The Great Siege of Malta Page 20
The end, however, was getting near. The sun went down, and as the exhausted Christians lay and waited, the cool night air carried the sounds from the Ottoman army of “the same prayers, rituals, and acts of superstition and false religion that had been heard the night before the previous assault.”10 There was no sleep, and so the defenders made the best use they could of the dark. Fifteen men under the Rhodian Pietro Miraglia (emulating the Italian Pietro da Forli) slipped into the ditch and attempted (unsuccessfully) to set the Ottomans’ bridge on fire before being chased back to the fort. The rest of the night was spent listening to the enemy’s prayers and chants as both sides prepared for the morning.
The attack came just after dawn and on every side. The Ottomans threw scaling ladders against the walls and were met by flying sacchetti, gunfire, trumps, and pikes. For six hours of repeated assaults, they chipped away at the defenders, never quite getting the upper hand. Several times the Ottomans planted their standards on the parapet, and each time the Christians pulled the banners down. On one occasion, the Muslims succeeded in mounting a portion of the wall, only to find that the siege cannon had left the masonry so unstable that it collapsed under their weight, throwing them down into the ditch below. From across the water, the guns on St. Angelo fired on the wooden bridge leading to the post of Colonel Mas. This was welcome help to the Christians inside the fort, who were running low on powder and soon forced to defend the breaches with steel.
Janissaries had also retaken their position near the cavalier and were again firing into the fort proper. Monserrat ordered the same gun that was so successful the day before to prevail again. For Monserrat it was a personal victory, and his last. Seconds later a bullet struck him in the chest, killing him instantly. The still-living were saved the trouble of burial when moments later cannon fire brought down a wall on his remains. After the siege was over, survivors “dug through the ruins of the fort and found his body, fully armed, his hands joined as if still in prayer to God.”11
With Monserrat gone, rumors spread among the foot soldiers that d’Eguaras, Miranda, and Colonel Mas, all three of whom had not been seen since the last assault, had also been killed. This was easy to disprove. The three were all badly wounded, struck by bullets, arrows, and artificial fire, but still alive, or half-alive. They dragged themselves into view to encourage their men and to restore some sense of order. Mas and Miranda returned to their places on the line; d’Eguaras returned to his command post at the center of the piazza. Those still alive had neither the time nor the energy to bury the dead. Instead, they stacked the bodies against the walls to bolster the defenses. Even this gruesome expedience might delay the enemy and cost them a few more casualties, which was some consolation to the survivors.
Seven hours after the assault had begun, five hundred Christians lay dead, one hundred others wounded.12 They comprised the last of the fort, and yet, against all logic, the Turks still fell short of victory. Balbi claims that all Christian officers were now killed.13 The men waited in what is described as a day as hot as any fire.14 The next attack could come at any time, on any side, on all sides. Anyone not utterly incapable was at his post, weapon in hand. Mustapha toyed with these men, launching a series of feints, so many that no one bothered to keep a tally. Nightfall provided welcome relief from the sun at least, and time enough to tend their wounds, many of them serious.
All stocks of gunpowder were now empty, and the surviving defenders were forced to scavenge the powder horns of their dead comrades. They were able to get out one last communication to Fort St. Angelo. A single light swift boat shot out from the grotto under St. Elmo and managed to elude ten heavier Muslim craft. As backup, an unnamed Maltese swimmer followed suit, navigating a good part of his trip underwater. They reported that in St. Elmo “almost none healthy remained, and of those who were still healthy, all were exhausted, all soiled and stained by the blood, brains, marrow, and viscera of the dead colleagues and the enemy they had killed.”15 That the defenders would have only cold steel to fight with—Cirni refers to picks and spades—was almost an afterthought.16
Men trapped in situations that must end in certain death can inspire a strange envy in outsiders. Having heard the last testimony from the fort, of its remaining defenders with their broken weapons, a large number of knights, soldiers, and citizens stepped forward to join the chosen few certain to die the next day.17 Romegas himself volunteered to lead them. Valette, who had masked his emotions with bluff heartiness and further talk of Don Garcia’s imminent arrival, refused to allow it. He did, however, agree that they might carry supplies to the beleaguered men, the first supplies in three days.
