2

THE ROAD TO MALTA, 1522–1530

We have been fighting among ourselves without end in what are worse than civil wars over trivia, while the Empire of the Turks, or, more aptly, their land grab, has expanded immensely.

Erasmus, Utilissimam Consultatio de Bello Turcis Inferendo

Releasing the surviving knights into the Mediterranean in January was not as kindly a gesture as it might appear. Anything could happen on a winter sea. The Muslim slaves who normally rowed for the Order had been freed by the victorious Ottomans, leaving the five thousand or so knights and a smaller number of Rhodiot exiles to somehow get the Order’s vessels across gray, choppy water to Crete. The long ships twisted and pitched on the water, rose up and crashed down, and the terrified passengers tossed worldly goods overboard to placate the storm. The gesture may have saved their lives, but left them destitute.

A few days later the fleet staggered into Heraklion. Whatever their private feelings—and some had been cheered by stories of Martinengo’s exploits—the Venetians had been serenely dispassionate during the siege, and although the locals now clucked sympathetically, their masters were already drafting a letter of congratulations to the sultan on this latest victory.1 It was an awkward situation all around, and L’Isle-Adam stayed just long enough to refit the fleet and head west, plagued by rough weather and wearied with melancholy. Some of the civilian refugees chose to remain here, some to head to Cyprus, some to accompany the Order wherever it might go.

The ships made a brief stop at Messina, where, as if there were nothing else that could go wrong, plague now broke out in the fleet. The governor of Messina ordered them to remove to the remote bay of Baiae until further notice. It was there, a month later, that they were instructed to come to Rome, just in time to find that Pope Hadrian was dying.2 The knights’ first official task back in Rome was to stand guard while the conclave of cardinals elected a successor. By good fortune, the new pope, Clement VII, had once been a member of the Order himself. While he was full of sympathy and praise, he had no immediate use for them. He did arrange lodging in a convent at Viterbo, just outside Rome, a considerable comedown from the fortress of Rhodes. What might be a suitable substitute? The island of Elba was suggested, as was Cythera, just off the Peloponnese peninsula, and Crete. The first was the possession of the Lord of Piombino, who was unlikely to sell, the latter two the possessions of Venice, who certainly would not sell, not as long as they wanted good relations with the Ottomans. Eventually, someone suggested the island of Malta.

Malta was in the gift of Charles V, Holy Roman emperor and a strong believer in the knights and their mission. L’Isle-Adam, still shaken by their experience at Rhodes, somewhat impulsively offered Charles one hundred thousand ducats for the privilege of settling in Malta, or failing that, Brindisi.³ Charles wrote back that he was more than happy to have the knights take charge of Malta, so long as they took Tripoli as well and rendered fealty to him rather than to the pope. As a pan-European Christian force, they could not accept the terms. They could, however, at least take a look at the place, pending a more equitable deal.

L’Isle-Adam sent eight men to inspect Malta and see if it might be suitable. However anxious he may have been for a stable home, L’Isle-Adam was not going to grab the first offer that came his way. His commissioners arrived at Malta in August of 1524. Malta in high summer is an inferno and does not set off the island’s best features. No surprise then that the opinion of the eight men about the island was not good. The island’s defenses, they said, were weak, the soil poor, resources few, well water scarce and brackish, and the people targets of frequent sea raids.

A gloomy assessment, and fair enough, but the knights’ contingent was comparing the place to green and pleasant Rhodes. This simply may have been the technique of a sharp buyer denigrating the product before settling on a price. A more balanced report is found in Jean Quintin d’Autun’s 1536 book, A Description of the Island of Malta. D’Autun described Malta as a rocky island home to some twelve thousand impoverished natives he considered more or less Sicilians with an admixture of North African: short, stocky, with speech that was more Arab than Latin. He acknowledged the brutal African heat in summer, but wrote that the climate in general is healthy.4 He praises the quality of what the natives, mostly peasant farmers, could coax from the thin soil—barley, olives, vines, figs, cumin, and cotton, the last two being the island’s chief exports—but regrets the quantity, and notes that Malta is fortunate to be situated so close to “most fertile” Sicily, without whose grains they would die of hunger.⁵ As a proper Frenchman, he also notes that the women are “not at all bad looking” (feminae non ignobili forma).⁶

