The Shield and The Sword

by Ernle Bradford

  Casualties were heavy on both sides, but heavier by far among the Turks in their more exposed positions. The gunners of Rhodes, behind their splayed gun-ports, wrought havoc among the Turkish batteries and the men that manned them.

  Nevertheless, towards the close of August, breaches were beginning to appear in the walls in a number of places. The science of fortification had improved tremendously since 1480, but so too had the skill of the cannon-founder and the whole art of gunnery. Meanwhile, despite the blockade maintained by Cortoglu, a ship managed to slip in from Europe with supplies, a few soldiers, and four Knights. The Sultan, enraged at the failure of the corsair, had Cortoglu bastinadoed aboard his own flagship. It was never wise to fail when in the service of the Grande Turke.

  Throughout the siege L’Isle Adam was helped by the fact that he had been able to secure in his service one of the foremost fighting men in Europe, and one of the most brilliant military engineers of his time, Gabriele Tadini. It was Tadini who was largely responsible for building the retrenchments within the walls and, above all, for supervising the tunnelling and countermining—for all the time the Turkish sappers and miners were probing in to try to sink their shafts and charges beneath the walls and towers. Early in September they did have a notable success, setting off a mine under the bastion of England and blowing a gap in it over thirty feet wide. They immediately came to the attack, surged up the smoking rains, and planted their standards on the wall itself. The English counter-attacked, the Grand Master himself as well as Tadini joining in the mêlée. Gradually the Turks began to yield. Mustapha Pasha, who had come up with the second wave, by the force of his personality, rank, and liberal use of his scimitar on the fugitives, forced them back into the breach. The straggle raged around the crumbling bastion for two hours until the Turks had finally spent their force. They fled for their trenches, leaving their dead and wounded in heaps along the wall. The Knights too had their casualties, three dead, and an unrecorded number of dead and wounded soldiers. It had been the most dangerous moment in the siege so far.

  Throughout September the cannonading, the mining and countermining never ceased. Rhodes seemed to rise like some smoking mountain above the shot-whipped Aegean Sea. The skill and ingenuity of Tadini time and again foiled the enemy, who were blown up in the dark ruins of their tunnels as his countermines exploded against them. Among numerous other inventions and new techniques used by Tadini was one designed for detecting the presence of enemy miners. It was a listening device which, by means of a taut parchment diaphragm, could detect the slightest sound or movement beneath the ground and, when this occurred, it immediately caused a number of miniature bells to chime. It was during this period, when the siege was well into its second month, that a spy in the midst of the city was revealed. The Christianised Jewish doctor in the Hospital was caught in the act of firing a message into the Turkish lines. Put to torture, he confessed that he had been steadily giving information to the Turks, even before the siege had opened. He was hung, drawn, and quartered.

  At dawn on September 24th the first great general assault was launched against the posts of Aragon, England, Italy and Provence. Preceded by the heaviest continuous bombardment of the siege the greater part of the Turkish forces were hurled at this semi-circle of the Rhodian defences. The first part to fall was the bastion of Aragon, which had been selected as the point at which the main weight of the Janissaries was to be hurled. Led by Bah Agha, their commander, they stormed the defences and soon their banners waved in the smoke-dense air. The men who boasted that ‘the body of a Janissary is but the stepping stone for his brother into the breach’ had proved—as they had on so many other battlefields—that they deserved to be called ‘The Sons of the Sultan’. But, for all their fanatical bravery, the guns of Auvergne mowed them down, and they were then taken in the rear by a picked band led by the Knight Jacques de Bourbon. (His chronicle of the siege was published four years later.)

  Suleiman, like Xerxes at Salamis centuries before him, had had a conqueror’s throne set on a raised platform so that he could witness his day of triumph. Again like Xerxes he was doomed to disappointment. The tide of battle which had roared all along the selected points of the walls began to recede before Greek fire, shot and shell, and the indomitable armoured men who gleamed like beacons at every point where the fighting was thickest. L’Isle Adam himself was prominent wherever it seemed that the flood was making up against the defenders. Behind him his standard bearer carried the banner of the Crucifixion. Although it only served to draw the Turks’ attention to the one man whom above all they wished to see dead, it did indeed seem that there was some special protection attached to the Grand Master. The attack wavered and then gradually the advancing hordes began to fall back towards their trenches.

