This is the day!

‘Was it really the greatest siege?’ Catherine de Medici asked. ‘Greater even than Rhodes?’ ‘Yes, madame,’ the knight commander Antoine de La Roche answered, ‘greater even than Rhodes. It was the greatest siege in history.’ Catherine’s constable, Anne de Montmorency, had been arguing for Rhodes, but even he had to concede that more guns had been fired, more mines dug, at Malta. La Roche, who was present at the siege, though he played an inglorious part in Malta’s defence, virtually recommending surrender at the moment of supreme danger, won the argument. This feverish discussion, described at length by the gossipy Abbé de Brantôme in his memoirs, sounds like a group of football fans debating the greatest ever cup final. The story of the Great Siege was told and retold from the moment the Turkish fleet sailed away from Malta’s rocky shores in September 1565. By the following spring, Brantôme was guiding a party of a thousand French aristos to view the scenes of combat in a barely disguised example of early war tourism.

Marcus Bull reminds us in this latest, no less enthralling retelling how often sieges, from Troy and Jericho onwards, have taken on a mythic quality. They are usually told from the point of view of the besieged and are invariably close-run things in which the defenders nearly run out of food or ammunition or simply the will to resist. When all seems lost, a hero steps into the breach. Francesco Balbi, an eyewitness to the most desperate hours on Malta, describes the moment when the veteran grand master of the Knights of St John, Jean de La Valette, leapt into the gash the Turks had made in the bastion of Castile, after the other fort on the island, St Elmo, had already fallen.

‘Come, my knights,’ he cried. ‘Let us all go and die there! This is the day!’ When his staff urged him to stand down, he replied: ‘I am 71. And how is it possible for a man of my age to die more gloriously than in the midst of my friends and brothers, in the service of God?’ He seized an arquebus from a soldier and opened fire on the Turks waving their banners from the battlements, shouting: ‘This way, boys, this way! I will not withdraw so long as those banners still wave in the wind.’

This kind of stuff, no doubt souped up by the chroniclers, leaves an indelible mark. The siege was instantly inscribed as a key moment in the five centuries of conflict between the Cross and the Crescent. The papacy set out to marmorealise it as the Counter-Reformation in arms. Barely a decade later, Pope Gregory XIII commissioned two large wall paintings by Egnazio Danti for the Galleria delle carte geografiche in the Vatican: on the right was the Great Siege of 1565 and on the left was the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, in which the Christians again beat off the sultan’s fleet. Nearly two centuries later, Voltaire remarked in his Annales de l’Empire: ‘Rien n’est plus connu que le siège de Malte.’

Is this reputation deserved? Is the whole bloody episode as significant as, for example, the second siege of Malta in 1940, when German and Italian bombers pounded the little island for two and a half years, earning it the George Cross? Bull interrogates the myth relentlessly but not unfairly, trying always to set the story in both its contemporary global context and its place in history. His cool findings do not diminish the savagery and bloodshed, or the heroism displayed on both sides, but they do make the proceedings seem peculiar, to put it mildly.

In the first place, the Knights of St John never wanted to be on Malta at all. The order originated in Jerusalem in the 1060s as a combination of hospice, hostel and hospital for pilgrims to the holy places, distinct from the military orders of Christian knights such as the Templars. But by the end of the 12th century, its knights too had taken on military duties. When Saladin threw them out of Jerusalem in 1187, they moved on to Acre, only to be turfed out a century later by the Mamluks, then to Cyprus and eventually to Rhodes, which they had seized from the Greeks by 1310. Rhodes was their happy place. It was there that they grew into a prosperous local naval power with a small fleet of galleys. Unfortunately, Rhodes is only twenty kilometres from the Anatolian coast and the knights became such a nuisance to Muslim pilgrims and merchants that the young Süleyman, not yet the Magnificent, moved them on again in 1523 after that other long and furious siege.

