A History of the Crusades

by Jonathan Riley-Smith

  The crown naturally justified its take-over of the Castilian orders with the old arguments that their resources would thus continue to contribute to conversion and to the holy war, and also that North Africa was, like Granada, on the route to Jerusalem. In 1506 King Fernando held a chapter of Santiago which agreed to set up a convent at Oran, and schemes to take Calatrava and Alcántara to Bougie and Tripoli followed. Though still being aired during the seventeenth century, these African projects, much like the Teutonic plans to fight in the Balkans, were never really fulfilled; Charles V’s establishment of the Hospital at Tripoli and Malta in 1530 followed a similar logic with more effect. Individual Castilian brethren frequently held military posts, but the orders as such were largely inactive. Between 1518 and 1598, out of 1,291 known knight-brethren of Santiago, only fifty or sixty performed significant service against the infidel. At least eight Santiago brethren took part in the Tunis expedition of 1535, and in 1565 others helped defend Malta where one of them, Melchior de Robles, served and died with great distinction. From 1552 Santiago expended some 14,000 ducats a year on three or four galleys which were active in the Mediterranean, after 1561 as part of the royal fleet; the order’s statutes demanded, ineffectually, six months service at sea as a condition of entry. The value of these galleys was partly symbolic yet, under Luis de Requesens, commendador mayor of Castile, they played a useful part at Lepanto in 1571. Corrupt ways did not always lead to inactivity; for example, Luis de Requesens had entered Santiago when aged 11, while Alvaro Bazán, whose brilliant naval career included Malta and Lepanto, had been received at the age of 2 in 1528. After 1571 Spanish efforts were concentrated more in northern Europe and that diminished the orders’ scope for holy warfare. In any case, many brethren simply ignored their duties; thus the poet Luis de Góngora was notoriously criticized when he disobeyed royal orders to serve at Marmora in Africa in 1614.

  While the Iberian and Teutonic Orders underwent fundamental change and were losing any convincing sense of mission, the Hospitallers fought on. Few single rulers could abolish them and the pope and emperor continued to give encouragement; in fact Pope Clement VII, elected in 1523 with the master of the Hospital as guardian of the conclave, had himself been a Hospitaller. For eight demoralizing years after 1523 Philippe Villiers de l’Isle Adam and his surviving convent trailed from Crete to Messina, Civitavecchia, Viterbo, Villefranche, Nice, and Siracusa, keeping alive their institutional continuities and seeking a new base. The Hospitallers were predominantly French but it was the Spanish Emperor Charles V who eventually established them on the tiny barren island of Malta which was, with nearby Gozo, to be held in fief from the Sicilian crown with obligations to defend a new mainland bridgehead at Tripoli in Africa, taken by the Spaniards in 1510. Still hoping for a return to Rhodes or conquests in Greece, the reluctant brethren, accompanied by some of their Latin and Greek subjects from Rhodes, occupied the sea-castle and its suburb of Birgu in 1530; they had little alternative. Given the French entente with the Turks, the initial move to Malta was essentially a Spanish development in Hospitaller history; indeed the master from 1536 to 1553 was the Aragonese, Juan de Homedes.

  The Hospital, known henceforth as the Order of Malta, carried forward amphibious campaigns in Greece, where Modon was sacked in 1531, and in Africa at Tunis in 1535, Jerba in 1559, and so on. Malta and its excellent harbour offered the essential independence; lying between Spanish Sicily and Ottoman Africa, it provided a base from which the order could continue its aggressive naval warfare against infidel armadas and pirates. The Hospitallers negotiated tax-free grain imports from Sicily and constructed minimal fortifications in the Grand Harbour. Arriving with some of their relics and parts of their archives, they demonstrated an extraordinary adaptability in transferring the corporate continuities of their order-state from one island to another and showing yet again that the survival of a military order need not depend on a particular territorial base. In 1551 Tripoli, inadequately fortified and defended, was lost and Gozo was drastically devastated. The sea-castle of Saint Angelo, the new town of Isola or Senglea nearby, and the fort of Saint Elmo at the harbour mouth had been considerably strengthened by the time the Ottomans attacked in 1565. The Turkish tactics were clumsy. The Hospitallers’ master, Jean de la Valette, a veteran of the final 1522 siege of Rhodes, resisted with determination and tactical sagacity, helped by the Maltese population; the strategic judgement displayed in the management of the relief expedition by García de Toledo, viceroy at Palermo and himself a commander of Santiago, probably proved decisive. The Hospital won enormous prestige in clinging so tenaciously to a technically indefensible position, and the Ottomans were excluded from a potentially dangerous strategic forward base.

