Empires of the Sea - the Final Battle for the Mediterranean 1521-1580 (3 page)

When he read Suleiman’s letter, L’Isle Adam framed a terse response, distinctly short of pleasantries and any recognition of the sultan’s grander titles. “Brother Philippe Villiers de L’Isle Adam, Grand Master of Rhodes, to Suleiman, sultan of the Turks,” it began. “I have right well comprehended the meaning of your letter, which has been presented to me by your ambassador.” The grand master went on to recount the attempt by Kurtoglu to capture the ship on which he was traveling, before concluding with an abrupt “Farewell.” At the same time, he dispatched a parallel letter to the king of France: “Sire, since he became Grand Turk, this is the first letter that he has sent to Rhodes, and we do not accept it as a token of friendship, but rather as a veiled threat.”

L’Isle Adam was well aware what was likely to unfold—the knights’ intelligence was excellent and they had been bracing themselves against attack for forty years. The early years of the sixteenth century ring with their appeals to the pope and the courts of Europe for men and money. After the Ottoman capture of Egypt in 1517, the menace of the Turk loomed larger than ever. The Christian sea began to tremble in dreadful anticipation. Pope Leo was almost paralyzed by fear: “Now that the Terrible Turk has Egypt and Alexandria and the whole of the Roman eastern empire in his power and has equipped a massive fleet in the Dardanelles, he will swallow not just Sicily and Italy but the whole world.” It was obvious that Rhodes was the front line in a gathering storm. The grand master renewed his appeals for help.

The unified response of Christendom was exactly zero. Italy, as Suleiman well knew, was a battleground between the Hapsburg kings of Spain and the Valois of France; Venice, bloodied in her earlier struggle with the Turk, had opted for treaties of friendship; while Martin Luther’s reformation was beginning to split the Christian world into fractious shards. Successive popes unceasingly jabbed the conscience of the secular potentates of Europe to no avail, and dreamed up fantasy schemes for crusades. In more lucid moments the popes bewailed the disarray of Christendom. Only the knights themselves rallied from their command posts across Europe, but their numbers were pitifully small.

Undeterred, L’Isle Adam began preparing for siege. He dispatched ships to Italy, Greece, and Crete to buy wheat and wine. He oversaw the clearing out of ditches and the repairing of bastions and the operation of gunpowder mills—and tried to stifle the hemorrhaging of information across the narrow straits to the sultan’s lands. In April 1522, the unripe wheat was harvested and the ground outside the town stripped of cover and scorched. A pair of massive iron chains was hauled across the harbor mouth.

Four hundred fifty miles away in Istanbul, Suleiman was gathering a huge army and fitting out his fleet. The hallmark of any Ottoman campaign was the ability to mobilize men and resources on a scale that paralyzed their enemy’s powers of calculation. Chroniclers tended to double or triple the reasonable estimate of a force that could be assembled and supplied for war—or simply gave up; “numerous as the stars” was a common epithet of appalled defenders crouching behind their battlements at the sight of the vast host of men and animals and tents camped outside. In this spirit, the expedition to Rhodes was put at an inflated two hundred thousand men and a mighty armada of ships, “galleasses, galleys, pallandaries, fustes and brigantines to the number of 300 sails and more.” L’Isle Adam decided against counting his men too carefully. There were so few of them, it would be bad for morale, “and he feared that the Great Turk might have knowledge by goers and comers into Rhodes.” In all likelihood there were five hundred knights and fifteen hundred mercenaries and local Greeks to defend the town. The grand master decided on a series of morale-raising parades, whereby the various companies “decked their men with colours and devices” and mustered “with the great noise of trumpets and drums.” The knights in their red surcoats bearing white crosses made a cheerful array.

When Mehmet had besieged Rhodes in 1480, he had not attended in person. He stayed in Istanbul and sent his commander. Suleiman resolved to make a personal call on “the damnable workers of wickedness.” Any sultan’s presence upped the stakes in a military campaign enormously. Defeat was inadmissible; failure by any corps commander meant dismissal—or death. Suleiman was coming only to win.

