The Great Siege of Malta

by Allen, Bruce Ware

  By late August, the news was not good. The weather began to turn—“the sun exited the sign of Leo, the heat of the Dog Star was lessened.”2 A cold tramontana wind stumbled down the Alps, thrashing the Mediterranean and kicking up high waves. Rain followed close behind. Now the Ottomans were at a serious disadvantage. Although no longer threatened by firepots, they found that the slow matches on their guns were useless, and their powder turned to paste. Worse, they were unable to use their bows. The Turkic composite bow was a magnificent weapon, perfected over centuries. It was designed, however, for a dry climate. In constant rain, the glues that helped give the bow strength absorbed moisture, grew loose, and robbed the weapon of its effectiveness.

  The Christians didn’t have that problem. Behind the walls, Valette had raided the armory and brought out crossbows for his frontline men. These weapons, their power stored in taut steel bands, could stand up to the weather, were deadly accurate in even a novice’s hands, and had a throw weight sufficient to put a bolt through a sheet of plate armor, much less the wooden shields of the enemy. The test came when one of the Ottomans fell in front of the post of Don Bernardo de Cabrera, and the Ottomans could not, or dared not try to, remove him—something of a scandal for an army that prided itself on taking care of its fallen. Christian defenders sallied out, hacked off the man’s head, and carried it back on a pole to decorate what was left of the walls of Fort St. Michael. Encouraging for the defenders, but distressing to the Ottomans.

  The Christian soldiers were now cocky enough to take chances they would not have done earlier, making increasingly bold sorties from behind the walls and getting away with them. Where the Ottomans had been attempting to build a wool-and-cotton bastion at the Post of Robles, defenders rushed out, chased the sappers off, destroyed their works, stole their picks and shovels, and again, took the head of a man not quite fast enough to get away.

  Lacking his suicidally brave soldiers and a favored traditional weapon, Mustapha now turned to higher technology. His engineers busied themselves for the next few days in sawing, shaping, boring, and nailing together the masts and planks of excess galleys. What they created was a manta, a primitive wheeled armored personnel carrier, covered with damp animal skin, that could carry a large number of troops as close to the front line as possible, impervious to enemy fire until the last few yards. The Christians had seen what they were up to.

  They busied themselves with a countermeasure conceived by a Matias de Ribera, soldado aventurero.3 He came at the problem from below. Masons were called, and stonework and rubble near the base of St. Michael’s walls were removed until finally there was one large stone between the wall and the outside world. When the manta was close to the wall and could not be missed, the men wrestled the last stone free, pushed a cannon into the freshly created embrasure, and fired off a quick blast of grape, metal chains, and miscellaneous rubbish. The hail of scattershot broke through the body of the manta, tearing the unsuspecting men inside to bloody shreds, and it also finished off some forty or so others who had followed behind. Thus ended the first and last attack of that day.

  Even Ottoman successes were turning against them. They had managed to take and hold the salient of the bastion before the Post of Castile. Valette had ordered a mine dug beneath them, and with two barrels of valuable powder, blew up the position and the forty men who were defending it. On August 28, the Ottomans pushed a siege tower toward the Post of Castile, much to the contempt of the defenders. The Christians cried out from the walls, “Rogues! To what end and to what purpose have you brought this pulpit, to preach the Mohammedan religion? For you know that nobody wants or believes in your false prophet.”4 A cannon shot fired into the base caused the structure to teeter and then fall, killing or wounding a good number of men inside and behind it. To add insult to injury, some quick-witted Christian officer had his men quickly exit from the walls and take over the wooden hulk for use as an outer bastion. Again money changed hands as the grand master handed out gold to the men who had brought the thing down.

  That night, the Turks began a twenty-four-hour cannonade. It was thought to be a distraction. Those guns that the Ottomans were not firing were being quietly removed from the scene.

  The only kind of fighting possible was close quarter and cold steel, and neither side appeared to have the stomach left for it. Morale among the Muslim ranks was so low that the attack of August 29 required officers to bully their soldiers with cudgels to get them to fight at all. A soldier may be willing to die for a lost cause, but no soldier wants to be the last to die knowing that his comrades will soon be packing up and going home. Mustapha himself was rumored to be contemplating retreat. Uludj Ali reportedly talked him out of it.5

  If mental exhaustion had not quite reached Valette, it certainly had reached his immediate lieutenants. The council of senior knights, alarmed at the state of their defensive works, proposed retreating to the keep of Fort St. Angelo. A hard force in there could maintain the position for weeks, months even. Long enough for relief to come. Long enough to preserve the artifacts and records of the Order.

