The Great Siege of Malta Read online

  Which is exactly what happened. A fresh storm at sea caused much of the fleet to sink with stores and hands on board. Christian soldiers who made it ashore were forced to spend the night without tents, in deep mud under cold rain, shivering and unable to rest. By morning, Muslim troops exited the city and attacked with the benefit of cannon and dry powder. “We were,” wrote the French knight Nicolas Durand de Villegaignon drily, “greater in number and equal in spirit, but they were superior by far in placement and type of arms.”26

  Doria managed to get word to shore that he could anchor some miles up the coast and evacuate the Christian forces. Charles ordered a retreat. The long column, its rear guard defended by the Knights of St. John, was dogged by Berber horsemen who picked off stragglers and retreated at the sign of any serious resistance. At the rendezvous it was clear that there would not be enough space for everyone. Those left behind would soon glut the slave markets of Algiers. (Arab sources claim that thirteen hundred women and children were left behind—“not one escaped”—which, if true, leaves open the question of why they were there in the first place.)27

  The cost of reclaiming the lands of Christendom, which had seemed so modest ten years before, was proving high indeed. If there was any comfort for Charles at all, it was in the fact that Suleiman, beguiled by his own roving mariners, was paying at least as stiff a price as well. From here on out, the cost would only rise.

  4

  WAR AT SEA, 1541–1550

  Turgut, who was worth an army.

  Selaniki

  It is only good sense to kick an enemy while he is down. Just one year after Charles’s catastrophic failure in Algiers, war broke out between Spain and France, which lead Francis to send envoys to Suleiman proposing (again) a joint Franco-Ottoman invasion of Italy. He suggested that in spring of 1543, the French armies would cross the Alps into Italy while Suleiman’s men invaded Hungary from the south, and Khairedihn with French help attacked Italy by sea. A bold plan, and it might have worked had it not involved Francis.

  The Ottomans certainly did their part. On land, Suleiman drove his forces up the Danube and (with French help) captured large chunks of Hungary. At sea, Khairedihn, accompanied by France’s ambassador to Constantinople, sacked Reggio, ravaged the coast of Naples, and even laid anchor at the mouth of the Tiber, appearing to threaten Rome itself. In fact, he left the city alone, since the pope was at the time an ally of France. He also scrupulously avoided raiding other port cities friendly to France, and made sure to pay for any provisions he might require of them.1 He had, moreover, no need to snatch slaves to man the oars; Italian volunteers (buonevoglie) all along the western coast readily signed on to be Barbary corsairs, which can only have further unnerved the peninsula’s Christian rulers.2 Doria, hopelessly outnumbered by the 148 Muslim vessels, remained holed up in Genoa.

  The fleet arrived on July 20, 1543, at Marseilles, where the Duc d’Enghien, the twenty-four-year-old governor and army commander, was surprisingly unprepared for their Ottoman guests. Perhaps he never imagined that the corsair actually would show up. The duke did what he could, however, showing them every honor, neglecting not “even so much as a hair.”3 Here as elsewhere, all enemies of Charles seemed fascinated by Khairedihn. François Rabelais possessed an oil portrait of him, later the basis for a widely distributed etching; the Venetian poet, pornographer, and blackmailer Pietro Aretino sent him admiring letters. Khairedihn’s decades of raiding the Christian coast and seizing Christian shipping served to raise his stature and were balanced at least in part by his respect for (and failure to sack) the odd Christian cloister.

  None of which answered the question of what d’Enghien was supposed to do with this powerful resource. Only after prodding by the duke and some weeks of vacillating did Francis, busy elsewhere in his kingdom, declare that the combined Ottoman and French forces should attack Nice, a city under Charles’s ally the Duke of Savoy. Together, Christians and Muslims prised open the lower town, which the French sacked; the Ottomans restrained themselves.4 The upper city held out, and by early September, all forces withdrew on rumors that Charles was heading their way. So ended the Ottoman participation in Francis’s latest war, which would continue for four more years, bankrupt France, and achieve none of the king’s territorial ambitions in northern Italy. Suleiman would cut his losses, staying well out of things while the Christian powers of Europe continued to fight one another.

