The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean

by David Abulafia

  Galley slaves in the Ottoman fleet were marked out by their shaven heads, with one lock left dangling in the case of Muslim slaves; they wore an iron ring on one foot as a symbol of their captivity. They were therefore easily identifiable on land. And it was on land that they spent much of their time. Although winter voyages were not rare (ferrying embassies, carrying out lightning raids, and so on), galley slaves were mostly laid off in the winter, and were often employed in activities that had nothing to do with the sea, for instance as spare hands in market gardens and workshops; some would trade on their own account, technically against the rules (at least in Venice), but important if they aimed to raise money with which to purchase their freedom. Even during the sailing season, they had to spend time on land awaiting orders to sail, and quarters, or bagni, were provided, often consisting of caverns and cells built deep within city walls and forming a reserved area with its own shops and markets. Conditions within the bagni varied from tolerable to miserable; homosexual rape was common. On the other hand, bagni often contained prayer-spaces: a mosque in the bagno of Livorno; room for church services in the bagno of Algiers. Tolerance of different religions was counterbalanced by a trend in some areas, such as North Africa, to change religion in order to win freedom, and Christian renegades played a major role in the Barbary fleets, often winning command.44

  The oarsmen seem to have been well enough fed to carry out their arduous duty, accentuating the need for frequent landfalls. Different fleets supplied different combinations of diet, as in earlier centuries: in 1538 the rations for an oarsman, or ciurma, in the Sicilian galleys of the Spanish navy were 26 ounces of ship’s biscuit each day, with four ounces of meat on three days a week, substituted by stew (mainly vegetable) on the remaining four days. Ships out of Spain favoured chickpeas and the amount of meat on offer declined during the sixteenth century. Over this period, galleys were built to larger and larger measurements, while the cost of food was rising across western Europe. This meant that the cost of supplying the galleys became prohibitive by the late sixteenth century: ‘the appetite of the Mediterranean war galley, like that of Tyrannosaurus rex, had outgrown the capability of its environment to support it’.45 The enormous expense of the land campaigns of the Turks in the Balkans and Persia, and of the Spaniards in the Netherlands, which rose in revolt under Charles V’s son and successor, the dour Philip II, left little money to spare for the Mediterranean fleets of both sides, which became locked in stalemate.

  4

  Akdeniz – the Battle for the White Sea,

  1550–1571

  I

  Jean de Valette was a Knight of St John who had led slave raids in the days when the Hospitallers were based on Rhodes. Several years after the evacuation of Rhodes, whose capitulation he had witnessed, he was appointed governor of Tripoli, granted to the Knights along with Malta; then in 1541 his galley, the San Giovanni, had an altercation with Turkish pirates, and he was captured and put to work as a galley slave at the ripe age (for those times) of forty-seven. He survived the humiliation for a year, until the Knights of Malta and the Turks effected a prisoner exchange. Back in Malta he rose up the hierarchy of the Order; he was known for his occasional bursts of temper, but he was also admired as a brave, imposing figure. He was emerging as a potential leader of the Order just as Turkish power edged ever closer to Malta, and indeed Sicily. In 1546, Turgut, or Dragut, one of the most capable naval commanders in Turkish service, captured Mahdia on the Tunisian coast, though the Spaniards recaptured it in 1550. Turgut clashed with Andrea Doria’s fleet off Jerba, but he escaped just when Doria seemed to have trapped him; he sailed to Malta and Gozo, laying waste the home islands of the Knights, before a victorious assault on Tripoli, lost after over forty years of Christian occupation.1 The Spaniards attempted to swing the balance back in their favour, and in 1560 they despatched a fleet of about 100 ships (half of them galleys) in the hope of finally capturing Jerba. Andrea Doria was now elderly, and command was entrusted nepotistically to his heir and great-nephew, Gian Andrea Doria, who was unable to impose on his captains the strict discipline that was needed to hold the line in the face of the Turkish naval counter-attack led by Piyale, a talented young admiral of Christian ancestry. It has been claimed that Piyale’s order to hoist sail and run down the Spanish fleet ‘ranks among the great snap decisions in naval history’.2 Few Spanish galleys escaped the destruction that followed at Jerba.3 The Sicilian and papal fleets took years to recover from the defeat. As damaging as the loss of ships was the loss of life among the Spanish and Italian officer class and among skilled seamen and artisans (coopers, boatswains, marines) – about 600 of Spain’s best men.4 The victory boosted the confidence of the Turks. They had good reason to feel that they were on the verge of a breakthrough.