  Six years later, when the Turks were defeated at Lepanto, five galleys and 100 knights were provided by a new military order dedicated to St Stephen (Santo Stefano) which had been founded in 1562 by Cosimo I de Medici, duke of Tuscany, who became its hereditary grand master. He transformed part of the feeble Tuscan fleet into a permanent standing navy modelled on that of Malta and designed both to protect his shores and shipping and also to consolidate his non-Florentine subjects around his regime through the creation and definition of a new nobility. In certain towns opposed to Florence, such as Siena and Lucca, the nobility largely remained faithful to Malta, but elsewhere Santo Stefano attracted many families away from the Hospital, even though its nobility lacked the prestige of Malta. Its knights could enter the order and secure noble status by endowing a new commandery in jus patronatus or family patronage and they could be married, as in Santiago; they were bound to give three years’ military service, partly at sea. Married commanders’ sons were able to inherit commanderies in family patronage, and defects in their mother’s nobility could be remedied by a supplementary payment or augmentation; furthermore, a rapid succession of renunciations by live commanders could enable a number of members of the same family to ennoble themselves quite quickly. All this differed sharply from Maltese practice with regard to celibacy and nobility, yet it too provided an efficient naval contribution to the holy war.

  Santo Stefano, with its own naval academy and with its convent and conventual church at Pisa designed by Giorgio Vasari, soon had hundreds of knights, some from outside Tuscany; no less than 695 commanderies were founded between 1563 and 1737. From its base at Livorno its well-organized fleet defended Tuscany’s commerce and shores, and fought the infidel further afield, often sailing alongside the ships of the Hospital; it contributed two galleys to the relief of Malta in 1565. The Tuscan galleys, sometimes ten or more at a time, raided aggressively off the African coasts, throughout the Aegean, and around Cyprus, most notably under their greatest admiral Jacopo Inghirami. They cruised as a squadron which took and divided spoil and ransoms but, unlike the Hospital, Santo Stefano had no semi-private individual corso. After 1584 the order shifted the weight of its Christian piracy from the western Mediterranean to the rewarding hunting grounds of the Levant. In the eight years from 1610 Santo Stefano took twenty-four Barbary vessels and 1,409 slaves in the West, and it pillaged several towns and took forty-nine Turkish and Greek vessels and 1,114 slaves in the Levant. Like the Hospital and very briefly the Teutonic Order, Santo Stefano fought with the Venetians during their Cretan war from 1645 to 1669, but thereafter it saw increasingly little action. The office of admiral was abolished in 1737 and the order was suppressed by Napoleon in 1809. In the same year Napoleon fundamentally disrupted the history of the Teutonic Order, which lost its German lands. It headquarters were moved to Vienna, but its military characteristics and all aspiration to an order-state were gone.

  In 1568 Cosimo de Medici attempted to incorporate the hospitaller order of St Lazarus into Santo Stefano, but instead the pope united part of it in 1572 to the Order of St Maurice, with Emanuele Filiberto, duke of Savoy, and his successors as perpetual grand masters and with an obligation to maintain two galleys; two did in fact serve at Tunis in 1574, but that order’s military activity ceas
ed after 1583. New military orders continued to be created. Pope Pius II founded the order of Bethlehem in 1459, using the goods of various suppressed minor orders. Its few brethren under their master, Daimberto de Amorosa, planned to defend the Aegean island of Lemnos, but it fell to the Turks and the brethren moved to Syros and built a hospice there in 1464. Following the Venetian reconquest of Lemnos in the same year they returned there, but the Turks regained the island in 1479 and the order practically disappeared. Much later, in 1619, Charles of Gonzaga, duke of Mantua and Nevers, helped to found a papal order of knights, the Ordre de la Milice Chrétienne, as part of elaborate French schemes to fight the Turks and the German Protestants. In 1623 Pope Urban VIII transformed it into a full military order with vows of conjugal chastity. Italian and German groups adhered, money was contributed, and a fleet constructed, but no action followed.