To anyone lucky enough to hold it, Malta has been, like Guam or Midway or Diego Garcia, a vital military base at the center of contested waters, bang center between Sicily and North Africa, halfway again between Gibraltar and Constantinople. It has been held over the centuries by neolithic people, Phoenicians, Romans, Arabs, Normans, and most recently by Spain as an adjunct to her holdings in Sicily. The natives at that time were divided between the aristocracy, generally off-islanders from Sicily who huddled in the capital city, Mdina, located at the center of the island, and men of humbler station—fishermen, traders, dilettante pirates—who lived a hardscrabble life by the magnificent, sheltered, deepwater harbor facing the east. Less populated is the island’s west coast, a place of high cliffs, difficult to scale. The island has been a staging point since antiquity for invasions into Sicily or North Africa, while itself being, as a French visitor in 1550 described it, “by artifice and by nature all but unconquerable.”⁷

The emperor was happy enough to lease Malta, but he also wanted the Order to defend Tripoli. This city, another of Charles’s possessions, was some 190 miles south of Malta, and the two were coupled in his mind. Since 1510 Tripoli was the easternmost of the several small Spanish holdings that impertinently dotted North Africa’s Barbary Coast, the lands between Egypt and Morocco that since their coming into Islam had divided into three dynastic holdings: the Hafsid, the Zayanid, and the Wattasid. Tripoli was strategically important in defending the western Mediterranean. On the plus side, its air was “very salubrious and not subject to any of the bad contagions.”⁸ The harbor could accommodate carrack-sized merchant ships—useful since the locals, Muslim and at times hostile, could not be counted on for supplies.

On the down side was just about every thing else. As on Malta, well water was scarce and brackish. Reliable—that is to say, Christian—food supplies were no closer than Sicily—fifty nautical miles away by sea. Houses and other buildings were ramshackle at best. The city walls, many unstable, would need to be rebuilt from their foundations. Bringing the place up to standard would take the kind of time and money the Order did not have. It was not an enticing offer, and L’Isle-Adam unsurprisingly put it on the back burner. In the meantime, however, the pope did have a job for L’Isle-Adam. The grand master was to put aside his war uniform and become a diplomat. The charge was not rapprochement with the enemies of Christendom, that is to say, Islam, but between the two most powerful Catholic kings of Europe, Charles V of Spain and Francis I of France.

Charles V, son of Philip the Fair and Joanna the Mad, was born with the century in Ghent, and royal titles dropped into his wagon like overripe fruit in an October orchard. At six he was duke of Burgundy, at sixteen, king of Spain; in the fullness of time, he would also be king of Sicily, Naples, Jerusalem, the Balearics, the Canaries, and the Indies; archduke of Austria; duke of Brabant, Styria, Carinthia, Carniola, Luxembourg, Limberg, Athens, and Patras; count of Habsburg, Flanders, and Tyrol; count palatine of Burgundy, Hainaut, Pfirt, and Roussillon; landgrave of Alsace; count of Swabia; lord of Asia and Africa, Holland, and the Holy Roman Empire. His holdings in the Americas and the Philippines, as well as the various strongholds on the North African coast, were almost superfluous.

Late portraits of Charles—Titian did several—show a face that was long, ugly, intelligent, self-aware, and intermittently amused. These older pictures stand in stark contrast to an earlier woodcut of the younger man, beardless, even foolish looking, with his gaping mouth and unnaturally protuberant jaw. The impression was magnified in person as he stuttered, spraying spittle on captive audiences, calling to mind descriptions of the Roman Emperor Claudius. As with Claudius, the appearance of simplemindedness was misleading, but one he seems to have been in no great hurry to dispel. He knew his capabilities, and in time so did others. His virtues were a very public loyalty, dedication, and piety.

