The Great Siege of Malta Read online

  Bruce Ware Allen

  The Great Siege of Malta

  THE EPIC BATTLE between the OTTOMAN EMPIRE and the KNIGHTS OF ST. JOHN

  ForeEdge

  ForeEdge

  An imprint of University Press of New England

  www.upne.com

  © 2015 Bruce Ware Allen

  All rights reserved

  For permission to reproduce any of the material in this book, contact Permissions, University Press of New England, One Court Street, Suite 250, Lebanon NH 03766; or visit www.upne.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Allen, Bruce Ware.

  The Great Siege of Malta: the epic battle between the Ottoman Empire

  and the Knights of St. John / Bruce Ware Allen.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-61168-765-1 (cloth: alk. paper)—ISBN 978-1-61168-843-6 (ebook)

  1. Malta—History—Siege, 1565. 2. Knights of Malta. I. Title.

  DG992.2.A55 2015

  945.8'502—dc23 20150150025

  To

  CAPTAIN HERMANN A. ALLEN

  (1919–2010)

  and

  CAPTAIN JOHANNES MÜLLER

  (1883–1943),

  who loved all things maritime,

  except war

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Introduction

  PART ONE. Corsairs and Rulers

  1. The Siege of Rhodes, 1521

  2. The Road to Malta, 1522–1530

  3. In Service to the Empire, 1531–1540

  4. War at Sea, 1541–1550

  5. Djerba, 1551–1560

  6. An Almost-Peaceful Interim, 1561–1564

  7. Dark Clouds in the East, 1565

  PART TWO. Objective: St. Elmo

  8. First Blood

  9. Sizing Up the Enemy

  10. Preparations for a Siege

  11. A Fatal Oversight

  12. Thrust and Parry

  13. Fresh Resolve

  14. Bullets Wrapped in Smoke and Fire

  15. A Plea to God

  16. The End of the Battle

  PART THREE. Honor Bought with Blood

  17. Piccolo Soccorso

  18. Relief into Birgu

  19. Bravi d’Algieri

  20. Endurance

  21. Onslaught of the Ottomans

  22. Two Gentlemen of Perugia

  PART FOUR. A Line Drawn in Water

  23. The Gran Soccorso at Sea

  24. Mustapha’s Last Hazard

  25. The Gran Soccorso at War

  26. From the Ashes

  27. Verdict

  28. The Survivors

  A Note on the Sources and Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Illustrations

  Illustrations

  1. Map of Malta and Gozo

  2. Map of Grand Harbor

  3. Map of the Mediterranean, 1565

  4. Philippe de Villiers de L’Isle-Adam

  5. Suleiman the Magnificent

  6. Charles V of Spain

  7. Khairedihn Barbarossa

  8. Sinan Pasha

  9. Jean de Valette

  10. Philip II of Spain

  11. Don Garcia de Toledo

  12. Gianandrea Doria

  13. Ascanio Della Corgna

  14. Vicenzo Anastagi

  15. The Death of Dragut

  16. Fort St. Elmo

  17. Fort St. Elmo after the loss of the ravelin on the left

  18. Fort St. Angelo

  19. Tripoli

  20. Fortress near Humt Suk, Djerba

  21. Djerba fortress

  22. The Tower of Skulls

  23. Sixteenth-century galley

  24. Galley of Knights of St. John

  Nay, could their numbers countervail the stars,

  Or ever-drizzling drops of April showers,

  Or wither’d leaves that autumn shaketh down,

  Yet would the SOLDAN by his conquering power

  So scatter and consume them in his rage,

  That not a man should live to rue their fall.

  Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine

  Introduction

  Selim I was dying.

  It was not expected; the sultan of the Ottoman Empire was only in his fifties and to all appearances perfectly fit. A man with his record would have to be. Called by Europeans Selim the Grim, he had ruled the empire by the sharp edge of his sword for nearly eight years, during which time he managed to depose his father, murder his brothers (and their offspring), conquer the Abbasid Empire, seize Mamluk Egypt, and double the size of his territory. His violence and temper were notorious—to be named one of his viziers was considered as good as a death sentence. Tens of thousands of Shiite heretics were slaughtered on his watch, and all of Anatolia’s Orthodox Christians would have followed had not the head of the College of Islamic Law convinced Selim that such an act would displease Allah.

