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Not Just the Tudors
The Great Siege of Malta
00:49:35
What happens when a small island faces the might of the Ottoman Empire?
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- [00:00]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb. If you'd like Not Just the Tudors ad free to get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to historyhit with a historyhit subscription. You can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my own on Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn, Brilliant Rivals, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com subscribe.
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- [00:47]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Okay.
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- [01:14]
Professor Marcus Ball
Perfect.
- [01:15]
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- [01:18]
Professor Marcus Ball
Hey, can I get your number?
- [01:20]
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- [02:03]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb, and welcome to Not Just the Tudors From History Hit, the podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to samurais relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. Defeated, homeless and low in numbers, the Knights of The Order of St. John, also known as the Knights Hospitalier, wandered Europe for seven years after being ousted by the Ottoman Turks from their home on the island of Rhodes in 1523. It was not the first time that the Knights had been forced to flee their base, having left Jerusalem in 1187 as the great Muslim leader Saladin approached, and again in 1291 when they fled the city of Acre as the Mamluks attacked. So when they were granted the isolated island of mortar in 1530 by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles Van no doubt they hoped that this would be a more peaceful, permanent home. Unfortunately, their activities raised the ire of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, who brought the enormous resources of the Ottoman state to bear against the tiny island. Despite being a religious order, The Knights of St. John had no qualms about engaging in piracy and enslavement against Muslim travelers and traders in the Mediterranean. At times, this was their only means of survival on the arid and resourceful island. Piracy was certainly no great stretch for a highly masculine and aristocratic order for which violence was a part of daily life. The efforts of this small but resilient religious order, with the help of local Maltese to resist the Ottomans caught the attention of much of Christian Europe. Many have positioned the siege of 1565 as a flashpoint in the clash between two superpowers of the day, the Ottoman Empire of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Spanish controlled dominions of the Western Mediterranean. Although our guest today prefers not to engage in such grandiose narratives. Joining me to explore further the story of the great siege of Malta of 1565 is Professor Marcus Ball from the University of North Carolina, an expert on Europe from the 10th to the 16th centuries and the author of a brand new authoritative book on the subject, the Great Siege of Malta. I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb and this is not just the Tudors from history hit. Professor Ball, welcome to the podcast.
- [04:52]
Professor Marcus Ball
Hello.
- [04:53]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
What do you think it is about sieges that capture people's imagination so much?
- [04:58]
Professor Marcus Ball
An excellent question. I think more than anything, we tend to see sieges, or at least favor a perspective on sieges told from the inside out. There aren't that many stories told from the outside in the Iliad, I suppose is an exception, Jericho. But mostly sieges embed themselves in popular memory, in the collective consciousness, when they are stories of epic resilience on the part of those on the inside. And in the process, I think they can be co opted as a kind of morality tale which tells A community, a nation, a religion, any group, that it's in the right, that its ability to overcome formidable odds against an implacable aggressor has in some sense served as a vindication of this group's self image and ideology. And one sees this again and again. A good example would be the enormous outpouring of relief and jubilation that greeted the news in Britain in May 1900 of the relief of Mafeking, which was being besieged in the Second Boer War, leading to scenes which were on a par, perhaps even more involving greater numbers and a greater outpouring of relief than VE Day, almost exactly 40 years later. Why not? Because this has been a crushing military victory, a battle won that illustrated the dominance of British arms, but that this had been a remote fortress commanded by Baden Powell, the future founder of the Scouts movement, which had held out for 200 and some days against the odds. Perhaps this signaled to everybody that the sun wouldn't set on the British Empire after all and that there was still life in the imperial project. And I think you find this again and again sometimes sieges where the defenders go down nobly. The Alamo would be a case in point. But the paradigm of the powerful siege par excellence is one in which the great's grain to odds. And with various close shaves, a dogged group of outnumbered, out resourced defenders nonetheless are able to fight back and to resist the seemingly insuperable forces opposed against them. I didn't really appreciate this when I started to research the great siege of Malta, but I became increasingly interested in the fact that sieges have a kind of transcultural, trans historical resonance that one finds in all sorts of places, and that that has in turn contributed to the popular memory, the image that is attached to the great siege of Malta. And indeed, for that matter, why, over the course of the 19th and 20th century, the words great became attached to it. Sieges are a powerful cultural property.
