Who won the Great Siege of Malta?
The Knights of St John won. From 18 May to 8 September 1565 an Ottoman army under Mustafa Pasha and a fleet under Piyale Pasha besieged Malta. Fort St Elmo fell on 23 June, but Birgu and Senglea held under Grand Master Jean de La Valette until a Spanish relief force landed on 7 September.1
In the spring of 1565 Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent sent a great fleet and army against a rocky island south of Sicily. Malta belonged to the Knights of St John, a military religious order whose galleys preyed on Ottoman shipping, and the sultan meant to drive them out as he had driven them from Rhodes in 1522. For almost four months an Ottoman army battered the knights' forts around the Grand Harbor. It took one of them, lost thousands of men, and in September sailed home with nothing.2
This is the story of the Great Siege from both sides, part of our guide to the Ottoman wars in Europe. See also our life of Suleiman the Magnificent, the Battle of Lepanto six years later, and our ranking of the greatest sieges in history.
Why did Suleiman attack Malta in 1565?
The knights had come to Malta as refugees. Suleiman took Rhodes from them in 1522, and in 1530 they settled on Malta and made the old castle at Birgu, which they renamed Fort St Angelo, their headquarters. From its harbor their galleys went back to war at sea.3
To the Ottomans the order was a nest of corsairs. The Turkish Encyclopedia of Islam (TDV) gives the knights' attacks on Muslim pilgrims, merchants and travelers as the reason for the campaign. Richard Knolles, an English historian of the Turks who drew on informants in Istanbul, named as the chief instigators Hasan, son of Barbarossa and ruler of Algiers, and Turgut, governor of Tripoli, whose lands and shipping the knights harassed.4
The moment also looked right. In 1560 the Ottoman fleet under Piyale Pasha had crushed a Christian expedition at Djerba, off Tunisia, and taken the island's fort with the help of the corsair Turgut Reis, known in Europe as Dragut. David Abulafia, quoted by Mallia-Milanes, writes that the victory boosted the confidence of the Turks.5
What Suleiman meant to do with Malta is still argued over. Francisco Balbi di Correggio, an arquebusier serving with the Spanish troops who fought in the siege, has the sultan planning larger enterprises against southern Italy once the island was his, and a recent Spanish study of the viceroy of Sicily reads the attack as the first step toward Sicily. Mallia-Milanes doubts it, noting that after taking Tunis in 1574 the Ottomans never used it to invade Sicily, and he thinks the sultan's real motive was anger at the knights' raids. J. E. Storace, writing in Melita Historica, argued instead that Suleiman wanted a forward naval base in the central Mediterranean.6
The Ottomans did not come by surprise. The minutes of the Order's council, now kept in Valletta, show the knights recruiting soldiers in Naples and Sicily in January 1565, raising a special tax in February and storing grain in Birgu in May. Don García de Toledo, the viceroy of Sicily, had visited Grand Master Jean Parisot de La Valette, warned him of the danger and sent him some troops and supplies, writes Santos de la Hera.7
How big were the Ottoman and Christian armies?
A decree of 23 March 1565 named the vizier Mustafa Pasha commander (serdar) of the campaign, and Piyale Pasha, the grand admiral, commanded the fleet. The Ottoman campaign register, studied by Arnold Cassola and reviewed by Caroline Finkel, records the fleet's voyage from Istanbul port by port, from its departure on 29 March, and holds 31 sultanic decrees issued between March and October 1565. The English historian Richard Knolles, whose account Joseph Galea read for its Ottoman details, has the fleet sail on 22 March and muster at Methoni in the Peloponnese.8
No figure for the Ottoman army is certain. The TDV encyclopedia gives about 240 ships and some 35,000 troops, and the Treccani encyclopedia about 200 ships. A Spanish naval study counts more than 130 galleys and over 29,000 men. The nineteenth-century historians William Prescott and Whitworth Porter, following the Order's chroniclers, give 130 galleys, 50 smaller vessels and about 30,000 soldiers, with 6,000 and 4,500 janissaries respectively. Mallia-Milanes puts the force that landed at 23,000 to 25,000, and Knolles at 20,000.9
Against them La Valette had some 540 to 600 knights: Federica Formiga counts 541, from all eight national divisions of the order, Carlos Morenés y Mariátegui 543 and Storace about 600. With them stood some 8,000 to 9,000 other men, about half of them Maltese in Storace's estimate.10
The fleet was sighted on 18 May. Within days the army was ashore at Marsaxlokk, the bay in the southeast (the Ottoman records date the landing to 21 May), and set up its main camp at the Marsa, at the head of the Grand Harbor.11
Why did the Ottomans attack Fort St Elmo first?
