The Pirates of the Levant (16 page)

Chapter 6. THE ISLAND OF THE KNIGHTS

I was impressed by both the appearance and the recent history of Malta, the island of the corsair Knights of St John of Jerusalem. The fearsome galleys of the Religion, as we called them, were the scourge of the entire Levant, for they patrolled the seas, pursuing Turkish vessels and seizing valuable merchandise and slaves. Hated by all Muslims, the Knights of St John were the last of the great military orders of the Crusades, and their members owed obedience only to the Pope. After the fall of the Holy Land, they settled in Rhodes, but when they were expelled by the Turks, our Emperor Charles V gave them Malta in exchange for a symbolic annual payment of one Maltese falcon. That gift, the fact that we were the most powerful Catholic nation in the world and their proximity to the Viceroyalties of Naples and Sicily — the latter sent aid during the great siege of 1565 — forged strong bonds between the Order and Spain, and our galleys often sailed together. Besides, many of the Knights of Malta were Spanish.

The Knights had taken a vow to fight Muslims wherever they might be. They were hard, spartan men who knew they would receive no mercy if taken prisoner and they so scorned their enemy that their galleys were under orders to attack even if they were one ship against four. Given these circumstances, it is easy to understand why the Order of Malta looked to Spain as its main defender and support, for we were the only power that gave no quarter to Turks and Berbers, whereas other Catholic nations made pacts with them or brazenly sought alliances. The most shameless of these were ever ambivalent Venice and, of course, France. Indeed, France, in her struggle with Spain, had gone so far as to allow her galleys to travel in convoy with the Turks and had permitted Barbarossa's corsair fleet to over-winter in French ports while it plundered the Spanish and Italian coasts, capturing thousands of Christians.

You may consider my state of mind when, having passed the Dragut Point and the formidable fortress of St Elmo, the
Mulata
cast anchor in the great harbour, between Fort St Angelo and the Sanglea peninsula. From there we could view the site of the dreadful siege that had taken place sixty-two years before, an episode that made the name of the island as immortal as that of the six hundred Knights of various nations and the nine thousand Spanish and Italian soldiers and citizens of Malta who, for four years, fought off forty thousand Turks, of whom they killed thirty thousand; battling for every inch of land and losing fort after fort in bloody hand-to-hand combat, until all that remained were the redoubts of Birgu and Sanglea, where the last survivors fought to the end.

As old soldiers, both Captain Alatriste and Sebastian Copons regarded these places with respect, for they could all too easily imagine the tragedy that had played out there. Perhaps that is why they were so silent, from the moment we got into a felucca to cross the large harbour to reach the Del Monte Gate until we passed under its two small towers and entered the new city of Valetta, named in memory of the Grand Master Jean Parisot de la Valette, who had led the defence of Malta during the siege. I remember walking through the city's dusty streets flanked by houses with shuttered balconies and roof gardens, with a Maltese boatman as our guide.

We viewed everything with almost religious awe, first following the city wall straight to the cathedral, then turning to the right towards the sumptuous palace of the Grand

