The Siege of Malta: Knights Hospitaller vs The Ottomans

This is the story of Suleiman the Magnificent's attempt to conquer Malta, the headquarters of a Catholic military order that had become a thorn in his side. They were known as the Knights Hospitaller, and the siege to come would pit Grand Master Jean de Valette and his force of outnumbered defenders against an elite Ottoman army. For this, we're joined by Marcus Bull, author of 'The Great Siege of Malta'. Marcus takes us through this tale of siege warfare and explains how luck as much as skill helped the defenders to hold out long enough for the siege to be broken. Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Matthew Peaty. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. We'd love to hear your feedback - you can take part in our podcast survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on. You can also email the podcast directly at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dan Snow?

  Hey friends, if you love this podcast and want to decide what history we cover, then you need to become a Dan Snow's History Hit subscriber. Pitch your topic and if I like it, we'll make it into a subscriber exclusive episode. So far, we've covered the English Reformation, the Hudson Bay Company, the Trail of Tears, all of which have been decided by dedicated subscribers. So take the reins of your favourite podcast by heading over to historyhit.com/subscribe or sign up in your podcast player.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  This is a paid partnership with Apple Card. The coolest flex at brunch these days is not the Bloody Mary with the bottomless gold flake caviar topping. It's not whipping out your wallet to pay. It's not having a wallet at all. Jack's been an Apple Card user since 2019. That's the same year he tossed his wallet in the trash. Because Apple Card holders earn 2% daily cash back on purchases made using Apple Pay. It's the only credit card designed for the iPhone. I tap to pay with Apple Card at the grocery store, at the gas station, at restaurants. And yes, I use it at my second home, the farmer's market. Jack tapping to pay with his Apple Card with Apple Pay is his favourite thing to do. And the pleasant vibration and chime sound means I just got 2% daily cash back on my latest purchase. Apply in the Wallet app on your iPhone today. Subject to credit approval.

• 1:15Speaker 01

  Apple Card, issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City branch. Terms and more at applecard.com.

• 1:27Dan Snow?

  Picture a late medieval, early modern siege. Picture those towering walls, damaged by early cannon. They're topped with soldiers. Among them, guns loaded with cannonballs but also chain shot, which when fired out, spins like a scythe at the besieging forces as they advance. Picture that attack coming.

• 1:59Dan Snow?

  Columns of infantrymen, many holding large shields above their head to protect them from the small arms on the walls above. Not just the small arms, the boiling water, the feces that's pelted down at them.

• 2:12Dan Snow?

  I'm sure you can imagine the unwieldy but terrifying siege towers, many storeys high, being pushed by gangs of men, roared on by burly sergeants, drawbridges ready to clatter down on the battlements. On the top level, sharpshooters providing covering fire, some with primitive firearms, others arrows, rocks from slings, throwing spears. To combat the threat of fire, those siege towers were clad in soaking-wet leather hides, with more water available on hand in casks in the tower to keep them nice and damp.

• 2:50Dan Snow?

  It's a siege which pits two religions, ancient foes, against each other, where prisoners are murdered. Their mutilated bodies floated across waterways on crosses, a taunt about their Christian faith. Muslim prisoners are beheaded in turn, their severed heads fired back at their comrades from the barrels of cannon. It's not just a siege, but an all-in struggle for a mighty fortress that seemed at the time to hold the key to the strategic balance of this entire region. A milestone in a centuries-long zero-sum struggle between sworn religious foes.

• 3:34Dan Snow?

  The siege, as I've described it, sounds like some kind of platonic, ideal form of siege, made for the big screen, an archetype just waiting to be used by filmmakers and novelists. And yet, this is a siege that did actually happen: the Great Siege of Malta in 1565.

• 4:01Dan Snow?

  Now for centuries, it was regarded as a definitive moment, a decisive moment, in the Ottoman Turkish Muslim attempt to conquer Europe, and a moment of Christian resistance to that conquest. But as you'll hear in this podcast, that interpretation is now being questioned by historians, although it was believed by many at the time and since, including, interestingly, by the English Queen, Elizabeth Tudor, Elizabeth I, who wrote about it as it was happening. She wrote, "If the Turks should prevail against the Isle of Malta, it is uncertain what further peril might follow to the rest of Christendom." Many people believed it was a battle for the future of Europe.

• 4:45Dan Snow?

  And even if that interpretation is now being questioned, what is not in doubt is the ferocity, the scale and intensity of the fighting that took place on that little island during that terrible summer. It is simply one of the most astonishing sieges in history, one that has come to define what we think of in our minds' eye when we hear the word siege. To tell me all about it, I've got Marcus Bull on the podcast. He is a distinguished professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He's just written The Great Siege of Malta, and he's going to tell us why it happened, what happened, and whether truly it mattered. Enjoy.

• 5:51Dan Snow?

  Marcus, great to have you on the podcast.

• 5:54Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 5:55Dan Snow?

