The Great Siege of Malta Read online

  The army, however, stayed behind. Suleiman, whether from stubbornness, or faith in his stars, or because he thought his still-young reputation could not withstand a loss, called up yet more reinforcements from the mainland, and his guns continued to pound the walls, slowly tearing the breaches wider.

  November passed. By now, half of the original defenders were either dead and buried, or maimed and useless. Cool weather turned cold, and snow fell on the distant mountains. Despair infected the survivors much as typhus had the Ottomans. Food other than bread and water had all but disappeared. Spies and fifth columnists were found sending messages to the enemy wrapped around arrows; to discourage such behaviors, those caught (including, possibly unfairly, Andreas d’Amaral, grand prior of Castile, L’Isle-Adam’s chief rival for power) were quickly tortured and executed.13

  On December 1, Suleiman sent his first call for surrender. L’Isle-Adam rejected it out of hand. An eyewitness, Sir Nicholas Roberts, wrote that the knights were “determyned to dye upon them in the feld rather than be put upon the stakese; for we doubted [Suleiman] would give us our lyves, considering ther wer slain so many of his men.”14 Others, notably the civilians and clerics who had family in Rhodes, took a longer view and were willing to gamble on Suleiman’s good faith. No longer shy in their opinion, they insisted on being heard. Whatever the knights might decide, they, the citizens of Rhodes, were prepared to make a separate peace.

  The terms had changed little from Suleiman’s original offer before the siege: “You can stay or leave, as you will.”15 Those who chose to leave might do so unmolested, and with their possessions. Those who chose to stay might keep their faith for a full five years without penalty, after which time they could convert to Islam or pay the customary tax owed by the infidel. No property would be taken, no churches would be seized, and new ones might even be built. There was a further condition. The Knights of St. John would have to leave. They might take their relics and other goods, even their weapons, but they were no longer welcome on Rhodes, nor must they trouble Muslims again. It was a bitter cup that L’Isle-Adam had no choice but to accept.

  A few days of equivocating, of trying to put off the inevitable, served only to anger the sultan. According to the French chronicler Bourbon, the sultan had his guards take two Christian soldiers and cut off “their noses, their fingers and their ears and gave them a letter to carry to the Grand Master,” warning him what lay in store if he delayed any longer.16 The compact was made; bureaucrats had composed, translated, and copied the official texts of surrender, a dry legal record of the bloody defeat. Now, for form’s sake, there had to be a ritual humiliation. L’Isle-Adam was invited to present himself to the Great Sultan, then made to stand outside in the cold for some hours—time enough to appreciate his reduced condition, time enough to ponder the shattered wreck of a stone city behind him, time to reflect on the fact that this defeat would be his legacy.

  The flap to the red tent was raised and L’Isle-Adam entered the close, muffled space, lit by brass lamps. Before him, alone, was the man heretofore separated from him by two armies and the walls of Rhodes: Suleiman, tall, wiry, with a delicate complexion, seated on a low-lying octagonal throne of gold.17 L’Isle-Adam approached the victorious monarch, kneeled, and kissed the soft extended hand of his enemy. According to the Ottoman historian Hafiz, the two men gazed at each other in silence for a time, after which Suleiman praised the grand master for his intrepidity and invited him to convert to Islam. The sultan offered high offices and comforts suitable to a man of L’Isle-Adam’s worth. The grand master thanked him but declined, noting that to accept would necessarily degrade his own integrity, the very thing Suleiman professed to prize in him.18 They went on to discuss the practical matters of the knights’ coming departure.

  Organizing the knights’ departure from Rhodes would take a few days, and there was to be no disturbing the emigrants at this time. A few overly ebullient Ottoman soldiers did try to filch civilian property; they were reported, tried in front of the sultan, and executed. The same discipline did not extend to the trappings of religion. The Ottoman chronicler Mustapha Gelal-Zade wrote that, despite Suleiman’s promises regarding freedom of conscience, “The victorious soldiers entering the city filled the town with cries of ‘Allah, Allah,’ struck down idols and removed signs of error in all the churches and filthy temples.”19 He makes no mention of any punishment for such behavior. Martinengo was bundled up and smuggled out of Rhodes on December 20—Suleiman was always on the lookout for talent, and L’Isle-Adam thought it prudent to remove any temptation.

