How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity (48 page)

Unfortunately for sultans to come, this victory inflated their belief in the invincibility of their armies—never mind that it was dearly won despite the Ottomans’ having had an advantage in numbers of better than eleven to one.

The victory in Constantinople provided the Ottomans with prestige, a splendid new capital city, and a base on the European continent (barely) from which to launch attacks through the Balkans. But on the whole it mattered little. (It wasn’t until 1930 that the Turks renamed the city Istanbul when they moved their capital back to Ankara, Turkey.)

Trying to make inroads through the Balkans proved difficult for the Ottomans. The Muslim armies that were dispatched to the northwest soon after the fall of Constantinople were turned back by Hungarian forces led by Vlad the Impaler (also known as Dracula), whose brutal executions of Ottoman prisoners were judged sadistic even by Turkish standards. Thus it was left to Suleiman to finally conquer the city of Belgrade in 1521. Suleiman reveled in his victory, writing: “Rejoice with me … that … I have captured that most powerful of fortresses, Belgrade … and destroyed most of the inhabitants.”
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In 1526 Suleiman also defeated a badly outnumbered Hungarian army at Mohács. But not even this victory resulted in an Ottoman breakthrough into Austria. What it did accomplish was to arouse the Habsburgs (including Charles V) to prepare for war.

Rhodes

The existence of Rhodes as a western outpost from which the Knights of St. John (as the Knights Hospitallers had renamed themselves) devastated Ottoman coastal shipping should have given pause to the Ottomans about their military capacities. Seized by the Knights in 1307, Rhodes stood for two centuries in defiance of Islam, despite being defended by only a tiny force. In 1480 the Ottomans sent 160 ships and a force of 70,000 troops under Mesih Pasha to put an end to this blatant affront. The Knights, numbering no more than 500 and supported by perhaps 2,000 mercenaries, repelled repeated attacks on the city’s walls, turning the final Ottoman assault into a rout that ended with the sacking of the Muslim camp and the capture of the “holy standard of Islam.”
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In 1522 Suleiman himself led an army of about 100,000 men (some sources say 200,000) to eliminate these “damnable workers of wickedness.”
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Once again Rhodes was defended by only about 500 knights; in addition to the knights were 1,500 mercenaries and a few local peasants-in-arms. The Knights had known for many years that the island would be attacked again and had used the time to perfect their fortifications, cleverly rebuilding the city’s walls at angles to resist cannon fire and setting
up devastating cross fires for their own artillery. Much of this redesign was done under the direction of Gabriele Tadino, who may have been the greatest military engineer of the era. Led by their brilliant grand master, Philippe Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, the Knights knew that their chances were slim. But they also knew that their ancestors had prevailed against similar odds.

Although Suleiman had brought a large battery of siege guns, he seemed aware that they might not be sufficient against the newly remodeled walls: he had brought thousands of miners to dig tunnels under the walls. When the miners went to work, they succeeded in blowing gaps in the fortress walls, but the narrowness of the gaps prevented Ottoman infantry from outnumbering the defenders at point of contact. One on one, the Ottomans were no match for the Knights. This was because the Knights, all being from noble backgrounds,
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had been trained for combat from childhood and then had trained constantly once they joined the order. In contrast, most of the Ottoman troops were slaves or conscripts, and aside from the Janissaries (who were slaves seized from subject Christian populations as young boys), the average Ottoman soldier had very little training and less armor.
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In addition, the Knights possessed individual firearms, so they could inflict heavy losses on Ottoman forces at a distance. In close combat, the Knights’ far superior swordsmanship prevailed. Equally important, Tadino had adapted the Knights’ artillery for close-range use against attacking troops. Instead of firing a single, large cannonball, the Knights loaded each cannon with dozens of small balls as well as scrap iron, bolts, nails, and pieces of chain to kill or wound many attackers with each shot. These small cannons could be quickly reloaded and resighted. Positioned to cross-fire at the most suitable approaches, they killed thousands. As time passed, the Ottoman troops became increasingly demoralized and reluctant to engage. Eventually their officers had to threaten them with drawn swords to drive them to the walls.
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Meanwhile, however, many Knights had been killed, many others had been wounded, and the survivors were growing short of food. On December 22, after six months of fighting, Suleiman was realistic enough to offer generous terms for the Knights’ surrender. Grand Master L’Isle-Adam preferred to go down fighting, but he was brought around by concerns to spare the civilians on the island. According to the surrender terms, the Knights had twelve days to leave the island with all their
belongings. No Christian church would be desecrated or turned into a mosque. Civilians could leave at will anytime during the next three years, and those who stayed would be exempt from all Ottoman taxes for the next five years. Unlike many other Islamic leaders, Suleiman kept his word.

