PICCOLO SOCCORSO
The men of St. Elmo have shown the Turks what we’re made of.
Valette
Since early spring, knights and soldiers and adventurers had been gathering from all over Europe at Messina. Once arrived, they sat. The waiting was made all the worse by the knowledge that just over the horizon fellow Christians were engaged every minute of every day in a hard-fought battle that they looked all too likely to lose. The men had come this far; it was maddening to have to stop now.
The man holding them back was Don Garcia, and if he was holding them back, it was with good reason. As overall military commander, he had to weigh the strength of the Turks already on Malta against the strength of his own fleet. He repeatedly had told Valette that he would send a force when, and only when, there were sufficient soldiers to overwhelm the enemy. Valette, in a letter of June 29, downplayed the threat, dismissing the enemy ships as “the trifling guard that the enemy is putting up.”1 Don Garcia would not be moved. The Ottoman armada was formidable and circled the island like a jealous dragon, watchful, dangerous.
Nor was Malta the only battleground that summer. In July, Don Garcia was reported to have “fought with forty galleys, and taken twenty-five and sunk the rest.”2 Algerians were, according to rumor, again laying siege to Spanish-held Oran, due south of Cartagena (unsuccessfully in the end).3
Always, Don Garcia had to consider the wishes of his king, who, like Suleiman, above all wanted to preserve the fleet. Suleiman was generally more aggressive than Philip, in part because he had no one else to answer to. In Philip’s case, the concern over his ships was stronger both because he had lost so much at Djerba and because his current fleet was largely funded by the generosity of the pope, who expected results. A navy was hideously expensive, and having recently borrowed two hundred thousand ducats from his Genoese banker Nicolò Grimaldi, “il Monarca,” he could not afford to lose another.4 If Philip’s galleys should be lost, the situation would be suddenly and drastically worse for Malta, Italy, and Spain, a point his father had taken some pains to drum into him.5 Philip said outright that his ships’ “conservation was more important than the relief.”6 (Giovanni Battista Adriani, court historian to the Medici, makes an offhand comment about Spain’s “customary slowness” (l’uso loro tardissime).7
There was also the question of tactics. Amphibious landings have always been a difficult business. Attempting one against a strong opposing force, and factoring in the sixty galleys patrolling the island, would be disastrous.8 What success Don Garcia had enjoyed in the past—and he was more successful than not—had been due to meticulous planning and a precise calculation of the odds.
The knights, understandably, didn’t want to hear any of this. Their position was simple. Their brethren were dying. They wanted to fight. This man was preventing them. In consequence, they hounded him. They reminded him of the service the knights had performed when he, Don Garcia, had taken the Peñon de Velez de la Gomera. They questioned to his face his strategy and his nerve.
It was not, however, as if Don Garcia had done nothing. Two other relief efforts had been sent out earlier, only to turn back in the face of Piali’s fleet.9 Moreover, the viceroy was dealing with a somewhat skittish monarch and had to convince him that the situation of Malta in general and Fort St. Elmo in particular might be worrisome, but not so dire that they should give up entirely: “And even if San Telmo [sic] were lost, I do not consider that loss the worse for Malta so long as the other [forts] are retained, because any fleet that [the Ottomans] will put in the port that lies under San Telmo is still subject to whomever is master of the island.”10 Philip meanwhile kept coming back to the situation at La Goletta. Did it have enough men, should they send more, had Don Garcia considered the thoughts of the locals?11 Don Garcia had repeatedly assured him that La Goletta was relatively safe, a “part of the world most difficult to attack, and easiest to defend, and if the Ottomans do go to that island I am certain that they will leave with little honor and a great deal of harm.”12 The king continued to fret, and Don Garcia replied with a tact that at times gave way to impatience: “If Your Majesty only knew how our enemies were now engaged on Malta.”13
Whatever the troops badgering him at Messina might think, the viceroy’s primary concern was with the island, and he had sent a long and detailed letter to Philip explaining the various risks of confronting the Ottomans on Malta (“putting people on the ground there is a lot of work”) or fighting the armada at sea.14 Curiously, Don Garcia’s brother-in-law Cosimo de’ Medici had taken upon himself to write directly to Philip, regretting that the knights had failed to prepare for this siege years earlier, but then suggesting that a few small relief forces sent in sooner rather than later could do good service while the larger relief for later that summer was being prepared.15 Whether this was done with or without Don Garcia’s knowledge or approval is impossible to know.