  Acknowledged caliph of the Sunni Muslim world in 1517, Selim was ready to turn his full attention toward Christian Europe. It was a disturbing prospect for the West. If Selim’s armies could maintain their previous rate of expansion, the Ottoman Empire would engulf all of Italy, Germany, and France and reach the shores of the English Channel and the northern reaches of Scandinavia in less than twenty years. In the early months of 1520, he was gathering his troops along the western coast of Anatolia and readying ships to strike at the offshore islands not already part of his empire.

  Fate granted Europe a reprieve. Neither war nor intrigue had put a stop to this phenomenon of a man, but now, as he planned yet another campaign against yet another enemy, a pustule on Selim’s leg turned septic and was proving more determined than any army. The doctors could do nothing, and for the dying man, there was nothing left but to pass his unmet ambitions on to his only son and sole heir. Selim’s final words to the next sultan, a challenge, really, were that “you will be a great and powerful monarch provided you capture Belgrade and drive the knights from Rhodes.”1

  He was referring to the Order of the Knights of St. John and Jerusalem.

  These men were among the last of the Roman Catholic military orders. Their origins lay, paradoxically, in a small fraternity of Benedictines who, funded by Italian merchants and sanctioned by the caliph of Egypt, had cared for indigent Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land since 1023. Their medical skills were put to a hard test in 1099 when European soldiers of the First Crusade captured the holy city, producing a mass of wounded soldiers who quickly overflowed the Order’s infirmaries. Moved by the Benedictines’ work, some patients under their care petitioned to join the Order. On the logic that care for pilgrims could include keeping the pilgrim routes safe, the Order’s mandate soon included a martial function. They also adopted the Augustinian Order, it being more aggressive and more open to expelling Islam from the Holy Land.

  Despite the pan-European nature of the Crusades, the knights were organized by their countries of origin, or rather their native languages, the so-called langues of Provence, Auvergne, France, Aragon, Italy, England, and Germany. Members were drawn exclusively from the elites, which limited their total numbers. What they lost in quantity, however, they more than made up for in quality. As warriors, the knights were formidable—first into battle, last to leave, and inspirational to those who placed religion above secular politics.

  As the years passed and the crusades rolled on, the Order grew rich on plunder and donations, established chapters throughout Europe (the quarter of St. John’s Wood in London was theirs before Henry VIII decided his needs were greater), and plowed money into castles a
nd fortresses across the Holy Land. Their masterwork, the fortress of Krak des Chevaliers in modern-day Syria, has served its intended purpose as recently as 2014. Expelled with the rest of the Crusaders from the Holy Land after the fall of Acre (1191 AD), the Order settled on the island of Rhodes, a green place with countless inlets and bays suitable for sea raiding. They transformed the eastern port city, also called Rhodes, into a formidable fortress city, with strong defensive walls, each section of which was assigned to a separate langue.

  Nor was Rhodes the only European colony in the eastern Mediterranean. By the end of the fifteen century the Knights of St. John also held the islands of Kos and Leros and the coastal city of Bodrum, while Venice could boast her own holdings on Crete and Cyprus, and Genoa her islands of Chios and Samos. For Genoa and Venice, traditional enemies with a long history of armed conflict, trade had replaced warfare; and like good merchants everywhere, both republics wanted a quiet life at all costs. The knights were a more complex proposition. They accepted the necessity of trade, and even occasional alliances with the enemy, but always maintained that dream of retaking the Holy Land at the back of their minds. A Jerusalem for Christendom, after all, had been the very reason they had come into being.

