The Great Siege, Malta, 1565

Somewhat shamed by Chev and McJ's contributions to the study of military history recently, I offer a glimpse and synopsis of my own current readings on the subject, currently focusing on the Mediterranean conflict between the Ottoman empire and the various European states in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. This story has it all, personal conflicts, insane bravery, impeccable stupidity, pirates, warrior monks, warrior monks who become pirates....

But, we must start with some administrative explanations. The past, as has been said, is a foreign land. The civil war is close and comprehensible, the motivations and sociopolitical climate of a pirate base in the mid 1500s is a long way from us today. So let us start with the basics, the broad overview.

The political situation

The Ottomans are ruled by Suleiman the Magnificent, their most successful and august sultan. While he expanded their borders more than any other ruler, and the rate of increase will slow, we are still more than a century from the high-water mark of the Ottomans, in 1683 outside Vienna. In the east, the Ottomans are nearly unstoppable. They have augmented their excellent native cavalry (Sipahi, or Spahi) with the most advanced siege technology of the day, and bolstered their military with the one thing eastern armies never managed to produce: quality infantry. This may be my personal hobby horse as a former infantryman, but this is the real lynchpin of the whole operation. The Janissary corps are slave soldiers, levied mostly from Balkan christians, taken at a young age, raised in Turkish culture and to fanatical muslim faith. Basically, the Turks reinvent the Spartan agoge, and add a dash of religious death wish. Though this institution will eventually be corrupted, at the time of our story, the janissaries are the most feared troops in the world. Their slogan "The body of a Janissary is only a footstool for his brethren into the breach" gives a glimpse into the millenarian esprit de corps of these units. It is the Janissary corps that is the backbone of the Ottoman military, it is they who are expected to turn the tide of battles. "Janissaries Forward!" is the command that indicates to everyone that the deciding moment has come.

On the European side, there are far too many polities and rulers for our purposes, but the largest and most important is Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, and crucially for our purposes at the time, King of Spain. Spain is the burgeoning continental power, Italy is dominated by the trading city states of Venice, Florence and the like. France is a distinctly second-rate power, Britain a piratical backwater barely of note. Germany is a thousand tiny duchies and principalities nominally under the control of the HRE, but in reality just a disorganized mess. The Spanish are the power, only two generations before they drove out the last of the Moorish occupation and now, in the age of discovery, their navigators are sailing the globe and New World gold is filling their treasury. Their infantry tercios were the kings of continental european battlefields, and their cavalry lent their name as far as the arabic word for "knight" (Al-Faris, a transliteration of the spanish name Alvarez). These are the same stock as the conquistadors.

However, it is not Spain that our conflict revolves around, but a small band of the church militant, the only surviving major knightly order from the era of the Crusades, the Knights of St. John, also known as the Hospitallers. The Teutonics had been settled, the Templars had been suppressed, but the Hospitallers had survived the Mamluk reconquest of the eastern Mediterranean, left the mainland and set up shop on the island of Rhodes. There they transformed themselves from a medical order with a sideline in combat into the pre-eminent christian pirates. When the Ottomans took over, they eventually had enough of these kuffar, and laid siege to Rhodes). It was a young and vigorous Suleiman who commanded the siege in 1522. The Ottoman miners did their work, the walls were breached and the Knights took a deal. They were allowed to evacuate in return for surrendering the fortress. They would wander without a main base for decades, before finally being given Malta by Charles V. They paid a nominal tribute to the HRE (a falcon, yes, that) falcon). Malta was a desolate island without much in the way of civilization, but it did have excellent harbors, so the knights brought their fleet there, built defenses, and set about harassing shipping once again. Under the most famous christian sea captain of the age (Chevalier Romegas), they would grab a rich haul in 1564 that would provide a now aged and gout-ridden Suleiman with the impetus to try to finish them off. They would capture a treasure fleet belonging to the Chief Eunuch of the Seraglio (the sultan's personal ho-wrangler) along with the governors of Alexandria and Cairo, and the childhood nurse of Suleiman's favorite daughter. With the politics turning, the personal pressure growing, and the pride of an empire at stake, Suleiman gathered a gigantic (for the time) army, and sent it to obliterate the Knights Hospitaller, and their base on Malta.

The personalities

Jean Parisot de la Valette, grandmaster of the Knights

A french nobleman from Provence, sent to the Knights at a young age, a completely single-minded person. He is a hard and unsparing man, aristocratic, practical, totally committed to his job and a keen commander and judge of human nature. It is his force of will that will hold the garrisons together in the months of siege. In the time, noblesse oblige was a real thing, and men like Valette were the role models. His job just happened to be religious piracy.

Turgut Reis, master pirate

Also known as Dragut. One of those rare men in history who literally rise from nothing to carve kingdoms for themselves out of nothing but natural ability, will and cunning. As a boy, he impresses a local Ottoman noble who takes him into service and has him trained as a soldier, he becomes a cannoneer, is very good at it, and keeps getting promoted. He becomes an artillery master, then a ship's captain, then an admiral. Brilliant, gallant, ruthless, an unstoppable opportunist, he sort of breaks off on his own, and becomes a pirate, but a sort of deniably Ottoman-allied one. He starts taking territory, periodically serves as a sort of naval contractor for the Ottomans, gains and loses several kingdoms. Mercs for the French and Venetians at times. In our story, he has basically retired into a governorship in North Africa. His contemporary enemies in Europe called him

"the greatest pirate warrior of all time",[7] "undoubtedly the most able of all the Turkish leaders", and "the uncrowned king of the Mediterranean". He was described by a French admiral as "A living chart of the Mediterranean, skillful enough on land to be compared to the finest generals of the time. No one was more worthy than he to bear the name of king".[2]

Piali Pasha, Ottoman admiral, commands the fleet at Malta

A Croat captured by Suleiman at Mohacs, he switched sides and through skill, luck and bravery climbed the slippery pole to naval command in the pre-eminent military of the age. Married to Suleiman's granddaughter, the son in law of the future sultan Selim. In his thirties at the time of our story, he is the young gun, the rising star of the Ottoman navy.

Mustafa Pasha, Ottoman general

In command of the land forces at Malta. The bluest of the blue-blood Ottoman nobility, his family claims descent from Mohammed's personal standard bearer. He is known as a capable soldier, a religious fanatic (in an age when that's saying something), and exceptionally (even for the time) cruel. He fought at Rhodes with Suleiman, is a veteran of a hundred battles and campaigns, and seeks to cap off a long and successful career with the eradication of Malta and the Knights as a threat to his boss.

Don Garcia, the Spanish governor of Sicily

He is mostly important through his absence in our story, but he is the person de la Valette calls for assistance when he falls under siege, and it is his feudal responsibility to help his nominal vassal. Of course, no one wants to run headlong into the Ottoman ripsaw, and nominal vassals get nominal aid, so he takes his time.

Rum, sodomy and the lash

The last big thing to understand is the state of naval warfare and piracy in the Med at the time. Though sailing ships were being used in the blue water oceans, the currents and lack of trade winds in the Med meant that the dominant naval vessels were still galleys, rowed mostly by slaves. These ships did sport cannon at the time, but were mostly used to ram other ships and board them. This was a navy that any ancient Greek, Roman or Phoenician would have recognized immediately. And it created an inexhaustible demand for rowers. The piracy of the day did steal a lot of shit, but a huge part of it was stealing people to replenish one's own propulsion system. Galley slaves had a very short life expectancy. The conditions on these ships were horrific, even for the non-slaves. It was truly hellish for the rowers. The few men who did survive the galleys often never recovered, but of those few who did, one surmises that having been through hell already, little remained to frighten them. Both de la Valette and Dragut had been captured and rowed in the galleys early in their careers. Whatever force of will sustained them through that seems to have powered their subsequent rise in power and influence.

The practice of Mediterranean naval slavery will last so long that some of the final battles eradicating it a couple centuries hence will be fought by the US. The Barbary Pirates were direct descendants, in function, of Dragut, Romegas, Valette and Piali.

This is a story in which almost everyone involved is some combination of pirate, slaver, slave and religious fanatic.

In our next episode:

Preparations are made, commands are unified and divided, and forty thousand Ottoman troops face off against six thousand mixed Knights, professional soldiers and local militia.

No sooner had Romegas' plundered prizes reached the harbors of Malta than whispers began to reach Valette of the sultan's plans. So well-organized a band of devout religious pirates had a highly developed intelligence system for the time. Their agents, traders and fellow pirates funnelled the information of the Ottoman preparations back across the Mediterranean. It was impossible to conceal an operation of this scale, and given the limitations of the day, it was clear to all that the conflict would occur the coming year.

Valette had been grandmaster for eight years in 1565, and had taken over at something of a nadir for the Knights. They had lost Rhodes, lost their fleet to Piali at Djerba, and lost Tripoli to Dragut. The rank and file had become somewhat less disciplined and devout. Valette reversed these trends, reimposing harsh discipline, forbidding duelling, removing or demoting insufficiently devout or committed men from office. He had spent great effort putting the finances of the order on better footing, and had used that money primarily to rebuild his fleet of war galleys and renovate the defenses of Malta. A new fort was hastily built across the harbor from the main base in Birgu, called Ft. St. Elmo. This commanded the approaches to the harbor, and so became the key to the whole siege. Storehouses were built, the cisterns were improved, even the local houses were reinforced. Valette had fought at Rhodes and he remembered well what a siege did to a town. In the winter of 1565, he organized the local militia and called in every favor he could from the mainland.