Hence, on January 1, 1523, led by their grand master, about 180 surviving Knights of St. John—those who could walk wearing full battle armor—marched from the city to the harbor with their flags flying and drums beating. There they boarded Venetian ships and sailed away to Crete.
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If more than half of the Knights had died, so had about half of Suleiman’s huge army, an astounding casualty ratio of about 40,000 to 320. But the sultan had troops to spare, and he returned to Constantinople in triumph. Victory over the West seemed to beckon.

Suleiman may not have known for several years that, subsequent to their withdrawal to Crete, Charles V had ceded the island of Malta to the Knights of St. John in return for their sending one trained falcon annually to the viceroy of Sicily. (This inspired the plot of Dashiell Hammett’s famous novel
The Maltese Falcon
and the classic Humphrey Bogart 1941 movie.) Renaming themselves the Knights of Malta, and still led by Grand Master L’Isle-Adam, they immediately set about fortifying this small, rocky island—eighteen miles long and nine miles wide, about one-fifth the size of Rhodes—and recruiting new Knights from the leading aristocratic families of Europe. To Charles V’s delight, they soon resumed their raids on Muslim shipping.

Failure at Vienna

In 1529 Suleiman made his next move in pursuit of his dream: he laid siege to Vienna. In doing so he struck directly at the Habsburgs. Fortunately for the sultan, at that moment Charles V was pinned down by a war with France and could spare only a contingent of Spanish arquebusiers and some German mercenaries to aid his Austrian subjects. So, as usual, the Western defenders were greatly outnumbered: by at least five to one, and perhaps as high as ten to one, not counting thousands of slave miners the Ottomans brought.
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Fortunately for Vienna, the Germans were led by the seventy-year-old Nicholas, Count of Salm, a distinguished veteran, who took command of all forces. He immediately had
the walls strengthened, blocked the four city gates, and leveled buildings to create clear fields of fire at vital points.

The Ottoman invasion was hampered by unusually long and heavy spring rains and by bad planning. The flooding and the mire caused by the rains made the route barely passable, and impassable for the sultan’s many big cannons, which had to be abandoned. Most of the large contingent of camels died, and their supply loads left along the way. At least a third of the Ottoman army was made up of light cavalry, useless for a siege or even for defending against sallies by the Austrian infantry, but a huge drain on supplies. Finally, sickness broke out among the troops during the march, especially among the elite Janissaries, and many died.

Suleiman and his army did not reach Vienna until late September—not long before cold weather arrived. The sultan immediately began a bombardment of Vienna with the light artillery that had been dragged through the muddy roads. But the balls bounced harmlessly off the walls. He also put his miners to work tunneling. But the Austrians dug countertunnels from which they killed all the Ottoman miners. Early in October it began to rain. By that point Suleiman’s forces were short of food, sickness was still taking a toll, casualties were very high, and desertions were increasing rapidly.

On October 12 the sultan held a council with his commanders and decided to commit everything to a frontal attack on the walls. Although Count Salm was killed during the battle, the attack was a bloody failure and thousands of Ottoman troops died. Then it began to snow. It was time to quit.

The Ottoman retreat was a disaster. Austrian forces struck again and again at isolated units, killing or capturing thousands of stragglers. It was a small Ottoman force lacking all its baggage and artillery that finally made it back to Hungary.

