The Great Siege of Malta

At dawn on May 18th, 1565, one of the largest armadas ever assembled appeared off the Mediterranean island of Malta. Its 200 ships had been sent by Suleiman the Magnificent, sultan of the vast Ottoman empire to destroy the Knights of Malta who had long been a thorn in his side. Aboard were crammed some 40,000 fighting men, including 6,000 of Suleiman’s elite infantry, the Janissaries, not to mention another 9,000 cavalry and seventy huge siege cannon, one or two of which were capable of hurling 600lb stones a mile and a half. Opposing this force were just 600 knights, a few thousand mercenaries and a few thousand Maltese irregulars – in all between 6,000 and 9,000 men. Once Malta fell, which Suleiman’s commanders thought should take a week, the Turks would evict the Spanish from Tunis and then invade Sicily and Italy.

Rarely in military history have the odds been so unequal and the stakes so high. Yet in dealing the first true defeat to the Ottomans in over a century, the Knights of Malta became the heroes of the age and the siege one of the most celebrated events of the sixteenth century. Nearly 200 years later Voltaire could write, ‘Nothing is more well known than the siege of Malta’.

Yet, three centuries on and the events of 1565 have receded from the minds of even most military historians. No longer do you find it on lists of the ‘seventy most decisive battles in history’. Nevertheless, the siege captures the imagination of anyone who stumbles across it. 

At the time the Ottoman empire was the most powerful in the European and Mediterranean world. Its slaving operations – and those of its vassals, the Barbary corsairs based on the coast of North Africa – were integral to its naval operations, although the empire itself allowed its citizens more freedom than many Christian states at the time. Religious refugees from Christendom made their way to the capital (and the world’s largest city) Constantinople, where they could worship as they pleased. Suleiman himself was intelligent, highly educated, an accomplished poet and determined. He was also a highly experienced campaigner.

The stronghold of Suleiman’s adversaries was decidedly not the setting of Christopher Marlow’s Jew of Malta (c.1589-90), in which a rich Jew and the son of the Turkish Sultan could scheme against an unwitting governor. The island had been taken by Muslims in the ninth century, but reconquered by Norman Christians in the eleventh, and became part of the Kingdom of Sicily in 1127; it became part of the Spanish empire in the mid-fourteenth century. Malta was a rocky limestone island that had been deforested over the previous century by the demand for ship- and fire-wood, so that the inhabitants had to resort to burning cow dung for fuel. ‘There was no such thing as any spring water, nor indeed, any well, and the inhabitants were forced to supply that defect by cisterns’, in the words of one eighteenth-century historian. The population of Malta, and its neighbouring island of Gozo, totalled about 20,000, almost all of them poor, illiterate farmers or peasants who came to the small harbour town of Birgu – the Borgo – to labour at the docks. Such was the poverty that perhaps two-thirds of the women, whether married or not, worked openly as prostitutes. The main saving grace were two large harbours which could provide ‘proper’ anchorage for any fleet.

Since 1530 the Knights Hospitaller of the Order of St John of Jerusalem, as the Knights were properly called, had owned the island, which was ruled by the Order’s Grand Master and its Council of Seigneurs. The Order, or Religion, as it was also known, had by then been in existence for over 400 years, having been founded during the First Crusade as an Order of nurses. Afterwards, it  rapidly evolved into a unique organization whose first duty was to care for ‘Our Lords the Sick’, and whose second duty was to fight the infidel. In 1113, Pope Paschal II granted the Knights the right to choose their leaders without interference from the Holy See and the Order of St John became sovereign, beholden to none but Christ and the Pope.

The Religion’s fortunes waxed and waned with the centuries. After the fall of Acre, the last crusader outpost in Syria, in 1291, the Knights seized Rhodes, where they remained for over 200 years, reinventing themselves into a naval force. With their tiny fleet (which officially never numbered above six or seven vessels), they preyed upon Turkish traders as part of the centuries-long guerre de course, or corso, between Muslims and Christians. The primary object of this legalized piracy was to seize the enemy’s cargo, which included humans, who could be ransomed in order to fill the coffers of the treasury. Those who were not ransomed became galley slaves.

