The Great Siege Read online

  To Sebastian, Sacha, Emma, Andrew, Charlotte, Jack and Tom

  The Last Crusaders

  The Great Siege

  William Napier

  Contents

  Cover

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Maps

  Prologue

  Part I: The Journey

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Part II: The Island

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Part III: Elmo

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Part IV: The City

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Epilogue

  Time Line

  List of Principal Characters

  Author’s Note and Further Reading

  By William Napier

  Copyright

  It was on this occasion that Catherine de Medici asked, ‘Was it really the greatest siege? Greater even than Rhodes?’

  She was answered by Knight Commander de la Roche, of the French Langue: ‘Yes, Madam, greater even than Rhodes. It was the greatest siege in history.’

  —Jurien de la Gravière

  Malta of gold, Malta of silver, Malta of most precious metal,

  We will never take you, not if you were protected by no more than the skin of an onion!

  No, for I am She who drowned the galleys of the Turk,

  Who destroyed all the heroes of Constantinople and Galata …

  —Sixteenth century ballad

  PROLOGUE

  Rhodes: Christmas Eve, 24th December, 1522

  One last arquebus shot cracked out from the battered walls of Rhodes, followed by the angry shout of a Knight Commander. Then there was silence.

  Spread out beyond the city lay the vast army of the Ottomans. The horses of the Sipahi cavalrymen waited in line, snorting and tossing their plumes. The Janizaries rested their hands on their sword hilts, gazing steadfastly out across the wreckage of the plain. The fanatical Bektaşis stood crowded close behind, in the eyes of every one of them a grievous disappointment that the battle was done and they were still living, while their slain brothers were even now with the Prophet in Paradise.

  Seated on a magnificent white stallion of Cappadocia, shaded from the mild December sun by an immense, tasselled palanquin of yellow satin, sat the Caliph of the Islamic World. Suleiman Kanuni: The Law Giver. The young Sultan moved not a muscle, never blinked. He waited for the inevitable surrender of the Christians with all the implacable patience of the Drawn Sword of Islam. For it was written that the whole world should finally bow to the religion of the Prophet, and even he, Suleiman, son of Selim, was but a slave of Allah and his purposes.

  The fall of Rhodes to his numberless armies was just the beginning.

  At last the splintered gates in the Eastern Wall of the city creaked open, and a slow procession emerged.

  They raised banners of the Virgin and of the warrior archangel St Michael for protection. First of all came the men, women and children of the city, for whose sake the Knights had surrendered. Barefoot, dusty and half-starved, four thousand of these wretched islanders made their way down to the harbour to beg for a boat to take them … who knew where? A new life, without possessions, without hope. But still alive.

  The Turks watched them go. These wretches would have earned a handsome sum indeed, four thousand souls, in the slave markets of Istanbul, even half-starved as they were. Especially the younger girls and boys. But the Sultan had shown himself as merciful as ever, and his soldiers’ only booty would be what they could plunder from an almost unpeopled city.

  Not one among the departing had not lost a father, brother or son in the bitter siege.

  A young widow, in black from head to toe, stumbled and fell by the roadside. Her small son moved to help her, a child of no more than four or five years, face already scarred and wizened by hunger and disease. A Turk stepped forward to help her. She glared up at him ferociously, and pulling herself to her feet with the fragile aid of her child, she hissed at the Turk,

  ‘Keep back from me, demon-worshipper.’

  The Turk stood back and let her walk on.

  After the long and mournful procession of islanders came the knights, some limping, some carrying their brethren on stretchers and litters down to the harbour, and their great carrack, the St Mary, riding at anchor in already choppy waters. Others carried the records of the Order, or its most holy possessions, the right arm of John the Baptist in a gold casket, and the Icon of the Virgin of Phileremos, painted by St Luke himself.

  At their head walked the Grand Master, tall, lean, white-bearded, some sixty years of age. Philippe Villiers de l’Isle Adam, son of the highest French nobility, silent and grave in defeat.

  He stopped before the Sultan and bowed his head, in acknowledgement of the Sultan’s mercy, and as one fighting man to another.

  Close by the Grand Master stood another, much younger Knight of St John. Like the rest he wore a long black gown sewn with a white cross, the habit of peacetime. Yet his eyes now fixed on the Sultan with an implacable spirit of opposition.

  No man looked directly at the Sultan, least of all an infidel. A Janizary stepped forward instantly, vine stick grasped tight in his right hand, ready to strike.

  ‘Lower your eyes, Christian!’

  Outrageously this young knight continued to stare full in the face of the Sultan. At last Suleiman himself turned his head slightly and returned his gaze. The Knights of St John had been defeated, their fortress home destroyed. And yet in this one’s eyes, there burned an emnity as deep as the Pontic Sea.

