The Knights of St. John

by Augusta Theodosia Drane

The besieged had now to sustain a double attack; for whilst the pasha and the Bey of Algiers continued the attempt on the fortress of St. Michael, Piali, the admiral of the fleet, led the assault on the bastion of Castile to the eastward of the borgo; and at the same time eighty of the largest armed galleys kept the sea, to prevent the landing of the daily-expected succours from Messina. The assault of the 2d of August was among the most desperate yet attempted: the pasha animated his soldiers by his presence and his threats, and with his own hand slew two Janizaries who had retreated before the swords of the knights. But he fought against men resolved to conquer. Even women and children presented themselves to defend the breach, and rendered no contemptible assistance to the garrison. While the knights and men-at-arms poured withering volleys of musketry on the assailants as they rushed forward to the breach, the Maltese launched down heavy stones and pieces of timber, and discharged torrents of scalding pitch and streams of wildfire on their heads; and when the storming columns had scaled the ruined walls they found themselves opposed by an inner barrier of newly-raised intrenchments, behind which stood a living and still more impenetrable rampart in the persons of the brethren of St. John. Great was the confusion and slaughter among the infidels: stunned by the incessant and increasing violence of the fiery hurricane that beat upon them, and entangled among the sharp-pointed spikes with which the ruins had every where been thickly planted, their disordered ranks reeled and broke as though the earth were quaking beneath their feet, and, in spite of all their leaders could do, turned and fled precipitately to their trenches, leaving the breach encumbered with their dead. Again and again, refreshed and reinforced, the Turks returned to the assault, and as often recoiled before the terrible prowess of the Christian chivalry, until at length, as the day wore on, and all his resources had been tried in vain, the pasha gave the word to retire; and from both bastion and fortress his baffled hosts withdrew in discomfiture and dismay.

Assaults again upon the morrow, and on each succeeding day, but with the same result; and then came the intelligence that 160 vessels and 15,000 troops were assembled in the ports of Sicily and about to sail. Mustapha was well-nigh in despair; but knowing that a failure and abandonment of the siege would entail certain disgrace at the hands of Solyman, he resolved on an extraordinary effort—an assault-general, made by relief-parties of his troops, and kept up without cessation till the physical strength of the exhausted garrison must perforce be worn out; and this was accordingly fixed to commence on the 7th of August.

He chose the hour of noon, when, in that burning climate, the knights would, he judged, be unfit for great exertions. The morning, too, passing in comparative quiet, was calculated to throw them off their guard. Suddenly, in the midday stillness, the explosion of a mine, and the cries from the wall of “Castile! Castile!” drew all eyes to the spot thus indicated. Floating over the bastion, they beheld a huge red banner, with its gilded pole and black horse-tail; and the alarming rumour spread rapidly through the city that the bastion was in the possession of the enemy. A few moments more and the infidels would have been in the heart of the town. Brother William, a chaplain of the order, ran instantly to seek the grand master, whom he found standing, as was his wont, in the great square unarmed. “My lord,” he exclaimed, “Castile is lost! and the borgo will soon be in the hands of the enemy; you will surely retire to St. Angelo.” La Valette, without a gesture of surprise, took his helmet from his page’s hands, and a lance from the nearest soldier: “Come, gentlemen,” he said to the knights surrounding him, “we are wanted at the bastion; let us die together:” and, regardless of the entreaties of his followers that he would not needlessly expose his person, he hurried to the spot. The alarm-bell was rung, a crowd of citizens rallied round him, and at their head he fell upon the Turks. A terrific struggle ensued, and the life of the grand master seemed in momentary peril. Mendoza, who stood by his side amidst a heap of slain, implored him to retire; he even knelt at his feet, conjuring him not to expose a life, on the preservation of which hung the only hopes of the city and the order; but La Valette answered him by a gesture of his hand: “Do you see those banners,” he said, pointing to the Turkish standards, “and ask me to retire before they are trampled in the dust?” Then, heading the attack, with his own hand he tore them from the ramparts, and planting himself among the pikemen who defended the breach, remained there till, after a long and bloody contest, the enemy had retreated. So soon as all immediate danger was over he bade his attendants prepare him some accommodation in this bastion, which he intended thenceforth to make his residence. He believed that the enemy had withdrawn only to return under cover of the night; and in reply to the knights who opposed his design he only answered, that at seventy years of age he had nothing better to hope for than to die in the midst of his children, and in defence of the faith.