Since Sultan Mehmet II’s capture of Constantinople in 1453, the Ottomans had increasingly dominated the Eastern Mediterranean. Nevertheless, the Knights’ depredations on their shipping continued, and Mehmet laid siege to Rhodes in 1480. One of Suleiman’s first acts upon ascending the sultanate in 1522 was to order the Knights off the island and when they refused, he commanded a second siege of Rhodes. After six months of resistance, the small garrison of Knights finally surrendered in exchange for Suleiman’s offer of safe passage.

Seven years later, after endless negotiations with the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, the latter offered the Order the islands of Malta and Gozo in perpetual fiefdom in return for one falcon sent annually to the Viceroy of Sicily. 

The Knights reluctantly accepted the gift and there established a theocracy where the Grand Masters actively persecuted non-Catholics: in 1546 at least two members of the small Lutheran community were burned at the stake by the Inquisitor. The only  Jews and Turks on the island were slaves, and carnal knowledge with either was punishable by ten years exile, or death by hanging.

Tensions between the Knights and the Ottomans continued to escalate. As part of his offer of Malta, Charles V had insisted that the Knights also garrison Tripoli on the Libyan coast of Africa, which lay within the territory of the Barbary corsairs but which a Spanish force had seized in 1510. However, the feared Turkish corsair and naval commander Turgut, or Dragut, Reis also had his eye on Tripoli. Born as early as 1485, by the mid-sixteenth century the ageing corsair was terrorizing the central and eastern Mediterranean with his small fleet of galleys.

In 1551 he and the Ottoman admiral Sinan decided to wrest Tripoli from the Knights. En route, they invaded Malta with a substantial force of 10,000 men. Only several hundred Knights were on the island and the assault might well have spelled the end of the Order of St John, but Turgut mysteriously broke off the siege, sacked Gozo instead and carried off the entire population of about 5,000 into slavery. Continuing on to Tripoli, he quickly forced the garrison there to surrender. Turgut became beylerbei, or governor, and the Ottomans controlled the entire eastern Mediterranean.

Anxious to be rid of the Turkish corsair, in 1560 Philip II of Spain assembled the largest armada in fifty years to evict him. But the expedition, which consisted of about fiftysix galleys and 14,000 men, was surprised and utterly destroyed by the Turkish admiral Piyali Pasha off the Tunisian island of Djerba. The surviving forces holed up in a fort on the island. After a siege of nearly three months the garrison surrendered. Some 9,000 men perished and 5,000 were taken in chains to Constantinople. It was Christendom's greatest naval disaster since the ill-fated invasion of Algiers in 1519.

The siege of Malta was the climax of this escalating chain of events. The match that ignited the powder-keg was the exploits of the Order’s notorious seafarer, Fra Mathurin aux Lescaut, better known as Romegas. Nothing is known about Romegas’ early career except that he was born in Provence, professed as a Knight in 1547 at the age of eighteen and quickly established a reputation as a fearless marauder. Within a few days during 1564, he captured several large Turkish merchantmen, one of which carried a cargo belonging to the Chief Eunuch of the Seraglio, valued at 100,000 Venetian gold ducats. Romegas took about 300 prisoners, among them the governor of Cairo, the governor of Alexandria and Giansevere Serchies, the former nurse of Suleiman’s daughter, returning from a pilgrimage to Mecca.

By this time Suleiman, was eyeing Italy for an invasion. The Spanish still controlled La Goletta, off Tunis, the largest fortress on the Barbary coast and Christian forces had just seized the Peñon de Velez, an important Moroccan fortress. Romegas’ captures provided a causus belli. By the end of 1564, Suleiman had decided to wipe the Knights off the face of the earth.