  What was at stake was command of the entire Mediterranean. Any ruler who aspired to control passage from the eastern to the western Mediterranean had to be able to control the Sicilian Straits. With Tripoli gone, and control of Tunisia in question, the importance of holding Malta became ever more apparent to Christendom. Turkish writers showed their impatience at what they called the ‘cursed rock’, and urged the sultan to take it quickly, so that communication between the Maghrib and the Aegean could flow smoothly.5 The urge to capture Malta became more intense following pirate attacks by the Hospitaller fleet. Among commanders in Maltese service, the most notorious was Romegas. In early June 1564, off western Greece, he led an attack on a large Turkish galleon, the Sultana, heading towards Venice; Romegas appropriated merchandise worth 80,000 ducats. Next, he captured the governors of Cairo and Alexandria, as well as an ancient and much loved nurse from the imperial harem, who was said to be 107 years old. Süleyman set out his aims with clarity:

  I intend to conquer the island of Malta and I have appointed Mustafa Pasha as commander of this campaign. The island of Malta is a headquarters for infidels. The Maltese have already blocked the route utilised by Muslim pilgrims and merchants in the eastern part of the White Sea, on their way to Egypt. I have ordered Piyale Pasha to take part in the campaign with the Imperial Navy.6

  A massive Turkish fleet sailed out of Constantinople on 30 March 1565 in the confident expectation that the gates to the western Mediterranean would soon be unlocked; 170 warships and over 200 transport ships, bearing 30,000 men, hove into sight off Malta on 18 May.7 This looked like an invincible armada; the horizon was white with sails.8 Further ships were on their way under the command of the elderly Turgut, based in Tripoli. The Ottoman pincers would surely seize and crush Malta.

  That this did not happen was partly the result of a series of bad decisions by the Turks, and partly the result of the attachment of the Maltese themselves to their new Hospitaller masters. The Maltese nobility bunkered down in their stone palaces in the ancient capital at Mdina, in the centre of the island. But Maltese of lesser standing identified enthusiastically with the cause of Christendom, acting as scouts and swimming across dangerous waters to carry messages to beleaguered garrisons. The conflict centred on the Grand Harbour and its inlets. The modern capital, Valletta, was built only after the siege, and where it now stands there was a rocky promontory, Mount Sciberras, at the end of which stood the fort of St Elmo, defended by a rather low set of walls. Opposite St Elmo, the Knights were based in Vittoriosa, the old port of Malta – now called Birgu – where they replicated their style of life in Rhodes, building headquarters for each of the divisions, or langues, into which the Order of St John was divided (the langue of England, now ruled by a Protestant queen, could muster only a single knight). Beyond the tip of Vittoriosa, the massive castle of St Angelo stood guard over the harbour. Opposite lay its suburb, Senglea, from which it was divided by a narrow inlet. These were mostly well-fortified areas, and not surprisingly the Turks were drawn towards them. An Italian soldier who helped defend Malta, Francisco Balbi di Correggio, wrote a memoir of the siege, and described, apparently accurately, the discussions between the two commanders, Mustafa Pasha, in charge of th
e land forces, and the much younger Piyale, in charge of the naval forces. Balbi stated baldly that if Mustafa’s advice to take Mdina had been followed, ‘we should certainly have been lost, for all our reliefs reached us by way of Mdina. But Almighty God did not permit that it should be so, for it was his will that the two pashas in their jealousy should disagree violently with one another – as we learned from deserters’.9 Instead, the Turks resolved to seize St Elmo, on the grounds that they would then be able to break the Knights’ hold on the Grand Harbour, as well as gaining entry into the northern inlet of Marsamuscetto (the channel between modern Valletta and modern Sliema), where they hoped to dock much of their fleet. They were full of confidence. St Elmo would be theirs in no more than a dozen days.