- [07:50]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And when it comes to this siege, the great Siege of Malta, which accounts are we relying on for details of the siege? Is one side more useful than the other? And, you know, are we telling the story from the inside out?
- [08:05]
Professor Marcus Ball
Well, that's part of the problem, because the overwhelming weight of primary evidence is from the inside out, or produced by those sympathizing with those on the inside out. The Ottomans on the outside did create records, some of which survived, though many were lost in a subsequent fire. Later Ottoman historians would seem to have had access to accounts of the siege which have since themselves disappeared. So we have a kind of echo in some later Ottoman evidence, the Ottomans were good at celebrating victories. They produced lavish, illustrated written account of campaigns that had gone well. This was part of their courtly culture. Needless to say, Malta, a rare setback, would not have been celebrated in that way, and the Ottomans essentially just moved on. Whereas on the side of the defenders, on the side of Christian Europe, they were beginning with letters and reports that were smuggled out during the siege, some of which were being printed even as the siege was ongoing, then growing into more detailed eyewitness narratives on the part of survivors, and finally culminating very quickly, in one case within a few months, in standalone printed histories. There was quite an industry for news stories, narratives of the siege, and this lasted for three, four years. Eventually, Lepanto, the great battle between the Ottomans and the west in 1571, as it were, became the new hot news item, and Malta receded into the middle distance. But for some years, Malta was the subject, or the siege was the subject, of fascinated reportage. There were also illustrations, paintings, prints. The Order of St. John itself were scrupulous keepers of records, and a number of those have survived. Relatively few tell us about the siege per se, but a lot tell us about the aftermath of the siege, how the Order coped, how it dealt with the many problems that the siege had left it. So, unfortunately, but unavoidably, there is this enormous imbalance of evidence. It would be almost impossible, I think, to tell the story of the siege solely from the outside in. It would be too little to go for the trouble. The challenge is not then, for to lean into a kind of sympathy for those on the inside simply because they are giving you the most evidence to work with.
- [10:41]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Thank you for that. So let's perhaps dial back a bit and understand The Order of St. John, also known as the Knights hospitality. It might be useful for you, if you could tell us why they were called that. Where do they come from and what brings them to Malta?
- [10:55]
Professor Marcus Ball
They originated in the 11th century, just before the First Crusade, as a religious order that provided hospital hospice services for pilgrims to the Holy city. After the First Crusade, when Jerusalem became controlled by Latin Europeans, gradually and perhaps in part imitation of the Order of the Templars, the hospital also required a military function. And gradually, that military function grew to be its principal raison d'etre. Though it never abandoned its hospital function and would always, wherever it fetched up, create a large infirmary to treat the sick. As you mentioned, the Order is buffeted by the vicissitudes of Latin European control and its retreat from the eastern Mediterranean. In the later crusade period. They found themselves on roads in the 14th century and having been predominantly a land based organization, were forced by virtue of being on a small island pinned against a hostile mainland in Anatolia, to develop a sophisticated naval operation. After about 200 years, as you mentioned, the Ottomans evicted them from Rhodes and there was an enormous challenge. What would they then do? They spent some years as it were, almost just migrating around parts of the Mediterranean, even living in tents on a be beach in the Bay of Naples. And interestingly, to my earlier point, even in those straightened circumstances, making it a priority to create an infirmary, even if it was under canvas on a beach. Eventually the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V gave them the Maltese archipelago, which was an appendage of one of his kingdoms, Sicily. The traditional story is that he was simply parking a rather sad anachronistic group of old gentlemen pass their best out of the way. It now seems more likely that Charles was thinking about using the hospital as part of an emerging forward policy in the Mediterranean. The knights arrived in Malta and it's important to remember they were also given a base in North Africa, in tripoli. And only five years later, in 1535, Charles V was famously launching an enormous attack on Tunis. So I think the hospital weren't just an anachronism parked out of the way in a feeling of pity, but were part of an effort to regroup and rethink the dynamic between Habsburg dominions and the Ottomans. They were small parts of it, but they would occupy a strategically important island and also had naval expertise which allowed them to punt significantly above their weight.
- [13:50]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I think that some people listening might struggle to understand how a religious order could lead a defense during a siege. And I would like to ask whether this aspect, this military aspect of their character had developed in response to circumstances. Having been on roads and given that you talk in your book about the importance of piracy playing a part in their survival, we should now think of them as sort of armed monk pirates.
