Empires of the Sea - the Final Battle for the Mediterranean 1521-1580 (19 page)

IT IS SAID
that when Piyale entered the fort and surveyed the horrific scene, he was overcome by repulsion. He asked Mustapha why such cruelty had been necesssary. It was the question, said or unsaid, that hovered repeatedly in the Mediterranean air throughout all the decades of this war. Mustapha replied that it was the sultan’s orders: no grown man must be taken alive. He promptly dispatched ships to Istanbul with news of the victory and captured war trophies. When they heard about the capture of Saint Elmo, the Venetians, with shriveling cynicism, celebrated in the streets—or the authorities might have organized this expression of spontaneous joy to satisfy Ottoman spies that the republic was still loyal to the sultan.

Two hours after Saint Elmo’s fall, Turgut “drank the sherbet of martyrdom and forgot this vain world.”

CHAPTER
12

Payback

June 24 to July 15, 1565

O
N THE AFTERNOON OF JUNE
24—the feast day of Saint John—from their fortified positions on Birgu and Senglea, the defenders could look gloomily across the water at the Ottoman flags fluttering from the ruined walls of Saint Elmo. After dark the Turkish camp was brilliant with fires and celebrations. “It grieved us all,” sighed Francisco Balbi in his diary, “because this celebration was not such as the Knights used to make on this day in honour of their patron saint.”

But La Valette was not the only commander to be troubled. Mustapha had lost valuable time—a rigid coordinate in the whole plan—and at least four thousand men, conservatively a sixth of his whole force, including a large part of his crack janissaries. He had fired eighteen thousand cannon shots, and no matter how ample the military planning had been in Istanbul, gunpowder was not inexhaustible. The death of Turgut was another blow. Mustapha ordered the corsairs to transport his body to Tripoli and to return with all the gunpowder they could find. He also hurried a galliot off to Istanbul with some cannon from the fort as trophies; it was a wise move. Instinctively he could sense that lack of positive news was starting to make Suleiman frown with displeasure. It was essential that Mustapha move the final assault forward. In Istanbul meanwhile, a bloodless revolution was taking place in the imperial administration. On June 27, the chief vizier died. He was replaced by the second vizier, the Bosnian-born Sokollu Mehmet Pasha, who would prove to be one of the ablest of Ottoman viziers and a statesman worthy of his great master. It was Sokollu who would largely steer the Ottoman ship in the years ahead.

ON BIRGU,
La Valette was confronting the consequences of defending Saint Elmo to the last. Proportionately, the fifteen hundred dead Christians were an even heavier loss—about a quarter of all his fighting men—but the lives had at least bought time to strengthen the flimsy defenses on the two peninsulas. However, behind the resolute public face, there was something approaching despair. A string of urgent letters was dispatched to Mdina in the center of the island, then on by small boat to the wider world. To Philip in Spain he wrote immediately, “I had put all our forces to defend St Elmo…We are now so few we can’t hold out for long.” To Don Garcia, the man on the spot in Sicily, he begged repeatedly for an immediate full-scale rescue fleet, “without which we’re dead.”

Both the grand master and the pasha had fought at Rhodes as young men, and the lessons of that encounter had not been forgotten. Even as Ottoman engineers surveyed the harbor, mapping angles of fire and siting gun platforms for the inevitable bombardment of Birgu and Senglea, Mustapha decided to try to cut the knot of his difficulties. On June 29, “at the hour of vespers,” a small posse of horsemen approached the walls of Senglea, carrying a white flag. The leader, richly dressed in a brilliantly colored caftan, fired a gun in the air indicating that he wanted to parley. He was answered by a blast of cannon fire, which forced him to dodge smartly behind a rock. A single man was pushed forward and ran blindly for the walls, hoping not to be shot dead; this unfortunate was an old Spaniard who had been an Ottoman slave for thirty-two years and spoke Turkish. The knights took the man, blindfolded him, and led him to the grand master. He had been sent to repeat the offer made by Suleiman forty years earlier—that they could avoid inevitable death by accepting the offer of free passage to Sicily, “with all your people, your property and your artillery.” La Valette promptly replied “in a terrible and severe voice,” “Hang him!” The old man fell on his knees in terror, “saying that he was only a slave and that he had been forced to come with this message.” La Valette let the wretched man go, with a word to the pashas that he would accept no envoys; the next man would be killed.

