything since the time of Alexander the Great. It is "a superior, readable treatment of an important but little-discussed epic from the Renaissance past... An astonishing tale" ( Kirkus Reviews ).

 

Chapter 1

 

The Sultan of the Ottomans

 

Soleyman’s titles resounded through the high Council chamber like a roll of drums: 

Sultan of the Ottomans, Allah’s deputy on Earth, Lord of the Lords of this World, Possessor of Men’s Necks, King of Believers and Unbelievers, King of Kings, Emperor of the East and West, Emperor of the Chakans of Great Authority, Prince and Lord of the most happy Constellation, Majestic Caesar, Seal of Victory, Refuge of all the People in the whole World, the Shadow of the Almighty dispensing Quiet in the Earth. 

His ministers, admirals, and generals prostrated themselves and withdrew. It was the year 1564, and Soleyman the First, Sultan of Turkey, was seventy years old. He had just taken the decision to attack the island of Malta in the spring of the following year.

His had been a life of unparalleled distinction from the moment when he had succeeded his father, Selim, at the age of twenty-six. Known in his own country as the Lawgiver, and throughout Europe as Soleyman the Magnificent, he had truly earned these appellations. He had reformed and improved the government and administration of Turkey, and had made her the greatest military state in the world. He was unequalled as a statesman, and was a poet in his own right.

If the Turkish people for these reasons called him ‘The Lawgiver’, the people of Europe for their part had good reasons for conceding to him the respectful title of ‘The Magnificent’. His conquests alone justified it, and Europeans have always lavished more respect upon conquerors than upon lawgivers. In the course of his Sultanate, Soleyman had added to his dominions, Aden, Algiers, Baghdad, Belgrade, Budapest, Nakshivan, Rhodes, Rivan, Tabriz, and Temesvar. Under him the Ottoman Empire had attained the peak of its glory. His galleys swept the seas from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, and his kingdom stretched from Austria to the Persian Gulf, and the shores of the Arabian Sea. Only at the walls of Vienna in 1529 had his armies faltered.

At the age of seventy, with so many resounding triumphs behind him, it might have been expected that the Sultan would wish to take his ease and watch the decline of day over the Golden Horn. But to Soleyman in his old age there remained only the desire for power, the ambition to extend his conquests. Even if he had not been ambitious himself, those who surrounded him would never have allowed him to rest.

‘So long as Malta remains in the hands of the Knights,’ wrote one of his advisers, ‘so long will every relief from Constantinople to Tripoli run the danger of being taken or destroyed …’ ‘This cursed rock,’ wrote another, ‘is like a barrier interposed between us and your possessions. If you will not decide to take it quickly, it will in a short time interrupt all communications between Africa and Asia and the islands of the Archipelago.’

It was forty-two years since Soleyman, in the prime of his life and at the head of a vast fleet and army, had driven the Knights of St John from their island fortress of Rhodes. He had felt for them, then, an unwilling but respectful admiration. Had he not said in the presence of his advisers, ‘It is not without some pain that I oblige this Christian at his age to leave his home’? It was the sight of the seventy-year-old Grand Master, Villiers de l’Isle Adam, preparing to embark with his Knights from the captured island that had prompted this reflection. Now, at the same age himself, the Sultan was less moved by chivalry, and more by a desire for vengeance.

The sandstone rock of Malta had proved an even greater irritant than Rhodes. Rhodes had been so close to the shores of Turkey that, in the last years of their residence there, the Knights’ sallies had been almost neutralized. The movement of the Order’s galleys had been quickly made known to the captains of the Sultan’s warships and merchantmen. Yet, even so, they had still managed to harry the trade of the Levant, and interrupt the shipping between Alexandria and Constantinople. Malta, however, was worse, because it was so far distant from Constantinople that it was less easy to spy upon the Order’s movements. Furthermore, the island’s position in the very heart of the Mediterranean gave it the command of the east–west trade routes. Everything passing through the channel between Sicily, Malta, and North Africa was at the mercy of the Maltese galleys. They let few opportunities slip through their fingers.