In the end, however, he did act. A small force of some forty-two knights and six hundred men, dubbed by history as the Piccolo Soccorso, the “Small Relief,” was slated to try where two other attempts had failed. It was still a risk—any force that reached the island could easily find itself caught between Piali’s ships and Mustapha’s army—but less a risk than sending everyone who wanted to go. Don Garcia, still unaware that Fort St. Elmo had fallen, was under no illusion that such a small number of soldiers would make much difference; at best, these men could be a temporary boost to morale, a show of good faith, and a means of disarming his critics.16
The boats would be commanded by Don Juan de Cardona, the land forces by Melchior de Robles, a highly charismatic Spanish knight of the Order of St. James and Maestro de Campo for Sicilian Tercios. In the past he had served as a soldier in Hungary and less dangerously as Gentilhombre de Boca for the Emperor Ferdinand.17
Don Garcia set down one condition—if they learned that Fort St. Elmo had fallen, the expedition was to be called off. The logic is clear enough. Their chances of reaching Birgu were better if Mustapha was still occupied with St. Elmo. If St. Elmo had fallen, the Ottomans most likely would target Birgu, making it impossible to reach. In that event, the relief could only be safe at Mdina, where they could do little good while eating and drinking stuffs that the locals could ill afford to lose. Don Garcia’s strategy all along had been to avoid any relief that was not overwhelming, and this exception needed exceptional justification. Bolstering Birgu and only Birgu was justified; bolstering Mdina, at this stage, was less so.
The Piccolo Soccorso arrived at Malta on June 29, too late to help Fort St. Elmo.18 There was, somewhat surprisingly, no interference from, or even sightings of, Muslim ships along the way. The galleys anchored most of the day a few miles offshore and behind the small island of Fifla. They sat there bobbing in the water for the better part of the day and night and only at dawn headed toward the western shore, where the lookouts saw the dull light of a nearly exhausted campfire. It could belong to Maltese fishermen; it could just as easily belong to Ottoman sentries. If the boats were discovered now, either from sea or from land, the expedition would be over before it had even begun.
Cardona brought his ships as close to shore as he felt prudent, then had a skiff lowered onto the water. Robles and two others climbed in and rowed toward the island. Among the party was Quincy, a French knight who spoke both Maltese and Turkish. Once the boat was dragged on shore, Quincy approached the fading campfire, around which was gathered a small group of Maltese peasants. He called out to them, explained who he was, and asked about Fort St. Elmo. The islanders regretted to inform him that the great fort had fallen with serious losses to his fellow knights and other brave soldiers. A tragic day for Christendom, and they prayed that the Turks could still be repulsed. The word also was that Valette, unlike Don Garcia, was eager to have any men regardless of the state of Fort St. Elmo. Quincy thanked the men for the information, got up, and returned to his comrades. His duty was clear and he did not hesitate. Fort St. Elmo, he said, still held out.
In short order, the men began to climb over the sides of the galleys and onto the longboats that would carry them to the shore. As they milled about along the beach, still beneath a black night sky, the ships had turned and, oars dipping rhythmically, disappeared into the dark. Cardona could not risk being caught in broad daylight in galleys stripped of their fighting men.
The Piccolo Soccorso was at risk so long as they were out in the open. Any stray foraging party, any patrol, might discover them and report their presence to the Ottoman command. The new arrivals needed to reach Mdina and safety as quickly as possible. At this point, fortune (miracolosa providenza Divina) favored them.19 A mild wind ferried in heat and moisture from North Africa, slowly but steadily, and in so doing conjured up an enveloping mist. It was and is an unusual midsummer phenomenon on Malta, and rarely so well-timed. Cloaked by this soft shield, guided by the coastal Maltese, the long train of soldiers ghosted its way across Malta’s short hills to the gates of Mdina, where it was welcomed with some surprise and great happiness by Dom Mesquita and the rest of city’s inhabitants. They would remain there while Toni Bajada, dressed like a Turk and fluent in their language, made his way through the lines, contacted Valette, and discovered what the grand master wanted them to do.
Mesquita was worried enough about word of their arrival getting out that he posted extra guards at all gates. It wasn’t enough. After sundown, a small boy at Mdina saw a man slipping out of the city. The boy cried “Turk, Turk!,” alerting a nearby sentinel, who saw the fleeing man and managed to capture him.20 Torture persuaded the renegade, a Greek, to confess that he had intended to report these new arrivals to the Ottoman invaders. He was taken out and quartered.
