The Great Siege of Malta Page 29

  Fighting became almost lackadaisical. One man (Balbi ascribes the idea to Valette) rigged up an arquebus to the end of a pole, which he raised above the parapets.29 By means of a pulley, he was able to ignite the charge and fire down on the Turks. How effective this was is not recorded—one guesses not very—but it probably was unpleasant for the heretofore secure trench dwellers. The Ottomans tried to pull the gun down with grappling hooks, but never succeeded.

  The Mdina raiders were becoming bolder, and even Turkish ships were at risk. The crew of a galleot put in to fill their water jugs at the straits between Malta and Gozo. A cavalry group had been waiting near the well, confident that the enemy would have to show up eventually. There followed a violent set-to, and the Christians would have taken the ship itself had two other Ottoman vessels not shown up. If nothing else, it shows how Turkish command of the island was deteriorating, and how badly they were defending the necessary resources still left to them. Despite this, the Turks, or at least Mustapha, were still hopeful. At this late stage a miracle could arrive for either side, and if the Muslim troops had more or less resigned themselves to the unfavorable will of Allah, Mustapha was a man of greater faith. Certainly he was a man with more on the line.

  24

  MUSTAPHA’S LAST HAZARD

  The true strength of armies exists in the first days of a campaign, and through experience one sees that time only worries, weakens and consumes them. It creates difficulties, disease, and shortages of many things without which it is impossible to do anything well.

  Francesco Laparelli

  By now the Ottoman army ran on momentum. Muslim sappers put out to the island of Comino to fetch brushwood for more gun platforms and trenches that would almost certainly never be used. Artillery continued to lob cannonballs, though fewer of them, on St. Michael and the Post of Castile, and most particularly against the Post of Provence, where the largest of the remaining Christian standards still rippled in the occasional breeze.

  Ottoman gunners had been lobbing cannonballs indiscriminately into the town of Birgu for some days now. The economics of warfare demanded it—the army could not afford to leave munitions behind, and the armada, or what was left of it, needed to travel as light as possible. If stray shots killed more Christians, so much the better. For the first time also, and in another sign that they were preparing to leave, the gunners were firing into the waters between Senglea and Birgu, aiming at the Sultana, “the large ship which up until now had not been fired upon, as it was something they had hopes of taking with them.”1 Heretofore, that prize had been inviolate, the one trophy (besides Valette himself) that would most impress the masses—certainly the harem—at Constantinople. Mustapha was resigned to the second-best option, of denying it to the knights. Even this hope backfired, quite literally. An artilleryman on the Salvador platform had not allowed his weapon to cool sufficiently, or perhaps there were stray embers left over from his previous shot glowing inside the barrel, or perhaps the bronze had become as exhausted as the men who tended it. Whatever the cause, the cannon itself exploded, killing the gun crew and turning the metal, so carefully engineered back in Constantinople, into scrap.

  The eager and luckless volunteers who weeks earlier would have charged these walls without question, almost without orders, were gone; the remainder saw destiny mocking their dreams. Fatalism had taken root. Other than spite and wounded pride, or shame in surviving where so many comrades had died, there was little point in continuing the siege. The soldiers spoke plainly: “It is not given to us to capture Malta.”2

  For Mustapha and Piali, however, the return to Constantinople was not going to be a happy occasion, and there was no reason to hurry. God was inscrutable. Even at this late day, something might turn up.

  What turned up was Uludj Ali and his ships and bad news. He had seen boats, he said, dozens of them, to the north. Mustapha and Piali wavered. They had intended another assault on St. Michael and the Post of Castile. Could they still risk it? How many thousands of Christians might be on those ships, and how many Muslims would be necessary to counter them? How long before these ships arrived?

  Piali didn’t spend too much time pondering these things. He had his fleet to secure. To that end, he redirected forces from Marsaxlokk and Pietra Negra to the mouth of the Grand Harbor. Piali did not want to be bottled up, in case Spanish ships should attempt a landing. His own victory at Djerba had demonstrated just how badly an unprepared fleet could suffer.