  Suleiman in his rage at the failure of the day condemned Mustapha Pasha to death. The senior of his Vizirs pleaded with him to spare Mustapha—and he in his turn was condemned. It was only the pleas of all the Pashas, pointing out that such an action could only help the Christians by depriving the army of two of its leaders, that caused Suleiman to relent. The losses on both sides that day were considerable but, if the Turkish by far outnumbered the Christians they could afford the toll. The Knights could not. Already the Turkish steamroller tactics were beginning to exhaust them. Some 200 of the defenders were dead and an equal number seriously wounded. They had little or no expectation of any relief from Europe. Indeed, although they were not to know it, a short while later the only relief ship to leave for Rhodes foundered and sank in the Bay of Biscay, taking all her men with her. Despatched from England in October under the command of Frà Thomas Newport, she might well have played an important part—had she arrived.

  Two important events marked the month of October, a month in which the Turks carried on with their continual wearing-down of the garrison and its defences. The first, and the most serious for the defenders, was the disablement of Gabriele Tadini. He was shot in the head and, although not mortally wounded, was confined to the Hospital for some six weeks. Happening as it did at a moment when the Turks were redoubling mining beneath the defences, Tadini’s disablement was a tragic blow. The second and far more sinister event was the discovery of treachery within the ranks of the Knights themselves. A Portuguese in the service of the Chancellor, Andrea d’Amaral, was caught firing a message into the enemy lines. The message contained information that the condition of the defenders was desperate, and that if the Turks only kept up the siege for a little longer Rhodes must certainly fall. Under torture the man came out with the further confession that this was not the first time that he had communicated with the enemy, but that he had been doing so constantly throughout the siege and even before. He then produced the most terrible piece of information of all. He had done so, he said, not for himself, but at the instigation of his master, Andrea d’Amaral, the Pilier of Castile, the Grand Chancellor!

  The trial and subsequent execution of Andrea d’Amaral have given rise to endless controversy among students and historians of the Order. D’Amaral was an arrogant and extremely unpopular man. He was known to dislike L’Isle Adam not only because of their dispute at Laiazzo, but because L’Isle Adam, and not he, had become Grand Master. This had undoubtedly embittered him, but could it have done so to such an extent that he would actually have betrayed the Order? The truth will never be known. D’Amaral was tried and racked. He said nothing—either in his defence or in confession. A number of Knights brought charges against him, one of them being that, after the election of L’Isle Adam, d’Amaral had been heard to say that ‘He will be the last’ Grand Master of Rhodes.’ This in itself might mean nothing more than that d’Amaral had come to the pessimistic conclusion that Rhodes was certain to fall one day to the Sultan. Proud to the last, he said nothing when carried to the place of execution, disdaining even the comforts of religion. L’Isle Adam himself was certainly convinced by the evidence that was brought against the Grand Chancellor. As he wrote to his nephew, the Marshal of Fra
nce: ‘…I must tell you, nephew, that I have been at war not only with the Turks, but with one of the most important members of our Council who, out of envy and lust for power, had for a long time conspired to bring the Turk here and to surrender the city to him.’

  The weather was now wet and cold and the shattered ramparts were slimy with mud. Ruin and desolation stalked the streets of what had once been the jewel-city of Rhodes. But the Turks under canvas and in the trenches were in as bad a condition as the besieged. There still seemed a hope that if Rhodes could hold out a little longer the enemy would withdraw. The arrival of one or two supply ships bringing a small number of men, but a fair amount of fresh victuals and wine, emboldened their hopes. Then, during the month of December, a number of offers were made to the Knights giving them fair and honourable terms if they would surrender their city. The news of these offers gave rise to much dissension; many of the Rhodians being by now exhausted with this seemingly eternal siege; even some of the Knights being in favour of accepting the terms so long as honour was satisfied.