  Valette squelched the idea. It could not be done, he said, without abandoning the common people of Birgu and the wellborn soldiers at Fort St. Michael.6 Although he himself had pardoned Vallier for abandoning Tripoli, Valette was not about to do the same here. The fort could hold only a small number of people. All others would be at the mercy of the Ottomans. It would bring shame to the Order, just as Rhodes had done, just as Tripoli had done. The council was concerned for the records of the Order? If the knights prevailed, the records would be secure. If they failed, the records would be superfluous. The knights, and everyone else, would remain in Birgu and fight alongside the volunteers and the citizens who had put their trust in God and the Order. To prove his seriousness, Valette ordered the bridge connecting Fort St. Angelo to Birgu destroyed.

  Another day passed with no attack. In the lull, a Maltese prisoner was able to escape from the Turkish lines and report back to his countrymen inside the wall on the ruinous conditions of the Turks. There were now, he said, not enough arms for the fleet; sixty galleys were without crew members; sappers were dying of hunger and illness. He might as well have added paralysis at the highest level. Mustapha had made a trip to Mdina, apparently with a view to taking it, but hesitated to attack, “like the proverbial dog caught between two hares who, chasing both, catches neither.”7 He was now acting like a gambler down on his luck and placing bets at random. His nerves cannot have been helped by rumors (true rumors, as it happened) that an emissary from Gianandrea Doria, a soldier named Martinez de Oliventia, had arrived on the island. Don Garcia de Toledo was keeping his word. The Gran Soccorso was collected, embarked, and was on its way.

  This had not been a sure thing. A week earlier (August 22), the troops of the so-called “Great Relief” gathered at Syracuse. Some ten thousand Spanish foot from Naples, the tercios milled about the town, as well as seventeen hundred mercenaries from Lombardy, scores of Maltese, Italians, Germans, and Knights of St. John, together forming a patchwork of color on the slopes above the city. A fleet of galleys and barges rolled and pitched on the water, ready to take the expedition and its equipment to Malta.8 Bad weather stopped them.

  Don Garcia had heard nothing from Malta since Anastagi’s report. He knew, however, that Mustapha would be keeping a sharp eye out for Spanish ships. What the viceroy wanted now was to coordinate his movements with Valette.

  Gianandrea Doria, always eager, volunteered to lead an advance party to Gozo. He and Martinez would land on that island to arrange signals for the Gran Soccorso—one torch to indicate no enemy ships to westward, two torches for ten ships, three for twenty, and so forth. A man running in the direction of the ships would show where they were. Doria himself would then proceed to Linosa, a small island west of Malta, to rendezvous with the main fleet and prepare for the final invasion. (The suggestion has been made that this was to be a diversion intended to lure Muslims into thinking that Tripoli was th
e target.)

  Martinez and Doria left on Doria’s flagship, and the remaining army enjoyed one more night’s sleep on dry land. On Saturday, August 25, Don Garcia judged the sky and water friendly enough to risk the crossing. Men in their thousands, land soldiers all, tramped up the gangplanks to the unfamiliar sounds of straining hawsers, lapping water, and creaking timber. For veterans of Djerba—Don Alvarez de Sande and Don Sancho de Leyva were the most prominent—this was a chance for vindication and revenge. Turgut might be dead, and it was a pity they had missed him, but Piali Pasha was still alive, and taking him would be a reasonable consolation prize.

