‘The Great Siege of Malta’ by Marcus Bull review

In 1942, at the height of the Axis powers’ siege of Malta, a young British first-lieutenant named Ernle Bradford arrived at the island’s Grand Harbour aboard a Hunt-class destroyer. He returned in 1951, this time on his own yacht, and had the leisure to explore Valletta and the three islands that make up the Maltese archipelago. Fascinated and charmed by what he saw, he decided to write a book about an earlier siege of the islands. Published in 1961 as The Great Siege: Malta 1565, it recounts how in May that year the Ottoman sultan, Suleiman the Magnificent, sent a fleet of 181 ships to the Grand Harbour with the aim of ejecting the then rulers of the islands, the Knights of St John.

The defenders were hopelessly outnumbered. Between 35,000 and 40,000 Ottoman combatants allegedly manned the fleet and landed on the main island. They were opposed by around 6,000, of whom just 2,500 were trained soldiers or members of the elite military order. It was the ultimate David and Goliath confrontation, and Bradford wove a gripping narrative centred on the Ottoman assault on the fort of St Elmo, which lay on a headland at the mouth of the Grand Harbour. One of the Ottoman leaders, the corsair Dragut (or Turgut), advised against wasting effort on the fort, but he was fatally injured shortly afterwards by a stray shot and his wise counsel went unheard. The fort was, after all, probably garrisoned by fewer than a thousand men, but it turned out not to be the pushover that the Ottomans had anticipated. It resisted for a whole month and only fell when the last of the defenders was dead and after the attackers had sustained over 4,000 casualties of their own and used 19,000 of their cannon balls. The sacrifice at St Elmo held up the Ottoman advance long enough for the resolute Grand Master, Jean de la Valette, to hold the line until a relieving force could arrive from Sicily on 8 September. Bradford’s book is a compelling read, albeit one evidently informed by his 1942 experience, with the outnumbered knights standing in for plucky British fighter pilots, battling in skies darkened by swarms of enemy aircraft.

Marcus Bull’s version of these events makes for an intriguing comparison. He takes a much wider perspective. While Bradford begins his story with Suleiman’s sonorous declaration of war on the knights, Bull offers us some thoughts about sieges in general. The earliest recorded ones took place at Troy and Jericho, although they are unusual in that the oldest surviving accounts, in the Bible and Homer’s Iliad, are told from the point of view of the besiegers. Generally, he observes, human sympathy lies with the besieged, whether they win, as at Malta, or lose, as at the Alamo in 1836. In the final chapters, he considers the global implications of the Ottoman defeat. He places the 1565 siege in the wider context of the great-power rivalry between the Ottoman Empire and the Habsburgs along with their proxies, the Mediterranean corsairs. The sultan’s state-sponsored pirates were the Barbary corsairs, led by men like Dragut. They ranged far beyond the Mediterranean, once attacking Iceland and taking 400 captives. The Christian corsairs were none other than the Knights of Malta.

From that point on, Bull leads us into a rather less heroic perspective on the episode, revealing plenty of very unappealing aspects of the military order of St John. He goes into detail about their piratical activities, which involved intercepting vessels carrying pilgrims on the first stage of the journey to Mecca, enslaving the passengers, and carrying off the loot. One victim was the Ottoman judge Mustafa Mancuncuzade, whose ship was boarded while he was sailing to Cyprus. He spent more than two years in captivity on Malta before money arrived to secure his release. These were no dedicated warriors of the faith. The knights were just as likely to seize Venetian vessels as those from Muslim ports. Nor were they all models of sobriety and virtue. The Scottish knight, John James Sandilands, was addicted to gambling and quite unable to resist a punch-up. In 1557 he was sentenced to six months in the guva, a tiny bell-shaped recess hollowed into rock beneath the fortress of St Angelo, with only a small hole at the top for access. A Latin poem that he scratched despondently on the wall can still be seen.

Bull also questions many aspects of the standard version of events. The disparity in numbers between besiegers and besieged may not have been as great as Bradford suggested. The most detailed contemporary accounts were written by Christians who were eager to present the victory as a miracle and thus tempted to exaggerate. Francisco Balbi di Correggio, who served with the Spanish contingent of the defence and later published the diary that he had kept during the siege, seems to have felt the pangs of conscience. In the second edition of his work, he revised his estimate of Ottoman numbers downwards from 45,000 to 28,000. The latest estimates now hover around 25,000. Bull subjects the epic defence of St Elmo, with its defenders willingly laying down their lives, to some close scrutiny. Apparently three knights who were sent over to St Elmo in early June found the garrison preparing to leave rather than philosophically resigning themselves to their fate. The Grand Master Jean de Valette, the towering leader of Bradford’s account, is shown to have been rather hesitant and vacillating at times. Bull even questions the advice of the wise Dragut not to waste time on St Elmo. There were good strategic reasons for taking the fort; it would have allowed the Ottoman land and sea forces to link up.

This is not a case of one book being better than the other. The accounts of the ‘great’ siege by Bradford and Bull are each absorbing and informative reads. But it is evident that they are written from different perspectives. To get the full picture, you need to read them both.

• The Great Siege of Malta
  Marcus Bull
  Allen Lane, 352pp, £30
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

Jonathan Harris is Professor of the History of Byzantium at Royal Holloway, University of London.