The Great Siege of Malta

by Allen, Bruce Ware

  Pope Clement saw this impasse as an opportunity for L’Isle-Adam. The grand master was, after all, technically a subject of Francis, and it had been to Francis that L’Isle-Adam had sent his earliest requests for aid before the fall of Rhodes. Clement encouraged the grand master to head to Madrid to work out a deal between Charles and Francis, to persuade them to turn their attention against their common enemy of Islam. L’Isle-Adam should also press for a permanent home, Malta by preference.12

  How much good L’Isle-Adam accomplished for the cause of Christian unity is unknowable. The only point he is said to have resolved was one of protocol: who, when the emperor and monarch were together, should have precedence in entering a room? Charles had deferred to Francis; Francis to Charles. Charles asked L’Isle-Adam his opinion, and L’Isle-Adam turned to Francis: “No one, sire, can dispute that the emperor is the mightiest prince in Christendom; but as you are not only in his dominions but within his palace, it becomes you to accept the courtesy by which he acknowledges you as the first of European kings.”13 Such niceties kept negotiations alive and Francis imprisoned for the better part of a year. L’Isle-Adam meanwhile had other things on his mind, and they must have proved a tantalizing distraction from the ongoing impasse between jailor and prisoner.

  He had a chance to take back Rhodes.

  Even at this late date, there were still men who thought they could get the better of Suleiman. One of them was Ahmed Pasha, Suleiman’s general-in-chief during the siege of Rhodes and the face of rough justice to Suleiman’s magnanimity. After the knights’ surrender, he kept various sacred relics, notably the mummified arm of St. John, for a ransom of thirty thousand ducats.14

  Now, two years later, he needed them. In 1524, passed over in his ambitions to become chief vizier in Istanbul, Ahmed Pasha had been sent to quell a revolt in Egypt. He did so, and in the doing began to imagine some outsized ambitions for himself. He was officially the governor of Egypt, but according to a Muslim chronicler, “He allowed himself to be led astray by the devil and plotted for the Sultanate.”15 His plan was to resurrect the Mamluk state, with himself as leader, to which end he had succeeded in expelling all troops faithful to Suleiman. Coins were to bear his name, the khutba (Friday sermon) to be said in his name.16

  For this project to work, he would need as much help as he could get, and he did not much care where he got it. If the Knights of St. John could act as a buffer for him on Rhodes, he would be happy to help them get there. There was precedence. The knights had allied with Egyptian Mamluks against the Ottomans in the fifteenth century.17 Discrete inquiries were made, nods and whispers exchanged, and L’Isle-Adam was convinced that their old enemy was sincere. Was the plan feasible? L’Isle-Adam sent Antonio Bosio (uncle of Giovanni Bosio, who would write the chronicles of the Order), disguised as a merchant, to investigate. What he saw was encouraging. Ottoman rule at Rhodes had been remarkably negligent. The broken walls were unrepaired, the people unhappy, the officials open to discussion. (Of course, the Ottomans might have considered that broken walls were a symbol of strength—what did any city under the sultan have to fear from foreign invaders?) Further trips followed, and Antonio Bosio met with senior Orthodox Christian clerics and Ahmed Pasha’s ally, the aga of Janissaries, at Rhodes.

  Even after Ahmed Pasha had been assassinated and his pickled head sent to Constantinople (March 27, 1524), the knights pressed on. The island’s recapture would galvanize Christian fellowship among European rulers—it was theoretically one subject on which all sides could agree—and L’Isle-Adam wanted to know to what extent those present would be willing to help.

  Charles offered twenty-five thousand ducats. The king of Portugal put up another fifteen thousand. Henry VIII of England would eventually pledge twenty thousand ducats, but only after two more years of pouting and a personal visit from L’Isle-Adam.18 Francis alone was unable to rise to the occasion. His immediate need was the paying of his ransom, which sum required special imposts within his kingdom. Honoring the general sense of collegiality at Madrid, L’Isle-Adam agreed to earmark the Order’s French revenues, normally exempt from taxation, for the ransom fund, and even donated money from his own pocket. Terms were agreed, signatures twirled, seals affixed, hands shaken.