  Just try and paint a picture for the audience of how much of a threat, or a perceived threat, the Ottoman advance through the Eastern Mediterranean was.

• 6:04Speaker 02

  I think the operative word there is perceived because there was a disconnect between the realistic threat posed by the Ottomans to Western Europe and what Western European observers chose to believe, or at least the rhetoric that they ramped up when trying to make a case. The reality was that the Ottoman Empire was, yes, a political organisation in which military expansion was built into its DNA. But it also, at the time of the Great Siege, in the 1560s, was slowing down, or at least being more selective about the targets it was identifying.

• 6:47Speaker 02

  And I think Western European Christian observers tended to hark back to a more aggressively expansive stage in Ottoman military history, 20, 30, 40 years before the fact, and assumed that there was something constant, permanent, about the way that the Ottomans lived for relentless expansion. Therefore, the rhetoric surrounding the Great Siege is sometimes out of kilter with the reality, which isn't to say that if you're on the ground in Malta in the middle of 1565, you didn't feud yourself in the middle of enormous history under grave threat.

• 7:26Speaker 02

  But the way in which the order of Malta itself and its Spanish overlords tried to build up support to aid in the defence of Malta was to suggest that Malta was the first step in a grand Ottoman strategy which would lead then to the conquest of Sicily, they would work their way up through Italy, and ultimately all of Western Europe was at stake. I don't think that's even remotely feasible, and people knew it, that the Ottomans would have been hard pressed even to hold on to Malta had they won it, let alone contemplate Sicily and Italy. I think they were attacking Malta as a bit of unfinished business.

• 8:11Speaker 02

  Their Sultan, Suleiman, was growing old.

• 8:15Speaker 02

  Malta and the Knights of St John on it had been a thorn in his side for years. And I think this was a last bit of let's deal with this persistent problem once and for all. They failed and the fact that they never really tried to come back to Malta, even though they could have perhaps taken it a year later because the defences were ruinous, suggests that ultimately this wasn't really a major strategic goal. It was more a kind of vendetta. It was a big feud against the Order of St John. That was ultimately what drove them.

• 8:50Dan Snow?

  Let's talk about the Order of St John. Who were they?

• 8:53Speaker 02

  Well, at the time of the siege, they'd already been around for nearly 500 years. They were a venerable order of the Catholic Church with origins in Jerusalem. They had developed an interesting and unusual two-facing personality. They were both a hospital order that cared for the sick and for pilgrims. And they were a military order modeled on the Order of the Temple, the Templars. And they were able to hold those two seemingly contradictory roles in a kind of creative tension. They were a socially top-heavy order. The great majority of their membership, at the time of the siege, there would have been

• 9:31Speaker 02

  about 1,400 knights around Europe, were the sons of high-status aristocratic families, predominantly in southern Europe. Under them were auxiliary personnel, sergeants and priests. But demographically and in terms of social importance, this was a very aristocratic, blue-blooded, elitist order. There were some nuns, but it was a predominantly a male order that prided itself on a tradition of resolute holy war on the frontiers between Christianity and Islam, which had inherited from its earlier history, first on the mainland of Palestine

• 10:15Speaker 02

  in Syria, then on the island of Rhodes, from which it had been ejected 45 years before the siege. And in a sense, had that mandate rebooted just before the siege by the Great Reforming Council of Trent, the Catholic Church's attempt to react to the Reformation, and one small part of Trent's pronouncements to vindicate to...

• 10:43Speaker 02

  Re-legitimize the vocation and existence of the Order of St John. So it was trying to rediscover itself. It had taken a very big hit in the Reformation because much of Northern Europe, its properties and membership in much of Germany, in all of England and Scotland had disappeared. It had been thrown back onto a Romance-speaking Southern European core. It had been given the islands of the Maltese archipelago when it had been evicted from Rhodes. It wasn't yet really convinced that Malta would be its permanent home. But nonetheless, the siege presented it with an opportunity to rediscover itself, to vindicate its historic sense of mission.

• 11:26Speaker 02

  And indeed, the way in which it celebrated their victory as they saw it after the siege and appealed for funds around Europe was built on this idea that the Order was back. It had discovered a kind of legitimacy and purpose which was in danger of ebbing away over the previous two or three generations.

• 11:46Dan Snow?

  We're back in the business of holding back or driving back the forces of Islam. Okay, so and they've been given Malta and the surrounding islands to run. I mean, they're, how would you describe it, a religious oligarchic state?

• 11:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think oligarchic is exactly the word. Like all ultimately medieval religious orders. It had an incredibly elaborate constitution and hierarchy. But essentially, it was an oligarchy of old men based in Malta in which the Grand Master, a quasi-autocratic figure, a monarch effectively, surrounded by the equivalent of a privy council. Though there were sometimes rumbles of discontent from the ranks of the knights, sometimes serious. But by and large, it was run as an autocracy or oligarchy perhaps in the interests of performing this mandate. It was ultimately answerable to the Pope.

