The turning point of early modern history

The latest edition of History Today features an article about the Great Siege of Malta by Tony Rothman, a physics lecturer at Princeton University who has recently completed a novel about the subject. Rothman describes it as one of the turning points of early modern history, when a heroic defence prevented the rampant Ottoman forces from gaining a strategic foothold in the central Mediterranean. From History Today:

At dawn on May 18th, 1565, one of the largest armadas ever assembled appeared off the Mediterranean island of Malta. Its 200 ships had been sent by Suleiman the Magnificent, sultan of the vast Ottoman empire to destroy the Knights of Malta who had long been a thorn in his side. Aboard were crammed some 40,000 fighting men, including 6,000 of Suleiman’s elite infantry, the Janissaries, not to mention another 9,000 cavalry and seventy huge siege cannon, one or two of which were capable of hurling 600lb stones a mile and a half. Opposing this force were just 600 knights, a few thousand mercenaries and a few thousand Maltese irregulars – in all between 6,000 and 9,000 men. Once Malta fell, which Suleiman’s commanders thought should take a week, the Turks would evict the Spanish from Tunis and then invade Sicily and Italy.

Rarely in military history have the odds been so unequal and the stakes so high. Yet in dealing the first true defeat to the Ottomans in over a century, the Knights of Malta became the heroes of the age and the siege one of the most celebrated events of the sixteenth century. Nearly 200 years later Voltaire could write, ‘Nothing is more well known than the siege of Malta’. Yet, three centuries on and the events of 1565 have receded from the minds of even most military historians. No longer do you find it on lists of the ‘seventy most decisive battles in history’. Nevertheless, the siege captures the imagination of anyone who stumbles across it.

At the time the Ottoman empire was the most powerful in the European and Mediterranean world. Its slaving operations – and those of its vassals, the Barbary corsairs based on the coast of North Africa – were integral to its naval operations, although the empire itself allowed its citizens more freedom than many Christian states at the time. Religious refugees from Christendom made their way to the capital (and the world’s largest city) Constantinople, where they could worship as they pleased. Suleiman himself was intelligent, highly educated, an accomplished poet and determined. He was also a highly experienced campaigner.

The stronghold of Suleiman’s adversaries was decidedly not the setting of Christopher Marlow’s Jew of Malta (c.1589-90), in which a rich Jew and the son of the Turkish Sultan could scheme against an unwitting governor. The island had been taken by Muslims in the ninth century, but reconquered by Norman Christians in the eleventh, and became part of the Kingdom of Sicily in 1127; it became part of the Spanish empire in the mid-fourteenth century. Malta was a rocky limestone island that had been deforested over the previous century by the demand for ship- and fire-wood, so that the inhabitants had to resort to burning cow dung for fuel. ‘There was no such thing as any spring water, nor indeed, any well, and the inhabitants were forced to supply that defect by cisterns’, in the words of one eighteenth-century historian.

The population of Malta, and its neighbouring island of Gozo, totalled about 20,000, almost all of them poor, illiterate farmers or peasants who came to the small harbour town of Birgu – the Borgo – to labour at the docks. Such was the poverty that perhaps two-thirds of the women, whether married or not, worked openly as prostitutes. The main saving grace were two large harbours which could provide ‘proper’ anchorage for any fleet..

Fernand Braudel, whose Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1949) is the standard history of the period, begins his discussion of the siege of Malta by asking, ‘Was it a surprise?’ No one has ever claimed it was. The Turks had sent spies disguised as fishermen to Malta the previous summer to survey the fortifications, later building a scale model of the island in Constantinople. The Grand Master Jean de Valette, meanwhile, had his own network of agents in place in Constantinople, headed by Giovan Barelli, which kept him informed of Suleiman’s intentions. A master of languages, Barelli pulled off one of the greatest espionage coups of the age: to smuggle out a complete report of the Turkish invasion plans as they were being decided...

Read an excerpt here of Rothman's novel; Tony Rothman's homepage