Sea of Faith

by Stephen O'Shea

  The firefight lasted most of the morning. The determined Africans, despite the best efforts of the Maltese, managed to pierce the improvised defense of the palisade and clamber up the walls where desperate hand-to-hand fighting took place. At the neck of Senglea the defenders threw down incendiary wooden hoops onto the massed Algerians, causing their billowing uniforms to catch fire. Into this pandemonium of flame and steel came a sudden explosive shock: a powder magazine in Senglea's fort blew up, creating a gaping hole in the fortifications and, worse, the beginnings of panic. The dispirited defenders fell back. Seeing the situation to be critical, Valette sent a detachment of knights, the manpower he so carefully husbanded on Birgu, charging across the pontoon bridge to join the melee. The defense held, barely—but Mustapha then played his ace.

  Jean Parisot de la Valette in middle age.

  As expectant eyes on both sides turned to the raging free-for-all on the ramparts, ten ships, each crammed with one hundred Janissaries, silently rowed around the point of Senglea to Galley Creek. The intention was not to force the chain drawn across its mouth, but to stage a surprise landing at the foot of Senglea's fortress and take the defenders from the rear. The thousand-man force was the cream of Ottoman soldiery, a commando unit that Mustapha assumed to be unstoppable. And so it would have been, but for one heretofore insignificant feature of the defense set up by Valette.

  Just before the arrival of the Turkish fleet and army in May, the grand master had placed a concealed artillery battery below Fort St. Angelo near the tip of Birgu, at water level, facing Senglea. It was a precaution against any enemy ships that might try damaging the chain between the two peninsulas and forcing an entry into the creek. Wisely, the Ottomans had resisted such a risky gambit; hence Valette's battery had been silent for the entire siege, never firing a single shot to betray its existence. Now, some one hundred meters directly opposite its big guns, ten ships bobbed together in a group, like so many sitting ducks, jammed with men steeling themselves to storm ashore. Their backs were to Birgu. An excited order was whispered, and the cannons roared. Eight hundred Janissaries were killed outright; nine of the ten ships were sent to the bottom. The disaster was complete, the day turned. By sundown the waters around Senglea were clogged with bloated bodies—the attackers had suffered three thousand dead, the defenders, 250. Enraged, Mustapha had his scores of cannon open up on Birgu and Senglea. Every hill and height around the peninsulas hurled hot metal down on the defenders in a foretaste of the attacks to come.

  There was now no question of either side negotiating, much less giving up. An old Greek slave from the Turkish encampment was sent to Birgu to deliver an ultimatum from Mustapha; Valette had the fellow blindfolded and prodded to the edgeo: an abyss atop a wall, at which point the blind was removed and the terrified man promptly soiled himself. Satisfied, Valette told him that the yawning ditch beneath them was where his master's troops would soon find themselves piled up as corpses.

  The defenders' determination had some desperation to it. If the Turks were to capture Malta, they might use it as a stepping-stone to the old Islamic land of Sicily and beyond. If they were repulsed, their aura of invincibility would be gone, and the chronically querulous Christians of Europe might come together to thwart them in the Mediterranean. For defender and attacker alike, it mattered little that the battle lines of faith had grown fuzzy, that the future lay on the Atlantic, that their masters had long ago become partners in the acquisition of wealth and the perpetuation of power. In the end, what was at stake, unbeknownst to its protagonists, was one last attempt at changing the confessional geography of the lands ringing the ancient sea. The waters of the Mediterranean would not be calm in the modern era, but that period's concerns of empire and capital differed from the medieval fascination with faith. On Birgu and Senglea, the last drama of a vanishing world became melodrama.

  The island was a furnace as July turned to August. Man abetted nature in rendering Malta unbearable, for the first week of the new month passed in an incessant firestorm. Mustapha Pasha had moved his artillery closer to the peninsulas, resighting the great guns to cause the maximum damage to the fortifications. Valette, in Birgu, sent out slaves to build barricades in the city streets, in the event a breach was made and the Turks poured through the walls. The unfortunate laborers working on these barriers died by the hundreds as the Ottoman artillery sent deadly missiles sailing into their midst. The bombardment of early August continued for six days and nights, of an earth-shaking intensity not yet witnessed on the island. In Syracuse, some 150 kilometers distant on Sicily, the broiling summer days echoed faintly with the cannonade, a strange rolling thunder under cloudless skies.