  The Turks underestimated the determination of their opponents, and they were taken aback by the desolate setting in which they found themselves: a rocky island, denuded of tree cover, which would be able to support their vast army only with great difficulty. Fort St Elmo was defended by 800 troops, amply supplied with meat (including live cattle), biscuits, wine and cheese.10 It was battered relentlessly; the Knights answered Turkish attempts to storm the citadel with deadly hoops that were set ablaze and sent into their midst. The Turks began to see that Malta was far less vulnerable than they had supposed. St Elmo held out, remarkably, until 23 June. In part this was due to the dedication of the Knights to the Christian cause they sought to defend. They were willing to fight to the death amid appalling scenes of carnage; Balbi testifies that the water of the Grand Harbour was red with blood. Eighty-nine Knights were killed during the siege, but they were only the elite of a much larger force: 1,500 French, Italian and Spanish soldiers died with them. Ottoman losses were even more severe: about four Turkish soldiers for each western European one.11 Jean de Valette, now Grand Master, boosted morale by appearing, as it seemed, everywhere, and never apparently sleeping. Christian relief ships from Sicily managed, as yet, to achieve little, though by early July 700 men from the relief force were able to enter Vittoriosa. Much greater assistance would be required if the Turks were to be chased away from the island, and yet the European courts only gradually saw the implications of an Ottoman victory. De Valette was constantly sending messages to Sicily appealing for aid, but the Spanish king was afraid he would lose his fleet at sea, as had already happened at Jerba. Sometimes Philip viewed the conflict with the beady eyes of an accountant, even though he was thoroughly convinced that it was his duty to throw the Ottoman advance back into the eastern Mediterranean. The king finally agreed to the proposal by Don García de Toledo, viceroy of Sicily, that a large navy should at once be sent to Malta; but poor communications between Madrid and Palermo accentuated the delay, as did the shortage of available galleys in Sicily (Don García could call on twenty-five in late June, 100 two months later).12

  The fall of St Elmo enabled the Turks to launch a much delayed assault on the Knights’ strongholds of Senglea and Vittoriosa, using cannon Mustafa Pasha had drawn up on higher ground behind these towns. There followed weeks of intense bombardment and hideous slaughter. Quite simply, the defenders were lucky or rather, in their view, God saved them and the island. At a desperate point in early August a Maltese detachment ravaged the Turkish camp near Senglea. Those they killed were already too sick to fight, but the havoc they created was enhanced by the assumption that they were the long-awaited relief force from Sicily. In fact, they had ridden out from Mdina, to which they returned; and when the Turks sent their own detachment to Mdina, they were shocked to see how well defended the ancient capital was. This and other events led to further quarrels between Piyale and Mustafa Pasha, reported by Balbi. Piyale insisted that he had heard of the arrival of a great Christian relief force. ‘If such were the case, he felt it was his duty to save the fleet. “The sultan”, he said, “thinks much more of the fleet than he does of an army like this one.” With this reply he walked off.’13 The ruthless slaughter continued for another month, as the Turks tried to mine Vittoriosa and turned the town into a pile of rubble; Mustafa was embarrassed by letters from Süleyman demanding information about the siege, which, the sultan insisted, should have drawn to a victorious conclusion by now.

  For a brief moment, it seemed that luck favoured the Turks: late summer storms sent the relief force from Sicily in a vast arc from Syracuse past the island of Pantelleria to Trapani, after which it at last made headway towards Gozo, reaching Malta on 6 September 1565. The news of the landing from Sicily set off further disagreements between Mustafa Pasha and Piyale:

  After a bitter and protracted argument, Mustafa gave it as his opinion that, since they were sure a strong relief force had landed, the best thing was to leave immediately. But Piyale said: ‘What excuse will you give, O Mustafa, to the sultan? If you leave without even seeing the enemy, will he not cut off your head? If you have not seen them, you cannot even tell him from what forces you have fled.’14

  So Mustafa agreed to stand and fight, but his troops were not of a like disposition: 10,000 men from the relief force routed Mustafa’s army near Mdina, and the Turkish army fled towards Piyale’s ships. By 12 September those Turks who were still alive had all gone. Many thousands had been left behind in makeshift graves on Mount Sciberras. Balbi reported that 35,000 Turkish troops had died in the siege, which would be a larger number of men than the initial invading force.15