  A brother knight, of the English Langue, limping badly from a wound to his left thigh, a rust-red bandage bound tightly about it, clapped his hand hard on the shoulder of the first. Yet still the young knight stood staring, like a hound fixed on its prey.

  Then a commanding voice rang out from the head of the column.

  ‘La Valette! Walk on, sir!’

  It was the Grand Master himself, looking back angrily.

  Chastity, poverty, and – hardest of all – obedience. For the knights were as much monks as soldiers. The young Frenchman dropped his gaze from the Sultan, Lord of the Unbelievers, as the Master of his ancient order had commanded, and moved slowly on. His English brother knight fell in behind him, a faint smile on his lips.

  ‘We will fight again, Fra Jean,’ he murmured. ‘Do not doubt it.’

  The knight called La Valette said nothing. Eyes staring ahead at emptiness, jaws set like iron.

  The knights could have fought on at Rhodes.

  Many times before, over five long c
enturies, they had fought the Armies of Islam to a standstill, and to the death. In 1291, at Acre in the great Crusades, they had fought and died almost to the last man. When the armies of Al-Ashraf Khalil finally broke into the city and began the steady slaughter, the last of the Palestine Hospitallers took their stand in a single dungeon. Just seven brothers were left, each still swinging his sword though mortally wounded, drenched in his own blood, white-faced. All died there. Seven knights, fighting in a tight circle, back to back. And perhaps another twenty or thirty jihadis, strewn around them.

  These Knights Hospitaller, these Knights of St John – they were the Bektaşis of Satan.

  They were the mad dogs of Christendom.

  But at Rhodes, it was not only their own lives they would sacrifice, but the islanders’ too. Fishermen, farmers, merchants and priests, wives and children, infants in arms. What right did the knights have to condemn the whole island to death? None. Not when Suleiman had promised them safe passage to leave, and merciful treatment of any islanders remaining.

  Besides, Villiers knew that the fighting was done.

  For six long, desperate months, the knights and the people had known nothing but the deafening roar of cannon, the crack of handguns, the hiss of seething, bubbling pitch on castle walls, the ring of steel, the hollow clubbing sound of shield on skull, the stench of blood and burning oil and ordure, the haw of mules, the squeal of pigs, the half-crazed barking of dogs.

  Finally there were so few men left to fight. There was no more gunpowder, not a sword left unblunted or a shield undented, and there was the Sultan of the Ottomans offering safe passage.

  With grieving and grace, Villiers de l’Isle Adam accepted the terms of surrender.

  As the old knight and his men limped away down the stony road to the harbour and Suleiman watched them go, he was heard to murmur, ‘It is with some regret that I drive this valiant old man from his home.’

  But they were destroyed as a fighting force. Without a homeland, with not a single fortress to their name, they who once commanded a chain of mighty forts and commanderies right across the Holy Land, the fiercest defenders for Christ – they were no more to be feared now than a toothless old dog.

  ‘They are out of their time,’ said Suleiman that evening, addressing his vizier. He placed his bare feet in the silver bowl for the slavegirl to wash. ‘They are …’ The scholar Sultan searched for the right word, and found it in the Greek. ‘They are an anachronism.’

  The vizier looked nonplussed.

  Suleiman would have smiled, if smiling had not been inappropriate for one of his dignity.

  ‘They belong to the ancient world, the old centuries. In these days, the new kings and rulers of the Christians have no sympathy for such – heroics as theirs. The Knights of St John are an embarrassment to them. The Genoans, the Venetians, the French – they would rather trade with us, buy our silks, sell us their grain.’

  ‘And their armaments,’ the vizier murmured.

  Suleiman paused to admire the slavegirl. The softness of her hands, the falling curtain of her hair.

  ‘Quite so. Though the knights themselves remain our enemies, they are powerless now. The wider Christian world has moved on. It has lost its appetite for war with Islam. It prefers silks, and spices, and gold. It is also bitterly divided against itself, these Catholics and Protestants endlessly fighting each other over the intricacies of their barbarous faith.’

  ‘Yet we ourselves wish them nothing but peace.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Suleiman allowed the slavegirl to dry his feet. He looked up at his vizier, eyes smiling.

  ‘Nothing but peace.’

  In the city, the Bektaşis were celebrating the triumph of Islam.

  First they attacked the Church of St John. They gouged lumps of plaster out of the brightly painted walls with their crescent yatagan daggers, they spat and urinated and heaped curses on these foul images of the idolatrous Christian dogs. They had confused a Jewish prophet with the unspeakable, the immeasurable, all-seeing, all-knowing Divine. What blinded slaves of Shaitan and his deceits!

  They overturned the altar and smashed it to fragments; they flung outside all the relics, ornaments and crucifixes and burned them in a heap in the square. Happily, their religious zeal coincided with their love of lucre, a coincidence often found among men. For some of the Christian ornaments and reliquaries abandoned by the fleeing townsfolk were of finest silver and gold, and readily taken as booty.