  In the meantime, the autumn of 1543 was closing in and Khairedihn, concerned for the safety of his ships, wanted to overwinter in the area. This was fine with France. Officials evacuated a good deal of Toulon and allowed the Ottoman fleet to stay there at France’s expense. (Francis gave the locals immunity from taxes for ten years to vacate the city.)5 City houses, suburban houses, and tents sheltered the thirty thousand Muslim soldiers and sailors who “were installed as in a faubourg of Constantinople, where they lived according to their customs.”6 They also paid for their food. The locals rejoiced with this large and unexpected windfall, and even Charles’s Habsburg ally Genoa shipped off superfluous grain, rationalizing this with the observation that the admiral could easily just steal the foodstuff. Certainly the official view from Toulon was that the fleet’s presence was something of a godsend. After the sack of Rome, all Europe knew what Charles’s army was capable of. As late as 1789, the town hall at Toulon held a mural of Khairedihn’s fleet in Toulon harbor with the quatrain:

  This fleet of fraternal oarsmen

  Whom tail winds favor so sweetly

  It’s Barbarossa and his army

  Who come to succor us all.7

  Any affection was not reciprocated. Khairedihn sailed off the following spring, plundering the Italian coast, disgusted that he and Suleiman’s French allies had managed to accomplish nothing more than the single abortive raid on Nice; worse, they now reneged on a promised joint attack on Tunis and would not help him to take on Genoa.8 Still, even if he could not take the city, his fleet could intimidate the citizens, and he made a point of stopping by for a bit of unfinished business. Three years earlier, Andrea Doria’s nephew Giannettino had captured Khairedihn’s finest lieutenant, Turgut Reis, in Corsica’s Girolata bay. Khairedihn wanted him back. In the end, it cost Khairedihn thirty-five hundred ducats—money well spent, as it would later turn out.9

  This voyage was to prove the old corsair’s last. He retired to his house overlooking the Golden Horn, honored for his piety and his achievements. For over forty years he had been a thorn in the side of Spanish ambitions and a terror to Christian inhabitants of the western Mediterranean. Rumors of his presence could move entire armies.10 The records of his annual voyages in search of ships to seize or towns to sack make for repetitive and depressing reading. These and the greater highlights of his (and his brother’s) successes over the years—taking Algiers, taking Tunis, besting the combined Christian fleet at Preveza, seizing papal galleys and treasure ships—all inspired an entire generation of adventurers who followed him and formed the solid foundation of the Barbary corsairs, who would trouble the Mediterranean and beyond for the next three hundred years. In 1546 Turkish chronicles recorded, “The king of the sea is dead,” after a bout of digestive troubles (he was a large man) and a quick fever.11

  It was stunning news for the empire, and as befits such a man as Khairedihn, rumors spread that he had not really died, that four or five hours after his entombment, he was seen wandering about the neighboring streets. His rest was assured by a Greek magus who instructed that a dead black dog be laid at his side within the tomb. Whatever the truth of the matter, he remains to this day in Galata on the shores of the Bosphorus. For sailors, men naturally given to talismans and traditions, his tomb became a necessary place to visit prior to any voyage away from the Grand Porte. As Christians would invoke the Blessed Virgin before setting out on the waters, Ottoman captains would pay respects to the King of the Sea.

  In the twelve years since 1531, the Order’s post at Tripoli, unwanted from day one, had deteriorat
ed. The castle keep was a square Byzantine relic dating from before 645, when the Arabs took over the city, marginally improved by the Spanish after they took the city in 1510. Even then the city walls were only two-and-half meters high and by no means thick. Bringing the defense works up to modern standards would cost, the knights calculated, twenty-five thousand scudi, far beyond their means.12 Charles was asked for help but was unable to provide it, leaving the Order to make do as best as possible. With little attention from Madrid or from Malta, the string of governors at Tripoli allowed the place to go downhill. The hired soldiers and even the knights gave in to indolence. Bored, idle, and interested only in the next relief ship, they sold or gambled away their weapons, and even their horses, to anyone who would pay. Professionally, Tripoli had become a place for a knight to mark time, endure, and get out of as soon as possible.