  For his part, Mustapha encouraged small skirmishes along the battle line. For the time being, however, he had nothing major in the works—the commanders on both sides were waiting for further developments or new orders. Mustapha still had his original letter from Suleiman, old and tattered and much brooded upon, telling him not to give up the fight.

  By nightfall, Muslim soldiers quietly filed out of the trenches before Fort St. Michael and Birgu and gathered around the camps now centered at the Marsa, near the ships that would take them away from this useless action. Only one day had passed since Uludj Ali’s report of ships on the horizon, but nothing seems to have come of it. They would, it appeared, escape any fresh attack from the Spanish relief.

  The Ottomans’ real failure, whether by Mustapha or Piali, was in not establishing lookouts at all possible invasion zones. Landing on a hostile shore puts an army at the greatest vulnerability and had been Don Garcia’s greatest worry. Why Mustapha and Piali neglected this is a mystery.

  On September 7, the lookouts at Fort St. Angelo had seen a small galleot enter Grand Harbor and tie up at the end of Sciberras. Across the water they watched as a short man in heavy robes was carried from that boat into a caique to Fort St. Elmo, disembarked, and was greeted by a retinue of men who provided him with one of the few surviving horses on the island. The man managed to get on the animal, fall off, get on again, and fall off again. By now the butt of a low comedy routine, he drew out a sword and slashed at the animal’s legs, leaving the unfortunate animal bloody, crippled, and presumably dying.3 Without a glance backward, the man then trundled his way by foot along the rocky peninsula to the Ottoman camp at the Marsa.

  Who he was and who sent him is unrecorded. Balbi infers that he brought orders from Suleiman to withdraw what remained of the armies and return at once to Constantinople. We have no confirmation of this. We do know, however, that supplies were still being forwarded to the Ottoman troops, and according to a September 27 letter from Petremol, that Suleiman had ordered the expedition to overwinter.4

  Whatever the truth of the matter, what followed is clear. Janissaries and spahis in the trenches were being primed for one more attack. In earlier battles, units had argued over who would have the honor of leading. Now the fight was to hold up the rear. They deferred to their commanding officers the question of who was to face near-certain and certainly futile death. The little man appears to have settled the argument in favor of both of them. Their fate was to live, and there was a sudden rush from the trenches to the ships, each man eager to be the first in line.

  Word had finally gotten to the Ottoman commanders that the Grand Relief had arrived, and thirty-five Muslim galleys soon left Marsamxett to block the entrance to Grand Harbor against any Spanish incursion. Bad luck had dogged the Muslim cause again. For some time, Uludj Ali had been stationed with sixty ships in St. Paul’s Bay just adjacent to Mellieha. Just hours before the Great Relief, he had moved his fleet to Marsamxett in preparation for another attack on Senglea, and so missed a chance to swoop down on the enemy in a replay of Djerba.

  News of the arrival flew overland quickly, but Valette had refused to believe it5—not until the entire Gran Soccorso passed the mouth of the harbor under full sail and fired off a triple volley of guns in salute, which the Maltese might have returned had they not been so low on powder. Now convinced and with the tide turning in his favor, Valette began to get ahead of himself. He imagined that the invading force would, “following standard tactics” (segun la razon de Guerra), wait until dark and then a
ttack the Ottoman camp.6

  They didn’t, and Balbi claims that this was a source of some contention later on. Valette imagined, and others would later argue, that two thousand arquebusiers could have marched from Mellieha, then attacked the Marsa while Don Garcia’s armada put in an appearance outside Grand Harbor. In this scenario, the Ottomans would be forced to fight a sea battle (which Don Garcia would of course win), leaving a smaller number of Muslim troops on land for the Gran Soccorso to defeat. It was a somewhat grandiose plan requiring a great deal of coordination between land and sea forces and an unrealistic level of hard intelligence as to Ottoman troop strength. Balbi himself is tactful enough to say that second-guessing is easy.7

  As dawn broke, the Ottoman trenches appeared to be empty. Behind the walls, caution turned to excitement, which finally overflowed to euphoria. Church bells rang out in Birgu, not in warning of yet another attack, but in honor of the Nativity of Our Lady. Valette ordered a High Mass. More good news followed: a renegade from the Ottoman camp appeared at the wall, confirming that the Gran Soccorso had indeed arrived. This was cause for rejoicing, and one man, Vespasiano Malaspina dei Marchesi di Mulazzo, unremarkable to this point, did just that. He climbed to the uppermost peak on the post of Captain Fra Don Bernardo de Cabrera and shouted out a Te Deum in thanks for their delivery. An Ottoman sniper shot him in the chest. He was the last knight to die in defense of Birgu.

