The Glory of the Crusades (39 page)

The Ottoman landing was unopposed, and forces soon arrived at the main harbor where La Valette had placed his troops in several forts. Mustapha Pasha arranged his camp in a crescent shape per Ottoman custom.
619

The Christian defense of the harbor centered on two linked peninsulas named Birgu and Senglea, which jutted into the Grand Harbor. Birgu was home to the main Hospitaller fort of St. Angelo and contained La Valette’s command post. Senglea was home to Fort St. Michael the Archangel. The largest peninsula contained Mount Sciberras along its length and ended with Fort St. Elmo at the tip. Ft. St. Elmo controlled the harbor passes, and was the most strategic place on Malta.

Mustapha Pasha and Piyale agreed on the need to capture Fort St. Elmo, since no Ottoman ship was safe attempting to sail into the harbors as long as the Knights controlled the fort. If the “key to Europe was Malta, the key to Malta was Saint Elmo.”
620

The Fight for Fort St. Elmo

La Valette was pleased that the Ottomans had planned a focused assault on St. Elmo. That fateful decision bought him time to finish his defensive preparations at Birgu and Senglea, and, he hoped, time for a Spanish relief army to arrive.

The fight for Fort St. Elmo began on May 25, 1565. Ottoman engineers believed the fight would be short: four or five days.
621
But Christians held their ground and made the Ottomans pay dearly for every inch; by May 29, the date the Turkish engineers believed the fort would be in their hands, the Ottomans had only captured the outer trench.

As the fight for Fort St. Elmo slogged into June, both sides engaged in intense hand-to-hand combat and heavy sniper activity. Turkish artillery continued to pound the fort, lobbing 6,000 cannonballs per day. On June 18, the Ottomans once again launched a major attack that, over six hours, resulted in the deaths of 1,000 Turks and 150 Christians.
622
Although the defenders fought bravely, it was only a matter of time before the fort would fall into Ottoman control. The defenders knew that time was near when on the twenty-sixth day of the siege a cannonball decapitated the fort’s commander.

The remaining Knights and soldiers knew they could withstand only one more attack, and it came on June 23, the vigil of the Feast of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist, the patron of the order. Only sixty defenders were left, and the senior officers in charge were unable to stand due to their wounds. They sat in chairs in the breach to fight, and were both shot dead in the final assault.
623
As the Turks poured into the fort, they made quick work of the remaining defenders. Only five Maltese soldiers were known to survive the final assault, by running down to the shore and swimming across the harbor.
624
Some soldiers tried to surrender to the Turks to save their lives, but they were lined up on a wall and shot. The bodies were then hung upside down where the heads and chests were split open and their hearts ripped out.
625

The thirty-one-day siege had paid a heavy price to the Grim Reaper, with 4,000 Turks and 1,500 Christians killed.
626
Although the Turks could absorb the losses better than the Christians, it was still a heavy price to pay for such a small (albeit strategic) fort. Mustapha Pasha, while looking across the harbor to the main fortress of St. Michael the Archangel on Senglea, remarked, “Allah! If so small a son has cost us so dear, what price shall we have to pay for so large a father!”
627

Mustapha Pasha hoped to demoralize the remaining Christian troops across the harbor so he ordered some of the bodies of the Knights stripped of their armor, their hearts ripped out and heads cut off. Each headless corpse was then marked with a cross cut into its chest and finally nailed by the hands and feet to a wooden crucifix that was placed into the water to float across the harbor to the Christian defenses.
628
La Valette responded to the Ottoman atrocity by beheading captured Muslim soldiers, loading the heads into his cannons, and firing them into the Muslim camp. This nasty exchange illustrates the fact that both sides knew this was a fight with enormous stakes for both Islam and Christendom, and a fight to the death.

The Fight for Birgu and Senglea

Those who died at Fort St. Elmo had given the other defenders of Malta time to consolidate and reinforce their positions, but the reprieve was now over. Mustapha Pasha ordered the attacks on Birgu and Senglea to begin on July 15.