  On December 31, the knights’ last full day on Rhodes, Suleiman mounted a white horse and, without benefit of personal aides or the protection of bodyguards, rode through the city gates, past the shattered defense work and half-starved locals, to visit the grand master one last time. The sultan presented him with a richly embroidered robe, and the two commanders again spent some hours together in talk, the record of which, unfortunately, is lost to history.

  Meanwhile, the surviving knights had buried their dead, bundled their wounded, and collected their belongings. On the first day of 1523, the remaining members of the Order boarded their galleys, lifted their oars, and slowly headed out of the choppy winter seas south to the island of Crete on the first leg of a journey into an unknowable future. Some of the native Rhodians, whether from fear of uncertainty, or devotion to the order, or distrust of the Ottomans, followed suit. As the grand master returned to his own people, Suleiman watched the departing graybeard and remarked to an underling, “It saddens me to see such an old man driven from his home.”20

  Suleiman would spend the next forty years pressing his enemies in Persia and in Europe, reforming the laws inside his empire, and presiding over the greatest flowering of Ottoman civilization. He would be referred to in Western records as Gran Signore, Gran Turco, or even, almost affectionately, Signor Turco.

  For the moment, however, he had established his military reputation and fulfilled his father’s hopes. He had defeated the last of the crusading knights and had sent them off, honorably, to trouble Islam no more.

  He was twenty-eight years old.

  He would live to regret the decision.

  2

  THE ROAD TO MALTA, 1522–1530

  We have been fighting among ourselves without end in what are worse than civil wars over trivia, while the Empire of the Turks, or, more aptly, their land grab, has expanded immensely.

  Erasmus, Utilissimam Consultatio de Bello Turcis Inferendo

  Releasing the surviving knights into the Mediterranean in January was not as kindly a gesture as it might appear. Anything could happen on a winter sea. The Muslim slaves who normally rowed for the Order had been freed by the victorious Ottomans, leaving the five thousand or so knights and a smaller number of Rhodiot exiles to somehow get the Order’s vessels across gray, choppy water to Crete. The long ships twisted and pitched on the water, rose up and crashed down, and the terrified passengers tossed worldly goods overboard to placate the storm. The gesture may have saved their lives, but left them destitute.

  A few days later the fleet staggered into Heraklion. Whatever their private feelings—and some had been cheered by stories of Martinengo’s exploits—the Venetians had been serenely dispassionate during the siege, and although the locals now clucked sympathetically, their masters were already drafting a letter of congratulations to the sultan on this latest victory.1 It was an awkward situation all around, and L’Isle-Adam stayed just long enough to refit the fleet and head west, plagued by rough weather and wearied with melancholy. Some of the civilian refugees chose to remain here, some to head to Cyprus, some to accompany the Order wherever it might go.

  The ships made a brief stop at Messina, where, as if there were nothing else that could go wrong, plague now broke out in the fleet. The governor of Messina ordered them to remove to the remote bay of Baiae until further notice. It was there, a month later, that they were instructed to come to Rome, just in time to fin
d that Pope Hadrian was dying.2 The knights’ first official task back in Rome was to stand guard while the conclave of cardinals elected a successor. By good fortune, the new pope, Clement VII, had once been a member of the Order himself. While he was full of sympathy and praise, he had no immediate use for them. He did arrange lodging in a convent at Viterbo, just outside Rome, a considerable comedown from the fortress of Rhodes. What might be a suitable substitute? The island of Elba was suggested, as was Cythera, just off the Peloponnese peninsula, and Crete. The first was the possession of the Lord of Piombino, who was unlikely to sell, the latter two the possessions of Venice, who certainly would not sell, not as long as they wanted good relations with the Ottomans. Eventually, someone suggested the island of Malta.