Fernand Braudel, whose Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1949) is the standard history of the period, begins his discussion of the siege of Malta by asking, ‘Was it a surprise?’ No one has ever claimed it was. The Turks had sent spies disguised as fishermen to Malta the previous summer to survey the fortifications, later building a scale model of the island in Constantinople. The Grand Master Jean de Valette, meanwhile, had his own network of agents  in place in Constantinople, headed by Giovan Barelli, which kept him informed of Suleiman’s intentions. A master of languages, Barelli pulled off one of the greatest espionage coups of the age: to smuggle out a complete report of the Turkish invasion plans as they were being decided.

In an attempt to avert an invasion, the Grand Master ordered a diversionary attack on Malvasia (known in Greek as Monemvassia) in the southeastern Peloponnese. This tiny island had been ceded by the Venetians to the Turks around 1540. Connected to the mainland by  a causeway, Malvasia was a natural fortress akin to Gibraltar and hardly less impregnable. In September 1564 de Valette sent a small force led by Romegas to scale the rock at night and seize the garrison above. The plan misfired: Romegas’ men failed to find a path to the summit and when news of the expedition reached Suleiman, it only increased his determination to eradicate the Knights.

But the Lord of Lords did not count on the ageing but remarkable Grand Master. Little is known about his early life. Universally referred to as ‘La Valette’, he was never called that during his lifetime. He was simply Jean de Valette, nicknamed Parisot, but in the decades following his death he became ‘La Valette’ in confusion with the name of the city he founded when the siege was over, La Città Valletta. As a young Provençal, de Valette had survived the siege of Rhodes and was among those who arrived at Malta in 1530. He seems never to have left the island thereafter, except on his ‘caravans’ against the infidel. During one of these, in 1541 he was seriously wounded and made a galley slave; Turgut himself evidently arranged for some leniency and after a year de Valette regained his freedom in a prisoner exchange. Captivity permitted him to add Turkish to his arsenal of French, Spanish, Greek and Arabic languages. The monument on Valette’s tomb, erected twenty-three years after his death, gives his dates as 1494-1568, suggesting that he was seventy-one during the siege; two eyewitness accounts, though, state that he was ‘only’ sixty-seven at the time.

De Valette rose in the ranks of the Religion, despite a violent temper: in 1538 he had nearly beaten a man to death and was sentenced to four months in a hole in the ground – then exiled for two years to Tripoli (as governor). In 1554 he was elected Captain General of the Knights’ galleys. At constant loggerheads with the enemy, between 1557 and his death in 1568, de Valette captured nearly 3,000 Muslim slaves. At his death he reportedly owned 530, most of them probably as galley
oarsmen.

As Grand Master he was a man of extremely conservative opinions. One of his first acts on being elected  in 1557 was to ban stockings of mismatched colours, in order ‘to avoid the ruin of man’. He hanged or gave long prison sentences to anyone who crossed him, and he also attempted to set up a collachio, an enclave in Birgu that isolated the Knights from the lay populace, in other words the prostitutes; it failed.

Knowing an invasion was imminent, de Valette made preparations, recalling the Knights to the island, raising troops, laying in stores of food and water and improving the fortifications, which were already considerable. Decades of labour had gone into adding walls and bastions to the main stronghold on the Great Port, Castle St Angelo, which was by 1565 fairly impregnable. A smaller fort, St Elmo, which had been built in 1552, guarded the harbour entrance and a third, St Michel, built at the same time, protected Birgu from the inland side. But de Valette refused an offer of 3,000 troops from Don Garcia of Toledo, the viceroy of Sicily, telling him to send them to La Goletta instead. When the invading armada appeared on Friday, May 18th, de Valette was still frantically making preparations, but he was not surprised.

