The Great Siege of Malta Read online

  Suleiman needed little persuasion. He headed east, arrived near Mustapha’s army and set up camp. The son, surprised by this unexpected arrival, hurried to his father’s quarters. He never got there. While Suleiman, impassive, sat upright on a cushion inside his tent and listened, assassins garroted his son with a bowstring. On the battlefield, the enemy was put to flight, the Persian crisis passed, but Suleiman was never quite the same. The death was said to have affected Cihangir, Suleiman’s youngest child by Hurrem. He was both well educated and clever and thought that since his severe hunchback precluded him from taking the throne, Suleiman might allow him to live; his mother brutally disabused him of this hope, and it was with that knowledge that he died in 1553, some say of grief.12

  Succession was now between Hurrem’s two surviving sons, Bayazid and Selim. It could not turn out well. Busbecq writes that she favored Bayazid, and she may well have done.13 But Hurrem died in 1558, leaving the matter unsettled. Suleiman placed Bayazid far to the east. Fearful of reprising Mustapha’s fate, he rebelled. He lost. Suleiman marched east and crushed his son’s followers at the battle of Konya in 1559. Bayazid escaped and wrote to his father, confessing his error, explaining his thinking, and begging forgiveness. The letter somehow never reached Suleiman.

  Hearing nothing, Bayazid sought asylum in Persia, and for two years he got it. The shah, however, was in a mood for peace with his Ottoman neighbor and spent those same two years hammering out a treaty with Suleiman. Among other things, the shah would receive the heads of some old enemies then living within the Ottoman borders. In return, he would have Bayazid executed.

  Once Suleiman ordered Bayazid’s infant son killed, all Selim had to do was wait.

  Meanwhile, the Knights of St. John under Valette were flexing their muscles. With only a handful of ships, they had made it their business to savage Muslim shipping in the Levant. Commanders such as Guimeran and Giou, La Motte, and above all, Romegas were becoming notorious throughout the Mediterranean. These men, whom Suleiman might have expected to have disappeared in 1522, were proving to be a singular piece of unfinished business.

  Certainly the Order needed the money. The costs of fortifying Malta on top of making good the losses at Djerba required a special levy of thirty thousand scudi on all foreign possessions, payable within the year 1563.14 When not taking part in the Habsburg Empire’s military operations, the knights and a large number of licensed Maltese corsairs sought out whatever infidel cargo came within their considerable reach. These attacks should not be overly romanticized. Ships generally carried the mundane stuffs of commerce—grain, cloth, rope, oil, and wine. Treasure ships were a rare occurrence and notable, such as Turgut’s taking the gold that was to finance Valette’s Tripoli. The most common high-margin commodity was prisoners, and one of the more reliable sources for these was the steady supply of vessels filled with devout Muslims making the Hajj. Those with money were ransomed for what they could get. Captives with no influence were sold in the bustling slave markets of Malta. Hurrem is said to have hounded Suleiman relentlessly on the subject, leaving at her death money to fund an expedition against Malta and the men who sailed the ships.

  The most successful of these was Fra Mathurin d’Aux de Lescout, called Romegas after the lands owned by his grandfather. Born in 1519 in Armagnac, he joined the Order at age eighteen. He rose swiftly, proving himself a capable, courageous, and most important, a productive sailor—he never returned to port without a prize in tow. Brantôme, who knew him, refers to the knight as “generous, splendid, magnificent and liberal.”15 Brantôme had a fairly florid pen and was lavish with his fellow countryman, but he was not alone. Blaise de Montluc, a marshal of France, Romegas's distant cousin and commander in the wars against the Huguenots, and he, a soldier as brave as any that period produced, considered Romegas “a courageous person, more than any other I know.”16

  Romegas also was lucky. On a September evening of 1555, a freak storm swept across Malta; a water spout, tidal wave, and high winds barreled through Grand Harbor, crashing boats against one another, lifting some onto shore, simply overturning others at their moorings. The storm lasted only thirty minutes. The next morning the bay was strewn with the remains of broken ships and the floating corpses of knights, sailors, and galley slaves, this final group still chained to their benches. Some five thousand people died.