To a ruler who had added thousands of square miles to his empire, the possession of an almost barren island might seem unimportant. To a ruler whose daily bread was adulation, who had grown weary of the title, ‘Conqueror of the East and West’, the island and its Knights were an irritation hardly to be borne.

It seemed as if the Knights, like gadflies, were determined to provoke the anger of the lion. Soleyman might mistrust the advice of his ministers. He could hardly, however, ignore the words of the greatest Mohammedan seaman of his time, the corsair Dragut.

Dragut, although a pirate, was allied to the Porte and in recent years had been careful to pay his duties and respects to the Sultan. He was, like Soleyman himself, a fighter and an opportunist. Soleyman heeded him more perhaps than his own Admiral Piali. When Dragut said: ‘Until you have smoked out this nest of vipers you can do no good anywhere,’ the Sultan was prepared to listen.

Recent events had confirmed Dragut’s opinion. When the Spanish Emperor, Philip II, had mounted an armada against the port of Peñon de la Gomera, the Knights of Malta had assisted him with their galleys, and had added the weight of their experience, seamanship, and military ability, to the Spanish forces. Peñon de la Gomera, which lay on the North African coast due south of Malaga, had long been a favourite port and anchorage for the corsairs of the Barbary coast. Its capture by the Christians was as much a blow to Moslem pride as its economic loss was important. The Knights had successfully attacked one of the Sultan’s ports on the Greek coastline. Ranging south of Malta, they had also captured a number of Turkish merchantmen. Soleyman was reminded that, ‘The island of Malta is swollen with slaves, true believers, and that among the distinguished men and women held there to ransom are the venerable Sanjak of Alexandria, and the old nurse of your daughter Mihrmah.’

Soleyman’s daughter, Mihrmah, was one of the chief advocates of an attack on Malta. The child of his favourite wife, the Russian-born Roxellane, Mihrmah never ceased to remind Soleyman of the account that still had to be settled with the Knights.

The capture of a great merchant ship belonging to Kustir-Aga, chief eunuch of the seraglio of the Sultan, was the ultimate provocation. It was an act which led Mihrmah and all the other members of the harem to raise their voices in protest. This merchantman, whose freight was estimated by the contemporary Spanish writer Balbi as being worth 80,000 ducats, was seized between the islands of Zante and Cephallonia by three Maltese galleys led by the greatest sailor that the Order of St John possessed, the Chevalier Romegas. The ship was bringing valuable luxuries and merchandise from Venice to Constantinople and, in the manner of the time, the principal ladies of the Imperial harem had taken shares in the venture. Captured and towed back intact to Malta, together with all its cargo, its loss mocked the Sultan’s favourites. Kustir-Aga, the chief eunuch, a personage of great power in the ‘boudoir politics’ of imperial Turkey, was not likely to lose any opportunity of reminding his lord and master of the constant depredations of the Knights.

The odalisques of the harem prostrated themselves before the Sultan, crying for vengeance. The Imam of the great Mosque, prompted no doubt by members of the court, was not slow to remind Soleyman, that True Believers were languishing in the dungeons of the Knights. They were being flogged like dogs at the oars of the very galleys which were raiding the empire’s shipping.

‘It is only thy invincible sword,’ the Imam proclaimed, ‘that can shatter the chains of these unfortunates, whose cries are rising to heaven and afflicting the very ears of the Prophet of God. The son is demanding his father, the wife, her husband and her children. All, therefore, wait upon thee, upon thy justice, and thy power, for vengeance upon their, and your, implacable enemies!’

It was unlikely that the Sultan, whose prudence and ability had been proved in as many council chambers as battlefields, was swayed entirely—if at all—by this clamour for vengeance. Malta was small, but, as he knew well, it was the keystone of the Mediterranean. Within its magnificent harbours he would be able to shelter his fleets, which would then be free for the conquest of Sicily and Southern Italy. The island was small, but it could be the fulcrum to the lever with which he might make the Mediterranean a Turkish lake. From it he could strike at what a later war-leader called ‘the soft underbelly of Europe’. The capture of Kustir-Aga’s merchantman, the effrontery of the attacks on his merchant shipping and coastal ports were additional factors, but irrelevant to his grand design.

