The Great Siege of Malta Read online

  He hadn’t. Some hours later, La Cerda returned to Fort St. Elmo, caked in blood and victorious. The incident should have been remembered when, as we shall see, his bravery was later called into question.

  Brave or not, soldiers were too valuable to risk when there were other, cheaper ways of denying the enemy water. Soon after this scuffle, Valette ordered Camillo Rosso, protomedico of the Order, to gather whatever filth and poisons he could and spike the cisterns and wells outside the walls, causing “serious illness and even death to a great number of the Barbary infidels.”5 They would eventually be forced to travel as far away as Gozo in search of the stuff. (Regarding water, the Ottomans appear not to have done their homework. According to the military engineer Laparelli, “You cannot prevent the enemy from obtaining water; anyone who digs a hole 4 palmi deep on the plain [of Marsa] will find fresh water and in abundance.”6)

  Water was a concern for the defenders as well, and comes up repeatedly in Valette’s letters to Don Garcia. Food stores he had, but with only three cisterns inside the wall for a swollen population, he was forced to economize. Two knights were dedicated to finding new sources within the walls. Just as at Djerba, all remaining oxen and cattle were slaughtered—better to let them rot in the sun than to swill the daily gallons they needed. Valette also ordered all dogs put down, starting with his own hunters (and presumably, the pet lion he kept in his quarters). Their howling at night, it was said, distracted the sentries. More likely it was their thirst, not as extreme as the larger animals, but constant.

  By the morning of May 21, the Ottoman’s brilliant multicolored tent village covered the hills of Santa Margarita, sprung up overnight like desert wildflowers after a sudden rain. The army corps of tent minders had unpacked and unfolded and erected the place in a matter of hours. Camps for Ottoman armies were designed along the lines of small cities, concentric circles of cotton, broadcloth, canvas, brocade, and even silk tents, each dedicated to private, semiprivate, and official use—latrines to bathhouses to hostels to conference rooms, smithies, workshops, and hospitals. Decorations hung from the walls, carpets softened the floors, stools and storage filled empty space. Chimneys rose out of some tents. Flags and pennants with emblems flew above them all, indicating what each one contained. Guylines crisscrossed the gaps and alleyways between the structures to keep traffic slow. Soft walls for hard men—orderly, tranquil, and clean. Busbecq knew these camps, and he knew their European counterparts: “Anyone who is familiar with conditions in our camps will scarcely believe it, but the fact remains that there was utter silence and calm . . . there was the complete cleanliness, no dung heaps or rubbish, nothing to offend the sight or smell.”7

  Comfort and order were important to the Ottoman campaigners. So was food. Janissaries would have understood Napoleon’s dictum of armies marching on their stomachs. Their entire hierarchy was laden with culinary terms; the corps itself, the ojark, translates as “hearth.”

  The soup cauldrons were the emblems of the various regiments within the corps’ battalions, as important as the standards and pennons carried into battle, and the colonel of any given regiment carried a soup ladle as a symbol of his authority. Officers were called shorbadji (soup makers), çörekçi (bread makers), and even karakullukçu (pot washers). When the Janissaries revolted, as they did from time to time, they indicated their displeasure by overturning the regimental cauldrons.

  For the moment, the invaders could be upbeat and eager to get past the mundane aspects of camp administration and on to more substantial matters. “All the soldiers were assembled in and around Mustafa Pasha’s tent and the imperial letter of command conferred upon him was read out loudly. Prayers were intoned and praise declaimed to the Sultan, and Mustapha Pasha himself bestowed many favors upon the soldiers”8

  They could now look down on a defensive system of good modern design, but it was still a work-in-progress.9 To reach the walls, the Muslim soldiers would have to cross over a flat expanse littered with the half-destroyed houses that had recently made up the suburb of Bormulu. Beyond this was a deep ditch, traversed at intervals by drawbridges. The walls themselves were traced in the current designs of pointed spurs, which allowed for crossfire against any invader. It was formidable, but these men had seen worse. Even now they could gaze down on the defenders in the suburb of Bormulu, gathering up the last of the old broken stones and beams. The Ottomans were not overly concerned. For them, it was a good time to strike a little terror.