Behind this lay a clear lesson from Rhodes. La Valette understood that the low morale of the townspeople had been a crucial factor in the outcome in 1522. Any hint of negotiation could undermine resolve. Defeatist talk would be met by death. When a Maltese renegade started to call over the wall to his compatriots a few days later, La Valette forbade any response. There would be only silence and gunfire. In any event, Mustapha had already lost any last chance of detaching the sympathies of the Maltese at Saint Elmo, with the decapitated and crucified body of their priest floating in the bay. The whole civilian population, down to the women and children, was ready to tear their prisoners to bits.

Having failed to achieve a quick win, Mustapha pressed urgently forward. A decision was taken to seal off both peninsulas but to tackle Senglea first, the weaker of the two, then to crack the knights’ main stronghold on Birgu. Senglea consisted of a fort at its landward end, Saint Michael, that defended the peninsula from the land and sheltered a small town. The promontory beyond was barren; there was a hill with two windmills on it, and where it tapered to a point in the harbor, there was a beaked fighting platform, called the Spur. Almost all of Senglea’s defenses were unsatisfactory; the Saint Michael bastion with its unfinished rock-cut ditch was as deficient as Saint Elmo in the finer points of fortress design. The western, seaward side of the promontory around to the Spur at the end, which could easily be bombarded from the shore, contained no serious fortifications; only the eastern side was reasonably secure. It faced into the inner harbor and was protected by Birgu on the other side; the mouth of the harbor between Senglea and Birgu was sealed by a massive chain. But if Mustapha could find a seaborne way of attacking the westward side, the peninsula’s doom would quickly be sealed.

IN FACT THE PASHA
had conceived a bold strategy for taking Senglea, called by the Turks the Fortress of the Mill. Unfortunately, details of the plan were quickly leaked by a curious defection. The Ottoman forces contained a substantial number of Christian renegades—either voluntary or forcible converts—and the durable loyalty of these men, in such close proximity to their coreligionists, was to prove a continual problem. On the morning of Saturday June 30, Francisco Balbi, looking from the Spur on the end of Senglea across the harbor, saw a lone figure in cavalry armor waving furtively from the foreshore opposite. He indicated that he wanted a boat to come and collect him. No vessel could easily be dispatched without attracting attention; he was gestured to swim across. The man stripped off his armor, tied his shirt around his head, and struck out inexpertly across the water. Three sailors dived into the water from the Spur to help him across. They reached the exhausted man at the same moment that the Turks raised the alarm and ran down onto the beach. Covering fire from the Christian side pinned the Turks back until the fugitive was dragged from the water, more dead than alive.

The defection was something of an intelligence coup—and a serious blow to Mustapha. The man’s name was Mehmet Ben Davud but he had been born Philip Lascaris, the son of a noble Greek family from the Peloponnese. He was fifty-five years old and had been taken as a child by the Ottomans and converted to Islam; now, seeing the heroic defence of Saint Elmo, “his heart touched by the Holy Spirit,” according to the pious chroniclers, he was resolved “to return to the Catholic Faith.” Mehmet had been a soldier of some standing in the Ottoman camp and party to the pasha’s innermost councils. He unfolded the details of Mustapha’s plan to La Valette, point by point. In order to attack the westward flank of Senglea without having to sail ships into the harbor past the Christian guns, the pasha was planning to have his smaller boats dragged overland across the base of Mount Sciberras into the top of the creek beyond Senglea. This was invaluable information; the defenders set about planning energetic countermeasures. And while Mustapha was busy preparing his gun platforms for a furious bombardment of Senglea, he suffered a further indignity.