  Eventually a small boat wove a course through the floating wreckage. As it approached the upturned hull of Romegas’s ship, crewmen heard the sound of tapping. They paddled over and began to hack at the wood with axes. They managed to break through, and instantly a terrified monkey, the knight’s pet, leapt out. Behind the monkey was Romegas, who, together with the animal, had spent twelve hours in total darkness, head just above the water line, not knowing if the wreck might shift at any moment and drown them both. His hair had turned white, and from that day forward, Romegas’s hands trembled.

  This tremor did nothing to diminish his abilities as a sailor. Valette thought highly enough of Romegas to put the knight in charge of his, Valette’s, own personal galley. Thinned ranks presumably helped the survivors hoping for promotion, but this kind of high favor turned on talent. One notable encounter was with Yusuf Concini, a Calabrian renegade. Their ships fired on each other, and finally the Christian galley crashed his bow into the corsair’s galleot. Romegas leapt on board, shouting, “Concini, you old bastard, where are you? Romegas is here.” “And here is Concini, son of the devil!” yelled his opponent, rushing forward with cutlass in hand.17 They fought on the bloody deck until Concini slipped and fell onto the benches, where the oarsmen, two hundred Christian slaves, tore him to pieces, taking his bones as souvenirs. Romegas roared out a threat to the remaining Muslims that he would throw them to the oarsmen as well if they did not yield. They chose to surrender, adding to better than a thousand Ottoman prisoners taken in the course of his career.18

  If Romegas was a long-standing irritant to Suleiman, 1564 was the year he became insufferable. In the spring, he and his colleague La Motte were cruising off the coast of Alexandria and came across a carrack too high walled to be stormed. The merchantman also had 150 soldiers on board. They were, however, becalmed, making it easy for Romegas and La Motte to fire, retreat, reload, advance, and fire again. They managed to punch holes into her hull, destroy her rudder, and take down her main mast. The knights won the fight and would have been rich with its cargo—but they had gone at it a little too hard and the vessel was sinking. They contented themselves with the nearly six hundred living passengers, including the governor of Cairo, who was ransomed for eighteen thousand zecchini, Venetian gold ducats.19 Also aboard was the onetime nurse to Suleiman’s favorite daughter, Mihrimah. Despite her age (a hundred years, according to Balbi), she was still able to write a bitter letter to the sultan on his inability to protect a pious woman such as herself.20 She was soon to die in captivity in Malta, her pilgrimage unfulfilled, her ransom unpaid, her story the subject of outraged sermons in Constantinople and a reproach to the sultan.

  A few days later Romegas took another galley, this one carrying the governor of Alexandria. Weighed down with booty (three hundred captives above and beyond the wretches pulling the oars), he dragged his prizes back to Malta and set out yet again.

  His next target was the Sultana.

  In the spring of 1564, the population of Suleiman’s seraglio, the various concubines, the head eunuch Capigias (aka Qapu Aga) and his underlings, and Mihrimah, bought a large quantity of silk and other luxury goods, which they intended to sell in the markets of Venice. The cargo was valued at eighty thousand gold pieces; the expected profit would be handsome. Presumably through the influence of Mihrimah, they were able to transport the goods in the hold of the galleon Sultana, personal property of Suleiman, armed with twenty brass cannon and a crew of Janissaries, as well as a few to ward off anyone reckless enough to approach her.

  It was still a risky venture. Constantinople was as given to gossip and rumor as any port, and word o
f this cargo and its owners was well known long before the ship set sail. And for all the influence that the Ottoman navy (and the Venetian navy at this time) had over the sea lanes between the Bosphorus and the Adriatic, there were still men able and willing to take up a challenge even of this size.

  The knights of Malta, alert to rumor, were now among that number. To take on the Sultana, they brought together the full seven galleys of the Knights of St. John, two belonging to Valette and commanded by Romegas, five belonging to the Order and commanded by Chevalier de Giou. The flotilla headed east. Various Greek and Venetian merchantmen claimed to have seen a large galleon carrying some two hundred soldiers and decked with twenty bronze cannon, some lesser guns, and with a caramusali, a small oared cargo ship, in attendance.21 They advised the knights to let it pass and look for prey closer to their own size. On this information, Romegas put himself between the straights of Zante and Cephalonia in the northern Adriatic, calculating that the Sultana most likely would choose that route to come back home. One more time, he was lucky.