But that wasn’t to be the end of it. Six years later Suleiman tried again. This time the Ottoman forces were frequently and very effectively attacked on their march forward. When word reached Suleiman that Charles V, his conflict with France resolved for the moment, had dispatched 80,000 of his best troops to defend Vienna, the sultan turned back.

In 1682 Mehmed IV tried to take Vienna again, with a force of 120,000. Once again it was a bloody disaster—this time the Ottoman army was destroyed in the field by Polish knights sent to relieve the siege.
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The attacks on Vienna were the high-water mark of Islamic overland invasions of Europe. Amazingly, some recent historians cite the three attempts to take Vienna as evidence of the Ottomans’ military superiority over Europeans. That’s a bit like claiming that the defeat of the Armada demonstrated Spain’s naval superiority.

The Siege of Malta

Having been defeated in eastern Europe, Suleiman ceased mounting major attacks on the West for about thirty years, during which he gained considerable fame by victories in the East. But then, in 1565, his attention was drawn to his enemies in the Mediterranean. The most vexing of these were those same Knights who had put up such a damaging fight at Rhodes: from their new fortress on Malta they were victimizing his merchant fleet. So Suleiman proclaimed: “Those sons of dogs whom I already have conquered and who were spared only by my clemency at Rhodes forty-three years ago—I say now that, for their continual raids and insults, they shall be finally crushed and destroyed.”
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By now the sultan was seventy-one and in failing health, unable to serve as his own field commander. He assigned the task of conquering Malta to Mustafa Pasha, commander of the army, and Piyale Pasha, commander of the navy. A split command always entails risks.

An attack on Malta was far more challenging than the one against Rhodes. Rhodes is only eleven miles off the Turkish coast; Malta is eight hundred miles to the west. Rhodes is fertile and has rivers with abundant water, able to support an invading army; Malta is barren rock. If the attackers needed timbers for siege works, each timber had to be shipped. Because the invasion posed such enormous supply requirements, a huge task force had to be built. “The cost was phenomenal—perhaps 30 percent of the treasury income,” author Roger Crowley noted.
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Still, the sultan was very confident: two renegade Greek engineers who had visited Malta pretending to be fishermen assured Suleiman that the whole island could be taken in a few days.
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For the assault on Malta, Suleiman sent a fleet of 193 vessels with an army of about fifty thousand aboard. Included were about seven thousand arquebusiers and more than sixty cannons, including two giant guns.
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To meet this overwhelming force were about five hundred Knights
led by Grand Master Jean Parisot de Valette, a seventy-year-old veteran of many battles who had spent a year as an Ottoman galley slave. In addition to his Knights, de Valette had about a thousand mercenaries recruited in Spain and Italy, and about three thousand men from the local population who had no training in the use of arms. Although even the pope had worked hard to rouse European kings to reinforce the Knights, nothing was sent; according to the pope, Philip II of Spain “has withdrawn into the woods, and France, England and Scotland [are] ruled by women and boys.”
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Malta was on its own. It would seem to have been no contest.

From the start, de Valette had known from his spies at the Ottoman court that the Turks planned first to take Fort St. Elmo, which guarded the entrance to the island’s main harbor.
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To meet the onslaught he stationed half his heavy artillery in Fort St. Elmo.
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The Ottomans eventually reduced the fort to rubble, but they did so only after five weeks and the loss of at least six thousand men, including more than half of their elite Janissaries.
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After taking the fort, Mustafa Pasha, the army commander, had the dead and wounded Knights beheaded, their bodies nailed to wooden crosses, and floated across the bay to taunt the Knights. De Valette responded by beheading his Ottoman prisoners and firing their heads back into the Turkish camp from his large cannons, which seems to have had a significant effect on Turkish morale. But what really mattered was that the Ottomans’ decision to focus on Fort St. Elmo gave the Knights time to finish rebuilding their main defensive works.
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