  In Mdina, in the Ottoman camp, and behind the defensive walls at Senglea and Birgu, each man passed the day alone, wondering what his commander had in mind for him.

  If Ottoman zeal was waning, Christian enthusiasm was on the rise. On September 8, the Grand Soccorso tramped south to Mdina. All men were equal, at least insofar as carrying provisions was concerned, and even the captains were hefting food and munitions stored in sacks both “large and difficult to carry.”8 The planned hike was no more than four miles to Bingemma, south of Mgarr, near the Falca gap that separates the northern plain from the outskirts of Mdina. These four miles were, however, under a Mediterranean sun; and early September on Malta, when heat combines with humidity, can be atrocious. Each man was weighed down with thirty days’ worth of biscuit (at twenty-four ounces a day) as well as armor, powder, lead, and weapons.9 The temptation to lighten their load was too much. They began to discard food.

  Chiappino Vitelli was bringing up the rear guard and began to see bags of hardtack littering the side of the road. Since the problem of feeding these men had been an argument for not coming at all, this had to be addressed. He sent word to the head of the column. As maestro di campo, Della Corgna was responsible for the tedious matter of supplying the army, and he was not going to let this kind of foolishness pass. Anything left on the road could do the men no good and might help the enemy. Della Corgna knew that the enemy, however demoralized, was still undefeated and still dangerous, and that in war, fortunes can change quickly. He brought the entire column to a dead halt. Minutes later, thousands of unwilling hands reached down to hoist the sacks of discarded food and only then did the soldiers retrace their lost progress.

  About a mile short of Mdina, they could see two figures approaching on horseback, kicking up dust in the morning glare. Vincenzo Anastagi and Boisbreton were coming down the road in person to intercept the new arrivals. Anastagi pulled up and greeted his fellow countrymen with more urgency than warmth. They should move as quickly as possible—they still had to negotiate the Falca Gap, a pass perfectly suited for an ambush, to get to Mdina, and it was only a matter of time before the Ottomans learned of their arrival. Della Corgna urged the men on, stressing the potential danger that faced them here in the open and promising them that teamsters were coming to help them carry their loads.

  And sure enough, as the men of the Gran Soccorso came within sight of Mdina, they saw nearly the entire civilian population—men, women, children, and pack animals—streaming down the slope toward them. The two columns converged, and the Maltese began relieving the soldiers of excess baggage and urging them on to the city and safety. (Sande, in his first report to Philip, slights the efforts of the locals—“the Maltese helped us somewhat,” Malteses nos ayudaron algo.)10 It would take another day to get all the munitions safely inside the city, and by nightfall, the men had settled down to rest in the shadows of the exterior walls. Their captains met inside to determine the best course of action.

  Dawn broke on September 9 to reveal smoke rising from the various Turkish gun platforms. Troops were shuffling onto a defensive position on Mount Sciberras, waiting for the relief force to attack. The Ottoman galleys at Marsamxett were being prepared, and men still ashore were busy with last-minute cleanup. Whatever could be carried home was packed up; whatever could be abandoned was abandoned; whatever destroyed, destroyed. Not content with littering the island with their own ash heaps, the departing Muslims also obliterated whatever remaining Maltese houses and fields and goods they could reach. Anything flammable still left at Bormla had been torched the night before, illuminating the sky with an orange parody of daylight. Two thousand Ottoman soldiers oversaw the operation, nursing the vain hope that the outraged Christians would come out to extinguish the fires. None did, but only because Valette forbade it, and by morning those same Muslim soldiers were ordered to the Marsa. The Christians at last dared to creep over the dust and rubble that had once been Birgu to inspect the now-deserted Ottoman trenches. Valette was still not ready to let down his guard. He ordered men into the trenches and to the entrances of the ditches in front of St. Michael and the Post of Castile in case there should be more fight left in the enemy.