  If the sinister rumble made the Sicilians think of Malta, their island was, in fact, uppermost in the minds of the belligerents at Birgu and Senglea. For the knights, their hopes of salvation lay in Sicily: the powerful Habsburg viceroy there had repeatedly promised since the beginning of the siege to send reinforcements to turn the Turkish tide, yet like the Latins in 1453 he had stubbornly failed to deliver. For the Turks, the arrival of a strong relief force from Sicily would further endanger an enterprise that grew more difficult as the weeks and months passed.

  The passage of time eventually became a problem for Sicily's viceroy. As tales of the heroic defense spread, tiny Malta rose to the status of cause celebre throughout Europe. Even the Protestant queen of England, Elizabeth, would write of this dreadful Catholic affray, "If the Turks should prevail against the isle of Malta, it is uncertain what further peril might follow to the rest of Christendom." For the Habsburg envoy, prevarication became less politic as indignation built, even if the choice facing him remained the same as it had been throughout the spring and summer: risk stripping the defenses of Sicily by sending an army south to an uncertain fate, or play it safe by keeping men and ships ready to repulse any assault on his island. It was better to lose Malta than Sicily. Despite the many voices pressing him to take action, the viceroy continued to delay as the summer drew on. On August 7 the distant thunder fell silent; listeners in Sicily wondered if Malta had finally been taken.

  At Birgu and Senglea the silence meant only one thing: the knights clambered through the rubble-strewn streets and raced to the ramparts. Through the swirling smoke and dust and flames came the whizzing of musketry and the cries of thousands of men hurtling toward them. Mustapha had ordered an attack everywhere, all at once. On the landward side of Birgu, a massive outer wall of a bastion known as the Post of Castile had been breached. The Turks were streaming through. At the neck of Senglea the attackers swarmed the walls. No longer could reinforcements be sent across the pontoon bridge to one or the other of the peninsulas; both were utterly beset. Mustapha, at age seventy, drew his sword and led a charge of Janissaries into Senglea. The knights fell back, overwhelmed, straining in their armor to fend off the scimitars flashing in the sunlight. From Birgu, where a desperate standoff was taking place, Valette could see that Senglea would soon fall. Mustapha pressed on, farther and farther along the length of the promontory, the banners of the Ottomans advancing inexorably.

  Suddenly Turkish trumpets onshore sounded a retreat. Puzzled, Mustapha and his men paused. Messengers reached him with the terrifying news that Christian reinforcements had landed and were at the main Turkish encampment several kilometers inland. The bloodied knights watched, amazed, as their assailants, on the verge of victory, re-formed and rushed rearward, away from Senglea. The attack was over.

  Fearing the worst, Mustapha sent out scouting parties in search of the dread Sicilian expeditionary force. They scoured the island but came across no Habsburg levy of soldiers, only the customary sun-bleached emptiness. Their camp, however, was a ruin: it lay littered with the bodies of hundreds of injured soldiers, summarily slain in their sick tents. Even the cooks had been murdered.

  When Mustapha discovered the explanation for this latest atrocity, he swore to kill every knight of the order. The end of the cannonade earlier in the day had been noted not
only by noncombatant listeners in far-off Sicily. In the center of Malta stood the modest city of Mdina, untouched by the events of the siege and garrisoned by a small detachment of knights and their men-at-arms. The ferocity of the week-long bombardment, followed by its sudden cessation, had led them to suspect that an unprecedented assault was under way in the Grand Harbor, one that might draw all available manpower away from the Turks' camp. A band of horsemen left the protective walls of Mdina and advanced through a countryside usually thick with thousands of the foe. They met no one, until arriving at the undefended camp crowded with the weak and the wounded. The knights from Mdina quickly set to work massacring and burning, but not before they told those whom they judged fit enough to run away and spread the news that they were the advance guard of a huge Sicilian army. By the time Mustapha returned, they had vanished. A savagely brilliant ruse had saved Senglea.

