Malta Fortified

Grand Master Juan de Homedes.

If in 1523 Charles V already looked towards the Turkish menace in offering Malta to the knights, within a few years the need for their presence there had been redoubled in urgency. The area of mounting danger was North Africa, whose political division at that time was very different from that of later centuries. Its centre was dominated by Tunicia, a large kingdom stretching from the Gulf of Syrtis to beyond Bougie; the capital, Tunis, had been for over a century the most important African city west of Cairo, with a population of some 30,000. Algiers and Tripoli were secondary ports, both of which were brought under Spanish control early in the century. In the west, Morocco and Tlemcen had for some years been faltering under the impact of Portuguese and Spanish expansion, but this advance provoked in its turn the rise of the Barbary corsairs. The most famous of them, Chaireddin, known as Barbarossa, seized Algiers with his brother in 1516; he lost little time in placing his lordship under the rising star of Turkey, and in 1529 he ousted the Spanish from the fortified rock which controlled the harbour. From this conquest began the history of Algiers as the chief corsair port of Barbary, a position it maintained for three centuries. The new threat to Spanish and Italian waters was clear enough, but it was soon turned into a far graver one: Barbarossa travelled to Constantinople to be appointed High Admiral of Soliman's navy, and in 1534 he seized Tunis and annexed it to the Ottoman Empire.

His exploit was one of the most signal Turkish successes of the century; the conversion of the leading kingdom of Barbary into an Ottoman vassal, with the extension of Turkish sea-power over the entire southern Mediterranean, posed such a threat to Christendom that Charles V called together a virtual crusade to reverse the loss. With the exception of France, all the principal Mediterranean states contributed their fleets and soldiers. The Grand Master Pietro del Monte threw the Order's resources into the venture. In July 1535 the Christian fleet appeared before Tunis with the Emperor at its head; but it was within the city itself that the issue was decided. The Knight of St John, Paolo Simeoni, who was held there as a slave, roused his fellow captives in rebellion, and Barbarossa was obliged to flee. Charles V restored the King of Tunis and left a Spanish garrison at La Goletta, which together with those at Bougie and Tripoli kept Tunis in vassalage to Spain for the next forty years.

When Charles V granted Malta and Tripoli to the Knights of St John his aim, certainly, was to make them the first line of defence of his Italian lands, and not least to support Spain's control of the Tunisian kingdom. Yet it is wrong to say that in doing so he diverted the Order from its proper task. In attack, the imperial campaigns were the best vehicle for the knights' war against the Infidel; as to defence, the Moslem threat fell, by geography, overwhelmingly on the Italian and Spanish shores of Charles V's empire. By contrast France carried its rivalry with the Emperor to the length of concluding in 1536 an offensive treaty with the Turks, who were thereby enabled to strike deep at the heart of Christendom, their corsairs plundering Christian shipping and ravaging the exposed coasts. The consequence of this shameful alliance was to make the traditional predominance of the French in the Order of St John an obstacle to its proper duty, while conversely it led to a period of unprecedented Spanish influence in the Order's affairs.

It would therefore be appropriate to speak of the years which opened with the reconquest of Tunis as the Spanish period of the Order's history, and the more so because it was a time when the military prowess of Spain and her ideals of chivalry and religious militancy gave their tone to Catholic Europe. The symbol of this hegemony within the Order of St John was the long reign of the Aragonese Juan de Homedes, who was elected Grand Master in 1536. He came to government at precisely the time when France made its treaty with Turkey, and the seventeen years of his rule were filled with the baneful consequences of that alliance. The international conflict was moreover reflected by unprecedented rivalry within the Order he ruled. Charles V's dominion over Castile, Aragon, Germany and much of Italy assured him the total or partial loyalty of four of the Langues of the Order, a state of affairs which threatened to overturn the advantage formerly enjoyed by the French. After Henry VIII swallowed up the priories of England and Ireland, the dwindling band of English Catholic exiles also increasingly became clients of the Emperor. The anti-Spanish party in the Langue of Italy seems to have maintained its strength, but if that element failed the danger was that the subjects of Charles V would sweep the board, winning the predominance which the French had traditionally regarded as theirs by natural right. In these circumstances we can understand the resentment of the French knights, and we can understand too their wounded pride at the consciousness that their country was betraying the cause to which they had dedicated their lives.