  What followed was a ten-day trial of snakes and ladders, and reads a lot like the Odyssey. Contrary winds, scattered comrades, skirmishes with enemies, and heavy storms at sea all plagued the expedition. These difficulties were compounded by the needs of the convoy. A fleet could progress only as fast as its slowest member, and each galley, fast or slow, towed a barge stuffed with equipment—biscuit, powder, lead, rope, shovels, picks, and field guns. Worse, they sailed “without lights” (sin fogones), which hid them from any passing enemy, but that also made sailing at night highly dangerous.9 Two leagues out they headed straight into contrary winds. Dawn revealed that they had made no progress at all. They decided to send two galleys ahead on reconnaissance. This pair found a Muslim cargo vessel also heading to Malta. The galleys set out to seize her—they didn’t want word of their approach leaking out as it had at Djerba, and a prize is a prize in any circumstances. She must have put up a good fight, since they were still scrapping by the time the armada caught up. It took five galleys to force the merchantman’s surrender. The vessel had been carrying food to the Ottoman army in Malta. Bad luck for the captain. Now he, his crew, and his cargo were sent to Sicily in chains.10

  It seemed auspicious. It wasn’t. New and heavier winds kicked up and blew the armada some hundred miles northwest to Pantelleria. Undaunted, Don Garcia ordered them to try again. On August 28, the weather turned even worse—gray skies turned black, the clouds were ripped by lightning, and cold rain poured in torrents. The barges and galleys twisted and strained and creaked in the rise and fall of the waves; oars and beaks and masts snapped; equipment was jettisoned or fell overboard. The soldiers, unaccustomed to rough seas and fearing a watery death more than the Muslim army, cursed Don Garcia and would have mutinied had they dared. The fleet scattered—no shipmaster with only minimal control of his ship wanted to be too close to the heavy battering rams of his colleagues. Hours passed and ten thousand prayers rose up to the dark sky. By the time this storm died and the sun broke through again, Don Garcia could only gaze across the pacified ocean and wonder just what kind of force he had left.

  In fact, they hadn’t lost a single galley. Several boats were damaged, some badly, but all eventually managed to limp to the island of Favignana, eleven miles off the westernmost tip of Sicily and 150 miles north of Linosa—testimony both to the power of the storm and these men’s ability to weather it. At Favignana, they found a galleot late of Malta and its crew of Turks and Moors, fellow victims of the winds. These men had given up the fight on Malta as unwinnable and gave a grim account of what the Ottomans were suffering. More good news, if not for the refugees—they were immediately sent back to Syracuse as slaves.

  Don Garcia ordered the fleet to Linosa, where he hoped to find Gianandrea Doria. Instead he found two of Doria’s sailors and a message. Doria had left Martinez on Gozo with instructions concerning the signal fires. He then had continued to the rendezvous point at Linosa, but judged it unsafe in the late gale. He would return in due course for new orders. Don Garcia left some of his own men with a message for Doria, food enough for two weeks, and comfortingly, the promise of ransom should the two men be captured by Muslims. If Doria should show up again, he was to return to Syracuse. As for Don Garcia, he was now leading his sixty-four ships straight to Malta.11

  There was more bad luck. The main body of the Soccorso approached Gozo on September 4, “in the fourth hour of the night”; but as the original plan had supposed the fleet to be approaching from Syracuse, there were no signal lights to guide them.12 Don Garcia was determined to round the island, in total darkness and heavy seas, and with all taillights extinguished, on account of which tactics those ships pulling up from behind lost sight of the fleet. By dawn, he was able to meet some of them, bemoan the lost opportunity of the night before, and sail back to Syracuse to regroup.

  Here they found Gianandrea Doria. After the Genoese had left for Lampedusa in search of water, he got sidetracked in a small scuffle with two small sailing ships—not, he stressed, because he wanted to, but because an overzealous subordinate, Don Pedro de Pisa, had. The fight had gone badly (forty wounded, two killed), though Doria himself reported that he had been in the forefront, rallying his men, retiring only when struck in the face by an arrow (a detail he quietly left off his official report).13 He took a few days to recover in Lampedusa before returning to Linosa, getting the viceroy’s message, and pressing on to Sicily.

  Doria’s partisans later claim that his volunteering to go to Malta alone with his own twelve galleys had shamed Don Garcia into following. This view assumes Don Garcia was reluctant in the first place, which is at best unknowable. Certainly he would have wanted to know what kind of force he had left. What he had were mutinous soldiers who were tired of all this useless cruising. It took both Ascanio Della Corgna and Leyva, some of the local cavalry, and some loosely held guns to corral the men back onto the ships. On September 6, late in the day, they set out, again from Syracuse, this time in good weather. By midnight they were again approaching Gozo, where the signal fires were visible and positive. Don Garcia had ordered the chickens on board killed in case their noise should give away the ships’ presence. Some commanders, anxious for a fight, or at least eager to get off the boats, requested that they land on the big island immediately. It was bold, but Don Garcia had had his share of amphibious landings and respected the kind of trouble they could bring. “Night,” he said, “is mother to confusion.”14 He ordered that they wait until dawn, and only then did they enter Mellieha bay, north of the island.

