CHAPTER XVI
Malta’s history really begins with the Phoenicians, who set up a trading post there around 800 BC. Perhaps surprisingly, in view of the number of Greek inscriptions, there seems to have been no Greek colony on the island. Its strategic importance became clear during the Punic Wars, and it was fought over by Rome and Carthage–changing hands several times–before it finally fell to Rome in 218 BC. For the next millennium and a half, its history was predictable enough: Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Norman. The first of the Norman rulers of Sicily, Count Roger I, conquered it in 1090. Tradition has it that he cut off part of his own scarlet standard and gave it to the Maltese as their flag. Finding this rather too small, they added a piece of white cloth to it; red and white–with the subsequent addition of the Cross of the Knights of St John–remain the colours of the Maltese flag to this day.
With the collapse of Norman Sicily at the end of the twelfth century, Malta was granted as a fief to the country’s Grand Admiral, but it soon fell, with Sicily, to Charles of Anjou and then, after the War of the Sicilian Vespers, to the house of Aragon. Somewhere around 1250 King James I of Aragon expelled all the Muslims–who until then seem to have formed the considerable majority of the population–and the island remained at least technically under Spanish rule until Charles V presented it to the Knights in 1530. Just thirty-five years later it was to find itself at the centre of the Mediterranean stage.
On the international political scene during the nineteen years separating the death of Kheir-ed-Din Barbarossa in 1546 and the siege of Malta in 1565, there was a major change of cast. Henry VIII of England and Francis I of France died within two months of each other in 1547, and in 1556 the Emperor Charles V abdicated and retired to the monastery of Yuste in Extremadura, from which two years later he followed them to the grave. Spain he left to his son Philip II, the Empire to his brother Ferdinand; but Ferdinand himself died in 1564, to be succeeded by his son as Maximilian II. Only one of the old principals remained in the centre of the stage. Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent was now in his seventieth year, but his physical and mental powers were undiminished. So too was his ambition.
Süleyman had had plenty of time to regret his merciful treatment of the Knights of St John after the fall of Rhodes. His safe-conduct had been granted them in return for a promise never again to take up arms against him; never had a promise been so flagrantly or repeatedly broken. Clearly, the time had now come to expel them from Malta, just as he had expelled them from Rhodes. Now they were settled in their new home, they were threatening to become as persistant a nuisance as ever they had been. And the Sultan had another reason too. Malta occupied a key position in the central Mediterranean, forming a natural stepping-stone between Turkish-held Tripoli and Sicily, which belonged to Philip of Spain. Once it had fallen into Süleyman’s hands, it would provide the perfect springboard for a conquest of Sicily, after which landings in south Italy would have followed as the night the day.
Charles V had been fully aware of this when in 1530 he made the island available to the Order. What better means could he hope for, at no cost to himself, of protecting the southern approaches to his empire? The Knights, it is true, had not been initially enthusiastic: they had considered the possibility of a move to Malta six years earlier, and had sent out eight commissioners to investigate its possibilities. ‘The island,’ the commissioners had reported,
is merely a rock of soft sandstone called tufa, about six or seven leagues long and three or four broad;146 the surface of the rock is barely covered by more than three or four feet of earth. This also is stony, and most unsuited for growing corn or other cereals. It does however produce quantities of figs, melons and other fruits. The principal trade of the island consists of honey, cotton and cumin seed. These the inhabitants exchange for grain. Except for a few springs in the centre of the island there is no running water, nor even wells, so the inhabitants catch the rainwater in cisterns. Wood is so scarce as to be sold by the pound and the inhabitants have to use either sun-dried cow-dung or thistles for cooking their food.
Malta was not, admittedly, a place designed to withstand a siege. It boasted, on the other hand, three immense advantages: a limitless supply of mellow, honey-coloured building stone; a fine tradition of quarrymen, builders, stonemasons and carvers; and perhaps the most astonishing natural anchorage in the world. To this day the first sight of Grand Harbour from the heights of Valletta cannot fail to catch the breath. It was unquestionably this that finally decided the Knights–after eight years’ homelessness–to accept the Emperor’s offer of a lease. The rent was reasonable enough: a single falcon, payable annually on All Souls’ Day.
The Knights never forgot that they were first and foremost Hospitallers; for well over five centuries the care of the sick had been their raison d’être. No sooner had they settled in Birgu (now known as Vittoriosa), the northern of the two long headlands on the far side of Grand Harbour, than they set about building a hospital.147 Its predecessor in Rhodes had been famous throughout Christendom and visited by the sick of every nation in the western world, and they were determined that a similar institution in Malta should be equally celebrated–as indeed it soon became. Their second priority was defence: the fortification of their superb harbour and their navy. Shipbuilding was no easy task on a treeless island; thanks, however, to massive imports of timber from Sicily, over the next thirty years they gradually built up a considerable fleet, until by 1560 their sea power was probably as great as it had been in the old Rhodian days. It was just as well; when they received the first reports of Süleyman’s coming expedition, their navy at least was ready.