Master of the Order and the lovely square in front of it, with its fountain and column. Then we reached the
moat
surrounding Fort St Elmo whose impressive star-shaped bulk loomed above. Next to the drawbridge, where the red flag bearing the eight-pointed cross of the Order was flying, our guide told us in a mixture of Italian, Spanish and lingua franca how his father, who had fought in the siege, had, helped sailors from Birgu to take volunteer Knights — Spanish, French, Italian and German — from St Angelo to the besieged St Elmo; how every night they broke the Turkish blockade — by boat or swimming — to replace the terrible losses of the day, although the Knights knew full well that this was a one-way journey and that they were going to certain death. He also described how on the last night, they had been unable to cross the Turkish lines, and the volunteers had had to turn back, and how, at dawn, those who were besieged with Grand Master La Valette watched from the forts of Sanglea and St Michael, as a tide of five thousand Turks overwhelmed St Elmo in a final assault on the two hundred knights and soldiers, almost all of them Spaniards and Italians. Worn down, beaten and wounded after five weeks of fighting day and night, battered by cannon shot, the Knights continued to resist among the rubble. He concluded his tale by describing how, injured and unable to go on, the last of the Knights had withdrawn, without once turning their backs on the enemy, to the final redoubt of the church, killing and dying like cornered lions. However, when the remaining Knights saw that the Turks, enraged by the price they had been forced to pay for victory, were showing no mercy to the wounded they came upon, they strode out into the square again, prepared to die like the men they were. So it was that six of them — one Aragonese, one Catalan, one Castilian and three Italians — fought their way through the enemy to the sea, where they hoped to be able to swim to Birgu. Alas, they were taken prisoner in the water. And so angry was Mustafa Pacha — he had, after all, lost six thousand men in St Elmo alone, including the famous corsair Dragut — that he ordered the Knights' corpses to be crucified and personally cut a cross on each chest with his scimitar. Then he set the bodies on the water and let the current carry them across to the other side of the harbour, where Sanglea and St Michael continued to resist. Finally, he brought out all the other captives, stood them on the city walls and ordered their throats to be cut. The Grand Master responded to this barbarous act by killing all his Turkish prisoners and firing their decapitated heads into the enemy camp.

When our guide had finished his story, we stood for a moment in silence, thinking about what we had just heard. Then Sebastian Copons, who was leaning on the sandstone balustrade and frowning down into the moat surrounding the fort, suddenly said to Captain Alatriste, 'We'll probably end up the same way one day, Diego ... Crucified.'

'Possibly, but we won't be taken alive.'

'Not a chance.'

These words shocked me, but not because the idea, however unpleasant, frightened me exactly. I understood what Copons and the Captain were saying, for I had good reason to know by then that almost all men are capable of both the very best and the very worst. The truth is that on the blurred frontier of those Levantine waters, human cruelty — and nothing is more human than cruelty — opened up so many disquieting possibilities, and not only on the part of the Turks. There were nebulous resentments buried deep in the memory: old hatreds and family feuds, which the Mediterranean light, its sun and blue waters kept alive. For Spaniards — born of ancient races, with a centuries-long history of killing Moors or killing each other — slitting the throats of Englishmen was not the same as dealing with Turks, Berbers or the other people who lived on the shores of that sea. Captain Robert Scruton and his crew were mere intruders, and killing them in Lampedusa had been a formality, an act of family cleansing, a delousing before getting back to our proper business: Turks, Spaniards, Berbers, Frenchmen, Moriscos, Jews, Moors, Venetians, Genoans, Florentines, Greeks, Dalmatians, Albanians, renegades and corsairs. We were all neighbours, living round the same courtyard; we were people of the same caste. There was no reason why we shouldn't share a glass of wine, a laugh, a colourful insult, a macabre joke, before — viciously and imaginatively — crucifying each other or exchanging heads instead of cannonballs, with good old-fashioned Mediterranean loathing. For one always slits a person's throat better and with more pleasure when one knows the person in question.

We returned to Birgu that evening, as the dusty air and the last rays of sun tinged the walls of Fort St Angelo with red, malting them look as if they were made of molten iron. Before returning to the ship, we had walked for a long time through the steep, narrow streets of the new city, visiting the harbour of Marsamucetto on the west side of the island, and the famous auberges or barracks of Aragon and Castile, the latter with its beautiful staircase. There is an auberge for each of the seven languages, as the Knights of the Order called them: the auberges of Aragon and Castile mentioned above — which, of course, belonged to the Spanish nation — those of Auvergne, Provence and France — belonging to the French nation — and those of Italy and Germany. On our way back, we ended up next to the moat of Birgu in the old part of the city, where the taverns for soldiers and sailors were to be found. And since there was still more than half an hour before the Angelus, when we would have to return to the galley, we decided to forgo yet another bowl of ship's gruel and instead wet our whistles at our own expense, eating a meal fit for Christians.