The knights' strength lay on two peninsulas across the Grand Harbor from Mount Sceberras: Birgu, with Fort St Angelo at its tip, and Senglea, with Fort St Michael. On the point of Sceberras itself stood Fort St Elmo, a star-shaped fort built in 1552 to guard the tip of the peninsula between the Grand Harbor and Marsamxett, the harbor to the north.12
The usual story, told by the Christian chroniclers and repeated by Storace, is that Mustafa wanted to attack Birgu at once while Piyale insisted on taking St Elmo first, to win a safe anchorage for his galleys in Marsamxett. A Spanish account drawn from the viceroy's papers turns the roles around, with Piyale preferring Birgu and Mustafa St Elmo. Brian Blouet argued in 1965 that no quarrel is needed to explain the choice: Marsaxlokk was a poor harbor if a Christian fleet came, and guns on Sceberras could reach the defenders inside Birgu, a weakness the order's engineers had pointed out since 1530.13
How did Fort St Elmo hold out for a month?
St Elmo was small but, as Blouet stresses, modern, with outworks and a cavalier, and he counts about 800 men put into it once the siege began. Its strength was that it could not be cut off. Guns in Fort St Angelo swept the open ground in front of it, and boats from Birgu brought fresh men and supplies across the harbor, so that the garrison was renewed as fast as it was killed.14
By the last week of May the Ottoman batteries were firing on the fort. On 2 June Turgut Reis arrived with 13 galleys. The TDV encyclopedia says he questioned the decision to begin with St Elmo but joined the attack. Porter credits him with pushing the siege lines down to the Grand Harbor to cut the fort's boat link.15
On 18 June, Bosio records, Turgut was struck on the head by a splinter of rock thrown up by a cannon shot. He died on 23 June, the day the fort fell, and his body was carried to Tripoli on his own galleys and buried at the mosque he had built there.16
St Elmo fell on 23 June, the eve of the feast of St John the Baptist, the order's patron saint, after a siege of about a month. Royal Museums Greenwich, describing the contemporary painting of the scene, says that all inside died except nine wounded knights, while Porter writes that nine men were taken alive by Turgut's corsairs.17
Prescott and Porter, following the Order's chroniclers, set the Christian dead at about 1,500, including more than 100 members of the order, and the Ottoman dead at about 8,000. Bosio, the order's own historian, counts about 4,000 Ottoman dead around the fort. Mustafa had the bodies of knights mutilated, tied to planks and floated across the harbor. La Valette answered by having his Turkish prisoners beheaded and their heads fired from the guns of St Angelo into the Ottoman lines.18
How did Birgu and Senglea survive the summer assaults?