Certainly, they had no illusions about the danger they faced. Without vast reinforcements they knew that they would be hopelessly outnumbered, both in men and in ships, and they could expect little sustenance from their scanty, stony soil. They also knew, however, that that soil would show itself still more inhospitable to a besieging army. Whereas Rhodes had been only ten miles from the Turkish coast, Malta was nearly a thousand. Minor reinforcements might be brought in from North Africa; nonetheless, it was clear that the force which the Sultan was to hurl against them had from the first to be largely self-supporting. Small wonder that his invasion fleet, carrying as it did not only the entire army of some 40,000 men with their horses, cannon, ammunition and military supplies but food and water too and even fuel for cooking, was said to be one of the largest ever to embark on the high seas. It consisted of well over 200 ships, including 130 oared galleys, thirty galleasses148 and eleven tub-shaped merchantmen which relied, like the galleons, entirely on sail. The remainder was made up of assorted smaller ships, mostly barques and frigates. Swelling the numbers still further–though emphatically not part of the official expedition–were the privateers, circling like vultures around them.
In 1557, at the age of sixty-three–he was almost exactly the same age as Süleyman–Jean Parisot de la Valette had been elected forty-eighth Grand Master of the Order of St John. A Gascon, he is said by the Abbé de Brantôme to have been outstandingly handsome and to have spoken several languages fluently, including Italian, Spanish, Greek, Turkish and Arabic. He was also a hard, implacable defender of the Christian faith. As a young Knight of twenty-eight he had fought at the siege of Rhodes; later he had been captured and had suffered for a year as a Turkish galley slave. He was utterly single-minded in the service of the Order–a man, it was said, ‘equally capable of converting a Protestant or governing a kingdom’. Faith, strength, leadership and steel discipline, all were his. He was to need them all in the ordeal that lay ahead.
The Knights, it need hardly be said, had their spies in Constantinople. They knew as soon as anyone when the Sultan had begun his preparations, and from the moment of his election La Valette had every able-bodied man in Malta working flat out to be ready for the battle to come. He had appealed for reinforcements of men and materials from the commanderies of the Order that were scattered throughout Christian Europe; even so, at the start of the siege he could count on only some 540 Knights with their servants-at-arms, together with about 1,000 Spanish infantrymen and arquebusiers and perhaps 4,000 local Maltese militia. He had also ordered emergency supplies of grain from Sicily and additional armaments and munitions from France and Spain. All his water cisterns were full, and he had no compunction in arranging for the waters of the Marsa–a low-lying region beyond Grand Harbour which he knew must be the principal source of water for any besieging army–to be contaminated with dead animals when the time came.
The great fleet appeared off the horizon on 18 May 1565. The Sultan had regretfully decided that he was too old to lead it in person, as he had led the last attack on Rhodes. Instead he divided the command in two, the naval force to be the responsibility of his young son-in-law Piale Pasha (who had recaptured Djerba from the Spaniards some years before), the land army that of his brother-in-law, the veteran general Mustafa Pasha. It was to prove a disastrous decision; the two men hated each other, Mustafa being deeply jealous of the younger man’s success and his popularity with the Sultan.
Grand Harbour was obviously far too stoutly defended to be a possible site for disembarkation, and Piale eventually selected the harbour of Marsascirocco (now Marsaxlokk) at the southeastern tip, some five miles away across country from Birgu. The Knights made no attempt to stop him. They could have had little impact on so huge a force in the open sea or even at a beachhead; their one hope lay in their fortifications, from which they had no intention of emerging more than was absolutely necessary. The Turks, once ashore, then advanced towards the city and pitched their camp on the land sloping down to the Marsa, from which they had a commanding view of the whole anchorage. There, stretching out before them, was the long central sweep of water, with the three narrower creeks leading off to the right and, to the left, the long crest of Mount Sciberras–where Valletta stands today–with, at its furthest point guarding the entrance, the towering walls of Fort St Elmo.
Had Piale Pasha elected–as he certainly should have done–to keep his fleet in the south (where it would have been perfectly safe during the summer months), Fort St Elmo would not have loomed large in Turkish calculations. Instead, he decided to bring his ships up the northeast coast and into the harbour of Marsamuscetto (Marsamxett), which runs along the northern side of Mount Sciberras. This certainly provided more shelter; unfortunately it brought him once again into violent disagreement with Mustafa Pasha. It also involved sailing directly beneath the guns of the great fortress, the destruction of which thenceforth became a top priority.
