[Malta Month] Cutting Room Floor - The Great Siege of Malta

This Cutting Room Floor is a little different from the others. A section about the Great Siege of Malta did make it into the final text of my book. However, my original draft was much, much longer than what I could eventually fit into the book. What I am presenting below is a (lightly edited) original cut of the text about the Siege of Malta.

This also serves as an introduction to Malta Month! This August I’m playing games about The Great Siege of Malta and giving you my thoughts. Since I’m going to be spending so long talking about it I thought it best to kick things off with a little historical context! I hope you enjoy!

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The Great Siege of Malta in 1565 was not the first time that the Knight’s Hospitaller clashed with the Ottoman Empire, nor even the first time they had fought against the sultan Suleiman I, The Magnificent. Forty years earlier in the winter of 1522-3, at the very start of the sultan’s reign, he had driven the knights from their previous home on the island of Rhodes. The 1522 Siege of Rhodes is just one in a series of famous Ottoman sieges, starting with the Siege of Constantinople in 1453, then the less talked about 1480 Siege of Rhodes during which the Hospitallers drove off the forces of Suleiman’s father, and the later Siege of Malta in 1565. Suleiman opened his reign by driving the hated Knights Hospitaller, a military order with its roots in the eleventh century and which had participated in nearly every major crusading conflict, from the eastern Mediterranean and opened the sea for future Turkish expansion.

The Siege of Rhodes dragged on for months, lasting into the winter, and finally ended when the Sultan Suleiman I agreed terms of surrender with the surviving Knights Hospitaller. The Knights would be permitted to take their possessions and leave the island in peace so long as they surrendered Rhodes to the sultan. These generous terms reflected the difficulty that Suleiman had experienced in besieging the Hospitaller fortress, as well as the length of time the siege had lasted. The knights accepted and left what had been their only home for centuries in search of a new one.

They remained homeless for seven years, from the fall of Rhodes in 1523 until 1530, when Emperor Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain, offered them the island of Malta as their new home. Malta was no Rhodes, it lacked the impressive fortifications built up over centuries and the abundance of natural wealth, but it had two excellent natural harbours and, most importantly, nobody was offering the Hospitallers anything else. Charles V required from them only a single hunting falcon, to be paid to the Viceroy of Sicily on Charles’ behalf, as payment along with a guarantee that the Hospitallers would never make war on his kingdom. Charles V also burdened them with the city of Tripoli in modern day Libya, an exposed bastion of his empire that they would struggle to hold at great cost. Tripoli was taken by a combined force of Ottomans and Barbary corsairs, including the famous Turgut who would participate in the Great Siege, in 1551.

The Hospitallers needed to reinforce Malta and make it a new home from which they could conduct their ongoing war against Muslims generally and the Ottomans specifically – but building fortifications is expensive and their funds were limited so progress was slow. While the Hospitallers had once been famous for their fortresses in the Holy Land, they were now more famous for their naval engagements. Their detractors saw little difference between the order and common pirates. Befitting their naval activities they set up their base of operations in the town of Birgu in Malta’s Grand Harbour. The main city on the island, and it’s technical capitol, Mdina was largely left to the Maltese.

The Hospitallers had taken several centuries to build up their impressive defensive fortifications in Rhodes, but they had neither the time nor the finances to achieve similar results before the next expected Ottoman attack. They also had limited resources, while Malta had immense supplies of stone readily available to be mined it was less abundant in earth and wood – two other materials necessary for fortress building. It was also not particularly abundant in foodstuffs, lacking the soil to grow grain in large quantities. It imported much of its basic food from neighbouring Sicily with funds made by exporting figs, melons, and other fruits. It also had few sources of natural water, with only a handful of springs located on Malta. However, this lack of abundance did offer one advantage to the Hospitallers: Malta was a difficult place to sustain a long-term campaign, like a siege, as any invading force would need to bring all its own supplies with it and could not rely on resupplying from the island. The island’s rocky foundations also made mining, a common siege practice of digging underneath enemy walls to collapse them, extremely difficult.