The Christians kept strict watch and ward; and, as La Valette expected, darkness had no sooner fallen than the infidels, knowing that no time had been given for throwing up new intrenchments, ran swiftly to the breach, while the whole scene was suddenly lighted up by incessant discharges of artillery, and by thousands of fiery missiles that came flaming and darting through the air. They had hoped to surprise the garrison exhausted by the day’s encounter, and sunk in profound repose; but they found the walls ready manned to receive them, and were met by such volleys of well-directed musketry, and by such a renewal of those deadly showers, the effects of which they had so well learnt to dread, that neither the threats nor the blows of their infuriated chiefs could urge them to the charge; and the broken routed columns rushed back as they had come, and abandoned the attempt. The Christians, in their joy at the hard-earned victory, forgot not Him from whom it came: in the morning a Te Deum was sung in public thanksgiving; and, if it were not performed with all the solemnity usual in the order of St. John, at least it was accompanied (says the chronicler) with tears of grateful devotion and of true contrition from the eyes of many a man as well as woman in the assembled crowd.

During the bloody assaults of the long days that followed, La Valette and his pike were ever in the front of the defence; severely wounded, he concealed his hurt, and by his words and example inspired soldiers and citizens with the same ardour that animated the knights themselves. The fight became too close for musketry; it was hand to hand, with pike and poniard, renewed every day, and scarcely ceasing even during night: for the design of the pasha was to do by the whole city as he had done by St. Elmo, and make himself master of the place simply by the annihilation of all its defenders. Proclamations went through the Turkish camp that the city was to be sacked, and every living soul destroyed, with the exception of the grand master, who was to be carried in chains to Constantinople. La Valette heard of this boastful threat: “Yet,” he said to his knights, “it will hardly be as the pasha thinks; sooner than suffer a grand master of the order of St. John to appear before the sultan in chains, I will take the dress of one of my own pikemen, and die among the battalions of the infidels at their next rush upon the breach.”

Meanwhile the condition of the besieged grew every day more desperate; their numbers reduced by half, and the survivors wounded, and well-nigh dying of fatigue; powder failing, and the ramparts all ruined and shattered by the cannon; breaches every where, and some so large that thirty men abreast could ride through them, dismount and mount again with ease; whilst in many places there rose over the walls enormous mounds, erected by the Turks, and furnished with cannon, which entirely commanded the quarters of the city against which they were directed. Every invention of military skill known to Turkish science was tried in turn by the pasha, and failed: his mines were countermined; his movable towers were burnt and destroyed; a huge machine which he caused to be constructed, capacious as a hogshead and filled with all manner of combustibles, and which was launched by engines on to the rampart of the bastion, was thrown back upon its constructors, and, bursting in its fall, dealt terrific havoc around.

At length, on the 20th of August, a letter was thrown into the borgo, and brought to the grand master, who opened it in the presence of his council, and found but one word, “Thursday;” which he rightly interpreted to be a warning from some friendly hand to prepare for a new assault on the 23d. In fact, it was the last effort of Mustapha, who found that, whatever might be his own resolution, the spirits of his troops were fast giving way under their repeated failures; and it was only when the emirs and chief officers of the army offered to make the assault alone, that the Janizaries and inferior troops could be induced to move. La Valette, who foresaw that a great struggle was at hand, and felt that he had no means of meeting a general attack with his reduced numbers, proceeded to the infirmary, and addressed the wounded knights. “I am likewise wounded,” he said, “yet I continue on duty; so also do others who have never left the walls. It remains to be seen whether you whom I see around me are content to be massacred in your beds, rather than to die like men upon the parapets; for to that crisis are we come.” Such an address had the effect he intended. “Death on the breach!” burst from the lips of all. La Valette answered their shout with a pleased and approving smile; and distributing them among the various quarters where their presence was most needed, he felt well assured that the sense of wounded honour would wring from them a resistance so long as life remained.

