The Grand Turk Read online

  Mesih Pasha had a herald call out to the defenders that he was requesting a safe conduct for his envoy to offer the knights terms of surrender. D’Aubusson said that the envoy could not enter the city, but would have to deliver his message from the counterscarp in front of the defence walls. According to Caoursin, the envoy, Süleyman Bey, said that Mesih Pasha offered to allow the knights to continue living in Rhodes as vassals of the sultan if they surrendered. But if they did not give in, he said, ‘The city will be devastated, the men slaughtered, the women ravished and consigned to ignominy.’

  Caoursin then quotes the response given by d’Aubusson’s spokesman, Fra Antoine Gualtier, castellan of the city of Rhodes, who concluded by saying: ‘Take your armies home and send us ambassadors. Then we will talk of peace as equals; but as long as you stand armed before our city, do your duty as a soldier, and, with the help of God, we will give you our answer. You do not have to do with effeminate Asiatics, but with Knights of proven valour.’

  After the refusal of his proposal Mesih Pasha resumed his bombardment of the city, pleased by the arrival of two shiploads of fresh janissaries. At this point Master George of Saxony, the German bombardier who had defected from the Ottoman forces, fell under suspicion and was summoned before the Council of Knights. When the question was put to him under torture, he admitted that he had been secretly communicating with Mesih Pasha, whereupon he was condemned and hanged.

  On 24 June the knights celebrated the feast day of St John the Baptist, their patron saint, with the usual Solemn Mass in their conventual church. A few days later a Christian ship made its way into port with reinforcements, a company of troops under Benedetto della Scala of Verona, greatly improving the morale of the defenders.

  D’Aubusson sent envoys to Rome, who arrived there at the beginning of July, bringing with them an appeal to the Pope for aid against the Turks. Pope Sixtus agreed to send two large ships to Rhodes with troops, ammunition and supplies, and King Ferrante of Naples promised to send two more vessels. On 3 July Sixtus convened a meeting of the ambassadors resident in Rome, and it was agreed that the expenses for this relief expedition were to be met by imposing a so-called Rhodian defence tax (tassa per defesa de Rodi). The assessments they agreed upon were: the Pope 10,000 ducats, the King of Naples 20,000, the Duke of Milan 15,000, the Signoria of Florence 8,000, the Duke of Ferrara 4,000, the Signoria of Siena 4,000, the Marquis of Mantua 1,000, the Marquis of Montferrat 1,000, the Signoria of Lucca 1,000, and the Duke of Savoy 3,000 - a total of 67,000 ducats. Venice was not included in the assessment, because of the republic’s peace treaty with the Ottomans. But Sixtus hoped that when the Venetians saw the other Christian powers preparing for a crusade they would scrap their treaty and join in the struggle against the Turks.

  Meanwhile, the siege on Rhodes continued unabated, the Turks bombarding the Jewish quarter day and night, eventually destroying the Tower of Italy and opening a breach in the defence walls. At dawn on 27 July, after a night of particularly heavy bombardment, Mesih Pasha ordered his entire army to attack the breach in the walls of the Jewish quarter. He first sent in his shock troops, the başıbozuks, who charged over the mound of rubble and up onto the ruins of the Tower of Italy, where they planted the Turkish standard. They were followed by the janissaries and sipahis, some of whom made their way into the town and began slaughtering the townspeople. By then d’Aubusson had led the knights up onto the tower, where a janissary severely wounded him with a spear so that he had to be carried away. But the knights outfought the attackers and forced them to withdraw, cutting them down in droves as they fled in disorder and slaughtering those who were cut off inside the town. The knights pursued their enemies as far as the Ottoman camp on Mount St Stephen, where they captured the sultan’s gold and silver standard, triumphantly returning to town with the severed heads of Turks on their pikes and lances.

  According to Caoursin, 3,500 Turks were killed in the attack on the Jewish quarter, including 300 janissaries. He writes: ‘There were corpses all over the city, on the walls, in the ditch, in the enemy stockades and in the sea…they had to be burned to avoid an infectious disease.’