A cursory examination of Fort St Elmo suggested that, as a star-shaped fort of a fairly traditional kind, it might not be a particularly tough nut to crack. The principal difficulty was the dragging of heavy guns for nearly two miles along the ridge of Mount Sciberras, where they would be within range of the guns from the headlands of Birgu and Senglea on the opposite shore. Trench-digging here was impossible; within a few inches the sappers’ spades hit solid rock. If the troops manhandling the huge cannon up the slopes and along the crest were to be protected, it could only be by bringing up vast quantities of soil from the Marsa with which to construct earthworks. All this consumed the energies of most of the Sultan’s army, providing a welcome breathing space for la Valette and his men as they worked around the clock to strengthen still further the defences of Fort St Angelo, their principal redoubt at the extremity of Birgu.
On 23 May the attack on St Elmo began in earnest. Night and day the bombardment continued. A few days later there arrived the most celebrated Ottoman commander on land or sea, Dragut himself, seemingly unaffected by his eighty years. He took personal command of the siege, setting up new batteries to the north and south of the fort, which was now suffering a remorseless bombardment from three sides at once. By the end of the month its walls were showing signs of imminent collapse. Every night under cover of darkness small boats from Fort St Angelo slipped across the harbour mouth to bring the garrison fresh troops and provisions, returning with the wounded for the hospital in Birgu; it was only thanks to them that the fort held out as long as it did. One night, however, a returning boat brought something more: a deputation from the besieged to tell the Grand Master that they could no longer continue. La Valette looked at them coldly and replied that in that case he would replace them with others who could, and that these would be led by himself. Ashamed, they returned to their posts. St Elmo might be doomed, but there would be no surrender.
Somehow, the fort survived for a total of thirty-one days. When at last on 23 June the Turks smashed their way in, only about sixty of the original 150-odd defenders remained alive. Of these, all but nine were instantly decapitated, their bodies nailed–in mockery of the crucifixion–to wooden crosses and floated across the harbour mouth to the waters below Fort St Angelo. When La Valette saw them he ordered the immediate execution of all Turkish prisoners. Their heads were then rammed into the breeches of the two cannon on the upper bastion and fired back into the ruins of St Elmo. There was no mistaking that message. From that time forward no quarter would be asked or given.
The Turks had now achieved their first objective. They had done so, however, at a cost of nearly a month of their time and some 8,000 of their finest troops–almost a quarter of their entire army. They had also lost Dragut, killed by a cannonball in the last stages of the siege of St Elmo. He lived just long enough to hear of the fall of the fortress–at which, we are told, ‘he manifested his joy by several signs and, raising his eyes to heaven as if in thankfulness for its mercies, immediately expired’. Mustafa Pasha is said to have stood among the ruins, gazing through the summer heat across the harbour. ‘If so small a son has cost us so dear,’ he murmured, ‘what price must we pay for the father?’
The father was, of course, Fort St Angelo itself. Behind it was the headland of Birgu, the Knights’ fortified city. Beyond the narrow inlet to the southwest lay the neighbouring headland of Senglea. It was on the defence of these two parallel peninsulas, by now completely surrounded by the Ottoman army, that the Order of St John depended for its survival. They were connected by a flimsy bridge across the creek (now known as Dockyard Creek) and by a chain stretched on pontoons across its mouth. At the landward end, a palisade of stakes had been driven into the muddy bottom. No longer, however, after the fall of St Elmo, could the entrance to Grand Harbour itself be blocked; the Turkish ships could sail down its entire length, with only the guns of St Angelo to hinder them.
But there were consolations too. In order to move into their new positions south of Senglea and Birgu, the Turks would be obliged to drag all their heavy cannon, ammunition and supplies back along Mount Sciberras and then around the harbour, over a good four miles of roads that were little more than cart tracks and in the fierce heat of a Maltese summer. Moreover, on the very day that St Elmo fell, ships from Sicily carrying a relief force of perhaps 1,000 all told, including forty-two Knights, had managed to land and, a week later, to make their way by night to what is now Kalkara, beyond another creek to the northeast of Birgu. Not only the arrival of the force itself, but its almost miraculous success in avoiding the Turkish army, had an immense effect on the Knights’ morale.
But the struggle continued. In mid-July a concerted attack on Senglea was made from the sea. It was foiled by the courage of the native Maltese, superb swimmers who tipped the Turks from their boats and fought them hand to hand in the water. A hidden gun emplacement completed the rout. On 7 August an Italian gunner with the Spanish army, Francesco Balbi di Correggio, who was later to write a fascinating eye-witness account of the siege, noted:
August 7: A general assault–8,000 on St Michael’s, 4,000 on the port of Castile…But when they left their trenches we were already at our posts, the hoops alight, the pitch boiling…When they scaled the works they were received like men who were expected…The assault lasted nine hours, from daybreak till after noon, during which the Turks were relieved by fresh troops more than a dozen times, while we refreshed ourselves with drinks of well watered wine and some mouthfuls of bread…Victory was given to us again…though not one of us could stand on his feet for wounds or fatigue.