There remains the question of Don Garcia’s curious condition, so casually dismissed by Robles, for going forward only if St. Elmo still held. The answer was a matter of hard logic. As long as St. Elmo stood, the Ottoman army would be preoccupied. Until they could turn their attention to St. Michael and Birgu, Ottoman lines were as stretched and their mass as diluted as it would ever be. Don Garcia knew that messengers could get through the Ottoman lines, if with some difficulty. Once the enemy began to concentrate on Senglea and Birgu, those gaps would quickly shrink, or even disappear. Certainly they would become too narrow for any moderately large force to make its way to Valette. Don Garcia had managed this calculation with a nicety that his later detractors were to ignore. He assured Philip that “I didn’t consider sending these galleys except with a wide margin of time before St. Telmo was lost.”21
Men die, other men replace them. Turgut’s successor as governor of Tripoli was Uludj Ali, whose first duty was to carry back the body of the old corsair and return with the city’s munitions that Turgut had refused to bring. Turgut was honored as befitting a man of his stature. No anonymous mass grave for him—the old corsair was wrapped in cloth and laid to rest inside Tripoli’s al-Saraya al-Hamra (Red Castle) mosque that he himself had built for the city. It can still be seen. Fittingly, Turgut shared his last journey with soldiers wounded in the several assaults on St. Elmo, men who would otherwise cram the already overflowing Ottoman hospitals on Malta. Uludj Ali set off on June 25. He missed the Piccolo Soccorso by forty-eight hours.
Uludj Ali (variously known as Uluch Ali, Kiliç Ali Paşa, El Ulucchialim, and to the Italians, Occhiali), born in 1519 as Giovanni Dionigi Galeni, the son of a Calabrian fisherman, was the last of Khairedihn’s great commanders. Calabria, the sharp, rocky toe of Italy with its many inlets and coastal villages, had been a natural haunt for pirates and smugglers since before the days of the Greeks; and if there was little enough treasure to steal, there were always people to kidnap. Galeni was snatched in one of the too frequent slave raids. Rumor—since proven untrue but persistent to this day—held that he was a failed Jesuit, or that he was at least intended for the church, when he was taken by Muslim corsairs.
Galeni was short, squat, scabrous, shrewd, loud-mouthed, and apparently fearless. He was hustled on board the corsairs’ galley and chained to the rowing benches with the rest of the miserable Christians. It was a common enough story of the time; and with no family connections and no money, his only hope of freedom was that a Christian pirate, or the Knights of St. John, might seize the vessel. Until then, endurance, faith, and patience were the chief allies of a galley slave. Galeni may have had all those qualities, but he did not have tact. Where others would row in silence, Galeni spoke out loudly and often, freely criticizing the way the captain and crew were handling the ship. A cruder man might have taken offense at a slave’s backtalk, but Chaifer Rais, who owned the galley, was fascinated by the Calabrian. Something might be made of a man like this.
The story goes that Chaifer Rais brought his ships back home to Egypt and Galeni into his house. He made the Calabrian a proposition. If he would accept the blessings of Islam, his master would take him on as a business partner and give him command of one of his ships. It was a generous offer, and it took a strong man to turn it down. Galeni was never anything but strong, and his Christian faith was still powerful enough to send him back to the oar bench.
What the captain could not force, Galeni’s own temper made inevitable. One day a fellow oarsman, presumably tired of this man’s mouth, insulted him, one guesses grievously. Galeni lashed out and struck him dead. Under the laws of his master, the slave Galeni must pay for a slave with his own life, and suddenly a dogged adherence to Christianity held less attraction. Galeni immediately professed Islam and claimed its protections. The captain considered the matter. As the dead oarsman was a Christian slave with few rights that a man of faith was bound to respect, the matter could be ended then and there. Galeni was free from the oar bench, free to join his master’s enterprises, free to marry his master’s daughter.
Now reborn as Uludj Ali, he began his rise to greatness. He started out as an able-bodied merchant seaman and soon became one of Barbarossa’s protégés. By 1560 he was sailing in tandem with Turgut, and as we have seen, played a significant part in the fight for Djerba. When he arrived at Malta, just before Turgut, he brought four ships, three hundred Levantine fighters, and three hundred Egyptians skilled in digging tunnels. Just the sort of man Mustapha could use. Unfortunately, although his own luck would hold out, his contributions at Malta would be plagued by bad timing.