The same could not be said of the king of France. While Charles wore plain black, Francis I flaunted highly colored brocades. A charming, vain, and fundamentally shallow man, Francis poured out fabulous sums on art and artists (Leonardo da Vinci died while working in his court), on books, and on some of the finest châteaux in France. It was unfortunate that he should live in such turbulent times.

When Charles came to the Spanish throne in 1514, the twenty-year-old Francis had been king of France for a year. Charles was cordial at their first meeting, and Francis could well have imagined that the drooling, slack-jawed Charles might look up to the dashing king of France. Certainly Charles, whose first language was French, acted with a cheerful respect and listened to everything the older king had to say. They might have strolled or ambled along side by side in harmony except for one thing—both men wanted to be Holy Roman emperor.

The title was in the gift of seven electors, all German, and they did not confer it lightly. From the year 800, when Charlemagne was crowned, until 1806, the Holy Roman emperor was secular head of the church, defender of the faith, and the pope’s generalissimo. There was no money in the title, but it carried significant moral authority. The Holy Roman emperor was, in a sense, the first among equals of Europe’s kings, though in practice he was only as strong as his army and his alliances. Francis wanted the title and felt he deserved it. Certainly he had paid enough for it. Honoring custom, Francis handed out four hundred thousand gold pieces to seal the deal.9 Charles, whose grandfather Maximilian I had held the position, handed out more. In 1519 the title went to Charles.

Francis sought consolation in 1524 by invading Italy and enforcing a dubious claim to Milan. It was an act of vanity that played to his taste for war and intrigue, and it was only the most fleeting of victories. He succeeded in taking the city but was himself captured by Spanish forces while laying siege to the imperial stronghold in Pavia. The French king was settled into a soft captivity in Madrid, while Charles pondered what to do with him. Charles, whatever his faults, was not by nature vindictive. He told the Venetian ambassador, a stickler for details like all Venetian ambassadors, that he hoped the victory would pave the way for a unified Christendom that could battle Islam.¹⁰ Italian and Vatican officials, skeptics by nature, didn’t believe this for a minute.¹¹ Pope Clement was increasingly fretful that Charles, ruler of Naples and Sicily, was already too much at home in Italy, an opinion shared in Venice, Florence, and other city republics farther north.

Pope Clement saw this impasse as an opportunity for L’Isle-Adam. The grand master was, after all, technically a subject of Francis, and it had been to Francis that L’Isle-Adam had sent his earliest requests for aid before the fall of Rhodes. Clement encouraged the grand master to head to Madrid to work out a deal between Charles and Francis, to persuade them to turn their attention against their common enemy of Islam. L’Isle-Adam should also press for a permanent home, Malta by preference.12

How much good L’Isle-Adam accomplished for the cause of Christian unity is unknowable. The only point he is said to have resolved was one of protocol: who, when the emperor and monarch were together, should have precedence in entering a room? Charles had deferred to Francis; Francis to Charles. Charles asked L’Isle-Adam his opinion, and L’Isle-Adam turned to Francis: “No one, sire, can dispute that the emperor is the mightiest prince in Christendom; but as you are not only in his dominions but within his palace, it becomes you to accept the courtesy by which he acknowledges you as the first of European kings.”¹³ Such niceties kept negotiations alive and Francis imprisoned for the better part of a year. L’Isle-Adam meanwhile had other things on his mind, and they must have proved a tantalizing distraction from the ongoing impasse between jailor and prisoner.

He had a chance to take back Rhodes.