The siege dragged on, and in early August, Mustapha Pasha ordered a heavy artillery bombardment that could be heard in Sicily.
629
The defenders kept their heads down in the trenches and on the walls as the Turkish infantry advanced.

Eventually the Christians noticed something odd about the artillery attack; they were suffering no damage. They soon realized the Turkish guns were firing blanks in the hopes of keeping the defenders hunkered down long enough for the infantry to reach the defenses. It did not work, and the assault was repulsed.

On August 7, Mustapha Pasha once more ordered a general assault, a combined attack on both Birgu and Senglea. The fighting was very intense at Birgu, and it appeared the Christian line might break. On hearing the news, the aged La Valette grabbed a helmet and pike and shouted, “Come, my knights, let us all go and die there! This is the day!”
630
He ran into the breach, grabbed a fallen arquebus, and began firing. A Turkish grenade exploded near him, and shrapnel wounded his leg. He refused to leave the line, telling those who were urging him to get to safety, “How can it be possible for a man of my age to die more gloriously than among my brethren and my friends in the service of God, in defense of our holy religion?”
631

The hour was so desperate that even Maltese civilians, including women and children, manned the walls to push back the Turks. With victory almost in reach, something odd happened in the Turkish assault. Rumor quickly spread that the long-expected Spanish relief force had finally arrived. Although this was not true, the Ottoman soldiers thought it was, and their attack faltered. In reality, what had occurred was a small Maltese militia cavalry force had swept into the unguarded Turkish camp stealing away with supplies and killing rear echelon soldiers. This very timely disruption caused the panic that stopped the Turkish assault, which had been on its way to securing victory.

The remaining days of August were filled with intense trench combat that produced a stalemate. Disease broke out in the Ottoman ranks, further thinning Mustapha Pasha soldiers. Casualties on both sides throughout the month were heavy. La Valette tried to keep morale high by praising “the dead so as to put courage into the living.”
632
As the calendar turned to September, the Christian defenders received the blessing of great news on the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary as 10,000 Spanish troops, the long awaited relief force from Sicily, arrived in eighty ships.
633

The Spanish reinforcements began their march toward the harbor to relieve La Valette’s troops on September 11, 1565. Mustapha Pasha knew defeat loomed on the horizon, but in order to stave it off, he tried a risky attack against the Spanish army. The fresh Spanish forces easily routed his troops, who were weary from four months of heavy fighting. The Ottomans retreated full bore to their awaiting ships in St. Paul’s Bay, the famous site of Paul’s shipwreck 1,500 years previously. They boarded their ships and sailed home.

Malta was saved. It had “survived through a combination of religious zeal, irreducible willpower—and luck.”
634

The siege of Malta was an epic struggle for the center of the Mediterranean, and it proved costly to both sides. The Turks lost half of the fighting strength of their invasion force, and La Valette lost half of his Knights and 2,500 Maltese troops.
635
An additional 7,000 Maltese men, women, and children also died during the siege.
636
Pope Pius IV offered La Valette the cardinal’s hat for his valiant and brilliant defense of Malta, but the humble warrior refused the offer. He would live another five years, finally dying from a stroke suffered during the summer heat when returning from a hunt. He was buried on the island he had so gallantly defended.

Pope St. Pius V and the Holy League

Although the Ottomans faltered at Malta, they remained a strong force. Selim II (r. 1566–1574), the successor of Suleiman the Magnificent, conquered Cyprus in 1571, but his sights were on a much more impressive prize, one worthy of his great-grandfather, Mehmet the Conqueror: Selim dreamed of conquering Rome. He called the Eternal City the “red apple” that he believed was ripe for plucking. A massive fleet would be required for such an invasion, and so Selim set about building one. By the fall of 1571, it was ready.