The exact size of the force Suleiman sent against Malta is in some doubt. The main eyewitness account,  a diary of the siege written by the Spanish poet-mercenary Francesco Balbi, lists just under 30,000 ‘special forces’, including the Janissaries and spahis (cavalry). He adds that the total number of invaders, including the corsairs who eventually arrived, numbered about 48,000. A lesser-known work by the Knight Hipolito Sans tallies quite closely with Balbi’s. On the other hand, a letter from de Valette written four days after the Turks arrived says, ‘the number of troops making land will be between 15,000 and 16,000’, while in another letter written shortly after the siege, he gives 40,000 at the start. By any reckoning it was an overwhelming force, supplemented by nearly seventy siege cannon.

A roll-call in early May had turned up 546 Knights and Serving Brothers. Balbi lists a total of exactly 6,100 defenders, half of them mercenaries, half Maltese irregulars. Giacomo Bosio, the Order’s official historian whose massive account was published in 1588 and who seems to have had first-hand information, gives about 8,500 defenders.

The disadvantages were not all on the Maltese side. Malta lies a thousand miles from Constantinople, and the Turkish fleet had to be provisioned en route; for the army of 50-80,000 men to be fed on Malta, supplies needed to be brought from Barbary. Worse, Suleiman split the command between Vizier Mustafa Pasha, who was in charge of the ground forces, and Admiral Piyale Pasha who had routed the Christian fleet at Djerba; Suleiman exhorted both to defer to Turgut in all decisions when the corsair arrived from Tripoli.

The bickering that resulted between the two commanders had disastrous consequences. Mustafa sensibly planned to attack the unprotected old capital Mdina, at the island’s centre, then besiege the port of Birgu by land. Piyale, though, demanded to anchor his fleet in Marsamxett harbour, just north of the Great Port, both to shelter it from the sirocco and to be near the action. To do so required first reducing Fort St Elmo, on the narrow peninsula of Mt Sciberras and guarding both harbour entrances. Had Mustafa’s plan been followed, the attack on St Elmo would have been unnecessary, but the Vizier relented, reasoning that to destroy the fort would take only a few days.

That is the traditional story. However, a letter dated December 7th, 1564, from ‘one in Constantinople who usually tells the truth’ (perhaps the spymaster Barelli), suggests that the Turks had planned from the outset to take Fort St Elmo first, establish a position at the mouth of the Great Port and besiege Castle St Angelo, even if that meant wintering on Malta. Perhaps Mustafa had thought better of the idea; in the event attacking St Elmo proved a fatal mistake.

After three weeks of fighting, the fort still held. The few hundred soldiers stationed there withstood an unremitting bombardment from Turkish guns, which quickly reduced St Elmo to rubble, then fought off assault upon assault, some with as many as 8,000 attackers, according to Balbi. The defenders made extensive use of incendiary weapons – fire hoops, primitive flame throwers and grenades – while de Valette,  determined to hold out until Don Garcia sent a relief, resupplied the fort each night across the harbour and evacuated the wounded. Nevertheless, by June 8th the Knights garrisoning the fort were on the verge of mutiny and  wrote a letter – which despite publication in some popular histories has never been found – begging the Grand Master to allow them to sally forth and die with sword in hand. De Valette’s response was to pay the soldiers, then shame them by offering to send replacements. Honour prevailed and the defence continued.

The siege of St Elmo left Mdina untouched by the fighting and it therefore served as a way-station for communication to Sicily, where Don Garcia was organizing a  relief force. When Turgut arrived on Malta in early June, he saw that it was too late to correct the Turks’ tactical error. Redoubling their efforts, the Turks eventually destroyed St Elmo and butchered the defenders almost to a man, but Turgut did not live to savour the victory. He died, probably  on June 23rd, the day the fort fell, killed, according to Balbi and Sans, accidentally in an instance of ‘friendly fire’.

Yet the Turks’ success at St Elmo probably cost them the siege. They lost between 4,000 and 6,000 men, including half the Janissaries, while the defenders lost 1,300 men, including a quarter of the Knights. Disease, which would eventually kill another 10,000 or 15,000 of the besiegers, was also beginning to take its toll. Despite the losses, and Turgut’s death, Mustafa persisted with the siege, in African heat, for another two months.