  That all changed in 1546 when the Order gave command of Tripoli to Jean Parisot de Valette.

  It is worth examining this man in some detail. He would in time become the hero of the great siege of Malta, yet his career until that point was marked at every turn by failures, some catastrophic, and sheer bad luck, none of which seem to have retarded his professional rise.

  Valette was born in 1494, a son of an old and noble Gascon family, and like his fictional Gascon counterpart Cyrano de Bergerac, imbued with both deep sentiment and a sudden temper. His ancestors had fought with St. Louis in the Holy Lands, and at home against the Albigensian heretics. Several had been members of the Order before him, and Jean, at age twenty, joined the langue of Provence. He was never to return home again. The soldier and historian Brantôme, who knew him personally, said of Valette: “Over and above his bravery and ability he was a most handsome person—tall and well-built, of a goodly appearance and fine manners.”13 Others say he was more melancholic than cheerful.14 He was dedicated, intense, hard, and with a clear instinct for command, respected more than liked—a man useful in war. In times of peace, some of his attributes proved more a liability. He had a temper, and losing it had twice landed him in prison—the first time for beating a slave nearly to death in a burst of what Giacomo Bosio, the Italian chronicler of the Order, called “youthful excess” (giovenile eccesso). He was forty-three at the time.15 The second time, again for assault, he served six months and apparently was shriven. A year later, in 1557, he would be elected grand master of the Order.

  He served at Rhodes, after which his name is absent from the records until 1534, when he is listed as one of four knights ordered to sail with Andrea Doria. A few years later he helped capture an enemy galley that was then given to him to command. Again, youthful excess got the better of him. Having spotted the double masts and sixteen-oar banks of a Muslim galliot and eager to prove himself, he ordered the helmsman to bring the Order’s galley forward. Under the eyes of the rest of the squadron, his oarsmen pulled through a heavy swell toward the enemy. Valette stood at the bow, upright, steady, determined. When the vessels came close, the enemy let loose a volley of arquebus fire. Valette’s response should have been to fire his own volley, grapple the ship, and then board her. Instead, his ship’s metal-covered beak, a standard-issue ramming device below the waterline on all galleys dating back to ancient Greece, gored the enemy galliot below the waterline. His oarsmen backrowed, and as the beak withdrew from the enemy’s hull, water gushed in. Within minutes the Muslim ship had sunk.

  Had Valette been reckless, or had he been the victim of an unlucky swell? Whatever his bravery and dash, he had lost a potential prize—worse, he had lost the oarsmen, probably Christian slaves, shackled to the sinking hulk. Seventeen of the wreck’s crew were hauled out of the sea and informed Valette that that ship had belonged to the corsair Cacciadiablo, a longtime enemy of the knights. Losing this notable prize seems not to have dampened Valette’s career. After serving at Tunis, he was named General of the Galleys in 1537.

  He did not get off so easily the next time. While patrolling off the North African coast in 1541, he spotted two galliots and headed forward to engage them. A mistake. His ship was edged into shallow water; he was himself badly wounded and fell unconscious. He awoke to find himself a prisoner of the corsair Kust Ali Abdul Rahman, and for the next two years he languished in the slave quarters at Djerba. (More dramatic chroniclers suggest he was put to the rowing bench.) It was then that he learned the Turkish and Arabic which supplemented his already fluent French, Greek, Italian, Spanish, and Latin. Oddly, Kust Ali made no attempt to ransom his prisoner, though he would have received a good price. The Order believed that Valette was dead. Whatever the reasoning, the corsair did get fair value in the end. In 1543 he exchanged Valette for his own father.16

  Valette was taken to Tripoli for recuperation and was appalled at what he saw. He and some like-minded comrades wrote to Charles and the council. The fort, he said, could not be expected to survive any serious attack. If Charles, or Grand Master D’Homedes, was not willing to do something about the place and soon, then the post should be abandoned, to eliminate the cost of maintaining it, and destroyed, to deny any remaining utility to corsairs. Charles made polite noise, but did nothing. In 1546 Valette, whether as reward or punishment or as a test, or possibly as a combination of all three, was ordered to turn Tripoli around.

