The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean (39 page)

Their Grand Master, Philippe Villiers de l’Isle Adam, a deeply religious French nobleman of fifty-seven who had spent most of his life in Rhodes, had received, within a week or two of taking office in 1521, a letter from the Sultan. In it Süleyman boasted of the conquests he had already made, including those of Belgrade and ‘many other fine and well-fortified cities, of which I killed most of the inhabitants and reduced the rest to slavery’. Its implications were all too clear, but de l’Isle Adam was not intimidated; in his reply he proudly reported his own recent victory over Cortog'lu, a well-known Turkish pirate who had tried unsuccessfully to capture him on his most recent return to Rhodes.

Then, in the early summer of 1522, there came another letter:

To the Knights of Rhodes:

The monstrous injuries that you have inflicted upon my most long-suffering people have aroused my pity and my wrath. I command you therefore instantly to surrender the island and fortress of Rhodes, and I give you my gracious permission to depart in safety with your most valued possessions. If you are wise, you will prefer friendship and peace to the cruelties of war.

Any Knights who wished might remain, without paying homage or tribute, provided only that they acknowledged the sovereignty of the Sultan. To this second letter the Grand Master returned no answer.

The island of Rhodes forms a rough ellipse, running from northeast to southwest; the city itself occupies the northeastern extremity. On 26 June 1522 the first ships of the 700-strong
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Ottoman fleet appeared on the northern horizon. More and more were to join this vanguard over the next two days, including the flagship carrying Süleyman himself and his brother-in-law Mustafa Pasha, who had marched down with the army through Asia Minor. Such was its size–not far short of 200,000–that it took over a month to disembark and assemble: an overwhelming force, it might be thought, when measured against some 700 Knights, even after their numbers had been swelled by contingents from the various commanderies of the Order throughout Europe, by 500 Cretan archers, by some 1,500 other mercenaries and of course by the Christian people of Rhodes. On the other hand, the city’s defences were immensely strong, perhaps even impregnable; and the Knights had spent the previous year laying in sufficient supplies of food, water and munitions to hold out for months.

In this type of warfare, moreover, life was always a good deal harder for the besiegers than for the besieged, since they had little protection either from the sweltering summer sun or from the cold and rain of winter. For the defenders, forced as they were into a passive role, the principal strain tended to be psychological; fortunately, however, there was endless work to be done. They had to keep a constant vigil over every foot of the wall, repairing damage as soon as it was inflicted and watching for any sign among the enemy below that might suggest the activity of sappers–for mining had become something of a speciality with the Ottoman armies, who well understood that many an impressive fortification was a good deal less vulnerable from the front than from beneath.

By the end of the month the heavy bombardment had begun in earnest, the cannon being even more powerful than those used against Constantinople, capable of hurling cannonballs almost three feet in diameter a mile or more. The Turkish army was now drawn up in a huge crescent to the south of the city; that of the Knights was divided into the eight tongues, each of which was responsible for the defence of its own section of the wall. The tongue of Aragon soon came under particular pressure, when the Turks began to throw up a huge earthwork opposite, from which they hoped to fire down into the city. Meanwhile, their sappers too were busy. By mid-September the Knights’ worst fears were realised: there were some fifty tunnels running in various directions under the wall. Fortunately they had been able to secure the services of the greatest military engineer of his day, an Italian named Gabriele Tadini. He constructed his own warren of tunnels, from which he could listen–with the aid of tightly-stretched drums of parchment which could pick up every blow of a Turkish spade–and frequently deactivate the enemy fuses. He could not hope, however, to succeed every time, and early in September a mine exploded under the English section, creating a gap in the wall over thirty feet across. The Turks poured in, and there followed two hours of bitter hand-to-hand fighting before the Knights somehow prevailed and the exhausted survivors retired again to their camp.