But by this time it was becoming clear that the Turkish army too was weakening. The heat was merciless. Food was short and water shorter still, since the dead animals with which the Knights had deliberately fouled the wells of Marsa had now been supplemented by large numbers of Turkish corpses. By the end of August dysentery had spread through the Ottoman camp, its victims being carried in the blazing sun to the improvised sick tents where they died in their hundreds. The Turks knew, too, that it would soon be the time of the equinoctial gales, which would be quickly followed by the first winter storms. Mustafa Pasha was prepared to spend the winter on the island if necessary, in the hopes of starving out the besieged; Piale, on the other hand, would not hear of it. The navy, he argued, was more important than the army, and he could not risk wintering his ships without a proper anchorage and full maintenance facilities. He would be getting the fleet under way by the middle of September at the latest; if the army wanted to stay it was up to them, but they would be on their own.
Had Süleyman’s forces remained, it is doubtful whether the Knights could possibly have held out. But then, on 7 September, came deliverance: the Gran Soccorso, as it was called, the Great Relief, sent by the Spanish viceroy in Sicily. Its 9,000 men were fewer than La Valette had expected, but they were enough. Mustafa hesitated no longer. Suddenly the guns were quiet; the clamour ceased; instead of smoke, there was only dust from the feet of what was left–little more than a quarter–of the once-proud army as it shambled back to the impatient ships. But the Christians too had sustained terrible losses. Two hundred and fifty Knights were dead, the survivors nearly all wounded or maimed. Only 600 men were now capable of bearing arms. And of the city of Birgu scarcely one stone was left on another; vulnerable to fire on every side, strategically it had proved a disaster. And so, when old La Valette limped forward to lay the first stone of his new capital, he did so not on the ruins of the old one but away on the heights of Mount Sciberras opposite, dominating Grand Harbour. As he richly deserved, the city was named after him: Valletta.149 Three years later, on 21 August 1568, he died. Sir Oliver Starkey, his secretary–and, incidentally, the only Englishman to have fought at his side throughout the siege–wrote a Latin epitaph, which can still be read in St John’s Cathedral. Translated, it reads:
Here lies La Valette, worthy of eternal honour. He who was once the scourge of Africa and Asia, and the shield of Europe when he drove off the heathen by the might of his holy sword, is the first to be buried in this beloved city, whose founder he was.
One of the first major buildings to rise up in the new city was of course the hospital. Like its predecessor on Birgu, it still stands, but it is conceived on an infinitely more ambitious scale: its Great Ward, 155 metres long, is the longest hall (with unsupported roof) in Europe. By 1700, when it could accommodate nearly 1,000 patients, its walls were hung in winter with woollen tapestries, in summer with canvases by Mattia Preti.150 It is full of light, space and fresh air, those virtues in which the Knights–virtually alone among the medical men of the sixteenth century–put their trust. Moreover, unlike other hospitals of the time, whose patients were normally fed from wooden platters crawling with bacteria of all kinds, the Order provided plates and cups of silver, thus drastically–if unconsciously–reducing the risks of infection. Each item was carefully numbered and stamped on the side with the emblem of the Holy Ghost. Finally, the Knights knew the value of good nursing; every one of them, whatever his seniority, would do his tour of duty in the ward, the Grand Master himself taking his turn on Fridays. For ‘our lords the sick’, only the best was good enough.
‘With me alone do my armies triumph!’ Süleyman’s words when the news of the disaster was brought to him were all too true. Had he assumed sole command as he had in 1522, there would have been none of the destructive rivalry between Piale and Mustafa; his supreme authority, together with his inspired generalship, might have saved the day. His first reaction had been to swear personally to lead a new expedition to Malta the following spring, but he changed his mind, deciding instead to launch yet another campaign against Hungary and Austria. It was while he was encamped outside the Hungarian fortress of Szigetvar that he died of a sudden stroke–or possibly a heart attack–on 5 September 1566. The tenth of the Ottoman Sultans, he was also the greatest. He had not only greatly expanded his empire; he had set it on a firm institutional and legal basis and, largely through his own personal prestige, had raised it to the status of a world power. Had his successors possessed a fraction of his ability, the history of the Mediterranean might have been different indeed.
In the Christian west, still elated by the heroic resistance of the Knights in Malta, the news of the Sultan’s death was greeted with jubilation. But the question remained: had the Turkish advance been stopped for good, or was this only a temporary halt on its onward path? Süleyman’s successor was his eldest son by his favourite wife, generally known to Europeans as Roxelana, the daughter of a Ukrainian priest. Selim II ‘the Sot’–a nickname he richly deserved–could hardly have been more of a contrast to his formidable father. Short, fat and incorrigibly dissolute, he cared nothing for affairs of state, preferring to leave the administration of the empire to his Grand Vizir–who was soon to become his son-in-law–Sokollu Mehmet Pasha. Sokollu was by origin a Bosnian Serb who, as the last of Süleyman’s Vizirs–he had actually closed the old Sultan’s eyes in death–was fully qualified to carry on his former master’s policies into the new reign. He had long cherished an ambition to build a canal across the isthmus of Suez, linking the Mediterranean with the Red Sea. This too, had he succeeded some three centuries before Ferdinand de Lesseps, would have changed the course of history; but now, for the first and last time in his life, Selim the Sot overruled him.
