Picture for a moment, just for a moment, the silhouette of a pirate against the light…
I am quite sure that many of you, especially the older readers, will picture the silhouette of Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard, the terror of the Caribbean, or that of Bartholomew Roberts alias Black Bart, or perhaps even that of the legendary Welsh corsair Henry Morgan, while younger readers will instantly picture Captain Jack Sparrow from the Pirates of the Caribbean films.
And if I told you that the true "ideal great-great-grandfather" of all those 18th-century corsairs and buccaneers was in fact a 16th-century French captain — and that this pirate captain was, on top of everything, a religious man, a friar — would you take me for a madman? Well, that is exactly the story I am about to tell you.
Captain Mathurin de Romegas, a Frenchman from Gascony, had belonged for twenty years to the Military Religious Order of Saint John of Malta — something rather like the legendary Knights Templar, but of the sea. He was a man of thirty-seven, tall, lean and strong, with a sun-weathered face and several weeks of unshaven beard.
Romegas had that steel gaze typical of those who have looked into the very heart of battle many times, and who have fought tooth and nail to come out alive. He became famous in his time for his sheer audacity — and for always carrying on his shoulders a small capuchin monkey with a face framed by white fur, accustomed to a thousand mischiefs.
And here is where the rusted gears of Mediterranean Naval History began, once again, to turn.
The Gascon who took to the sea
His full name, as God commands in the official records of the Sovereign Hospitaller Order of Saint John, was Mathurin d'Aux Lescaut de Romegas. He was born in 1528 in southwestern France, into the noble House of Armagnac — the same Armagnac that gives its name to the finest brandy of Gascony — the very same brandy that Pope Urban II, as recounted in one of my books, used to drink to keep warm during long, freezing winter nights, but that, dear friends, is another story.
At eighteen, in December 1546, Mathurin took his vows and entered as a knight in the Sovereign Military and Religious Order of Saint John of Malta. He could have chosen, like so many other noble French cadets, the quiet path of Catholic administration on dry land — perhaps a fine diocese in Provence, with servants, abundant food and good wine, plus a warm stove for the winter and a priest friend to play chess with over a glass of Armagnac. But no, our Mathurin was not one of those. Mathurin chose the sea, the dangers and the adventure. And not just any sea, but the most violent and bloody one of that century: the Mediterranean of the Moorish and Christian corsairs. A perilous place where the slightest lapse of attention — say, dropping your guard and failing to watch the horizon properly — could cost you your head, or your freedom. For in those days, it was extremely easy to end up chained for life to the oars of a Muslim galley, with an armed guard shouting at you, humiliating you and lashing you every single day. That is how both sides — Christians and Muslims — treated the slaves of the opposing religion in those distant times.
It so happens that in those years the Order of Saint John had seven heavily armed corsair galleys forming a fearsome squadron of true sea wolves: a naval squad that would suddenly appear on the horizon, deal a deadly blow to the enemy, plunder his ships and vanish in the purest style of a German U-Boot of WWII in the Atlantic. Everything contributed to feeding their legendary image — including the seven ships themselves, painted in black and gold, with the red eight-pointed crosses sewn onto their white sails.
Mathurin enlisted as a simple junior officer, and from his very first day he revealed himself for what he truly was: a great hunter of Muslim pirates. A hunter with infinite patience, capable of tracking down across the immensity of the sea the pirate ships of Moroccans, Algerians, Tunisians and Libyans — the so-called Barbary corsairs — as well as Lebanese, Syrians and other Muslim corsairs of the Levant (as the Muslim inhabitants of those regions were known at the time), who infested those waters kidnapping Christian men, women and children, only to sell them as slaves in the markets of Istanbul, Tunis, Tripoli and Algiers.
His career, as you can imagine, was meteoric.
A miniature monkey from the jungles of the new world
And here is where the true co-protagonist of this article enters the scene: a tiny American capuchin monkey whose story we have tried to reconstruct based on logic.
By the mid-16th century, the recently discovered jungles of Central America still smelled new, and Hernán Cortés — the conqueror of Mexico — had been dead barely thirty years when a Spanish captain — anonymous in the chronicles, if he ever truly existed — who used to sail the Atlantic route from Seville to the new American colonies, brought back to Europe a small capuchin monkey with a white face and a sharp, knowing gaze, native to the jungles of what we now call Panama, Costa Rica, El Salvador and Nicaragua.