  It all went to the bad, however. L’Isle-Adam’s dream of returning to Rhodes died on the vine, and Francis would double-cross all who believed in him. The king, it turned out, had not been idle during his captivity. In his spare moments, he (and his mother Queen Dowager Louise of Savoy) scribbled letters abusing Charles and pleading for help. The emperor, they said, was a brute, an ambitious tyrant, a danger to peace-loving peoples everywhere. Both mother and son complained about Francis’s cruel treatment and requested that the recipient “demonstrate your great munificence and ransom my son.”19 The letters were addressed not to the pope or other European crowned heads, but to Suleiman, and to Ibrahim Pasha, grand vizier of the Ottoman Empire. No record exists of how Suleiman reacted—in general, the sultan cultivated impassivity like a prized tulip. Nevertheless, the letters were a huge advance in Renaissance realpolitik, a remarkable proof of Suleiman’s reputation and Francis’s desperation. When the republics of Venice or Genoa sent ambassadors to the sultan, it demonstrated once again that merchants care only for money; but when a powerful European king, and his mother, trudged to the Grand Porte, “refuge of the world,” for aid—that revealed an entirely new realm of possibility.20

  Suleiman dictated a friendly, if noncommittal, response: “It is not shocking that an emperor should suffer defeat and be taken prisoner. Take courage and do not allow yourself to be cast down.”21 The sultan also gave verbal promises to Francis’s envoy of more tangible help and mooted a joint effort at squeezing their common enemy Charles between their own two armies.22

  The collusion between Francis and Suleiman, like most secrets, did not stay secret for long, though perhaps unfortunately it did not come to light until Charles had released Francis on the promise, unfulfilled, that the French king would not raise arms against the empire. One courier went through a region of Italy under imperial control and, as will happen, was detained, searched, and the letter discovered in his boots. Charles himself would not believe it until he was presented with a copy of the sultan’s letter. He was outraged. A Christian might trade with Muslims (Charles himself had extended a treaty of peace and commerce with Suleiman’s father). He might even enter alliances with a petty sheik on the North African coast, though only against another Muslim. But for a Christian to solicit a Muslim power against fellow Christians was unimaginable. Charles, in a gesture that seemed quixotic even at the time, challenged Francis to single combat, a challenge idly accepted but never actually fought (though interesting to contemplate).23

  Others in Europe were less outraged at Francis’s intrigues. Indeed, the various powers of Italy—the republics of Venice, Genoa, and Florence, the Duchy of Milan, and even the Pope—now seemed to fear Charles more than Islam, and cobbled together the so-called League of Cognac to preserve their interests against a presumably rapacious Charles. Francis, now freed from prison on the solemn promise that he would renounce his war aims, immediately accepted the invitation to join the league. His envoys suggested that French armies now embark on a full-scale invasion of his own, “without which Charles will inevitably become signor dil mondo, king of the world.”24

  In the event, the League of Cognac never fully coalesced, and Charles’s troops, unpaid for months, grew restless. With nothing to restrain it and with the natural instincts of a predator, the army, more a mob than a disciplined military force, roused from its fitful sleep and embarked on the very invasion that the league had been formed to prevent. Their target was Rome. German Lutherans, men who despised the Catholic Church, had religious zeal to help motivate them. Others, nominally good Catholics, considered only the city’s wealth. The troops trudged down the spine of Italy, their numbers swollen by adventurers and bandits and opportunists until, when they arrived at Rome, they were
some forty thousand strong.25

  The sack of Rome, on May 6, 1527, was straight out of Dante’s inferno: civilians were attacked, robbed, and murdered; churches ransacked; priests killed; nuns raped; buildings burned. It was a scandal across Christendom, and Charles was mortified to learn what his men had done.26 In the following weeks there was some residual fighting in Naples, Savoia; there were some changes of allegiance—Admiral Andrea Doria of Genoa now chose to switch sides from Francis to Charles—but at the end of the day, a general peace was settled and Pope Clement finally crowned Charles Holy Roman emperor in Bologna.