  The Modern Period: The Survival of an Order-State

  After 1561 only the Order of Malta remained an effective and independent military body. It was managed by tough warriors who knew their business; the master Jean de la Valette had been captured in 1540 and held as a Muslim prisoner for over a year. The 1565 siege gave the Hospitallers new purpose and confidence; they at once began the construction of the new conventual city of Valletta, beautified by Girolamo Cassar, and of an immense system of fortifications spread around the Grand Harbour. The island was transformed into a powerful deterrent which threatened the strategic communications between Istanbul and Alexandria on which the Islamic front from Egypt to Tunis, Algiers, and Morocco partly depended. The Hospitallers stood as a key bulwark against this menace, their propaganda emphasizing Muslim solidarity in order to keep the fear of the infidel alive and to justify their own position and the holy war upon which, ideologically, they relied. Because Malta’s massive stone defences were never seriously attacked, itself a proof of their effectiveness, they gave the impression of a regime obsessed with invasion phobia. Some element of danger always remained and these fortifications, constantly held to be in need of updating, were eventually extended over much of the island; the last major construction in this almost continuous building programme was Fort Tigné, completed as late as 1794. The fortifications required much financial investment and local taxation but they provided the islanders with protection and employment. Dockyards and arsenals supported major naval campaigns, and the economy was diversified as the port and the new towns, the hospital and quarantine service, and the well-located trading entrepôt all expanded rapidly. The population of Malta and Gozo nearly doubled in a hundred years, from some 49,500 in 1680 to 91,000 in 1788, and while there was some dissatisfaction with the government, as there was throughout western Europe, the Maltese, like the Rhodians before them, were comparatively well treated and content. These achievements were safeguarded by ceaseless diplomatic intervention in the papal, French, Venetian, and other courts, where indeed Hospitallers were frequently present in secular service. Valletta became an outstanding academy for naval commanders, some of whom became officers in the French fleet, but by the eighteenth century the war at sea, along with the Ottoman threat itself, was in decline.

  Malta’s military achievement was founded on countless significant minor episodes, as the Hospitallers effectively policed the seas from Tunis to Calabria with their objective not so much to sink or to kill as to secure booty, ransoms, and slaves. Fortunes fluctuated and the Hospital took its losses; for example, three of its galleys were taken in 1570, which reduced the order’s presence at Lepanto in the year following to a mere three galleys. After that battle the great powers never again mounted vast galley fleets, which had become too expensive. Instead there was a balance of Mediterranean seapower which Malta did much to maintain. Lepanto had not destroyed Ottoman strength; in fact, the Turks had conquered Cyprus in 1571 and in 1574 they retook Tunis. The Hospitallers sustained their aggression. In 1611, for example, they attacked both Corinth in Greece and Kerkenna off the Tunisian coast; on the other hand, there was a small Turkish landing on Malta in 1614. There was collaboration with Venice in defence of Crete from 1645 to 1669, during a war provoked by a Hospitaller attack on an Egyptian convoy. Maltese and Tuscan galleys continued to sail against the Ottomans, but the Turkish war which ended in 1718 saw their last major campaign in Levantine waters. In 1705 the Hospitallers had introduced heavy sailing vessels known as ships-of-the-line to supplement their oared galleys. Special foundations financed these warships, on which the knights were supposed to complete four six-month periods of service before securing advancement. The war at sea declined and the Hospital could claim much credit for that, but hostilities never entirely ceased; in 1749, for example, there was an attack on Oran. The Russians demolished Ottoman seapower in 1770, yet dangers remained; at the very end, when a Tunisian vessel was taken near Gozo in April 1798, the Hospital’s fleet still consisted of four galleys, two ships-of-the-line, and two frigates.