  L’Isle Adam was adamant. He represented the old crusading spirit: he would rather they all died buried in the ruins than that the Order of St John should compromise with the Moslem. But the fact was that the Order had often compromised, had traded with the Moslems, and had quite often established reasonable relationships with them. In the end, with the Rhodians saying that they would make their own terms if the Knights would not, it was the peace party that won the day.

  On Christmas Eve Sultan Suleiman made it quite clear to the Grand Master that he was offering peace with honour. The Knights and any Rhodians who cared to accompany them might leave the city freely. He paid tribute to the astonishing resistance that they had put up, and said that he would even supply them with ships if their own were not sufficient or too badly damaged to put to sea.

  On December 26th, L’Isle Adam, who had already had two previous conversations with the Sultan, went to make his formal submission. Suleiman is said to have treated him with courtesy and respect, and there is no reason to believe that he would not have done so. Indeed, turning to his Grand Vizir, Ibrahim Pasha, he is reported to have said: ‘It saddens me to be compelled to force this brave old man to leave his home.’ The remark is not unlikely. In those days, as indeed in the days of Saladin, a spirit of chivalry and courtesy could still veneer the harsh canvas of war.

  ‘Nothing in the world was ever so well lost as Rhodes,’ said the Emperor Charles V when they told him the story of its fall. It was indeed astounding that a handful of men could have held out so long against an army of the size that the Sultan had brought against them. Tribute must also go to the military engineers who had designed those walls and ramparts, the remains of which are still one of the architectural wonders of the Mediterranean. The Rhodians themselves (as they had shown in that other famous siege when they had defeated the Macedonian king Demetrius Poliorcetes in the fourth century B.C.), were as brave on land as they were at sea.

  The fact remained that, however grand the resistance, however brave the men, the Knights no longer had a home. For over two centuries they had lived in Rhodes. They had embellished the island not only with the beauty and grandeur of their city but with villas and hunting lodges, gardens, roads, harbours and high towers. All these were now the Sultan’s as he and his triumphant soldiers occupied what had been the city and the island of the Holy Religion.

  Chapter 17

  ‘TWO FINE, LARGE HARBOURS’

  On a cold winter’s evening on January 1st, 1523, the peaks of the Carian mountains across the strait white with snow, and the sea darkening as the sun went down behind Rhodes, the survivors of the siege left their island home for ever. Their destination was the port of Khania in Crete where they intended to water and victual, as well as give the wounded some respite from the rolling and pitching of the ships before setting course for Messina. L’Isle Adam was in the great carrack Santa Maria which was commanded by an Englishman, Sir William Weston. Accompanying him were two galleys, San Giovanni and Santa Caterina, together with a barque, the Per la. It was a small enough fleet to represent all those years in Rhodes and all those triumphs at sea, and little enough that they had with them. They had, however, been allowed to take their arms, with the exception of the bronze cannons. They took also along with their personal belongings those relics so dear to the Religion, including the Right Hand of St John in its jewelled reliquary, as well as the precious archives of the Order. (These records of their history over the centuries, together with relics of the True Cross, the Holy Thorn, the Body of St Euphemia, and the Ikon of Our Lady of Phileremos, were all to accompany them to their next island home.) It is interesting to reflect that, as Eric Brockman observes, ‘Amongst the survivors who embarked with the Grand Master was a young Provencal called Jean Parisot de la Valette. Forty-three years later, when the remnants of his armies came back to Constantinople from the siege of Malta, beaten and shamed by the Grand Master La Valette, Suleiman was to regret his youthful act of chivalry in letting these accursed Kuffar escape alive.’

  It was not until April that the ships reached Messina, the port from which, if those in Europe had honoured their obligations, a relief force should have sailed for Rhodes many months ago. The fate of the Order now rested very largely on L’Isle Adam, and on his ability to use his skill in diplomacy. This fortunately was almost as remarkable as his skill in warfare. Nevertheless, he had as hard a task ahead of him as he had ever known—even in the siege of Rhodes. Europe was in its usual troubled state, the Order seemed something of an anachronism, and the spectre of Martin Luther and his followers had appeared to haunt the security of the papacy, a papacy indeed which was so far from secure that in 1527 Rome itself was to be sacked by the German Lutheran troops of Charles V. It was very largely the forceful personality of L’Isle Adam that kept the Order from collapsing altogether. The Knights thought constantly of Rhodes. Its memory haunted them; their gracious city, the streets of Auberges, the view across the strait to the land whence their enemy had come, the pleasant vineyards, wooded slopes, and butterfly-bright valleys.