  Malta was in the gift of Charles V, Holy Roman emperor and a strong believer in the knights and their mission. L’Isle-Adam, still shaken by their experience at Rhodes, somewhat impulsively offered Charles one hundred thousand ducats for the privilege of settling in Malta, or failing that, Brindisi.3 Charles wrote back that he was more than happy to have the knights take charge of Malta, so long as they took Tripoli as well and rendered fealty to him rather than to the pope. As a pan-European Christian force, they could not accept the terms. They could, however, at least take a look at the place, pending a more equitable deal.

  L’Isle-Adam sent eight men to inspect Malta and see if it might be suitable. However anxious he may have been for a stable home, L’Isle-Adam was not going to grab the first offer that came his way. His commissioners arrived at Malta in August of 1524. Malta in high summer is an inferno and does not set off the island’s best features. No surprise then that the opinion of the eight men about the island was not good. The island’s defenses, they said, were weak, the soil poor, resources few, well water scarce and brackish, and the people targets of frequent sea raids.

  A gloomy assessment, and fair enough, but the knights’ contingent was comparing the place to green and pleasant Rhodes. This simply may have been the technique of a sharp buyer denigrating the product before settling on a price. A more balanced report is found in Jean Quintin d’Autun’s 1536 book, A Description of the Island of Malta. D’Autun described Malta as a rocky island home to some twelve thousand impoverished natives he considered more or less Sicilians with an admixture of North African: short, stocky, with speech that was more Arab than Latin. He acknowledged the brutal African heat in summer, but wrote that the climate in general is healthy.4 He praises the quality of what the natives, mostly peasant farmers, could coax from the thin soil—barley, olives, vines, figs, cumin, and cotton, the last two being the island’s chief exports—but regrets the quantity, and notes that Malta is fortunate to be situated so close to “most fertile” Sicily, without whose grains they would die of hunger.5 As a proper Frenchman, he also notes that the women are “not at all bad looking” (feminae non ignobili forma).6

  To anyone lucky enough to hold it, Malta has been, like Guam or Midway or Diego Garcia, a vital military base at the center of contested waters, bang center between Sicily and North Africa, halfway again between Gibraltar and Constantinople. It has been held over the centuries by neolithic people, Phoenicians, Romans, Arabs, Normans, and most recently by Spain as an adjunct to her holdings in Sicily. The natives at that time were divided between the aristocracy, generally off-islanders from Sicily who huddled in the capital city, Mdina, located at the center of the island, and men of humbler station—fishermen, traders, dilettante pirates—who lived a hardscrabble life by the magnificent, sheltered, deepwater harbor facing the east. Less populated is the island’s west coast, a place of high cliffs, difficult to scale. The island has been a staging point since antiquity for invasions into Sicily or North Africa, while itself being, as a French visitor in 1550 described it, “by artifice and by nature all but unconquerable.”7

  The emperor was happy enough to lease Malta, but he also wanted the Order to defend Tripoli. This city, another of Charles’s possessions, was some 190 miles south of Malta, and the two were coupled in his mind. Since 1510 Tripoli was the easternmost of the several small Spanish holdings that impertinently dotted North Africa’s Barbary Coast, the lands between Egypt and Morocco that since their coming into Islam had divided into three dynastic holdings: the Hafsid, the Zayanid, and the Wattasid. Tripoli was strategically important in defending the western Mediterranean. On the plus side, its air was “very salubrious and not subject to any of the bad contagions.”8 The harbor could accommodate carrack-sized merchant ships—useful since the locals, Muslim and at times hostile, could not be counted on for supplies.

  On the down side was just about every thing else. As on Malta, well water was scarce and brackish. Reliable—that is to say, Christian—food supplies were no closer than Sicily—fifty nautical miles away by sea. Houses and other buildings were ramshackle at best. The city walls, many unstable, would need to be rebuilt from their foundations. Bringing the place up to standard would take the kind of time and money the Order did not have. It was not an enticing offer, and L’Isle-Adam unsurprisingly put it on the back burner. In the meantime, however, the pope did have a job for L’Isle-Adam. The grand master was to put aside his war uniform and become a diplomat. The charge was not rapprochement with the enemies of Christendom, that is to say, Islam, but between the two most powerful Catholic kings of Europe, Charles V of Spain and Francis I of France.