- [14:17]
Professor Marcus Ball
But it's very good, that's a very good succinct way of capturing it. I think much of the, I suppose modern problem is thinking of how could a group of people combine overt religiosity, often ostentatious self conscious religiosity, with routine violence, violence both conducted in unofficial or semi official context and also as part of the institution's own operations. I think we just have to have the humility to remember that we live in exceptional times culturally and that most places, most peoples in most times have had no real problem living with some form of formal connection between religion and violence. And that the proof of that pudding, I think, is that having dick somewhat in prestige and visibility in the later Middle Ages, the Order was undergoing something of a revival in terms of its image and appeal to the aristocracies of Western Europe. Particularly by the time of the siege, Southern European, romance speaking, Catholic aristocracies in France, Italy, Spain and Portugal, much of northern Europe had been lost to the Order because of the Reformation. And that having for a long time appealed largely to the boys, the children of middling aristocratic families, by the 16th century, the order in its recruitment was becoming, for want of a better word, posher again, and that very high status families would be willing to vote one of their, quote, spare sons to a life in the Orders. The Council of Trent, the great reforming forum in which the Catholic Church tried to organize its reaction to the Reformation, gave the Order a green light. It could have said, well, you're a relic from a past age, thanks anyway, but thanks for the memories. But instead, Trent very specifically rubber stamped the vacation and existence of the Order. So it was invigorated in a way by the Counter Reformation, and in some sense could pose as the august military arm of a newly invigorated, militant, robust Catholicism that was fighting back not just against non Christian enemies, but in different ways against heretics, against Protestants.
- [16:47]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And you mentioned there that violence was sort of part of their functioning. One of the striking things is the role that violence seemed to play in establishing a hierarchy. And slapping each other was one way in which they did this.
- [17:02]
Professor Marcus Ball
Why? What you have to imagine is that There were about 14, 1500 Knights of the Order. The knights, the aristocratic elite, were actually in the majority. And at any given time, perhaps a fifth or a quarter would be in the convent, the headquarters in Malta. You take the essence of elite aggressive masculinity as it existed in 16th century Europe, and you distill it and pour it into this tight space as a kind of experiment to see what happens. And what you get is violence. Violence against outsiders, violence against the Maltese and servants, and violence against one another. And you're right, there was these subtle language, rituals, codes of violence. They weren't just fighting in the streets. Well, they were, but not always. And at the top of this hierarchy of controlled, ritualized violence was what the sources called the alappa, the slap or strike, which was really not just an impulsive punch, but a kind of controlled demonstration of disdain and aristocratic hauteur. And clear that the Order worried as much about these kinds of ritualistic displays than they were about People punching each other worse in the street. That violence was a kind of expression of aristocratic identity, and the Alapa was the cruel, cold expression of that mood.
- [18:41]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Given that you've got this group of multinational, aristocratic, violent young men, how did the Order maintain discipline?
- [18:49]
Professor Marcus Ball
It was tough. We know that disciplines could be tough, including imprisonment. As a religious order, they were technically not allowed to inflict capital punishment, but that was a technicality because they simply handed people over if they were to be executed to the, quote, independent civic authorities on Malta, and they would be summarily executed, often in quite cruel ways. They would throw people into very confined prison spaces. There was this constant effort to try and keep a lid on this bubbling energy. The challenge that the Order faced was that its career structure and command structure meant that at the sharp end in Malta, most of the Knights were young. They were relatively new recruits in their later teens and 20s. From there, they could expect in due course, to graduate to middle management positions, where they would be sent to the Orders many hundreds of properties distributed around Europe, the legacy of centuries of donations of lands, rents, incomes and so forth. And they would manage the Orders landed assets and send the money back for use at the sharp end in Malta. But that kind of middle age, sobering influence was largely absent. And what you had in Malta was this cauldron of young, violent aristos ruled by a small gerontocracy, a kind of oligarchy of very old men who had made it all the way to the top of the hierarchy and were now back in Malta forming the government elite. So it was a strange dynamic. In the event of something like the siege, or in the conduct of caravans, which were formal corsair piracy raids involving the Order's galleys. Having young, virile guys would be perfect. But for much of the time, the Order was desperately trying to find ways to keep a lid on this energy, or at least to find what they would regard as legitimate outlets for it. But it's an interesting, fascinating story, and it's a challenge to understand how that, if you like culture of semi licit violence, could then just flick, switch into siege mode and provide the energy which would the leadership, the officer class that would galvanize the defenders of Malta so as to be able to resist the Ottoman attack.