  Mustapha ordered the musicians out. Kettledrums, tambours, trumpets, bagpipes, and brass horns began to shrill and wail down and across to the Christian defenders.10 Only then did Valette order the work halted and the demolition crews back inside. Some were reluctant. Soldiers stood at the ramparts watching all this, many seeing an enemy for the first time, most eager to fight. Valette himself was never one to shrink from a challenge; best to let his men loose. Veterans could get back the feel of battle; greenhorns would learn what they were really up against; civilians could get over the initial shock of seeing the bleeding dead and wounded being carried through their streets.

  Valette ordered his own musicians to reply to Mustapha, then called Lieutenant Medrano, Colonel Mas, Captain d’Eguaras, and Romegas to the wall. Their orders were simple. They were, he said, to take a few hundred arquebusiers outside, draw up a defensive line, and fire on the enemy. Minutes later, the gates opened and the men trotted out, took positions, and took aim against the enemy. Music on both sides was soon drowned out by the sounds of gunfire and shouting soldiers. The battle was on and still had room to grow. Giou and La Motte came out and bolstered the Christian forces with another four hundred foot. Valette noticed the Ottomans watching from Mount Salvador and Calcara, some five hundred meters southwest of Senglea and Birgu. He ordered Captain d’Eguaras, still smarting from his initial failure days earlier, to take the cavalry out and engage the enemy once more. Horsemen passed through the gate and passed by the infantry and galloped headlong for the Ottoman lines. Valette stood at the gate, pike in hand, holding back anyone else who wanted to get into the fight. However eager his soldiers might be, Valette was still determined to show he was in charge.

  The rank-and-file discipline of the European armies, rooted in the almost machinelike Greek and Roman phalanx, was not the Ottoman way. The sultan’s troops were greatly disciplined, but their fighting was of a looser nature.11 In formal battle, they followed a crescent formation that dated back to Hannibal at Cannae and Khalid at Walaja, and would come down to Shaka Zulu at Roark’s Drift. The center line of cannon and Janissary arquebusiers, flanked by spahi cavalry, was curtained by stolid Azap infantry. The spahi’s task was to excite the enemy and retreat, drawing the enemy in toward the Azap. These men could fight and then part in order to give an open field to cannon and Janissary arquebusiers. Spahis then enveloped from the flanks.

  Spahis, skilled horsemen, would therefore have to make war on foot. This was not too much of a handicap. On or off their horses, they were practiced archers who disdained guns as dirty, loud, inelegant, and unmanly; their nomad ancestors had perfected the composite bow, carefully and patiently built from layers of wood, animal horn, sinew, and glue. These graceful weapons had a range of up to eight hundred yards, and its arrows fired en masse could find unprotected parts of any soldier (something that arquebus fire could not always achieve). Mounted spahis, even at a full gallop, could hit moving targets. Even unhorsed, however (and the historian Cirni tells us they brought no horses to Malta), they were formidable opponents and excelled at close-quarter fighting.12 As d’Eguaras and his men now rode into their ranks, the sound of sword hitting scimitar, much like a smith pounding hot iron, almost pleasing in any other context, carried across the field and back to the respective camps.

  Elsewhere, the respective arquebusiers had spread out and were engaged in a slug match marked by the familiar pattern of load, prime, fire, and reload. Christian guns had shorter barrel lengths, enabling their owners to fire more rounds per minute, but
at the cost of accuracy. The Ottoman arquebus was a longer weapon, harder and more time consuming to load, but once loaded, it was, in the hands of a skilled marksman, unnervingly accurate. Each weapon had good and bad points—for the Janissaries, the accuracy allowed snipers to hold down an enemy behind walls. For the Christians, the ability to reload quickly made it easier to defend a specific area—a breach in a wall, say—against mass attacks.

