The Great Siege of Malta — Imperial Ottoman

The Great Siege of Malta, fought between May and September 1565, was one of the most celebrated military operations of the sixteenth century. The siege was launched by Suleiman the Magnificent with an army of perhaps 40,000 to 48,000 men, supported by the Ottoman navy, against the small island fortress of the Knights Hospitaller in the central Mediterranean. The defence, mounted by the Knights of St John under the French Grand Master Jean de Valette, and by the Maltese population, lasted for four months. The exact strength of the Ottoman land force is a question the sources refuse to settle: 30,000 to 48,000 is the standard range, and Cassola argues for the higher figure while Spiteri is closer to 40,000. A general account of the Ottoman military and warfare and of the broader history of Ottoman gunpowder siege warfare provides the wider context.

Key dates

18 May 1565 — Ottoman army lands at Marsascala.
24 May 1565 — Turgut Reis arrives with the Maghrebi reinforcements.
23 June 1565 — Fort St Elmo falls after a month’s siege; Turgut Reis is killed on 17 June.
15 August 1565 — Feast of the Assumption; the largest single assault on Birgu and Senglea.
7 September 1565 — Spanish relief force under Don García de Toledo lands at Birgu.
8 September 1565 — The Grand Assault; the date commemorated in Malta as a national holiday.
11 September 1565 — The Ottoman army begins to withdraw; the siege is lifted.
1566 — Construction of Valletta begins on the Sciberras peninsula.

The strategic context

The Knights of St John, expelled from Rhodes in 1522, had been granted the island of Malta by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in 1530. From their new base, the Knights had become a major obstacle to Ottoman control of the central Mediterranean. Their corsairs, based at Malta, preyed on Ottoman shipping and on the rich ports of the North African coast, and the island was a staging post for Christian raids on the Ottoman possessions. Suleiman had resolved to capture Malta for some years before the siege, and the operation was part of a long-running contest for the central Mediterranean.

The Ottoman army of 1565 was a major expedition. The land force was commanded by Mustafa Pasha (commonly identified with Sokollu Mustafa Pasha, the brother-in-law of the grand vizier Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, although some sources distinguish the two), supported by Turgut Reis (Dragut), the famous corsair-admiral of the western Mediterranean, as his senior lieutenant. The forces included a strong contingent of Janissaries, supported by Sipahi of the Porte cavalry, the provincial sipahi levies, and a substantial artillery train. Turgut Reis landed with the army in late May, took charge of the siege of Fort St Elmo, and was killed in action on 17 June 1565 by a splinter from a defending cannon-shot. The fleet, under Kapudan Pasha Piyale Pasha, was the largest the Ottomans had sent into the central Mediterranean since the reign of Suleiman’s father, and it was designed to blockade the island and to prevent relief from Sicily or from Spain.

The defence of the island

The Maltese defences consisted of four main forts: Fort St Elmo, at the tip of the Sciberras peninsula, which commanded the entrance to the Grand Harbour and the Marsamxett Harbour; Fort St Angelo, on the Birgu peninsula; Fort St Michael, on the Senglea peninsula; and the older castle at Mdina, in the centre of the island. The garrison, on the eve of the siege, numbered perhaps 700 Knights and 8,000 soldiers and Maltese irregulars, supported by several hundred avanturier adventurers — Corsican and Sicilian volunteers, Spanish arquebusiers, and a small Italian contingent. The fortifications were in poor repair, and the Knights had not received the reinforcements they had expected from Spain.

The Ottoman army landed on 18 May 1565 at Marsascala, in the south of the island. The first objective was Fort St Elmo, which controlled the entrance to the Grand Harbour. The siege of St Elmo lasted for a month, and the fort was defended to the last man. The fall of St Elmo, on 23 June, was a heavy blow to the defence, but it gave the Ottomans a foothold at the tip of the peninsula, and the rest of the campaign was fought around the fortified positions of Birgu and Senglea. Valette himself commanded at Birgu, while the Italian knight Melchiorre del Balzo held Senglea against repeated assaults.

The four months’ battle

The siege of Birgu and Senglea lasted from the end of June to early September. The Ottoman army attempted to take the two peninsulas by a series of frontal assaults and by a series of mining operations. The defence was marked by a series of sorties, by the steadfastness of the Knights, and by the discipline of the Maltese militia. The Ottoman army was unable to break into the fortresses, and the cost of the siege, in men and material, was rising sharply. The arrival, on 7 September, of a small Spanish relief force under Don García de Toledo, with a handful of Italian and Spanish soldiers, was the signal for a final Ottoman assault.

The Grand Assault on the Christian lines, on 8 September 1565 — the date commemorated in Malta as a national holiday — was repulsed with heavy loss. The Ottoman army withdrew to its ships, and the siege was lifted. The losses on both sides were severe. The Knights lost perhaps a third of their number, and the Maltese population had suffered heavily. The Ottoman army had lost perhaps 20,000 men, and the failure of the siege was a serious blow to the prestige of the empire.

The contemporary Spanish account, the Gran Galeotto of the anonymous Hospitaller chronicler, captures the mood at the moment the relief arrived:

“On the seventh of September, by the grace of God, the fleet of Don García appeared off the island, and on the eighth, the day of the Nativity of Our Lady, the Grand Assault was launched and broken; and on this day, more than on any other, the Order of St John was preserved from destruction.” — Anonymous Hospitaller chronicler, the Gran Galeotto (c. 1566).

The exact identity of the Gran Galeotto’s author is still disputed; the standard attribution is to a Knight of the Langue of Italy.

Aftermath

The failure of the Great Siege of Malta was the first major Ottoman defeat in the central Mediterranean. The Ottomans had failed to take a small island, defended by a small force, despite a major effort. The defeat, coming shortly after the Ottoman victory at the battle of Djerba in 1560, did not prevent further Ottoman operations, but it marked the limit of the empire’s ambitions in the western Mediterranean. The Knights remained in Malta, and the new city of Valletta, founded by Grand Master Valette, was built on the peninsula of Sciberras in the years after the siege.

The Great Siege is widely remembered in the history of the Mediterranean. The anniversary of the lifting of the siege, 8 September, is celebrated in Malta as a national holiday. The siege is, with the siege of Vienna of 1529 and 1683, one of the three great sieges that mark the boundaries of Ottoman expansion into Christian Europe. Roger Crowley’s Empires of the Sea remains the best narrative in English; the documentary history is best approached through the older Ernle Bradford.

Ottoman military and warfare — A general account of the Ottoman military, of which the Malta expedition was a major operation.
Ottoman gunpowder siege warfare — The general history of Ottoman siege warfare, of which the Malta operation was a particular case.
The Ottoman navy — The fleet under Piyale Pasha that blockaded Malta and supported the army during the siege.
The Janissary corps — The elite infantry that formed the storm troops of the Ottoman army at Malta.
The siege of Vienna — The 1529 and 1683 sieges that mark the other great moments of Ottoman siege warfare in this period.

Sources and further reading

Roger Crowley, Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, the Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Center of the World (Random House, 2008).
Rhoads Murphey, Ottoman Warfare 1500–1700 (Hurst, 1999).
Mesut Uyar and Edward J. Erickson, A Military History of the Ottomans: From Osman to Atatürk (Praeger, 2009).
Caroline Finkel, Osman’s Dream: The Story of the Ottoman Empire 1300–1923 (Basic Books, 2005).
John Keegan, A History of Warfare (Knopf, 1993).