  As at Rhodes, the corso contributed to the island’s employment and economy. The Maltese corso was not crude piracy; nor was it the standard privateering licensed by a public authority under legally valid rules but without religious distinctions. It was rather a form of holy warfare limited, in theory though frequently not in practice, to attacks on infidel shipping. Authorized by the master, who received ten per cent of the booty, and strictly regulated by a special tribunal, it permitted Hospitallers and others to invest in piratical expeditions by arming a ship and dividing profits made from booty and ransoms. There was great spoil in the Aegean and the Levant, as operations moved from Tripoli to the Peloponnese, to Rhodes, and to Cyprus. Attacks on Venetian shipping in particular repeatedly led to diplomatic confrontations and to the sequestration of the Hospital’s incomes in its priory of Venice. The Hospital took part in many major sixteenth-century campaigns and in the Veneto-Turkish wars between 1645 and 1718, but after 1580 the emphasis shifted to the corso. Like its North African counterparts, Malta became a corsair state whose vessels were active along the Maghrib coasts where they confronted a Barbary counter-corso in conflicts which occasionally extended into Atlantic waters. Maltese sailors and investors participated fully in the corso, while Hospitaller brethren not only financed the vessels but served on them; of 483 known eighteenth-century ventures some 183, or 38 per cent, were under Hospitaller command. The growing predominance of the French, with their Turkish entente, constrained the Hospitallers to reduce their Levant operations and diminished their prizes. Down to 1675 there were still some twenty to thirty active corsairs, but from then until 1740 the number fell to between ten and twenty; and thereafter there were even fewer, with no licences being issued for the Levant. Only after the crisis of 1792 was the corso briefly revived. By then the Hospital was, with considerable success, policing and pacifying the seas rather than conducting a morally justified religious war, but the order was still performing a useful activity which fostered western commerce, particularly as it forced Ottoman subjects to seek safety by sailing on Christian shipping.

  The Hospital’s institutions remained static. Its field of administration, which extended far beyond the island order-state, depended predominantly on the master. Between 1526 and 1612 the chapter general met, on average, every six years, but from 1631 until 1776, when a financial crisis finally proved compelling, it was never summoned. The Hospital, never seriously reformed, became ever more autocratic, its masters even seeking forms of sovereignty. The southern French monopoly of the mastership had been broken in 1374, and subsequently there were Iberian and Italian as well as French masters; in the eighteenth century two Portuguese, Antonio Manoel de Vilhena and Manoel Pinto de Fonseca, ruled between them for some forty-six years, Pinto for thirty-two of them. The election of a ruler for life ensured continuity, stability, and an absence of child or female successions, but the seniority system encouraged longevity and produced a gerontocracy throughout the upper echelons of the administration. The master’s extensive incomes and patronage enabled him to win influence, to pack committees, or to elect knights thr
ough his own magistral grace, and he could therefore become unduly autocratic. Such behaviour led to the deposition in 1581 of the master, Jean l’Évêque de la Cassière, who had sought clumsily to restrain lawless behaviour among the brethren; he was only reinstated after a major upheaval and a visit to Rome.

  The French, with three of the Hospital’s seven provinces, clung instinctively to the lands, commanderies, and incomes on which their survival depended. There was scandalous, but irresistible, royal interference in the priory of France, and in general the system of promotions developed into a complicated bureaucratic competition permitting pluralism, absenteeism, and other abuses. Widespread intervention, especially in appointments, by popes who failed to withstand pressures from rulers and other individuals played a significant part in undermining the morale of all the military orders. Nepotism was inevitable; in an extreme case, the great-nephew of the Hospitaller master Adrien de Wignacourt received the commandery of Lagny-le-Sec at the age of 3 in 1692 and still held it on his death eighty-two years later. Manoel Pinto de Fonseca was received at the age of 2 and died, as master, aged 92. Yet the Hospital was by no means decadent. It remained strong in Aragon and Bohemia, in parts of Germany, and in Italy, especially in Naples and Sicily. By 1583 when of some 2,000 brethren there were only 150 sergeants and 150 priests, the knights had become decidedly predominant. In 1700 there were still about 560 commanderies in France, the Iberian peninsula, Italy, and the empire.