• 12:41Speaker 02

  But on Malta, it was in a funny position because it had been given the Maltese Islands by Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, in his capacity as King of Spain. And therefore, they were, the order was, to some extent, beholden to the Spanish monarchy at the time of the siege. And the expectation was that it would be the Spanish king, by then Philip II. If Malta were to be saved, who would galvanise the resources to bring relief?

• 13:11Dan Snow?

  So we've mentioned the Ottomans a little bit. Suleiman the Magnificent has been ruling over the Ottoman Empire. He's taken it to their maximum extent. He's marched to the gates of Vienna. He's conquered all sorts of territory in South East Europe and islands in the East Mediterranean, like Rose that you've mentioned. It's important for us to remember, I mean, they were extraordinary maritime power, that, you know, one of the great strategists of all time, I always think is Barbarossa, the famous Ottoman commander in the Mediterranean, and they've done things like link up with the French. And I mean, they've, they were dominant naval power in the Mediterranean, I suppose. But you mentioned that this is a sort of vendetta. Why particularly? Is it, is this just a nest of very nasty anti-Islamic folk who the Sultan wants to get rid of?

• 13:52Speaker 02

  I think they could dress it up as holy war. That was always a gambit available to the Ottomans to be gazes, to cast themselves as leading a holy war against infidels. But in reality, I think the siege was an exercise in clearinghouse. The Knights of St John, or the Knights of Malta, we can now call them, were amongst other things, part of a culture of corsairing in the central and western Mediterranean, indeed the whole of the Mediterranean. Corsairs were, at least by their own lights, licensed, formerly acceptable pirates. They were pirates who had been given facilities or gave themselves licence to both capture shipping.

• 14:36Speaker 02

  Or to raid coasts and take slaves. Slavery was one of the big stories of the 16th century Mediterranean, and interdictional or capturing of ships was the other. And the Knights of St. John did it, as indeed many other coastal powers in the Mediterranean, along the North African coast, many Italian coastal cities and others. The Knights of St. John, though they were a quite small naval operation punched above their weight, they knew the eastern Mediterranean very well from their time at Rhodes. Two things happened to the Ottoman Empire in the generation before Suleiman came to power.

• 15:16Speaker 02

  The most important was that Suleiman's father Salim had taken what is Syria, Palestine, and crucially Egypt from the Mamluk regime, which was in decline. This was the game changer, perhaps the single most important fact in 16th century world history. And I would put the discovery of Americas underneath this, because it gave the Ottoman Empire access to the wealth of Egypt in itself, but also the access to the wealth that came through Egypt, up the Red Sea, the spice trade from the Indian Ocean and beyond. This made the route between Alexandria, the port through which all this spice trade came, and Istanbul a vital maritime link for the Ottoman world.

• 16:02Speaker 02

  Also, that same conquest, which extended into parts of Arabia, gave the Ottomans control of the holy places of Islam, Mecca and Medina. And that gave the responsibility for supervision of the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca that devout Muslims are expected to take, and responsibility to protect pilgrims.

• 16:27Speaker 02

  In the early to mid 1560s, it looks like the Knights of St John had pivoted from grandiose schemes of territorial expansion to a more realistic marshalling of their resources towards their corsairing naval activities. And they had recently captured both valuable Ottoman cargo vessels travelling between Alexandria and Istanbul. And they had severely disrupted the movement of pilgrims by sea on way to the holy places. This therefore threatened the Ottoman regime both financially and also in terms of its ideology and prestige.

• 17:11Speaker 02

  So I think it was in their capacities glorified pirates that the order of St John were attacked. This was ultimately the threat. It was a double whammy of threat of both money and image as far as the Ottoman regime was concerned.

• 17:28Dan Snow?

  So this is an imperial policing action. It's not the first step on a great expedition to conquer the rest of the world?

• 17:33Speaker 02

  No, it's actually a very realistic, hard-headed impulse that Sulaiman is aging. He had perhaps been too generous to the order when he'd let them go from roads, when he'd captured roads from them on New Year's Day 1523. They had remained a thorn in his side. Why not have one last push to be rid of them? I'm not sure they would know what to do with Malta. They would have probably abandoned it. It would have been too costly in men and money to maintain. But they have had the satisfaction of ridding themselves of this pesky thorn in their flesh.

• 18:10Dan Snow?

  He sends a big old fleet, doesn't he? It's a huge force to deal with these, the thorn in their flesh.

• 18:16Speaker 02

  Well, it is a huge force as an amphibious force. But the fleet of 170 frontline galleys, perhaps another 50 or 60 smaller ord craft and cargo ships and others, delivers about 20,000 to 25,000 frontline troops. A large number and certainly far more than the defenders had available to them.