In the event, it didn’t matter. The moon was full and the Ottomans were on highest alert; and while a lone swift boat might, with some luck, successfully dart its way through, there was no hope of five cargo-laden boats lumbering over the water between St. Angelo and St. Elmo in safety. Piali Pasha, already humiliated by the last vessel out of St. Elmo, was in no mood to let another one back into the fort, and now led the flotilla to prevent any action in person. Romegas, outnumbered sixteen to one and target of a furious storm of cannon fire, gunfire, and arrows, chose to return back to Fort St. Angelo.18
The chosen few remaining at Fort St. Elmo were now utterly alone. Without hope for victory, for rescue, or for mercy, they could only prepare themselves for a good death. “Seeing that all hope of survival was broken, being already certain, clear, and secure that they were to be taken and killed, and their fate delayed only so far as the hour of dawn; with great contrition they confessed to one another, asking forgiveness of God for their sins, and with his Divine Majesty, they devoutly reconciled themselves with no Sacraments other than a shared fraternal and devout embrace.”19
Along with the soldiers, two friars, Pierre Vigneron and Alonso de Zembrana, one French, one Spanish, remained at St. Elmo. The two had tasks of their own to fulfill before sunrise. They entered the chapel, which now served as a hospital for the most grievously wounded, and delivered what last rites they could. This accomplished, the two brothers prised up a large paving stone and, putting it to one side, dug a hole in the earth below. Into this cavity they laid the gold and silver chalices and candlesticks and a reliquary containing a bone of St. John the Baptist. With the stone back in place, they proceeded to gather all remaining sacred objects—the tapestries that covered the walls, the wooden crosses and cloth vestments, the sacred books. All these they carried out of the chapel, piled up in the center of the fort, and set on fire. The Turks took this as a signal fire calling for help.
The pair made the circuit of the fort. They took confession from and conferred absolution on all those who remained alive in Fort St. Elmo in anticipation of imminent death. Then they, too, waited for the dawn.
16
THE END OF THE BATTLE
The castel of St. Elmo is taken and all within it hewn to pieces.
Phayre to Cecil
June 23 was the eve of the feast of St. John the Baptist. Fort St. Elmo had held out for twenty-nine days, and the Ottomans were impatient to be done with it. Throughout the night, their thirty-six heavy guns fired from three points on land and several of Piali’s ships on the water, illuminating both the sky and the fort and proving if nothing else that they still had a vast amount of ordnance to waste. Dawn broke. The Muslim soldiers on Sciberras gazed up at the smoking ruins and saw the white-and-red crossed flag still flying, still defiant. Presently they made themselves ready for what would have to be the final assault. Across the water, the men at Fort St. Angelo, all too aware of what was coming and helpless to stop it, stood and watched the final act play out.
Inside St. Elmo scarcely sixty men remained, scattered among the breaches and placed in the remains of the cavalier, outnumbered by the dead, who lay where they had fallen. Few of those left alive had escaped injury; all were determined to hold on to the last instant.1 The captains were focused on a hard fight, a good death.
One more time the kettledrums pounde
d, brass horns shrilled, men shouted, and the order to advance was given. Mustapha reported to the sultan that his troops, “shouting ‘Allah, Allah!’ and accompanied by the souls of the martyred,” began to charge the walls.2 Janissaries, spahis, and their corsair allies, impatient for victory, crossed over the rubbish pit of stone, earth, and broken weaponry, climbed over the corpses, scrambled up the incline toward the breaches, and braved a single, weak volley from inside the fort.
If they expected the job to be easy, they were disappointed. The first Muslims into the breach were met with a hedge of sharp steel, pikes, swords, lances, and a hail of stones. An hour passed, and although men on both sides fell, the fort did not. Another hour passed, and the attackers fell back, re-formed, came forward again, and again were held off by the stubborn Christian line. Both sides licked their wounds and dragged their dead away. From time to time there followed small diversionary attacks of no particular consequence, each a prelude to the next general assault.
When the final assault came, the first Janissaries to cross the rise found, to their astonishment, Captain Miranda, strapped into a chair and gripping a pike. The commander was maimed and bandaged, but still possessed of the soldier’s skills of thrust and parry. Even now in a position of weakness he managed to slash and gut a handful of enemy soldiers before his fellow Christians were able to repel the attackers one more time. The Muslims, however, managed a final parting shot that killed Miranda.
