Some defeats are worth more than a thousand victories. The most famous is that of Leonidas' three hundred Spartans at Thermopylae, in 480 BC. But there is another, almost twenty centuries later, on a spur of rock lost in the middle of the Mediterranean, that deserves to stand beside it: the fall of Fort St Elmo, in the summer of 1565. An utter military disaster —the fort lost, its garrison killed to the last man— that nonetheless saved the island of Malta and, with it, probably half of Europe.
A star of stone in the worst possible place
To understand the tragedy you must understand the geography, so put on your Indiana Jones hat for a moment. The harbour of Malta has been, since antiquity, one of the finest natural refuges in the Mediterranean: a cluster of peninsulas reaching out into the sea and inlets pushing inland like the fingers of a hand. At the tip of one of those tongues of rock, the Sciberras peninsula, right at the mouth and guarding the entrance to the two great harbours, stood Fort St Elmo —Sant'Elmo to the Maltese—, a star-shaped fortress of Italian design, thrown up in haste around 1552 under the Spanish Grand Master Fra' Juan de Homedes and later reinforced by the Order under the Frenchman Fra' Claude de la Sengle.
By its position, St Elmo was the key to the lock that opened and closed the door of Malta. As long as that key stayed in Christian hands, the Ottoman fleet could not comfortably use the sheltered anchorage of Marsamxett to ride out storms. So when the vast army of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent landed on Malta on 18 May 1565 —tens of thousands of men, the greatest military force of its age—, his commanders Mustafa Pasha and the admiral Piali Pasha (two men who loathed each other) decided the first task was to wrench that key from the few Christians dug in inside.
They reckoned the little fort, once they began pounding it with the hundreds of guns brought from Istanbul, would fall in four or five days. Spoiler: it took them thirty-one, and cost them half an army dead or maimed beneath its walls.
“Hold. I know you are going to die.”
In command of Malta's defence stood the Grand Master of the Order of St John, Jean Parisot de La Valette, a wily old Frenchman of seventy-one, hard as granite, who had spent half a lifetime at war and had known Turkish slavery in his own flesh: a whole year chained to the oar of an Ottoman galley. La Valette knew perfectly well that St Elmo, isolated on its point of land, could not withstand the enemy's artillery or numbers. He harboured no illusions. But he knew something more important: every day the fort held was a day the bulk of the Turkish army wasted there, bleeding, instead of hurling itself at the heart of the defence —Birgu, Senglea, Fort St Angelo—, whose works were still being finished.
So the Grand Master's calculation was as cold as it was brutal, and absolutely necessary: St Elmo had to hold as long as humanly possible, even at the cost of its entire garrison. He sent in his best knights, professional soldiers —Spaniards of the Tercio Viejo de Sicilia and Italians— and a handful of Maltese volunteers, ferried across by night, knowing he was sending them to certain death. When the defenders, seeing how desperate things were, begged to be evacuated or properly reinforced (with thousands of men who did not exist), La Valette replied that their duty was to die there, to the last breath. And when some protested, the old Master —to prove there was no favouritism when it came to sacrifice— offered to go and die at St Elmo himself, in their place. That shut every mouth. No one asked for anything again, and all of them prepared for the end, swearing to take down as many of the enemy as they could. And take them down they did. By God, they did.
The monster of iron and fire
And then the ordeal began. The Ottomans of that age were undisputed masters of the siege, and they set up on the hills overlooking the fort batteries with so many guns they dwarfed anything seen before. Day and night, without pause, a rain of stone, iron and shrapnel tore the walls and the men of St Elmo to pieces.
The Italian chronicler Francesco Balbi da Correggio, who was inside as an arquebusier and left us the truest account of the siege, describes a ceaseless roar, an inferno of explosions, smoke, dust, blood, screams and severed limbs in which it was almost impossible to think or stay on one's feet.
The walls fell faster than the defenders could rebuild them. They did it at night, in the dark, piling rubble, sandbags and the bodies of their own comrades to plug the breaches. By day they threw back the assaults in ferocious hand-to-hand fighting. By night they rebuilt and buried the dead. And next morning, it began again: a nightmare carousel that repeated, identical, for a month and a day.