Mustapha, his spleen vented on the dead of St. Elmo, now had a harder nut to crack in Birgu and Fort St. Michael. In theory, taking St. Elmo had been a worthy endeavor, but the cost had been horrendous, more than he cared to count, more really than he could afford. Even now he was preparing Suleiman for lowered expectations. He wrote that he hoped for victory, but that, in his judgment, it would prove more difficult and time consuming than previously believed.22 Balbi goes further, stating that Mustapha reported home “his small hope of actually taking Malta.”23 Suleiman, in a letter that must have been both encouraging and alarming, acknowledged the taking of St. Elmo and the loss of Turgut, then added that “you should encourage the army and the Janissaries to fight against the enemies and you should conquer the island. I trust that you and everybody else will succeed in this feat.”24
Mustapha could comfort himself with the belief that the worst was over. The Christians had put on a brave show, an astonishingly brave show, but one that had cost them as much if not more than it had cost the Ottomans. The cream of the knights had died in defending St. Elmo; those who remained might just be willing to accept peace with honor. Protocols of war, though much abused in this siege, still had meaning, and Mustapha would have to make the offer. It would be irresponsible, unchivalrous, and contrary to the laws of Islam to do otherwise. Worse, it would be unbusinesslike. Mustapha would rather take a walled city fully intact than plant his standard on a second pile of blasted rock.
On June 29, a small party overseen by a man on horse approached the walls just outside St. Michael under a white flag of truce. One of their number declared that he was a fellow Christian, a Spaniard, thirty-two years a slave of the Ottomans, and that the party wished to discuss terms. There was some consultation behind the walls, and after a time, an answer came down. The Christian might approach and enter. The others should stay where they were. Minutes later the old man was hustled inside, searched, and his eyes bound. He was then frog-marched through the stone streets of Birgu to the Piazza del Borgo, where his blindfold was removed. He blinked in the sudden glare, and he found himself face to face with an unsmiling Valette.
Mustapha, the slave told him, was proposing an honorable finish to this affair on the same terms as his master Suleiman had offered at Rhodes. The knights would have to leave, of course, but unmolested, and they might take their belongings with them. The Maltese were welcome to stay, their lives spared, their property and religion respected, and their safety guaranteed. Peace would be restored, lives saved, and honor served. The Order was even welcome to return east, to an (undetermined) “larger and better island than Malta, paying a light and fair tribute, allowing each one to live according to their own laws,” where they might “practice their skills as Hospitallers.”25 There could be no shame in accepting these terms. The alternative was the grisly fate of St. Elmo; worse, even—all killed and the grand master marched in triumph through Constantinople.
Valette listened to the envoy in silence, and when the terms had been laid out, he spoke. He ordered the guards to kill the man, in sight of the enemy, to make an example to others who might come to him with similar offers. The old man broke down. He was a good Christian, he said, an unfortunate who had been captured by these infidels and forced to serve them all these many years, but a man whose true faith had never wavered. He was here by order and hoped only to save the lives of fellow Christians through his mission. For the knight and a man of God to execute a poor wretch such as him would be a sin.
Valette let the man babble on for a while, then, at the urging of his knights, appeared to relent. He pardoned the envoy, but told him not to try this again, since he, Valette, would not entertain further offers from such barbarous men (gente tan barbara) and would hang anyone who brought them.26 He ordered that the Spaniard’s eyes be bound again, then led those present out of the chamber. They tramped down the hot echoing streets and into a stone-covered passageway, down some steps, then stopped. Again the blindfold came off. The slave looked about him, again adjusting his eyes in the bright sunlight, and found himself at the bottom of the ditch between the enemy lines and the defensive walls by the bastions of Provence and Auvergne. Valette let him take in the sight.
Mustapha, said Valette, might have Malta, but not before he had filled this ditch with Muslim dead.
The whole affair had been a well-planned piece of theater, but the dramatic setting and the blunt talk had a powerful effect on the slave. He said that the Turks would never take Birgu. He was not, however, going to risk uncertainty in his own life—faith could only take a man so far. He chose instead to return to the Ottoman lines, presumably to a familiar and comfortable station in life. He is hereafter lost to history.
The next day, Mustapha sent his envoys to Mdina with much the same message, slightly altered to play to this different audience. Suleiman, they declared, had no wish to make war on or in any way harm the ancient and pacific capital of Malta. His quarrel was with the knights, old enemies and constant troublemakers in the sultan’s domains. An alliance, or at least an understanding, was suggested, though on what terms we are not told.
It was an interesting approach, and the aristocracy of Malta, those old Italian families who had lorded over the island before the knights arrived, might have been tempted by the promise of renewed, if largely nominal, power on the island. That was the hope, in any event. Mustapha, however, was negotiating in a vacuum. The elite of Mdina had left the city before the Ottomans ever arrived. The envoys got their answer from an unnamed prefect, foursquare with the defense: “Those who are enemies of the Knights of Rhodes are also enemies of the Maltese, nor will I ever permit such an alliance.”27 Turgut might have talked his way into Tripoli. Mustapha would not be so lucky.