Sea of Faith

by Stephen O'Shea

  And yet Valletta stands as testament that history is not lived, or even remembered, as postscript. The city's eponym, Jean Parisot de la Valette, couched his argument for defense of the island thus: "It is the great battle of the Cross and the Koran, which is now to be fought. A formidable army of infidels are on the point of investing our island. We, for our part, are the chosen soldiers of the Cross, and if Heaven requires the sacrifice of our lives, there can be no better occasion than this. Let us hasten then, my brothers, to the sacred altar." A scion of the great—and greatly conflicted—families of Toulouse, who had slaughtered infidels in the First Crusade and defended heretics in its Albigensian variant, Valette had no doubt whatsoever that he was fighting for Christ. As for the Turks, the convivencia of their capital did not translate into religious relativism—a slain attacker was found bearing a bracelet inscribed with the words "I do not come to Malta for wealth or honour, but to save my soul." These are not the sentiments of people conscious of being superannuated.

  Valletta, of course, is a monument to the Christian viewpoint, even if it was constructed after the last decisive clash of the Mediterranean encounter between the two faiths. The knights on Malta left their valedictory in stone; and, like Justinian and Abd al-Rahman, they lavished special attention on a sanctuary. In Valletta it is the astounding cathedral of St. John, the church of the order.

  To understand the cathedral's message is to know that the knights were organized into langues—that is, "tongues," or national academies—that took specific responsibilities in the various campaigns of raiding and slaving conducted by the order. In the order's latter—and fatter—days, the langues stayed closer to home, preferring to compete with one another in memorializing themselves. Evidently there was a contest to construct the most elaborate mansion in the city—this was won by the Langue of Castile and Leon, whose residence, or auberge, is an eighteenth-century gem unrivaled anywhere else in Valletta. In the cathedral, however, it is difficult to say which langue outpaced the others. Indeed, the sanctuary of St. John is so stupendously excessive in its decoration that one almost needs sunglasses to survive a visit unblinded. Sculpted galley slaves, altars disguised as clouds, stone effigies recumbent on sarcophagi, coats of arms borne by caryatids, even a gory Caravaggio canvas that aptly takes as its subject the beheading of John the Baptist—all is here in abundance. The church's floor, every square foot of which is covered in a kaleidoscope of marble tombstones carved for dignitaries of the order, beggars the eyes. An overawed Walter Scott proclaimed it to be "the most striking interior I have ever seen." What is at work, behind the supernova of vanity, is a desire to bask in reflected glory.

  That glory dates to the moment of 1565, when the island's doughty resistance made it the darling of Christian Europe. That year takes the lead in Malta's theater of memory. In the center of Valletta's grid of auberges and churches, beside a national library displaying musty lettres de marque and antique testimonials, present-day entertainment engineers have constructed an audiovisual labyrinth that splashily evokes the island's travails of 1565. It, along with much of the historical literature devoted to the knights, takes the view that pointy-bearded and incorrigibly wicked Turks suddenly decided to descend on the saintly Hospitaler knights in a fit of un-Christian aggression. The charge of aggression is certainly true—in their prime the Ottomans relied on conquest to feed the voracious maw of court and capital—but without doubt Sultan Suleyman had been sorely provoked.

  Out on the tour boat, as Fort St. Elmo comes up on starboard, a pincerlike outcropping shelters the entrance of the bay to port. This is Dragut Point. Its name evokes the reason for war.

  Dragut Rais was a pirate. In the sixteenth century such an occupation was not a noble calling, but neither was it irredeemably sociopathic. Piracy had its uses. In the Mediterranean of Dragut's day two great dynasties vied for primacy, the Habsburgs in the west (who controlled Spain, Sicily, southern Italy, Lombardy, the Low Countries, Germany, and Austria) and the Ottomans in the east (who controlled Turkey, Greece, the Balkans, Egypt, Libya, the Maghrib, Palestine, Syria, Arabia, and Iraq). Each of these enormously powerful families relied on the lawless to harass the fleet and commerce of the other.