We do not know exactly how Mathurin and that hypothetical captain met. Perhaps they shared a table one night playing cards in a tavern in the port of Cádiz, or perhaps it was in Messina or Naples, or perhaps in Malta itself — for the island also belonged to the Spanish Empire. Nobody knows. What we do believe to know is that the captain, at some point, gifted the delightful little creature to Romegas. And that from that day on, the tiny monkey, baptised François (of course), never left his French captain's side.
"Mathurin and his monkey, together, were truly the image of the perfect pirate — exactly as we imagine him today."
Just think about it for a moment: Mathurin de Romegas anticipated, by more than four hundred and fifty years, the classic image of the modern cinematic pirate. Long before Robert Louis Stevenson wrote Treasure Island, before Errol Flynn wielded a sabre in his black-and-white films, before Johnny Depp slipped into the boots of Jack Sparrow to climb aboard the Black Pearl, there was already in the 16th-century Mediterranean a pirate captain who entered combat with a monkey on his shoulder, earning the respect of his crew with a thoroughly improbable mixture of valour, French elegance, Catholic faith and well-aimed punches that hurt.
The animal accompanied him in everything: in the night manoeuvres, in the chases, in the boarding actions, in the war councils, at dinner with the Grand Master.
How the bloody hell could that 16th-century French bastard and his mischievous little ape NOT become a living legend?
The storm of the century
1554. Malta. Summer had already departed, leaving behind the calm sea, the warmth and the good weather; but on a night in mid-October, a night when the sea lay strangely flat as a sheet of lead, a strange and suspicious calm fell over the island — that calm every sailor knows, the one that almost always precedes a great storm. Romegas, then twenty-six years old and captain of the galley Capitana, was that fateful night sleeping aboard with François when, suddenly and without warning, the sky over Malta turned pitch black and the island became a hell.
What fell upon the island that night was, in the words of the chroniclers, "the storm of the century": a Mediterranean hurricane with winds of two hundred kilometres per hour, accompanied by torrential rain and towering waves that, in a matter of minutes, devastated the entire town of the Borgo, sinking half the boats in the harbour and capsizing like nutshells even the largest and heaviest galleys of the Order. Among them, belly-up and caught completely off guard, was the galley of Captain Romegas.
When the ship turned over, the candles fell from the table and went out, and Mathurin and the monkey were trapped beneath the deck, plunged into absolute darkness. We can easily imagine how dramatic that moment must have been for the Frenchman, with the seawater rising relentlessly to their necks and only one bubble of air left, trapped against the timber of what until half a minute earlier had been the floor of the ship… and was now the ceiling. To breathe, Mathurin and François had to float on their backs in the dead man's pose, their chests pressed against the wood, inhaling the last molecules of air that still remained in the world.
And there they remained for several hours, submerged in cold black water, with the terrified monkey shrieking without pause. Mathurin, however, did not lose his head. He never did. He drew his dagger from his belt and began to strike the hull hard with the handle: thump, thump, thump… again and again. Like a castaway knocking on the gates of heaven straight from the antechamber of hell.
Outside, on the surface, the rescue teams of the Order were already searching the harbour for survivors. Among them, directing local Maltese, divers and carpenters, was a French knight of the Order of Saint John, well advanced in years, with a strong yet serene gaze and a square jaw, named Jean Parisot de la Valette. Brother La Valette was then fifty-four years old and not yet Grand Master, but already one of the most respected and listened-to voices in the Order.
That night, it was precisely he who heard the knocks coming from the Capitana. He swiftly ordered the carpenters to pierce the hull with an axe, and when the timber of the keel finally yielded, the first creature to emerge from the deadly hole was not Mathurin: it was François, shrieking like a soul possessed.
Behind the monkey, soaked through, spitting saltwater, his blood still pumping with adrenaline, came Captain Romegas. The living proof that, in this life, courage and good fortune almost always walk hand in hand.
"The first to come running and screaming out of that deadly hole was none other than François the monkey."
La Valette stood looking at him, somewhere between admiration and astonishment. He handed him a blanket, dry clothes and a wineskin. In that very moment, without need of a single word, a deep friendship was forged between those two men — one that would last until death.
The two Frenchmen (and the monkey)
From that night of the 1554 hurricane onwards, the relationship between Jean de la Valette and Mathurin de Romegas ceased to be that of a veteran knight and a young officer. It became something far closer to a father-son bond. And here is a fact to make it crystal clear: when the Siege of Malta of 1565 broke out, La Valette was sixty-seven and Romegas thirty-seven. Exactly thirty years' difference. Father and son, indeed.