  As for the Knights of St. John, they had maintained their neutrality and sat out the conflict. In August of 1526, they disarmed their galleys to demonstrate their indifference to political arguments between Christian rulers. They lost some tapestries in the looting at Rome, but were otherwise little affected materially. Spiritually, however, the more devout members were devastated. These men had put their lives on the line, had lost companions, good Christians, while defending the continent at the edge of Christendom, and all for a people who saw fit to squabble among themselves when their common enemy was still eyeing the landmass of Europe. They had voluntarily contributed to the ransom that freed Francis from Madrid only to find that he had been consorting with the enemy. After five long years with no central location to call their own, utter dissolution of the Order now seemed a distinct possibility, and one that haunted the grand master. On January 21, 1527, L’Isle-Adam gathered an audience of knights to their quarters in Viterbo and announced that he feared he might “prove to be the last Grand Master” and then broke down in tears.27

  L’Isle-Adam was nothing if not resilient, and with the return of peace in Italy, he returned to the problem of a permanent home. It took another three years, but once all other options were exhausted, L’Isle-Adam capitulated. Charles, unwavering in his loyalty to Christendom, contracted an official donation of Malta and Tripoli to the Order for as long as they remained on the island, to revert to the Emperor should they leave. It was fully accepted on April 25, 1530. The knights now inhabited a fiefdom of Spain, for which they would give him every year on All Saints Day a single falcon—far less than the one hundred thousand gold pieces that L’Isle-Adam had desperately offered just seven years earlier.28 It wasn’t Rhodes, but it was better than nothing. All that remained was for the Order to recover their purpose.

  3

  IN SERVICE TO THE EMPIRE, 1531–1540

  Indeed, we must praise the glory of Prince Andrea Doria for having been one of the great captains of the sea, if it is possible, in living memory or even to be found in our written history.

  Brantôme on Doria

  Not even among the Romans or the Greeks, great conquerors of kingdoms and nations, has there ever been such a one as he.

  Brantôme on Khairedihn Barbarossa

  On September 2, 1531, two brigantines, their holds carrying wine and lumber, sailed into the harbor at Modon, modern Methoni in the south of Greece not far from Rhodes, with its sister city Coron one of the Twin Eyes of the Republic of Venice until seized by the Ottomans in 1498. The vessels were piloted by relatives of the port master. Once the ships were tied up safely at dockside, the port master invited the ships’ crew and the Ottoman port security to a small celebration in honor of their safe return in these dangerous times. The gathering was enhanced by the free use of wine, which in due course put the guards into a drunken sleep. It was a plan as old as the Aegean. Just before dawn, two hundred armed knights of St. John shifted the lumber concealing them in the ship’s hold, crept out, and made their way along the quay, past the tower of Christian bones erected by the Ottomans when they conquered the city.1 The knights murdered the sleeping guards, seized the main gate, and fired a cannon to signal a squadron of galleys anchored out of sight three miles down the coast. The plan was for this larger force to speed their way to the port and then for the combined troops to take the city.

  Nature apparently had other ideas. The wind was capricious that morning. The governor and the townspeople heard the shot—the knights and their mercenary allies waiting down the coast did not. With admirable presence of mind, the governor rallied what soldiers he had along with the more robust natives (who clearly had no interest in freedom from Ottoman rule) against the small force of knights. He also managed to send a messenger to run farther down the coast, where some six thousand Ottoman troops were encamped.

  Hours passed. The fighting in town continued with the knights initially getting the worst of it. The tide turned as the second wave of Christians, alerted by a swift boat, now arrived and rushed into battle. Once more on the defensive, the governor ordered the population of Modon to take refuge in the citadel overlooking their homes. The knights and their mercenary allies had the town to themselves, and they made the most of it. As the refugees in the citadel watched, helpless, the invaders sacked and burned their houses and shops. The end came only when the Ottoman troops arrived and sent the knights packing. These men were not able to stop them from taking eight hundred (some claimed sixteen hundred) prisoners (“chiefly women and children”) and hauling off booty worth a hundred thousand ducats.2

  The message, however, was clear. The knights were back in business.