• 18:40Speaker 02

  Compared to the sorts of numbers that the Ottomans would have been able to throw against the Habsburgs of Austria in Central Europe, or against their Iranian rivals in Anatolia, this is a quite small army, but as an amphibious force, it is enormous. And that is itself an indication that this wasn't just a gestural effort, let's see if we can get lucky, enormous amounts had been invested in it, in terms of men and materiel. The trouble was that to get that, those 20, 25,000 frontline troops there, of which the majority were elite Janissaries and Sepahis, the two corps that represented the frontline

• 19:20Speaker 02

  troops of the Ottoman military machine, that to get them there, you had to have a lot of people rowing the galas, they could perform auxiliary roles, they could drag cannon around, they could build fortifications. But in a sense, the Ottomans were condemned to take a lot of non-combatants to the island with them to use up precious food and water on what is a very small, barren, dry island. So, in a way, the clock was running from the moment they arrived off Malta in May 1565, because, yes, the numbers were impressive, but they were committing to a campaign on a small island with very few resources that

• 20:02Speaker 02

  they couldn't live off the land, they would have to bring basic supplies in from both North Africa and from the Eastern Mediterranean. So they were always vulnerable. This was a campaign on a tight clock, and the fact that they were able to prolong the campaign for four months is ultimately evidence of the Ottoman Empire's extraordinary command of logistics and organization, which was ultimately what gave them the advantage over their Western European rivals, was that all early modern governments were dreadfully inefficient. Money would get lost in transit, supplies would sort of fritter away, people

• 20:43Speaker 02

  would desert. The question was, how well you one could do to at least mitigate the worst effects of that inbuilt inefficiency?

• 20:52Speaker 02

  And the Ottoman Empire definitely developed systems which reduced those inefficiencies to a much greater extent than their Western European rivals. So the net effect was that they could organise themselves to contemplate something like the siege of Malta, even though they were at the very limit of the operational range of their galleys in a summer campaign season, is evidence that they were perhaps the only people who could have done it. And the fact that they persisted for four months is again evidence of their powers of organisation and persistence.

• 21:27Dan Snow?

  Listen to Dan's history, talking about the siege of Malta, more coming up. Well, there were more sieges, but more of this podcast coming up.

• 21:36Dan Snow?

  This episode is brought to you by TikTok. I never thought about the history of coffee. You make it, you drink it, nothing more to it. Then I've had a TikTok video about how people in the 1700s would pour their coffee into saucers to let it cool before drinking it. I love those sort of discovery, a detail, but suddenly you're imagining how people lived and drank and socialised. Now I wonder what will baffle historians about us: mugs. It's a ceramic vessel, but crucially, it has a handle. Well, that's the joy of TikTok, folks. You look for one thing and find yourself somewhere completely different. Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. Learn more at tiktok.com/discovermore.

• 22:20Speaker 01

  This is a paid partnership with Apple Card. The coolest flex at brunch these days is not the Bloody Mary with the bottomless gold flake caviar topping. It's not whipping out your wallet to pay. It's not having a wallet at all. Jack's been an Apple Card user since 2019. That's the same year he tossed his wallet in the trash. Because Apple Card holders earn 2% daily cash back on purchases made using Apple Pay. It's the only credit card designed for the iPhone. I tap to pay with Apple Card at the grocery store, at the gas station, at restaurants. And yes, I use it at my second home, the farmer's market. Jack tapping to pay with his Apple Card with Apple Pay is his favourite thing to do. And the pleasant vibration and chime sound means I just got 2% daily cash back on my latest purchase. Apply in the Wallet app on your iPhone today. Subject to credit

• 23:02Speaker 01

  approval. Apple Card, issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City branch. Terms and more at applecard.com.

• 23:11Speaker 03

  What started the civil war? What ended the conflict in Vietnam? Who was Paul Revere? And did the Vikings ever reach America? I'm Don Wildman, and on American History Hit, my expert guests and I are journeying across the nation and through the years to uncover the stories that have made America. We'll visit the battlefields and debate floors where the nation was formed, meet the characters who have altered it with their touch, and count the votes that have changed the direction of our laws and leadership. Find American History Hit twice a week, every week, wherever you get your podcasts. American History Hit, a podcast from History Hit.

• 24:06Dan Snow?

  So they get a foothold on Malta. Tell me about the defenses and how the campaign takes shape.

• 24:11Speaker 02

  Well, there are four defensive positions on Malta. And really, the phrase "the Siege of Malta," or "the Great Siege of Malta," evokes a classic siege-type, forces arrayed around one single walled position. It was a little bit more complicated than that. The Knights of St. John, various Spanish troops and Italian troops, they had either been given by the Habsburgs or had paid for, and importantly, a large number of Maltese militia volunteers were tasked with defending four positions. And the score at the end of the campaign season would determine the ultimate result.