  The madness continued. Mustapha no longer cared about Senglea; Birgu, the vile head and heart of the monstrous order, had to be crushed. A great siege tower was built, covered with soaking hides, and rolled up toward the sagging walls of the Post of Castile. The men atop the tower fired flaming arrows and threw incendiary devices down on the defenders. Valette had foreseen the peril: large casks of seawater stood at regular distances on the ramparts, so that his soldiers could douse their flaming limbs and continue the fight. He had even found a solution to the dangerous siege engine: unbeknownst to the Turks, yet another artillery battery had been set up, hidden behind movable blocks at the base of the bastion. When the tower finally reached the wall, the blocks were pulled away and a tremendous salvo of shot and chain tore into the props of the structure from point-blank range. It tottered, then fell over into the ditch.

  Mustapha mined, Valette countermined. Mustapha executed prisoners in sight of the walls, Valette hanged his from the ramparts. Mustapha feigned an attack on Senglea, then set off a tremendous charge that brought down both the outer and inner walls of the Post of Castile. The Turks ran into Birgu proper. Now it was Valette's turn—at seventy-one, he ran through town to the breach, staunching the flow of his panicked men and forcing them to turn and hold back the Turks. The Maltese civilians pelted the attackers with stones, the knights charged, and men from rooftops threw down burning brands and iron hoops. Birgu was saved.

  Throughout it all the cannons blasted away. There was no more room in the hospital. Any man who could stand was not considered wounded. They crouched on the ramparts, small children bringing them sponges soaked with wine. Women brought up the last of the munitions. In the Turkish camp, dysentery set in and news came of supply ships being hijacked on the high seas. Mustapha learned that he had less than three weeks' worth of grain to feed his great host.

  Meanwhile Valette's senior commanders urged a retreat of all men, women, and children into Fort St. Angelo at the tip of Birgu. Senglea could no longer hold, they argued; neither could the town of Birgu. They would stand a fighting chance within the embrace of the fortress. Valette alone disagreed: it was better to keep the Turks occupied with many targets, even if it meant greater loss of life. To cede an inch would be to cede the battle; the attackers, he reasoned, could not know how desperate the defenders were.

  On August 20 eight thousand Ottoman troops volunteered to storm Birgu or die in the attempt. Most of them fulfilled the second proposition, for the coun-terfire of the defenders remained withering, even from the shapeless piles of stone that had once been the proud bastions. The attack fizzled and collapsed, the Turks' morale sinking even lower than the physical condition of the defenders. Both sides were exhausted.

  Only Valette knew that, a week earlier, the viceroy of Sicily had managed to get a message through to him promising to send a relieving army of sixteen thousand soldiers. The grand master had known better than to share the information or to believe in it. Yet in early September as the Turkish guns once again battered the peninsulas and another great massed attack faltered, out at sea beyond the Grand Harbor the unimaginable at last made an appearance. A line of Habsburg ships brazenly sailed into view and fired off a triple gun salute. The Turkish admiral, realizing their significance, did not give chase.

  The siege of Malta was lifted on September 6,1565. Mustapha Pasha, ever the brave commander, had his men stage a fierce fighting retreat from Birgu and Senglea all the way to the north side of the island. He remained on the beach almost to the very end, battling the Sicilian skirmishers who galloped into the surf in an effort to prevent the embarkation of the tired army. Mustapha prevented the annihilation of what remained of his great force: on the eighth the Ottomans finally weighed anchor—in the same bay where St. Paul was supposed to have landed—and made haste back to the safety of faraway Kostantiniyye. The armada of Islam had failed, against a fanatical clan of corsairs who viewed themselves as crusaders. The valediction was nearly complete. In 1565 Valette had been seventy-one; Mustapha, seventy; Dragut, eighty; and Suleyman the Magnificent, seventy-one, with just one more year to live. True to their faith, the old men had ushered out an old era in the most sanguinary style possible.

  Birgu is now known, quite reasonably in view of 1565, as Vittoriosa. It is a sleepy place, its dusty streets having nothing in common with the dazzling cathedral and the audiovisual maze across the waters of the Grand Harbor in Valletta. Senglea is more industrious, a home to dockworkers and stevedores. On the side of Senglea where the watery palisade was erected during the siege is a great dockyard, a hospital of sorts for what seems to be every ailing car ferry and tramp steamer of the Mediterranean. On a recent visit the letters on the stern of one terminally rusted vessel showed its home port, ISTANBUL, and its name, DRAGUT.