The French would be no help. Despite making up the largest Langue (the Knights were organized by country of origin, called Langues), the french government was officially allied to the Ottomans. They would not help lay the siege, but they would offer no assistance to fight it. The British had very nearly pulled out of the Order since their country was now Protestant. The whole representation of the English Langue was one man, Sir Oliver Starkey, secretary to Valette and one of the main reasons our records of this siege are so complete. The Germans were the second-largest Langue, but there was no Germany. So it was Spain that the Knights turned to, and began lobbying for reinforcements, money, a relief force, anything really. As the Ottoman force picked its way toward Malta in the early spring, Don Garcia de Toledo visited the island, bringing a few knights with him, and two hundred enlisted soldiers under Don Juan de la Cerda to aid the defense. As a surety of his commitment to the defense of Malta, he left his own son, Federico, in the care of the Grandmaster. Perhaps most importantly, he took back to Sicily all of the local inhabitants too old or infirm to help in the defense. There would be no “useless mouths” to feed and protect during the siege.

Across the sea, Suleiman's well-oiled machine of conquest was spooling up. The greatest conqueror of the century, the King of Kings, the Shadow of Allah on the Face of the Earth was going to put on a clinic in power projection. It is said among military historians that amateurs study tactics and professionals study logistics. The Ottomans were the world's best at logistics. We may think nothing about putting forty thousand men on the other side of the world, but it was an incredible undertaking. Even the Crusades had been, in logistical terms, merely a raid. They lived (or not) off the land, and had very little in the way of supply lines. Not since the height of Rome had a nation been able to organize, feed, supply and move that amount of manpower so far, much less amphibiously. Some two hundred ships, carrying men, horses, powder, shot, food and other supplies set off from Constantinople on March 29th, and began the month-and-a-half journey to Malta.

The length of the trip imposed some time limits on the operation. The Med would become too rough for troop transports by mid-fall, and so the siege had to be laid as soon as possible to give it the greatest chance of success. Arriving in mid-May, the Ottomans would have roughly four months to conduct their siege before they would have to decide whether to winter in Malta or return. This is the clock that is running in every commander's head from start to finish in our story. Four months.

The long sea journey was too arduous for Suleiman to take personal command. We cannot know what political pressures were bearing on him, nor what experience he drew on, but he decided on an interesting command structure. He appointed three commanders, and didn't make it entirely clear who was in charge. Mustafa Pasha would lead the ground troops, Admiral Piali would command the navy. The Sultan commanded them to consult each other “on every matter” and for Piali to “treat him [Mustafa] as your honored father” while Mustafa should consider Piali “his beloved son”. Furthermore, when Dragut, travelling separately from north Africa arrived, both men were to “take him into your counsels”. In theory, Mustafa had the command of the siege itself, but now there were other considerations. Historians surmise that Mustapha and Piali must not have liked each other much. The grand vizier of the time, the wit Ali Pasha, watching the old zealot and the hot-shot convert leave the palace and walk to their waiting fleet remarked ironically: “There go two jolly fellows, always ready to enjoy an espresso or an opium pipe, off for their island holiday”.

As to the size of the army being sent to Malta, there is the usual historian quibbling over the numbers, with some contemporary sources placing it in the hundreds of thousands. Our most reliable sources are Starkey, the british secretary, Fransico Balbi, a spanish soldier of fortune who fought as an arquebusier in the siege and kept a journal, and the official Ottoman documents, and those all put the number of actual soldiers between thirty and forty thousand. Of course, counting slaves, camp followers, merchants, enterprising pirates and volunteers, the number of people who showed up may well have exceeded 100k, but the actual fighting men were likely no more than 40k. Six or seven thousand of these were the Janissary corps, and another eight to nine thousand of the special Ayalar units, suicide squads of religious nutters who sought the most direct route to paradise through the most dangerous and idiotic military maneuvers. The Janissaries were famous for their willingness to die. Ayalars for being good at it. Traditional Turkish tactics for something like a frontal assault would be to batter the enemy with artillery until they were softened up, then send human waves of Ayalars to soak up the opposing ammunition stores, and then when a foothold was gained or the situation seemed to tip, send in the Janissaries. In addition to all this, the Ottomans brought the best siege equipment and trained sappers in the world. Their cannon was world class, and their siege engineers had better training and more experience than any others. Sieges were a science, and it was the Turks who were the masters of it.

Against this host stood the fortifications of Malta, and inside them five hundred of the Knights Hospitaller. Valette had called in every Knight who could travel to assist in the defense. They had another two thousand mixed professional soldiers, Italians, Sicilians, Spanish etc. and about three thousand Maltese militia. At the beginning of the siege, the manpower stood right at about 5,500, with the local population and two thousand slaves available for labor, but not so much the actual fighting. The preparations for siege were thorough. Outside the walls of the fortifications, every building was demolished, trees cut down, and the ground levelled. The green crops were harvested or burned. The cisterns were topped up. And, as the Turkish fleet came into view of the island, the wells and springs were poisoned or contaminated. Both sides would stage for the coming confrontation with religious services. The knights held a convocation and chapel, where Valette exhorted them: “We...are the chosen soldiers of the Cross, and if Heaven requires the sacrifice of our lives, there can be no better opportunity than this”. From the deck of the Sultana, Mustafa's flagship, the mullah cried out to the troops “O true believers! When you meet the unbelievers coming against you...whosoever turns his back on them will draw the anger of Allah, and he will find his home in hell”. Balbi will record a gold armband captured from a Turk in the coming days, apparently they were common, and it sets the tone of this siege. In arabic, it said “I do not come to Malta for riches or honor, but to save my soul”. The summer of 1565 would provide them all with rich opportunities to die for their faith.

It will now be helpful to get some idea of the geography of Malta and the layout of the defenses. Malta is located in the strait between Sicily and North Africa, astride the trade routes to and from Tripoli and the whole western mediterranean. The archipelago itself is small, consisting of two main islands, Malta itself, and Gozo just to the north. The main city of Malta was somewhat inland, at Mdina. It was here that the old nobility of the island lived, and was the center of the island's political and social life at the time. It was also relatively weakly defended. Here, Valette had placed his small band of cavalry under Marshal Copier. The idea was that if he was besieged in Birgu, they could at least scout and sally from time to time. In addition, the garrison at St. Elmo was bolstered with the troops Don Garcia had brought, and fully half of the heavy artillery was moved there. The twin towns of Birgu and Senglea were on parallel peninsulas poking out into the Grand Harbor, and it was here that the Knights had their headquarters. The towns make a sort of “11”, so the defenses on their landward side were relatively short and easy to defend. But, if the Ottomans could take the high ground across the harbor, they could bring their own shipping into the harbor, and bombard the cities from the heights of Mt. Scibberas. Valette was gambling a bit that the main blow would fall on him, rather than Gozo or Mdina, but he was born out by subsequent events.

The Turks were first sighted off Malta on May 18th. The fleet took up the whole horizon to the east. After a bit of sailing around, they landed in the south of the island at the harbor of Marsasirocco (for short, called the Marsa). Mustafa wanted to pacify the whole island before focusing on the Knights, but Piali, wanting the Grand Harbor for his ships, demanded that it be taken first. In the end, ships were expensive and soldiers cheap, so Piali got his way. This decision will play directly into Valette's plans and leave open vital lines of communication as well as those harassing cavalry raids from Mdina until after the Grand Harbor could be taken. This may seem clear in retrospect, but one must always keep in mind the timeline, and the turkish expectation of victory. For one, they won everything, pretty much. They would have been no more fearful of defeat than the US is today sending a strong expedition somewhere. They had their own spies, and had sent two siege engineers to Malta over the winter to inspect the defenses. They had measured every wall, sighted every cannon.Their verdict? Two days for Ft. St. Elmo, five for the cities of Birgu and Senglea. Total time of siege: one week. The fort at St Elmo, as we have said, was hastily built and some of the geometry in the landward side was off. There were dead spots her guns could not reach, and she was located at the end of the peninsula, so the ground was higher further west. They could haul up cannon to point blank range and blast the walls from relative safety on the top of Mt. Scibberas.

But, before all that, Mustafa would have been remiss as a commander had he not made at least an attempt to probe the defenses and take the city by storm, saving himself the time. So, after establishing his siege camps and having a cavalry scuffle with Copier, he turned to two prisoners captured in that short battle, the knight Adrien de la Riviere and the Portuguese novice Bartolomeo Faraone. Neither would talk initially, but under torture, both men separately screamed that the defenses were weakest at the Bastion of Castille, at the landward walls of Birgu. Mustafa marshalled his forces and sent a strong probe to the Bastion. Inside Birgu, Valette had given strict orders for everyone to remain inside the walls, close the gates, and let the turks get close before opening fire. But the younger Knights and some of the more aggressive soldiery stormed out of the gates before they could be closed, wanting to confront their enemy. Yielding to necessity, he ordered three units to support them outside the walls, and the first major battle was joined under the massive guns of the Bastion. This lead to a six-hour inconclusive struggle, but one which caused great casualties on the turkish side. Their prisoners had lied to them, and sent them directly into the kill zone of the strongest defenses on the island. Mustafa withdrew in a rage and ordered Riviere and Faraone tortured to death. But the knights had been bloodied, and even in this first engagement, they found the turkish marksmen to be particularly dangerous. In an era of matchlocks and arquebuses, the turks had mastered the form, the Janissaries especially, and their snipers would be of great import in the coming months. Valette's own page had been struck in the neck on the walls of the Bastion, just next to the commander.