• 24:51Speaker 02

  In the event one of those four fell, a fortress called St. Elmo, the other three held, though two came close to it. So ultimately, that represented a victory for the defenders, insofar as a victory, if you are defending in a siege, is not to lose. Three of those four positions were accosted around the Great Harbour area of Malta, which visitors to Malta today would be very familiar with. If you're looking from the modern city of Valletta, which was then just a bare rock peninsula, you'd have St Elmo at the tip of that peninsula and then the twin peninsulas perpendicular to you of Birgu and Senglia pointing towards you. Those were the three Grand Harbour fortified positions.

• 25:35Speaker 02

  A fourth was in the interior of the island, the ancient capital of Deena, which was threatened at times but was basically not in the front line to the extent that Grand Harbour was. The point was that for the Ottomans, this was an amphibious campaign. They had to keep their navy and their ground forces as close together as possible. This is the first law of amphibious warfare. And therefore, they had to concentrate on those defences which the order had, in most cases, rather hastily and inadequately erected in the 10 or 15 years before the Great Siege. In the event, they just about held, though it was a very, very close run thing. So it was a siege.

• 26:18Speaker 02

  It was a siege of four places at various times and with varying levels of intensity. One fell, three survived.

• 26:26Dan Snow?

  So St Elmo falls.

• 26:29Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 26:30Dan Snow?

  What's the secret there? Is it Turkish bombardment? Is it the fact they were able just to smash the walls with cannon?

• 26:34Speaker 02

  Yeah. St Elmo was the weakest point. Its value lay in guarding the Grand Harbour and its sister harbour on the other side of the peninsula, Massum Shet. If it fell, the Ottomans would be able to bring their fleet into Massum Shet and have the fleet available very close to where the action was on land. So it was important. It clung on for about five weeks, facing formidable bombardment. And the standard narrative of the siege is that every day that St Elmo survived, it was buying more time for the defenders in the other larger fortresses to improve their defences, to organise themselves.

• 27:19Speaker 02

  And this is the way in which the order and its grand master, Jean de Vallet, approached it. It was a kind of sacrifice to buy time. Something like 19,000 or 20,000 cannon shots were fired at it. This was a tiny, weak fortress. The fact that it survived for several weeks was nothing short of miraculous. In the long run, perhaps the greatest significance of the fact that the Ottomans were held up for more than a month taking St Elmo was that a disproportionate number of their frontline troops, especially the Janissaries, were killed in that phase of the operation, meaning that when they swung around to the other side of Grand Harbour

• 28:03Speaker 02

  and began the siege in phase two of the peninsula of Birgau and Sengglia, their frontline troops were depleted, and this may have made the difference in the long run. They just didn't have enough of the trained, hardened, experienced veterans to make the difference in the killing zone of the frontline when they came face to face with the defenders.

• 28:29Dan Snow?

  When St Elmo falls, there are atrocities and prisoners are beheaded and just all sorts of disgusting things are done. Is there a religious element? I mean, is this bloody and more horrific than fighting going on between Christian powers in northern, central Europe at the time, for example, you know, Henry, Charles V and the King Francis are always at each other, but was, is there something different about this fighting?

• 28:53Speaker 02

  I think there is. What happens particularly is when St Elmo finally falls, the Ottomans very demonstratively, visibly desecrate the bodies of the leadership, the knights who had fallen there. And in doing so, they're deliberately raising the bar or trying to alter the mood music. They've been frustrated by St Elmo. They now face the, on paper, more formidable task of reducing the remaining fortifications that stand in their way. And they need to galvanize their own men. And one of the ideological tricks of the Ottoman regime was to be able to ramp up the language of holy war, knowing that the other side

• 29:38Speaker 02

  would very happily respond in kind, and they do. Valet orders his cannon to fire the heads of beheaded Turkish prisoners back in a kind of crude tit for tat. And at that point, one senses that, yes, this was always a holy war. It would be impossible for a knight of the order of the Catholic Church and the Ottoman Empire to come to blows without this being a heavily religious moment. But from that point, after St Elmo, I think that holy war rhetoric goes up a notch and becomes much more important.

• 30:12Dan Snow?

  So now they turn their attention to these other two forts around the harbour. You talk in the book about this being one of the greatest artillery bombardment possible to that point in history. I mean, is this, is this important in the history of warfare just because of its, the use of artillery?

• 30:25Speaker 02

  Yes. The Ottomans brought about 70 cannon to prosecute the campaign. Virtually all of them are then brought to bear after St Elmo falls on the defences of the two peninsulas. Artillery warfare had really taken off over the previous 40 or 50 years, perhaps earlier, perhaps in the early Italian wars involving the French, as early as the 1490s. One of their great strengths as a military machine was that the extent of the empire, as it had grown by Suleiman's time, meant that it controlled regions that

• 31:08Speaker 02

  individually and collectively supplied it with the materiel of 16th century warfare very effectively, including tin for bronze, which was imported from England of all places. It had the wherewithal to develop sophisticated shipbuilding and gun making facilities. So the cannon arrayed against the defences around Grand Harbour were ultimately evidence of the Ottoman Empire's luck with the natural resources at its disposal, and which had also allowed it to grow into a formidable naval

• 31:48Speaker 02

  force. So, yes, it would be wrong to say that this was, I feel like, a revolutionary moment in the history of artillery warfare, but it was an affirmation that if even amphibious warfare could now be conducted with the full might of the Ottoman artillery park arrayed.

