The Great Siege of Malta

The Epic Battle between the Ottoman Empire and the Knights of St. John

Bruce Ware Allen

• Publisher: ForeEdge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781611688436
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In the spring of 1565, a massive fleet of Ottoman ships descended on Malta, a small island centrally located between North Africa and Sicily, home and headquarters of the crusading Knights of St. John and their charismatic Grand Master, Jean de Valette. The Knights had been expelled from Rhodes by the Ottoman sultan, Suleiman the Magnificent, and now stood as the last bastion against a Muslim invasion of Sicily, southern Italy, and beyond. The siege force of Turks, Arabs, and Barbary corsairs from across the Muslim world outnumbered the defenders of Malta many times over, and its arrival began a long hot summer of bloody combat, often hand to hand, embroiling knights and mercenaries, civilians and slaves, in a desperate struggle for this pivotal point in the Mediterranean. Bruce Ware Allen's The Great Siege of Malta describes the siege's geopolitical context, explains its strategies and tactics, and reveals how the all-too-human personalities of both Muslim and Christian leaders shaped the course of events. The siege of Malta was the Ottoman empire's high-water mark in the war between the Christian West and the Muslim East for control of the Mediterranean. Drawing on copious research and new source material, Allen stirringly recreates the two factions' heroism and chivalry, while simultaneously tracing the barbarism, severity, and indifference to suffering of sixteenth-century warfare. The Great Siege of Malta is a fresh, vivid retelling of one of the most famous battles of the early modern world—a battle whose echoes are still felt today.

PART ONE

Corsairs and Rulers

1

THE SIEGE OF RHODES, 1521

I command you, therefore, instantly to surrender the island and fortress of Rhodes.

Letter from Suleiman to L’Isle-Adam

On a summer day in 1521, a desperate hunt was in progress along the northern coastline of Crete. The quarry was riding a horse not his own, on a mission not strictly his either, and being pursued by horsemen who were determined not to let him escape. Both parties had been at it the better part of the day, alternating periods of riding and resting, and keeping a weather eye out for the other. As the sun began to fall, they were coming to the end of the chase, and despite the dangers of the breakneck pursuit after dark and over the sometimes rocky outcroppings that cover the beaches and roads east of Heraklion, neither the pursuers nor the pursued dared to rein in their mounts. At stake was the fate of one of the last Christian fortresses in the eastern Mediterranean.

So the wild ride continued over the scrubby undergrowth, skirting the few gnarled trees that edged the road, and in the increasingly uncertain light, the fugitive and his several companions peered out over the water, straining to see the lanterns of a boat sent to carry him away.

The subject of this chase, Gabriele Tadini de Martinengo, was a military engineer of unusual skill—“few or none his equal at that time.”¹ He was not fleeing impatient creditors or outraged husbands; he was running out on his Venetian employers and an extremely lucrative contract for improving their defensive works on the Venetian colony of Crete, an island then at peace with all the world. He was heading to the island of Rhodes, some 250 miles away, where the ancient crusading Order of the Knights of St. John was already under siege by the Ottoman sultan, Suleiman I.

Earlier that year the knights had sent an envoy to Martinengo’s employer, the governor of Crete, and requested that he be temporarily seconded to Rhodes, where his expertise would be invaluable. The governor had equivocated. Venice, and by extension all of Venice’s colonies, of which Crete was the largest, were currently at peace with the world. To allow such a thing might appear to be unfriendly to Venice’s Ottoman trading partners in Constantinople. A decision of this magnitude was too important for him to make alone; he would have to defer to the Venetian senate, some twelve hundred nautical miles away. This would entail a regrettable delay of some weeks, but what could one do? Diplomacy and politics were both slow-growing plants.

The envoy did not take it well. He became, the governor wrote, “very angry, and employed the most extraordinary language, claiming that any failure to turn over that man would spell the end of Rhodes.”² The envoy left, and the governor put their guest under close observation—though in the event, clearly not close enough. In a matter of days, Martinengo, contacted surreptitiously by the knights, followed his conscience, slipped past his custodians, and took flight.

Only after sunset did Martinengo and his companions come over the heights overlooking the Bay of Mirabella and see the light of a waning July moon sparkle on the water. Offshore was a brigantine, a small swift galley, awaiting his arrival; on the beach was a longboat with strong-armed men ready to row him out to sea. He and his companions, all fustian and leather, stumbled down to the water, dismounted, and climbed aboard, the first leg of the journey completed.³ Martinengo’s Venetian minders were just in time to see the ship raise anchor, drop sails, and head into the darkness. As the moon rose, they cantered back to Heraklion, followed by a half dozen riderless horses.