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The course for Mustafa was now clear, St. Elmo would have to be reduced, then Mt Scibberas could be one massive artillery battery grinding down the defenders of Birgu and Senglea. With the mountain in hand, he could bring in his navy, and alternate his ground assaults with amphibious landings from the harbor and generally keep the defenders off balance. The investment began immediately. The stony ground of the mountain offered no cover for the troops, so the camp was sighted just over the peak of the mountain from the fort. The heavy batteries were emplaced just over the top of the ridge, and without any dirt to dig in, the Ottomans began bringing in their own. Their sappers and slaves began hauling dirt by the basketload from the lowlands up the mountain to create their earthworks. The marksmen built shields out of boards and earth, covered them in brush and dust, and used these to protect and conceal themselves as they crept close enough to command the walls. The defenders of St. Elmo soon found it difficult to even keep an eye on what was going on, any head that showed above the wall was greeted with a well-aimed arquebus shot.

But the fort did not fall the first nor the second day, as the engineers had promised. The artillery barrage was opening holes in the wall, and without any actual combat joined, the defenders were suffering a lot of casualties. That same stony ground that made it impossible to dig made bombardment that much worse, as every cannonball impact sent up showers of stone splinters as shrapnel, and the balls would bounce along the ground rather than sink into it. The commander of the fort, the redoubtable but eighty-year-old Luigi Broglio, sent the spanish captain Juan de la Cerda to apprise Valette of the situation. There is some recrimination here, but the main story is that Broglio wanted Valette to know that the fort could be held, but only by continual reinforcement, due to his casualties. De la Cerda, perhaps having been under bombardment for the first time, was shaken. His presentation to the grandmaster and his war council Starkey records as “fear having made him eloquent”, he painted a picture of imminent disaster, predicting the fall of the fort within eight days. Perhaps impatient with the younger man, perhaps desirous to avoid the morale hit if this became wide knowledge, Valette dressed him down in public. When de la Cerda said that St. Elmo “is like a sick man...at the end of his strength!”, Valette leaped from his chair and shouted “Then I shall be your doctor! And if I cannot cure your fear, I can at least hold the fort!” For the prickly, arrogant, reputation-conscious noblemen of the day, this was a terrible insult. De la Cerda would leave in shame, discredited, and Valette would set about organizing a regular nighttime ferry of boats across the harbor to evacuate the wounded and reinforce the beleaguered defenders. After the scene in the war council, he was up to his eyeballs in volunteers. Fort St. Elmo was now the post of honor.

Before these reinforcements could even arrive however, in the early morning hours of the next day, the defenders of the towns heard their own trumpets and signal fire and rushed to the harbor-side walls to witness the garrison of the fort sally out against the labor battalions that had been working through the night to bring the earthworks nearer to their defenses. Whatever de la Cerda made it sound like, the garrison was still capable of taking the offensive. Up the bare slopes of Mt. Scibberas and into the fledgling trenches the knights swept, and the advance guard and labor force broke and ran. Mustafa, awakened from his sleep by the terrified men streaming through his camp, knew how to stem a route. Up went the call of “Janissaries Forward!” and the white-robed infantry in their ridiculous hats with the long heron plumes formed up and marched to meet the enemy. The knights almost made it to the crest of Mt. Scibberas before these supreme infantry topped it, and with the weight of numbers and gravity pulling them, rolled down the slopes in a wave. The attacking troops fled back to the safety of their defenses with the Janissaries close behind. So furious was the assault that the outer earthworks of the fort were taken, and the Janissaries established themselves in the defenders' own trenches at the base of the walls. The morning that started so gloriously for the knights by noon saw the crescent flag of Islam waving under the ravelin of the fort.

A short note on age and scapegoating here: of the notable people involved here, many were quite aged, especially for the era. Suleiman, Mustafa and Valette were all (as near as we can make out) seventy years old in 1565. Broglio, the commander of Ft. St. Elmo and Dragut were in their eighties. When the story is told, it helps to remember these tidbits. Students of martial history will be well acquainted with the blame games we have to sift through, the lies and half-truths we read because someone blamed someone else for something bad that happened. This is also important to remember. On the Ottoman side, the chroniclers were all in a row, and they blame Piali for most everything that goes wrong. To be fair, if he did all the things they say, he well deserves it, but we can't be sure. It could just be that Mustafa had better PR people in Istanbul. On the christian side, Don Garcia gets a lot of stick for not showing up and saving the day, an understandable view from the besieged, but we do not know his side of the story (or at least I don't). The other person that Starkey in particular singles out for criticism is Juan de la Cerda, the spanish captain. He rarely misses an opportunity to remark disparagingly on his courage, or experience, or wisdom. Balbi on the other hand mentions him only twice, and both times as being almost recklessly brave, leading mad charges, rallying troops etc. Of course, both could conceivably be true, they just saw the same man at different times and in different contexts. We are not exactly slaves to the narratives we are told, but we do rely heavily on them. And with that, back to our story....

The defenders were soon heartened by some good news. Marshall Copier's cavalry, raiding from Mdina, had caught a four-hundred man detachment from the besiegers sent to protect their scavenging parties, and mauled it badly, killing and capturing about half their number. These pinprick raids were ongoing, and for the most part do not warrant excessive time explaining beyond the fact that they were a constant drain on the manpower and the security of the Ottoman army. Foragers and water carriers had to be protected, and that took guns and swords away from the siege, and this relatively small action meant that the protection forces had to be substantial. Arriving at almost exactly the same time however was much worse news. New ships appeared on the horizon, only fifteen of them, but they were flying a flag the Knights knew and feared. The man who had escaped Doria at Djerba, who had taken Tripoli, who had taken Gozo previously, the lion of the Mediterranean, the heir of Barbarossa, the Drawn Sword of Islam had arrived. Dragut had come.

Admiral Piali met Dragut on the water, and the two of them made their way to Mustafa's tent, where a proclamation from the Sultan was read out to the army. Praise was lavished on Dragut, and in public, the commanders of the turkish army were ordered to seek his advice on all matters pertaining to the siege. The old pirate knew the area well, having besieged and raided Malta several times in the past and he was blunt. He excoriated Mustafa and Piali for not securing Gozo and Mdina first. His plan would have been to cut off the knights from their lines of communication to Sicily first, then to secure the interior of the island (eliminating those pesky raids like the one that very day), and then reduce Birgu and Senglea while ignoring Fort St. Elmo. Piali and the chief siege engineer argued their case, but Dragut had the heft to make it stick. There was a slight problem though. The valor of the Janissaries had carried them to the very walls of St. Elmo, the fort was invested. It would be a great loss of time and morale to retreat from it now. “A thousand pities that the attack [on St. Elmo] was ever begun” Dragut is recorded has having said: “But now that it has, it would be shameful to give it up”. A week, or even a few days prior, we might be telling a different tale today, had Reis arrived in time to guide the course of the siege more to his liking. As it was, he fell back on his oldest profession, and took personal command of the artillery now battering the smoking fort.

Not for him the silk tents of Mustafa nor the luxurious yacht of a flagship that Piali lived in. Dragut stormed down to the trenches on Mt. Scibberas and slept there beside the guns. New guns had been brought, the batteries on the mountain were strengthened by fifty pieces. An enormous earthwork wall was built on the Senglea side of the harbor to screen another massive battery to fire from the south across the water. Yet another artillery park was opened on the north point of the Marsamuscetto, on the north side of the fort, at the tip of the peninsula now called Dragut Point. He also sited batteries of artillery to cover the water of the harbor, realizing that the fort was being reinforced by boat at night. He ordered Piali to land a strong battery on Gallows Point on the south side of the Grand Harbor, but Piali dragged his feet (allegedly), and then landed only a small number of guns. The reinforcements were endangered but not completely cut off. It is telling that none of this was discussed in the turkish war council. Reis just did it. He went over the ground personally, would stand on a hillock and order a gun emplaced just there. Piali complained that Dragut was not in command, and Dragut didn't give two shits. He toured the trenches, ate among the men, lived in the dirt. He came back to the war council to catch them up on how he was repairing their half-assed siege, and had a further suggestion. Storm the ravelin. We do not have a picture of the original fort, but an example of a ravelin can be seen here, the detached fortification above the fort itself.

On the receiving side of this vicious cannonade, the knights could only hunker down and try to counter with their much smaller number of guns. It was now the end of May, the days were hot and the armor worn to protect from injury was heavy and made the heat worse (notably, the turks wore little if any armor, different priorities it seems). Labor parties scrambled to repair the crumbling walls and to erect new works inside the fort. Food and water was run up to the ramparts because the defenders could no longer run shifts and could not leave their posts. An inspection of the fort reported back to Valette that the soldiery was exhausted, men ate, slept and shit at their posts. The number of wounded was so large that anyone not literally about to die just stayed and coped as best they could. The inspector, Salvago, phrased it like this: “Ashamed of retiring for wounds not manifestly dangerous or nearly mortal, those with smaller bones dislocated or shattered, or with burned faces and broken heads, or lame and limping..these figures were frequent and nearly general”.

It was under these conditions the defenders lived as a new normal. It may go some way to explaining why one day in the early pre-dawn, a scouting party of turkish engineers was able to slip up to the face of the ravelin, originally to inspect the damage and plan for the day's bombardment. But getting close, there was no challenge and no one took any potshots. One stood on his comrade's shoulders to peek into a gap opened by artillery and saw nothing but dead and sleeping men garrisoning the outwork. The engineers raced back down to the trenches and the Janissaries swift and silent came pouring over the walls. The defenders, quite literally caught napping, were mostly cut down before they could even move. A small number escaped across the bridge to the main fort, with the turks close on behind. By then the alarm was raised, and the assault was blunted by cannon fire, and the portcullis was closed. But now the turks were mere yards away, and inside a major fortification with some protection from the guns of the besieged.