  Charles V, son of Philip the Fair and Joanna the Mad, was born with the century in Ghent, and royal titles dropped into his wagon like overripe fruit in an October orchard. At six he was duke of Burgundy, at sixteen, king of Spain; in the fullness of time, he would also be king of Sicily, Naples, Jerusalem, the Balearics, the Canaries, and the Indies; archduke of Austria; duke of Brabant, Styria, Carinthia, Carniola, Luxembourg, Limberg, Athens, and Patras; count of Habsburg, Flanders, and Tyrol; count palatine of Burgundy, Hainaut, Pfirt, and Roussillon; landgrave of Alsace; count of Swabia; lord of Asia and Africa, Holland, and the Holy Roman Empire. His holdings in the Americas and the Philippines, as well as the various strongholds on the North African coast, were almost superfluous.

  Late portraits of Charles—Titian did several—show a face that was long, ugly, intelligent, self-aware, and intermittently amused. These older pictures stand in stark contrast to an earlier woodcut of the younger man, beardless, even foolish looking, with his gaping mouth and unnaturally protuberant jaw. The impression was magnified in person as he stuttered, spraying spittle on captive audiences, calling to mind descriptions of the Roman Emperor Claudius. As with Claudius, the appearance of simplemindedness was misleading, but one he seems to have been in no great hurry to dispel. He knew his capabilities, and in time so did others. His virtues were a very public loyalty, dedication, and piety.

  The same could not be said of the king of France. While Charles wore plain black, Francis I flaunted highly colored brocades. A charming, vain, and fundamentally shallow man, Francis poured out fabulous sums on art and artists (Leonardo da Vinci died while working in his court), on books, and on some of the finest châteaux in France. It was unfortunate that he should live in such turbulent times.

  When Charles came to the Spanish throne in 1514, the twenty-year-old Francis had been king of France for a year. Charles was cordial at their first meeting, and Francis could well have imagined that the drooling, slack-jawed Charles might look up to the dashing king of France. Certainly Charles, whose first language was French, acted with a cheerful respect and listened to everything the older king had to say. They might have strolled or ambled along side by side in harmony except for one thing—both men wanted to be Holy Roman emperor.

  The title was in the gift of seven electors, all German, and they did not confer it lightly. From the year 800, when Charlemagne was crowned, until 1806, the Holy Roman emperor was secular head of the church, defender of the faith, and the pope’s generalissimo. There was no money in the title, but it carried significant moral authority. The Holy Roman emperor was, in a sense, the first among e
quals of Europe’s kings, though in practice he was only as strong as his army and his alliances. Francis wanted the title and felt he deserved it. Certainly he had paid enough for it. Honoring custom, Francis handed out four hundred thousand gold pieces to seal the deal.9 Charles, whose grandfather Maximilian I had held the position, handed out more. In 1519 the title went to Charles.

  Francis sought consolation in 1524 by invading Italy and enforcing a dubious claim to Milan. It was an act of vanity that played to his taste for war and intrigue, and it was only the most fleeting of victories. He succeeded in taking the city but was himself captured by Spanish forces while laying siege to the imperial stronghold in Pavia. The French king was settled into a soft captivity in Madrid, while Charles pondered what to do with him. Charles, whatever his faults, was not by nature vindictive. He told the Venetian ambassador, a stickler for details like all Venetian ambassadors, that he hoped the victory would pave the way for a unified Christendom that could battle Islam.10 Italian and Vatican officials, skeptics by nature, didn’t believe this for a minute.11 Pope Clement was increasingly fretful that Charles, ruler of Naples and Sicily, was already too much at home in Italy, an opinion shared in Venice, Florence, and other city republics farther north.