  During these years of exile the Knights had two homes, the first at Viterbo, north of Rome, and the second at Nice. L’Isle Adam travelled constantly through the courts of Europe endeavouring to solicit help, but even his diplomatic charm could achieve little in that troubled age. The Renaissance, the New Thought, the questioning of all authority, the struggles of nationalism, these were real enough. The Order, it was said, was medieval. It belonged to a dead and forgotten world. Curiously enough, one of the few rulers to respond to L’Isle Adam was Henry VIII of England, who gave him a number of valuable bronze cannon to replace those that had been lost, together with a considerable quantity of weapons and armour. Within a few years, in his search for money and his conflict with the Pope, Henry would forget his earlier sympathy, and would seize all the possessions of the Order within his realm. But before that happened the Order would have acquired a new home.

  They had asked for peninsulas in Sicily, Corsica and Sardinia, and even the island of Elba; anywhere indeed where they could recreate on a narrow strip of land the fortified home that they had lost. But rulers felt suspicious of them, for might they not turn from their avowed obligation to fight only the infidel, and allow their fleet to be used by one European power against another? Then, in 1530, Charles V of Spain was crowned Emperor by Pope Clement VII at Bologna. Now among the immense areas that came under his rule there were the three small islands of the Maltese archipelago, These had in fact already been discussed by the Order, but the three French Langues had been fervently against the idea (possibly because the islands were sterile, unfertile, and did not look like good wine country). The German Langue and the two Spanish Langues, however, had considered them quite favourably. They were largely influenced by the fact that the main island, Malta, had a number of extremely fine natural harbours. Admittedly the feelings of the French can be understood when one reads the report on the islands that h
ad been made by eight commissioners in 1524.

  The island of Malta [they said] is merely a rock of a soft sandstone, called tufa, [it was, in fact, limestone] about six or seven leagues long and three or four broad; the surface of the rock is barely covered by more than three or four feet of earth. This also is stony, and most unsuited for growing corn or other cereals. It does, however, produce plenty of figs, melons and other fruits. The principal trade of the island consists of honey, cotton, and cummin seed. These the inhabitants exchange for grain. Except for a few springs in the centre of the island there is no running water, nor even wells, so the inhabitants catch the rainwater in cisterns. Wood is so scarce as to be sold by the pound and the inhabitants have to use either sun-dried cow-dung or thistles for cooking their food.

  It hardly sounded encouraging! They went on:

  The capital, Città Notabile, is situated on rising ground in the centre of the island. Most of the houses are uninhabited… On the west coast there are no harbours, coves or bays, and the shore is extremely rocky. In the east coast, however, there are many capes, bays and coves, and two particularly fine, large harbours, big enough to accommodate any size of fleet

  It was this that turned the scales. First-class harbours were rare enough in the Mediterranean and, since the Knights’ business was upon the sea, it was natural that they should want adequate and sheltered accommodation for their ships. Ambassadors were accordingly sent by the Order of St John asking the Emperor if he would graciously consider giving the Knights Malta. Charles V and his advisers considered the question carefully and came to the conclusion that it would be generally convenient for the protection of his dominions, and in particular Sicily, to have the Knights in Malta. In the same way that the Knights had used little Dodecanese islands like Leros and Cos as bastions and outriders to their home in Rhodes, so Malta might provide a useful defence and listening post against the Turks and the corsairs of the North African coast. Charles agreed to the gift—in return for an annual nominal rent of one falcon—but added the uncomfortable rider that in return for Malta the Knights should also agree to garrison the town of Tripoli due south of the islands on the North African coast. This was indeed a left-handed gift, for Tripoli was in the middle of hostile Moslem states, nearly 200 miles away from Malta, and would be difficult enough to garrison let alone maintain. It is indicative of the desperate straits to which the Order had been reduced that they agreed to the Emperor’s offer.