The final battle

Noel Malcolm reviews Empires of the Sea by Roger Crowley, in The Telegraph:

Now, for his second book, he has moved into the 16th century. His subject is the great series of campaigns and conflicts between Ottoman and west European forces in the Mediterranean which culminated in the battle of Lepanto of 1571 - above all, the Ottoman siege of Rhodes in 1522, the Spanish conquest of Tunis in 1535, the Ottoman siege of Malta (which failed) in 1565 and the invasion of Cyprus and siege of Famagusta (which succeeded) in 1570-1..

Any one of these topics could have made a good book in itself, and most of them already have: there are classic works by Ernle Bradford on the siege of Malta and the Barbarossas, a good book by Eric Brockman on the two sieges of Rhodes, and an excellent recent account of Lepanto by Hugh Bicheno. So what, if anything, has Crowley got to add?

Part of the answer to that question is that he reads Turkish, and has been able to bring in details supplied by Ottoman chroniclers and modern Turkish historians. This means that he can give a less one-sided account, quoting, for example, from the stiff-lipped entries in Suleyman the Magnificent's campaign diaries..

When Don Juan of Austria was on his way to Lepanto, for example, he took advice from veterans with 40 years' experience of fighting the Turks. The successful defender of Malta in 1565, La Valette, had learnt the art of siege warfare the hard way, in Rhodes in 1522. And the tactic which gave the Christian fleet victory at Lepanto - the use of a few large galleons as floating gun-platforms - had been pioneered more than 30 years earlier, and then almost forgotten..

In the end, though, this book is an account of human beings under extraordinary circumstances; and the most extraordinary of all were the great sieges, of which Malta was the supreme example. Few stories in military history can match that of the little fortress of St Elmo, a miniature Mediterranean Stalingrad, where a defence that was expected to last four days continued for nearly a month, and where at the end the commanders, too badly wounded to stand, were placed in chairs, with their swords in their hands, to face the final assault.

This is narrative history at its most gripping. True, the best bits of the story have been told before - but never mind. A publisher's adage used to say that the market can take a new biography of Napoleon every five years; and the siege of Malta is such a good story, it could be told more often than that. But I doubt whether it will receive as powerful a telling as this one for many years to come.