  The impact of the siege of Malta on morale in the West should not be underestimated. The news of the Turkish defeat reached the papal court in about a week. The pope announced at an audience that the victory had been achieved by God and the Knights, giving no credit to King Philip.16 Victory in Malta broke a cycle of defeats at the hands of Süleyman and the Barbary pirates: the loss of Rhodes; the battle of Preveza; the embarrassment at Jerba. The Spaniards felt rejuvenated and started to build a new fleet in Catalonia, southern Italy and Sicily, for they were convinced that the Ottomans would return in force; but they now had the energy and confidence to try to block rather than evade a Turkish counter-assault. The Ottomans seem to have regarded the defeat as an inconvenient reversal, rather than as the end of a period of Turkish ascendancy in the Mediterranean. The sultan could still call on massive reserves of manpower. He had not actually lost his fleet. Neither Piyale nor Mustafa Pasha lost his head, though Mustafa was deprived of his command. But, against all expectations, the Hospitallers had managed to prevent the Ottomans from breaking decisively into the western Mediterranean. Of course, the Turks already possessed allies there, among the Barbary emirs who recognized Ottoman sovereignty. The Ottomans hoped, too, to find allies on the very soil of Spain, among the converted Muslims, or Moriscos, many of whom still adhered to Islam and deeply resented attempts to suppress ‘Moorish practices’ in religion and daily life. The Moriscos erupted in rebellion at the end of 1568, and were defeated only after two blood-filled years, during which aid was supplied by the Barbary states – easily done, since ‘in Spain at this time there were no galleys at all, for the king’s forces were fully occupied in many distant places’.17 An Ottoman breakthrough might well have forced the Spanish monarchy on to the defensive in what it still, despite the presence of the Muslim corsairs, regarded as its own maritime space. Instead, the Sublime Porte turned its attention to the eastern Mediterranean, contemplating the fact that three of the most important islands, Chios, Cyprus and Crete, still lay in Genoese and Venetian hands.

  II

  The Knights were remote from the people over whom they ruled. They were French, Spanish and Italian noblemen; officially at any rate they did not procreate; it has been remarked that the lowliest Knight was regarded as more important than the most noble Maltese.18 After 1565 they were lauded as the saviours of Christendom, for their grit and determination in horrific circumstances had earned them respect as far away as Protestant Europe and even, grudgingly, in Ottoman Constantinople. However, Malta’s strategic position at the heart of the Mediterranean was expressed in other ways than as the target of Ottoman armies and navies. The
coming of the Knights and their choice of Vittoriosa rather than Mdina as their centre of government greatly stimulated the life of what had previously been a small fishing port. Piracy had been a major source of income for the Knights since their days in Rhodes, but they also encouraged Maltese captains to apply for privateering licences; they were allowed to fly the flag of the Order (a white cross on a red field), and had to pay 10 per cent of their profits to the Grand Master. Still, fitting out a ship, which would need to be armed with efficient cannon, was an expensive business; a pirate flotilla might contain a combination of ships owned by the Grand Master and vessels owned by local pirates.19 Corsairs such as Romegas often brought captured ships to Malta and put them up for auction.20 And among the booty brought back from raids, the most precious was often the cargo of slaves who, if male, could be put to work in the galleys of the Knights. There was a massive slave market in late sixteenth-century Malta. As the port of Vittoriosa developed into an important stopping-point on trans-Mediterranean voyages, Christian navigators increasingly relied on its slave market to replace captives who had died or escaped earlier in their voyage. As in previous centuries, there was also profit to be made from ransoming those slaves about whom someone cared back in their homeland.21

  In times of relative peace, the Maltese conducted trade in the surrounding waters, mainly to Sicily, which accounted for 80 per cent of voyages from the island between 1564, the eve of the Great Siege, and 1600. Since this amounts to nearly 4,700 voyages to Sicily, the intensity of this activity is clear. But there were also nearly 300 recorded trips to Marseilles and nearly 250 to Naples, as well as occasional trading visits to Egypt, Syria, Libya, Constantinople, Algiers, Dalmatia and out into the North Sea as far as England and Flanders. Meanwhile, the presence of the Knights made Malta into a pole of attraction for settlers from across the Mediterranean. There were Greek merchants from Rhodes, following in the wake of the Knights themselves. Further down the scale there were local Maltese businessmen who would have counted for little in international affairs, small cogs in the great machine that distributed food around the Mediterranean. Villagers from Naxxar, Zebbug and other places in the interior invested small sums of gold in trading ventures whose aim was to bring Sicilian grain to Malta. Another product in very short supply on Malta was wood, and the presence of the Knights vastly increased demand for timber, for they were above all a naval power.22 Their ability to keep the island supplied with timber is almost as impressive as the massive building projects initiated by de Valette, which resulted in the creation of the Grand Harbour as it is today. As the heirs to the Hospitaller Order of St John of Jerusalem, the Knights of Malta did not forget their duty to care for the sick: the great ward of their infirmary was the largest hall in early modern Europe. Care for their patients demanded a ready supply of often expensive and exotic spices, and even of luxury metals: the practice of serving food on silver plates reflected not inordinate luxury but a sense that silver was more hygienic than earthenware.