The month at St Elmo bought time. At the end of June a small reinforcement from Sicily, some 600 to 700 soldiers and several dozen knights under Melchior de Robles, landed on the far side of the island and slipped through the Ottoman lines into Birgu under cover of fog.19
Mustafa now turned on Senglea. Hasan Pasha, the governor of Algiers, had joined the siege in July, and the Ottomans hauled some 80 boats overland into the Grand Harbor to attack Senglea from the water. On 15 July Hasan led the assault on the land front while the boats struck the point of the peninsula. Prescott, following the Order's chroniclers, says a low battery at the foot of St Angelo sank nine of ten boats carrying a thousand janissaries, and that the day cost the attackers 3,000 to 4,000 men, but he adds that “the arithmetic of an enemy is not apt to be exact.”20
In August the Ottomans attacked Birgu and Senglea together. During the general assault of 7 August, Bosio relates, the cavalry of Mdina, the walled town in the interior, rode out and fell on the Ottoman camp at the Marsa, where the sick lay. The cry went up that a Christian army had landed, and the Ottomans pulled back from the breaches. The Royal Collection's catalogue of the engravings of the siege ties the raid to the assault of 21 August instead.21
The worst crisis came in the second half of August, when a mine brought down part of the wall of the post of Castile at Birgu and Ottoman troops planted their standard on the breach. Porter dates it to 18 August, while the paintings and engravings of Matteo Perez d'Aleccio show the great attack on the post of Castile on 21 August. The old grand master seized a pike, led the counterattack himself and was wounded in the leg, and the breach was cleared. When his council later urged him to abandon the town and withdraw into Fort St Angelo, he refused.22
How did the Spanish relief force end the siege?
The knights blamed Don García for coming late, and the charge has stuck to him in Maltese tradition. Blouet and Storace both argue that this is unfair: the viceroy had too few ships and men to risk them while Sicily itself might be attacked, and he could not act without orders from Philip II. The Spanish historian Fernando Santos de la Hera adds that most of his councillors opposed any attempt, and that García lost his own son during the siege.23
The relief fleet of 28 galleys sailed from Syracuse on 25 August, was driven back to Sicily by a storm, and sailed again on 6 September. On 7 September it landed its troops at Mellieħa Bay in the northwest of the island. La Valette, writing to the Pope on 11 September, put the force at 8,000 or 9,000 men. The Italian writer Pietro Bizzari, reporting to William Cecil on 19 September, gave 9,600, and Porter gives 8,500.24
Rumor made the Spanish force larger than it was. Through the night of 7 September the Ottomans dragged their guns to the ships, and on 8 September, the feast of the Nativity of the Virgin, the bells of Birgu rang for Mass instead of alarm. Balbi wrote that “never did music sound so sweet to human ears.”25
Learning how small the relief army was, Mustafa landed again, with about 9,000 men in Porter's figure and 16,000 in Bosio's, and marched inland. On 11 September the Spanish commanders Ascanio della Corgna and Álvaro de Sande met him on the high ground between Mdina and Naxxar, and the knights and volunteers with them pushed forward before they could be held back. The Ottoman troops broke and fled to their ships in St Paul's Bay under fire. La Valette's letter of 11 September puts their losses at about 1,500.26
Knolles, as Galea reads him, says the fleet did not run at once but stayed in St Paul's Bay for another day and night before sailing for Greece, and Bosio also has it there on 12 September. The fleet left on 12 or 13 September.27
How many people died in the Great Siege of Malta?
No count is exact. The Christian chroniclers, followed by Prescott, put the Ottoman dead from battle and disease at more than 30,000, and a Spanish naval historian repeats the figure of 30,000 bodies left on the island. The TDV encyclopedia, writing from the Ottoman side, gives about 20,000 dead and notes that the official records list 540 timar holders among the drowned and killed.28
For the defenders, Prescott gives about 200 knights, 2,500 soldiers and more than 7,000 Maltese men, women and children. Carlos Morenés y Mariátegui writes that only 300 of the 543 knights who began the siege were still alive at its end.29
Who won the Great Siege of Malta, and why did the Ottomans fail?