In the end the Hospitallers constructed three main fortified positions around Malta’s Grand Harbour. The first was the town of Birgu, built on a peninsula that emerged into the harbour perpendicular to the harbour’s entrance. Birgu had been a relatively small fishing village which the order expanded into a respectably sized town with walls and, on the peninsula’s point, the fortress of Fort St. Angelo. On a parallel peninsula located slightly further into the harbour they built the town of Senglea, a less impressive fortified town than Birgu with the fort of St. Michael located on the landward end of the peninsula. Between these two peninsulas a chain was hung that could be pulled up to block off access to the water that lay in between. On the opposite shore from these two peninsulas was Mount Sciberras, a large peninsula that formed the north-western side of the Grand Harbour, with the smaller harbour of Marsamuscetto lying on its opposite side. Mount Scibberas represented a point of significant threat, as artillery mounted on the mountain could threaten both Birgu and Senglea. The Hospitallers constructed another fort at the very tip of this peninsula, Fort St. Elmo, which could command a position overlooking the entrances to both the Grand Harbour and Marsamuscetto, while contesting control of mount Sciberras as well. In addition to enhancing their fortifications, the Hospitallers expanded the system of watch towers and signal fires across both Malta and Gozo, the second largest island in the archipelago, so that they would be notified immediately of any approaching enemy fleets.

An early modern map of The Grand Harbour and its environs during the Great Siege. Mount Scibberas juts out in the center, the Ottoman fleet anchored on its left, while the twin peninsulas and the Grand Harbour lie to the right.

None of these fortifications were without their flaws. Limited funds and resources, which sometimes had to be shipped over from Sicily, as well as the challenges of building a fort on the end of a mountainous peninsula meant that the Hospitallers were forced to compromise on the quality of their defences. Fort St. Elmo may have overlooked the harbours, but Mount Scibberas looked down on it, meaning that an attacking force could fire into the fort from a higher position if they took the mountain. St. Elmo had also been built without adequate protections on its north-western side, something that was partially fixed with the addition of a projecting fortified position called a ravelin. Birgu was the best fortified of the Hospitaller communities, while Senglea was reasonably well fortified on its landward ends but had gaps in its water defences.

Despite their lack of finances, the Knights Hospitaller were a notable thorn in the side of the Ottoman Sultan when operating out of their new home, continuously raiding his shipping lanes, and causing grief to the sultan and his followers. Malta itself also presented a problem for the Ottomans if they ever wished to control the Mediterranean and be able to threaten Western Europe will asserting control over North Africa. Malta sits almost in the middle of the Mediterranean and any vessel wishing to travel from the Eastern Mediterranean to the Western, or vice versa, must pass very close to the island. This made it a constant threat to Ottoman ships trying to raid in the Western Mediterranean. It also meant that Malta was the natural first steppingstone for any plans to launch an invasion into Western Europe, particularly Sicily which had been a Muslim holding centuries before. The annihilation of the Knights Hospitaller was also some unfinished business for Suleiman I, who in 1565 still ruled the Ottoman Empire at the ripe age of seventy.

Unlike at Rhodes, Suleiman did not decide to lead the invasion of Malta in person. Instead, he chose as his general Mustapha Pasha. Mustapha was a veteran of the siege of Rhodes, having fought under Suleiman as a young man, and Suleiman placed great trust in him. Commanding along with Mustapha was the admiral Piali Pasha. Piali was only in his thirties and married to the daughter of Suleiman’s son, and future sultan, Selim. The third commander of this expedition was one of the most feared men in the Mediterranean, Turgut (sometimes known as Dragut), a notorious North African corsair and, since taking it from the Hospitallers, governor of Tripoli. Although Mustapha was given overall command, in practice these three men had to share in all the decision making. Suleiman sent to Malta a truly staggering invasion force, estimated to be at least 30,000 soldiers, not including the sailors, slaves, and other non-combatants that travelled with them. This included over six thousand Janissaries, the elite of the Ottoman armies.

Standing against the Ottoman invasion force were the Knights Hospitaller and their grand master Jean "Parisot" de la Valette, usually known just as La Valette. La Valette had also served at Rhodes as a young member of the order and had risen through the ranks over the intervening forty years to reach its very top. He had filled numerous commands as a Hospitaller, and even spent some time as an Ottoman prisoner. Under La Valette the order had at most seven hundred knights who were able to travel to Malta before the Ottoman fleet arrived – that being out of a total of probably not much more than a thousand Hospitallers. This force was supplemented by between two and three thousand Maltese irregulars and at least that many mercenaries and Spanish soldiers supplied by King Philip II, son of the Charles V who had given the island to the knights. The Hospitallers also had approximately 1,500 slaves – a mixture of captured Muslims and Christians serving sentences of imprisonment – to use as an involuntary labour force to reinforce defences and do other onerous and thankless tasks. In total, the forces tasked with defending Malta probably number between eight and nine thousand soldiers, less than a third of what the Ottomans were bringing.

