RELIEF INTO BIRGU
If the fort is on the water, there must be stones and stakes emplaced around it to render its approach secure, so that the sea borne machines of war should not be able to advance within close range.
Giovanni Battista Alberti, De Re Aedificatoria
The enemy is laboring with all diligence to dig trenches all around Senglea, and although the Pasha and his Janissaries have not yet moved from the Marsa, they will not delay long, perhaps tomorrow, having already established many emplacements above Santa Margarita . . . It is desirable to send some vessels to hearten our people.
Valette to Don Garcia, June 29, 1565
The offer and refusal of surrender was as much a matter of protocol for Mustapha as it had been for Valette. Mustapha, however, also had a practical reason for ending the siege now. This was not Rhodes, close to the center of Ottoman power. If he should manage to seize Malta, it would need walls. Anything that was destroyed on Malta, particularly any defense works, would have to be rebuilt. Even as his heralds had raised white flags, he had been arranging his guns before Senglea and Birgu. Four new platforms rose on the grand master’s garden in the Marsa, readying the army for the next phase of operations—the battle for Senglea and Birgu.
On the morning of July 2, a lone man dressed in red robes stood on the shore across the Spur of St. Michael. The clothing suggested a figure of some consequence, and for some reason he was waving his hands at the defenders, trying to catch their attention. Someone shouted over to him, asking his business. He called back that he wished to join them but had no way of getting across. Could they send a boat over to fetch him? The ranking officer hesitated. A boat over would require lowering the massive chain that defended the water between Senglea and Birgu. He needed permission from Valette for this and sent a runner to get it. It would, however, take some time and the man was advised to swim, if he was able, and wait for Christian swimmers if he was not.
This conversation had been carried on over a thousand feet of water, and although it was far from the Ottoman activities, it could not escape notice for long. Armed Muslim soldiers from Coradin began to run down Sciberras toward the man in red. There was only one way out. The defector threw off his cloak, tied his shirt around his head, and stumbled and flailed into the water. As the Muslims drew closer, the men on the ramparts of Fort St. Angelo were able to provide covering fire. In the water, the renegade managed to reach the halfway point before he began to founder. Three Christians—a Maltese, a Provençal, and a Sicilian—managed to reach him and haul him back to Fort St. Angelo.
Once the rescue party and their charge returned, Balbi himself and Don Jaime de Sanoguera escorted the shaken guest to rest in the room where Valette once kept his lions before being led to the grand master.1 His Turkish name, he said, was Memi Celebi, but he was born Philip Lascaris. This would have raised an eyebrow among the knights. Lascaris was a name with roots deep in Byzantium’s imperial history, and included two emperors and a small army of court officials. When Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in 1457, his family had been largely humbled. He had, he said, been taught to despise the faith of his ancestors. The logic was simple enough: Allah had permitted Islam to seize Constantinople, proving itself better favored than Christianity.
In submitting to Islam, Lascaris found opportunities almost as dignified as any that he might have enjoyed in Christian Byzantium. The fifty-five year old had been a spahi and close to Mustapha Pasha. But the example of the Christian soldiers at St. Elmo had moved him and, as Bosio writes, “The Holy Ghost touched his heart . . . to return to the sacred Catholic faith” (ignoring that the Lascaris family had been born Greek Orthodox).2
This conversion was no small thing. As an apostate of Islam, Lascaris had bound his fate entirely with that of Malta. If the island fell, he would be executed immediately, and so more than most he needed to see the Ottomans fail. Fortunately, he had a wide and intimate knowledge of the Ottomans’ strategies, troop levels and dispositions, morale, intelligence, and supplies. He was able to tell Valette that an attack was imminent, and a serious one, and that it would come by land—no great secret there—and by sea. The bulk of the attack would, in fact, be aimed at the relatively weak western flank of Senglea, and to get the ships past the guns of Fort St. Angelo to the inner harbor, Mustapha would take a page out of Turgut’s playbook. He intended to drag his ships overland around the base of Mt. Sciberras.
Lascaris had other news as well. He was also able to explain recent anomalies, such as the smoke and flares that Valette had seen since June 24 at Mdina, but which Valette could not interpret. Lascaris said that this was a signal that the Spanish relief had arrived, a fact, he added, known only to him. (How this could be, we are not told, but if true, it might have factored into his decision to switch sides.)3
Confirmation that the Piccolo Soccorso had arrived came the next day with the arrival from Mdina of Toni Bajada. Valette pondered his options. St. Elmo was gone and had taken nearly a quarter of his entire force with it. His soldiers had bought him time, but that time was now up. The Ottomans were redirecting their guns against Fort St. Michael and Birgu. They were also redeploying around those walls, making it more and more difficult to get in and out of the peninsula. A few hundred fresh soldiers would be useful both militarily and as a morale raiser for the general population on Malta.