  In Galley Creek, now Dockyard Creek, are a yacht club, a marina and, under construction, a casino. Wandering the streets of Birgu, one comes across the different auberges of the national leagues of the knights—they are now either museums or properties purchased by the wealthy. These are different from the great Baroque mansions in Valletta, which are the product of profligate endowments and the revenues of Malta, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as the largest slave market in Europe. On Birgu, which was left neglected after the successful resistance to the siege, the buildings are modest, consonant with the order's first few decades of piracy on the island. To move landward on the peninsula is to the see the notorious Post of Castile, scrupulously rebuilt and improved over the centuries, as well as other fortifications—jauntily called cavaliers—marking Birgu off from the once-threatening interior.

  For all the urban promiscuity of the peninsulas and the built-up shores of the Grand Harbor, the visitor there is unquestionably adrift in the middle of the Mediterranean. Our sea, their sea, everyone's sea—the mare nostrum—surrounds. In the improbable course of human events, the improbably successful defense of Malta in 1565 punctured, once and for all, the idea of an inexorable Turkish tide. It was a galvanizing moment, as powerful in its repercussions, if not in its site, as Alaric in Rome or the Mongols in Baghdad. Six years after the Turkish failure here, the fleets of a fractious and soon to be imploded Christendom momentarily united and met the Ottoman navy at Lepanto, once again near the Ionian locale of Mark Antony and Cleopatra. There erstwhile rivals with mixed motives—Venetians and Habsurgs—combined for one brief historical instant to deal a devastating blow to the Turkish fleet. Their temporary union was called, with a solemn face, the "Holy Alliance"—leading to a commonplace in western histories that places Lepanto as the closing of a parenthesis opened at Poitiers. Yet Lepanto was not possible, not imaginable, not even probable, without Malta. The siege of Malta marked the end of the age of Turkish supremacy in the Mediterranean; Lepanto, the halting beginnings of an early modern maritime donnybrook over whose fleet or whose pirates would gain the upper hand in slaving and looting. To students of the soul, Lepanto's prime importance lies in the survival of its most important combatant, Cervantes, who almost met his death there.

  There is a sort of insane point to walking the shore of Birgu at midda
y, alone in August, in a moment fit only for mad dogs and Englishmen. The daze induced by the heat may be the only constant in this sea of change. Notwithstanding fixations over Palestine and Jerusalem past and present, the most important actors in the struggle over who would believe what hailed from other places of the Mediterranean, what we now call Spain and Turkey. From the days of Constantinople facing threats at Yarmuk and Manzikert to those of the Iberian Muslims at Poitiers and Las Navas de Tolosa, the most fertile ground for conflict and convivencia lay at opposite corners of the inland sea. This is a surprise. Elsewhere there were other moments, other struggles, and other long-standing periods of confessional complicity, but the greatest players were, and perhaps remain, embodied in the Mezquita and the Ayasofya. They represent the ambivalence of the Mediterranean after the collapse of antiquity. To realize this is to shake off a blinkered view of confessional history during the Middle Ages and beyond. More unexpected yet, those two countries—Spain and Turkey—are nowadays the most culturally expansive in outlook toward the worlds still labeled, by some, Christian and Muslim.

  And yet the final battle was fought in the middle, in Malta, where today one still sweats in the airless embrace of Africa while the quaint Angelus of Europe sounds from a dozen unseen churches. Fort St. Angelo, a block of granite wavering in the kinks of heat, still flies the eight-pointed flag—or rather it would, were there a breath of wind. In the few shadowed recesses of the fortress, workmen have fallen asleep in their trucks. Toward the center of Birgu, in a square sized for no more than a dozen small cars or horses, a few lunatic remnants of British colonial days loudly advertise lunchtime menus of bangers and mash on their unshaded terraces. In other places around the square are churches and chapels of exemplary discretion. One knocks, pounds, calls neighbors to get a peek inside. In the Oratory of St. Joseph the cool mustiness of the small sanctuary comes as a relief. A glass case lined with a garish red fabric displays a sword that belonged to Jean Parisot de la Valette. Beside the sword, tattered and appropriately headless, is his hat, a simple broad-brimmed, black felt affair, hanging there as proof that even holy warriors must one day retire.