Pius V had been elected pope in 1566. As a Dominican monk he was known for his orthodoxy and hatred of heresy, serving as the head of the Holy Office of the Inquisition under Pope Paul IV. Pius was very aware of the Turkish threat to Rome and Christendom, so he wrote letters to the major European secular rulers pleading with them to unite against it.

Most of them ignored the papal exhortation. Europe in the late sixteenth century “was a ferment of violent passions, torn apart by different interests, imperial dreams, and religious tensions.”
637
Despite the lack of response, Pius kept pressing for an alliance to mitigate the Ottoman threat and, eventually, the persistent pontiff succeeded. A Holy League alliance between Spain, Venice, and the Papal States was formed on March 7, 1571.

The Battle of Lepanto

Selim II’s naval campaign to rule the Mediterranean Sea began with the crafting of large numbers of oared galleys.
638
These galleys were ships with limited range that operated in the littoral areas near the shore. They rarely ventured into open ocean and could only do so for short periods of time, primarily because they required vast amounts of potable water for the oarsmen. Initially volunteers manned the oars for these ships, but by the sixteenth century, chained slaves—especially Christian slaves captured by Muslim pirates—and conscripts provided the manpower. Life as a galley oarsman was akin to servitude in hell: “[T]he galley was an amoebic death trap, a swilling sewer whose stench was so foul you could smell it two miles off.”
639
In fact, galleys were periodically sunk just to cleanse the filth.

As the deployment season of 1571 came to a close, the Ottoman fleet sought anchorage in their fortified port of Lepanto at the mouth of the Gulf of Corinth. Lepanto was a strategic location, as the prevailing Mediterranean wind favored the defender. An attacker would waste valuable energy and time trying to row against the wind to get into the gulf while the defender sat and waited to attack until exhaustion took the enemy fleet out of action.

Ali Pasha commanded the Ottoman fleet in 1571. Ali Pasha was “brave and generous, of natural nobility, a lover of knowledge and the arts; he spoke well, he was a religious and clean-living man.”
640
He was in charge of a substantial fleet of 300 war galleys, 100,000 men, and 14,000 Christian galley slaves. It was a fleet bred for one purpose: the invasion of Rome and the conquest of Christendom. His flagship flew a large green standard known as the banner of Mohammed. The flag was covered with verses from the Qur’an, and had the name of Allah embroidered 28,900 times in gold calligraphy. The banner had never been captured by enemy forces and always seemed to bring luck and victory to the Muslim force that raised it in battle.

The Holy League fleet had assembled in Naples in August. Don Juan of Austria, the twenty-four-year-old illegitimate son of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, commanded the 208-ship fleet. Half-brother to Philip II, king of Spain, Don Juan was “good looking, dashing, intelligent, chivalrous, and daring, driven by an unquenchable appetite for glory.”
641
Pius V sent Cardinal Granvelle to Naples to consecrate Don Juan as commander of the Holy League, presenting him with a twenty-foot blue battle pennant that contained an image of the cross with the linked coat of arms of Spain, Venice, and the pope.

The cardinal also passed on the pope’s exhortation to Don Juan to demand virtuous living from his sailors and soldiers. The notion that warriors would embody Christian virtues while preparing for and participating in combat was a mainstay of the Crusading movement, and Pius V clearly saw his Holy League as the newest chapter in Crusading history.

Among the 26,000 Holy Leaguers who were asked to live virtuously and pray the rosary (each man was given one), was the Spanish author, Miguel Cervantes. The later writer of
Don Quixote
fought well in the battle, was wounded, and lost the use of his left hand for the rest of his life. Despite his wound, Cervantes later wrote that the battle was “the greatest day’s work seen for centuries.”
642

The Cross and the Crescent

The sound of the liturgy wafted across the water on the morning of October 7, 1571. The chaplains scattered throughout the fleet blessed the troops and granted them general absolution. Every man knew the next several hours would be filled with smoke, noise, confusion, death, and destruction. Each prayed that death would not find him.