The Great Siege of Malta Read online

  There was one slim reed of hope. With the exception of the first battle in front of Birgu, Mustapha had never met his enemy on the field, not in any significant way. Now that the relief force had arrived, he might just be able to arrange it. If he could defeat fresh, but possibly green, troops on open ground—he had done so elsewhere in the past—then he might still turn the fiasco around. A demoralized Mdina might capitulate; a shattered Birgu, all hope spent, might follow. The knights could retreat into the relatively secure Fort St. Angelo, but without food or water or any hope of another relief, theirs would be a choice of surrender or suicide. Summer was dying, chances were slim that the Europeans would add more soldiers any time soon. The prospect of Mustapha winning just one set battle and then holding the island through the winter months, as Suleiman had ordered, was compelling enough to risk one last throw of the dice.

  By day’s end they had come to a decision. Piali Pasha would shepherd what remained of his fleet north toward St. Paul’s Bay, where they could bring water on board for the return voyage. Mustapha would take what was left of the army and head inland for the last battle. The two forces would rendezvous the following day, and depending on how the day unfolded, they would go, or stay, as God might decide. Ironically, by their very arrival, the Gran Soccorso had given the invaders a powerful incentive to drag the matter out.

  Malta was back in play.

  25

  THE GRAN SOCCORSO AT WAR

  Let no Turk be left alive!

  Don Álvaro de Sande

  On the night of September 10, a Genoese escapee from the Ottoman fleet, a man of good judgment (buen juicio), appeared before Valette, claiming to have been present among the enemy captains and to have heard that they intended to dispatch five or six thousand men for a fresh assault.1 Valette believed him. He sent two knights to Mdina with news of the enemy’s plans; as predicted, arising two hours before dawn and taking advantage of the cool night air, Mustapha’s army was on the march, burning what lay behind them, heading inward and northward, and leaving a trail of torched buildings like so much bioluminescence in the wake of a ship. Valette, still recovering from his leg wound, had been cautious these past few days about letting his guard down. Now that Mustapha was making his move inland and Piali’s ships were streaming out of Grand Harbor, the game had shifted to the relief force. Valette ordered the hundred or so visiting soldiers and many of the siege veterans, Balbi among them, back to Mdina as quickly as possible. As a grand gesture, he also ordered Romegas to the ruins of Fort St. Elmo to raise the flag of the Order, the white cross on a red field.

  Dawn crept over the horizon. Members of the Gran Soccorso, well placed on the heights near Mdina, could see the fires that marked the Ottomans’ path. The men were mustered while the commanders tried to anticipate Mustapha’s next moves. It appeared that the Ottomans were not heading toward Mdina, but across the northern fields of the island. The Christian troops were ordered to stand down.

  Besides their smaller numbers, the Christians still had a problem with their command structure. The top commanders did not get along. Don Garcia’s hopes that Valette might whip them into line were dashed on September 7, when Valette’s emissary first arrived at Mdina. Della Corgna asked him to convince the grand master to name him, Della Corgna, as commander in chief. The emissary then ran into Sande outside the city, who presented to him the commission signed by Don Garcia giving Sande full control. Valette chose to confirm the viceroy’s decision, but it cannot have smoothed relations.2

  Ironically, Della Corgna held not only the same strategic views as Philip, but also the same tactical views as Valette. The grand master considered the size of the opposing forces and for the moment agreed with the passive-defensive strategies devised in the gloomy elegance of El Escorial. The numbers were in Mustapha’s favor. The siege was very much in the balance and would turn on how this next encounter played out. With no chance of further Spanish reinforcements for some days, Valette advised the relief force to exercise restraint in the face of the enemy. He did not, however, order it.

