The only fort that failed to hold its ground against the Turkish besiegers in the Great Siege of 1565 was Fort St Elmo. Although the fort held out stubbornly for nearly a month before it was overrun, it only managed to so at a great cost in human lives. Superintendent of Fortifications Stephen C. Spiteri looks at the
reasons for St Elmo’s overall poor performance under fire
It can truly be said that the history of the Hospitaller Knights of the Order of St John is, in many ways, a history of fortifications – and, perhaps even more emphatically, of sieges. Voltaire’s well-known comment that “nothing is as well-known as the Siege of Malta” well reflects the importance that fortifications played in the Order’s affairs. From early in their military career, the Hospitallers had well understood that their effectiveness as a military force, ever-perched as they were on the border outpost of Christendom in the face of superior enemy forces, depended as much on their military prowess as their ability to defend themselves by means of stone walls. Fortified strongholds, were a part – and an essential part – of Hospitaller existence and way of life.
The importance which the Hospitallers ascribed to their fortifications is best comprehended when one appreciates the many severe limitations in the Knights’ military organisation which, in terms of manpower alone, never amounted to more than a few hundred Knights backed by a few thousand mercenaries or native militia recruited from the Order's territories. Stacked against them, however, was the might of the Muslim world and, on many occasions, this was unleashed with great fury. With a shortage of manpower being a constant feature of the Order’s existence, it was inevitably the ramparts that had to make up for the lack of warriors in the arduous task of defence. The Knights of St John put this fund-amental principle of defence to use very well in a succession of sieges in the Holy Land (Belvoir, Marqab, Crac des Chevaliers, Acre), Rhodes, and Malta. However, nowhere was this formula tested as vigorously as during the Ottoman siege of Malta.
In 1565, a large Turkish army, equipped with a massive artillery train, landed on the shores of Malta and laid siege to the Hospitaller strongholds. The Knights, fighting from behind their bastioned ramparts, bravely held on as the Turks unleashed punishing bombardments and murderous assaults, and after four long, hot, bloody months, the Turks were forced to lift
the siege and sail back to Constantinople. The story of the siege itself is well-known and does not need to be repeated here. What is less well-understood is the manner in which the Hospitaller defences fared throughout the terrible onslaught.
The only fort that failed to hold its ground against the besiegers was Fort St Elmo. Although the fort held out stubbornly for nearly a month before it was overrun, it only managed to so at a great cost in human lives. St Elmo’s overall poor perform-ance under fire was largely the result of the fact that it was designed primarily as a coastal battery and built to command the entrance of Marsamxett and Grand Harbour – hence its tenaille (star-shaped plan). Little provisions were made for close-in defence. It was because it lacked all the adjuncts of the trace italienne – flanking batteries, spacious bastions and adequate outerworks – that it was so vulnerable to bombardment and assault. Particularly because of its lack of flanking devices and its very low parapet (described by Laparelli as “a mezza rota”), the defenders were highly exposed and vulnerable to enemy artillery fire from the guns and sharpshooters on Mount Sciberras.
An important factor that helped prolong the fort’s struggle was the Turkish inability to make efficient use of their siege guns. Quentin Hughes has convincingly shown that, given the nature of the terrain, the Turkish batteries were sited too far away from the ramparts for effective battering fire.
Much has been said about the Turkish decision to target Fort St Elmo as their first siege object. Being the weakest, most isolated, and smallest fort in the whole defensive complex, it made a natural and obvious first target (compare with Fort St Nicholas in the Siege of Rhodes). Most sources cite the need to shelter the fleet at Marsamxett as the main reason for the Turkish decision, but the weak, isolated fort offered them the opportunity for a seemingly quick victory, one designed to demoralise the defenders and bring the siege to a rapid conclusion.
Indeed, by the rules of war, no fort as small as St Elmo was expected to last for long, especially against the type of massive force that the Turks could bring to bear against it. At most, the capture of Fort St Elmo was expected to take 10 days. As things turned out, however, it held out for a whole month. The reasons for this unexpected outcome were several.
As the investment got underway, the many inherent defects of the fort soon became evident. The unfinished and unlevelled glacis, for example, left considerable areas of dead ground all round these, allowing the Turkish infantry to close in as far as the ditch and ravelin with relative ease and impunity. The fort had no sally-ports leading into the ditch, making counterattacks difficult and cumbersome, while the ravelin – a half-hearted affair, put together before the arrival of the Turkish armada – was a low, flimsy structure.