  The Sultana had had an uneventful cruise until the galleys hove into view. The caramusali took off to find help, but for the Sultana, flight was not possible—the galleys were far too quick—and the Sultana’s captain did not try.22 He readied his two hundred arquebusiers as the seven galleys steadily drew closer, and Giou let off a gunshot that invited surrender or battle. The Sultana’s crew fired back their refusal, then raised their pennants “to show that they were men of war.”23 It was to be a fight, the more numerous Christian sailors having the task of laying siege to the high wooden walls of what was in effect an extremely well-defended and well-armed floating fortress.

  The men of the seven galleys were practiced in this sort of thing. They slid their vessels forward to flank the ship, forcing her captain to split the defenders port and starboard. The galleys waited just out of range until Romegas gave the orders, when there followed a series of twinned assaults against the Sultana, each galley darting forward, firing the guns on the bow, and retreating to let the next galley follow.

  The Sultana was strong and carried enough firepower to give back some of what it was taking. Scattershot from large-bore guns killed and maimed the knights and their crew in large numbers. Small arms did the same, one man at a time. Hot cannon fire splintered chunks of ship’s lumber, creating a nasty form of shrapnel. Incendiaries exploded on decks. Smoke and the ringing echo of cannon fire lingered in the air and ears, further degrading sight and sound and making coordinated action progressively more difficult. In time, Romegas believed Giou had been killed. Giou believed the same of Romegas.

  Romegas finally sensed that the time had arrived to end the fight. He ordered his galley to head toward the Sultana’s stern. As it approached the galleon, his bow gun sent a barrage of shot, clearing the space of enemy soldiers. His men swung grappling hooks onto the poop, rapidly pulled the two ships fast, then began to swarm up and over the rails and onto the Sultana’s bloodied decks. Ottomans struggled to climb over their own dead and dying to repel the invaders. The sound of metal striking metal rang out as the men finally got a chance to fight hand to hand. Other galleys now joined in, grappling where possible and pouring new soldiers over all sides of the Sultana. These men pushed forward, hacked, and thrust their way down the center of the ship, killing large numbers of the crew, and finally pulling down the Turkish standard.

  Five hours after the fight had begun, the Sultana was taken, its Muslim crew in chains, its Christian slaves freed. Romegas and his men towed the prize back to an astonished Malta, where the cargo was now examined, tallied, and divided. The vessel itself was a notable prize, and it graced the wharf for the next year. It was a near-run thing for the knights—the English ambassador to Venice wrote from home on July 29, 1564, referring somewhat enigmatically to “the seven galleys of Malta, which had taken a Turkish ship, being nearly surprised by Dragut Reis, with difficulty saved their prize in Syracuse.”24

  Back in the seraglio, the reaction was understandably violent. Bad enough that the honor of the sultan had been smirched—so had the pocketbooks of the women and eunuchs. Their chief and Mihrimah herself goaded the sultan, reminding him of his obligations to his family, his empire, his honor, and his religion. “Is it possible that you, my Lord, who have much power find it so difficult to destroy these disturbers of our sea, whose only home is a rock?”25 Outside the palace the imams and citizens also were calling for revenge against the knights.

  Age, experience, responsibility, and loss had caught up with Suleiman; he was now a dour, solemn man concerned with his legacy and his god. He had abandoned his old pleasures of listening to a boys’ choir and orchestra, had exchanged his silver dining service for clay, forbade the import of wine, which, although forbidden to Muslims, had traditionally been permitted to Christians and Jews living within the empire. Even ten years earlier, his face had been powdered with red dust, probably less from vanity—he had little—than to suggest a younger, healthier circulation. The defeat of the knights forty-two years before had proven to be a job half finished; his magnanimity at Rhodes was now a rebuke.

  Spanish and Italian histories cite the taking of the Sultana as the triggering event for the expedition; Pallavicino Rangone, in a postsiege report to the pope, states that the knights brought it on themselves with their sheer greed for pirate treasure.26 This is true as far as it goes, but other issues would have made the attack inevitable. The French ambassador Petremol suggests that Don Garcia de Toledo’s 1564 taking of Peñon de la Velez and the growing size of the Spanish fleet were a consideration.27 Viperano, writing in 1567, claims that the knights’ forefront in any military action against the Turk was reason enough for the Ottoman to go to war.28 Unlike the Venetians or the French or almost anyone else in Europe, the knights would not be bought off, negotiated with, or frightened away. Suleiman’s only course was to destroy them, and on this topic he was blunt. To Hassan ben Khairedihn in Algiers, he wrote: “The island of Malta is a headquarters for infidels. The Maltese have already blocked the route utilized by Muslim pilgrims and merchants in the East Mediterranean on their way to Egypt.”29 (A somewhat petulant Valette, writing to a fellow knight, construed Suleiman’s reaction to the Order’s recent activities as almost a matter of spite: “Not content with kicking us out of Rhodes . . .”)30