Less sympathy is due to those chroniclers who have imposed the distortions of the French party as the prevalent history of the Order. Bosio's sly denigration of Homedes was elaborated by later historians into a veritable black legend, representing the Spanish Grand Master as a hated tyrant, elected through an intrigue, who enriched himself and his family at the Order's expense, whose personal jealousies made him exclude his best subjects from their due opportunities, and whose avarice was responsible for the loss of Tripoli. These charges, each and severally, are the work of propaganda, as is the misguided orthodoxy which has represented Spanish influence on the Order as an alien burden on its natural destiny. Given the national alignments of the time, it is a view that does not so much distort the truth as stand it on its head. The first task that confronted Homedes was that of turning Malta into a secure base for the Order's martial undertakings. Military experts had already pointed out that the Borgo was a difficult site to defend, being surrounded on all sides by higher ground, including the peninsula of Sciberras across the harbour. Their advice was to build a new city on Sciberras itself, but such an enterprise was beyond the Order's means, and would have implied that Malta was a permanent home. Homedes therefore followed L'Isle Adam in preferring the provisional fortification of the Borgo. The Knights of St John could not see, as we can, the centuries of Ottoman power that lay ahead, and the ambition of returning to Rhodes continued to animate them. But much had to be done to guard the Borgo against even a moderately strong Turkish attack. Homedes employed one of the leading military engineers of the day, Antonio Ferramolino; under his direction Castel Sant'Angelo was turned into a powerful fortress, with a large cavalier commanding the town and the harbour. The ditch between the castle and the town was deepened to make it a sea-filled moat, isolating the castle from the adjoining peninsula and forming a refuge into which the galleys were withdrawn during the Great Siege. Later Homedes extended the scheme of defence to include the neighbouring peninsula to the west, known as L'Isola, and he ordered in Venice the huge chain, of which each link was said to have cost a hundred ducats, that enclosed the intervening creek against an enemy attack. Like the fort of St Elmo which Homedes began building on the tip of Sciberras, the fortifications of L'Isola were only completed under his successor, Claude de la Sengle, the peninsula being thence named Senglea.

While these walls rose, the knights carried the war to the enemy, and continued to lend their aid to Spanish arms. In 1541 Charles V attempted to cap his success at Tunis by ousting Barbarossa from Algiers. Four hundred Knights of Malta - a force seldom if ever exceeded in an offensive campaign - supported the venture, but the tardy ways of Spanish administration delayed the expedition until too late in the season. An autumn storm shattered the fleet and left the army floundering in mud; the troops were forced to re-embark, with the Knights of Malta conducting a desperate defence of the rear-guard in which they suffered the terrible loss of seventy-five knights. This costly sacrifice of chivalry prevented the retreat from turning into the rout and massacre of the imperial army.

The Fortress of Saint Elmo I

There were the two linked promontories of Birgu and Senglea that made up the nucleus of Christian resistance, but these were interlinked with the fortress of Saint Elmo across the water on Mount Sciberras that provided the key to the best harbor. The main Ottoman camp at Marsa was six miles from the fleet anchored at Marsaxlokk, and the early skirmishes had revealed the need to guard the supply chain from ambush along its entire length. There were also the two forts in the hinterland to consider, that at Mdina and the other on Gozo, which provided potential centers of guerrilla warfare and rallying points if left unattended. One of these targets had to be chosen first; the others had to be managed. It would be necessary to split the army into sections. Perhaps twenty-two thousand fighting men was not so large a force after all.

Other things were concerning the commanders too. Piyale was edgy about the winds, less predictable in summer than those in the eastern half of the White Sea. The imperative to keep the fleet safe was his absolute priority. Shipwreck or a daring raid by enemy fire ships would commit the expedition to lingering but certain collective death at the hands of an enemy with reinforcements uncomfortably close at hand. Malta, lying under the eagle wing of Christian Sicily, was the king of Spain’s domain; sooner or later a counterattack was certain. The long lines of communication, the finite time frame, the inability to remain on Malta over the winter—all these things were weighed in the balance.

Relations between Mustapha and Piyale were tense as the options were discussed on May 22. The admiral and the general had issues about priorities and seniority; both were aware of Suleiman looking over their shoulders; he was there by proxy in his banners and flagship, more directly in the presence of his personal heralds—the chaushes—who reported back to him directly. Both Piyale and Mustapha were well-connected within the Ottoman court; both were eager for glory and to avoid disgrace. The two were united only in their jealousy of Turgut, the third player in the sultan’s triangle of command, expected any day from Tripoli. Christian accounts provide vivid and probably highly imaginative accounts of the wrangles, the choices, the votes cast on the day—it is highly unlikely that any Christian slave was present in the pasha’s ornate tent—as they lobbied for their tactics.