Even at this late date, there were still men who thought they could get the better of Suleiman. One of them was Ahmed Pasha, Suleiman’s general-in-chief during the siege of Rhodes and the face of rough justice to Suleiman’s magnanimity. After the knights’ surrender, he kept various sacred relics, notably the mummified arm of St. John, for a ransom of thirty thousand ducats.¹⁴

Now, two years later, he needed them. In 1524, passed over in his ambitions to become chief vizier in Istanbul, Ahmed Pasha had been sent to quell a revolt in Egypt. He did so, and in the doing began to imagine some outsized ambitions for himself. He was officially the governor of Egypt, but according to a Muslim chronicler, “He allowed himself to be led astray by the devil and plotted for the Sultanate.”¹⁵ His plan was to resurrect the Mamluk state, with himself as leader, to which end he had succeeded in expelling all troops faithful to Suleiman. Coins were to bear his name, the khutba (Friday sermon) to be said in his name.¹⁶

For this project to work, he would need as much help as he could get, and he did not much care where he got it. If the Knights of St. John could act as a buffer for him on Rhodes, he would be happy to help them get there. There was precedence. The knights had allied with Egyptian Mamluks against the Ottomans in the fifteenth century.17 Discrete inquiries were made, nods and whispers exchanged, and L’Isle-Adam was convinced that their old enemy was sincere. Was the plan feasible? L’Isle-Adam sent Antonio Bosio (uncle of Giovanni Bosio, who would write the chronicles of the Order), disguised as a merchant, to investigate. What he saw was encouraging. Ottoman rule at Rhodes had been remarkably negligent. The broken walls were unrepaired, the people unhappy, the officials open to discussion. (Of course, the Ottomans might have considered that broken walls were a symbol of strength—what did any city under the sultan have to fear from foreign invaders?) Further trips followed, and Antonio Bosio met with senior Orthodox Christian clerics and Ahmed Pasha’s ally, the aga of Janissaries, at Rhodes.

Even after Ahmed Pasha had been assassinated and his pickled head sent to Constantinople (March 27, 1524), the knights pressed on. The island’s recapture would galvanize Christian fellowship among European rulers—it was theoretically one subject on which all sides could agree—and L’Isle-Adam wanted to know to what extent those present would be willing to help.

Charles offered twenty-five thousand ducats. The king of Portugal put up another fifteen thousand. Henry VIII of England would eventually pledge twenty thousand ducats, but only after two more years of pouting and a personal visit from L’Isle-Adam.¹⁸ Francis alone was unable to rise to the occasion. His immediate need was the paying of his ransom, which sum required special imposts within his kingdom. Honoring the general sense of collegiality at Madrid, L’Isle-Adam agreed to earmark the Order’s French revenues, normally exempt from taxation, for the ransom fund, and even donated money from his own pocket. Terms were agreed, signatures twirled, seals affixed, hands shaken.

It all went to the bad, however. L’Isle-Adam’s dream of returning to Rhodes died on the vine, and Francis would double-cross all who believed in him. The king, it turned out, had not been idle during his captivity. In his spare moments, he (and his mother Queen Dowager Louise of Savoy) scribbled letters abusing Charles and pleading for help. The emperor, they said, was a brute, an ambitious tyrant, a danger to peace-loving peoples everywhere. Both mother and son complained about Francis’s cruel treatment and requested that the recipient “demonstrate your great munificence and ransom my son.”19 The letters were addressed not to the pope or other European crowned heads, but to Suleiman, and to Ibrahim Pasha, grand vizier of the Ottoman Empire. No record exists of how Suleiman reacted—in general, the sultan cultivated impassivity like a prized tulip. Nevertheless, the letters were a huge advance in Renaissance realpolitik, a remarkable proof of Suleiman’s reputation and Francis’s desperation. When the republics of Venice or Genoa sent ambassadors to the sultan, it demonstrated once again that merchants care only for money; but when a powerful European king, and his mother, trudged to the Grand Porte, “refuge of the world,” for aid—that revealed an entirely new realm of possibility.²⁰

Suleiman dictated a friendly, if noncommittal, response: “It is not shocking that an emperor should suffer defeat and be taken prisoner. Take courage and do not allow yourself to be cast down.”²¹ The sultan also gave verbal promises to Francis’s envoy of more tangible help and mooted a joint effort at squeezing their common enemy Charles between their own two armies.²²