But could it be done? Bajada made frequent trips back and forth between Mdina and Birgu—as had others—but always alone, always at night, and always with a native’s instinctive knowledge of the area. Even those trips were dangerous. Getting a train of that many men weighted down with heavy clanking armor and metal weaponry through lines increasingly thick with enemy soldiers would seem nearly impossible.
Valette and the council discussed the matter with Bajada and Lascaris present. Lascaris noted that the Ottomans were at their most lax in the depression below Mount Salvador, opposite to the Post of Castile. Even a force as large as the Piccolo Soccorso might, with the grace of God, be able to follow the coastline, skirt the enemy pickets, and be brought to safety. Bajada could not do this alone; he needed guides who could navigate the terrain at night and keep a line of men this large moving quickly and quietly. Lascaris himself volunteered. He might not know the land as well, but he did have a native’s command of the Turkish language and the army’s habits, in case they were challenged. Others were quietly lined up, though not told what for—Valette could not risk word leaking out—then sent off to Mdina under Bajada’s command.
In short order, Robles assembled his troops and, just an hour before sundown on July 3, they began to march. Seven hundred men, many armored and some on horse—the silence could not have been total.4 The moon was entering its first quarter, too dark to be seen clearly. The closer they came to Birgu, the more Turks were in evidence on the ground. Several times the column passed “within a stone’s throw of the Turkish line”; not once did any sentry or watchman challenge them.5 The sheer unlikelihood of a Christian relief force was its protection. What the Ottoman sentries could not imagine, they would not investigate. Robles was not taking undue chances, however, and before he got much closer, he had his riders dismount and the horses sent back to Mdina. It was to be pure marching from here on in.
Some six hours had passed from the time Robles and his men had left Mdina. With just two hours of darkness left, they arrived on the outskirts of Birgu and filed north to the rendezvous point at the water’s edge. One of the guides descended into the glittering surface and silently disappeared toward the defenders’ bolt hole. Several minutes passed before the first of six longboats glided into view and settled near the shore. Then they began the steady feeding of the Christian defenses. For the next hour the boats brought the six hundred on the final leg of the journey, just as they had carried men back and forth from Fort St. Angelo to Fort St. Elmo. Their luck held to the end, when Robles allowed himself to be the last man out of 521 ferried across.6
Those members of the expedition leading the horses back to Mdina were not so lucky. Ten or twelve men under the command of Commendatore Fra Girolamo di Gravina, knight of Catania and Capitano d’Arme of Mdina, seem to have lost their way in the dark.7 They were discovered at first light and hauled before Mustapha. Gravina confirmed that the unfamiliar pennants now flying from the walls opposite were the calling cards of new soldiers, proof that Europe had not abandoned Malta as it had Rhodes and Djerba. It can be argued that the Piccolo Soccorso, more than any other strategic decision, determined the outcome of the entire siege. Even Balbi—who credits God rather than Don Garcia—notes that, had they not arrived, “Birgu would have been taken at the next assault.”8
The Ottoman response to the Piccolo Soccorso was a cannonade aimed at Birgu proper. The purpose was pure terror. It also meant repair work had become more dangerous. Valette directed that the Order’s slaves take this duty, both to keep Christians out of danger and in the hope that the Ottomans might be reluctant to fire on their fellow Muslims (who were, in addition, expendable mouths for Valette to feed). It was a vain hope. Even assuming he knew the sappers were Muslim, Mustapha was not going to spare any lives so long as victory was on the line. Besides, Muslims killed in this manner would go straight to paradise. The benefits were most likely lost on the slaves themselves, some of whom, to avoid the assignment, chose to cut off their own ears. (How effective this tactic was is not, unfortunately, recorded. Given Valette’s nature and the desperation of the defenders, one can guess not very.) Over five hundred Muslim slaves (los pobres) would die under the Ottoman guns.9
As for the Christian response to the Piccolo Soccorso, Don Garcia wrote that “the Grand Master’s joy was such that I cannot write about it without tears.”10 The new arrivals were, however, a mixed blessing. Although they had brought themselves and their weapons, they had not brought much in the way of provisions, and no water. Those still alive behind the walls, already headed toward strict rationing, were now allotted that much less, a serious problem on a dry, hot summer island with no wells, and with the rainy season still two months away. Geofrè de Loaysa and Iacomo Coloroti had still come up with no new sources.
