The Great Siege of 1565 was a crucial clash of religions and empires
In around December 1564, Suleiman the Magnificent, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire for more than 40 years, issued a decree.
‘I intend to conquer the island of Malta and I have appointed Mustafa Pasha as commander of the campaign. The island of Malta is a headquarters for infidels.’
What the Sultan wanted, the Sultan got. By March the following year, a great fleet of 130 galleys and many more auxiliaries was ready to set sail from Istanbul.
Stopping to pick up even more troops from the Peloponnese, the Sultan’s armada made steady progress. On 18th May, it was spotted off Malta. The Great Siege of 1565 had begun.
As a new book on the siege by Marcus Bull argues, there is something peculiarly fascinating about these encounters. A siege stands at the very beginning of Western literature, after all, in Homer’s Troy.
Bull points out that the Iliad is unusual in concentrating more on those conducting the siege – the Greeks – than on the besieged Trojans. I think he is right that, mostly, sieges grip our imagination for the plight of those inside, rather than outside, the walls.
Perhaps Virgil agreed, which is why his hero, Aeneas, suffers no shame from having been on the losing side at Troy.
Bull draws examples from across global history, often of doomed resistance, as of the Texians – and Davy Crockett – at the Alamo.
For British readers, Rorke’s Drift, the siege depicted in the film Zulu, springs to mind. In the 20th century, the siege of Leningrad provides the same themes on an epic, savage scale, with humane punctuation provided by the première of Shostakovich’s symphony, while the city was still under siege.
The amphibious face-off at Malta is something of a classic of the genre. It is GETTY no surprise that, immediately afterwards, it was being written up and celebrated as much for its moral lessons as for its geopolitical ones.
It became a staple of the story Europeans told about themselves; so much so that
Voltaire could write that ‘nothing is better known than this siege’ – a remark that hardly rings true today.
Bull shows that the siege certainly is worth knowing better. If observers at the time saw it as a clash of religions, as well as empires, they were right to do so.
Suleiman’s ‘infidels’, whom the Ottoman fleet hoped to expunge, were not any old Christians. Malta was the latest, and last, place of refuge for the remaining military order spawned by the Crusades, the Knights of St John, also known as the Knights Hospitaller.
The Hospitallers had begun life as an organisation committed to caring for pilgrims in Jerusalem. Unlike the Knights Templar, they had not started out as a military order. But, as the Holy Land became more dangerous for pilgrims, the Hospitallers began to provide protection, too. With the arrival of the crusading era, beginning in 1096, the fighting element began to dominate.
The order never gave up its founding aim. After they were forced out of Jerusalem, everywhere they went they set up a hospital and devoted a proportion of their resources to it. But the balance had tipped. They could have contracted out the fighting, but instead they reduced the caring to secondary status.
By the time of the siege, the Hospitallers had already been chased away from their first resettlement, in Rhodes and on the Turkish coast at Bodrum. Malta had been granted to them by the King of Spain (and Holy Roman Emperor), Charles V. This may have been a token gesture: the annual ‘rent’ of a falcon gives the impression that Charles didn’t think Malta was very valuable.
Then again, putting the Hospitallers there and charging an honorary payment might imply that he saw Malta as having strategic importance, and wanted to flatter the Knights into protecting it.
If Malta was of strategic importance to Western powers, the West had a funny way of showing it. You cannot help but draw modern parallels with Ukraine, when reading of an outgunned, outnumbered ally receiving just enough help – financial and military – to survive, just in time.
The knights came from all over Europe – from France, Spain, Italy and even Scotland and England. But it was on Habsburg Spain, the Ottomans’ chief rival and the richest polity in Europe, that the main burden fell.
Any sense of a united front against a religious foe was hampered by the inconvenient fact that France, the Habsburgs’ inveterate rival, was actually in alliance with Suleiman’s Ottomans.
This was despite the fact that the duly celebrated leaders of the Maltese Hospitallers were French. Their Grand Master, Jean de la Valette, gave his name to the new capital city that rose after the siege, Valletta.
I hope it’s not a spoiler to say that the siege failed. Bull gives a vivid account of a close-run thing, in which heroism was intermixed with luck. The opposing empires, of course, regrouped, but eventually only Malta remembered.
It would not be the last time the island paid the price for its importance to others.
The Great Siege of Malta by Marcus Bull is out on 30th January