For Selim had his eye on Cyprus. It was always said–and may well have been true–that his determination to seize the island was due to his penchant for its unusually potent wines. In fact, its strategic importance was every bit as obvious as the fertility of its soil; the wonder is that Süleyman had not acted years before to rid himself of an unwanted Christian presence less than fifty miles from his own southern shores. Cyprus was a colony of the Venetian Republic, and it was to Venice that, in February 1568, there came a number of disquieting reports. Turkish agents were said to be active on the island stirring up disaffection among the local population, many of whom had no particular love for their Venetian overlords. Turkish ships were taking soundings in Cypriot harbours. Most worrying of all, the Sultan had recently concluded an eight-year truce with the new Emperor Maximilian II, and was consequently free to devote all his attention to a new enterprise. It was true that he had on his accession also signed a peace treaty with Venice, but he was still very much an unknown quantity, and was moreover rumoured to be growing more and more mentally and emotionally unstable.
All these rumours, and many others of the same kind, continued to spread throughout 1569, and towards the end of January 1570 news reached Venice which left no doubt of the Sultan’s intentions. The Venetian bailo in Istanbul had been summoned by Sokollu, who had informed him in so many words that the Sultan considered Cyprus to be historically part of the Ottoman Empire. A day or two later there followed mass arrests of Venetian merchants and seizures of Venetian ships in the harbour, and on 28 March an ambassador specially sent from the Ottoman court delivered an ultimatum to the Doge: either Venice must surrender Cyprus of her own free will or the island would be taken from her by force. The Venetian reply was short and to the point. Venice was astonished that the Sultan should already wish to break the treaty he had so recently concluded; she was, however, the mistress of Cyprus and would, by the grace of Jesus Christ, have the courage to defend it.
Already the Republic had despatched appeals for help to all Christian states, but the response had been less than enthusiastic. The Emperor Maximilian had pointed out that his formal truce still had eight years to run. From France Catherine de’ Medici, now effectively regent, was quarrelling with Spain over Flanders and had pleaded her old alliance with the Sultan. The King of Portugal had claimed that he was fully engaged in the east, and that anyway his country was being ravaged by plague. The Knights of St John–who were, incidentally, the biggest landowners in Cyprus–had been more obliging and had offered five ships; alas, four of them had been captured by the Turks soon after leaving Malta. No appeal had been addressed to Queen Elizabeth of England, who was under sentence of excommunication.
That left Pope Pius V and Philip II of Spain. The Pope had agreed to equip a dozen vessels if Venice would provide the hulls. Philip for his part had offered a fleet of fifty ships under the command of Gian Andrea Doria, great-nephew and heir of that Andrea whose hatred of Venice had twice led him to betray the Republic’s trust, at Corfu and Preveza, some thirty years before. Even this was a niggardly enough contribution; Venice herself had mustered 144 ships, including 126 war galleys. But Philip had always mistrusted the Venetians, whom he suspected (not without some cause) of always being ready to make terms with the Sultan if the opportunity offered; and as events were to show, he had given Doria–whose feelings against the Republic were no whit less hostile than those of his great-uncle–secret instructions to keep out of trouble, to let the Venetians do the fighting, and to bring the Spanish fleet safely home again as soon as possible.
From the start, the expedition was ill-fated. The Venetian Captain-General, Girolamo Zane, who had understood that the Spanish and papal squadrons were to join him at Zara (Zadar) on the Dalmatian coast, waited there in vain for two months during which his fleet was ravaged by some unidentified epidemic, causing not only many deaths but a general demoralisation which led to hundreds of desertions. On 12 June 1570 he sailed to Corfu, where he picked up Sebastiano Venier, the erstwhile Proveditor-General of the island who had recently been appointed to the same position in Cyprus. Here he heard that the papal squadron under Marcantonio Colonna was awaiting the Spaniards at Otranto–but of Philip’s promised fleet there was still no sign. Not until July was it learned that Gian Andrea Doria had simply remained in Sicily, on the pretext that he had received no instructions to go further. After urgent protestations from the Pope, Philip finally sent his admiral sailing orders, which arrived on 8 August; even then it was another four days before the Spanish fleet left Messina, and a further eight before it reached Otranto–a journey which, in the perfect weather then prevailing, should have taken no more than two.