The bombardment of Birgu soon commenced. The town was surrounded by sixty-five to seventy large-calibre guns. Bosio speaks of two ‘basilisks that could hurl stones of weight beyond measure’. The famous Turkish siege cannons screwed breech and barrel together to form a gun of twenty or more feet in length, and thirty tons in weight: Balbi mentions that their balls buried themselves ‘thirty palms under the earth’. He also records that by the end of July, at the height of the bombardment, the thunder was so great it ‘could be heard distinctly in Syracuse and even at Catania, forty leagues away’, and that ‘it seemed as if the end of the world had come’. The Maltese took refuge in large cisterns under their homes but ultimately, Balbi writes, 7,000 inhabitants perished.

Meanwhile, couriers were desperately passing to and fro between Mdina and Sicily. As word of the siege spread, soldiers and adventurers were arriving in Syracuse. In early July, apparently on the fourth attempt and aided by fog, the Viceroy’s captain-general succeeded in landing 600 men and getting them into Birgu. This small relief lifted spirits, but Mustafa was unrelenting.

On July 15th, he launched a massive double assault on Senglea, a peninsula in the Great Port occupied by Fort St Michel at the inner end. The Turks ported a hundred small boats over Sciberras into the harbour and attacked Senglea by water, while 8,000 troops attacked the fort by land. The sea assault would have succeeded and Malta fallen that day, had not the Turkish boats come into range of a sea-level battery that de Valette had constructed at the base of Castle St Angelo. Several salvoes destroyed the vessels and most of the attackers drowned. He had also constructed a floating bridge to allow reserves to cross from Birgu to Fort St Michel, with the result that, after a day of ferocious fighting (costing the Turks, Balbi says, another 4,000 men), the fort held.

Still no end was in sight. On August 7th, Mustafa launched another massive assault against Fort St Michel, as well as against Birgu itself. This time, the Turks breached the town walls, the old Grand Master went forth to fight with his troops, and was wounded. It seemed as if the end had come, but the Turks miraculously  broke off the attack and retreated, believing the Christian relief force had arrived. In fact, cavalry Captain Vincenzo Anastagi had sallied forth from Mdina, massacring the sick and wounded Turks left in the unprotected field hospital.

Anastagi’s actions have subsequently been excused with the observation that the concept of mercy in battle was nonexistent. When Mustafa took Fort St Elmo he had beheaded and disembowelled the bodies of the commanding Knights and floated them across the harbour to St Angelo; de Valette had retaliated by decapitating his Turkish prisoners and firing their heads across the harbour. Yet, Bosio described how after the assault on Senglea some Turks ‘threw down their arms, demanding “good war”’. To no avail: such was the thirst for vengeance on the part of the Maltese that the Grand Master had these prisoners tortured and thrown to the crowd.

After the battle of August 7th, the spirit of the Turks seems to have flagged, though they continued the bombardment and launched at least one more major assault against St Michel and Birgu. At some point in August the Council of Seigneurs made a decision to abandon the town and retreat to Castle St Angelo. De Valette refused to desert his subjects who had fought so bravely, and vetoed the proposal. He apparently realized that the enemy was becoming as exhausted as the defenders, and, indeed, the Turks did not at once re-attack.

Accounts of the siege’s final weeks are hazy as Balbi’s diary becomes increasingly sparse. A deadly and ingenious game ensued, of mining and countermining, with single combats between men carrying flame-throwers. The Turks attempted to build a bridge to St Michel in order to storm it; a Maltese engineer lowered himself over the fortress wall in a protective shell to cut a hole to allow a cannon to be trained to destroy the bridge. The Turks raised a siege tower, but the engineers tunnelled out through the rubble of the fort and with a point-blank salvo of chain-shot destroyed the tower’s legs.