The knights won: Malta stayed in their hands and the Ottoman army went home. Prescott names the Ottoman failures: they did not cut St Elmo off from Birgu soon enough, let reinforcements reach the island from Sicily, struggled to feed an army on a barren island, and lost thousands to disease in the summer heat. Storace blames above all a divided command between Mustafa and Piyale.30
Blouet thinks the Ottoman commanders have been judged too harshly. In his reading the attack on St Elmo had sound reasons, and Piyale could not have kept his fleet on station to intercept the relief force once the late summer weather broke. Blouet blames the north winds, while Bosio records a storm of siroccos striking the relief fleet. Either way, the weather turned the Spanish galleys back to Sicily on their first attempt.31
In Istanbul the news was received with sorrow. Mustafa Pasha was blamed and lost his place as vizier, according to the TDV encyclopedia. Knolles says he fell into disgrace while Piyale was restored to favor. In 1566 Piyale took the island of Chios from Genoa, and Suleiman died that year on campaign in Hungary.32
Why does the Great Siege of Malta matter?
After the siege La Valette had Italian engineers build a new bastioned city on Mount Sceberras, named Valletta after him, and UNESCO dates its foundation to 1566. La Valette, grand master since 1557, died in 1568.33
Its larger meaning is disputed. Heritage Malta writes that the siege shattered the Ottomans' reputation of invincibility, and a Spanish historian calls it the beginning of the end of their growing empire. Mallia-Milanes calls the view that it began the Ottoman decline historically untenable: Vienna had already shown in 1529 that the Ottomans could be stopped, and in the years that followed they took Chios and Cyprus and, after Lepanto, rebuilt their fleet within months. He quotes Desmond Seward's verdict that “the siege had decided nothing.”34
The siege captured the imagination of Europe, as UNESCO puts it, even in Protestant England. In July 1565 the Spanish ambassador Guzmán de Silva reported from London that great importance was attached there to what was passing in Malta and that Queen Elizabeth had ordered a general prayer for victory. Morenés adds that after the victory the Archbishop of Canterbury ordered six weeks of prayers of thanksgiving.35
What it did decide was the fate of the order. Mallia-Milanes argues that what was really at stake was the survival of the Hospitallers themselves: had Malta fallen, they had nowhere left to go. Storace adds that the victory won the Christian world a respite, not a final deliverance. The order kept the memory alive with a feast every 8 September, and Malta still marks the day.36
How do we know what happened in 1565?
Most of the story comes from the Christian side: the diary of Balbi, the arquebusier who served with the Spanish troops, first printed at Alcalá de Henares in 1567 and revised for a Barcelona edition in 1568, and the official history of the order by Giacomo Bosio, printed in Rome at the turn of the seventeenth century. Federica Formiga counts about 120 works on the siege printed in the sixteenth century, in Latin, Italian, Spanish, German, French, English and Greek. Blouet warns that these chroniclers were storytellers more than historians and that the Ottomans appear in them as a brutal, barbarian horde.37
The Ottoman side has been recovered only in part. Mallia-Milanes, following Onur Yıldırım, writes that the official palace chronicles passed over the defeat. Finkel notes that the Turkish historians Ş. Turan and M. Ş. Tekindağ nevertheless built their accounts on the major chronicles and on archival documents, and the Malta campaign register, which Tekindağ had already used and Cassola later presented, gives the fleet's itinerary, the course of the siege and the petitions of soldiers who fought in it. The TDV article also draws on the later Ottoman historian Âlî.38
Where was the Great Siege of Malta fought?
The fighting centered on the Grand Harbor on the northeast coast of Malta. Birgu and Senglea face Mount Sceberras, where Valletta was built after the siege. Fort St Elmo stands at the tip of Sceberras and Fort St Angelo at the tip of Birgu. The Ottomans landed at Marsaxlokk in the southeast, camped at the Marsa, and finally left from the bays of the north coast, while the walled town of Mdina in the interior stayed in Christian hands. Both forts still stand. According to Heritage Malta, which runs them, Fort St Elmo now houses Malta's National War Museum, and Fort St Angelo, which it calls the main stronghold of the defenders in 1565, can be visited in Birgu.39