If morale was low at this time, there was no record of it. Certainly the men of the Piccolo Soccorso were upbeat. Fresh and full of high spirits, they confronted the Ottomans the first day and “killed a great number.”11 The armories were running full tilt, forges blazing in the creation of more weaponry, slaves put to work making the slow matches for the arquebus. The bombardments became routine, and one can become accustomed to routine, however frightful. Slaves and civilians scrabbled at the collapsed houses and other unoccupied shelters in Birgu and recycled the stones and roof tiles to fortify the walls. It was in the open-air lee of these walls that many of the dispossessed civilians now slept.
Mustapha, however, was just warming up. On July 6, even as he was sending word out to Modon that he was greatly concerned about his diminishing supply of powder and cannonballs and ordered that more be sent, along with fresh fruit and “other things,” he was, as Lascaris had promised, pushing six Muslim vessels deep inside Grand Harbor, outside gun range.12 The next day there were six more and the day after more still. But forewarned was forearmed, and Valette had opened the question of how to improve Senglea’s shoreline defenses, and fast. The walls, only about ten feet high, fronted onto a stretch of flat beach. They held two gun emplacements capable of crossfire on the shoreline. How well this could hold off a massive, dedicated, and sustained assault was unknowable. In thirty years, no invaders had ever gotten this far.
A partial solution came from an aging captain who had clearly read his Alberti. This man advised an adaptation of the chain barrier that protected the inlet between Senglea and Birgu. The shoreline did not possess a pair of anchor points from which to string a chain across; it did, however, have sand. Sappers should be able to get out into the water, drive wooden piles deep into the silt and mud, and settle the ends just below the water level. It would then be merely a question of stringing a barrier chain from post to post.
The difficulty was in the doing. The Ottomans had arrayed sharpshooters on the far shore of Corradin, six hundred paces away, too close for anyone to expose himself in safety. Construction would have to take place at night. Maltese, adept at water work, again came forward. Under cover of darkness they dragged the piles out fifteen feet from shore, and in a feat of astonishing strength and virtuosity, somehow drove them deep into the seabed, underwater, at fifteen- to twenty-foot intervals. On the final day they mounted the chain, and where the sand or silt was insufficient and the space between the posts exceeded fifteen feet, they tied the chain in place with floating logs. A barrier now stretched between the point of Zanogara on Senglea’s tip to the so-called Post of Robles at the wall.
The Ottomans had monitored this painstaking labor and the men who had bobbed in the water and nighttime chill, sinking the posts and stringing the links. The day after that work was finished, the same Maltese heard the sharp tap-tapping of metal on metal. Ottoman swimmers had crossed the narrow strait and were taking axes to the poled chain. The demolition team was working in full daylight and under the protection of Ottoman sharpshooters, who would pick off gun crews, making certain that Christians did not fire on the sappers.
The gunners may have been cautious, but the men who had installed the chains were not going to let their hard work be destroyed without a fight. Four of them grabbed knives, rushed out a sally port, ran across the strip of land between wall and water, plunged in, and headed straight toward the Turks.
There followed a series of fierce hand-to-hand struggles. Steel blades and wet skin glinted in the sun, and dark water turned a shade of purple as the Maltese and Ottomans began to draw blood. Men slashed and gouged, held their opponents under the surface, burst up and gasped for air, were pulled down again, never certain that they would ever come up again. The Ottoman sappers realized that their choice was between destroying the defenses or preserving themselves. In the end, they paddled back to their own line, the poles and chains remained as they were, and the Maltese returned to Senglea and safety. Not one of the Maltese was injured, testimony to their skills as swimmers and as fighters.
Later that day, the Ottomans made one more attempt on the chain. This time a single Ottoman swimmer carried a hooked line to the chain, threw it across, and returned to his comrades. The cable was attached to a winch, the purpose of which was to pull out the entire line with the mechanical advantage it conferred. A lone Maltese ran across the short beach, swam out to the chain, cut the cable, and the Turks never tried again.
Ottoman records of July 11 cite one Salih ben Mahmud as having “rendered outstanding services by cutting one of the booms laid by the infidels in the sea in front of the suburb of the Malta fortress,” for which action he was duly rewarded.13 The Ottomans recognized bravery and honored those who demonstrated it, whatever the final outcome.
Meanwhile, in sight and still out of range, the number of galleys kept growing.