A year earlier, senior knights of the Order had gathered in the stone council chamber at Rhodes to elect Philippe de Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, then grand prior of France and serving the king, Francis I, at Bourgogne, as their new grand master.

It was a respectable choice. L’Isle-Adam’s family had provided many knights over the centuries, most famously Jean de Villiers, who had been grand master when Al-Ashraf Khalil in 1291 expelled the Order from Acre, its last stronghold in the Holy Land. Philippe, who had entered the brotherhood at age eighteen, rose steadily through the ranks. He was fifty-eight at the time of his election, and his portraits, presumably somewhat idealized, show him as a white-haired, round-faced, tough, dignified, noble creature—the very model of a Christian knight.

L’Isle-Adam set sail from France to Rhodes in September of 1521. The small flotilla endured a sequence of disasters: fire broke out on an accompanying ship. Lightning hit L’Isle-Adam’s own vessel, killing nine and, ominously, destroying the new grand master’s sword. As they made their repairs in Sicily, they could see the Barbary corsair and Ottoman admiral Kurtoğlu Muslihiddin Reis loitering just outside the harbor in anticipation, forcing L’Isle-Adam to a prudent escape by night. Despite this formidable string of misfortunes, the grand master elect made landfall at Rhodes before the month was out, and after going through the obligatory ceremonies, settled into his office.

It was not long before he heard from his neighbors. Suleiman I, sultan of the vast and powerful Ottoman Empire, Caliph of Islam, Leader of the Faithful, Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, and soon to be called the Lawgiver by Islam and the Magnificent by Christendom, sent a diplomatic note of congratulations, proffering friendship and inviting L’Isle-Adam to rejoice in Suleiman’s own recent triumphs over Christian Belgrade as well as other “fine and beautiful cities,” where he had “reduced the better part of their citizenry by sword or fire and put the rest to slavery.” There was little L’Isle-Adam could say in reply, though he did keep up the pretense of diplomacy: “Your propositions for a peace between us are as pleasing to me as they will be obnoxious to Kurtoğlu.”⁴ The epistolary aggression escalated on both sides, increasingly uncivil, until on June 10, 1522, Suleiman came to the point. Rhodes, he declared, must submit to Ottoman rule. As a man of religion and honor, the sultan would guarantee freedom from excess taxation, from forced conversion, and freedom of passage for all who chose to leave Rhodes, along with their goods and chattels.

L’Isle-Adam did not even bother to answer. Instead, he stepped up preparations for an attack on Rhodes. As early as April, he ordered his men to harvest the crops and bring the yield inside the city walls. What could not be harvested was torched. He dispatched ships to buy oil and wine from Greece. He stepped up production of gunpowder in the mills near the harbor. He instructed the local priests to preach the nobility of armed struggle against the Ottomans. And finally, he sent emissaries across Europe to plead for support: anyone, knight, soldier, or layman, who believed, like Martinengo, in the brotherhood of Christendom should set sail for Rhodes as quickly as possible.

It was a badly timed request. The crusading spirit still flickered fitfully in Europe, but the Holy Land was far away and other problems seemed closer to home. A twenty-one-year-old Charles V, Holy Roman emperor, was at war with Francis I of France (as Suleiman well knew); Venice, never much for war against Constantinople, had just renewed the peace treaty of 1503 with the Ottomans. The Genoese, hoping to curry favor with the new sultan, chose to send military intelligence to Constantinople. Pope Hadrian VI was concerned, but had few military resources outside the Knights of St. John themselves, and he preferred to send those he had against France. Francis I of France gathered a few soldiers, but failed to send them off in time. Rhodes found itself isolated in a sea without allies.

Suleiman, by contrast, was master of his sprawling empire, and with a single command, he was able to conjure up an army of many thousands and a navy of over three hundred sails, galleys and galleasses, barges and brigantines to carry them across the water.⁵ On June 25, 1522, the first Ottoman troops made the seven-mile crossing from Marmarice in Anatolia to Rhodes. The Ottoman fleet under Kurtoğlu passed by the fortress city, also called Rhodes, their bands playing on shipboard in case the inhabitants might have overlooked their arrival. The Christians answered the music with a volley of cannon fire. The Ottomans continued on some six miles away to Kalitheas Bay, where they began the long process of unloading men and matériel for what promised to be a long summer. For the next month, within sight of the city and just outside cannon range, they erected a multicolored canvas metropolis over the barren ground; new banners and pennons of various hues and markings sprouted above circular pointed tents and flapped in the offshore breezes, gradually encircling the looming walls of the port city as ever more troops landed on the island. It was a show intended to overawe and discomfort the people of Rhodes, to undermine the confidence that had supported them for the past three hundred years, and the cast of this show just kept growing. By the end of July, the total number of men reached one hundred thousand, including the sultan himself.⁶