In the end they chose the objective that Don Garcia had predicted they would: the little fort of Saint Elmo, “the key to all the other fortresses of Malta.” This decision had probably been taken months ago in Istanbul, well before departure, at a divan meeting on December 5, 1564, when engineers laid plans and models of Saint Elmo before the sultan, explaining that they had found it to be “on a very narrow site and easy to attack.” At the time Spanish spies in the city had filed a report back to Madrid that was eerily prophetic in all but one respect: “Their plan is to take the castle of St Elmo first so that they can get control of the harbour and put most of their ships there to overwinter and then capture the castle of St Angelo by siege.” Now Mustapha’s engineers studied the site again and were confident it would be an easy task, “four of five days” was the estimate; “losing St Elmo, the enemy would lose all hope of rescue.” But if they were confident of taking the fort quickly, there was also a note of defensiveness, even fear, in this decision. Saint Elmo would “secure the fleet, in which lay their safety, by drawing it inside the harbor of Marsamxett, out of all danger from prevailing winds and maritime disasters and all possibility of enemy attack…[and]…of all dying on the island without being able to escape.” Even at the outset they were pondering the implications of operating so far from home. For Piyale particularly, preserving the fleet was the key to everything. The commanders decided not to wait for Turgut to confirm this decision; time was pressing. They set to work straightaway.

Time was critical for La Valette too. When he learned of the Ottoman plan from escaped renegades, he was said to have given thanks to God; the attempt on Saint Elmo would buy a breathing space to repair the defenses of Senglea and Birgu and time to dispatch pleas to Don Garcia, Philip, and the pope for a rescue fleet. Work continued on the fortifications day and night; obstacles outside the walls that could provide sheltering positions for the enemy—trees, houses, and stables—were demolished; the whole population was engaged in hauling vast quantities of earth inside the settlements for running repairs to walls damaged by gunfire. All that the grand master had to do was persuade the garrison over on Saint Elmo to sell their lives as dearly as possible.

On May 23, the Ottomans started to transport heavy wheeled guns from the fleet to the Sciberras Peninsula. It was an immensely difficult journey over seven miles of rocky ground, involving large numbers of animals and men. The landscape echoed to the grinding of the iron wheels, the bellowing of the oxen, the shouts of exhausted men. Balbi watched the guns from Senglea: “We could see ten or twelve bullocks harnessed to each piece, with many men pulling the ropes.”

The defenders made their own preparations. As the Turks established their positions on the peninsula, the only safe way out of Saint Elmo was by boat from the rocky foreshore across the harbor to Birgu, a distance of five hundred yards. La Valette ordered the evacuation of some women and children who had taken refuge there, and he sent back supplies and a hundred fighting men under Colonel Mas, sixty released galley slaves, food, and ammunition. In all there were about seven hundred fifty men in Saint Elmo, the majority of whom were Spanish troops under their commander, Juan de la Cerda.

From the landward side, where the Turks were establishing their gun platforms, Saint Elmo presented a long low raked profile, like a stone submarine floating on the end of the rocky ridge. Two of the four points of its star faced the hill on which the Turks were establishing their position. The fort was protected at the front by a stone-cut ditch, and at the back on the seaward side by a detached keep, a cavalier, which reared up above the whole fort like the submarine’s conning tower. Hidden in the heart of the fort were a central parade ground—protected in front by a blockhouse—a cistern for water, and a small chapel to provide for the men’s spiritual needs. The hastily constructed triangular ravelin was outside the fort and linked to it by a bridge; it provided some protection from a flank attack, but to an experienced siege engineer looking down from the heights of Mount Sciberras, Saint Elmo looked small and vulnerable. There were numerous shortcomings; the fort’s design was poorly thought out and badly executed. It had low parapets and no embrasures to protect the men, so that no defender could shoot without making himself a clear target; its small size precluded the siting of many guns on the ramparts; it lacked sally ports from which troops could safely exit to clear the ditch of enemy infill or launch counterattacks. Worst of all, the angles of the stars were so sharp that there were large areas of dead ground beneath the ramparts upon which defenders were unable to fire. The Ottoman engineers’ assessment of the task ahead seemed reasonable. To all intents and purposes, Saint Elmo was a stone death trap.