Consequently the Turkish troops had little difficulty overcoming the outerworks and ravelin – a process no doubt aided by the garrison’s reluctance to defend what was perceived to be indefensible. But despite these early successes, the Turks failed to gain a permanent foothold on the ramparts. Their repeated infantry assaults were repulsed time and again with heavy losses. Notwithstanding the heavy haemorrhage, the garrison held out. And the main reason for this was that the fort was continually being re-supplied. Each night, fresh troops and provisions were sent from across Grand Harbour to reinforce the garrison. Quentin Hughes demonstrated that, for most of the time, these reinforcements were able to get through because the nights were dark and without a moon. This careless oversight cost the Turks dearly. Their failure to appreciate the need to systematically isolate the fort, or at least to pin down the Hospitaller troops in Birgu and Senglea and make the re-supply of St Elmo a difficult task, provided the knights with the opportunity to drag out its resistance well beyond the predictable.
Frustrated at their lack of progress, the Turkish commanders grew increasingly impatient, and carelessly threw in wave upon wave of infantry against Fort St Elmo, hoping to overwhelm the defenders with sheer numbers, well before adequate breaches had been prepared – only to suffer wasteful losses in the attempts. It seems that, as noted by the late Prof. Hughes, the Turkish batteries were firing at the extreme of their operational range and, hence, were not very effective.
The Knights held on to the fort, but similarly paid a high price for it. In all, Christian losses amounted to some 1,500 men, including 89 Knights and 17 serving-brothers killed, and 28 Knights wounded. The Grand Master had taken a huge gamble in persisting to delay its capture. Not all those in the Council were in favour of defending a position that was widely acknowledged as being untenable. Many believed that it was better to use the troops to defend Birgu and Senglea, which had stronger defences and, therefore, better chances of withstanding the Turkish onslaught for a prolonged period of time. They realised that the more and longer they defended Fort St Elmo, the weaker became their forces required for the defence of Birgu and Senglea. And in the end, the Knights could not sustain the haemorrhage for too long.
Indeed, the Grand Master had enormous difficulty persuading his Spanish troops and hired mercenaries, as well as some of his Knights, to hold on to the position and, on more than one occasion, the situation practically developed into an open rebellion which most apologetic chroniclers, flushed by the final victory, later sought to play down and disguise. In the space of a month the Knights lost nearly a fourth of their army. As a matter of fact, they lost a greater portion of their available men defending Fort St Elmo than the Turks did in attacking it. But unlike the Turks, the Knights could not absorb their losses painlessly and as the siege of Birgu and Senglea dragged on with no sign of Don Garcia, it was not altogether clear what the sacrifice of so many men at St Elmo had actually achieved that could not have been equally, perhaps ever better, accomplished in Birgu and Senglea. With most of the professional troops having been sacrificed in the defence of St Elmo, it came down to the Maltese to save Birgu and Senglea from the clutches of the Turks.
Little of Fort St Elmo’s outer walls were left standing after a month of continual heavy bombardment. But it would be wrong to think that the fort was reduced to one large heap of rubble. Most of the damage seems to have been inflicted on the ramparts directly facing the Turkish batteries, namely the land front (the two faces of the demi-bastions and intervening curtain), the Marsamxett-facing part of the enceinte, and one side of the cavalier. The existing documentary and pictorial evidence tends to suggest that the major breaches were made at the salients of the narrow pointed bastion, particularly at the post of Colonel Mass where a wooden bridge was erected by the Turks to span the ditch. The whole stretch of adjoining walls would have been heavily battered, however, and pock-marked with stray hits. This fits in with the nature of siege bombardment tactics of the time, as is well illustrated in the military treatises of Sardi, for example. The narrow salients of acute-angled bastions were extremely weak and vulnerable points and these were usually the first to be targeted by enemy guns. The Turkish gunners evidently knew what they were doing. Laparelli remarks that the ditch was full of rubble and debris after the siege – most of this would have been thrown in by the Turks to create a causeway, but they seem to have abandoned this effort very early on in the attack, so the rest of the material must have fallen into the ditch from the crumbling walls. The interior of the fort, and the Grand Harbour-facing side of the ramparts, on the other hand, would have survived practically unscathed. It is difficult to ascertain the exact extent of the damage inflicted by the Turks, for the fort was rebuilt after the siege and heavily remodelled in later centuries. A few original elements from the 1565 fort have, nonetheless, survived among the later fabric and these, not surprisingly are found in those areas that were shielded from Turkish bombardment.
This article is based on a lecture delivered as part of Din L-Art Helwa’s series of lectures.
Dr Stephen C. Spiteri has recently finished reading for his PhD degree in the art of fortress-building. His interest in the military aspects of Maltese history has led to a number of books and papers on the fortifications of Malta and on the military organisation of the Knights of St John. Foremost among these are Fortresses of the Cross (1994), British Military Architecture (1996) Armoury of the Knights (2003), and The Great Siege: Knights vs Turks, mdlxv (Malta – 2005).