- [21:22]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Okay, so we've got the Knights settling in Malta in 1530. What sort of shape were they in after seven homeless years?
- [21:31]
Professor Marcus Ball
Poor. But they always had the assets of these landed estates distributed around much of Western Europe. It's true, every time one moved into military order, One was faced with enormous startup costs and the principal challenge facing them was to create fortifications in anticipation of any future attack. Malta was not heavily fortified or defended. There was one rather unremarkable fortress in Grand Harbour which was developed and became the Knights hq. But the capital costs of digging in to somewhere like new, like Malta, would have been enormous. And indeed the Knights were found out because in 1551 there was a significant raid by the Ottomans and their North African confederates. Raid might be too kind or too gentle a word, a mini invasion which badly exposed the parlour state of Malta's defences. And from that point the Knights went into a panic of activity, trying to create fortifications as quickly as they could, but on a budget. And what confronted The Ottomans in 1565 was essentially the product of that panic burst of fortification 10 or 15 years earlier. Scarcely adequate, but the proof was in the pudding, as the events in 1565 would show. Just about enough to keep the aggressors out.
- [23:01]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Just let's talk about those aggressors then. How daunting a prospect would it have been to go to war with the Ottomans?
- [23:07]
Professor Marcus Ball
Very. As is well known, 16th century Christian Europe had developed this fixation almost to psychosis, this fear of the Turk. And it's very difficult to know where judicious appraisal ended and irrational fear began. But I think the basis was a pretty sensible understanding of the sheer might of the Ottoman Empire. It had long excelled at being able to throw very large armies at its opponent and regularly did so, both against Habsburgs in Central Europe and against their opponents in the east, the Persians. They had developed naval expertise relatively recently, only to the point of being the dominant element in the Mediterranean in naval terms 30 years or so before the siege. But they had developed a skill at combining those two strengths, being able to use their navy to deliver at least significant portions of their armed forces. Their army never as large as you could throw against Vienna, for example, or in a campaign in Hungary, but still you could land several tens of thousands of frontline troops, a very significant artillery train and also supplies. The Ottomans, perhaps secret, was not just the skill of their frontline troops, their janissaries and sepahis, but also their shrewd command of logistics. So much 16th century warfare is really not about people fighting, it's about who's going to run out of stuff first. And the Ottomans were good at logistics. Malta stretched that to the limit. We know that towards the end of the siege they were panicking about their ability feed, to supply, even to bring water to Their army on a very dry island. Nonetheless, I think the fact that they were able to sustain this siege for four months ultimately comes down to their command of mundane but important matters of supply, plus a track record of confident military expansion.
- [25:18]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So you mentioned the earlier raid of 1551, and in that it looks like the Ottomans give up from a winning position. Why?
- [25:27]
Professor Marcus Ball
I think they had other fish to fry in the Mediterranean. I think it was perhaps a half exploratory raid. I think too, though, they realized that if they were to be serious about the reduction of Malta, they would have to bring a larger artillery complement. And they didn't. It literally didn't bring enough of the big guns. But in many ways, they did get what they wanted, or at least the North African Corsairs who had become their allies. Their coadjutors got what they wanted because they weren't sure about Malta per se. Malta's second island, Gozo, was devastated. The Ottomans allowed the Corsairs to conduct a devastating slaving raid. And it's likely that almost all of the 4 or 5,000 inhabitants of Gozo were scooped up and taken away. Gozo became the no man's land, and it took many years for it to be repopulated from Malta and Sicily. So in a way, they did get what they wanted, which was slaves, not just land, if you like, human resources were part of the equation here. It wasn't just a question of who owns what, who conquers what, but it's a lot of the violence that bubbles up through the Mediterranean in the 16th century is driven by slaving on all sides against everybody foreign.
- [27:02]
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- [27:33]
Professor Marcus Ball
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- [27:34]
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- [27:37]
Professor Marcus Ball
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- [28:57]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So is that true of the Knights of Mortar? How comfortable are they when it comes to slavery?