Soleyman was well aware that the Knights of St John were not like other Christians. They were men who had dedicated their lives to an eternal war against his religion, and against everything that Turkey, as the leader of the Moslem world, represented. He had fought them at Rhodes and he knew that death in battle was something they sought as ardently as did his own Janissaries. He knew their reputation as sailors and corsairs. He had questioned his own sea-captains who had been in action against the Knights.

‘Their vessels,’ he had been told, ‘are not like others. They have always aboard them great numbers of arquebusiers and of knights who are dedicated to fight to the death. There has never been an occasion when they have attacked one of our ships that they have not either sunk it, or captured it.’ His sea-captains were in error there, for the records of the Knights show a number of occasions when their attempts on Turkish vessels were unsuccessful. In the main, though, it was true that in skill, seamanship, and fighting ability, there was no single vessel in the Mediterranean that could compare with a galley commanded by one of the Knights from Malta. Soleyman knew enough of their prowess to respect them as adversaries. Even as an old man, he would never have decided to attack their island-base purely on a matter of pique or prestige.

In October 1564 at a formal council, or Divan, presided over by the Sultan, the question of Malta and of a possible siege of the island formed the issue of debate. Not all of those present were in favour. Some envisaged an extension of the empire beyond Hungary and pressed for a large-scale military campaign in Europe. Others were for driving straight at the heart of their chief Christian adversary, and making an attack on the coast of Spain. Others, again, urged the capture of Sicily. Soleyman was reminded of the poverty and insignificance of Malta. ‘Many more difficult victories,’ they said, ‘have fallen to your scimitar than the capture of a handful of men in a little island that is not well fortified.’

It was the Sultan himself who pointed out that Malta was the stepping stone to Sicily, and beyond that, to Italy and southern Europe. He envisaged the day when ‘The Grand Seignior, or his deputies, master of the whole Mediterranean, may dictate laws, as universal lord, from that not unpleasant rock, and look down upon his shipping at anchor in its excellent harbour.’ Piali, admiral of the fleet, and Mustapha, Pasha of the army, were not slow to grasp the sound strategy behind Soleyman’s desire to attack the island. When the Divan concluded, the decision had been taken to invest Malta in the spring of the following year.

The edict went forth. The might of the Ottoman Empire—‘that military state par excellence … built upon an ever-extending conquest—’ was to be deployed against the minute island of Malta, and against the Knights of the Order of St John. The Sultan himself had spoken: ‘Those sons of dogs whom I have already conquered and who were spared only by my clemency at Rhodes forty-three years ago—I say now that, for their continual raids and insults, they shall be finally crushed and destroyed!’

 

 

 

Chapter 2

Malta of the Knights

The Maltese archipelago consists of two main islands, Malta and Gozo. Malta, the larger of the two, is only eighteen miles long by nine wide, while Gozo is no more than eight miles by four. The islands lie on an axis running north-west to south-east, and are divided from one another by a narrow channel in which lies the islet of Comino. Cominotto, a small rock adjacent to Comino, and Filfla, another rocky outcrop, a few miles south-west of Malta, complete the group. Fifty miles south of Sicily, commanding the main channel through which all shipping between east and west must pass, they are almost equidistant from Gibraltar, on the one hand, and Cyprus on the other.

The islands had been presented to the Order of St John by the Emperor Charles V of Spain in 1530, ‘in order that they may perform in peace the duties of their Religion for the benefit of the Christian community and employ their forces and arms against the perfidious enemies of Holy Faith’. On the face of it the gift was highly acceptable, for the Knights had been homeless since their expulsion from Rhodes eight years before. The annual presentation of a falcon to the Viceroy of Sicily, and a guarantee that they would never make war upon his Kingdom was all that was required of the Knights in return.