  Until the rest of Europe came on board, however, the dream would have to wait. In the meantime, life was pleasant in Rhodes. The island flowered with rich orchards of figs and dates, busy markets carried all good things from the East: spices and sandalwood, slaves and silk, some of it honestly traded, some stolen at sea. The richer merchants lived in splendid houses, and the Order took a cut of all transactions. On the water, the Order ran protective convoys for Christian merchants, transported Christian cargo and Christian pilgrims, and prowled in search of Muslim and Jewish merchants, and Muslim pilgrims. The chronicler Mustafa Gelal-Zade describes the knights as the “worst of those who live in error, sent by the devil and famous for cunning and artifice, outcasts, accursed workers of iniquity, expert seamen and outstanding navigators.”2

  The Nemesis for the knights was coming on the Anatolian landmass in the form of the Ottoman Turks. The Ottomans, descendants of the minor tribal leader Osman Bey, founded their principality in 1299 in eastern Anatolia. Their power grew steadily over the ensuing years, in time enveloping all of what had been the Byzantine Empire, entitling the sultans to call themselves, not without cause, heirs to the Roman Empire. They had setbacks, to be sure, in men such as Vlad III, voivode (warlord) of Transylvania, inspiration for Dracula, who filled a two-mile stretch of road with the impaled bodies of Ottoman invaders, and George Castrioti, aka Skanderbeg of Albania, athleti Christi, champion of Christ, antemurale Christianitatis, bulwark of Christendom, who for twenty-five years led armies to keep his land, and by extension all of Christian Europe, free of Islam. But for the most part, the Ottomans were able to subdue the unwilling and cajole the undecided in these mountain regions; there were, after all, decided advantages for the newly conquered to profess Islam, not least among them a lower tax rate. Skanderbeg would die in 1468 and Vlad in 1477, and the Ottoman empire continued to engulf the Balkans, though never so far as Belgrade, where Selim’s grandfather Mehmed II had been halted in 1456. At sea, the emerging Ottoman navy would take its first tentative steps on the unfamiliar and unstable element, but with little success.

  Mehmed II had also made the first serious attempt to expel the knights from Rhodes, in 1480, and failed miserably. He settled for a peace treaty that stipulated an end to piracy, at least for the remainder of his reign—piracy, that is, that affected Ottoman trade. The agreement worked more or less well until 1517, when Selim conquered Egypt. As soon as he had brought that nation into the Ottoman Empire, the knights were no longer of any use to him; indeed, they were a hindrance. With the entire corridor between Constantinople and Alexandria in Ottoman hands, the piratical side of the knights far outweighed any small good they might provide as traders. An adviser to Selim laid the matter out in plain words: “My Sultan, you are resident in a city whose benefactor is the sea. When the sea is not secure, no ship can come and when no ship comes, Constantinople cannot flourish.”3 It was time for the knights to go, and it was this campaign that Selim was planning when he fell ill. His death set in motion the whirring clockwork of bureaucratic gears that transferred control of the empire to his sole heir, Suleiman.

  Suleiman, a quiet, scholarly man, a skilled goldsmith (for all potential sultans were expected to master a useful craft as insurance against personal disaster) was governor of the Crimea at the time. Eight days later, he was in Constantinople, where he doled out alms to the poor, death to the wicked, and a promise of continuity to everyone. An anxious Europe sighed in relief. A Venetian ambassador reported that he had a pleasant expression and that “his reputation is that of a wise lord, he is said to be studious, and everybody hopes that his rule will be good.”4 Other observers spoke of the lamb following the lion.5 A few heads of state thought the accession an opportunity to pursue their own ambitions at the expense of the empire. The governor of Damascus was one such. He tried, and failed, to set himself up as ruler of Syria. In a matter of weeks, his head arrived in Constantinople inside a casket of vinegar.6 The lamb, it appeared, had teeth.

  Suleiman next turned to Belgrade, where the fifteen-year-old King Louis of Hungary, a young man with a wild streak, had insulted and mutilated a crew of Ottoman diplomats, who had come to discuss the new order in Constantinople. As the Ottoman military machine advanced to take revenge, reports filtered to the rest of Europe, stories of burning villages and Christian heads mounted on spears. Belgrade became a critical Ottoman military base, its inhabitants exiled or enslaved, the land given over to citizens of the Ottoman Empire.7 The pious of Europe were stunned and turned to God; the impious, like Machiavelli, to black humor. The pragmatic (Venice, Ragusa, and Russia) hastened to congratulate the new sultan on this great victory, and to update their trade agreements.