  And so he did. Immediately on taking office, he expelled the city’s indigent and demanded loyalty oaths from established citizens. He began to rebuild the defense works, making them capable of absorbing the impact of modern cannon.17 He cultivated friendships with local sheiks who had no love for the Ottomans. He reorganized the military structure, bringing in new weapons for the garrison and destroying the old. Of the foot soldiers who could not account for their missing weapons, he punished the worst offenders, pardoned the less guilty, and then announced a training regimen worthy of Christian soldiers. As his men began to regain their spirit, Valette went further—he planned a raid.

  The target was the ships in the port city of Tagiura, nine miles down the coast and a haven for followers of Khairedihn. Valette’s plan required coordinated action by land and sea, at night. Cavalry under the knight Marsile were to approach the city walls and make a display of shouts and gunshots. While the city was distracted on its landward side, two of the Order’s vessels would enter the harbor and torch every ship they could reach. Once the cavalry was alerted by the glow of burning ships, they would know that the raid was successful and head home immediately.

  The horsemen and sailors set off into the darkness. The night passed. The ships, their mission accomplished, returned just before daylight. The cavalry did not. Dawn broke, the sun glanced over the horizon, then began its morning ascent.

  Some four hours later, dust clouds appeared in the direction of Tagiura, followed by the sounds of charging horses, gunfire, and eventually Arab battle cries. Marsiles’s men were returning with enemy cavalry in hot pursuit. Valette ordered the artillery to prepare scattershot, then deployed his remaining men outside the gates to form a line against the oncoming charge. Once his own men were out of harm’s way, he ordered the guns fired. Between the volley of arquebus fire and cannon shot, they were able to send the enemy cavalry off, but not before Marsile had wheeled about to face his pursuers. His horse was shot from under him, and enemy cavalry captured him and took him back to Tagiura.

  The story emerged from the tired and dusty survivors. Marsile had gotten ambitious. They had created their diversion and were preparing to leave when Marsile decided to take the enemy’s livestock. It was a bold decision, but it slowed down their retreat enough for the men of Tagiura to chase them down.

  A few days later, a herald appeared. The aga of Tagiura sent his regards and offered to return Marsile in exchange for a sum greater than the treasury was able to pay. Valette was forced to take up a collection from his fellow knights, and so brought home his cavalry commander.

  Despite this inauspicious beginning, Valette had hopes for Tripoli. In 1547 the knights’ ruling council, the Chapter General, gathered in Malta to consid
er the state of the Order. Valette rose to speak. He contended that despite all his work in Tripoli, much still remained to be done, and quickly, as his local enemies were now petitioning for help from Suleiman. He could point to numerous drawbacks in locating the Order’s headquarters in Malta—the distance from their enemies, the weak state of Malta’s forts, the sheer number of Malta’s forts, the uncertain water supply, and the dependence on Sicily and its Spanish masters for food. Tripoli, by contrast, had several advantages. The city, he noted, was surrounded on three sides by water and could be cut off from land entirely by a digging a moat. The soil around Tripoli was fertile and fed by springwater, capable of producing grain, fruit, wine, and oil. He pointed to his alliances with local sheiks, men who were hostile to Ottoman control. He suggested that the Order could more efficiently expand its influence throughout the region in ways impossible on the island of Malta. It might even, he suggested, be best that the Order abandon Malta and move operations to Tripoli entirely.

  This last suggestion was a bit much, but Valette was persuasive and his superiors, who had never quite settled in to Malta or done much to bolster its defense works, did agree to invest more in the city.18 Fifty more knights would be stationed in Tripoli; the governor’s rank would be raised to that of a grand cross, just below that of grand master. Grand Master D’Homedes allotted seven thousand scudi, donated by various European powers, for capital improvements. The money and the troops to guard it came from Marseilles on the Catarinetta, a galley famous for speed.