The Janissaries were not ones to fail to press an advantage. Immediately they brought up scaling ladders and stormed the fort itself. This initiates the first direct action against a fortification in this siege, so it is worth taking a moment to discuss equipment and how that affected the combat of the day. As I've said earlier, the turks wore little armor, and mostly wore flowing, lightweight robes. Quite comfortable in the heat, and affording excellent mobility, they were no proof against weapons, and crucially, were also quite flammable. In their four hundred years of mediterranean combat, the Knights had mastered the fiery arts and would use them to great effect on Malta. They used firebombs in thin clay pots, a sort of primitive Molotov cocktail and a device called a “trump”, basically a huge, napalm-belching roman candle affixed to a pole which could be sprayed to some distance at one's enemies (modern political parallels present themselves). But their most effective and fearsome device was a lightweight wooden hoop, like a hula hoop, rubbed with oil and brandy and covered in wool soaked in saltpeter and high-test liquor. These would be lit, then thrown with iron tongs into the assaulting force, and were apparently good for two or three casualties per hoop (according to both the Knights and the Ottoman reports). Lastly, the armor of the day was extremely advanced among the Europeans. The knights themselves, noblemen with resources, spent vast sums on expensive armor, including ball-proof breastplates and helmets (which sometimes worked). These would have been hell to live in under the summer sun, but when hand-to-hand battle was joined, it made a huge difference. Time and again we will hear stories of small bands or even single men holding breaches against massive odds, but it helps to remember that a fully-armored man who can wield a weapon is hard to bring down without guns or polearms. The Spanish troops favored pike, sword and small shield in the day. The Knights tended to use massive two-handed swords in the Zweihander style. The Ottomans, mostly scimitars and occasionally shields. The whole turkish philosophy of combat was offensive, not defensive. They too used incendiary devices, notably a sort of greek-fire grenade that spread flaming napalm. The Knights would station huge barrels of water at regular intervals to jump into if they were set alight.

Back at the gate of St. Elmo, the Ottoman assault was blasted off their ladders, pelted with incendiaries, and forced to retire. Two thousand of the elite Janissaries left their corpses in the ditch in front of the walls, quickly to be covered by their comrades with dirt and rubble as they labored to fill it in. The defenders lost ten Knights and seventy soldiers, but were far less able to absorb the losses. And now their situation was desperate. Under cover of the taken ravelin, the turks could stage their assaults right at the gates of the fort, and also, they began to build a massive ramp behind the ravelin, so they could bring up cannon at point blank range and fire down into the fort. On the eighth of June, another massive attack washed over St. Elmo, lasting six hours and ceasing only at nightfall. But the walls held, and the attack was repelled. The remaining knights in the fort sent a messenger that night to Valette. In his hand he carried a letter, signed by fifty-three of the Order, to the effect that the fort could no longer be held, the soldiers were starting to resist orders, and that if they were not evacuated, their plan was to sally out from the fort and “die as Knights should”, in open combat. It was not quite a mutiny, and Valette can have been under no illusions that he was commanding men to die. But he needed them to die later rather than sooner. Don Garcia was to return by the end of June, and it was barely out of the first week.

The old commander sent a delegation of his staff officers across to St. Elmo to inspect the fort and report to him the conditions and morale of the men. One of them, an Italian knight named Castriota, perhaps simply impetuous or perhaps acting on orders, declared that the fort was perfectly defensible. This raised a huge argument with the garrisoning knights that came so close to violence that Broglio ordered the attack alarm sounded to break it up. One can imagine the fury of the besieged at being told they were exaggerating the damage by some REMF. The other two officers felt that the fort was in a bad way, but could be held “for a few days more”. Returning to Birgu, the delegation reported to Valette, with Castriota claiming that all that was needed was “fresh men and a fresh approach” to hold the fort indefinitely. He offered to raise volunteers and lead the defense personally. Valette arranged for messages to be sent to the besieged Knights apprising them of these developments, as well as personal notes from their friends and colleagues in the Langues urging them not to dishonor themselves. Castriota was allowed to organize his volunteers, and the following night, Valette sent word to the fort that their request for evacuation was granted, and they would be replaced by Castriota's men. “For my part” he wrote “I shall feel more confident when the fort.....is held by men I can trust”. This gambit effectively ruined the nascent mutiny. The same signatories of the letter two days prior now begged Valette not to relieve them. They would stay at their posts, there would be no sally. Castriota was stood down, and instead, a small relief force was sent to replace the wounded (by this point already, the chroniclers note that “no man was considered wounded if he could but stand”).

A massive night attack on the tenth of June lit up the darkness with the quantity of artificial fire, but resulted in another lopsided casualty count, with the turks losing some 1,500 men and the christians about sixty. Following the attack, a spanish deserter took news to Mustafa that the garrison was on its last legs, and if he continued doing what he was doing, the fort would soon fall. Mustafa reminded the deserter of what happened to the last christians to lie to him, and appears to have frightened the man badly enough that he escaped yet again, made his way to Mdina where he claimed to be an escaped slave of the Turks. He was recognized as a deserter, tied to a horse's tail, and dragged through the streets of the town while the population stoned him to death. A side note on desertions, there were many on both sides during the Great Siege, up to and including some of the knights themselves. The only exception was the native Maltese. Not one of them ever went over to the Turks.

June 14th, Mustafa sent a herald to call on the defenders of Fort Saint Elmo to surrender, and that he would grant anyone who wanted to leave safe passage. Had this offer been made five days prior, it might have resulted in more desertions. As it was, the herald was showered in garbage and chased back to the trenches with gunfire. Valette had trapped his men between their exhaustion and their sense of shame. No one would leave the fort.

A raid by Marshall Copier's horsemen had destroyed the recently established battery on Gallows Point, but it was soon rebuilt, bigger and better, with more defenses. The attack on St. Elmo was renewed on the 16th, and it was the nastiest yet. The Ayalar were given the chance to prove themselves where the Janissaries had failed. These picked men, known colloquially as “The Religious” in Ottoman circles, used a combination of religious rites and drugs (hashish, mostly) to induce a battle frenzy. Under the covering fire of four thousand arquebusiers and a cannonade personally supervised and directed by Dragut, the Ayalar in their animal skins, with sword and small shield flooded the walls of the fort. Urged on by their dervishes and imams, who called on them to seek the wonders of paradise through death in jihad, the Ayalar gained the walls, but were pushed back down by the garrison. Over a thousand of them died that day, against a hundred and fifty of the defenders, but there were more Ayalar, and the defense was running out of bodies. For the first time, Valette did not order reinforcements, but called for volunteers. Thirty knights and three hundred Maltese offered to go and die in St. Elmo.

On the 18th, while supervising the guns, Dragut was struck by a stone splinter in the head and presumed dead initially. He lived for a time, but slipped in and out of consciousness, and was of no further use to the Ottoman army. It is not known even which side fired the shot that threw up the stone, some claim that a turkish cannon was sighted too low, and struck the ground right in front of the gunners, others that a shot from the cavalier of St. Elmo was the culprit. The turkish writers claim that Dragut had predicted his own death, that he would perish “in the territory of the Knights”, but these stories are common flavor in the writings of the time. A turkish deserter carried the news to Birgu that their most feared enemy had fallen. Unbeknown to them, during the same day's artillery action, both the Aga of the Janissaries and the Master of Ordnance (second in command after Mustafa and Piali) had also been struck and killed by artillery fire. The leaders on both sides lead from the front, and sometimes that resulted in high-level officers dying to random shot.

The next day, the reconstructed battery on Gallows Point was completed, and with this the nightly ferry of reinforcements was directly under fire. St. Elmo was cut off. Too, the ramp at the ravelin had been completed, and the cannon of the attackers now commanded the entire fort. The cavalier behind St. Elmo had been reduced by artillery fire and now fell to infiltrating snipers, who took cover in the ruined fortification and now had fire from raised positions on both sides of the fort. The last official message from the fort informed Valette that they could stop perhaps one more assault. The artillery barrage was now a 24-hour thing, ringed with snipers and now cut off from any further aid. On the 22nd, the Ottomans brought part of their fleet to fire from the seaward side, while every cannon they had pounded the fort. The combined arms of the Turkish military assaulted the fort soon after dawn, Ayalar, Spahi and Janissary together. The defenders expended their reserves of incendiaries and still the attackers came on. They were now low on ammunition as well, and had to rely on older, simpler weapons. The Janissaries gained a breach in the walls, and only a wild counterattack lead by Broglio himself managed to force them back, but he was gravely wounded in the fighting. The observers across the harbor in the towns said that the whole fort seemed to shake and jump under the fire. But after several hours, the retreat was called, and they could hear the cheers of the defenders hounding the turks back. The turkish staff recorded some two thousand casualties, the defenders numbers are unknown.

Moved by the heroism they were witnessing, the knights begged Valette to be allowed to reinforce the fort once more, and he gave in. Chevalier Romegas lead the relief, but it was turned back with heavy losses by the new battery, a parting shot from the dying Dragut. Everyone seemed to know the end was near. The chaplains of the fort confessed the remaining men, the flags and relics of the garrison were burned or buried in the night. Broglio was incapacitated, his seconds Miranda and de Guaras both too wounded to stand. The two knights ordered a couple of chairs to be brought and placed in the largest breach. With their massive two-handed swords, backed by what men remained, they met the morning attack on the 23rd for the last time. The two commanders died almost immediately, but the fighting continued for over an hour. The defenders were beaten back from the breach, across the fire-swept courtyard and into the chapel itself. The last of the knights lit the signal fire that indicated the fort was lost, and a couple of the last Maltese left jumped from the rocks and swam back across the harbor to Birgu, bringing us these tidbits of information third-hand down through history. The fort that was estimated to last two days had held for thirty-one. Mustafa did not savor his victory. Regarding the fortified towns of Birgu and Senglea, he is recorded as lamenting “with such a cost for the son, what price shall we pay for the father?” A messenger brought the news of the fall of the fort to the tent of Dragut, and he is said to have raised his eyes to heaven and died when he heard it.