Charles V was not magnanimous by nature, and the aged Grand Master Villiers de l’Isle Adam may well have murmured ‘Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes’ when he saw that, along with the gift of the Maltese islands, went that of the seaport of Tripoli in North Africa. Tripoli, a Christian outpost in the middle of the hostile Moslem states on the notorious Barbary Coast, was a gift that Charles V could well afford to make. De l’Isle Adam was right to hesitate when he saw it in the Emperor’s rescript. He had yet further grounds for hesitation when the report of the commission, whom he had sent to investigate the Maltese islands, came before him.

‘The island of Malta,’ they said, ‘is merely a rock of soft sandstone, called Tufa, about six or seven leagues long and three or four broad; the surface of the rock is barely covered with more than three or four feet of earth, which is likewise stony, and very unfit to grow corn and other grain.’ On the other hand, they agreed that ‘it produces an abundance of figs, melons, and different fruits; the principal trade of the island consisting of honey, cotton, and cummin, which the inhabitants exchange for grain. But, except for a few springs in the middle of the island there is no running water, nor even wells: the want of which the inhabitants supply by cisterns …’

The Maltese archipelago, showing the principal places and positions at the time of the Great Siege of 1565

After fertile and fruitful Rhodes, one of the loveliest islands in the Mediterranean, Malta had been something of a shock to the eight Commissioners. Wood, they reported, was so scarce in Malta and Gozo that it was sold by the pound. Cow-dung or wild thistles were used as fuel for cooking. The capital, called Mdina in the Maltese language, or Città Notabile in Spanish, was situated upon rising ground in the centre of the island. Most of its houses were uninhabited. There were no ports, bays, or coves on the western side of the island, and the shore was studded with rocks and shoals. On the eastern side, though, there were a number of useful coves and inlets, as well as two spacious and very fine harbours. These were capable of housing the largest of fleets. Unfortunately, they were at the moment very ill-protected. A small castle called after Saint Angelo guarded part of the largest harbour, but it was furnished with only three small cannons, and a few mortars.

The Knights must certainly have known of Malta’s two great harbours in advance of the report, for they had been constantly used by European fleets for many centuries. It was they, in fact, which turned the scale and decided the Grand Master in favour of accepting Charles V’s gift. The Knights of St John at that time lived by what can only be called ‘organized piracy’, and a good harbour was their prime necessity. There was nothing to equal the harbours of Malta until one came to Syracuse in Sicily, or Taranto in southern Italy.

Apart from their favourable comments on the two main harbours, the Commissioners had found everything else disagreeable. There were about 12,000 inhabitants in Malta, most of them poor peasants speaking a kind of Arabic dialect. The climate in summer was torrid and, indeed, almost insupportable. Gozo, on the other hand, was greener and more fertile, but had no harbours at all. In this smaller of the two islands there were about 5,000 inhabitants, living mostly in primitive villages. There was also an ill-constructed castle on the highest point, to which the natives withdrew whenever the Moslem corsairs raided their shores. These raids were common, said the Commissioners, and the inhabitants of the Maltese islands were long resigned to the almost annual arrival of Moslem pirates, who carried off to slavery any Maltese who fell into their hands.

If the Order had not been desperate for a new home, there is little doubt that De l’Isle Adam would have tactfully declined the Emperor’s gift. For more than seven years, however, he had made the round of the European courts asking for assistance. Minorca, Ibiza, Ischia—innumerable islands and ports had been considered by the European sovereigns as potentially suitable for the Knights. For one reason or another, all the more fertile and prosperous islands had been deemed by their owners as unsuitable for the Order.

The fact was, that respected though it might be for its fighting prowess, the Order was not popular. Its Knights, drawn from every nation in Europe, owed direct allegiance to the Pope and were thus insusceptible to national allegiances. They were, indeed, constrained by their rules never to fight against other Christians, but only against the Moslem enemy.

In the sixteenth century, when nationalism was becoming the dominant force in European affairs, such an international Christian Order was somewhat suspect—particularly when it was known how rich it was, and how influential its members. But, quite apart from the difficulty of finding another home, De l’Isle knew how hard it had been to keep the Order together after its expulsion from Rh...