Medieval The Ottoman-Habsburg wars
The Great Siege of Malta, 1565
| Battle | The Great Siege of Malta |
|---|---|
| Date | 23 June 1565, the fall of Fort St Elmo, in a siege that ran from 18 May to 8 September |
| War | The Ottoman-Habsburg wars |
| Location | Fort St Elmo and the Grand Harbour, on Malta |
| Belligerents | The Knights Hospitaller and the Maltese, with a Spanish relief force, vs the Ottoman Empire |
| Commanders | Jean Parisot de Valette, Grand Master (defenders) vs Mustafa Pasha and Piyale Pasha, with Turgut Reis, called Dragut, killed at St Elmo (Ottomans) |
| Strength | An Ottoman force usually put at about 40,000; some 6,000 defenders in all, of whom perhaps 500 were knights. St Elmo itself was held by roughly 100 to 150 knights and 600 to 700 soldiers, reinforced by boat across the harbour at night |
| Outcome | The siege broken after nearly four months: the Ottomans withdrew on 8 September and never again threatened the central Mediterranean |
| Defenders' losses | The St Elmo garrison was killed almost to the last man; total defender and Maltese losses across the siege ran into thousands |
| Ottoman losses | Around 30,000 dead by the traditional count, with modern estimates spanning 25,000 to 35,000 from fighting and disease; some 6,000 of those were spent taking St Elmo alone |
The Account
In May of 1565 an Ottoman army of some forty thousand men landed on Malta to take the island from the Knights Hospitaller. Against them the Grand Master, Jean Parisot de Valette, had about six thousand defenders in all, perhaps five hundred of them knights of the Order. The invaders, under Mustafa Pasha and Piyale Pasha, came at St Elmo first, a small star fort on the point at the mouth of the Grand Harbour.
St Elmo was not defensible and everyone involved knew it. The fort was old in design, overlooked by ground the Ottomans could take and did. When Mustafa Pasha’s engineers looked at it they told him it would fall in four or five days. They were not being careless. On the arithmetic they were right.
La Valette looked at the same fort and saw the same thing, and then did the sum that made him what he was. Malta could not be held if the main fortifications at Birgu and Senglea were stormed before they were finished. They were not finished. What he needed was time, and the only currency he had that would buy time was St Elmo and the men in it.
So he garrisoned it. A hundred knights or so, six or seven hundred soldiers, and sixty galley slaves under arms, and when they were killed he sent more across the harbour by boat in the dark, and when the survivors sent word that the position was hopeless and asked to come out and die attacking instead, he refused them and sent more men in.
The fort held for a month.
They were shelled from three sides by the heaviest siege train in the Mediterranean. They were assaulted again and again by janissaries coming across ground that was by then made of rubble and bodies. They fought with hoops of flaming cotton soaked in brandy that they threw down onto men wearing loose robes, and it worked, and it is one of the more horrible things I have watched. Every night boats crossed the harbour with powder and food and men, and went back with the wounded, until the Ottomans took the shore and even that stopped. In the last days the garrison could not stand and were carried to the walls in chairs to keep fighting.
Turgut Reis, whom the Christians called Dragut, the best sailor and siege commander the Ottomans had, was killed there by a stone splinter while directing the batteries. He was around eighty years old.
On the twenty-third of June it fell, and the garrison was killed almost to the last man. Mustafa Pasha had lost something like six thousand men and a month of campaigning season for a fort his engineers had promised him in five days. He is supposed to have stood in its ruins and looked across the water at Birgu, which was much bigger, much stronger, and now much better prepared, and asked what the greater work would cost him if the small one had cost him this.
It cost him the campaign. He spent the rest of the summer failing at Birgu and Senglea, and by August his army was sick, out of ammunition and camped in the heat among its own dead. On the seventh of September eight thousand Spanish and Italian troops landed at St Paul’s Bay. The Ottomans, exhausted and afraid of being caught on the island with winter coming, began pulling out the next day, abandoning guns as they went. They had lost about thirty thousand men. They never came at the central Mediterranean that way again.
The men in St Elmo bought that. They were spent, deliberately, by their own commander, for a month on a calendar. They knew it while it was happening. I was in the fort with them the whole time and I can tell you they knew it by the second week, and most of them stayed anyway, and the few who asked to be let out asked to be let out so they could attack.
I do not call that a waste. I do not call it a sacrifice either. Those are words for the living to sort out afterwards. I call it fifteen hundred men, and I have all of them.