  For the Turks, the corsairs of north Africa's Barbary Coast fulfilled this function admirably. Prior to Dragut the pride of Muslim piracy was a pair of brothers originally from the Aegean island of Mytilene, the offspring of a retired Janissary and an Orthodox priest's widow. The younger and longer-lived of the siblings is known to history as Barbarossa (Red Beard). In Istanbul today, a commuter ferry landing on the Bosporus bears his name—proof that even the most ferocious reputations can be domesticated over time, for Barbarossa, a seaman of exceptional ability, was cruel, rapacious, and terrifying, a figure whose raids on the Christian coastal lands of the Mediterranean led to the erection of even more of the watchtowers that still stand guard over the sea. From the Balearic Islands in the west to Crete in the east, Barbarossa wrought havoc.

  Barbarossa began his rise to prominence by wresting from the Spanish the toeholds they had gained on what are now the Algerian and Moroccan coastlines. The already obstreperous region—over the cenmries Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Vandals, Byzantines, Arabs, and Turks had all had problems asserting authority there over the Berbers—was made even more volatile by the arrival of the resentful Iberian Muslims, many of whom had been chased from their ancestral homes when Granada fell. Resentment, ability, and opportunity came together when Barbarossa made himself the ruler of Algiers, a wide-open port for every advenmrer and cutthroat in the Mediterranean world, the paradigm of a den of thieves.

  The Barbarossa brothers, Muslim pirates of the sixteenth-century Mediterranean.

  The Christian Spaniards could not possibly come to an understanding with these Muslim corsairs; for the Turks, there was no such barrier. Ibrahim Pasha, the canny Greek who was Suleyman's grand vizier, looked at the murderous maritime rabble and saw opportunity. Much as the Crown of England would later do with Francis Drake, Ibrahim sought to bring a buccaneer into the fold, all in the service of harassing Spain. Barbarossa was offered the official Ottoman governorship of the Barbary Coast, the use of the sultan's treasury in building more ships, and a place of honor at the Sublime Porte, as the governing council was then styled. Barbarossa personally supervised the construction and training of the Turkish navy in the Golden Horn and conducted stunning seaborne commando operations throughout the Mediterranean, at the head of a fleet of galleys filled with Janissaries and his own piratical mates. A particularly nasty shock to Christian complacency, one that had the pope himself running for cover, came in the 1530s, when Barbarossa devastated the coast of southern Italy, burning villages and abducting thousands for slave markets and harems. He even tried to bag the noblewoman Julia Gonzaga, reputedly the greatest beauty of the age, by laying siege to her castle—she got away in her nightgown, although the horseman she clung to while escaping was later executed, at her request, for having had too good a look at the cause of the commotion.

  Dragut Rais was Barbarossa's protege—as the older man mellowed, the younger grew bolder. Born a Christian in Anatolia, Dragut distinguished himself in his youth in the service of the sultan's army before turning freebooting mariner. He took part in the battle of Preveza, where Barbarossa and his galleys, in the same expanse of the Ionian Sea that had witnessed the defeat of Mark Antony and Cleopatra in 31 B.C.E., confronted a Spanish fleet commanded by the great Genoese admiral Andrea Doria. Genoa, its empire proving ephemeral in the face of Ottoman naval might, was reduced to providing sailors for hire to the court of Spain (yet another reason behind the employment history of Christopher Columbus). At Preveza in 1538, the normally adroit Doria found himself outmaneuvered by Barbarossa, and the Christian armada, though superior in numbers, was badly mauled. The victorious Barbarossa is supposed to have said of the fearless boarding tactics of his young lieutenant, "Dragut is a lion, he is a braver man than me."

  A galley of the Order o
f St. John, for use in Christian piracy.

  Courage aside, Dragut is more emblematic of the age than Barbarossa. His Christian antecedents—he may have been a product of the boy tribute—underscore the most arresting feature of this era of Mediterranean piracy: many of the best Muslim buccaneers were, in fact, former Christians. Vilified by the clergy and severely punished by the Inquisition if captured, such slippery converts had ample reason to let the Christian scales fall from their eyes. Certainly some sought only glory and wealth—both of which would be denied them by the accident of lowly birth in Europe. Others, held captive in the lands of Islam, were forced to convert, although many thousands did so willingly, their new identity as Muslims providing them a chance at freedom and at advancement in the ruthlessly meritocratic milieu of the Barbary Coast. Conversion held other advantages as well: no priests consigning souls to hellfire and no nobles needing their boots licked—only a shot at lucre in this life and paradise in the next, the exploits of brigandage encouraged by a florid wink from the sultan in Kostantiniyye. Add to these inducements the attractions of an adopted religion free of clergy, class, and the constraints of monogamy, and the leap of faith required to become a renegade began looking like a very small step. Dragut and his fellow mariners, slavers, and thieves prospered in the embrace of a loosely understood Islam.