  They smashed open the ancient tombs of the Grand Masters in the crypt of the church, hoping to find treasure. In vexation at finding nothing but plain wooden crosses and old bones, some seized these crosses and bones and ran about the streets, using them as clubs. Some especially in the grip of religious fervour found the hospital where a few sick still lay, too ill to be moved, and beat them to death in their beds, raping the women first before killing them.

  At dawn on Christmas Day, Suleiman himself rode into the city, sending word that order should be restored. His men had had their reward for victory. He approved of the cleansing of the Christian church, and ordered it to be turned into a mosque, with prayers to Mecca to be said five times daily from tomorrow. But the others had betrayed his own promise of fair treatment. He ordered those who had attacked the hospital to be disembowelled and beheaded, all stray dogs and pigs to be killed, and the streets to be thoroughly cleaned.

  He gave another order, which caused surprise among his Janizary guards, but could not be disobeyed. He ordered that the magnificent carved stone escutcheons of the Hospitallers, all along the principal thoroughfare of the city known as the Street of the Knights, were not to be destroyed or damaged in any way.

  At the moment that Suleiman rode into Rhodes on Christmas Day, it was said that Pope Hadrian was celebrating Mass in St Peter’s, Rome. As he raised the chalice, a cornerstone fell from the roof above him and smashed to the ground close by.

  They said it was an ominous sign that one of the key bulwarks of Christendom had been lost.

  From the tilting decks of the St Mary, rolling through unforgiving winter seas, the knights looked back not only at lost Rhodes, but at the snow-capped Taurus mountains beyond, the whole of the Levant, the ancient heartlands of Christianity. So many knights, Hospitallers, crusaders, had fought and died to regain those lands for the Cross, over nearly five long centuries. Now all of it was lost.

  They sailed west, and three weeks later, Villiers stepped ashore at Sicily with his handful of faithful knights, and all the islanders there to meet him knelt bare-headed in honour of fallen greatness. The knights knelt too, giving thanks to God that they had survived the dangerous winter voyage.

  It was a cold day, and the January wind ripped at a tattered banner the knights brought with them. At one point the wind seemed about to tear the banner free altogether and hurl it contemptuously away, until one knight stood and planted the staff more firmly in the wet sand.

  It was the knight called La Valette.

  The banner showed the Holy Mother with her crucified Son. Weather-beaten, salt-stained and torn, it bore the motto,

  Afflictis spes uniea rebus.

  In adversity our only hope.

  Part I

  THE JOURNEY

  1

  Istanbul: October, 1564

  ‘All present, bow the knee!’

  ‘Bow the knee and bow the head, before the Sultan of the Ottomans, Allah’s Viceroy on Earth, Lord of the Lords of this World, Possessor of Men’s Necks, King of Believers and Unbelievers, Emperor of the East and West, Majestic Caesar, Seal of Victory, Refuge of all People, the Shadow of the Almighty, the Destroyer of Christendom!’

  Any who did not bow his head would lose it. All bowed.

  Now almost seventy years of age, Suleiman the Magnificent, ruler of the most powerful empire on earth, turned carefully on the high dais and sat back upon the richly gilded, crimson cushioned Throne of the Caliph. Before him, more than a hundred courtiers, viziers, eunuchs and pashas be
nt low in obeisance. He waited for some time. It was at his word, his whim, that they might arise again, and none other. Let them remain bowed until they stiffened and ached. Let them remember.

  At last he gave the nod, and the assembled commanders of his empire stood upright once more.

  He surveyed the Hall of Audience, hushed with soft Persian carpets, lit with fine silver filigree lanterns, hung with silks and tapestries. He knew almost everything, but let them think he knew all. His great dark eyes rested on many a face in turn. His once handsome features now sagged, riven with lines of care, and more private sorrows. But he was Sultan and Emperor still.

  In the past four decades, had he not conquered from the Pillars of Hercules to the Black Sea, from the heart of European Christendom to the shores of India? Tomorrow he would have his crier give out his list of conquests once again. Let none think this ageing Emperor was finished yet, or ripe to fall. Let them remember.

  ‘By the will of Allah, the compassionate, the merciful, Conqueror of Aden, Algiers, Baghdad, Belgrade, Budapest, Rhodes, Nakshivan, Rivan, Tabriz, and Temesvár!’

  His kingdom stretched from Austria to Egypt, from Algiers to Tartary and the debatable lands beyond. His galleys ruled the seas from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf. Only once, in 1529 before the walls of Vienna, had his army been halted. But he was young and foolish then, and had learnt much about the arts of war in the intervening years. Now in his last decade – for a dream of the Prophet had told him he would rule for another ten years yet – he would complete the task appointed to him. He would turn back upon the ancient enemy, Europe, now so weakened and divided. He would at last avenge the shame at Vienna, the insult of the Crusades, and complete the destruction of Christendom.