  It was a shocking failure by the Ottomans that this was even possible. El Eudj Ali had warned his masters of an enemy fleet in the area. Algerian ships had heretofore been patrolling the entire island regularly. Why special vigilance was not kept at this place and time, and therefore no army lay in ambush for the Christian armada, is a mystery. Perhaps they trusted bad weather to safeguard them. This was a mistake on their part, and within ninety minutes of arriving, the Gran Soccorso managed to offload 9,600 men along with 250 horses, mules, and asses to prepare for the next stage.15

  A runner took off for Mdina to give Don Mesquita the news, and then it was time for Don Garcia to leave. King Philip’s orders not to risk the fleet had been clear, and Don Garcia had obeyed them to the best of his ability. He was also under orders not to risk his own person, which gave rise to his dry, even witty (“por manera de donayre”) parting words: “Now all that remains is for me to go, and you had best not detain me, if you wish to comply with His Majesty’s orders.”16 The response, presumably said jokingly, was that they would not wish to do anything counter to the king’s orders. Some contemporaries ridiculed Don Garcia for leaving the island, but he had other good reasons not to stay. By delegating operational command, Don Garcia avoided the potentially awkward question of whether a Spanish viceroy would outrank a grand master on the island itself.

  Indeed, the entire question of the relief’s command structure was a thicket of regional and political rivalries. Philip had put Sande in overall command, because, says Balbi, Sande was a Spaniard.17 Don Garcia was a bit more generous, in public at least, citing Sande’s “experience and the confidence in which we hold him.”18 His bravery was undisputed—the scars on his face and hands that he carried from St. Dizier were proof of that—but his record as a commander was not inspiring. At St. Dizier, he had lost control of his troops. At Djer
ba, he was unable to hold the fort together, and rather than standing to the end, he had tried to escape so that, according to Busbecq, others could take the blame for the final surrender.19 In private, the viceroy had serious doubts, which he shared in a letter to his cousin the duke of Alba: “Although I consider Sande a very good subordinate (ejecutor), I have no faith in his judgment or his ability for high command.”20 For whatever reasons, he had had bad relations with Neapolitan admiral Don Sancho de Leyva at Djerba—“they could not have hated one another more if they had been brothers”—and it seems that the choice did not go down smoothly with the men deputed to save Malta either.21 Chiappino Vitelli had command of the Italian soldiers, but “has made it clear that he would not serve under Don Álvaro nor della Corgna.”22 Della Corgna was presumably grateful just to be out of prison. He was deputed maestro de campo general—second to Sande was the best that Don Garcia could offer.23 Don Diego de Guzman, ranking knight of the order, was also to be consulted (“honoris gratia”) in operational matters.24 (A few contemporary historians write confidently that Della Corgna was in overall command—more evidence of just how vague the situation was.25) Other appointments included Pompeo Colonna as captain general of the artillery and Paolo Sforza as general of the commissariat. In a clear attempt to rein in Don Álvaro, Don Garcia dictated that no action could be taken without the clear majority of the council voting in favor.26 This was to last until they could get in touch with Valette, at which time his word would become law.

  Foot soldiers on Malta, men on opposite sides of the trenches, sworn to kill each other but close enough now to talk, even to shake hands, were exchanging small kindnesses. The Ottomans at St. Michael passed food—oranges and melon, taken from Maltese groves—to the besieged. In exchange and to the Ottomans’ astonishment, the Christians gave them fresh bread and cheese. Valette put a stop to this sort of thing since “the courtesy of the enemy must always be suspect,” but the point was made—any hope of starving out the Christians vanished.27 In fact, by September 6, some of the auberges were putting their men on half rations—one and a half loaves of bread and half a quartuccio (.14 liter) of wine—but the Turks were not to know this.28