Having at last joined his papal allies, Doria made no effort to call on Colonna or even to communicate with him; and, when Colonna decided to ignore this studied piece of discourtesy and to take the initiative himself, he was rewarded with a long speech implicitly recommending that the whole expedition should be called off. The season was late; the Spanish ships were not in fighting condition; and as Doria was at pains to point out, though his instructions were to sail under the papal flag, he was also under the orders of his sovereign to keep his fleet intact. Colonna somehow forbore to remind him who was to blame for the first two misfortunes, merely reiterating that both King and Pope expected their fleets to sail with the Venetians to Cyprus, so sail they must. Finally, with ill grace, Doria agreed.
Girolamo Zane had by now moved on to Crete, where the papal and Spanish fleets joined him on 1 September–almost exactly five months since his departure from Venice. A council was called, at which Doria at once began raising new difficulties. This time it was the Venetian galleys that were unfit for war; moreover, once the allied fleet left Crete there would be no harbours in which to take refuge. Now, too, the admiral revealed a fact that he had not, apparently, thought it necessary to mention before: he was instructed to return to the west by the end of the month at the latest.
Colonna remained firm. The season, though advanced, was not yet prohibitively so; there were still two clear months before the onset of winter. Cyprus was rich in admirable harbours. The Venetian ships had admittedly been undermanned after the epidemic and the desertions, but their long wait had given them plenty of time to find replacements and their crews were once again up to strength. Altogether the combined fleet now comprised 205 sail; the Turkish was thought to number 150 at the most. Why, therefore, should they fear an armed encounter? To retire now, before even sighting the enemy, would be nothing short of ignominious. Doria still prevaricated, and Zane sent a furious letter back to Venice accusing him of disrupting the whole enterprise. Then, on 16 September, after further delaying tactics, there came a report that the Turks had landed in Cyprus. It was now or never. On the night of the 17th the fleet sailed for the beleaguered island.
Almost immediately there came worse news still: Nicosia had fallen. Another council was called. Now, for the first time, the Marquis of Santa Cruz, who as commander of the Neapolitan contingent was technically a subordinate of Doria’s but who had hitherto taken a considerably more robust line than his chief, also advised turning back. The capture of Nicosia, he pointed out, would mean a vast increase in the number of fighting men available for the Turkish fleet, and a corresponding upsurge in enemy morale–all this at the worst possible time, when the allied crews were becoming more and more dispirited. Colonna agreed with him; so, reluctantly, did Zane. The only voice raised in favour of a continued advance was that of Sebastiano Venier, who argued that however strong the Turks might be, they would almost certainly be a good deal stronger next year, when the allies were most unlikely to have a fleet of over 200 sail to throw against them.
They were brave words; but they failed to convince, and the mighty fleet, flying the banners of Christendom, turned about without once having come within sight of its enemy. In an almost pathetic attempt to salvage the last shreds of his reputation, poor Zane proposed that the allies should at least try to inflict some damage on enemy territory during their return journey; once again, his hopes were sabotaged by Doria’s impatience to get home. By the time his ships reached Corfu on 17 November a new epidemic had broken out and he himself was, mentally and physically, a broken man. Lacking even the heart to return home, he wrote to the Senate in Venice asking to be relieved of his post. His request was granted, and on 13 December Sebastiano Venier was appointed Captain-General in his stead. Later Zane was to be summoned to Venice to answer several grave charges relating to his conduct during the expedition. After a long enquiry he was acquitted–but too late. In September 1572 he had died in prison.
The fate of Gian Andrea Doria was somewhat different. Philip II had been left in no doubt of the bitter feelings his admiral had aroused; Pope Pius, on receiving Colonna’s report, had sent him a formal letter of complaint. But Philip chose to ignore it. Doria had obeyed his instructions to the letter, and was rewarded by immediate promotion to the rank of general, with seniority over all the commanders of the fleets of Spain, Naples and Sicily–in which capacity he was to do still further damage to the allied cause before his disastrous career was over.
In 1570 Venice had held Cyprus for eighty-one years. In 1489 Queen Caterina had been replaced by a Venetian governor–known as the Lieutenant–based in Nicosia. The military headquarters, on the other hand, was at Famagusta, where both the standing garrison and the Cyprus-based fleet were under the command of a Venetian captain. Famagusta, unlike Nicosia, was superbly fortified. Historically it was the island’s principal harbour, although by 1570 Salines (the modern Larnaca) had overtaken it in terms of commercial traffic. The total population was about 160,000, still living under an anachronistically feudal system which the Republic had made little or no effort to change. At the top was the nobility, partly Venetian but for the most part still of old French crusader stock like the former royal house of Lusignan; at the bottom was the peasantry, many of them still effectively serfs. Between the two was the merchant class and urban bourgeoisie, a Levantine melting pot of Greeks, Venetians, Armenians, Syrians, Copts and Jews.
