Plan of Fort Saint Elmo.
In the letters that la valette dispatched day after day to
Sicily and the Italian mainland, he never failed to stress the strategic
importance of Malta. Its loss would leave Christian Europe as “a fortress
without a ravelin.” The metaphor was not wasted on his audience. Since the fall
of Constantinople, the technical language of Italian fortress engineering had
been constantly on the lips of Christian potentates and churchmen. They
conceived the whole of the Christian Mediterranean as a vast system of
concentric defenses, at the center of which sat Rome, God’s keep, constantly
under attack from the barbarian horde. One after another, the outer works had
crumbled. In the years after 1453, Venice had been the outer wall of Europe;
the Ottomans had neutralized it in just fifty years. Then Rhodes was the shield
of Christendom. It had fallen. With each retrenchment, the Turk was a step
closer. Now Malta had become the ravelin of Europe. Everyone realized the
significance of this—the pope in Rome, the Catholic King high up in his palace
in Madrid, Don Garcia across the water in Sicily—for when the ravelin fell, the
end of a fortress was nigh. In late May and early June 1565, concern for the
defenses of Christendom focused on a single point. For if the key to Europe was
Malta, the key to Malta was Saint Elmo; and the fortress, in its turn, was
dependent on the small makeshift triangular ravelin that protected its
vulnerable side. Turgut understood this as clearly as La Valette. And he was
determined to act.
By the morning of June 3, following a night of intense
bombardment, Ottoman troops had established sheltering positions close to the
ditch and only tens of yards from the ravelin’s protecting walls. It was, by
irony, the saint’s day of Saint Elmo—the patron saint of seamen.
Ottoman engineers, intent on assessing the effect of the
night’s barrage, slipped into the ditch in front of the fort and approached the
ravelin. There was silence from the position—no challenge, no shots from a
lookout. They got up to the foot of the fortification unnoticed. In all likelihood,
the assigned sentry had been silently felled by a single arquebus shot, and lay
on his stomach on the parapet looking “as if he were still alive.” His
comrades, only forty in all, assumed he was still on guard. Other versions give
a more cowardly version of the sentries’ behavior.
The engineers stole away and informed Mustapha. A force of
janissaries with scaling ladders crept forward and stealthily climbed the
parapet. They burst into the small fortress with ululating cries and shot to
death the first men they saw. The remainder turned and fled, too panic-stricken
to raise the drawbridge into the main fort behind them. Only a determined sally
by a small group of knights stopped the rush of the janissaries into Saint
Elmo. A spirited counterattack was mounted to force the intruders out of the
ravelin; two or three times they seemed to have succeeded, but more men were
flooding the ditch, and the defenders were forced to withdraw. With lightning
speed the Turks seemed able to consolidate their position in the ravelin,
bundling in sacks of wool and earth and brushwood to construct a rampart
against counterattack from the fort. Flags—the critical markers of
possession—started to flutter from the makeshift defenses. It was just the
prelude to a berserk, impromptu assault by the men in the ditch, who propped
ladders against the walls with the hope of finally storming Saint Elmo. They
felt certain of success, but the attempt was suicidal. The defenders hurled
down rocks and liquid fire on the Turks’ unprotected heads. The din of the
battle was extraordinary; according to the Christian chroniclers, “with the
roar of the artillery and the arquebuses, the hair-raising screams, the smoke
and fire and flame, it seemed that the whole world was at the point of exploding.”
After five hours of havoc, the Turks were forced to withdraw, leaving five
hundred crack troops dead in the ditch. The defenders claimed to have lost
sixty soldiers and twenty knights, including the French knight La Gardampe, who
crawled away into the fortress chapel and died at the foot of the altar.
Despite the huge Ottoman losses, the ravelin was now in enemy hands.
The serious consequences of the loss were felt almost at
once. The Ottomans worked furiously to consolidate their command of the ravelin,
using goatskins filled with earth to raise the platform until it was level with
the wall. They now occupied an offensive position within yards of the fort;
they were soon able to bombard its very heart with two captured guns. In the
ditch below, men could work their way up to the base of the walls without being
attacked Toward dawn on June 4, while the Turks were still fortifying the
ravelin, a small boat was seen approaching the rocky promontory below the fort;
the sentries on the rampart tensed themselves, ready to fire, when a cry rang
out in the dark: “Salvago!” It was a Spanish knight, Raffael Salvago. He had
been dropped by galley from Sicily with messages from Don Garcia, and had run
the blockade around the harbor. With him was an experienced captain, Miranda.
The two men clambered ashore and briefly inspected the fort in the dark, then
climbed back on board. By now the crossing between Saint Elmo and Birgu was
under threat from sharpshooters. Boats could no longer make the journey in
broad daylight; even night crossings were fraught with danger. As they rowed
quietly across the harbor, a volley of shot struck the boat and killed one of
the crew.
La Valette listened to their report in gloomy silence. It
was devastating to have lost the ravelin so negligently. Hardly more reassuring
was the news from Sicily: Don Garcia was struggling to gather forces but he
hoped for relief by June 20. The question was simply how long Saint Elmo could
be kept alive. Miranda was dispatched back again to make a more detailed
appraisal of the defenses and the men’s morale. His second report was emphatic:
“The fort could not be held for long if the Turks were persistent, because the
lack of traverses meant that the defenders’ fire had little effect.
Furthermore, there was no strongpoint to which the defenders could retire.” Yet
again La Valette wanted to test this information. Another commission was
dispatched specifically to study the feasibility of retaking the ravelin, with
the same conclusion: “It was impossible to get the ravelin back; they should
shore up the defenses for as long as they could.” From now on Saint Elmo was
living on borrowed time. A nightly transfusion of men and materials slipped
across the harbor, dodging the enemy guns, keeping the doomed fort alive. It
was on life support.
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