The Great Siege

9

As soon as La Valette had heard of the death of Don Federique de Toledo, he had sent news to his uncle Don García in Sicily with all speed. No reply came. He had then sent out as many of his knights as he could spare to Mdina under cover of darkness, a troop of fifty mounted men under the command of the redoubtable Don Pedro Mezquita, to remain at Mdina in its defence.

‘At Mdina!’ Mezquita had protested, thirsting for vengeance for the death of his own nephew.

‘You must bring the Maltese nobility in Mdina to battle,’ said La Valette. ‘And observe how the camp of the Turks at Marsa will be ever less and less defended, as the siege wears on.’

And so Mezquita and his horsemen had harried the Turks relentlessly from Mdina. At first the Maltese nobility ordered him to cease, but by then it was too late. The Turks were marching on Mdina in punitive mood, knowing it was only thinly defended.

The nobility panicked and begged for Mezquita’s advice.

‘My advice,’ he said grandly, tossing back his cloak with his still-bandaged arm and assuming his haughtiest air, ‘is that you appoint me Military Commander of this city. Otherwise you are doomed.’

They agreed.

Don Pedro had the men and women of the ancient capital of the island dressed as soldiers, bearing pikes and lining the walls when the Turks came in sight. A crude and laughable ruse, but it worked. Bewildered at the large number of defenders, the Turks backed off. Mezquita told his anxious hosts that they would return. This was not a battle they could leave to Birgu. This was a battle for the whole of Malta. Indeed, for the whole of Christendom. The older nobles still hesitated, but hot-blooded younger sons begged to join Mezquita’s cavalry and ride out against the Turk.

Finally Mezquita could command a hundred and twenty horseman. A small force against an Ottoman army, true. But it could move fast, and must suffice.

It was La Valette’s desperate, last-ditch ruse. To fool the Turks, even in their moment of victory, that a mighty Spanish army had arrived.

Mezquita and his cavalry troop rode out in the thick summer mist before dawn, passing silently through the humid night. The horses snorting softly, muffled with cloths, the men not talking. And keeping watch from an outcrop of rocks, they saw the last titanic bombardment of Birgu begin, and the entire Turkish infantry move out from Marsa to the forward camp for the final assault.

Once battle was joined there, Mezquita and his cavalry galloped in behind and descended on the main camp like a whirlwind. They took no prisoners. They slaughtered all the sick and wounded that they found, they fired the tents and the magnificent pavilions, even the pavilion of Mustafa Pasha himself, they ruptured the water butts and burnt the last of any supplies remaining. In less than a quarter of an hour they had wreaked utter devastation, and were galloping back to the safety of Mdina even as Mustafa and his commanders looked over their shoulders towards Marsa, vaguely uneasy, to see black smoke roiling high into the sky.

Not a Turk had seen the horsemen come in secret from Mdina, and so they thought there was only one explanation.

‘The Spanish have come, and fallen on us from behind!’

The battle-horns sounded the retreat, and Mustafa ground his teeth and almost wept as Birgu was abandoned at the hour of its fall.

The Turks broke camp and pulled apart or burnt their gun emplacements and, utterly broken in spirit, began the trek north to their ships. Wooden wheels grinding over the stony implacable landscape, past ransacked and ruined villages, the sky hotly burning, shame on their sunburnt cheeks.

Outriders kept lookout for the imagined Spanish army, but saw none. The camp appeared to have been attacked by djinns. Some said among themselves that they no longer had enough food to keep them alive on the three-week voyage home.

As they retreated they looked back and saw with crushing dismay that a triumphant banner of St John was once more flying … over St Elmo. A mere patch of cindered rubble on the end of Sciberras.

One Turk shook his head. ‘Against such men as these,’ he said, ‘there could have been no victory.’

A strange and unseasonal wind was picking up from the north, a tramontana, they said, bringing a thin scattering of rain and turning the thin earth of the island to mud. The guns were twice as heavy to haul, the oxen emaciated for lack of fodder. There were more heavy and ominous clouds to the east: the way home looked rougher each day. The rain came down harder on their sodden backs, their hanging silks, and their muskets were now useless if they should need them.

The news that it wasn’t the Spaniards did not bring them to life again. The bitter truth — that their camp had been sacked by only a hundred horsemen or so, riding from Mdina — was even harder to bear. They hung their heads along with their horses and oxen, humiliated to defeat and beyond. Allah had turned against them, and so all was hopeless.

The sky rumbled with late summer thunder. The day was as dark as winter twilight.

‘We go,’ said Mustafa. ‘We are finished.’

But the people of Malta were not finished. Now it was time to punish the Mohammedan invaders with a punishment they would never forget. On the Naxxar Plain, between the saltpans and the sea, it was a bitter butchery. Led by Don Pedro Mezquita himself, resplendent and terrible in his billowing crimson cloak, they harried the retreating army with savage, unrelenting ferocity. Women and children with knives, old men with crutches, falling out of the night and destroying wagons, killing horses, even flinging dead or poisoned rats down on the Turks from the rocks above. In their implacable fury they pursued them all the way to the shores of St Paul’s Bay and the waiting ships. Many Ottoman guns were abandoned. Great basilisks sunk half drowned in mud and sand, their heavy breech-ends sunk deepest, their serpent mouths raised to the sky as if gasping for air, for their last breath.

Mezquita’s cavalry and the nobility of Mdina and any still with an appetite to fight fell on their rear and slew them in their hundreds. Maltese fishermen rowed out and attacked the waiting galleys, cutting throats and rigging with equal zeal. The rain lashed down, the wind grew, the waves reared up angrily and dashed against the rocking hulls, straining at their hawsers. Mustafa’s orders were lost on the wind and he too looked lost.

The embarkation of the Turkish forces, hugely reduced in number though they were, was not the work of an hour. It took three days. During all that time the rain drove down, and the beach and the surrounding fields began to resemble a scene of sodden trench warfare. To defend themselves, the Turks in their turn erected poor and hasty barricades around the shoreline, as the Christians had done against them: overturned wagons, barrels, bales, dead horses. Rats fed among the dead, and bit the living if they tried to sleep. The people of the island returned to their hidden stores across the island and ate well enough once more, but the Turks were weak with hunger and trapped in a hostile land. The first galleys left, but more struggled to follow. Bodies floated in the bay bloated and gaseous, giving off a stench like putrid cheese. The sea was cluttered with wrecked shipping, timber and corpses.

It was too wet for arquebus or musket, but the islanders and the knights fired down on them with crossbows, and the bolts fell ceaselessly with the rain. The sandstone ledges of St Paul’s Bay ran red.