The Ottoman fleet arrived at Malta on the 18th of May. After initially appearing to sail north toward Gozo they eventually settled into the harbour of Marsasirocco on the south-east end of the island. On the 19th of May they began to land their massive invasion force. La Valette had ordered all the available food and livestock to be moved into the defendable settlements and distributed his forces – although some reports suggest that they were not entirely successful in this. Most of his troops were stationed in Birgu and Senglea. The cavalry he placed in Mdina, from which he hoped they would be able to harass the Ottoman position. He placed smaller garrisons in St. Elmo and the citadel on Gozo. The Ottoman and Hospitaller armies first clashed on the 21st of May, when a small force sortied forth from Senglea and Birgu to attack the Ottomans who were positioning themselves outside the cities. The two forces battled for six hours, with casualties on both sides, before La Valette ordered the Christian forces to return behind their fortified walls.

From then on, the Hospitallers would fight an almost exclusively defensive war – buying time in hopes of a relief force to come to them from Sicily, only fifty miles north of Malta. There the Viceroy of Sicily, Don Garcia de Toledo, was amassing a relief army to drive off the Ottoman invasion – or at least that was the theory. In practice, Garcia was attempting to amass that army with what limited resources he could get from the Spanish king, Philip II, and struggling to put together sufficient forces, in terms of both ships and soldiers, so that he could safely take on the risky endeavour of launching an amphibious invasion of Malta from the north. The Spanish king was very worried about risking his fleet, he had only just replaced it after an earlier disastrous battle and fleets were not cheap. They also could not afford to land a small army on Malta and have it be isolated and crushed by the Ottomans, any relief force must be overwhelming in strength. The Hospitallers and their allies would have to wait a long time for relief to come.

In the meantime, the Ottoman’s decided on their battle plans, although it was not a unanimous agreement. Mustapha wanted to first capture Gozo, then move on to Mdina, and once they had completely isolated the Hospitaller main force begin the siege of the Grand Harbour. Admiral Piali did not agree, he did not feel safe with his ships in their current harbour and wanted access to the bay north of Mount Scibberas to protect him from the risk of any unseasonable winds. Securing that safe harbour would mean taking Fort St. Elmo first. In the end, Piali won the day, and the Ottoman forces began positioning artillery on Mount Scibberas to begin the bombardment and eventual assault on Fort St. Elmo. Turgut was late to the siege, so while he eventually would agree with Mustapha’s assessment, he was not present to influence the initial debates and by the time he did arrive it was too late change. The Ottoman chief engineer estimated that the fort would not last more than five days. On the 24th of May, after painstakingly hauling guns into place and building defensive positions with dirt that also had to be moved up the mountain, Mustapha ordered the start of the Turkish bombardment of St. Elmo.

The garrison of St. Elmo numbered only a few hundred, a mixture of Knights Hospitaller, mercenaries, and Maltese, who were faced with the full might of the Ottoman army. Mustapha ordered near constant bombardment of the fort, the Ottoman artillery slowly wearing away its defences and reducing it to a ruined husk. Over the subsequent days the Ottoman forces would mount multiple assaults on the fort, only to be repulsed after hours of fighting at the cost of massive casualties. La Valette kept St. Elmo supplied with a slow stream of new soldiers to replace the Christian losses but balancing the needs of the fort with those of his own fortresses, as well as managing morale in St. Elmo, was a significant challenge. La Valette likely knew that most if not all the soldiers he sent over to St. Elmo would die there, but he also needed them to hold that position for as long as possible. Each new week was predicted to be St. Elmo’s last, with both sides doubting that it could hold out much longer, but somehow the Christian defenders endured. Even after Ottoman forces captured the ravelin and the Knights were forced to burn the bridge that connected it to the rest of St. Elmo the garrison held out.

Finally, on the 23rd of June St. Elmo fell to the Ottoman attack. The Ottomans killed every Knight they could. Nine knights were reportedly taken prisoner, but little evidence survives of what happened to them, while a handful of Maltese soldiers jumped into the Grand Harbour and successfully swam to Birgu, bringing with them the story of the final hours of the fort. St. Elmo, a fort that the Ottoman engineers had predicted would fall in five days, had lasted for a whole month. In the process of taking, it the Ottoman army has been estimated to have lost upwards of eight thousand soldiers, with significant casualties having come as recently as the 21st of June when a failed attack had reportedly cost them the lives of two thousand soldiers. These casualties were high, but the Knights had also suffered significant losses. It is estimated that the Christians lost 1,500 soldiers in the defence of St. Elmo, a significantly smaller figure than the Ottomans but also one the Knights and their allies were less able to afford. It had also cost the Ottomans significant resources in terms of gunpowder and ammunition, although the Turkish army had brought ample supplies of both for the invasion.