Increasing desperation overtook the Turks. Towards the end of August the Janissaries mutinied,  then Mustafa ordered an abortive attack on Mdina in order to winter there. A long letter from Captain Anastagi, the liaison with Sicily, of August 11th, to Ascanio della Corgna, one of the commanders of the assembling relief force, observes:

I judge and assert to you, Illustrious Excellency ... that the Turks do not have more than 12 to 13,000 fighting men, of whom the only ones worth anything are the janissaries; the flower is dead, and the survivors no longer dare approach the walls, even though they are forced with cudgels by the Pashas ...

Anastagi’s letter drips with disdain for the enemy, but his job was to persuade the leaders of the long-awaited relief that Malta would be a romp. Indeed, he claimed that only 22,000 troops arrived to begin with, a number closer in line with de Valette’s initial estimate than with Balbi’s; perhaps the Turks lost simply because they didn’t bring enough men, and Balbi and others later inflated the size of the invading force.

Eventually, the siege ended in exhaustion. By September the weather was turning; in the rain the survivors had to resort to using crossbows instead of arquebuses. Food was running low but the defenders were not starving: Balbi speaks of exchanging bread for melons with the Turks, and Anastagi writes that in Mdina, cattle remained plentiful, although the wine had run out.

The Turks knew that winter was upon them. After the abortive march on Mdina they began embarking their artillery and by September 8th, the siege was over. The day before, about 8,000 of Don Garcia’s men had finally arrived from Sicily. On September 11th they engaged the demoralized Turks at the battle of St Paul’s Bay, after which the survivors scrambled into their galleys and vanished over the horizon.

How many men died? According to Balbi, 35,000 Turks; Bosio, 30,000. An anonymous Breve Narratione states precisely 26,654, while yet another source gives 23,000. About a third of the defenders perished, and a third of the Maltese population. Traditionally, it is said that by the end only 600 of de Valette’s men could walk.

Money now poured into Malta, allowing the slow reconstruction of Birgu, which had been levelled by 100,000 cannonballs, as well as the construction of the first modern planned city, the fortified La Valletta, named after the Grand Master, on the slopes of Mount Sciberras.

For his slowness in organizing the relief expedition, Don Garcia became the villain of the piece and most writers have him dismissed from his post, although he remained viceroy until 1568 and served as chief adviser to Don John of Austria at Lepanto three years later. Moreover, the correspondence between de Valette, Don Garcia and Philip II of Spain makes it fairly clear that if Don Garcia was cautious, he was cautious because the King Philip was more so.

Partisans of the Turks have pointed out that the failure of the siege did nothing to alter the balance of power, that the Ottomans continued to control the eastern Mediterranean, just as they were quickly able to do even after the battle of Lepanto off Corfu, six years later, which saw the destruction of the Turkish armada at the hands of a Christian armada led by Don John. Even so, the stand on Malta prevented another battle for North Africa at La Goletta, which the Turks had intended to take immediately afterwards, and stopped a possible invasion of Italy.  And it showed that the previously invincible Ottoman empire could be halted. In that sense Malta was more decisive than Lepanto, and the Knights – and especially de Valette, who died before his new city was complete and now lies in its cathedral –  were showered with honours.

Further reading

• Francesco Balbi di Correggio,  The Siege of Malta, 1565, translated by H.A. Balbi (Copenhagen,1961)
• Abbe de Vertot,The History of the Knights of Malta, vol II (London: 1728; reprint Malta, 1989)
• Giovanni Bonello, Histories of Malta, vols. I-III (Valletta, 2000-2002)
• H.J.A. Sire,  The Knights of Malta (Yale University Press, 1994)
• Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (University of California Press, 1995)
• Godfrey Wettinger, Slavery in the Islands of Malta and Gozo (Malta, 2002)
• Francisco Balbi di Correggio, The Siege of Malta 1565, trans. by Ernle Bradford (Folio Society, 1965; Penguin reprint 1985)

Tony Rothman lectures in physics at Princeton University.