They sailed away from Rhodes, a belligerent bunch of homeless knights drawn mainly from the nobility and gentry of southern Europe and by now more interested in their ancestral quarterings than in the teachings of Jesus, although the veneer of piety never quite cracked. They approached several European rulers for help – including Henry VIII, who would have no truck with them – and in the end reluctantly accepted the only offer going. Malta was an informal part of Charles V’s newly acquired kingdom of Sicily. The main island and its smaller neighbour, Gozo, had very little water. The rocky soil grew few crops. The scant fortifications were badly sited. The citadels, despite reinforcements, presented easy targets to attackers on higher ground. For years, the knights hankered to move on to Tripoli, where La Valette had been governor, but that option was foreclosed when Tripoli fell to an Ottoman armada in 1551. They were stuck with Malta. Even after the Great Siege, in which so many died to defend a dump they loved so little (more than half of the 580 knights perished, along with at least five thousand Maltese, perhaps a quarter of the population), they still yearned to move to somewhere nicer: Sicily, perhaps, or Corsica, or the Îles de Hyères just off Toulon. They did build a splendid new capital, which was named after their heroic grand master, but Valletta seems to have been a provisional station until something better turned up.

All the same, a vigorous propaganda exercise succeeded in portraying the knights as the forward defence of Christendom against the infidel – the propugnaculum of the Council of Trent, which had finished two years earlier. Victories were celebrated with High Masses in the chapel; papal banners could be seen waving on the battlements. But much of this seems to have been for show. The new grand master, Jean de La Cassière, had been determined to re-establish the religious vocation of the order and to suppress the macho culture that had taken hold of these brawling bloods after the siege turned them into heroes. He was deposed by rebel knights in 1581 after ordering the deportation of Malta’s substantial population of prostitutes.

Bull makes clear the enthusiasm with which the knights took up piracy to sustain their meagre resources. La Valette was himself involved in slaving raids and owned slaves. There was little to choose between the brutal treatment he had endured as a galley slave in 1541 and that suffered by the great corsair Turgut Reis (or Dragut), who was killed in the siege after first being ‘sent to the oars’ in 1549 by the Genoese Admiral Doria. Turgut had bumped into La Valette when he was a galley slave and then met him again, eight years later, when their roles were reversed. ‘Monsieur Dragut, it is the custom of war,’ La Valette said consolingly. To which Turgut replied: ‘And the change of Fortune.’ The Med was a pirates’ lake, in which no side could claim moral superiority. The Ottomans presented their campaigns as part of a holy war, but they had plenty of down-to-earth justifications: Muslim pilgrims to Mecca were being seized and enslaved, or ransomed at huge expense, and Ottoman cargoes of silk, bullion and food were being snatched all the time.

When it comes to questions of long-term global strategy, Bull is more quizzical. The knights themselves believed that the Ottoman fleet’s mission was ‘to overcome and annihilate this our Religion and Knighthood of Jerusalem’. The theme of imminent extermination was a keynote of their fundraising letters to European leaders, including one to Charles IX, the king of France, in the middle of the siege. It was a mission to raise cash to repair the fortifications after the siege that brought La Roche to the court of Queen Catherine.

Bull is keen to stress that ‘Ottoman naval policies, and the wider strategic objectives that they subserved, were adaptable and fluid,’ but he does concede that by 1565 Süleyman’s aim was indeed the destruction of the order. There is, after all, no reason to doubt Süleyman’s pep talk to his two generals, Mustapha and Piali (a split command that was to prove a bad idea). Balbi’s verbatim report is, of course, a reconstruction, like Thucydides’ reports of Pericles’ speeches, but it sounds close to what the Magnificent One, now in his early seventies, might have said:

It is my dearest wish to capture the island of Malta – not because it is important in itself, but because, if this expedition is successful, there will follow other, more large-scale enterprises … If you do succeed, we shall try to accomplish what my father attempted – the conquest of Calabria, a task well begun by the capture of the important port of Otranto … There would come a time when we should take that fertile land, Sicily, the granary of the Romans who once ruled where now – praise be to Allah and to His Prophet! – it is we who rule. Thus we should be able to make war upon Italy and upon Hungary, and the great German Empire would become ours. We should extend our sway to the limits of the known world, and your names would become immortal.

