The Great Siege of Malta

by Allen, Bruce Ware

  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 stony ground before the walls with a series of deep zigzag trenches, which would enable the troops to approach the city in apparent safety. The defenders of Rhodes, however, had their own artillery, and through careful practice over the years, knew the ranges of the guns to the inch. Ottoman sappers found themselves under a storm of cannonballs that appeared to anticipate their very movements.

  There was, however, a second corps of sappers busy digging underground in multipronged attempts to undermine the walls. Day and night these men sat cross-legged in cramped, fetid holes, working by flickering oil lamps, carving out the dirt and stone before them, shoring up the low ceiling with beams and planks, and hauling the detritus to the entrance in baskets. It was a standard tactic of siege warfare at the time. The goal was to create a void beneath the walls, stuff it with gunpowder and light a fuse. (Alternatively, besiegers could dispense with powder and just set the tunnels’ wooden supports on fire.) With luck, the wall would collapse and combat soldiers could scramble over the rubble. It was hazardous duty and earned them extra pay; it did not necessarily keep them safe from the enemy.

  In siege warfare, it was engineers who made the difference, which is why L’Isle-Adam had been so keen on getting Martinengo.11 To track the Ottoman miners, the Brescian crafted a number of large tambourines and attached small bells to them. The wooden frames were pressed into the bare earth beneath the walls. The distant shock of a miner’s pick would travel through the soil, causing the nearest diaphragm to quiver and the bells to sound, and so direct Christian sappers where to dig countermines. When the opposing tunnels met, Christians drove out the enemy with incendiaries, then blocked off the tunnel. Even where the Ottomans did manage to lay and detonate charges, defense technology again often triumphed. In building a second line of interior walls, Martinengo incorporated a series of narrow vents into the masonry, allowing the gunpowder’s “fury to drain through the rock” and dissipate harmlessly into the air.12 Rhodes was not an easy nut to crack.

  Even hard nuts must give in eventually. On September 4, well over a month after the first shots were fired, subterranean Ottoman gunpowder opened a thirty-foot section of wall defended by the English langue. Concealed by the rising dust, Suleiman’s Janissaries, elite troops, climbed over the unstable pile of stone, planting green banners of Islam in triumph and preparing to rush the city itself. They never made it. Spanish knights on the right, French knights on the left, lay down a withering crossfire into the Ottoman troops. At the center, Martinengo and a crew of English knights and volunteers rushed forward with pikes to defend the breach. They were soon joined by L’Isle-Adam himself, fresh from celebrating Mass and brandishing a short pike. The fighting was vigorous and said to be costly, but when the encounter broke off, the cross of St. John still flew over Rhodes.

  More breaches followed in the coming weeks, and each time the knights fought the enemy to a standstill. And although the Ottomans could not gain entrance, Christian ships were clearly able to weave through Kurtoğlu’s naval blockade, taking messages out and the odd company of volunteers in. Christian sources claim that Suleiman marked his displeasure by having Kurtoğlu publically whipped on the deck of the corsair’s own ship.

  The season was getting late and Suleiman was getting impatient. It was time for a general attack. In the late morning of September 24, fires were lit all around the city walls of Rhodes to create a curtain of black smoke, hiding the Ottoman troops from the defenders, who were anxious to know where the blow might fall. At noon, the sound of trumpets, kettledrums, and pipes spangled the air. Seconds later, tens of thousands of Ottomans let loose a high-pitched yell and burst through the black gloom at every point around the city. Walls with breaches were rushed, walls without breaches were scaled. Within minutes, dozens of Ottoman banners were planted on the walls and cries of victory filled the air.

  The defenders were quick to regroup and close with the enemy. Crossfire again poured into Muslim ranks. A flood of determined knights and mercenaries crashed against the onslaught of invaders. Dust and smoke rose and men fell, and shouting was answered by th
e ringing of steel striking steel. Christians skilled at the deadly balletic movements of pikes and halberds gored their enemy, or severed the odd hand or foot or pound of flesh. Men on scaling ladders were drenched in a blistering rain of hot oil and bubbling pitch poured on them by defenders on the wall. Suleiman watched the spectacle from a high platform well out of harm’s way; L’Isle-Adam was in the thick of it, directing his men to hold firm and push back, rushing from one trouble spot to the next, inspiring fresh courage wherever he appeared.

  Hours passed, and once more and against all odds, the defenders were succeeding. They toppled scaling ladders, cast down the intruders, and closed up the breaches with enemy dead. As the sun fell onto the horizon, Ottoman troops trudged back to the safety of their own lines. Again the normally impassive Suleiman lost his temper, and not content with a simple whipping, he ordered that his top generals be executed, an order he rescinded the next day after he had a chance to reconsider.

  What to do? Sixteenth-century warfare was a warm-weather enterprise, and military campaigns were supposed to wind down by autumn. The days were growing shorter. Autumn rain turned the soil to mud, difficult to tunnel. Disease had entered the invaders’ camp and escorted more soldiers off the island and into paradise.

  The defenders, also badly mauled in this latest fight, hoped that the Ottomans would follow custom and abandon the island for the winter, giving them at least some time to rest. Spirits rose when, on October 4, a knight arrived from Naples with the announcement that a relief force was assembling at Messina. The Mediterranean sailing season, however, effectively ends by October, and the promised soldiers never arrived. A few volunteers made the trip across the relatively short distance from Heraklion, Crete, to Rhodes, but in nowhere near the numbers needed. The defenders of Rhodes could count on nothing from Europe before spring. Powder and shot and arrows were so limited that L’Isle-Adam forbade any firing without orders from a superior officer. Their final hope was that Suleiman would follow custom and depart before winter. And indeed, on October 31, the Ottoman fleet did depart.