  There were also larger strategic concerns. Conquering Malta would make the island firmly Ottoman, and only Ottoman. It would not be a fiefdom or a client state like Algiers or Tripoli, the loyalty of whose leaders and people could waiver. A powerful Ottoman fortress in their midst would stiffen Muslim resolve throughout the Maghreb. The eastern Mediterranean would be more secure, the western, certainly from Spain’s perspective, in greater peril. The idea was seductive. Sicily and even Malta itself had once been parts of the caliphate; Granada was lost to Islam within living memory. With God’s favor, they might be regained.31

  Balbi fancifully quotes Suleiman as saying, “My intention in the taking of Malta is not for the sake of the island itself but rather for its utility in other even harder and greater enterprises.”32 His previous schemes with Francis I back this up.33 Specifically, he wanted Sicily, then Apulia and Calabria, the heel and toe of the Italian boot, perhaps the rest of Italy, perhaps beyond. He could envision a pincer movement into central Europe through the Balkans and past the Alps. It was an ambitious plan, no less grandiose than Charles V’s stated hope of retaking Constantinople back in 1538. Certainly Valette believed that Italy was next after Malta—or at least said as much, possibly to catch the attention of Spain. In a letter to Philip in February, Valette assures him that his spies, “always very truly informed,” had told him that the Ottomans had targeted Malta in 1565 as a springboard to Italy.34

  Back in Constantinople, a council was called to discuss the matter. The knights were an offence against Islam, true, and the world would be better off without them. But was now the time? Malta was not Rhodes. It was far from any Ottoman base and surrounded by uncerta
in allies at best, its land too poor to feed an invading army, much less supply it with water. Conversely, the Order could draw on the religious sympathies and material aid from both Rome and Philip II. The current crop of knights was stronger than those who had abandoned Gozo and surrendered Tripoli. Suleiman should recall the Order’s stubbornness at Rhodes and consider that he had had shorter supply lines there. Moreover, the season, which had worked against the Christians at Rhodes, would work against the Ottomans in Malta. In a bit of flattery, Mohammad Pasha pointed out that at Rhodes, Suleiman himself had been present, and was not to be at Malta.35

  The war party was anxious to move. Two spies had gone to Malta disguised as fishermen and taken the measure of its defenses—interior design, elevations, angles, walls, capacity of the port.36 Time was passing. Given the island’s current state and Valette’s sudden rebuilding campaign, this might be the last chance before it was all but impossible. Then there was the matter of Turgut—he was now eighty and had the most experience of any man alive of raiding Malta, and he owed the sultan some gratitude for coming to his side at Djerba. Turgut had a working relationship with Piali Pasha, whom he saw as a “dear son” (caro figlio), and who was also the best man, possibly the only man, who could galvanize the Barbary corsairs.37 It was enough to make Suleiman opt for Malta.

  By custom, Renaissance powers prepared for war in winter and prosecuted it in spring and summer. Siege guns needed to be cast, men enlisted, campaign supplies gathered. In the campaign of 1565, a fleet needed to be raised and a commander named. Suleiman tapped Kızılahmedli Mustapha Pasha of the Isfendiyarid Dynasty, an exact contemporary and a cousin (they both were grandsons of Bayazid II) and allegedly a descendant of Khalid Ben Walid, robe carrier to the Prophet Mohammed.38 Mustapha had entered the army at an early age and served in various campaigns, including the siege of Rhodes. He made a name for himself in Persia and Hungary, and had been appointed governor of Rumeli in 1555, then promoted to fifth vizier in 1561.39 An Arab ambassador judged him to be “a venerable person with charm and good nature.”40 Bosio says that he was “robust, and in command, very determined.”41 This last point at least comports with what the Ottoman chronicler Selaniki says of him, that he was “possessed of such heroism that it cannot be described.” However, Selaniki also writes that “as long as [Mustapha] was vizier, he was suited to the post; once appointed serdar (field marshal), they say that he lost his wits.”42