The walls during those three days were strangely manned: wounded men, with arms and heads bound up in bloody cloths; women, with casque and cuirass, assumed to deceive the enemy with the appearance of a garrison, the skeleton of which alone was left; guns worked by feeble children,—sometimes the strongest and best fit to fight of all the forces that were there. The assault one day lasted twelve hours,—the bloodiest and fiercest that had yet been made; the enormous platform, or “cavalier,” as it was called, which rose above the parapet afforded such a position for the Turkish musketeers, that no one appeared on the walls but he fell instantly under their deadly aim. Nothing silenced their fire; and night alone brought a brief respite, which was employed by the grand master in assembling a council of his knights to determine what steps should be taken in the deplorable condition to which they were now reduced. The majority of the grand crosses and dignitaries of the order were for abandoning the outworks, and retiring with what strength they had left to the castle of St. Angelo, where they might hope to hold out till the arrival of the succour; but to this plan La Valette would not for a moment consent. He rejected it with as much horror as though he had been required to surrender the city to the infidels; for, good and Christian veteran as he was, he well knew that St. Angelo, though capable of receiving the troops and fighting men, could offer no protection to the women and defenceless citizens, who, in case of such a resolution being taken, must be given up to the fury of the enemy: St. Michael and its brave defenders must also be abandoned to their fate. “No, brethren,” he said, addressing the assembly, “we will all die together, and on our walls, as becomes our profession, if first, by God’s blessing, we do not drive these Turkish dogs from thence.”

So the day dawned on a fresh scene of battle; the Turks, maddened to frenzy, seemed callous to musketry and stones and boiling oil, and gaining rampart after rampart, stood at length with nothing to separate them from the Christians who held the city but a stockade of wood, behind which the garrison was drawn up; but beyond that they could not pass. As to the bastion of Castile, La Valette had declared his resolution of remaining in it to the last; and calling in almost all the forces which garrisoned St. Angelo, he caused the wooden bridge which connected it with the borgo to be sawn asunder, thus cutting off the possibility of retreat. On the last day of August, the pasha made an attempt on Citta Vecchia, leaving Piali to continue the assault on the borgo and St. Michael. Mesquita, a brave Portuguese, commanded there; and on the news of the enemy’s approach, dressed up his walls with banners and pikes, women again assuming their casques and muskets, and crowding to the ramparts; for indeed the place was almost wholly without defenders, yet a warlike aspect was so well sustained, that no real assault was attempted. In fact the siege was drawing to its close: ammunition was failing; twenty-five days’ provision was all that remained in the Turkish camp; a dysentery, the result of the great heat, bad food, and constant exposure, was carrying off large numbers every day; the troops were disheartened, and the garrison, as it seemed to them, invincible; and when, on the 4th of September, the sails of the Sicilian galleys were seen on the broad horizon, nothing more was needed to complete the discomfiture of the infidels.

The succour so long promised consisted of about 11,000 men, 200 being knights of the order, with whom were associated a number of volunteer adventurers of the best blood of Spain, Italy, and France, eager to join in a defence whose fame had now spread through Europe, and bade fair to surpass in glory even that of Rhodes. At the first news of their approach a kind of consternation seized the two pashas, and they resolved on a hasty embarkment of their troops. Without waiting to ascertain the strength of the force opposed to them, they made every preparation for retiring; the garrison which had been posted at St. Elmo was called in, the artillery was abandoned, and a precipitate retreat commenced. As morning broke on the 8th of September, the festival of Our Lady’s Nativity, the weary watchers once more dragged themselves to the walls. Taught by bitter and repeated disappointments, they had put no trust in the reported sight of those distant sails, and treated the talk of the Sicilian succours as a delusive dream; no news had yet reached them of the landing of the troops, which had, indeed, taken place on the preceding evening, in a distant part of the island, the forces being then in full march upon the town. Nothing, therefore, was looked for by the garrison, now reduced to six hundred feeble men, but a renewal of the long struggle which had lasted without interruption for so many weeks. Yet, though exhausted in body, their confidence and courage were unshaken; leaning from the ramparts, they even defied their enemies to the assault, shouting to them to come on, and do their worst, without waiting for the sunrise. There was no answer, only a clang of arms that seemed dying away in the distance. “Heard you that?” suddenly exclaimed one of the men; “surely those were the Janizary trumpets sounding from the shore. And down there yonder, beneath the walls, what can be the meaning of those marshalled troops defiling from the trenches towards the camp? Either my eyes are blinded by long watching, or the infidels are in retreat.”