La Valette had no legitimate sons of his own — the knights of the Order of Saint John, in theory, having all taken the vow of chastity required by the rules of religion, could not have any — and Romegas had lost his biological father while still very young. For that very reason, the chemistry that grew between them was utterly inevitable. The Gascon of Armagnac became the Grand Master's right hand. His counsellor, his trusted captain and his friend. And it was Jean de la Valette himself, years later — by then Grand Master — who entrusted Mathurin with command of the two galleys belonging exclusively to the Master, la Capitana and la Patrona, the two finest vessels the Order possessed.
Brother Romegas, with those two galleys plus the other five of the Order under the general command of Captain Brother Pierre de Jou, became the greatest terror of the Ottoman Empire's merchant ships, attacked and plundered without mercy in the waters of the 16th-century Mediterranean. A terror that would not take long to cross the red line of no return because, obviously, pulling the beard of the powerful Turkish-Ottoman empire of Sultan Suleiman I was not going to come cheap to the men of Malta. In fact, these (and many other) corsair actions to the detriment of the Turks would end up triggering the great naval siege of 1565 that was to define the century and be remembered for all eternity.
The prize that changed History
4 July 1564. One year before the great siege.
The seven galleys of the Order, after a fruitless month combing the central Mediterranean without laying a hand on a single Turk worth attacking, were returning to Malta with empty holds and many funeral faces on board. In the words of an eyewitness to the events: "we were all thirsty for prey and hungry for plunder, like dogs chasing a hare". And then, off the Greek coasts between the islands of Zante and Cephalonia, they crossed paths with some Venetian merchants who gave them the information of the century:
Merchants: Gentlemen, up there, a few miles to the north, slowly sails the ship Sultana. Three thousand five hundred tons of priceless cargo. Gold, silver, exotic spices, silk and precious stones… She belongs to Kustir Aga, the chief eunuch of Suleiman's harem, the man (well, "man" so to speak, since this one is missing his balls) who holds in his hands all the commercial concessions of the great Ottoman empire.
The Sultana, according to secret reports arrived in spring from Constantinople (a city they now call Istanbul) was carrying on board a cargo of more than eight hundred thousand gold ducats. A true fortune with which, in those days, you could buy yourself an entire kingdom — castle, cattle and beautiful peasant girls included.
Romegas and Pierre de Jou did not think twice. They unfurled the sails of their galleys and flew over the calm waters of the Greek summer at more than twenty knots, throughout that day and all night long. At dawn on 5 July, the Sultana was finally within range, defended by twenty Turkish escort galleys. Twenty. Romegas and his men had only seven. The arithmetic of valour, however, is not done with mere numerical calculations: it is done with a well-set pair of bollocks. And the Knights of Saint John resolved to give battle.
The naval clash was brutal and lasted for hours. And when the smoke from the last cannonade dissipated, the seven galleys of the Order had captured the richest cargo ship of the Mediterranean. They had also taken alive several important pashas — to be ransomed in gold from their families — among them the Sanjak-Bey (viceroy) of Cairo, and a venerable centenarian old lady named Jansever, lady-in-waiting and former nurse to none other than Princess Mihrimah, beloved daughter of Sultan Suleiman and his wife Hürrem, a Polish woman whose true name was Alexandra Lesniewska, nicknamed Roxelana, the red sultana.
When the bombshell news reached Constantinople, Suleiman the Magnificent lost his temper and the chief eunuch nearly committed suicide. The "Divan" — the sultan's supreme council — was hastily convened, and orders for general mobilisation were drafted, decreeing the total destruction of Malta in the name of Allah. The religious excuse — defending Islam against the Christian infidels — was, as always, a convenient smokescreen. The bare truth was this: the Turkish-Ottoman sultan, the most powerful man on the planet, could not allow a thirty-six-year-old French captain, with a monkey on his shoulder, and a band of bloody seafaring friars turned corsairs, to roam his seas kidnapping people and plundering his ships without paying the consequences…
And he decided to attack Malta!
And that, my friends, is History. The history with a capital H that nobody ever told you, where reality holds out its hand to fiction. For Mathurin, the monkey, the furious tempest that capsized his ship with him inside, the sultan, his Polish wife, the eunuch, the great treasure-laden vessel, the attack of the seven Christian ships against the twenty Muslim ones and their victory — all of these are historical facts, proven beyond any doubt. The rest of it could perfectly well have happened just as I have told you, but that we shall never know.