- [29:03]
Professor Marcus Ball
As comfortable as everybody else, I don't think. They don't do it on quite the scale of some of the North African Corsair cities, but that's simply because of opportunity and means and need. There are accounts of Ottoman officials and others being captured, intercepted on board ship, and have left accounts of their experiences on Malta. Slaving was different from what we imagine slaving in perhaps North Atlantic terms. Yes, many people were enslaved simply to be condemned to a life of hard labour, but some were taken in order to be ransomed. It was a financial racket. There's no doubt that the Knights were involved in that ransom business as everybody else was. We have records of them ransoming our high status Ottoman captives only a few months or a couple of years before the great Siege began. During the siege, there was a large, formerly Ottoman ship sitting in grand harbor, which the Knights had appropriated only a couple of years before. So this was an ongoing thing and indeed it was resumed as soon as the siege was over. This was part of the rhythm of the Mediterranean was the presence of corsairs from all parts of all religions preying on one another.
- [30:24]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Okay, so 1565. Why attack Malta and why then?
- [30:29]
Professor Marcus Ball
Well, my goodness, that's the big one. A traditional answer would be that the Ottomans were voracious acquirers of territory for its own sake. They were people on a mission. They were driven by a sense of religious antagonism which pitted two civilizations, two faiths against each other. It's impossible to say, while there was no attention to religious difference, that people weren't alive to the fact that the other people trying to kill them spoke a different language and professed a different religion. It would be naive to wish that kind of binary away. That said, I don't think that was the primary driver, nor indeed conquest. I'm not entirely persuaded that the Ottomans would have known what to do with Malta had they conquered it. It would have been spectacularly expensive to hold on to and they would have had to have effectively fortified it in the same way that the knights had to after 1565. The Ottomans would had to have built the letter at enormous cost. I think they were after the Order. They wanted to eradicate the Order once and for all. They specifically the Sultan Suleiman, had let the Order go with quite generous terms from Rhodes on the 1st of January 1523. And they repaid his generosity by perfecting this system of corsairing, preying on Ottoman shipping in the eastern Mediterranean. The stakes were higher because the Ottomans had in the 1510s conquered the Mamluk Empire, which brought them Egypt and access to the Red Sea and through the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean. Spice trade, the single most important element of global economy in the 16th century. The wealth generated from tolls and from the passage of goods and spices up through the Red Sea, arrived in Egypt and sailed from Alexandria to Istanbul. That naval maritime route became the lifeline of the Ottoman Empire. And it was precisely that lifeline that the Order was preying on. In the years before the siege, the Order had had a number of spectacular hits. Capturing ships loaded with goods or money in which members of the Ottoman called to lead had financial stakes. This was hitting them where it hurt. And I think an aging sultan nearing the end of his life was in the business of. Well, in the business of unfinished business. I let them go when I was young and chivalrous, and now I'm going to just get them. So I think ultimately the siege of Malta was directed at the destruction of the Order of St. John. What happened to the islands themselves? That was really secondary.
- [33:18]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And for the Christian west, what was the nightmare scenario if Malta fell?
- [33:26]
Professor Marcus Ball
Well, the rhetoric was, and this was propagated by popes, by the Grandmaster and the Order itself by Habsburg officials. In Sicily and southern Italy. The nightmare scenario as they conceived it, was that there would be a domino effect, that Malta would fall and this would be the launchpad for an Ottoman attack on Sicily. From Sicily the Ottomans would launch an attack into Italy itself, work their way up the peninsula and who knew, Europe next. They were best of interests in the Mediterranean, were very happy to paint this nightmare apocalyptic scenario, partly, I think, or chiefly in some cases, to produce Philip ii, King of Spain and Lord of much of the western Mediterranean, into panicking and to devoting his resources to the defense of Malta. I think in their quieter moments, the Popes, the Viceroys of Sicily, even the Grand Masters may have expressed some reservations about whether this was a realistic scenario. But as far as public consumption was concerned, this was the narrative. And the proof of that is that after the siege and the Order's control of Malta was secured, at least for the time being, the Order made a point of pitching itself, as in Latin, the Propugnaculum Europae, the bulwark, the outer wall of Europe, this idea that you must support us because if you let us go under, you're next. And I think that rhetoric did take hold. It was a kind of self fulfilling prophecy in a way. Once the Ottomans turned up, oh my God, it's going to happen. After all, this isn't just alarmism, they mean business. It's very difficult. Again, in this, better than anybody in the 16th century, one never quite knows where to draw the line between what they really thought and the spin. And the spin tended to whir off into exaggerated rhetoric about, my God, they're coming for us. It's the end, it's the end. I think the Ottomans were right at the limit of what their resources, their manpower, their naval capacity could achieve. They were sensible enough to know that it was a case of thus far and no further. Malta was just about on the outer edge of their realistic operational range. And they were mad. They had allowed these glorified pirate lair to exist as long as possible, as long as they had, and they wanted them done with. And interestingly too, that view was shared by the Ottoman's principal Christian partners, Venice, who were very often the victims of hospitaling activity. Yes, in theory, the hospital wasn't meant to prey on Christian shit, but they did. And the fact that Venice stood aloof from the chorus of alarm in 1565 suggests that it had an understanding, an appreciation of why the Ottomans were mad.