• 32:09Dan Snow?

  And yet they got blown out of the Indian Ocean by Portuguese cannons and ships. I don't understand it. I don't understand it. It's so strange. Anyway, let's keep on Malta here. These artillery pieces are battering these walls. Are there kind of ferocious infantry battles going on here as well? And people launching themselves into the breach?

• 32:26Speaker 02

  The story of the siege is really punctuated by what the Christian sources called the Great Assaults. Wave after wave, often lasting five, six hours, picking their way through the rubble field, which their own artillery had created. The defenders didn't have that luxury and they would gradually tire and weaken. So even if the first wave would be sacrificed, the hope was that the Christian defenders would ultimately be overwhelmed by sheer assistance. Though the Christian sources often talk about the Ottomans throwing

• 33:02Speaker 02

  two, five, 10,000 people into a Great Assault, in reality, it must have been done in smaller bursts, and that made the difference. Because you couldn't throw thousands of people across a rough rubble field, fighting their way up a slight incline where the walls had been, towards the improvised defences created by the defenders. You'd have to do it in small groups, or those groups would break up as they struggled their way up through the rubble. So the defenders simply had to devise ways to channel these successive waves into small, compact killing zones, where the disparity numbers would be neutralised, and deal with

• 33:45Speaker 02

  them bit by bit. They couldn't defend themselves to the eight thousands, but if they could channel a few dozen at a time into a space, they would deal with them, rest as well as they could, wait a few minutes, deal with the next wave, deal with that, deal with the next wave. And you see in all the Christian sources, an obsession with the relative number of casualties, day by day, like a running score. Oh, we only lost 70 today, they lost 250. And it becomes an attritional war in which they're keeping score. And they can do so, even though the attackers outnumber the defenders about four or five to one, they can do so by exploiting the fact that Ottomans ultimately

• 34:30Speaker 02

  could not make their enormous advantages in numbers tell where it mattered, which is in the killing zone on the edge of the fortified line. It didn't matter whether there were 10,000 soldiers half a mile away. The Christians were able just to manage those killing zones in a way which meant that they survived, more or less.

• 34:55Dan Snow?

  You're listening to Dan's History, more on the siege of Malta after this.

• 35:05Speaker 01

  This is a paid partnership with Apple Card. The coolest flex at brunch these days is not the Bloody Mary with the bottomless gold flake caviar topping. It's not whipping out your wallet to pay. It's not having a wallet at all. Jack's been an Apple Card user since 2019. That's the same year he tossed his wallet in the trash. Because Apple Card holders earn 2% daily cash back on purchases made using Apple Pay. It's the only credit card designed for the iPhone. I tap to pay with Apple Card at the grocery store, at the gas station, at restaurants. And yes, I use it at my second home, the farmer's market. Jack tapping to pay with his Apple Card with Apple Pay is his favorite thing to do. And the pleasant vibration and chime sound means I just got 2% daily cash back on my latest purchase. Apply in the Wallet app on your iPhone today. Subject to credit approval.

• 35:48Speaker 01

  Apple Card, issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City branch. Terms and more at applecard.com.

• 35:54Speaker 04

  Outdated technology isn't going to improve a disconnected healthcare system. Next. So what will? At Optum, we wake up every day and work for better. We call it healthy optimism. It's how we use insights and technology to help providers focus less on paperwork and more on patients. Will we fix it all overnight? No, but we'll wake up trying, again and again, until healthcare works as one for everyone. That's healthy optimism. Learn more at optum.com.

• 36:33Dan Snow?

  Such an extraordinary example of the force multiplying nature of fixed defences, of these kind of defensive structures, and as you say, leading the attackers into these horrific narrow defiles and cutting them down. How close did the Ottomans come to victory?

• 36:47Speaker 02

  I think perilously close. It's impossible to gauge because we don't know what would have happened had this moment gone differently and so on, but I think the margins were incredibly fine. I think the best evidence of that is the attitude of Jean de Vollet, the Grand Master leading the defence. Several times in the later stages of the siege, he positioned himself in command of a kind of flying squad which would rush to, in the aid of any particular point of the defences that was under particular strain. And at several points, he threw himself forward, exposing himself and his members of his high command around him.

• 37:29Speaker 02

  Now, after the fact, this was spun as evidence of his fortitude, of his leadership qualities. I think it was really acts of desperation or resignation. He didn't want to be taken alive and he was convinced that today was the day that it will collapse. He was sacrificing himself, but luckily he survived. Out of the story could be reworked as an example of his resilience and bravery. The fact that Vollet, I think, was convinced more than once that the game was up is evidence that the margins were incredibly fine. The defenders were just very, very lucky. A number of things did make the difference.