  Before dawn on September 11, Valette had sent Boisbreton to Mdina with word that fifteen thousand Ottomans were heading their way and that the Gran Soccorso should show itself, but they should also “take advantage of the situation at hand, while taking all possible precautions for their safety.”3 The first person whom he could find with any authority in that city was Della Corgna. He told Boisbreton that if they stayed inside Mdina, they could hold off up to forty thousand men, and with no risk to the troops.4 A good answer, but not one Della Corgna as second in command was technically authorized to make. Boisbreton went in search of Don Álvaro, who took a more active reading to the order. He immediately left the city and joined Chiappino Vitelli and three hundred infantrymen in order to get a good look at the army advancing against them.5

  The Ottomans could be seen in the distance, a huge mass in the middle of which there was a single large banner, heading to the high grounds of Naxxar, north of the city. Mustapha seemed to be taking the same view as Della Corgna. Instead of marching to Mdina and sending an exhausted army up a high hill against fresh troops on a blisteringly hot day, he appeared to want his men to rest awhile on a strong position. If he did so, the two sides would be at a stalemate, each on a hilltop staring across an empty game board at the other, each commander waiting for the other to advance a pawn.

  There was also a small hillock near Naxxar. Sande recognized its strategic value and ordered two captains to take the place. Della Corgna, guardian of the king’s strategy of caution, came galloping out of the city toward Sande and Vitelli, protesting that he had not been consulted and demanding to know what they intended to do now, as it seemed to him that the Ottomans were determined to march on the Christian position near Mdina, and that it would be more advantageous to be inside the city walls. There was, he said, “more to the military arts than boldness.”6 (Cirni suggests that their meeting was rather more collegial: “What do we wish to do, gentlemen? The Turks appear to be already resolved to come and find us, and so we should stay in place since it is strongest and we are already securely ensconced at this time, and in waiting we shall be most advantageously placed to overcome them.”)7 Don Álvaro, whose experience with a desperate last stand in the fort at Djerba had turned out badly, took a more aggressive view. He countered that putting the entire army and its artillery on display should be enough to scare them off.

  While the better part of the Christian force remained agitated but more or less restrained near Mdina, their commanders argued over tactics. The small hillock Sande had ordered to be secured was now being approached by Ottomans as well. Vitelli, who had done some reconnaissance on his own and saw what the Ottomans intended, took matters into his own hands. He cried out to his own men: “Captains, soldiers of honor, this is not the time to tarry and think—Let us go forth with spirit and without any doubt we will carry back the hoped for victory.”8 His men were more terse: “Sant’Iago, forward and at them!”9 They started running down the hillside and charged the Ottomans, and twice repelled them. Flush with this success, Vitelli then turned his men toward another hill with a house and windmill on it and pushed the occupying Turks off that as well. A small victory, but visible. It got the soldiers’ blood up and whetted their appetite for more.

  Valette’s account to Don Garcia was straightforward and to the point. “Eight or nine thousand marched from Marsamxett to within sight of Mdina, from which exited our forces, and with much skirmishing, closed with the vanguard and without forethought they broke and chased them as far as the armada, killing all those [whom] they caught up with.10 In his report to King Philip, Sande describes this as a result of his having been warned of an ambush, and of taking it upon himself to seize the hill as “it seemed to me to be a good thing to close with the enemy before he embarked.”11 Sande was, in this reading, in full control at all times, but goes on to suggest that although the Italian troops might well have obeyed (suggesting Italian cowardice, perhaps), the
Spanish troops were too hot-blooded. (It should be remembered that Spain had completed the Reconquista in 1492, just within living memory.) His men, soldiers who had idled for weeks on the wharves of Messina with no distractions other than to imagine what the infidel was doing over the horizon, who had endured the storms at sea and the final march across the hot island, could now see the smoke rising from Bormla and Senglea; they could see every trace of petty vandalism the Turks had left behind on their final march; they could see the enemy troops responsible for these outrages. And they could see that the Turks had clearly been bested at Torre del Falca. Talk of prudence and caution was no good to them. These were violent men with a serious grudge and a yen for Ottoman blood and wealth. They wanted a fight, the more one-sided the better.

  The Christian line became ever more skittish, like racehorses, heads shaking, nostrils flaring, and impatient for the gate to drop. Finally, they could stand it no longer. The Spanish troops under Sande broke free of their line and rushed down at the Ottoman soldiers, shouting, “Sant’Iago, vittoria, vittoria!”12 Della Corgna gave up and joined in the charge.