  The knights’ botched attack on Modon had been an unapproved, freelance effort intended as a stepping-stone back to Rhodes, and their failure to take the city did little to boost their reputation. The pope was said to be very disturbed by the incident, both because they had failed to regain some lost borders of Christendom and because the fight had been a triumph for the Ottomans. The fear was that the raid could only goad Suleiman.3

  Instead, it inspired Charles to follow suit. If this was what a mere half-dozen ships of the Order could accomplish, imagine what a proper armada could do. In the fall of 1532, as Suleiman was engaged in a massive invasion of Hungary (ultimately fruitless), the emperor took the opportunity to retake the ancient ports of the Peloponnese now in the hands of the Ottomans. To this end, he gathered a fleet of thirty-five ships and forty-eight galleys comprising ships of his own, some belonging to the pope, some to the Knights of St. John, and some to the Genoese admiral Andrea Doria, who commanded the expedition.

  This tall, long-nosed man was one of the titans of his age. Born in Genoa in 1468, he served as a condottiere, literally a contract man, a mercenary who would fight for the highest bidder in various land campaigns throughout Italy. For the early years of his career, this meant France; as time passed, however, he found that connection less and less attractive. In 1503 Genoa’s civic leaders offered him the position of admiral of their fleet, a post he refused on the grounds that he knew nothing of naval combat. They countered that, for a man of his achievements, nothing was too difficult. So it proved to be. In the years that followed, Doria came to be regarded as the finest sailor that Christian Europe could muster. His activities were confined to the shifting winds of Genoese politics, first as allied to the French, independent of the French, allied again, and finally, after the sack of Rome (and slow payment from Francis I) he allied firmly with Charles V, who made certain to pay the annual stipend on time.4 The expense was worth it to Charles, if only to have access to the considerable balance sheets of Genoese bankers.

  The planning took into consideration current realities. Modon was rejected as a target since the knights had left nothing to steal. Coron, sister city to Modon, would do. The city fell on September 23, to be followed by Patras farther east, as far as the two towers guarding the Gulf of Corinth, and the cruise might have gone on even longer had not the weather turned and reports reached them that Suleiman was coming back from Hungary. Doria ordered the fleet home, his own hold richer by a load of cannon worth sixty thousand ducats, the cities of Coron and Patras (unlike Modon) firmly in imperial control.

  The expedition marked a significant turning point. It was one thing for corsairs such as the Knights of St. John to raid Suleiman’s territory; it was quite another for the Holy Roman emperor to
expand the Christian commonwealth into Ottoman territory. Then there were the rumors that Charles intended to place the knights in Coron, far too close to Constantinople for comfort.5

  The sultan tried to make the best of the situation. He was hampered by the cost of the Hungarian campaign and the rumblings of trouble on his border with Shiite Persia. Throughout 1533, he made several suggestions for a comprehensive peace covering Charles and the pope and other Christian powers. The overtures came to nothing.6 There was little choice for Suleiman but to respond with force and in kind. He lacked, however, the means.

  It was not that he lacked a navy. Heretofore, the Ottomans had gotten by with small squadrons based in Alexandria, Suez, the Danube, and the Red Sea. They had proven sufficient so long as the remaining Christian stronghold in the eastern Mediterranean behaved, as they generally did. Now that Charles, pushed by the ambitions of the knights, was heading full bore into the eastern Mediterranean, Suleiman had to raise the ante. The Mediterranean east of the Aegean was effectively Ottoman territory that suffered Christian provinces such as Crete, Cyprus, and Chios only so far as they behaved well. Now that an engorged Habsburg fleet was pecking at the eastern Mediterranean, Suleiman needed to expand his navy, and quickly. Beyond that, he would require someone with considerable seafaring experience, another Doria if possible, to command it. That summer, the sultan requested Khairedihn, known to the West as Barbarossa, a legend among the Barbary corsairs, to present himself in Constantinople.

  It was the highpoint in a career that had begun decades earlier on the island of Mytilene (Lesbos), where Khairedihn and his elder brother Aroudj had been born to a retired Janissary and his Christian wife. Aroudj, or Oruc, the elder, started out his adult life as a merchant mariner and sometime navy man (and briefly a prisoner of the Knights of St. John), who headed west to try his hand at piracy. He was soon followed by Khairedihn.