Aside from the few Maltese who escaped and nine men captured by Dragut's corsairs (who were never heard from again), the main turkish force took no prisoners. In total, some fifteen hundred of the defenders died in St. Elmo over that month. Mustafa decided to engage in some psychological warfare. He had the knights picked out from the dead (their armor made them readily identifiable). The bodies were stripped, decapitated and crucified to planks of wood. These were then pushed out into the harbor in the night of the 23rd, and the next morning began washing up on the shores of the two towns. Starkey records that he accompanied Valette down to the shore to inspect the bodies. Most were unrecognizable, but the members of the Italian Langue identified two of their number among them. The response was quick and ruthless. Valette had several hundred turkish prisoners, some from the first battle at Birgu, some from Copier's raids. He ordered them all beheaded immediately, and from the big guns atop the cavalier of St. Angelo, he had the severed heads fired into the Ottoman lines. The message on both sides was clear.

Unknown to either Valette or Mustafa at the time, the day St. Elmo fell, several ships containing reinforcements had come to the island. The commander was under orders from Don Garcia to reconnoiter the situation and not to land if St. Elmo had fallen. Aboard was forty-odd members of the Order of St. John, another fifty or so “gentlemen adventurers” from across Europe, and six hundred Spanish infantry. One of the Knights was sent ashore and he quickly learned that St. Elmo had fallen merely hours before. He returned to the ships, told the commander that everything was kosher, and the troops unloaded. The galleys returned to Sicily blissfully unaware they'd been tricked, and the men of the “Piccolo Soccorso”, the “Little Relief”, holding to lesser trails and traveling at night, skirted the besieging army and slipped into Birgu a couple nights later.

---

Meanwhile, the defenders had almost two week's respite as all the massive earthworks and artillery batteries so carefully arranged by Dragut were torn down or re-positioned to now face the twin towns. The entire peninsula of Mount Scibberas was now a bank of cannon firing at their defenses. And as the defenders watched these preparations, they saw something else on the heights of the mountain. The prows of ships began cresting the ridge, and then slowly sliding down the slopes into the far end of the Grand Harbor. Mustafa was having Piali's ships dragged on rollers overland from the Marsamuscetto to the protected inlets behind the Corradino. The guns of St. Angelo still blocked the entrance to the harbor, so he simply entered the harbor from the rear. Valette did not waste his time. All private food was confiscated (paid for, but confiscated nonetheless), and all dogs were killed (they spread disease, barked incessantly, and crucially, consumed precious food). Even Valette's own hunting hounds were destroyed. A new system of defenses was begun along the harbor-side of Senglea, basically a series of enormous stakes arranged not so differently from anti-tank obstacles, all chained together in the water off the shore. This was meant to keep the Turks from running their landing boats right up to the shore, at least. A deserter from the Ottoman army, a high ranking one named Lascaris (a Greek nobleman) had brought news that the coming attacks would focus on Senglea, and would include amphibious landings. This man, having fought at St. Elmo, was apparently so overcome with admiration for the defenders of that fort that he “reproached himself for fighting with the barbarians, and returned to the faith of his fathers”. Previously having been a member of the war council, he had detailed information about much of the Ottoman dispositions, invaluable to the defenders.

It is now that we take one of my patented rabbit trails to talk for a moment about the native Maltese. They are criminally underreported on in this story, and the primary sources are simply too thin to make a solid narrative of them. But they more than anyone bore the suffering, hardship and cost of this grand battle. We get tied up in the named men, the generals and the nobles, the sort of guys who got their name in the paper, so to speak. We get precious little about the men who, for instance, swam the harbor and dragged Lascaris' unable-to-swim ass back to the garrison. Every time I write something like “Valette sent word”, what that meant is that some crazy Maltese took a message, swam through a naval blockade, under the cannon of the besiegers, slipped through enemy lines, stole a boat, ran the blockade again to Gozo, and hopped a larger ship to Sicily. There is no record of a message failing to get through. At a time when the ability to swim was rare, the Maltese were born to it. Descended originally from Phoenicians, by this time with a mix of a thousand other nationalities, they spoke an Arabic-based language but considered themselves some of the first christians. Short, brown, barrel-chested, anyone who has seen a mediterranean fishing village has seen their type. We get a few Hispanicized names down through the years, most notably a local folk hero named Toni Bajada, a Robin-Hood-ish figure, a famous scout, messenger and peacetime bandit whose intimate knowledge of the island helped him guide many of the cavalry raids. We do not know much about the mass of the common people. I will write as best I can the story of the siege, and that involves the names and dates that come down to us. But the honor of Malta goes not to the professional soldiers, not to the monk-pirates, not to the generals. It goes to the mostly-untrained fishermen, the mad, brave, resourceful natives of the island who time and again came through when crack troops failed, when the high-born deserted. It was their faith, toughness and skill that made everything else possible. They came from common lives, did immense deeds, and then slipped back between the lines of history to their fishing boats, (what remained of) their families, many no doubt bearing the scars and maimings of this vast struggle for the rest of their lives. We shall make do, but I will have failed in this story if you, the reader, do not read “and a whole bunch of local Maltese” into everything I have the leaders doing. Broglio did not stem the penultimate assault at Ft. St. Elmo, he lead a charge of mostly Maltese militia that flung the pride of the Ottomans back from the breach on the 22nd. We are talking about bit players, these long-forgotten people are the protagonists of the real story.

Back at the siege, Mustafa did not fail to notice the new obstacles to his planned amphibious assault. He sent out a request for soldiers who could swim (as I said, this was rare at the time, but he had a lot of men). These were mustered on the shore of the Corradino just across the inlet from Senglea. Armed with axes and hatchets, they swam the couple hundred yards to the obstacles and began to dismantle them. Seeing this, the alarm went up inside the town, and a mob of Maltese climbed down the walls, lept from the rocky shore and with daggers and short swords in their teeth, swam to meet the Turks. This may be the strangest and least bloody of all the conflicts on the island, only a few people were killed that day, but the end of the swimming battle saw the Turks driven off with a couple losses, and the defenders managing to repair what damage had been done to their new palisade. A new plan was devised. Under cover of darkness, the Ottomans attached large ship's cables to the massive chain running through the palisade, ran these lines back to capstans installed on dry land, and hundreds of slaves began to wind the cables up, dragging the obstacles out of the water. Once again, this plan was thwarted by the locals, who swam out to the palisade (this time without opposition) and chopped the cables free.

Mustafa had seen enough, and he was now under pressure from a new arrival. Hassem, the governor of Algiers had arrived with fresh troops (we are not sure how many, but it was substantial). Hassem was son-in-law to the recently deceased Dragut, and inspecting the defenses, his read was much as the original spies. He didn't understand what was taking so long. He and his lieutenant, Candelissa, apparently talked some shit in the camp and volunteered to do the amphibious assault themselves. Mustafa was happy to let these ignorant youngsters get a taste of what he'd been dealing with for over a month. The Algerians were given the water assault portion of the plan. Our information here is excellent, as Balbi, one of our chroniclers, was posted to Senglea and watched all this from the bastion. On the 15th of July, the first major assault of the towns began. Hassem's Algerians, with Candelissa in the van, launched their boats from the Corradino toward Senglea. They, of course, were soon entangled in the palisade, but they poured out of their boats, swam or thrashed their way ashore, and laid their ladders against the bastion itself. Needless to say, this was all a slow process, and one which the defenders did not neglect to make them pay for. Artillery blew great holes in the mass of men, while the musketry and incendiaries did their work. But the Algerians were fresh, rested, and confident. They scaled the walls in the face of terrifying casualties and took the battle to the defenders. They soon had a beachhead on the walls themselves. It was at this critical moment that a powder magazine inside Senglea was ignited by a spark, blowing a huge breach in the outer walls at the worst possible time for the defenders. Shocked by the explosion, with their defenses in disarray and the north africans continuing to land, the defenders began to fall back. Valette's foresight now bore fruit. In addition to the palisade, he had also ordered a pontoon bridge built across the creek between Birgu and Senglea. Seeing the enemy banners waving on the far walls of the opposite town, he dispatched his reserves to stanch the wound. Hassem's men were thrown back, out of Senglea, off the walls, into the water. The defenders left the walls and chased them into the shallows, where the fleeing men were hacked apart by the hundreds. But even as this happened, the second part of Mustafa's plan was going into action. From the shores of Mt. Scibberas, he had ten large landing boats, each containing a hundred Janissaries. While the attention of the defenders was on the fight on the southern walls of Senglea, these slipped across the harbor on the north side of the town to make a landing there. Unfortunately for these picked men, the spies and scouts had missed a concealed battery of five guns hidden in the very cove they attempted to land in. The commander of the cannon let them come very close before opening fire with chain shot (two cannonballs attached with a heavy chain). At less than two hundred yards, the opening salvo sank eight of the ten boats, and only one of the surviving craft managed to escape. The water and the arquebusiers took care of the Janissaries. The few who reached the shore could not surrender. “St. Elmo's Pay” was the term used now, for any action in which surrender would not be contemplated. It was a cost the Ottomans would pay for some time.