  Their Christian opponents were no less intrepid. The Habsburg monarch and his admiral, Andrea Doria, raided north Africa repeatedly and on several occasions came close to finishing off Dragut. (At Jerba, off the coast of Tunisia, the Muslim pirate eluded Doria by dragging his blockaded ships across the island in the middle of the night.) The Christian fleets of Spain patrolled the western reaches of the Mediterranean to engage the Barbary corsairs, while the galleys of the knights on Malta went on what were called "caravans"—long-haul campaigns of piracy against Ottoman shipping, usually in the eastern basin of the sea. The spies of the Order of St. John kept a close watch on the dockyards of the major ports around the Mediterranean to determine the juiciest targets for the knights' attentions.

  The locomotive power for all of this mayhem was the muscle of slavery. At any given time during the sailing season in the sixteenth-century Mediterranean, tens of thousands of naked wretches sat chained to benches on the high seas, forced to live in their own filth as they pulled on the great oars of the galleys. A keen nose could detect the approach of these vessels of human misery long before they were sighted on the horizon. To survive a year or two as a galley slave—frequent ransomings and exchanges of notable prisoners were concluded between Muslim and Christian—was testament to possessing an incredibly robust constitution. After setbacks at various times in their careers, both Dragut and Grand Master Valette had done their time on the galley bench, as had many other knights and renegades. These then were hard men, survivors who knew no other world than that of constant combat and physical effort. Even as they grew old, the mixture of greed, spite, and confessional fervor animating the fighters on both sides ensured that the murderous game would continue unabated.

  In late June 1565, immediately after the fall of Fort St. Elmo, as the Turks swarmed the inlets of the Grand Harbor to take up their positions around Birgu and Senglea for the final assault, some among the defenders might well have regretted the actions that had brought things to this perilous pass. In the previous year, Grand Master Valette had commanded the knight Romegas, the only Christian buccaneer to rival Dragut and Barbarossa in piratical panache, to board, capture, and loot a large trading ship bound for Kostantiniyye. Valette's informants would have told him beforehand that the vessel's precious cargo had been underwritten by the chief eunuch of the seraglio, a powerful figure who was a close ally of an even more powerful Ottoman princess. The latter, the daughter given to Suleyman by his beloved Roxelane, a Ukrainian beauty by then deceased, had her widowed father's ear—and the loss of the ship and her investment in it was a splendid pretext to raise her voice. Further, her childhood nurse had been captured and enslaved by these infidels.

  With this action, Valette went too far. In his youth he—along with the rest of the order—had been allowed to leave Rhodes unharmed by a gracious Suleyman, an act of compassion that the knights would never recognize or repay. Forty-three years later the sultan rued the day he had shown leniency to these Christian ingrates. Suleyman, the conqueror of Aden, Algiers, Baghdad, Belgrade, Budapest, Nakshivan, Rhodes, and Tabriz, decided at last to put an end to these fanatical crusading corsairs. In his long career he had been foiled only on rare occasions, the most notorious being his failure before Vienna in 1529. But that was long before; in the summer of 1565, an army of some forty thousand soldiers and a fleet of 180 ships, commanded by his most trusted confidants, would show that no one could trifle with the "caesar," as he called himself, who had dedicated his life to the expansion of the dar al Islam: the fate of Malta would show the world the future of the Mediterranean.