  The final battle had begun.

  Ottoman accounts give Mustapha some credit: “After the dawn had turned to midday, he collected the troops and arranged them for combat; the vile infidels, by that courageous act, were stricken with fear and had turned already to escape, when an infidel approached a coward in the Musulman army and struck him and that man began to raise laments.”13

  After this, the fight began to go against the Ottomans. Christian writers claim that Mustapha turned to the man who had promised him that the relief force was trivial and said, “Traitor! Are these the few pathetic and poorly led soldiers you promised me?”14 Without waiting for an answer, he pulled out his scimitar and killed the man on the spot.

  But if the Christians were expecting the Ottomans to cut and run, they underestimated the enemy. Seeing the Christian soldiers pouring down the hillside and even flanking the Ottoman left, the Ottomans, whether by instinct or under orders, rapidly formed a defensive position around the Torre de Falca, north of Mdina. From this superior position they were able to rain fire down on the enemy, and it was around this position that the battle coalesced. The first crew of Ottomans soon were joined by a second wave of two thousand men under Mustapha and Uludj Ali.15 Although the Christians were still relatively few at the front and had no standards to rally around, their fury began to take its toll. Slowly, surely, Chiappino Vitelli and his Tuscan troops halted the Muslim advance and began to force it back.

  Mustapha saw that his van had been stopped. He attempted to gather his men and position arquebusiers to best advantage, but it was clear that he was in retreat. With only a handful of Janissaries and a larger number of his hastily promoted auxiliaries against fresh troops, he was forced to execute that most difficult of military procedures, the disciplined withdrawal while under fire. He did so in heat that Balbi records as being the worst that they had ever experienced during the siege. Some Christian soldiers in heavy armor, padded with leather or heavy cotton, sweating vital fluids, collapsed from heat prostration. Four died of sunstroke.

  As the day wore on, discipline among the troops, not the best to begin with, ebbed further. Valette in his brief account to the German knight Georg von Hohenheim stresses that these men were “inspired by Christian piety alone,” sola Christiana pietate commoti.16 Clearly he knew better. For all their devotion and blood lust—and there was plenty of both—these soldiers could see a potential windfall in Ottoman gold and silver in danger of slipping away. Spanish troops, thrifty men, stopped fighting long enough to examine the Muslim casualties in case there should be anything worth stealing. The uneven advance helped the remaining Janissaries, the genuine ones, in drawing up a series of defensive lines to hold the Spanish long enough for the next phase of the retreat.

  The battle became a jumble of events—a Spanish renegade, engaging some private vendetta, shouted from a distance, “Where’s Don Álvaro? Take this arrow I’m sending over to salute you with!”17 The anonymous missile missed its intended target but struck the commander’s horse. Don Álvaro appears to have found the whole thing exhilarating. Turning to his colleague, he called out: “More value here, Señor Ascanio, than back in the fort!”18 Humiliating enough to be second-guessed, Della Corgna was soon thereafter struck in the face by a stone.

  Throughout it all, Mustapha kept his head, directing each section as was needed. Here he showed coolness under fire that, if it did not save the day, at least saved a good number of Muslim lives. Nothing seemed to faze him. His horse was shot out from beneath him. A nameless lieutenant immediately gave up his own mount to the commander. Again and again, Mustapha and Uludj Ali placed their best men at various strategic points to cover the retreat.

  Sande writes of a hillock near St. Paul’s Bay that aroused his suspicion, enough for him to send four hundred arquebusiers to investigate. They found and drove off five or six hundred of the enemy and “scuttled over four thousand water barrels”—water intended for the Muslims’ long journey home, though it would seem unlikely that Mustapha’s soldiers would have had time to load them.19