  As the Christians stood and fired, a Spanish knight called Sésé, commander of the Post of Bormla, strolled about in the stink and smoke with a keg of powder and a sack of bullets, replenishing the troops’ ammunition as needed and shouting out encouragement. His constant movement made him difficult to hit, but his vital role made him all the more desirable a target. His time came. A hot bullet pierced the keg, ignited the powder, and sent Sésé and some dozen of those around him to a better world.

  The day wore on, the sun rose higher, the fight dragged on; men fell at random as unseen bullets hit their arms, legs, chests, or heads. Men negotiated the spaces between the dead and dying. Among the horsemen, fighting was up close and vicious. D’Eguaras was struck in the thigh and turned over command to his adjutant Antonio Varese. Turkish infantry edged down from the slopes for hand-to-hand combat. Valette was now overseeing the fight on the Post of Provence on the walls of Birgu, highly visible and “exposing himself to great danger.”13 A soldier standing nearby was struck and killed. Soon after, the grand master’s page was also hit. Given the notorious accuracy of Janissary marksmen, it is tempting to think they were ordered to avoid hitting any white-haired gentlemen. Valette alive would make a nice prize either caged or in chains during the inevitable triumph in Constantinople.

  Out on the field, the Christians were beginning to flag, their formations to fragment. Accidents occurred. A misfired cannon killed several gunners and burned nearly all of Faderigo de Toledo’s face (the report to his father Don Garcia downplayed the damage and commended the young man’s valor, assuring all that the boy would make a “fine knight”).14 The battle had lasted some five hours—enough for one day. Valette ordered that retreat be sounded and finally, steadily, perhaps reluctantly, perhaps not, the men pulled back into the gates. The day’s fighting had seen twenty-one defenders killed and a hundred and fifty wounded. The Turks had lost over a hundred men, including an unnamed sanjak-bey.15

  The Christians might have viewed that day as a victory since more Muslims than Christians had died. The Ottomans used other measures. Back in the camp, Mustapha wrote his report back to Suleiman that the first battle had gone to the Ottomans and all was well; he had, after all, seized the Marsa, a “place of water” for his campground.16 (He does not mention the state of the water, though whether from neglect, from ignorance, or because the protomedico’s work had not taken, is unclear.) And whether victorious or not, Mustapha still had his prisoners to deal with.

  At some point prior to the fight, La Rivière had singled out the Post of Castile in front of Birgu as being the weakest, and in consequence Mustapha had thrown the better part of his effort against it. The weaker outer wall was backed up inside with a new inner wall, strengthened until it was the “strongest of the chain, and enforced by iron.”17 Mustapha understood that he had been duped. La Rivière was dragged off to an Ottoman galley, where his executioner was waiting for him. Over the course of the next few hours, his bones and internal organs were expertly and painfully shattered.

  He died before morning.18

  Suleiman had ordered that no action be taken without consulting Turgut Reis.19 Turgut still had not arrived. Some thought that he was not coming at all—he was old, and strange things happen at sea. There was no reason to hold up all operations on his account. Spain was a formidable power, moreso now that they were not distracted by wars in the Lowlands and against France. They were quite capable of launching a relief force to trouble this siege, and intelligence suggested that, under the guidance of the new and capable viceroy, they were in the process of doing so. Best then to get on with the operation and hope that Turgut would show up sooner rather than later.20

  The leading commanders gathered in Mustapha’s tent to decide what to do next.

  In theory there should have been little to discuss. The strategy had been laid out months earlier in Constantinople, aided by a scale model of Grand Harbor built on the report of two Muslim spies posing as fishermen.21 The plan was to take out Fort St. Elmo and so control the eastern-facing deep waters and the secure bay of the Grand Harbor, better protected than Marsaxlokk from the spring’s strong gregale winds that could sweep down from the northeast. In so doing, the Ottomans could maintain a supply base close to the army’s center of operations, thus simplifying the demands of logistics. All future matériel arriving from Constantinople or North Africa would not have to be hauled the eight miles overland from Marsaxlokk, a wearisome task at best, and a dangerous task so long as there were Christian marauders about—as, in fact, there were until the very end.22