• 38:12Speaker 02

  The story of 16th century siege warfare around the world, certainly around Europe, is punctuated by plague or other epidemic disease, that the defenders were fatally weakened by disease. Miraculously, though there is evidence that epidemic disease raged through the Ottoman camp, it doesn't seem to have affected those on the inside. That would have been lights out. They were able to preserve their water supply. The systems were never damaged by the Ottoman bombardment, and their water was running very low by the end, it never ran out. That would have been a game changer. And also, again, though supplies were running low by the end of the siege,

• 38:57Speaker 02

  the defenders were able to preserve at least some of their stocks of gunpowder. So that at one point, they fired a mine towards the end as if to show off the fact that they had gunpowder to spare. At one point, one of their powder mills blew up. Mid-siege, sabotage was suspected. But even that huge setback ultimately didn't mean that they ran out of that basic resource of 16th century warfare. So between the absence of disease, the availability of water, at least to some degree, and they were able to produce gunpowder in some quantities right to the end, those were the difference makers.

• 39:38Dan Snow?

  It's shocking to think that so more Ottomans would have died because of disease, because of terrible disease, because of misunderstanding the nature, how to maintain and drink clean water and all that, dealing with the the consequences of all the the waste products produced by that massive army camping and temporary lodgings. More people were probably killed by disease than by Christian shot and steel.

• 40:04Speaker 02

  I think that's right. And the sad irony of it is that the Ottoman armed forces, the army in particular, had a reputation amongst Western observers for being far more attentive to matters of hygiene and medical care than Western armies. They were ahead of the game. Even they could not mitigate being forced to live on a cramped island with very little water. And once disease takes hold in those sorts of situations, it there's inadequate medical science and it cannot be stopped. But the Ottomans, in fairness, were always an object lesson

• 40:49Speaker 02

  in their other wars in at least a superior attention to matters of hygiene and medical care.

• 40:55Dan Snow?

  Well, they had to be, they had to be. Great reason for their enormous success. What brings the siege to an end?

• 41:02Speaker 02

  I think two things. The headline is that finally,

• 41:08Speaker 02

  The forces of Habsburg Europe, especially in those parts of Italy which were under the control of the Habsburg kings of Spain, are able to pull together a coalition of forces from which a relief force, known as the Grand Secours, or Great Relief, about eight or nine thousand strong, lands on Malta in early September 1565, meets the Ottoman forces in a running battle in the centre of the island, forces them back onto their ships. The survivors of that debacle aboard the Ottoman galleys and they sail off. In reality, I think there's evidence

• 41:51Speaker 02

  that the Ottomans were already beginning to disengage from Malta even before the Grand Secours arrived. The defenders were seeing them starting to take down gun emplacements and to withdraw to more distant positions. And I think, in reality, the Ottomans would have had to have, even if the Grand Secours had never happened, the Ottomans would have had to, I think, made a decision: do we tough it out over the winter, which would have been almost impossible, or do we withdraw? And I think they would have withdrawn. Don't forget that the siege took place before a great reform in the Christian calendar, the result of which was that when we think of the siege ending

• 42:35Speaker 02

  in the first half of September 1565, in meteorological terms, that is equivalent to later September today. So they were pushing closer towards autumnal weather conditions. They would have had to equip very soon. The Grand Secours provided that final push, but I don't ultimately think it was the reason why the siege ended. The siege was ending as the relief force arrived.

• 43:04Dan Snow?

  As you say, survival, therefore a victory for the defending side. It's always said, what are the great sieges of history? Certainly in its intensity and drama as it was going on, it seems like it was. But does it matter? Does it leave a big strategic footprint, imprint on subsequent history?

• 43:19Speaker 02

  It is very important, but its importance is symbolic rather than strategic. When the knights regroup and attempt to ensure that there is never a restaging of the Great Siege by fortifying the peninsula of Shiboras and building what is now the capital of the modern state of Malta, Valletta. They build the siege into their mythology by using the language of claiming that they have become what they called the bulwark of Christianity or the bulwark of Europe. This was a phrase that they banded around a lot. We were the front line defending Europe as a whole from the Ottoman menace.

• 44:05Speaker 02

  I think it was largely rhetorical posture. Once Valletta had been built and the defences of Malta enormously improved, the chances of the Ottomans trying to restage the events of 1565 were slim. There were scares, invasion scares into the 17th century. But I think the chances of the Ottomans trying again, their opportunity was only a year after. The fortifications were still ruinous. Half the knights were dead or severely injured. They missed their chance. So I think it was a symbolic moment.

• 44:48Speaker 02

  It achieved a lot of its longer term resonance by being twinned with the Battle of La Panto six years later. It becomes the first part of a kind of double act, a one-two, which demonstrated that finally Western Europe, Mediterranean Europe, was able to organise itself and to meet the Ottomans on equal terms, if not better.