  The distance between the end of the Turkish line and the Spanish infantry and Maltese militia narrowed. The cavalry only got closer. Mustapha drew up a force of arquebusiers to fire a concerted volley into the Christian horse, and it had its intended effect. Sande was still at the head of this cavalry column, pushing forward, when the volley rang out. He was thrown from his mount (a thing he neglects to mention in his own official report), but survived and managed to re-form his line and again attack the Ottoman ranks. This time Hassan Pasha of Algiers had been given the job of holding the attackers off. Having established his men in their positions, the bey waited for the Christian cavalry to charge, and when they did, he ordered a second volley. Lead shot tore into men and horses. The animals screamed and fell, their riders did the same, and the charge temporarily staggered back. By day’s end, most of Sande’s fifty horses lay dead on the ground, victims either of enemy action or of excessive heat.20 Mustapha himself was struck twice by gunfire, and eventually, the Ottomans just cracked.21 “Then, while the vanguard of the base infidels presented itself, the Muslim soldiers withdrew from the battle and the serdar was abandoned. The base infidels, having seen that the Ottoman army had unraveled, advanced to attack.”22

  At the shores of St. Paul’s Bay, northeast of the fighting, Piali and his galleys lay waiting to learn the outcome of Mustapha’s work. The sounds of battle, inconclusive and chaotic, came first. That the volume grew louder was a bad sign. Then the first of the retreating Muslims came trickling down to the shore and safety. Piali ordered longboats out to carry the soldiers from the beaches to the galleys. He also had his cannons loaded to discourage any Christians who might chase his colleagues to the water’s edge.23

  By now the Christian infantry had caught up to the remnants of Sande’s cavalry and were overrunning Hassan’s soldiers, eager to get a piece of the final action. The battle line had come within shooting range of Piali’s ships, and Ottoman gunners began to fire onto the shore. The last fighting was touched with the madness that takes over when a battle becomes futile. Men fired guns where they could, blades rang against blades, and once their guns were spent and blades broken, they grabbed at anything that might serve as a weapon.

  As the fight approached St. Paul’s Bay, all order fell apart. In a scene he had witnessed from the other side at Djerba, Piali Pasha saw an unexpected crush of desperate men who threw themselves into the water, neck deep, rather than wait for lifeboats. “Among those who touched the edge of the sea only those who had the strength to reach the ships were saved.”24 The bravest of the Spanish were right on their heels, pushing the fight to the edge of the water and even, it is said, into it, some reaching as far as the enemy galleys themselves.25 In so doing they turned the water of St. Paul’s Bay pink with blood.

  Piali ordered the ships to rush the beaches and pull men directl
y on board. To the extent they could, the mounted guns on these ships also helped cover the final withdrawal, while just beyond the mouth of the bay, warships waited, on guard against a Christian fleet that might appear at any moment. Don Álvaro and Della Corgna, seeing the danger, called off the attack, with the intention of hauling Chiappino Vitelli’s fourteen artillery pieces to the bay to finish the job the next day.26

  The battle by the shore had lasted an hour or so; the numbers of living dwindled as the surviving Ottoman troops reached the safety of their boats or died in the process. The decrescendo of a dying battle gave way to the drawn-out groans and sudden cries of the injured, the arguing of soldiers over loot, the gasping and panting of the exhausted, and finally to the normal sounds of a late summer day on the seaside, the occasional cry of gulls, the repetitive susurrus of water lapping on shore. The victors could attend to their spoils, the defeated, to their wounds. Twenty-five Christians, according to Sande’s report, had been killed. Of the Turks, better than fifteen hundred.27 The disparity was attributable, we can guess, to the fact that Mustapha was reduced to using exhausted, dispirited, untrained auxiliaries against an influx of fresh, eager, drilled professionals.

  The Muslim boats lingered just offshore until nightfall, perhaps stunned, perhaps defiant, perhaps trying to best settle the injured and dying preparatory to leaving, perhaps wondering if Mustapha’s remaining hale troops had one last fight within them. The answer to the last question was clearly no. “Having lost many of their oarsmen through deprivations, fatigue and scarcity of necessities, with the armaments of the galleys having been used up in the war to make bridges and war machines against the forts, it became necessary that those galleys better equipped should tow many vessels.”28 After sundown, the wind shifted and the armada departed, Piali’s fleet eastward to Constantinople, the corsairs to their several homes to the west and south.29