- [36:32]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So you mentioned manpower and resources. How much could each side call upon?
- [36:37]
Professor Marcus Ball
The catch for the Ottomans was that it takes Almost as many people just to row a galley to deliver a force of soldiers as the force of soldiers it delivers. So There were about 40,000 people in Malta when the Ottoman armada disembarked, of whom perhaps only 20 or 25,000 were frontline troops or gunners or engineers, those that made trench networks and so on. The galley slaves could be put to use dragging cannon, digging ditches, doing all the dangerous work in the firing line. But in a sense, the fact that it was an amphibious operation meant that the Ottomans couldn't just throw the enormous numbers at a problem that they were used to when they were fighting on land. On the inside was a coalition which, over the course of the siege, learnt to work together. There were about 4 or 5,000 Maltese, about a fifth of the population of the island, inside the defenses, doing all the legwork, ferrying the supplies, bringing the water, frantically repairing fortifications every night, only to be destroyed the following day. There are about 2,000 soldiers, mercenaries of mixed value, but also stiffened by companies seconded by Habsburg authorities in Italy and Sicily, the tercios, or elite Spanish troops. And there were between 400 or perhaps 450 knights, the officer class, who in a sense dominate our surviving evidence. Much of the evidence, as it were, was produced by them, or sees the story of the siege through the experience of the Naya. We don't know very much about the Maltese, though they were in the majority. We know a little bit about the soldiers. There's some interesting evidence after the siege when they ask permission to leave, and in asking permission to leave, describe some of the wounds or injuries that they'd sustained. But overwhelmingly, the evidence tells the story of what happens through the experience of the knights, the aristocratic elite who, in a sense, owned the story.
- [39:05]
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Professor Susannah Lipscomb
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- [39:51]
Professor Marcus Ball
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- [40:14]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So what happened? How did the Ottomans begin there as well?
- [40:18]
Professor Marcus Ball
One thinks of a siege in the classic sense of a single position, a fortress, a city surrounded by hostile forces. The siege of Malta was really a series of sieges on four positions, not simultaneous. Some lasted a long time, some only a short time. But in essence, the Ottomans had to secure ready access, ready communication between their fleet and their army. This is the first rule of amphibious warfare. They had to bring, or wanted to bring their fleet round to the second harbour next to Grand Harbour, called Marsum Shedd. To do so, they had to take a fortress which guarded the entrance, called St Elmo. They spent about a month reducing St Elmo. The defenders poured men and resources into it in this desperate attempt to prolong the resistance of St Telmo as long as possible in a kind of war of attrition, an attempt to try and bleed as much of the Ottoman elite dry before they turned their attention to the other fortresses. St Elmo eventually falls, but it is the only one of the four fortresses that does fall, and the rest of the siege is largely a case of the Ottomans turning their attention to two other fortresses in the grand harbor area, which any visitor to Malta will remember. If you go to the Baraka in Valletta and look over the money shot over Grand Harbour, you see two peninsulas pointing straight at you, Senglia and Birgu. And the siege was the joint sieges of these two adjacent peninsulas. There was also a fortress in the interior of the island, the ancient capital of Mdina. But the Ottomans only sporadically and rather half heartedly tried to take that. That may have been a strategic mistake. Almost certainly was the apotheosis. The climax of the great siege was the attempt to take the two peninsulas sticking out into Grand Harbour. They just about held on until such time as the Ottomans were already thinking that they needed to leave. And at that point a relief force from Sicily arrived and gave them the final nudge. The Ottomans put up a show of resistance against this relief force, but pretty much resigned, I think, to the failure of that expedition and sailed off.