With Hassem's troops now properly blooded (having lost some three thousand men), the besiegers escalated their bombardment. Mustafa may have taken some grim solace in the fire-eater's humiliation, but he was no closer to eliminating the Order. The defenders had lost around three hundred men, among them the teenaged son of Don Garcia, left with Valette back in April. When the reserves of Birgu were dispatched to Senglea, he slipped away from his minder and joined them. He made it to the walls of Senglea and died on the ramparts to a cannon shot. The siege would now proceed as a larger version of St. Elmo. The walls would have to be reduced, the entirety of the two towns would be surrounded, and to avoid the reinforcement bridge being used to ferry reserves to the weakest point, both towns would be assaulted. This was work that the Turks knew how to do. Mustafa repeated his heraldry to the town, as he had to St. Elmo, offering safe passage to deserters. The Maltese and the Knights were not biting, and when one of the professional soldiers evinced the opinion in public that this might be the best deal they were going to get, Valette had the man hanged.

All these maneuvers took time, the artillery most of all, and it was not until the second of August that the next major assault was raised against the towns. For two weeks, the Ottomans had hammered the defenses with their siege cannon. The walls were cracked and smoking everywhere, and there were breaches aplenty. The ditches and outworks were partially filled with debris. Valette had his slaves working to repair the damage, but they were easy prey to the turkish snipers, and so could work primarily at night. Inside the outer walls, they blockaded streets, and built an entire network of inner walls inside the town, in case the main defenses failed. The attack on the second thrashed the defenses with artillery fire, the most intense the defenders had endured, and then the walls of both towns were assaulted. Five times the Ottomans attacked, and five times they were driven back. Mustafa pulled out and directed a further five days' bombardment.

New dispositions were made, Piali was placed in command of the Birgu part of the siege, Mustafa personally commanding the troops facing Senglea. The outer walls of the towns were now more breach than wall. On the seventh of August, the Turks threw themselves in a massive wave at the bastions of the defense. At Birgu, Piali's men swamped the walls, bypassed the bastion of Castile, and drove the defenders back into the town. But here those internal walls now trapped the attackers between the mass of men pressing forward from the rear. The slaughter was terrible. Even the women and children mounted the walls to dump boiling water on the trapped men, or to hurl grenades and incendiaries down. And then, when the weight of the assault slackened, the defenders counterattacked. Piali could only watch as his men broke and streamed back from the town. But they had done their job. They had occupied the defenders and prevented them from reinforcing Senglea. While all this was happening, Mustafa's men had taken the main bastion defending that town, and now pressed into Senglea itself. The old zealot was there, at the head of his personal guard, and at the crucial moment, he sent in his Janissaries, with himself in the lead. They smashed through the defenses, and the townspeople and soldiery began to flee to the fortress, or across the bridge to Birgu. But then, with no discernible reason, the assault halted. The retreat was sounded, and the newly-promoted Aga of the Janissaries could be heard screaming at his men to fall back to the camp. A messenger had dashed through the burning town to find Mustafa and tell him that a large army had attacked his base camp and was slaughtering his wounded and sick. His worst nightmare had come true, apparently. Don Garcia had arrived and taken him in the rear while he was attacking Senglea. Arriving back at his siege camp, it was indeed in ruins, and few of the camp followers or invalid were left alive. But there was no sign of an army.

The savior of Senglea was in fact Copier and his cavalry. From Mdina they could hear the bombardment, and they could hear it crescendo and then slack as the assault began. Surmising correctly that this indicated a mass assault was happening and the camp would be lightly defended, they slipped out of Mdina and scouted the camp itself. With only a few sentries posted, there was little to stop them. Their charge swept the camp clean of defenders, slashed the tent wires, set fire to anything they could and killed everyone they could find. They hamstrung horses by the hundred, butchered the sick and wounded, burned or spoiled the food and supplies. It was a massacre of the first order. And then, as the troops began streaming back from the now-failed assault, they remounted their horses and escaped back to the city. Bitterly Mustafa must have remembered giving in to Piali and failing to take Mdina before beginning his siege, bitterly he must have remembered the counsel of Dragut. With victory snatched from his grasp, he could only rage. Tearing his beard out in clumps, he swore an oath on the tombs of his ancestors to take but one prisoner. Valette he would leave alive, to drag before the Sultan in chains. Everyone else was doomed.

If Mustafa was enraged, he did not allow it to make him stupid. New plans were formed and new options explored. The thin soil had precluded mining on Mt. Scibberas, but the engineers found just enough dirt to sink a tunnel on one side of Birgu. Their target was the Bastion of Castile, that imposing fortification they had been tricked into assaulting on the first day of the siege. The plan was to seesaw the defenders. Assault Senglea, leave Birgu unattacked. Then, when the reserves crossed the bridge, explode the mine and take Birgu. In addition to the mine, he also had a siege tower constructed to aid in the assault of the strong point.

Inside Birgu, a different set of plans were taking place. Throughout our story, Valette and Don Garcia had been communicating in a long series of messages. Garcia would delay or find excuses. At one point he had requested Valette send his last two galleys to run the blockade and get to Sicily to escort the relief force. This was clearly silly, impossible and pointless. Two galleys would make no difference to the size army needed to relieve the siege, and the blockade was too thick to escape, but Valette's refusal to send them to their doom gave Garcia yet another excuse to hold off on relieving the defenders. But now, in mid-August, both men had reached a decision. Valette called for a general conclave of the Knights of St. John where he informed them there would be no relief. He addressed them thus:

“I will tell you now openly, my brethren, that there is no hope to be looked for except in the mercies of Almighty God – the only true help...We are all servants of the Lord, and I know well that if I and all those in command should fall, you will fight on for the honour of our Order and for our holy Church. We are soldiers and we shall die fighting. And if, by some evil chance, the enemy should prevail, we can expect no better treatment than our Brothers at St. Elmo. Let no man think there is a chance of receiving honourable treatment, or of escaping with his life. If we are beaten, we shall all be killed. Better to die in battle than slowly and shamefully at the hands of the conqueror.”

After this rousing pep talk, the same information was announced to the citizens of the towns, but Valette paired it with something he'd been keeping to himself. The new pope, the Medici Pius IV had recently promulgated a bull offering plenary indulgence to all christians who died in the holy struggle with Islam. It was within Valette's religious purview to declare the current action such, and he did so now. If the Ayalar across the ditch sought instant induction into paradise, the soldiers and townspeople were no less enthusiastic (if a bit less high). Balbi, still guarding the bastion of St. Michael at Senglea, heard the news from the grandmaster himself. “From then on” he wrote “there was no more talk of relief forces. Every man determined to die rather than fall alive into the hands of the Turk.” As to the the locals, the announcement of indulgence worked like a charm. “With the greatest devotion, with the firmest hope and faith they would be received into Glory, they resolved to die.”. Reading between the lines, I suspect it was the practical consideration of torture that swung it for Balbi himself, his reporting of the religious always seems a bit cynical to me, but that could be my own projection.

Several hundred miles away, Don Garcia de Toledo had made his own decisions. He'd been playing for time, hoping the siege would resolve itself one way or another without his having to risk yet another naval force. But now in August, spurred by the political machinations of Valette's lobbyists, the news of his son's death, and perhaps most importantly, the growing embarrassment as the tale of Malta swept Europe (even the Protestant Queen Elizabeth of England was singing the praises of the Knights), he resolved to come to their rescue. But he'd wasted a lot of time, and it was not so easy to put together such an army and a flotilla to get them to Malta. The risks were high, but he began to muster his men and assemble his fleet.

On the 18th of August, the mine under the Bastion of Castile was in place, and the attack on Senglea was commenced. But siege towers are hard to hide, and Valette was not baited into committing his reserves. Balbi and the defenders of Senglea would have to fend for themselves, and they did. But when the mine blew, it was still an incredible shock. The egyptian siege engineers were peerless. They brought down nearly half the bastion with one blow. The explosion was so strong it blew soldiers out the back of the fortification into the street. The Turks came in a rush, overwhelming the staggered defenders and gaining the walls. A messenger raced to find Valette. “All is lost!” he cried “We must fall back to the fort of St. Angelo!” But the old pirate was not one for retreats. Snatching a spear from a nearby soldier and with only a light helmet for protection “not waiting even to don his cuirass” he and Starkey, with their personal servants and bodyguard, launched the counterattack themselves. Any who might have (like the messenger) been considering flight now banded together to follow. Members of the Order, seeing their grandmaster charging into the teeth of the attack, flung themseves at the attackers to try to shield him. A grenade exploded at his side, wounding him in the leg, but still he pressed on, up the pile of rubble that had been his strongest fortification. The Maltese had flocked to him from the town as well, and together they blunted the attack, but a strong group of Ottomans yet held the breach, their banners inviting another assault. When his men begged him to withdraw now that the attack was halted, he refused, and led the clearing of the breach personally. Only when every Turk had fallen or fled, and the defenses were manned again did he return to the town, and have his wounds tended.

With the defenses so damaged, Mustafa and Piali would not give the defenders much time to regroup. The attack was renewed after dark, and the grandmaster had to scramble all night to stabilize various positions and put out fires. Desperation was setting in. There were no more reserves, the ammunition was running out, the hospital was full. The defenders were suffering major losses that could not be recouped. The attacks were endless on the 19th. Valette's own nephew Henri was killed in the battle at the siege tower, and seeing his body among his fallen comrades, the grandmaster sounded resigned. “These young men have only preceded us all by a few days....To the very last man, we must bury ourselves beneath these ruins.” Fortifications could no longer be repaired, bodies lay unburied in the streets. The women of the town now staffed the hospital completely, as well as reinforcing the defenders on the wall, running ammunition and even operating the guns. There was no one else left. In the words of Balbi, “the world seemed to be coming to an end”. On the other side of the walls, Mustafa could smell blood. His losses were heavy, but he had the manpower. This was the grinding part of a siege. And he had a few tricks up his sleeve as well. But then, so did Valette.