  Mustapha had his own ideas. A veteran of wars in Hungary and Persia, Mustapha was accustomed to long marches over rough terrain—what was an eight-mile trek to him? Concede Grand Harbor to the knights, he thought, and St. Elmo becomes a Christian liability, a place they would have to defend while the bulk of Muslim soldiers were wearing down the main objectives elsewhere. His proposed order of operations was for Piali Pasha to take ten thousand men and ten guns and seize the lightly defended capital of Mdina at the center of the island. This would be both a psychological blow to the Maltese and a boost for his own men, and it would serve to protect the army’s rear from Mdina’s cavalry raiders and any possible Spanish relief forces. Once Mdina was taken, he could then attack the bulk of the enemy’s forces at Birgu and Senglea, and finally, almost as an afterthought, seize the island of Gozo. His vision went further, offshore and into Piali’s area of authority. He suggested a new disposition for the fleet, that it be divided into three parts: one to blockade Grand Harbor, one to remain in Marsaxlokk, and one to patrol the channel between Malta and Sicily.

  It did not go down well. Piali Pasha reminded the council that his responsibility was to meet the needs of the sultan’s “powerful and invincible armada” and to guard the island from any Christian warships.23 (After his attempt to swindle Suleiman out of some ransom after Djerba, he was also on his best behavior.) Piali wanted the eastern-facing deep waters and secure bay of the Grand Harbor. To get this, they would need to take out the defensive Fort St. Elmo. The council, many of them navy men, concurred with Piali.

  Compelled against his better judgment to target Fort St. Elmo, Mustapha wanted to know how long it would take to capture the place, and he sent out engineers skilled in this kind of calculation to make an estimate. They got as close as they dared, and came back with a mixture of good news and bad. The good news was that the shortcomings Don Garcia had criticized were all in place. The bad news was that the stony ground, while suitable for trenches, was useless for digging mines. As to siege artillery, that was simply a matter of getting cannon down the steep length of Mount Sciberras and into position opposite the fort. The engineers were confident that the Ottoman army, fresh from their voyage and ready for a fight, would be able to bring down the walls and take the fort in under five days. With luck, they might be able to present the first victory of the campaign to Turgut when he eventually arrived.

  Mustapha gave in. His May 23 report to Suleiman notes the divided opinions and the final proposed course of action; it does not, interestingly, indicate what he thought.24

  Balbi describes this squabble in some detail, based on the gossip of two more renegades who had, they claimed, stood guard outside the tent. (In camps famed for their silence, shouting commanders were presumably easy to hear.) Gossip or not, an overjoyed Valette reacted swiftly. His spies in Constantinople had reported that St. Elmo was to be the first target, but he could not be sure. Initially he had entrusted its defense to the aging and unwell Fr. Broglio and a small contingent of Spanish foot. From his com
mand center in Fort St. Angelo, he now ordered the French knight Pierre de Massuez-Vercoirin (aka Colonel Mas) and two hundred of his men, as well as sixty-five volunteers from the knights, dispatched to bolster the three hundred and thirty-five soldiers already in Fort St. Elmo.25 He cautioned them, however, to make self-preservation their priority, to not engage the enemy in any unnecessary skirmishes.

  The day saw one other small victory for the Christians. Pierre Antoine de Roquelaure de St. Aubin, a knight of the Order, was commanding a galley that had been scouting the north African coast for intelligence. As he approached his home port, guns began to fire at him from Tigne point on the northern entrance of Grand Harbor. Damning the cannon, he headed full speed forward in hopes of running the gauntlet and rejoining his comrades at Fort St. Angelo. Piali in turn called six captains, led by Mohammed Bey, son of a onetime governor of Algiers, and ordered them to seize the interloper. Six Ottoman galleys progressed toward the bay’s entrance, and a large audience of both Ottomans and Christians at St. Elmo gathered to see what was about to happen.