The only umbilical cord to the world was the arm of sea separating St Elmo from Birgu. Each night small boats rowed across the harbour mouth in the dark, carrying ammunition, food and fresh men, and bringing back the wounded. The Turks, who were nobody's fools, tried to cut that thread of life with batteries at the water's edge. As long as the boats could cross, St Elmo went on breathing. When they stopped, St Elmo began to die.
The night of the embraces
Towards the end of June came the moment when there was nothing left to do. The walls were a heap of flattened ruins, the few survivors were exhausted or maimed, and everyone knew the next assault would be the last. That night, Balbi tells us, the men did something that, honestly, raises the hair on my arms every time I read it: knowing that dawn would bring their death, they confessed one another —the Knights of St John were friars and could “legally” hear their comrades' confession—, supped together one last time, and embraced and bade each other farewell like brothers before the slaughter.
The knights who could no longer stand asked to be set in chairs placed in the breaches of the wall, sword or arquebus in hand, to die facing the enemy, at their post. Let someone explain to me how you stand up to that. This was no longer strategy or war: it was sheer heroism and a pair of well-set guts in the face of the inevitable.
At dawn on 23 June 1565 —the very eve of the feast of St John the Baptist, patron of the Order—, the Ottomans launched the final assault. The wave broke over the ruins and this time nothing held it back. The last defenders died fighting, exactly as they had promised. Over the course of the month some fifteen hundred men had passed through those walls; with the fort's fall scarcely one was left alive. Only a few Maltese, who knew the ground, managed to throw themselves into the sea and swim across to tell what had happened.
The price of the Turkish victory
The Ottomans had won, yes. But what a bitter victory. Taking that heap of rubble had cost them thirty-one days —when they expected five, just like a certain Russian dictator of our own day— and, above all, a ghastly toll: thousands upon thousands of men, including the dreaded corsair Dragut Reis, one of the most legendary seamen of the Mediterranean, mortally wounded by a splinter during the operations against the fort.
Tradition has it that Mustafa Pasha, gazing at the ruins of the little fort that had cost him so dear, uttered a line that says it all: “If taking St Elmo, the youngest son, has cost us this much blood and death, what the hell will it cost us to take the father?”. By father he meant Birgu, with its Fort St Angelo, and Fort St Michael: the two great strongholds he had not even begun to attack.
And that was St Elmo's true triumph. Those men saved neither their fort nor their lives, but they gave La Valette thirty-one precious days to strengthen the main defences, and inflicted on the Ottoman army a moral and human attrition from which it would never recover. The great war machine had bitten the first bone of the siege… and broken its teeth.
Heads, crosses and an answer in kind
The end had a macabre epilogue worth telling, because it sets the tone for everything that followed. According to the chronicles, after taking the fort, by Mustafa Pasha's order —and despite the opposition of the admiral Piali Pasha, who tried to prevent such barbarity— the victors beheaded some of the dead knights and fixed their heads on pikes along the wall; the dismembered bodies they nailed to wooden crosses and set adrift in the harbour, so the current would carry them to Birgu and sow terror among the besieged. They achieved the opposite: the Christians, seeing what awaited them, drew strength from their weakness and resolved to sell their skins dearly.
Old La Valette's answer was one to freeze the blood. The Master, no man to stay silent before such cruelty, ordered every Turkish prisoner he held beheaded and their heads fired from his cannon at the enemy positions. Heads literally rained from the sky. The message could not be clearer: there will be no surrender here, no mercy, no quarter for anyone. It would be a fight to the death. And so it was, all through July and August.
When, two and a half months later, the Gran Soccorso sent from Sicily by Philip II of Spain finally arrived and the Ottomans withdrew in defeat, everyone understood one thing: the victory had begun to take shape that summer, in the ruins of that little star-shaped fort, where a handful of men chose to die on their feet rather than live on their knees, enslaved by the Muslims. All of this, and the final miracle of the relief, I tell day by day in my book Malta · The Great Turkish-Muslim Siege of 1565, reconstructed from the account of Francesco Balbi da Correggio, who lived the siege at first hand. Per Aspera, Ad Astra.