Command now devolved on d’Eguaras. His leg had been shattered, and so he too was confined to a chair. Seeing how the number of his men had dwindled, he thought to improve the odds by consolidating his remaining forces. He ordered the gunners on the cavalier to fall back and join their comrades inside the fort. This move was a boon for the Muslims, who quickly moved to fill the cavalier with sharpshooters. From its heights they could look down inside the shattered fort and signal to their comrades just how diluted the Christian force truly was.3 All tactical advantage now lay with Mustapha. Marksmen on the ravelin and on the cavalier could fire down on the Christians from the rear while Muslim infantry could attack from the front and flanks. (Oddly, Balbi says that the Muslims confined themselves to throwing stones.)4
A little past eleven that morning, the final assault began. Janissaries, corsairs, and anyone else who wanted to be in at the kill, drew their blades and overtopped the crumbling edge of the fort and poured into the main piazza. The area soon resembled a Roman amphitheater in the final stages of a gladiators’ show, a confused mass of desperate men fighting in separate brawls “in which there ran rivers of blood from the multitude of the dead and the wounded on all sides.”5 D’Eguaras was among the first to die. Knocked from his chair, he managed to raise his sword and limp toward four Janissaries. One of the four brought a scimitar down on his neck and severed his head, which Mustapha would later order stuck on the end of a pike.
With their comrades gone, not wishing to survive them, unable to see beyond the moment or to hope for a life in this world, the remaining Christians lashed out with a superhuman fury at any Muslim who came within reach. At the door of the chapel, Chevalier Paolo Avogadro swung a broad sword with both hands and soon created a half-circle of Muslim dead around him. It took a volley of arquebus fire to put an end to this slaughter, and the dying knight collapsed on top of the pile of men he himself had killed.
The few small fights were winding down as force of numbers made good the Ottoman effort to leave no man standing. Colonel Mas, last of the commanders and also confined to a chair, swung a two-handed sword until he was himself cut down. Fortunio Escudero, last gunner on the cavalier, headed a small group of soldiers wielding broadswords on the crest of the fort, clearly visible from across the water at Fort St. Angelo, until he and they too succumbed to greater Muslim numbers. Official reckoning was now only minutes away. Mehmed ben Mustafa, who had captured La Rivière on the first day of the invasion, had the honor of seizing the knights’ ragged banner for his general as well, after which he “entered the bastion of the infidels and chopped off some heads.”6 The end was marked when a wounded knight, Frederico Lanfreducci, went to his post at the marina and gave the final agreed-upon smoke signal (una fumata) that the fort was lost.7 Moments later he was taken prisoner, becoming one of nine Christian survivors captured in Fort St. Elmo’s last battle.8 A handful of Maltese, able swimmers, were able to escape.
The fight was over. It had taken four hours.9
“After having occupied that post for several days, [Mustapha] bombarded Fort St. Elmo and attacked night and day with heavy formations, then, following the attacks, with a uniform and impatient force, and with the help of God, the fort was taken.”10
So wrote the Ottoman historian Selaniki in his brief account written years after the fact. In the days after the taking of St. Elmo, Mustapha appears to have commissioned forty-two lines of poetry extolling the Muslim troops, Suleiman, and Mustapha himself.11 Piali Pasha is mentioned, but not named, and due respect is paid to Turgut Reis. Composing this kind of poetry was a common practice in the Ottoman army, and Mustapha may have hoped that it would soften the harsher realities of the campaign.
The taking of St. Elmo, the proposed work of well under a week, in the end cost the Ottomans thirty-one days, four thousand men, and eighteen hundred rounds of artillery.12 Mustapha’s initial reaction was one of horror and dismay: “If this is what such a small son has cost us, what price the larger father?”13 The fort’s new occupants busied themselves with hauling up a new collection of pennons and flags. Mustapha Pasha’s men were relieved that the worst of it was over, and cheered as Piali’s fleet sailed into the safety of Marsamxett Harbor.