ON JUNE
10
THE KNIGHTS
received a second letter, this time stripped of diplomatic niceties:

The Sultan Suleiman to Villiers de L’Isle Adam, Grand Master of Rhodes, to his Knights, and to the people at large. Your monstrous injuries against my most afflicted people have aroused my pity and indignation. I command you, therefore, instantly to surrender the island and fortress of Rhodes, and I give you my gracious permission to depart in safety with the most precious of your effects; or if you desire to remain under my government, I shall not require of you any tribute, or do anything in diminution of your liberties, or against your religion. If you are wise, you will prefer friendship and peace to cruel war. Since, if you are conquered, you will have to undergo all the miseries as are usually inflicted by those that are victorious, from which you will be protected neither by your own forces, nor by external aid, nor by the strength of your fortifications which I will overthrow to their foundations…. I swear this by the God of heaven, the Creator of the earth, by the four Evangelists, by the four thousand prophets, who have descended from heaven, chief amongst whom stands Muhammad, most worthy to be worshipped; by the shades of my grandfather and father, and by my own sacred, august and imperial head.

The grand master did not deign a reply. He concentrated his efforts on the manufacture of gunpowder.

On June 16 Suleiman crossed the Bosphorus with his army and proceeded to make his way down the Asian coast to the crossing place to Rhodes. Two days later the fleet set sail from its base at Gallipoli, carrying heavy guns, supplies, and more troops.

DESPITE THE HUGE DISCREPANCY
in numbers, the contest was less one-sided than it appeared. When Ottoman armies had surrounded the town of Rhodes in 1480, they looked up at a typical fortress of the medieval world. The thin, high walls, designed to resist scaling by ladders and siege engines, were horribly vulnerable to sustained gunfire. By 1522, the defenses had been largely remodeled. The knights may have been backward-looking in their ethos and sense of mission, but when it came to military engineering, they were early adopters. In the forty years of peace, they had spent their spare cash commissioning the best Italian engineers to strengthen their redoubts.

This work was undertaken on the cusp of a revolution in military architecture. The gunpowder age and the development of accurate bronze cannon that fired penetrative iron balls were revolutionizing fortress design. Italian military engineers developed their discipline as a science. They mapped geometric angles of fire with compasses and used knowledge of ballistics to design radical solutions. At Rhodes, the engineers constructed prototypes of this new military engineering: massive walls, angled bastions of immense thickness that commanded wide fields of fire, slanted parapets to deflect shot, mountings for long-range guns, splayed gun ports, inner defensive layers with concealed batteries, double ditches excavated to the depth of canyons, counterscarps that exposed an advancing enemy to a torrent of fire. The new principles were depth defense and cross fire; no enemy could advance without being hit from multiple vantage points, nor could he be sure what traps lay within. Rhodes in 1522 was not just the best-defended city on earth, it was also a laboratory of siege warfare. The labor for this enterprise was largely supplied by enslaved Muslims, one of whom was a young seaman called Oruch, destined neither to forget nor forgive the experience.

In layout, the town was as round as an apple with a bite taken out of one arc, where the protected harbor was let into the town. The knights fought in national groups so that the defense of the circle was divided into eight sectors, each with its tower, managed by a particular country. England held one sector, Italy another; Auvergne commanded the most redoubtable bastion of all; then Germany, Castile, France, Provence, and Aragon.

Despite failing to draw substantial Western aid, L’Isle Adam had a small stroke of luck. From Crete he managed to recruit the services of one of the great military engineers of the day, Gabrielle Tadini, “a most brilliant engineer and in the business of war a supreme expert in mathematical science.” Tadini was nominally in the pay of the Venetians, who were utterly opposed to his participation, which would be seen as a breach of their neutrality. The knights smuggled him off the island at night from a deserted cove. It was a cheering coup. Tadini, craggy, spirited, innovative, and brave, was worth a thousand men. He set to work adjusting the defenses, measuring distances and fields of fire, fine-tuning the killing zones.

It was on the feast day of Saint John, June 24—the most holy day in the knights’ year—that the Ottoman fleet made a first tentative landing on the island. Two days later the fleet came to anchor six miles south of the town and started the lengthy process of unloading equipment and ferrying men and materials across from the mainland. In a solemn ceremony, the grand master laid the keys to the city on the altar of the saint’s church, “beseeching St John to take keeping and protection thereof and of all The Religion…and by his holy grace to defend them from the great power of enemies that had besieged them.”