- [42:49]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So during the period of the siege how did the defenders deal with the bombardment?
- [42:55]
Professor Marcus Ball
It's a complicated question because it's difficult, I think, to fully picture precisely how the limestone walls of the fortifications held up to what was believed by the end to have been about 70 or 80,000 cannonballs fired at them. I suspect, rather than just punching holes through the walls, that the walls simply crumbled into a diagonal rubble field and that we know that every night the defenders would frantically try and rebuild as much of those fortifications as they could. Under the COVID of darkness, they could be reduced to using mattresses, blankets, bales of cotton, bits of wood that were lying around any old bit of rubble, just to prevent, as it were, not to be able to prevent a large force from pouring in, but essentially creating a kind of slope over broken ground which the Ottomans could not storm in large numbers. The Christian forces talk about assaults on various days. Oh, the ottomans sent in 2000 people, they sent in 1500 people. Well, yes, but no, they must have come in small waves, scrambling over broken ground and then hitting the Christian defenders at the top, where the numbers were relatively even. And the challenge for the defenders was to deal with that wave, relax for five minutes, boom. The next wave would come along, scrambling through the rubble, climbing over the mattresses, repelled with primitive grenades and sort of hoops that were set on fire to try and burn people to big chunks of earth just to absorb cannon shots. So we know there are examples of cannon penetrating 20 foot mounds of earth. So the trick was to use the slow disintegration of the fortifications as a kind of obstacle that would prevent the Ottomans from fully maximizing their enormous advantage in numbers. It's very difficult to picture because illustrations of the siege always show the walls impeccably well preserved, even at the height of the bombardment. But they must have been a complete mess. We know they were because seasoned soldiers who arrived with the relief force in September and then took the opportunity for a bit of sightseeing in the grand harbor area expressed utter amazement at how much punishment the walls had received and how on earth they'd stop the Ottomans from just walking in. But the trick was, I think, that it was a slope over broken ground and it forced the Ottoman assaults to break up into small, manageable bursts, which the defenders could, if they were lucky, and a couple of times it was very, very close run, but if they were lucky, they could push back these individual waves. The trouble was the Ottomans could send in fresh waves. The defenders just didn't have that luxury. They just had to go again and again and again.
- [45:56]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Yes. The same men meeting the next force. Were there psychological tactics that they could employ as well to get an edge?
- [46:04]
Professor Marcus Ball
Well, yes, there are stories which I think one partly has to take, with a pinch of salt, of the desecration of corpses, firing heads of captives from cannon. Yes, I think 16th century siege warfare, whoever was on the inside, whoever was on the outside, was a very grim business. I think largely it was a case on the part of the defenders of trying to create as many opportunities to convince those on the outside that things weren't as bad as they actually were. They would sometimes fire volleys of gunpowder just to demonstrate that they've got large supplies of it. They didn't. But it's the thought that count Two, throw food, bread, over into the opponent's trenches, as if to say, we've got so much food in here, we can afford to just throw it away. Again, unlikely. But I think there was this understanding, especially in the latter stages of the siege, where it settled down into a rather grim, attritional, almost trench type warfare, morale became increasingly important. The big trial of strength, the throwing of technology through the cannon at the defenses that had characterized the early stages of the siege. Now it was about just the sheer will to survive and to prevail. And I think for the last month or six weeks or so of the siege, one did get into this warfare. My favorite story, I hope it's true, is of renegades, converts to Islam in the Ottoman forces, shouting encouragement in their original native language, Italian, Greek, whatever, to the defenders in the hope that none of their peers in the trenches with them would understand what they were doing or using coded language to try and communicate the idea of how part of the state the Ottoman camp was in, and that this too was an understanding that morale was everything by the later stages. That said, I think the Christian sources exaggerate the collapse of morale and indeed of health in the Ottoman camp. I think the Ottomans were in pretty good shape. Their withdrawal was organized, it wasn't panicked. They held it together. And that it was really the approach of the end of the campaign season, when the weather in the Mediterranean turns, that forced them off. And don't forget, of course, that we're still the other side of the Gregorian reform of dates, and that what was early September to them would be mid to late September for us. And the weather was beginning to get bad. So the Ottomans knew that they just could not hang around. And when they did withdraw, they tried very hard to defeat the relief, but they withdrew in an orderly fashion. So their morale wasn't so shot that they weren't able to do that.