The collusion between Francis and Suleiman, like most secrets, did not stay secret for long, though perhaps unfortunately it did not come to light until Charles had released Francis on the promise, unfulfilled, that the French king would not raise arms against the empire. One courier went through a region of Italy under imperial control and, as will happen, was detained, searched, and the letter discovered in his boots. Charles himself would not believe it until he was presented with a copy of the sultan’s letter. He was outraged. A Christian might trade with Muslims (Charles himself had extended a treaty of peace and commerce with Suleiman’s father). He might even enter alliances with a petty sheik on the North African coast, though only against another Muslim. But for a Christian to solicit a Muslim power against fellow Christians was unimaginable. Charles, in a gesture that seemed quixotic even at the time, challenged Francis to single combat, a challenge idly accepted but never actually fought (though interesting to contemplate).²³

Others in Europe were less outraged at Francis’s intrigues. Indeed, the various powers of Italy—the republics of Venice, Genoa, and Florence, the Duchy of Milan, and even the Pope—now seemed to fear Charles more than Islam, and cobbled together the so-called League of Cognac to preserve their interests against a presumably rapacious Charles. Francis, now freed from prison on the solemn promise that he would renounce his war aims, immediately accepted the invitation to join the league. His envoys suggested that French armies now embark on a full-scale invasion of his own, “without which Charles will inevitably become signor dil mondo, king of the world.”24

In the event, the League of Cognac never fully coalesced, and Charles’s troops, unpaid for months, grew restless. With nothing to restrain it and with the natural instincts of a predator, the army, more a mob than a disciplined military force, roused from its fitful sleep and embarked on the very invasion that the league had been formed to prevent. Their target was Rome. German Lutherans, men who despised the Catholic Church, had religious zeal to help motivate them. Others, nominally good Catholics, considered only the city’s wealth. The troops trudged down the spine of Italy, their numbers swollen by adventurers and bandits and opportunists until, when they arrived at Rome, they were some forty thousand strong.²⁵

The sack of Rome, on May 6, 1527, was straight out of Dante’s inferno: civilians were attacked, robbed, and murdered; churches ransacked; priests killed; nuns raped; buildings burned. It was a scandal across Christendom, and Charles was mortified to learn what his men had done.²⁶ In the following weeks there was some residual fighting in Naples, Savoia; there were some changes of allegiance—Admiral Andrea Doria of Genoa now chose to switch sides from Francis to Charles—but at the end of the day, a general peace was settled and Pope Clement finally crowned Charles Holy Roman emperor in Bologna.

As for the Knights of St. John, they had maintained their neutrality and sat out the conflict. In August of 1526, they disarmed their galleys to demonstrate their indifference to political arguments between Christian rulers. They lost some tapestries in the looting at Rome, but were otherwise little affected materially. Spiritually, however, the more devout members were devastated. These men had put their lives on the line, had lost companions, good Christians, while defending the continent at the edge of Christendom, and all for a people who saw fit to squabble among themselves when their common enemy was still eyeing the landmass of Europe. They had voluntarily contributed to the ransom that freed Francis from Madrid only to find that he had been consorting with the enemy. After five long years with no central location to call their own, utter dissolution of the Order now seemed a distinct possibility, and one that haunted the grand master. On January 21, 1527, L’Isle-Adam gathered an audience of knights to their quarters in Viterbo and announced that he feared he might “prove to be the last Grand Master” and then broke down in tears.27

L’Isle-Adam was nothing if not resilient, and with the return of peace in Italy, he returned to the problem of a permanent home. It took another three years, but once all other options were exhausted, L’Isle-Adam capitulated. Charles, unwavering in his loyalty to Christendom, contracted an official donation of Malta and Tripoli to the Order for as long as they remained on the island, to revert to the Emperor should they leave. It was fully accepted on April 25, 1530. The knights now inhabited a fiefdom of Spain, for which they would give him every year on All Saints Day a single falcon—far less than the one hundred thousand gold pieces that L’Isle-Adam had desperately offered just seven years earlier.²⁸ It wasn’t Rhodes, but it was better than nothing. All that remained was for the Order to recover their purpose.