Taking the advice of a Maltese carpenter, the first order of business was to get rid of the siege tower now dominating what remained of the Bastion. It could not be set alight, it was covered in hides that were continually soaked in water. Instead, the workmen tunneled through their own walls at the base of the tower, and ran out a massive cannon. Loaded with chain shot, they blew away the supporting beams of the tower until the whole thing collapsed in a heap. The cannon was withdrawn, and the hole bricked back up. That same day, at Senglea, yet another machine was tried, this one a massive barrel bomb filled with “gunpowder, chains, nails and other shrapnel”. Under cover of an assault, the Ottomans rolled this massive contraption into the town and lit the fuse. Swiftly retreating to their trenches, they waited for the explosion to open the way for them. But the energy of the defenders and a fuse cut a bit too long foiled and reversed their plan. Discovering the bomb, the locals rolled it right back out of the breach, down the slope where it fell into the trenches and exploded among the waiting assault force. The day that had begun so terribly for the defenders ended in something like a victory.

All this was finally taking a toll on the Ottoman army. They had a lot of men, but their losses were extremely high. Also, the normal siege diseases of dysentery, fever and cholera were making the rounds, further sapping their strength. For the first time, morale was becoming a problem, as the cannon fodder became less enthusiastic about their role. For three months they'd been hurling themselves at walls and cannon muzzles, with little to show for it except the small ruin of St. Elmo. Every success was reversed. In addition, supplies were beginning to get thin. Pirates working out of Sicily were disrupting the lines of communication from north Africa. Copier's massacre had destroyed critical supplies and ships sent out for more were not returning. That four-month clock was running out. By mid-September, the fleet at least would have to return to Turkey. The dislike between Mustafa and Piali had blossomed into real hatred and without Dragut to get them on the same page, they began working at cross purposes. Piali began to prepare his fleet to leave, and when Mustafa tried to float the option of wintering in Malta, which the defenders could surely not last, Piali told him basically that the fleet was leaving in September, with or without him and his men.

The question was who would crack first. At the war council of the Order inside Birgu, it was proposed that since the defenses of the town had been reduced to rubble, they should retreat to the still-relatively intact fort of St. Angelo. A vote was taken, and only one person voted against this option, but he happened to be the commander. His reasoning was that the move would allow the Turks to concentrate their fire so effectively that it would not last as a fortress. Forcing the enemy to besiege two different fortifications effectively halved the fire on each. Furthermore there was not sufficient water inside the fort, limiting how long they could hold out. Lastly but perhaps most importantly, he would not abandon the townspeople to the invading army. There was not enough room in the fort for them. Valette ordered every post to be held, and to impress upon everyone that there was no panic room for them to run to, he withdrew all but a skeleton crew to man the guns from the garrison of St. Angelo, then destroyed the bridge from the fortress to the town. The pontoon causeway between the towns, which had saved Senglea previously, was also destroyed. Valette was literally burning his bridges. Everyone would have to stay and defend or die where they were, there was nowhere else to go. It had been a long game, one Valette had played almost perfectly for a year now. This was his last hand. It was now all up to the competing wills of the adversaries.

The attacks on the cities were relentless. The mining operations continued, and nearly every day some mine or countermine exploded beneath the sandy soil. On the 20th, under cover of a new type of morion and a rebuilt siege tower now reinforced with earth and stone, the Janissaries came again to the walls of Senglea. The fighting was fierce, but they were driven back by a counterattack lead by Starkey's scapegoat, Juan de la Cerda, who was hacked to death in the hand to hand combat, answering the charges of cowardice once and for all. Across at Birgu, the defenders repeated their trick of opening the tunnel through the walls to counter the siege tower, but cannon could not harm the reinforced tower. Instead, they sallied out and stormed the platform as it approached the walls. Capturing the tower, they installed a couple cannon in it, filled it with arquebusiers, and made it part of their defenses. This may be a testament to the flagging morale of the Turkish army. A further major assault on the 23rd also failed, but the defenders had to empty the hospital of anyone who could hold a weapon to do it.

The bad news for Mustafa was coming from all quarters now. He was informed that a supply fleet of grain ships had been captured by Sicilian pirates. The siege diseases had been manageable in the short term, but they were beginning to get out of hand. His officers were telling him that men were beginning to refuse to attack. Food was short. For the first time, he was beginning to run low on ammunition for the siege guns, and many of those guns were becoming inoperable. Three months of nearly continuous fire had taken their toll not only on the walls of the defenders. The weight of the artillery falling on the towns began ever so slightly to decrease, day by day. Over all of this was the knowledge that Suleiman did not suffer failure, and his age and gout had made him an angry old man. A quick strangling might await a commander who returned without his objective.

Mustafa decided to hedge his bets and do what he should have done in the first place. Take Mdina. The walls were weak, the place was undermanned, Copier's cavalry based there had been a thorn in his side. With the city in hand, he might be able to winter in Malta after all, and he could use the supplies stored there. If nothing else, capturing the capitol of the island would be something to show the sultan. Leaving a screening force at the twin towns, he moved the bulk of his army and the lighter siege guns overland to Mdina. This offered the defenders some chance to catch their breath. Don Mesquita was the governor of the island, and commanded the town of Mdina during the siege. His best men and cannon had been sent to Birgu at the beginning of the siege. He had but a skeleton garrison and little ammunition, but he did have most of the population of the island who were sheltering in the largest town as the Ottomans overran the island. He made virtue of necessity and decided to make a show of force. He had the locals dressed in every military uniform he could find, armed them, and had them stand to the defenses on the walls where they could be seen. The city could only be attacked from one side, as sheer cliffs bounded it on the others, but he filled his walls completely with men, women and children dressed as soldiers. As the Ottomans approached, they saw a town bristling with pikes and arquebuses, every wall manned, and even out of range, the cannon of the town began to fire, as if they had plenty of powder. Mustafa halted his column and ordered scouts to check around the town. They reported back that every wall was held, even the cliffside ones. The men were grumbling that this was yet another fortress like St. Elmo and Birgu. The army that had come to Malta in May would have likely made short work of Mdina. What remained at the end of August was a demoralized shell of its former organization. Mustafa turned his troops around and returned to the siege of Senglea. The artillery still fell, but the fire was gone out of the besiegers. The defenders, now past their darkest hours on the 20th-23rd, began to dare to hope they might not only survive, but be victorious. Balbi was exultant. “Alone we did it!” he wrote in his journal. Without relief (aside from the small force sent in June), they had held out.

Ironically, on the day Valette was emptying his hospital to hold the walls against the last great assault, Don Garcia was reviewing the army he had raised for the relief of Malta. Some eight thousand men and twenty-eight ships were mustered and set off into the Mediterranean on the 25th. There were no assaults on the towns for a week, and then on the first of September, another massed attack. But the long siege, the sicknesses, the casualties and the humiliating retreat from Mdina had gutted both the psychological and the physical capabilities of the army. Of his original thirty thousand men, bolstered by Dragut and Hassem perhaps to around forty thousand, he had single digit thousands remaining who could fight. And after the long disaster that the siege had been, they were largely unwilling to risk their necks for a face-saving maneuver. Fatalism had set in. “It is not the will of Allah that we should be masters of Malta”, the troops were saying. Willing to die for their religion, willing to make their bodies stepstools for their brethren to victory, they were less willing to die for a loss, nor to save the personal reputation of their commander.

Don Garcia's relief force stopped off at a small island on the way, a sort of naval waystation called Linosa, where a message from Valette awaited him. If he had come this far, it informed him that the Ottomans were moored in the harbors of the Marsasirroco and the Marsamuscetto, and so he should avoid those parts of the island and land in the north, where there were a couple decent beaches to offload troops, if not a secure harbor. But the question was how exactly this relatively small naval force was supposed to break the blockade. Piali had three times as many warships as Garcia had total ships, transports included. Any competent naval commander would have scout ships flung far, and long before they could even get close to Malta, by rights, there should be a Turkish fleet many times larger blocking their approach.

The defenders saw Garcia's cautious approach as either cowardice or malevolence. The reality is that running a naval blockade of a hundred warships with ten or fifteen, plus slow, lumbering transports was an incredibly risky proposition. Not for the first time though, the christians were aided by a combination of the weather and Piali's inexplicable indolence. The seas grew rough on the approach to Malta, not quite enough to deter the relief, but perhaps enough for the scouts to head back to harbor, which might explain why the relief was never spotted until they were at Malta. As to the warships, Piali had given up the blockade, apparently, and his main forces were inside the harbors, with the entrances barred with chains and stakes. We do not know what was the reason, it seems beyond mad to do so. It seems so outrageous that one suspects there must have been some reason for it, and we simply don't know what it is. Leaving the water approaches open during a blockade is a pretty basic mistake.

Whatever the reasons, on the sixth of September, the relief arrived at Malta, unchallenged and intact. But they did not land immediately. Garcia had his fleet circle the island. We are not sure why, the Knights he had with him accused him of trying to find some obstacle that would permit him to flee back to Sicily rather than engage the enemy. We do know that he was under strict instructions not to risk the fleet from his boss, the HRE. But yet again, within sight of the island, the Ottoman fleet, many times larger, did not sally out from their protected harbors to send the small force to the bottom. Piali waited. Now without any possible excuse, on the 7th, Garcia landed his troops in the north of the island at a shallow beach and swiftly returned to Sicily, where yet more troops awaited trasport.