This was an age of vaulting global ambition, but that didn’t preclude a tactical propensity for caution and bureaucratic nitpicking, nowhere better exemplified than by Philip II fretting over every detail of his plans for world domination. Philip certainly had his hands full. By the summer of 1565, revolt was brewing in the Spanish Netherlands. Just as the siege of Malta was being lifted and he could breathe again in the Mediterranean, his top man in Florida, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, was rowed ashore at what he christened the bay of St Augustine, which became the oldest continuously occupied European settlement in the territory of the United States. It was forty years since the conquistadors had discovered and appropriated huge deposits of gold and silver in Mexico and Peru. Potosí, in what is now Bolivia, was to become the most populous city in the Spanish Empire and to produce more silver than any other mine in history. The flotas from Seville were the most eagerly sought targets on the high seas, dreamed of but only rarely nabbed by French, Dutch and English privateers. When Thomas Cavendish, the cheeky young buccaneer from Suffolk, succeeded in capturing the Santa Ana off the coast of Mexico, he returned home to Greenwich in September 1588 with a cargo worth two million pesos, only to be a little miffed when his thunder was stolen by the defeat of the Spanish Armada.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, the Philippines, named in honour of Philip II before he succeeded to the throne, were unified by a Basque sea captain, Miguel López de Legazpi, and proclaimed a colony of New Spain. Not merely that: Legazpi’s little ships cracked the puzzle, for which Philip had offered a prize, of finding a route back to New Spain that avoided the Cape of Good Hope and the wider Portuguese zone of influence.

All these excursions around the globe threaten to make the Great Siege look like a sideshow or at least an anachronism. The tug of events was pulling away from the old Mediterranean cockpit and towards the wider world. In any case, neither the Great Siege nor the Battle of Lepanto prevented the Ottomans from rebuilding their fleet. But their attention was increasingly drawn to the possibilities in the East: the trade routes across the Indian Ocean to China and the Muslim realms of South-East Asia. In general the Turks were still seen as invincible and their fiscal resources inexhaustible. The Grand Vizier Rüstem Pasha boasted to the Venetian ambassador in 1554 that the sultan’s tax receipts gave him the resources to wage a major military campaign every year for eighty years. Süleyman could have sent an even larger fleet to Malta to rid himself of those turbulent knights.

By contrast, Philip lived on tick. The huge mineral booty from the Americas mostly went towards paying off his creditors. At one point, his principal bankers, the Fuggers of Augsburg, took possession of his mercury mine at Almadén in the Sierra Morena (the name is Arabic for ‘the metal’). The debts of these voracious imperialists grew as fast as their appetite for minerals.

On both sides the range of the rowing galleys was limited. Though suited to the minimal tides and winds of the Mediterranean, they could travel only as far as their supply of biscuits and water would carry them. The greater range of the emerging Dutch and British sailing fleets was to give them a huge advantage.* During the Siege of Malta, Süleyman’s galleys were operating at the limit of their radius of action, however hard the generals drove their wretched crews, who sweated naked all day long, dreading the overseer’s lash and at risk of being chucked overboard if they dropped. Every galley required several hundred oarsmen. With the thousands of siege troops also aboard, the overcrowding, stench and squalor can scarcely be imagined, although plenty of galley slaves survived to describe their ordeal in graphic detail, not least Miguel de Cervantes, who fought at Lepanto and was later enslaved by Barbary corsairs for five years. The numbers of galley slaves on both sides were huge. After Lepanto, no fewer than fifteen thousand Christian slaves were set free.

In this world of snobbery, humbug and unrestrained violence, it is hard to come to anything resembling a useful sober judgment, but I do think Bull is a bit harsh in concluding that ‘in the end, the defenders in the Great Siege just about held on because they were very, very lucky.’ After all, on the preceding pages, he points out the many things the knights got right: they laid on sufficient supplies of food and gunpowder, they carefully maintained the water cisterns they had built as soon as they arrived on the island and they supplemented their swords and crossbows with the latest devilish weapons. Their arsenal included the dreaded basilisk, which fired cannonballs of up to 200 lbs; pots of wildfire, which exploded like hand grenades when chucked twenty yards; and a weapon of their own invention, firework hoops, which were smeared in a gunpowder compound, set alight and tossed at the advancing Muslims. There was also the Trump, a hollow tube packed with explosives and fixed to a lance. ‘When you light the Trump, it continues a long time snorting and belching vivid, furious flames … several yards long.’ That sounds about right.

There isn’t really much to quarrel with in Balbi’s judgment that, ‘if it had not been for the constant foresight and preparations made by the grand master, not one of us would have survived.’ The knights’ determination to defend a barren island they had never wanted to occupy may seem irrational, yet their actions were not only suicidally brave but perfectly sensible; a not unknown combination in human carry-on. Crazy, yes, but lucky? I don’t think so.

They stayed on Malta for another two centuries, until Napoleon threw them out in 1798. Dispersed once more across the world, the Knights of St John survive to this day, still with a snobbish tinge in their upper echelons but reconnected to their original vocation of tending to the sick, most conspicuously through the St John ambulances, though the only knights they pick up these days are jockeys who have fallen off in point-to-point races.