On the night of July 3, a long column of dark figures was making its way furtively across the Maltese landscape. They moved through the warm summer night without talking; just the occasional snort of a horse, muffled footsteps, the faint clink of armor; they picked their way through the maze of dusty lanes behind the Ottoman camp.

These seven hundred armed men were a small relief force dispatched in four galleys from Sicily by Don Garcia and put ashore secretly on the north of the island a few days earlier. The operation had been carefully planned with an elaborate system of fire signals and messages conveyed by Maltese runners dressed as Turks. In thick fog the force had been conducted to Mdina and secreted in the walled city. Their presence was successfully kept from the enemy, but only through lucky chance. A child looking out of a window on the ramparts spied a ghostly figure slipping away through the fog, and called out “Turks! Turks!” Horsemen hunted down the fleeing figure and dragged him back; a Greek slave, hoping to win his freedom, had set out to the Ottoman camp with the news. He was chopped to pieces.

The relief column reached the coast beyond Birgu before dawn for a prearranged rendezvous with boats sent by the grand master. The twenty-mile march had entailed a huge semicircular detour to avoid the Ottoman lines, but passed almost without mishap. Only one knight, Girolamo of Gravina, “heavily armed and very fat,” had got detached from the party, along with a dozen soldiers laden with baggage. They were captured and hauled before Mustapha. The rest made a triumphant entry into Birgu by boat. It was a cheering moment for La Valette; the new contingent consisted mainly of professional soldiers from the garrison of Sicily under their commander Marshal de Robles. Among those who also came were La Valette’s own nephew, and two English adventurers, the exiled Catholics John Smith and Edward Stanley.

The assault on the walls of Saint Michael (I) and Senglea. The windmills are at the end (G); the spur is just to the left of them. Also shown: Saint Elmo (H); the boats being hauled into the harbor (X); the pontoon bridge (L) connecting Senglea to Birgu (B); the chief eunuch’s galley (K); just to the left, the hidden gun battery; Fort Saint Angelo (A); chains at E and M closing the inner harbor

When Mustapha learned the truth from Gravina, he was both stunned and furious. A row broke out with Piyale over culpability for this humiliating relief right under their noses. Mustapha thought it prudent to get his explanation to Suleiman in first; another ship was dispatched to Istanbul on July 4. The army was put to frantic work, finally sealing off Birgu and Senglea from all contact with the outside world. Henceforward the dispatch of messages became a risky business; Maltese swimmers slipped into the night sea with coded letters scrolled into cows’ horns and stoppered with wax.

Meanwhile the inhabitants of Senglea were being subjected to all the measures they had witnessed at Saint Elmo. Wooden gun platforms were established in an arc around the two promontories; the guns were laboriously dragged back around from the high ground above Saint Elmo by teams of men and oxen, and were then sited and prepared to fire. The cannon fire that opened up in earnest on July 4 pounded the land walls of the Saint Michael fort and the exposed western shoreline; it was accompanied by sniper fire from the arquebusiers designed to pick off soldiers and laborers working to strengthen defenses against the coming attack. The bombardment was ceaseless. La Valette countered by sending the Muslim slaves out to work in exposed positions, chained together in pairs. It made no difference; Mustapha pressed on regardless—felling the reluctant workers from the heights above. Balbi found their plight pitiful. “These poor creatures became so exhausted by sheer fatigue from the continual toil that they could hardly stand. They cut off their own ears and even preferred getting killed to working any longer.” A few days later a pair of chained slaves, caught in the firing line, called out in Turkish to their comrades over the walls to stop firing out of pity for their plight. The intent of their words was misunderstood by the Maltese, who guessed they were directing the gunners to the weak sections of wall. A mob of yelling women fell on the slaves, dragged them through the city streets, and stoned them to death.