Some time towards the end of October, a Portuguese in the service of Andrea d’Amaral, the Chancellor of the Order–second in importance only to the Grand Master–was caught firing a message into the enemy lines to the effect that the position of the defenders was now desperate and that they could not hope to hold out much longer. Put to the rack, he made an extraordinary confession: that he was acting on the orders of d’Amaral himself. Such an allegation is hard to believe. The Chancellor seems to have been generally disliked for his arrogance; having expected the Grand Mastership for himself, he also cherished a deep resentment of de l’Isle Adam personally. But would he really have betrayed the Order, to which he had devoted his life? We shall never know. Put on trial, he refused to plead one way or the other, saying nothing even when brought to his place of execution and refusing even the comforts of religion.

The gist of the message, however, was all too true. By December the Knights were at the end of their tether. Well over half their fighting force was now either dead or hopelessly disabled. Although the Sultan was offering honourable terms, for a long time the Grand Master kept his resolve. Rather than surrender to the infidel, he argued, every last Knight should perish in the ruins of the citadel. It was the native Rhodiots who finally persuaded him that if he continued to resist the result would be a massacre, of Knights and people alike. And so at last de l’Isle Adam sent a message to the Sultan, inviting him personally into the city to discuss terms–and Süleyman accepted. It is said that as he approached the gates he dismissed his bodyguard with the words, ‘My safety is guaranteed by the word of a Grand Master of the Hospitallers, which is more sure than all the armies of the world.’

The negotiations were protracted, but on the day after Christmas 1522 the Grand Master made his formal submission. Süleyman is said to have treated him with the respect he deserved, congratulating him and his Knights on their tenacity and courage. A week later, on the evening of 1 January 1523, the survivors of one of the great sieges of history sailed for Crete. It is reported that the Sultan, as he watched them depart, turned to his Grand Vizir, Ibrahim Pasha. ‘It saddens me,’ he said, ‘to force that brave old man to leave his home.’

Meanwhile, in Italy, the old struggle between France and Spain continued. It might be more correct to say ‘between France and the Empire’, but Charles’s real interest in the peninsula was based on his Spanish heritage. Sicily, Naples and Sardinia he had all inherited from his grandfather Ferdinand, and he was determined to pass these on intact to his successors. He had no wish to acquire any further territory in Italy, and was only too pleased that the native rulers should remain in charge of their states, provided that they recognised the Spanish position and showed it due respect.

French influence, however, could not be tolerated. King Francis, for as long as he remained in Italy, constituted a challenge to the imperial hold on Naples and seriously endangered communications between the Empire and Spain. The Papacy, desperate to prevent either party becoming too strong, swung backwards and forwards between the two. Thus in 1521 a secret treaty was signed between Charles and Pope Leo, as a result of which a combined papal and imperial force expelled the French once again from Lombardy, restoring the house of Sforza in the person of Ludovico’s limp-wristed son Francesco Maria. Only three years later, however, in 1524, the new Pope Clement VII
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joined with Venice and Florence in an equally secret alliance with France against the Empire, and Francis, with an army of some 20,000, marched back over the Mont-Cenis pass into Italy.

In late October Francis recaptured Milan, then turned south to Pavia, where he remained through the winter, trying unsuccessfully to divert the river Ticino as a means of taking the city; he was still there four months later when there arrived an imperial army, led not by a Spaniard or an Austrian but by one of his own countrymen: Charles, second Duke of Bourbon, one of the most exalted members of the French nobility and the hereditary Constable of the Kingdom. Charles should have been fighting beside his king, to whom he was distantly related, but Francis’s mother, Louise of Savoy, had contested his inheritance and in a fit of pique he had sold his sword to the Emperor. He was now the imperial Commander-in-Chief in Italy. His army met that of Francis just outside Pavia, and on Tuesday, 21 February 1525, battle was joined.