Cyprus, in short, cannot have been an easy place to govern, though it must be admitted that the Venetians–whose own domestic administration was the wonder and envy of the civilised world–might have governed it a good deal better than they did. By the time the Turks landed in the summer of 1570 the Republic had acquired a grim record of local maladministration and corruption, and had made itself thoroughly unpopular with its Cypriot subjects. Thus, even if the allied expedition for the relief of Cyprus had arrived on time and fought valiantly, it could scarcely have saved the island. A major victory at sea might perhaps have proved temporarily effective, delaying the inevitable for a year or two, but since the Turkish invasion fleet that dropped anchor on 3 July at Larnaca numbered not less than 350 sail–more than double Colonna’s estimate–such a victory would have been, to say the least, unlikely. The truth is that, from the moment that Sultan Selim decided to incorporate the island into his empire, Cyprus was doomed.
It was doomed for the same fundamental reason that Malta, five years before, had been saved: the inescapable fact that the strength of any army in the field varies inversely with the length of its lines of communication and supply. Since Cyprus had neither the means, the ability, nor–probably–the will to defend itself, it could be defended only by Venice, from which all military supplies, arms and ammunition and the bulk of the fighting men and horses would have to come. But Venice lay over 1,500 miles away across the Mediterranean, much of which was now controlled by the Turks. They, on the other hand, had only fifty miles to sail from ports on the southern coast of Anatolia, where they could count on an almost limitless supply of manpower and materials.
Their success seemed the more assured in that the Cypriot defences, apart from those of Famagusta, were hopelessly inadequate. Nicosia, it is true, boasted a nine-mile circuit of medieval walls, but they enclosed an area considerably larger than the town and needed a huge force to defend them. They were moreover far too thin–the siege techniques of the sixteenth century were vastly different from those of the fourteenth–and despite the feverish last-minute efforts of Venetian engineers to strengthen them they stood a poor chance of survival against the massive artillery that had long been a speciality of the Turks. Kyrenia had once been a splendid fortress, but had long since fallen into ruin and was unlikely to withstand any serious attack. The defences of all other Cypriot towns were either negligible or nonexistent. Manpower and weaponry were both in short supply. Fra Angelo Calepio, who was present throughout, tells us that there were 1,040 arquebuses in the magazines, but that no instructions had been given as to their use, with the result that many soldiers found it impossible to fire them without setting light to their beards.
For this and many other shortcomings the principal blame must attach to the Lieutenant, Niccolò Dandolo. Uncertain, timid, forever vacillating between bouts of almost hysterical activity and periods of apathetic inertia, he was totally unsuited to the supreme command. Through the agonising months that were to follow he was to prove a constant liability, his lack of judgement and immoderate caution giving rise to suspicions–as it happened, unfounded–that he was in enemy pay. Fortunately, there was a better man at Famagusta: its captain, Marcantonio Bragadin.
The Turkish fleet had appeared off the coast on 1 July. Once again it was under the command of Piale Pasha. The army, on the other hand, had a new chief: Lala Mustafa Pasha, who thanks to Dandolo’s timidity was able to land his entire force at Larnaca without opposition. By the 24th he and his men were encamped outside the walls of Nicosia. Now once again a chance was lost: the Italian commander of infantry begged for permission to mount an immediate attack while the enemy were still tired by their march of thirty miles through the heat of a Cyprus summer, their artillery and heavy cavalry still unprepared. But Dandolo declined to take the risk, and the Turks dug themselves in undisturbed.
And so the siege began. Dandolo, fearing a shortage of gunpowder, had rationed its use to the point where even those of his soldiers who had firearms and knew how to use them were forbidden to shoot at any group of Turks numbering fewer than ten. Yet somehow the city held out for forty-five days, all through a sweltering August; it was only on 9 September, after fourteen major assaults had been fought back and after Lala Mustafa’s men had given a noisy and jubilant welcome to a further 20,000 troops freshly arrived from the mainland, that it finally yielded. Dandolo, who had taken refuge in the Lieutenant’s palace some hours before, while his men were still fighting on the ramparts, now appeared at the doorway in his crimson velvet robes, hoping to receive the favoured treatment due to his rank. Scarcely had he reached the foot of the steps when a Turkish officer struck his head from his shoulders.
The usual atrocities followed, the usual massacres, quarterings and impalements, the usual desecrations of churches and violations of the youth of both sexes. Nicosia was a rich city, generously endowed with treasures ecclesiastical and secular, western and Byzantine; it was a full week before all the gold and silver, the precious stones and enamelled reliquaries, the jewelled vestments, the velvets and brocades had been loaded on to carts and trundled away–the richest spoils to fall into Turkish hands since the capture of Constantinople itself, well over a century before. Lala Mustafa, however, had no intention of losing momentum. Already on 11 September, just two days after the fall of Nicosia, he had sent a messenger to the commanders at Famagusta calling on them to surrender and bearing, as an additional inducement, the head of Niccolò Dandolo in a basin. The implication was plain. It would be their turn next.