Mustapha’s final report was prepared and a fast ship ordered to Constantinople with the good news, along with a collection of various Christian guns, small trophies from a small fort too hard won. Mustapha could only hope that these (and the poem) would mollify the sultan when he read the casualty reports. Royal displeasure in the sultan’s court could cost a man his head, and this knowledge would weigh on both Piali and Mustapha. In his report, Mustapha refers to “one hundred galleys of the imperial fleet that guarded and impeded the Maltese barges and caiques from bringing reinforcements to the defenders of St. Elmo”—a measure of overkill that might have led some to wonder why the siege had taken so long.14 He also had his engineers draw up a map of the siege to accompany news of the victory back to Constantinople. This chart is brightly colored and minutely detailed, and gives a recognizable outline of the area and each side’s deployments. It is (like some of its Christian counterparts) somewhat out of proportion, suggesting to the observer a more formidable target than a strictly accurate illustration might.
The corsairs concentrated on the search for loot. There wasn’t much—broken weapons, the cannons, some of the coins that Captain Miranda had had brought over to boost the men’s morale. More mundanely, there was leftover grain and three cisterns of water.15 There were also a handful of Christian survivors. Always on the lookout for a business opportunity, the corsairs gathered those unhappy few who might be worth a ransom and protected them against the Janissaries, who still had spleen to vent. Mustapha settled the matter by paying the corsairs four gold zecchini a head, whether as living trophies or as a capital investment is uncertain, though we do know that Lanfreducci was set free in Constantinople six years later at a crippling cost to his family.16
As for the Janissaries, they found an outlet for their lingering rage among the surviving defenders too far gone for the slave markets. Soldiers they killed and hacked to pieces. Those identified as knights had their legs bound and were hoisted upside down through a ring in the roof of the chapel normally used for the chandelier. The victims were then gutted like cattle, their hearts (“still beating” according to the chroniclers) torn out, their heads cut off.17 A quartet of these heads were stuck on poles and lifted up to gaze back over the waters on their comrades at Fort St. Angelo—a grisly attempt at intimidation. The victims were assumed to be d’Eguaras,
Miranda, Medrano, and Mas, but at that distance, who could tell? It scarcely mattered. The four heads, covered in flies and quickly turning black in the scorching heat, were emblematic of all who had fought and died at Fort St. Elmo.
Meanwhile, a messenger was sent back to the Turkish camp. He hurried to enter Turgut’s tent, then leaned down and gently whispered to the semiconscious man that Fort St. Elmo was theirs. Hearing is the last sense in the dying to go. Moments after the words were spoken, Turgut Reis, Drawn Sword of Islam, lay back on his pillow and died, faithful to the soothsayer’s prediction. Four galleys carried him back to Tripoli for burial, and Uludj Ali, the onetime Calabrian peasant, now became the city’s governor. Mustapha and Piali would have had another reason to regret Turgut’s death. Ottoman historian Kâtip Çelebi wrote that the noncorsair “should consult corsairs and listen to them” in naval affairs, one reason being that should an enterprise fail, this will “save him from being the only one to bear the blame.”18 (Mustapha took the opportunity of Turgut’s death for his “gold coins, his money, his personal belongings and six kula infidels, his horses, his mules etc.” to be listed and if possible brought over for the use of the siege.)19 Bosio ends his chapter on St. Elmo with an extended peroration on the wickedness of Turgut and the debt owed by Christendom to the knights who finally killed him. Balbi refers to him as el perro, “the dog,” a rare bit of abuse from this normally generous man, but leaves it pretty much at that. Cirni, ever one for the humiliating detail, notes that his “tongue was lolling out.”20 The English made no editorial comment; his stature was enough that this death needed only one line in the reports sent to Queen Elizabeth: “Torgut Reis is slain.”21
For Mustapha, the victory was Pyrrhic. Soldiers want easy victories, and they value and admire the leaders who arrange them. Mustapha’s engineers had promised that St. Elmo would be a walkover. For superstitious men—and both soldiers and sailors can be exceedingly superstitious—this broken promise was a bad omen. Why should they respect Mustapha? Not only had he failed to bring quick victory, but his unwillingness to press his case against Piali was the only reason they were at St. Elmo in the first place. Instead the supreme commander of the army had allowed himself to be browbeaten by his junior in a quarrel over strategy. And it was no comfort that the legendary Turgut had agreed with Mustapha’s original plan to leave Fort St. Elmo until last, or that the plan was probably sound—both facts merely underscored this failure. No doubt if the old corsair had shown up earlier, he would have won the point and might still be with them, bringing victory.