  The final contest all came down to two thin fingers of rock poking into the salt waters of the Grand Harbor of Malta. Senglea, the more western, was barely inhabited, its perimeter ringed with fortifications and its tip crowned by a star-shaped fortress. It is, at most, one kilometer in length. Birgu, similarly diminutive, housed a small city of Maltese, the hostelries of the different national langues of the order, and the hospital that was the distant descendant of the knights' original establishment in Jerusalem. Birgu was the headquarters of the corsair operation—its shores were rounded with thick walls; its point crowned by a formidable castle, Fort St. Angelo; its landward side protected by great triangular bastions jutting into the rocky hinterland. Between Birgu and Senglea lay Galley Creek, a narrow stretch of water no more than 150 meters wide; across its mouth a chain had been stretched, in much the same manner as the Byzantines had blocked access to the Golden Horn a century earlier.

  Valette had readied his positions for this moment—he had ample supplies of food, water, gunpowder, and cannonshot, and a pontoon bridge had been thrown across Galley Creek to allow rapid movement of soldiers from the center of one peninsula to the other. The only thing he really needed, and needed desperately, was men: under his command, after the fall of St. Elmo on the main uninhabited peninsula of the harbor, were a mere seven hundred knights and eight thousand Maltese, as well as a swollen population of women and children from the evacuated villages inland, along with the usual mass of slaves.

  With overwhelming and entirely reasonable confidence in victory, tens of thousands of Turks and newly arrived north Africans busied themselves in the early days of July in erecting artillery batteries and constructing siege towers. They blockaded the mouth of the Grand Harbor and, once again, hauled ships overland, this time to the rear of the harbor in order to make sure that Birgu and Senglea were entirely surrounded by land and by sea. The only sour note for the attackers was the disappearance of Dragut. The redoubtable eighty-year-old pirate had been felled by shrapnel and had died on the day the headless corpses had been floated from Fort St. Elmo.

  Although it was obvious that the Ottomans were preparing to unleash a ferocious attack—gunnery had improved since Fatih's day, and the Janissaries were by then expert musketeers—the question of precisely where and when the fearsome assault would be mounted nagged at the watchful defenders. Because of the lopsided balance of forces, intelligence was crucial to the knights. In early July, help came in a theatrical fashion, as Christian sentinels spied on the opposite shore a Turkish officer waving wildly at them. The man was spotted too by Ottoman lookouts who rushed to capture him; he jumped into the Grand Harbor, his arms thrashing helplessly in an attempt to stay afloat. Maltese swimmers dived into the water at Senglea and raced surely and strongly to his rescue through a volley of musket shot; within an hour he was before Grand Master Valette and had identified himself as a Greek—but not just any Greek. The deserter was a Lascaris, of the family that had intermarried with the Comneni and placed several of its members on the imperial throne following its exile to Nicaea after the sack of Constantin
ople in 1204. The defection of so illustrious an officer from the Ottomans gave heart, and precious information, to the knights.

  The main target was to be Senglea, on its western side, away from Galley Creek and the formidable Fort St. Angelo on Birgu. Valette promptly ordered a strange, half-submerged palisade to be constructed in the waters outside the western wall of Senglea; festooned with iron hoops, spikes, and the great spars of timber from the masts of the order's galleys, the barrier was meant to stop any seaborne attacker from nearing the fortifications and setting up scaling ladders. The Ottomans sent out their best swimmers at night to dismantle the construction; they were met by the Maltese, small men with gleaming daggers, who had known this harbor and its depths since boyhood. The dark waters turned red, the palisade remained in place.

  Still, the Ottoman commander, Mustapha Pasha, could not prolong the wait. The Algerians, Moroccans, and Libyans, led by Dragut's son-in-law and a renegade who had once been a Dominican friar, were chafing to attack their longtime foes and, in the process, show up the Turkish regulars who had wasted a full month in taking the small fortress of St. Elmo. At dawn on July 15, after a deadly artillery barrage, they attacked Senglea. By sea a flotilla of ships pulled toward the peninsula from the rear of the Grand Harbor, their Barbary and Ottoman officers in full finery. "Even the rank and file wore scarlet robes," wrote an eyewitness on Senglea, "and there were many in cloth of gold, and of silver, and of crimson damask. Armed with the fine muskets of Fez, the scimitars of Alexandria and Damascus, and magnificent bows, they all wore splendid turbans." The admiring defender, a Spanish soldier whose memoir of the siege is our best source, nonetheless remarked, "They certainly made a fine sight—almost beautiful, if it had not been so dangerous." By land a corps of similarly splendid Algerians poured down the hillside to the land walls of Senglea.