• 45:14Speaker 02

  I think the Great Siege benefited from being linked to La Panto and thereby assumed a significance which in isolation it probably didn't deserve, at least in real strategic terms. Its symbolic importance was enormous.

• 45:29Dan Snow?

  But that is important. I mean, is it fair to see the twins of La Panto and Malta? So the La Panto Great Naval Victory, won by a sort of Christian alliance off the west coast of Greece. Were they right to say this represents a new chapter in Mediterranean history, that the era of slow grinding advances by the Ottomans say it's going to come to an end? Is that fair to see them together like that?

• 45:53Speaker 02

  The most famous victim of the Corsairs around this time was Miguel de Thivantes, the author of Don Quijote, whom fought at La Panto, was injured at La Panto. And he writes that, though he had personal reasons to look back regretfully on La Panto, he lost the use of one of his hands, he wrote that it was the day when Christian Europe regained its confidence. It learned not to be afraid of the Ottomans again. And he was writing that some decades later. So I think, yes, it was important. The Ottomans remained active

• 46:33Speaker 02

  in the central and western Mediterranean for 10 or more years after Malta. But eventually they and the Habsburg kings of Spain realised that they were being sucked into an expensive arms race that neither of them really needed or wanted. Both of them wished to engage elsewhere and to divert resources away from the Mediterranean. And so by about 1580, the tension is dying down, which is to say that the Mediterranean doesn't become a safe place. The culture of Corsairian is still there. It reemerges in a way after the great powers have partly withdrawn from the central Mediterranean.

• 47:17Speaker 02

  Malta is the last moment in this decisive change, but it is a single moment in a process whereby the two great powers of the 16th century Mediterranean, the Ottomans and the Spanish Habsburgs, eventually agree to disagree, to draw rough lines of demarcation and to more or less leave each other alone, or at least to allow themselves to pursue a war through small surrogates. The order of Saint John of Malta and the various North African corsairs in what is now Libya, Tunisia and Algeria, over which the Ottomans had some kind of overlordship, but were ultimately

• 48:00Speaker 02

  left to do their own thing, to make a living from corsairing. Another indication of that is that from about 1580, you see the beginnings of Northern European traders, the English and the Dutch, muscling their way into the Mediterranean to pick up the spice trade from ports in the East. And muscling is the right word, because these would be armed, they'd have to fight off corsairs, they're displacing the Venetians, the historic carriers of that spice trade.

• 48:39Speaker 02

  So you get the sense that the Mediterranean is now being plugged into larger global economic circuits. The Ottomans at the other end begin or develop systems to tap more effectively into the spice trade coming through from the Indian Ocean. So the Mediterranean is no longer the centre of attention, it's simply one important part of a much larger global circuit movement of goods, in which many different players, the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean... The English and the Dutch in the Atlantic, they're all starting to be much more joined up. And in that sense, the siege was the one of the last hurrales

• 49:24Speaker 02

  of an older world in which people fought over the Mediterranean for itself. And then it becomes part of this much larger, joined up world.

• 49:33Dan Snow?

  What an interesting way of looking at it. Thank you very much for that. Tell everyone, Marcus, what is your book called?

• 49:37Speaker 02

  It's called The Great Siege of Malta.

• 49:39Dan Snow?

  Go and get it, everybody. It's fantastic. Thank you very much for coming on the podcast.

• 49:43Speaker 02

  Thank you very much.

• 49:55Speaker 01

  This is a paid partnership with Apple Card.

• 49:56Speaker 05

  The coolest flex at brunch these days is not the Bloody Mary with the bottomless gold flake caviar topping.

• 50:02Speaker 01

  It's not whipping out your wallet to pay. It's not having a wallet at all.

• 50:06Speaker 05

  Jack's been an Apple Card user since 2019. That's the same year he tossed his wallet in the trash.

• 50:10Speaker 01

  Because Apple Card holders earn 2% daily cash back on purchases made using Apple Pay. It's the only credit card designed for the iPhone.

• 50:17Speaker 05

  I tap to pay with Apple Card at the grocery store, at the gas station, at restaurants.

• 50:21Speaker 01

  And yes, I use it at my second home, the farmer's market.

• 50:25Speaker 05

  Jack tapping to pay with his Apple Card with Apple Pay is his favorite thing to do.

• 50:28Speaker 01

  And the pleasant vibration and chime sound means I just got 2% daily cash back on my latest purchase.

• 50:34Speaker 05

  Apply in the Wallet app on your iPhone today.

• 50:36Speaker 01

  Subject to credit approval. Apple Card, issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City branch. Terms and more at applecard.com.

• 50:46Dan Snow?

  Have you been enjoying my podcast and now want even more history? Sign up to History and watch the world's best history documentaries on subjects like how William conquered England, what it was like to live in the Georgian era, and you can even hear the voice of Richard III. We've got hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week. And there's always something more to discover. Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.