The Battle of Pavia proved to be one of the most decisive engagements of European history. It was also, perhaps, the first to prove conclusively the superiority of firearms over pikes. The Swiss mercenaries–fighting this time on the French side–struggled valiantly, but their weapons, fearsome as they were, were no match for Spanish bullets. When the fighting was over the French army had been virtually annihilated; some 14,000 soldiers–French and Swiss, German and Spanish–lay dead on the field. Francis himself had shown, as always, exemplary courage; after his horse had been killed under him he continued to fight on foot until at last, overcome by exhaustion, he was obliged to give himself up. ‘All is lost,’ he wrote to his mother, ‘save honour–and my skin.’

He was sent, a prisoner, to Madrid, and Charles V was once again master of Italy. The decisiveness of his victory sent a tremor through the whole peninsula, which depended–or so it believed–on the balance of power; but the Emperor had other preoccupations. Eight years before, in 1517, Martin Luther had nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the church door at Wittenberg; three years after that, he had publicly burned the papal bull excommunicating him; and in 1521, at the Diet of Worms, he had effectively raised the standard of revolt against Pope and Emperor alike. The only hope of satisfying him, in Charles’s view, lay in calling a General Council of the Church to discuss reform; but what was the use of a General Council if all the delegates from France and her allies were absent?

Then there was Süleyman to be considered. News of the fall of Rhodes had been received with horror throughout the west. Where, men asked themselves, would the Sultan strike next? Certainly he would continue his advance against the forces of Christendom. How could he be halted except by a concerted Crusade, led by the Emperor and backed by all the Christian powers? But how, in the circumstances prevailing, could Francis of France ever be persuaded to lend his support to such an effort? How was such a Crusade to be launched while Europe was so bitterly and brutally divided against itself?

It was perhaps considerations such as these that persuaded Charles to trust his royal captive, and to release him, after a year of not uncomfortable confinement, according to the terms of an agreement which Francis had absolutely no intention of observing–even though he left his two sons as hostages for his good behaviour. In what was known as the Treaty of Madrid, which he signed on 14 January 1526, the King readily renounced all his claims to the long-disputed Duchy of Burgundy, to Naples and to Milan. (He also, incidentally, restored all the disputed lands to the Duke of Bourbon, ‘on condition that we never see him again’.) When Francis returned to Paris, however, and the terms of the agreement were made public, there was a general outcry. The Estates of Burgundy protested vociferously that the King had no right to alienate a province of the kingdom without the consent of its people. Pope Clement, too, was aghast; without a French presence anywhere in Italy, how could he hope to defend himself against Charles? Hastily he recruited Milan, Venice and Florence to form an anti-imperialist league for the defence of a free and independent Italy–and invited France to join. Though the ink was scarcely dry on the Treaty of Madrid, and though he and the Pope held widely differing views on Milan–the Pope favouring the Sforzas, while Francis wanted the city for himself–on 22 May 1526 the King, with his usual flourish, signed his name.

The League of Cognac, as it was called, introduced an exciting new concept into Italian affairs. For perhaps the first time, here was an agreement dedicated to the proposition that Milan, and so by extension all the other Italian states, should be free of foreign domination. Liberty was the watchword. Clearly there could be not yet be liberty for Italy, since Italy was still no more than a geographical expression; at the same time, it was clear to all the Italian signatories of the League that the only hope of resistance to the power of Charles V or Francis I lay in a settlement of their internal differences, a pooling of their resources and the presentation of a firmly united front to any would-be invader. The Risorgimento was still more than three centuries away, but here, perhaps, were the first glimmerings of the national sentiment that gave it birth.

It need hardly be said that Charles V did not view the League of Cognac in quite this light. To him it was a direct and deliberate challenge, and over the next few months relations between himself and the Pope steadily deteriorated. Finally, in September, two letters from the Emperor were despatched to Rome. They could hardly have been more outspoken if they had been written by Luther himself. The first, addressed personally to the Pope, accused him of failing in his duties towards Christendom, and Italy, and even the Holy See. The second, to the cardinals of the Sacred College, went further still. If, it suggested, the Pope refused to summon a General Council for the reform of the Church, it was the responsibility of the College to do so without his consent. Here was a clear threat to papal authority. To Pope Clement, indeed, it was tantamount to a declaration of war.