The Fortress of Saint Elmo II

No army in the world could match the Ottomans for their grasp of siege craft, their practical engineering skills, their deployment of huge quantities of human labor for precise objectives, their ability to plan meticulously but to improvise ingeniously. Armies that had reduced castles in Persia and frontier forts on the plains of Hungary, who had dug trenches at Rhodes with such astonishing speed, who had, their enemies acknowledged, “no equal in the world at earthworks,” went about their task with dreadful skill. From the fort itself, and from across the water on Birgu and Senglea, the defenders watched with awe. The rocky terrain and the lack of topsoil and wood made trench cutting difficult, but the sappers pushed forward their spidery network of trenches “with marvelous diligence and speed.” Careful angles of approach shielded the work from the fort for a considerable time. Earth was transported from a mile away to construct gun platforms. Hundreds of men marched in long columns up the slopes of the hill with sacks of earth and planks of wood. The deep planning of this operation was astonishing; they had brought the materials and components for their gun batteries ready-made from Istanbul. The trenches advanced with sinister intent. Within a couple of days the Ottomans were entrenched at little more than six hundred paces from Saint Elmo’s ditch. Soon the Turks’ front lines had reached the edge of the ditch itself. They created two lines of raised earth platforms to mount their guns, and protected them with triangular wooden battlements filled with earth. Flags fluttered brightly from their forward positions; the guns were hauled painstakingly up the bare hill to their emplacements at the summit; other positions were established to bombard Birgu across the water. At night, transport barges rowed silently into the harbor of Marsamxett below Saint Elmo with bundles of brushwood for filling up the castle ditch. Across the water La Valette watched this activity with alarm and dispatched urgent messages to Don Garcia in Sicily.

By Monday, May 28, the Ottoman guns were starting to bombard Saint Elmo from the heights; by Thursday, Ascension Day in the Christian calendar, the Turks had twenty-four guns positioned in two tiers, wheeled guns that fired penetrating iron balls, and giant bombards, one a veteran of Rhodes, firing enormous stone ones. The initial bombardment was preceded by a rattling barrage of musket fire to prevent any defender from showing his head over the parapet, then the cannon opened up. The Ottomans started to pulverize the two star points facing outward toward the ditch and the weak flank toward the ravelin. From Birgu, La Valette did his best to disrupt this cannonade by mounting four cannon of his own on the end of Saint Angelo and pummeling the platforms that were visible on the ridge across the water. He was not without success; as early as May 27, Piyale was slightly wounded by a stone splinter; but the cost in gunpowder was too great to be sustained.

From the start the omens were not good for the defense. The men could hardly raise their heads over the parapet without being ready targets, clear against the summer sky. The janissary snipers with their long-barreled arquebuses waited in the trenches below for any sign of life. Their patience was extraordinary; they watched, concealed and motionless, for five, six hours at a time, sighting down the barrel, finger on the trigger, waiting like hunters for the prey. They shot thirty men dead in a single day. The defenders did their best to erect makeshift protecting parapets; at the same time they worked to reconstruct crumbling walls out of earth and whatever other materials came to hand. Within a few days, morale started to collapse: whenever the defenders risked a sighter at the Ottoman guns looming on the hill above, they were in danger of being picked off. The proximity of the trenches, the crash of cannonballs, and the patent shortcomings of the fort made it obvious that their position was not sustainable. As early as May 26 the defenders slipped a man across the harbor in the dark. Juan de la Cerda was one of Philip’s Spanish commanders and owed no allegiance to the knights. He gave La Valette and his council a blunt, uncomfortable, and public assessment of what the grand master already knew: the fort was weak, small, and without flanking defenses, “a consumptive body in continuous need of medicine to keep it alive.” It could hold out without reinforcements for eight days at the most. More resources must be committed.

This was not what the grand master wanted to hear. Everything in his calculations depended on Saint Elmo buying time for Birgu and Senglea to strengthen their defenses and for Don Garcia, thirty miles away in Sicily, to send a relief fleet. He ironically thanked the Spaniard for his advice and appealed to the defenders’ honor. At the same time he promised to send what was required: one hundred twenty men were ferried across under the command of Captain Medrano, who was now to be in charge of all the rebellious Spanish troops, as well as extra food and munitions. Wounded men made the journey back to the knights’ hospital at Birgu. The defenders’ morale was bolstered by these prompt actions but their underlying predicament remained unchanged. Smoldering dissatisfaction would soon break out again.