  At first it was thought that d’Aubusson would die from his wound, for the spear had punctured his lung, but he made a remarkably rapid recovery. He reported that ‘many of our Knights and Bailiffs fell, fighting to the last wherever the combat was thickest. We and others of our comrades sustained many wounds.’ Fra de Curti noted that in the battle in the Jewish quarter ten knights of the Order lost their lives, ‘including the Bailiff of Germany’. According to other sources, seven of the ten knights who died were English: Thomas Benn, John Wakelyn, Henry Hales, Thomas Plumpton, Adam Tedbond, Henry Battesby and Henry Anlaby. Marmaduke Lumley, who later became Grand Prior of the Order in Ireland, was gravely wounded but subsequently recovered. Other English knights who fought in the battle and survived were Leonard Tybert, Walter Westborough, John Boswell, who was a Scot, and John Roche, an Irishman.

  The failure of his assault on the Jewish quarter convinced Mesih Pasha that he was unable to take Rhodes, and on the following day he ordered his troops to lift the siege and begin preparations for withdrawing from the island. It took ten days for them to strike their camp, and the last of the troops were taken aboard the Ottoman fleet late in the afternoon of 7 August.

  Just as the Ottoman fleet departed, headed for Physkos, observers on Rhodes saw two ships approaching, a carrack and a brigantine, one flying the flag of the Pope and the other that of the King of Naples. Mesih Pasha sent a squadron of twenty galleys to attack the Christian ships, a shot from one of their guns carrying away the mainmast of the brigantine. But the heavily armed carrack, the Santa Maria, captained by a Spaniard named Juan Poo, covered the brigantine until it was able to make its way into the harbour of Rhodes before nightfall. The Santa Maria was unable to enter the harbour because of heavy seas, and the next day it was attacked by the Ottoman galleys, which it fought off in a three-hour battle in which the Turkish squadron commander was killed. The Santa Maria then entered the harbour under full sail, unloading fresh troops and supplies, including 800 barrels of wine, as well as letters from Pope Sixtus and King Ferrante for Pierre d’Aubusson, whose life still hung in the balance.

  The siege had left the city of Rhodes in ruins, with the Grand Master’s palace and many of the churches destroyed along with the Tower of St Nicholas and much of the defence walls. About a half of the knights were killed during the siege, including seven of the fourteen English, Scottish and Irish knights, along with a similar proportion of the other Christian defenders, not to mention the civilians who were slain when the Turks broke into the Jewish quarter.

  The Ottoman casualties, according to Christian sources, probably amounted to 9,000 killed and 15,000 wounded, about a quarter of Mesih Pasha’s force. Mesih Pasha kept his fleet in Physkos for eleven days before sailing homeward, after unsuccessfully trying to take the fortress that the Knights of St John had built at Halicarnassus. When the fleet arrived at Gelibolu, Mesih Pasha was relieved of his command on the orders of Sultan Mehmet, who is reported to have said that if he himself had led the expedition Rhodes would have been taken. When the defeated fleet reached Istanbul, according to Angiolello, its crews and troops arrived in silence, ‘not sounding instruments of joy, as they were accustomed to do on such occasions when the fleet came home’.

  Meanwhile, the Christian victory was celebrated joyously all over Europe, particularly in the city of Rhodes itself. When the celebration was over Guillaume Caoursin, vice chancellor of the Order, sat down to write his famous account of the siege ‘for praise of God, exaltation of the Christian religion, and the glory of the knights of Rhodes’. Entitled Obsidionia Rhodiae Urbis Descriptio, Caoursin’s account was first published at Venice in 1480. It was then translated into English by John Kay, laureate to King Edward IV, and published by Caxton in 1496 as The Derlectable newess & Tithyngs of the Gloryoos Victorye of the Rhodyns Agaynst the Turke.