Opposing them inside the tawny stone fortress of Rhodes was a core force of six hundred knights of St. John. Now that war had arrived, each knight exchanged the black robes and white cross significant of the Order’s service to the sick for the red cloaks and white cross of men prepared for battle. Other Christian soldiers numbered one thousand mercenaries and five hundred native militia, plus 250 Jewish volunteers.⁷ An Ottoman chronicler came up with a total even higher, at five to six thousand.⁸ The disparity of numbers alone should have given the invading troops confidence. Many were veterans of the sacking of Belgrade, and their chief concern was how many hands would demand a share of the plunder—Rhodes was, after all, a city grown rich on generations of trade and raiding. True, the city was known to the Muslims as a “strong fortress with high walls, one third of it washed by the sea, for over a thousand years a state for the infidel.”⁹ True also that Mehmed II’s attack of 1480 had failed, just as the Mamluk siege of 1444 had come to nothing. But that was all ancient history, and an army as skilled and well equipped as Suleiman’s could not fail to succeed where those lesser men had failed.

The Order, however, had not been idle. Rhodes in 1522 was encased in the best defensive works that Italian military engineers since 1480 could contrive. Any attackers would initially have to run across a counterscarp, a wide flat upward incline every inch of which was vulnerable to gunfire from the fort. There followed a vertical drop of anywhere from forty to sixty feet into a ditch itself marked by loopholes at ground level and above that turned the space into a killing ground. Also spotted about the ditch was a system of ravelins, high diamond-shaped bulwarks detached from the fortress itself that commanded the space below. Anyone who overcame these obstacles would then have to contend with heavy firepower from ramparts and five bastions that permitted crossfire against every angle of approach. Finally, thirteen towers framed the walls themselves two and even three layers deep, which could withstand weeks and even months of the heaviest cannon fire before collapsing to a usable breach. Small wonder that the Muslim soldiers’ first reaction on first seeing the city they were expected to defeat was just short of mutiny.¹⁰

Suleiman, however, saw beyond the stone and science that disquieted his troops. He was confident. His own mother had appeared to him in a dream and promised him victory. The season was late, and given the distance of Rhodes from a distracted Europe, and the small likelihood of aid for the knights, his army could proceed without worrying about their backs. After four weeks of hauling innumerable carts full of grain and dried meats, picks and shovels, tents, guns, powder, shot, and all other materials for war, his men were ready, his siege guns in place. These were monstrous bronze cylinders, the fruit of European invention cast largely by European renegades in the armories of Constantinople. The largest, colloquially referred to as basilisks, could take the better part of a day to prepare and load, but once fired, were capable of hurling stone balls six and eight palms in diameter and a thousand pounds in weight. Exactly how many guns of how many sizes in which different positions varies depending on different sources. One account records between sixty and eighty Muslim cannon and mortars arrayed against Rhodes, fully half of which the Christians managed to target and destroy within the first month. There is also a brief mention of brass shells filled with Greek fire, a kind of primitive napalm, the first mention of hollow shells of any kind in the history of artillery. The greatest effect, however, would come from the wall-shattering basilisks, four of which were directed against the bastions of England and Aragon, two against that of Italy.

On July 28, a full month after his arrival, the sultan nodded and the artillerymen lowered smoldering matches to the touchholes of their guns. From the parapets of Rhodes, the defenders could see the sudden wink of muzzle flashes in the distance, followed by the puff of white smoke, then feel the deep boom of shaking air and finally the shuddering of the wall itself as the mammoth cannonballs struck and began the slow work of fracturing and cracking the masonry open. By the end of August, some 1,316 of the largest cannons had been fired, with little to show for it; between this and uncounted mortar fired directly into the city, only twenty-five people were killed.

Simultaneously, Ottoman sappers, or combat engineers armed with picks and shovels, began to etch the s...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• Part One. Corsairs and Rulers
• Part Two. Objective: St. Elmo
• Part Three. Honor Bought with Blood
• Part Four. A Line Drawn in Water
• A Note on the Sources and Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index