Nicosia had given the Turks a good deal more trouble than they had expected, but the challenge of Famagusta was more formidable still. With all its recent new fortifications it was now, to all appearances, as nearly impregnable as any town could be. Behind those tremendous walls the defenders were admittedly few–some 8,000 as compared with a Turkish force which, with new contingents arriving regularly from the mainland, probably now fell not far short of 200,000. On the other hand, they had in Marcantonio Bragadin and the Perugian captain Astorre Baglioni two superb leaders, for whom their admiration was steadily to grow during the trials that lay ahead.
The siege began on 17 September and continued all through the winter, the defenders–very unlike those of Nicosia–making frequent sorties outside the walls and occasionally even carrying the battle right into the Turkish camp. Towards the end of April Lala Mustafa ordered his corps of Armenian sappers to dig a huge network of trenches to the south. As they numbered some 40,000 and were further supplemented by forced labour from the local peasantry, work progressed rapidly; by the middle of May the whole region was honeycombed for a distance of three miles from the walls, the trenches numerous enough to accommodate the whole besieging army and so deep that the cavalry could ride along them with only the tips of their lances visible to the watchers on the ramparts. The Turks also constructed a total of ten siege towers, progressively closer to the town, from which they could fire downward on to the defenders. It was from there, on 15 May, that the final bombardment began.
The Venetians fought back with courage and determination, but slowly, as the weeks dragged on, they began to lose heart. Hopes of a great Venetian–Spanish relief expedition had faded. Powder was running short, food was even shorter. By July all the horses, donkeys and cats in the town had been eaten; nothing was left but bread and beans. Of the defenders, only 500 were now capable of bearing arms, and they were dropping through lack of sleep; yet still they fought on. Not until the last day of that nightmare month did Bragadin and Baglioni face the fact that they could hold out no longer. Only by a voluntary surrender might they still, by the accepted rules of warfare, avoid the massacres and the looting that were otherwise inevitable. Dawn broke on 1 August to reveal a white flag fluttering on the ramparts of Famagusta.
The peace terms were surprisingly generous. All Italians were to be allowed to embark, with colours flying, for Crete, together with any Greeks, Albanians or Turks who wished to accompany them. Greeks who chose to stay behind would be guaranteed their personal liberty and property, and would be given two years in which to decide whether they would remain permanently or not; those who then elected to leave would be given safe conduct to the country of their choice. The document setting out these terms was signed personally by Lala Mustafa and sealed with the Sultan’s seal; it was then returned to Bragadin and Baglioni, with a covering letter complimenting them on their courage and their magnificent defence of the city.
On 5 August Bragadin sent word to Lala Mustafa proposing to call and formally present him with the keys of Famagusta; back came the reply that the general would be delighted to receive him. He set off that evening wearing his purple robe of office, accompanied by Baglioni with a number of senior officers and escorted by a mixed company of Italian, Greek and Albanian soldiers. Lala Mustafa received them with every courtesy; then, without warning, his face clouded and his manner changed. In a mounting fury, he began to hurl baseless accusations at the Christians standing before him. They had murdered Turkish prisoners; they had concealed munitions instead of handing them over according to the terms of the surrender. Suddenly he whipped out a knife and cut off Bragadin’s right ear, ordering an attendant to cut off the other and his nose. Then, turning to his guards, he ordered the immediate execution of the whole delegation. Baglioni was beheaded; so, too, was the commander of the artillery, Luigi Martinengo. One or two managed to escape but most were massacred, together with a number of other Christians who happened to be within reach. Finally the heads of all those who had been murdered were piled in front of Lala Mustafa’s pavilion. They are said to have numbered 350.
The worst fate of all was reserved for Marcantonio Bragadin. He was held in prison for nearly a fortnight, by which time his untreated wounds were festering and he was seriously ill. Only then, however, did his real torment begin. First he was dragged round the walls of Famagusta, with sacks of earth and stones on his back; next, tied to a chair, he was hoisted to the yardarm of the Turkish flagship and exposed to the taunts of the sailors. Finally he was taken to the place of execution in the main square, tied naked to a column and, literally, flayed alive. Even this torture he is said to have borne in silence for half an hour until, as the executioner reached his waist, he finally expired. After the grim task was completed his head was cut off, his body quartered, and his skin, stuffed with straw and cotton and mounted on a cow, paraded through the streets.
When, on 22 September, Lala Mustafa sailed for home, he took with him as trophies the heads of the principal victims and the skin of Marcantonio Bragadin, which he proudly presented to the Sultan. The fate of the heads is unknown, but nine years later one of the survivors of the siege, a certain Girolamo Polidoro, managed to steal the skin from the Arsenal of Constantinople and returned it to Bragadin’s sons, who deposited it in the church of S. Gregorio in Venice. From here it was transferred in 1596 to SS. Giovanni e Paolo where, in the south aisle near the west door, it was placed in a niche just behind the urn which forms part of the hero’s memorial.
On 24 November 1961, with the consent of Bragadin’s direct descendant, the niche was opened. It was found to contain a leaden casket, in which were several pieces of tanned human skin.