We duly installed ourselves in a small inn, around a barrel that served as a table, with a leg of mutton, some pork chops, a large round loaf of bread, and a pitcher of strong red wine from Mytilene, which reminded us of Bull's Blood. We were watching people come and go: the swarthy men who looked and behaved like Sicilians and spoke a language that still contained words used by the Carthaginians; and the women, who were very beautiful but, out of modesty, avoided male company and swathed themselves in black or grey shawls because of strictures imposed by their relatives and husbands. Indeed, the men were as jealous as Spaniards, or more so — a legacy, no doubt, of the Moors and the Saracens. And there the three of us were, sitting with our belts loosened, when some Venetian soldiers and sailors who were drinking nearby happened to buy from a passing peddlar some St Peter's stones, which were held in high regard in Malta — legend has it that the saint was shipwrecked there — because they were said to cure the bites of scorpions and snakes.

At this point I did something unwise. I was not a sceptical youth but I did question certain aspects of faith, as I had been taught to do by Captain Alatriste. And with the insolence of youth, I could not repress a smirk when I saw one of the Venetians proudly showing off to his companions the stone he had bought, threaded onto a cord. Unfortunately, he saw that smirk and took umbrage. He was clearly not a very long- suffering fellow, for he strode over to me with a snarl on his lips, one hand resting on the hilt of his sword and backed up by his companions.

'Apologise,' Captain Alatriste muttered to me.

I shot him a sideways glance, taken aback by his abrupt tone and by his order to retract the offence, although, when I thought about it later, I realised he was right. Not because he feared the consequences — although there were six of them and only three of us — but because there really wasn't time to get involved in a dispute, and because quarrelling with Venetians, and in Malta, could prove serious. Relations between Spain and Venice were not good; there were frequent incidents in the Adriatic over matters of pre-eminence and sovereignty, and it took very little to set a match to such quarrels.

And so, swallowing my pride, I gave a forced smile and said, in the lingua franca that we Spaniards used on those seas and in those lands, something like: '
Escusi, signore, no era cuesto con
VOL

The Venetian, however, remained unappeased. Emboldened by what he believed to be this show of meekness and by the difference in numbers, he flicked back his hair — he wore it long, unlike we Spaniards, who had been wearing our hair short since the days of Emperor Charles — and heaped abuse on me, calling me a thief, which would be enough to enrage anyone, especially a proud lad from Guipuzcoa. I was foolishly about to leap to my feet, when the Captain, still impassive, grabbed my arm.

'He's just a boy and doesn't know the customs here,' he said very calmly and in Castilian, looking the Venetian straight in the eye. 'But he'll gladly buy you a mug of wine.'

Again, the man misinterpreted the situation. Thinking that my two companions were also backing down and made braver still by the presence of his colleagues, he pretended not to have heard the Captain's words and, unwilling to let go of his prey, namely me, he puffed himself up and said very insolently:
^l
Scende, espagnuolo marrano, ca te volio amasar.'

Captain Alatriste, without any hint of emotion, removed his hand from my arm and glanced at Copons. Until then, Copons, as usual, had said nothing and had simply been keeping a close eye on our boastful companions. At that point, however, he stood up.

'Lily-livered swab,' he muttered.

'Che cosa diche?'
asked the Venetian angrily.

'He says,' replied the Captain, also standing up, 'that you can beat your own whorish mother to a pulp, but not us.'

And so began the incident between Spaniards and Venetians that the history of Malta and the records of the time recall as the Birgu riot, a detailed description of which would require more paper than exists in the whole of Genoa. For having spoken those words, the Captain took out his sword, as did Copons and I, with such speed that the 'lily-livered swab' — as Copons had called him — stumbled backwards with a cut to one cheek inflicted by the dagger that had leapt like lightning from its sheath to the Captain's left hand and from there to the Venetian's face. And in less time than it takes to tell it, the man nearest Copons found his upper arm skewered by a sword, while I, light on my feet, took on the third. The latter jumped to one side, but nevertheless felt the blade of my sword against his buff coat, and even though it didn't pierce actual flesh, it was enough to encourage him to keep a respectful distance.