  The Gran Soccorso—or at least the officers—was established inside Mdina. Foot soldiers and support were billeted in half-ruined buildings outside Mdina’s walls near the churches of St. Paul and St. Francis. The question then was, what next? Della Corgna took a measured view, which happened to mirror that of Philip, who had gotten him out of jail. This strategy—engage only if necessary, and avoid putting any forces at undue risk—applied to land as much as to sea. Expelling Muslims was their goal, and if this could be done with shadow boxing and the mere threat of force, so much the better.

  It was a reasonable position, but one that appealed more to Della Corgna and the king than it did to the king’s chosen commander, Sande. Philip should have expected as much. Sande and Leyva, both Djerba veterans still chafing from their last encounter with the Turks in general and Turgut’s men in particular, had been waiting for this moment for five years.

  If Della Corgna wanted to dampen their enthusiasm, he did have the weather on his side. The rainstorms that had dogged the relief at sea had given way to a sudden heat wave. From Mdina to Birgu is some nine miles. The soldiers had already seen what a four-mile march in Maltese heat could do. The prospect of another eight to nine miles, all of it under blazing sun, must have given even the most wild-eyed pause. For the moment, it was probably easy to let them wait for Mustapha’s next move. Both factions, the cautious and the bold, agreed to rely on Valette’s opinion and to this end dispatched three men on horseback to Birgu. Tagging along, presumably on foot, were about a hundred soldiers—tourists, essentially—who wanted to see Valette in person, to see the damage that had been done to Birgu, and to find out if there was any wine, “as they had brought none with them.”11

  As to the civilians, they apparently did not care. The enemy was elsewhere, the Great Relief had arrived—the Maltese were already thinking of the future. All that day, the men, women, and children of Birgu left the city to scavenge wood from the Ottoman gun platforms to rebuild their houses.

  In the Ottoman camp, new quarrels arose between the two commanders. Piali, claimed Mustapha, had been slack in his job. Had he not allowed the Small Relief to sneak onto the island? Had he not then allowed the Large Relief to follow? Had he not missed any number of couriers sailing between Don Garcia and Valette? And who was to say what new dangers were even now just over the horizon? It was difficult enough to stage a siege at the best of times, how much more s
o when a general could not be certain of his back?

  Piali Pasha could respond that he had not only kept the fleet intact, but he had also led various land operations as well. And even if the Piccolo Soccorso had landed despite his cordon, the six hundred men had passed through Mustapha’s army like water through a sieve. That the island was still in Christian hands was purely the fault of Mustapha, who failed to achieve a victory on land. Further muddying the waters, a renegade now showed up at the Ottoman camp. This renegade assured Mustapha that the numbers were exaggerated—six thousand Christians, not the nine thousand that had first been reported, and not very good soldiers at that. Mustapha could still field sixteen thousand men.12

  The new intelligence changed everything. There would, Mustapha saw, be a window of opportunity of perhaps four days—more if the weather cooperated—until Don Garcia could return with more men. The matter went to committee. It would be better to stay a little longer. Rhodes had fallen in a winter campaign. Suleiman originally had anticipated a winter campaign, had promised supply ships—they still might arrive at any time. “If,” said Piali, “[the enemy] are as few as they say, then you shall be able to defeat them easily and having done so will still have time to conquer Malta.”13 He should, said Piali, at least confirm with his own eyes how large the force was.

  For Mustapha, there were also personal considerations to be weighed. The Maltese adventure was almost certain to be his final campaign, the one thing he would be remembered for whatever the outcome. Victory over the knights would be a glorious cap to a long career, defeat an undying disgrace. Defeat also could mean the executioner’s silk garrote—a distinguished end for those who disappointed the sultan, but an end nonetheless.