Behind the Song
The Song
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Why St Elmo, and not the siege
The title is doing precise work. The song covers the whole siege in three verses, but it is named for one fort and for what that fort cost, and the cost is the subject.
The Great Siege is usually told as a heroic defensive victory, which it was. What is less often said out loud is the mechanism: the victory was bought by a commander who put men into an indefensible position on purpose, refused their request to withdraw, and fed reinforcements into it by night for a month because the position’s job was not to hold but to be expensive.
That is a harder and more interesting thing than a last stand, and it is what the song’s chorus is actually asking about. “When the cost is weighed and the truth stands tall, then the world will remember their deed.” The cost, not the victory.
The song, against the history
The mode is epic chronicle told gently, and the gentleness is load-bearing. A record of this kind could easily set a four-month siege with thirty thousand dead as a battle anthem. This one is nearly a lullaby, and the distance between the delivery and the content is where the song lives.
Verse 1 opens the siege. “Forty thousand soldiers came to take the island whole” is the standard figure for the Ottoman force. “The knights in black and white” is the Hospitaller habit, and “John de Valette swore his oath that they would stand alone” is close to literal: Malta’s relief was promised, repeatedly delayed, and did not arrive for nearly four months.
Verse 2 is the fort, and it is the most historically dense passage on the record. “A thousand men held back the tide” is fair for the garrison across the whole month once the nightly reinforcements are counted, though it began at perhaps eight hundred. “For thirty days they bled and burned” is right: the assault on St Elmo ran about a month, from late May to 23 June.
“But every hour that they bought let Birgu’s walls grow strong” is the line the whole song is built around, and it is exactly what happened. The fort’s purpose was delay, and the delay was spent fortifying the positions that actually had to hold.
“The Sultan cursed the price he paid” is the reversal in a line. Taking St Elmo cost the Ottomans roughly six thousand men and a month of the campaigning season, for a fort their own engineers had estimated at four or five days.
Verse 3 is the relief and the withdrawal, and every figure in it holds. “September brought the northern wind, the rescue on the dawn” and “eight thousand soldiers hit the shore” are the Gran Soccorso, roughly 8,000 Spanish, Italian and other troops landed at St Paul’s Bay on 7 September. “Where thirty thousand lay” is the traditional count of the Ottoman dead, and modern estimates run from 25,000 to 35,000 including disease.
The bridge does what the bridge does on every track here: it steps back off the specific war. “Counting kings and soldiers, keeping neither score” is the flat refusal to keep the ledger the way the histories keep it, in a song that has just spent three verses counting very carefully indeed.
Lyrics
[Verse 1] Malta, fifteen sixty-five, beneath a blackened sky The Ottoman fleet came sweeping in, dark sails riding high The sea went black with galleys and the drums began to roll As forty thousand soldiers came to take the island whole The knights in black and white prepared to hold the ancient stone John de Valette swore his oath that they would stand alone The cannons spoke, the walls replied, the siege had now begun And Lady Death stood waiting in the shadow of the sun
[Pre-Chorus] She draws no blade, she speaks no word, she bears no name,
[Chorus] There will come a NIGHT when the silence breaks There will come a DAY when the dark recedes Through blood and smoke they held the line And the world will remember their stand
There will come a NIGHT when the fires fall still There will come a DAY when the tale is told When the cost is weighed and the truth stands tall Then the world will remember their deed
[Verse 2] Fort St. Elmo bore the fury through the endless summer heat A thousand men held back the tide and would not know defeat For thirty days they bled and burned beneath the crescent moon Until the fortress finally fell upon the last of June But every hour that they bought let Birgu’s walls grow strong The Sultan cursed the price he paid, the siege had stretched too long The bodies choked the harbor and the stones ran red with war And Lady Death walked heavy where the knights had gone before
[Verse 3] September brought the northern wind, the rescue on the dawn Eight thousand soldiers hit the shore, the tide at last was drawn The Ottoman army broke and fled, retreating through the bay And left their dead beneath the sun where thirty thousand lay The bells rang out from shattered towers across the scarred terrain A legend forged in fire and blood, a victory through pain The island stood, the cross held high, the crescent turned away And Lady Death moved on to find another war to claim
[Bridge] Walls collapse in thunder as the sky burns black, Voices tear the darkness, never coming back, Oaths dissolve in ash where the brave once prayed, And the weight of centuries cracks at the break of day, Lady Death drifts softly through the broken door, Counting kings and soldiers, keeping neither score, Banners sink to embers as the last lights fade, And the blood of empires settles in her wake.
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