The greatest cost to the Ottomans was in time. They had expected to be finished with St. Elmo in a week, but it was now near the end of June. The passage of time presented two major risks to the Ottoman army. The first was that each passing week increased the likelihood that Don Garcia could organise his relief force and come to the Knights’ aid. Garcia had already told La Valette to expect him on the 20th of June, a deadline he would not make, but a sign of the risk to the Ottomans.

The greater risk, however, was the end of the campaigning season. Malta was not like Rhodes, where the Ottoman army had been only a few miles from the Turkish mainland. This force was halfway across the Mediterranean in unfriendly waters on an island with little food. They could not winter there for the siege, they could not even risk staying late in the Autumn lest they be unable to safely sail home in the more tempestuous autumn Mediterranean. The Ottoman army needed to conquer Malta before autumn and with St. Elmo only just captured it was already almost mid-summer. With the clock ticking and casualties mounting – dysentery having now also reared its ugly head in the Ottoman camps – Mustapha turned his attention to the joint siege of Birgu and Senglea.

It took several days to reposition all the guns from Mount Scibberas, as well as to dig trenches and build a fortified camp outside of Birgu and Senglea, and the bombardment of them both only began in earnest with the coming of July. During the process of relocating the Turkish army a small relief force numbering approximately seven hundred men, mostly Spanish infantry but including a few more Hospitallers and soldiers of fortune, landed on the north of the island near Gozo. On the night of the 29th of June, this force, known as the Piccolo Soccorso, snuck around the Turkish camp and were ferried in to Birgu, providing much needed support to the beleaguered forces and in a single night replacing half of those lost in St. Elmo. These reinforcements may well have decided the overall siege, as when all the dust would settle at the end of the summer the number of Hospitallers still fit to fight would only number approximately six hundred.

For his first attack on Birgu and Senglea Mustapha had something special planned. The Ottoman army dragged several ships over the narrow gap where Mount Scibbers joins the rest of Malta and put them in to the bay on the western end of Senglea – a position where the Hospitallers had not expected an attack. In response the Hospitallers did their best to reinforce the exposed side of Senglea against naval attack with a wooden palisade and chains while the Ottoman’s did their best to stop them. The Maltese swimmers proved their worth, playing an instrumental role in constructing the palisade and defending it from Ottoman attempts to tear it down.

On the morning of the 15th of July, the Ottoman’s launched a joint attack by both land and sea against both Birgu and Senglea. The fighting was fierce and bloody, but the attack ultimately stagnated. Mustapha’s second wave of Janissaries, intended to encircle the already engaged forces on Senglea and land on an empty bit of shore further north, ran into unexpected trouble. The Ottomans had missed that there was a very low gun port on Ft St Angelo, and he entire second wave sailed directly into its sights. The Hospitaller in charge waited until the perfect moment before unleashing a barrage, sinking most of the ships and sending the rest fleeing for shore.

In the end the Ottoman attack, which included attacks on the landward walls of Senglea and Birgu, was repulsed with heavy losses suffered by the attacker. This was to be a theme for the coming weeks. The Ottoman artillery kept up a near constant barrage of the fortifications while Egyptian siege engineers attempted to undermine the walls. Occasionally Mustapha would order an all-out assault on the Hospitallers which, often through the vagaries of fate and to the surprise of both sides, would be driven back with significant Ottoman casualties.

The attack on the 2nd of August seemed to nearly be a complete victory when alarms that the Ottoman camp was on fire and fears of a Sicilian relief force having arrived unannounced forced Mustapha to call it off. In the end, it turned out to have been a raid by the cavalry that were operating out of Mdina – one with devastating results but that likely would not have been enough to save Birgu and Senglea had it not been mistaken for Diego’s rumoured relief force. Another attack, this time launched in conjunction with the detonation of a mine dug under the bastion of Senglea, was repulsed when La Valette himself led a counter charge into the breach caused by the detonation and, while rallying all available soldiers to him, pushed the Ottoman forces back off the peninsula. La Valette suffered a wound to his leg in the process and would be unable to lead troops with the same vigour for the rest of the siege. The continuous bombardment and attacks were slowly wearing the Christian forces down, but Mustapha and Piali still could not successfully take either peninsula and time was running out.

By the end of August, the defenders of Birgu and Senglea were exhausted. They had endured countless hours of cannon fire, the buildings were in ruins, bodies lined the streets as there was not enough time or people to bury them. They had endured numerous Ottoman attacks, many of them employing a variety of siege weapons, each one different from the last.