  The defiant, among them the Knights of St. John of Rhodes, prepared for war.

  The knights and their unrealistic hopes might have remained a minor nuisance to Islam, but times were changing and the Mediterranean was becoming subject to an arms race in what historian Andrew Hess calls “the sixteenth century world war.” The conflict began quietly enough, in the Mediterranean theater at least. At the outset of their reigns, the twin superpowers of the day, Charles V’s Habsburg Spain on one end of the sea and Suleiman’s Ottoman Empire at the other, paid relatively little attention to the waters between them. It was a highway where both empires endured the regular loss of trade to Christian and Muslim raiders; raiders of both faiths were an unfortunate fact of life, but each ruler could take comfort in knowing that his own pain was no less than that of his counterpart.

  For the Muslim corsairs at least, the business proved an increasingly profitable way of making a living in the first decades of the sixteenth century; and as their strength and numbers grew, so too did their ambitions. The Barbarossa brothers, the most successful of the Barbary corsairs, began as small-time bandits on one modest boat, which grew into a fleet that terrorized the entire western Mediterranean. Eventually the elder brother, Aroudj, seized the port of Algiers, then swore fealty to the Ottoman Empire in exchange for both brothers’ political legitimacy. On the Christian side, Charles V eventually was able, more or less, to counter the likes of the Barbarossas with his own self-financing raiders in the persons of the Knights of St. John.

  War has a tendency to metastasize. The proxy warriors, whether Barbary corsairs or Christian knights, were brilliant in terrorizing the coasts of the Mediterranean, but wayward, not wholly reliable. Rather than agreeing to quash the corsairs once and for all, both Charles and Suleiman chose to augment them with professional navies beholden more strictly to the respective empires. The cost of building and maintaining a fleet is never trivial, but advisers in Madrid and Constantinople (and the corsairs themselves) assured their rulers that the respective empires could well afford it—Charles had the gold and silver of the New W
orld to draw on; Suleiman, a healthy portion of all trade with the Far East. With God and such ferocious men on his side, Charles began to talk openly, if only rhetorically, of retaking Constantinople. Suleiman, for his part, was beguiled by the likes of Khairedihn Barbarossa into believing that a reconquest of Spain was well within his grasp, if he would only trust to Allah, the Barbary corsairs, and the seas.

  And so both monarchs succumbed to temptation, and both dispatched motley naval forces to lands not their own, sometimes successfully, sometimes catastrophically, calling for truces when money ran short or when wars elsewhere demanded their attention, never quite getting to the point of total victory, but refusing to call it quits. The long-term goal, simply put, was domination, a restoration of the old Roman Empire, the title to which both Charles, as Holy Roman emperor, and Suleiman, as ruler of Constantinople, the New Rome, felt themselves entitled to. Both felt certain that God would deliver the prize to them and so pave the way for a world sharing the true faith.

  It was a long, drawn-out, and costly struggle that would eventually, and critically, come down to the geographical center of the Mediterranean on the tiny sun-blasted outpost of Malta. It began, however, six hundred miles to the east, on the lush green island of Rhodes.

  PART ONE

  Corsairs and Rulers

  1

  THE SIEGE OF RHODES, 1521

  I command you, therefore, instantly to surrender the island and fortress of Rhodes.

  Letter from Suleiman to L’Isle-Adam

  On a summer day in 1521, a desperate hunt was in progress along the northern coastline of Crete. The quarry was riding a horse not his own, on a mission not strictly his either, and being pursued by horsemen who were determined not to let him escape. Both parties had been at it the better part of the day, alternating periods of riding and resting, and keeping a weather eye out for the other. As the sun began to fall, they were coming to the end of the chase, and despite the dangers of the breakneck pursuit after dark and over the sometimes rocky outcroppings that cover the beaches and roads east of Heraklion, neither the pursuers nor the pursued dared to rein in their mounts. At stake was the fate of one of the last Christian fortresses in the eastern Mediterranean.