- [48:55]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So in the end, is it a combination of the fact that the defenders never ran out of everything they needed and they kept up the morale to the end of the campaigning season as much as that relief force that brought the siege to an end?
- [49:10]
Professor Marcus Ball
The narrative loves the idea of a relief force arriving at the 11th hour and saving the day. And I think it wasn't insignificant, but I think ultimately it was those forces generated from within the defense that led to the siege ending as it did. I think the single most important factor was the absence inside of epidemic disease. The stories of early modern sieges are punctuated by how defences were wholly undermined, collapsed because the defenders catch the plague or some other one of the many interesting pathogens circulating in the 16th century world. It looks like at times the Ottomans were struggling with epidemic disease, but there's no evidence that it really took hold even in a starving population inside the fortification had disease taken hold. Lights out. There is no siege of Malta. There's just Ottoman victory. In some ways, it's what didn't happen that is the story of the outcome of the Great Sea.
- [50:15]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And we've established in this conversation the reasons why you don't like it when people paint the siege as a clash between Islam and Christianity. So my last question for you then is, what would you describe the enduring impact of the siege as being if it is not a sort of precursor of some grand clash of civilizations?
- [50:38]
Professor Marcus Ball
I think the story of the siege is, and this brings us back to how we began pondering the resonance of the word siege in culture. I think the story of the siege subsequently is whose memory is it? Who derives benefit from the story of the siege? To begin with, it's the knights. They build the city of Valletta, which, amongst other things, is a kind of permanent monument to the siege. The Grandmaster's palace in the middle of Valletta has as its centerpiece a wonderful masterpiece of narrative art depicting the story of the siege. Generations of knights would know the siege forwards, backwards and every which way, because they've been told about it and shown it again and again and again. Then the knights are thrown out of Malta by Napoleon en route to Egypt in 1798. Question, who gets the siege? For a time, the British run with it, oddly, because the English contribution to the great siege was, on any measure, minimal. One knight and about four or five Catholic adventurers who were making themselves scarce from Elizabeth's England. So scarcely the siege was scarcely part of the English narrative. But in the early 19th century. Walter Scott got very excited about the Great Siege. He was the most widely read author in 19th century English speaking world. William IV even lent him a frigate so he could go down to the Mediterranean and research it. And he got so caught up in the story that he abandoned the idea to write a novel based on the siege and just wrote a history of the siege. And that was in a sense a foretaste of how the British ran with the siege as long as they were in control of Malta. The attachment to the word great is largely in the English language and seems to be a British convention mostly. I think the apotheosis of that was reached with the best selling book by Abel Bradford, which came out in 1961, which is an enormous bestseller and which was, yes, on the surface it was the story of the great siege in 1565. It was actually a book about the Battle of Britain. A plucky little island faces insuperable odds against a seemingly irresistible enemy and survives in the process vindicate a powerful sense of identity. Latterly, I think unfairly, and especially since the experience of the second greater Siege, which is when the axis pounded Malta between 1940 and 1943, Malta is the most bombed country on earth by square meter. The Maltese themselves have warmed to the Great Siege as part of the island's history and in conjunction with the Great Siege is celebrated now in a national holiday every September. So in a way, the memory of the importance of the Great Siege has come home, that it's now regarded not through the lens of who happened to be in charge. The Knights in 1565, the British in 4043, but it's now a Maltese story.
- [53:43]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Professor Marcus Bohr, you have given us a fascinating and crystalline introduction to the Great Siege today. And listeners who would like to know more and get an insight into the human richness and complexity of the Great Siege would do well to pick up a copy of your book. Thank you so much for your time.
- [54:04]
Professor Marcus Ball
Thank you.
- [54:08]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Thanks for listening to Not Just the Tudors and to my researcher Alice Smith and my producer Rob Weinberg. And do join me, Professor Susannah Lipscomb next time for another episode of Not Just the Tudors from History. Hit.
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- [55:04]
Professor Marcus Ball
Perfect.
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Professor Marcus Ball
Hey, can I get your number?
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Verizon Advertiser
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