The relief force was small enough, eight thousand men, mostly Spanish and Italian, but with a force of the Knights of St. John whose travels had prevented them from being there for the siege. These were understandably itching to get into the fight and rescue/avenge their brothers. The commander of the relief was a cautious man, Asconio de la Corna. Keep in mind, the original numbers of the Ottoman army were more than four times the size of this force, and they did not know how badly the siege had gone for the Turks. As it was, they were still outnumbered, though some significant portion of Mustafa's men were injured or sick. The relief was also fresh, which at this point in our story, makes a world of difference. They struck inland to make contact with the capitol of Mdina, where they were met by the governor and joined by Copier.

The news of this landing reached both Mustafa and Valette at about the same time. Valette ordered one of his turkish galley slaves to be released, the man was told that this was an act of joyous clemency, since a relief force of sixteen thousand men had just landed, and the Turks were sure to be trounced. This man, of course, ran directly to the Ottoman camp and repeated the story. Without proper scouting reports and now nearly caught in a vise by what he believed to be a superior force, Mustafa ordered the end of the siege and the evacuation of the island. Piali was already prepared to leave. The sun rose on the eighth of September and for the first time, the defenders of Birgu and Senglea looked toward the siege lines and saw nothing but scattered equipment, a few guns too damaged or large to move quickly, and no Ottoman army. The camp had been struck in the night and in their harbors, the Ottoman fleet was under way. The defenders and townspeople left their walls for the first time in four months and picked through the abandoned camp. Scouts rode out to locate the retreating Turks, and these soon gained the heights of Mt. Scibberas, where they could see the Ottomans loading into their ships on the far side of the peninsula. They planted the flag of St. John in the ruins of Fort St. Elmo, and sent word to Birgu to bring up some cannon to harass the fleet as it exited the harbor. Inside Birgu, Valette and his men, and the locals all gathered for mass, giving thanks to god (when they should have been thanking Piali) for the rescue of the island. Balbi says it was “The first time in three months that the bells of the church summoned us to something other than an enemy attack”.

It was only now, midday on the 8th, that Mustafa learned from his Spahi scouts the size of the force that had landed. Infuriated that he'd been tricked, he ordered the evacuation to halt, and for the troops to disembark from the ships. He might not take Birgu, but he would at the least win one more battle before leaving. Having spent the night encamped on a high ridge in the middle of the island, de la Corna could see these troops massing on the beach of the Marsamuscetto, and beginning to take the road toward him. A prudent man, he decided to hold the high ground and let Mustafa attack him in his strong position. Roughly nine thousand men had formed up, against his eight, all that remained of a forty-thousand man host. His caution did not spread to the Knights of St. John, who had spent the summer hearing of the heartbreaking heroism and suffering of their Order at Malta. From the ridge at Naxxar they could see the ruins of St. Elmo, now waving their flag. They began to shout to the entrenched army, pointing first at the Ottomans and then to rubble of the fort, “There is the enemy! And there are the ruins where our brothers died!” What more did they need to know? The knights, joined by the locals and the cavalry, broke from the lines and stormed down the slopes to meet the Turks. De la Corna was forced to follow them, and ordered a general charge.

So disorganized an attack would have in all likelihood been smashed by a confident Turkish army. But as we've discussed, they were desperately demoralized after the long unsuccessful siege, and having put the soil of Malta behind them once, they disembarked with the greatest reluctance. Some of their number were still in good discipline, but not enough of them. Faced with a ragged charge, a long flood of steel and hatred spilling toward them from the high ground, the army reacted irresolutely. Some immediately formed up and met the charge. Some broke and ran to the boats, some to the high ground. The troops in the lowland were ridden down, but a band of Janissaries had taken a small tower in a flanking position, where the main battle now developed. This group opened a withering fire on the cavalry, which was forced to break off the charge. The spanish infantry was formed up, and assaulted the tower with heavy losses, but took it nonetheless. With their flank now unprotected, the Turks fell back to the boats. Whatever his failings as a commander, Mustafa could not be accused of cowardice. He was everywhere in the battle. Two horses were shot from beneath him. With only a few Janissaries and Hassem's Algerian musketeers, he covered the retreat as his forces for the second time in twelve hours loaded onto their boats and made for the open sea.

The christian forces had become spread out, the infantry had taken to the high ground after the battle at the tower, the local milita had fallen far behind, but the cavalry still pressed forward. They were cut to pieces by the Algerians. Four of the Knights died to sunstroke in their heavy armor. With this first assault checked Mustafa managed to get the bulk of his remaining men loaded and out to sea. The Algerians were left to cover the retreat, and were trapped as the main body of de la Corna's troops caught up with them on the beach. Gallant to the last, this rear-guard fought a ferocious delaying action, but was driven by weight of numbers and the guns now appearing on the heights down into the shallows of the harbor and butchered there. None survived.

Without even a few galleys to harass them, the Ottomans now withdrew unopposed and set off on their long voyage back to the displeasure of the Sultan. The Order and the Maltese now took stock. The relief forces were shocked at the damage. They report that they met not one person soldier or civilian who was uninjured, and not a single building anywhere in the two towns was undamaged. Of his six thousand men (5.500 at the start plus the Little Relief), Valette had around six hundred remaining who could bear arms. Half his Knights were dead, and many of those living were maimed or incapacitated. Counting civilian deaths, the defenders lost something like seven thousand dead. The Ottomans had lost somewhere between 25,000 and 30,000. Fewer than ten thousand would return to Turkey, and we have no records for the corsairs and Algerians.

This would mark the high-water mark of Ottoman expansion into the Mediterranean. Six years hence, their navy would suffer a massive defeat at Lepanto which would permanently reverse the balance of power on the sea. The Order of St. John would play a key role in that battle, and pay a terrible price for it. Europe was ecstatic at the victory at Malta. The island became an icon of resistance to the Islamic threat, now referred to as “The Bulwark of the Faith”. Even the Protestants hailed it rapturously. With its strategic importance proven, and money pouring in from all sides, Valette decided to build a new town and a new fort on the heights of Mount Scibberas, replacing St. Elmo. This fortified town would be absolutely state of the art, the strongest fortification in the Mediterranean. It was named for the founder “Humillima Civitas Valettae”, “The Most Humble City of Valette”, now simply called Valetta.

Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent would suffer only two military reverses of any import during his longest reign over the Empire. The first at Vienna, and the other at Malta. He swore to return in person to devastate Malta, but died on campaign in Hungary in 1566 before he had the chance. His reign would be remembered as the golden age of the Ottoman Empire, the episode at Malta a mere footnote in a glorious record of reform, conquest and competent adminstration.

Jean Parisot de Valette was showered with awards, honors and titles. He became the icon of chivalry, a legend in his own time. He lived to see the founding of the city that bore his name. Three years after the siege, he suffered a stroke while falcon-hunting, and died two weeks later. He was buried in the chapel of his new city, now the Cathedral of St. John, the inscription on his crypt composed by his long-time secretary:

“To God, Supreme, Almighty, Sacrosanct. He was the scourge of Asia and Libya and the guardian of Europe, having defeated the Turks by means of his Sacred Arms, the first to lie buried here in this propitious city of Valletta which he founded, worthy of eternal honour.”

Sir Oliver Starkey himself would long survive his most famous boss, serving four grandmasters in total and finishing his long and devoted career as the Grand Prior of the English Langue. On his death in 1588, he would be buried next to Valette, the only non-Grandmaster to be interred in the crypt of the Cathedral to this day.

Piali would be spared execution for his failure, but was relieved of his admiral's post. He would be brought back after Suleiman's death by his father-in-law, the new Sultan Selim II, and would participate in the siege of Famagusta and the conquest of Cyprus, one of the preceding actions to Lepanto. He was appointed Vizier and eventually was given command of the entire Ottoman navy, charged with rebuilding after their disaster at Lepanto.

Of Mustafa, history becomes confused because there were several Mustafa Pashas at the same time, and I am not sure which one was ours.

Chevalier Mathurin d’Aux de Lescout, called Romegas would lead the Order's naval forces at Lepanto and become the greatest christian admiral in the Mediterranean. He was less successful politically, though he eventually and briefly became Grandmaster of the order, he died in disgrace in Rome in 1581.

Don Garcia de Toledo would be made the scapegoat of Malta, though his inaction was according to some sources ordered by Phillip. He was relieved of his governorship and “died in obscurity” in Naples, 1577.

Vincenzo Anastagi, who actually lead the charge of Copier's cavalry that destroyed the Ottoman camp in August and saved the towns, was promoted through the ranks and murdered by two rival knights of the Order in 1585.

Fransisco Balbi de Corregio lived a long and unhappy life as a mercenary, poet, and itinerant historian. Already sixty years old when he served in the siege of Malta, he lived to a ripe old age “persecuted by men and by Fortune”, and died at an unknown time and place in 1589. His journal, specifically the Bradford translation, has provided the core of my readings on this topic, and we are forever indebted to him for the most complete and personal account of the siege.

Fort Saint Elmo was rebuilt and would survive more sieges in the future. It still stands today on the point of the peninsula it defended so many years ago, a museum to the distant past.

The towns of Birgu and Senglea were world famous (or at least Europe-famous). They were renamed “Vittorioso” and “Invitta”; “The Victorious” and “The Unconquered” or “The Invincible”, respectively.

Of the local Maltese, there is only legend and a few names bastardized by Balbi in his records. Pedro Bola, Lucca Briffa, Toni Bajada. The surviving fisherfolk and townspeople went back to their lives and rebuilt their shattered island, and we know neither their names nor their stories. But as I have said before, it is they who deserve the highest honor. It is they who were victorious, invincible, unconquered.