On the of 29th of August, it began to rain. The heavy rain stopped the Ottoman attack on that day and hindered both sides’ ability to use their guns. It was also an ill omen for the Ottoman’s, since rain suggested that the inclement weather of the Mediterranean autumn was already coming. The Hospitallers were obviously hopeful that the weather would convince the Ottomans to leave rather than risk wintering on the island, but they were also prepared for this eventuality. Inside their armoury was an ample supply of crossbows, a weapon whose performance was not at all diminished by the rain despite the claims of some fourteenth century chroniclers. The crossbows, according to the eyewitness Francisco Balbi, were given out to the men defending the most dangerous positions and significantly outperformed the Ottoman bows which their opponents were forced to use – so much so according to Balbi that the Turkish soldiers feared the Hospitaller crossbows. The Hospitallers used their crossbows against subsequent Ottoman attacks, which came steadily as the bad weather motivated Mustapha to try and seize the fortresses as soon as possible. Ottoman morale was so low at this stage that Mustapha was even forced to lead some of these attacks personally.

While the end of August is the first time that crossbows were explicitly mentioned by Francisco Balbi, it is very likely that they were used earlier in the siege. Back in April of 1565 a small assortment of arms was issued from the Hospitaller’s armoury to the city of Mdina which included 41 arquebuses and one crossbow. Given Mdina’s lack of a central role in the siege it is possible that this particular crossbow was never used, but nevertheless it shows that the Hospitallers were considering the crossbow a viable option for the coming battles, even if they obviously preferred the more modern arquebus. The historian Stephen Spiteri has argued that crossbows were distributed to the Maltese irregulars along with guns, possibly indicating again that the Hospitallers preferred their guns as they distributed the crossbows to soldiers outside the order, but it is also highly suggestive of the possibility that crossbows were used more extensively throughout the siege.

It would follow that the late August rains were an instance when the crossbow really showed its value and stood out to Balbi, but that it was not the only time it was used. While the evidence suggests that the crossbows may have mostly been used by untrained militias, it is worth noting that as recently as 1562 the crossbow was still standard issue on Hospitaller galleys and that knights were expected to practice shooting the crossbow to ensure their familiarity with it. This means that nearly every Hospitaller at the Siege of Malta would likely have some experience with the crossbow and some of them may have used that during the siege. The Hospitaller armoury certainly seems to have had many crossbows in it, and even still does today. The Palace Armoury in Malta still possesses a large collection of early sixteenth century crossbows in the Spanish style, exactly what one would expect the Knights Hospitaller to have used at the time of the Great Siege given that they were partially Spanish subjects thanks to the gift of Malta from Charles V.

On the 7th of September the relief force finally landed on Malta. It had first departed some days before but been blown off course and delayed by inclement weather. The exact size of the relief army has been debated but is generally estimated to have been between 8,000 and 12,000 soldiers, nowhere near enough to drive off the Ottoman army when it first landed but probably enough to face the exhausted, diseased, and depressed soldiers that occupied the island at the end of the summer. With the impending arrival of autumn and the news of fresh troops landing on the island, Mustapha decided it was time to cut his losses and withdraw. After one final battle on the 8th of September, where Mustapha’s exhausted army was easily routed by the fresh and enthusiastic Spanish soldiers who made up most of the relief force, the Ottoman army retreated to Constantinople, leaving Malta devastated but still in the hands of the Hospitallers.

While they had won the siege things were not immediately so secure for the Hospitallers. Their fortresses had been destroyed and the Ottoman fleet had sailed off intact. The chance that Suleiman could send a new army with the spring loomed large, but in the end the Sultan decided to campaign closer to home and his death in 1566 put an end to the immediate threat. The Ottoman’s remained a potent force in the Mediterranean, the major naval battle of Lepanto in 1571 saw the Ottoman fleet destroyed by a grand Christian alliance but even with those losses a new fleet was quickly constructed. The Ottomans would not attempt a full invasion of Malta again and the island would remain under Hospitaller control until the order was expelled by Napoleon at the end of the eighteenth century.  

Recommended Reading:

Bruce Ware Allen, The Great Siege of Malta

Roger Crowley, Empires of the Sea

Ernle Bradford, The Great Siege of Malta 1565

Francisco Balbi di Correggio, The Siege of Malta 1565 trans. Ernle Bradford

Stephen C. Spiteri, Armoury of the Knights,

Guy Francis Laking, A catalogue of the armour and arms in the Armoury of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, now in the Palace, Valletta, Malta,