A regular interchange of small boats, apparently able to break the Ottoman naval blockade with impunity, carried messages to and fro between La Valette and Don Garcia in Sicily. The viceroy’s news was profoundly discouraging. There were innumerable delays in gathering ships and men. The logistics of assembling a task force were proving immensely complicated. Some galleys were still being fitted out in Barcelona; in Genoa, Gian’Andrea Doria had been waiting for soldiers from Lombardy; then it rained heavily and the sea was too rough to risk moving his ships. In Sicily, Don Garcia had five thousand men but only thirty galleys, and the Ottomans knew this. They could afford to disarm many of their own galleys and send the crews ashore to work, leaving seventy to patrol the coast. They pressed forward with the bombardment. La Valette confined this information to his small council.

The days were heating up; nights were lit by brilliant moons, but the Ottoman sappers worked around the clock, snaking their trenches closer and closer to the walls, building protective embankments from earth carried up the stony slopes of Sciberras. “In truth it was a remarkable thing,” declared Giacomo Bosio, “to see, in a barren landscape, the speed with which the Turks could make mountains of earth appear almost in a flash, from which they created bastions and platforms to bombard Saint Elmo, and the urgency with which they advanced their trenches and covered ways.” Medrano mounted unexpected sorties to disrupt the work and kill the laborers; but during one of these sallies on May 29, the janissaries counterattacked and planted their flags on the counterscarp, hard up against the outer defenses and close to the ravelin. On Ascension Day, May 31, the Ottoman gunners opened up again on an even larger scale with twenty-four cannon, determined to blast Saint Elmo’s fortifications back to the living rock. The bombardment continued unabated all night; so unceasing was the firing that the defenders calculated that the guns were not being cleaned out or allowed to cool between rounds—a highly risky practice for guns and gunners alike. The following morning at dawn, a shot knocked down Saint Elmo’s flagstaff and flag. A great cry went up from the Turkish troops; it was taken as a sign of impending victory.

However, across the water in Birgu and Senglea, the time being bought by the small fort was put to good use. The soldiers and inhabitants worked feverishly, raising walls, building parapets and fighting positions for the day when Saint Elmo would fall and the guns would be turned on their fortifications. At night the sound of gunfire set the dogs in the towns barking; La Valette had them all killed—including his own hunting dogs—and dispatched a continuous stream of small boats to the fort. By now, however, the Turks were starting to think about this loophole. They set up two small artillery pieces and some arquebusiers on the shore to try to disrupt the lifeline to Birgu.

On the morning of June 2, it all took a further turn for the worse. At daybreak, lookouts on the cavalier of Saint Elmo spotted sails to the southeast. There were brief hopes that these were the outriders of Don Garcia’s rescue fleet, but the truth was grimmer. It was Turgut, coming up from Algiers with his corsairs—some thirteen galleys and thirty other vessels, fifteen hundred Islamic fighters under the most experienced and resourceful commander in the whole sea. The circumstances of his welcome perhaps highlighted the gulf in ability between Turgut and the commanders already in place. Piyale, determined to make an impression, sailed his own galleys out “in superb order” to greet the newcomer. Passing Saint Elmo, they fired off a volley of gunfire at the fort. Their shots whistled overhead and killed some of their own men in the trenches, while return fire from the fort holed one galley amidships, so that it had to be towed quickly off to prevent its total loss.

Suleiman had perhaps placed his ultimate confidence in Turgut, “a wise and experienced warrior”—and Mustapha and Piyale were aware of this. “The Drawn Sword of Islam” knew Malta better than anyone; he was not only an expert seaman, but also a highly experienced gunner and siege specialist. Once ashore, the old corsair was quickly apprised of the situation. He pursed his lips with displeasure. He probably disliked the whole venture and would have preferred an easy attempt on the Spanish enclave at La Goletta, an irritant to his own personal North African fiefdom. He may or may not have disagreed about the decision to go for Saint Elmo first—all Christian accounts of the matter have the ring of invention—but since the siege was under way, it would be best if it were concluded as quickly as possible. He wasted no time in going up to the front line to reanalyze the terrain and the disposition of the artillery. He saw that speed was essential: more guns must be brought up and they must be brought nearer. A second heavy bombard was hauled forward, and four cannon were placed on the northern shore to bombard Saint Elmo’s weakest flank. He was determined to pulverize the fort as heavily as possible. To this end he set up a battery of guns on a point across the Marsamxett harbor that could rain shot onto the ravelin and cavalier; in due course he established another battery on the opposite headland. Saint Elmo was now under fire from a hundred and eighty degrees; so heavy was the shot, Bosio declared, “that it was extraordinary that the tiny, straightened fort was not reduced to ashes.”

Turgut’s final suggestion was to take the ravelin as quickly as possible, “even at the cost of many good soldiers.”