It took two weeks for the Ottomans to bring everything across. Onto the shore they unloaded a comprehensive lexicon of artillery pieces: bombards and basilisks, serpentines, double guns, and pot guns. These fired an exotic range of projectiles intended to fulfill specific purposes in the pattern of attack: giant stones nine feet in circumference, and penetrative iron balls propelled at explosive velocity, for battering and puncturing walls; brass firebombs that fragmented and spread flaming naphtha “to make murder of the people’ high-trajectory mortar bullets. Even biological weapons: some cannon were expressly designed to hurl rotting corpses over the walls.

No army in the world could match the Ottomans in the art of siege warfare; through espionage they came to Rhodes quite well informed about the defenses, and had made a realistic assessment of the task. The Turks accordingly placed their ultimate confidence less in their siege guns than in subterranean devices: the use of explosive mines. To this end, a substantial portion of the men unloading onto the bright beaches were armed only with picks and shovels. Suleiman had scoured his Balkan territories for skilled miners, mainly Christians, to tunnel under the walls. Inflated figures suggested sixty thousand—a third of the total army. They would dig their way under the cunningly designed Italian bastions yard by painstaking yard.

On July 28 the defenders could see the Ottoman ships draping celebratory banners from their tops: Suleiman had crossed the straits in his galley. Once the sultan had established his camp and ceremonial tent beyond the reach of gunshot and overseen the arrangements, the siege could formally begin.

INITIALLY IT WAS
a contest for the ground beyond the walls; later for the walls themselves. The miners were put to work constructing trenches parallel to the town’s defenses and erecting wooden palisades in front of them; a second phase involved the digging of saps—deep narrow trenches—spidering forward to the walls themselves. From the start it was a brutal affair. The wretched miners, digging in the open, were massacred by Tadini’s pinpoint gunfire; unexpected sorties killed more. It was of little import to the Ottoman commanders—men were plentiful and expendable. Trenches were established, guns dragged into position behind the protective screens, and the firing began. Heavy cannon pummeled the walls night and day for a month; mortars bombed the town with flaming missiles and “falling to the ground they broke and the fires came out of them and did some harm” sharpshooters with arquebuses—matchlock muskets—attempted to sweep the battlements clean of defenders. One eyewitness noted that “the handgun shot was innumerable and incredible.” The immense supply of human labor enabled prodigious feats of excavation. The miners brought “a mountain of earth” from half a mile away to construct two huge ramps that overtopped the walls, on which they mounted five cannon to fire into the town.

So large was the army that it encircled the landward perimeter in a Turkish crescent that stretched from shore to shore, a distance of one and a half miles. An extensive network of trenches started to inch forward day by day, their open tops covered with screens of wood and skin, while the miners worked below.

Tadini mounted energetic countermeasures. As the tunnels advanced, he constructed ingenious listening devices: skin membranes were stretched tight across frames to which bells were attached. These were so sensitive that even the minutest vibrations from beneath the ground set the alarm tinkling. He dug countermines to intercept the tunnels and killed the intruders in the dark, blasted the miners out of their covered saps with gunpowder, and set up elaborate traps to catch the advancing enemy in a murderous cross fire. In case a tunnel should be missed, he bored spiral vents in the walls’ foundations to disperse the force of explosive charges.

The newly constructed Italian bastions resisted the pummeling of the guns well, but some of the older sections, particularly the English zone, were more vulnerable. And the miners were indefatigable. By early September, Tadini had neutralized some fifty tunnels, but on September 4 the whole town was rocked by an explosion under the English bastion. An undetected tunnel had allowed the Turks to detonate mines and blast a thirty-foot hole. Infantry poured forward; for a while Suleiman’s men established a bridgehead and planted banners on the walls, before being beaten back with great loss of life. Successive days saw the bloodshed escalate. Mines exploded—mainly with little damage, because of Tadini’s system of vents—direct attacks were mounted and repulsed, unknown thousands of Ottoman troops perished. Suleiman’s master gunner had his legs blown off by a cannonball—a loss said to have been more grievous to the sultan than that of any general. The men became reluctant to attack; on September 9 they had to be driven to the walls “with great strokes of the sword.” Casualties within the city were far fewer but much more serious—each man killed was an irreplaceable loss. On September 4 alone, the knights lost three leading commanders: the captain of the galleys, the standard-bearer Henry Mansell, and the grand commander Gabriel de Pommerols, who “fell from the walls as he went to see his trenches…and hurt his breast.”