  13


  The Capture of Otranto

  Although Pierre d’Aubusson had been seriously wounded during the siege, immediately after it was over he set out to rebuild the ruined city of Rhodes and its defence walls and towers. Three days after the Ottoman withdrawal the Grand Master and the council met and decided to send an envoy to Italy to inform Pope Sixtus and King Ferrante of their victory over the Turks, and also to request further aid, ‘for it is of course assumed that the enemy proposes to come back’. By the beginning of October 1480 d’Aubusson decided that the Ottoman fleet had finally left the region and was not likely to return in the immediate future. The council therefore decided to allow the departure of the galleys and mercenaries that had been sent by King Ferrante. But they decided to retain the 100 men of arms who had come to Rhodes with the prior of Rome, because the knights had suffered such heavy casualties during the siege that their garrison needed reinforcements.

  Mehmet’s expedition against the Ionian Islands in 1479 had given him possession of Santa Maura, Ithaka, Cephalonia and Zante, the former possessions of Leonardo III Tocco, who had taken refuge with King Ferrante of Naples. Corfu, the northernmost of the Ionian Islands, remained in the possession of Venice, which because of its peace treaty with the Ottomans remained neutral when Gedik Ahmet Pasha conquered the other islands in the archipelago.

  On 2 July 1480 the Senate wrote to Vettore Soranzo, the Captain-General of the Sea, who at the time was on Corfu, informing him that the Ottoman fleet had left the Dardanelles and had divided into two parts, the larger one headed for Rhodes (where the siege had already begun on 23 May) and the other bound for the Adriatic.

  As soon as Soranzo received the letter he left Corfu with twenty-eight galleys for Methoni, in the south-west Peloponessos, which together with nearby Methoni were called the ‘Eyes of the Republic’, for they surveyed all maritime traffic between the eastern Mediterranean and the Adriatic. Soranzo’s instructions were to avoid any conflict with the Ottoman forces, but if they attacked any Venetian possessions he was to oppose them. At Methoni, Soranzo met with an Ottoman envoy, who requested safe passage for a Turkish flotilla headed into the Adriatic, along with provisions. Soranzo agreed to the envoy’s requests, and he followed with his squadron as the Turkish ships headed towards the Adriatic to join Gedik Pasha’s fleet at Valona in Albania.

  On 24 July 1480 Naples, Milan, Florence and Ferrara renewed their alliance for twenty-five years, an alignment designed to counter the pact between Venice and the papacy. Pope Sixtus IV immediately summoned envoys of the Italian states to Rome in order to gain their cooperation in sending help to Rhodes. The envoys expressed their concern that internecine war in Italy would make it difficult or impossible to help the Rhodians, and they asked the Pope to give them reassurance in this matter. Sixtus responded on 27 July with a circular letter to the states of Italy, making an impassioned appeal to keep the peace and take united action against the Turks before it was too late.

  We think of nothing else than how the Italian states may with a unity of purpose resist the terrible power of the Turks… [Now] we have the enemy before our very eyes. He has already been sighted, poised to strike at the province of Apulia with a large fleet. If he should seize Ragusa or Rhodes (which God forbid!), nothing would be left of our safety… Hear our paternal voice, consider the common peril, and judge for yourself how great is the need to quicken our pace…

  Meanwhile, Gedik Pasha’s fleet had left Valona on 26 July, headed across the Adriatic to southern Italy. The Venetian squadron under Soranzo remained at Corfu and made no move to interfere with the Ottoman fleet, which comprised forty large galleys, sixty smaller galleys and forty freighters, carrying some 18,000 troops and 700 horses for the cavalry.

  The original plan was for the expedition to land near Brindisi, but, having learned from the sailors on a captured Italian freighter that the coast further to the south was undefended, Gedik Ahmet decided to head for Otranto. On the morning of 28 July he landed a squadron of cavalry without opposition near the castle of Roca, and the horsemen rode through the countryside as far as Otranto, on the heel of the Italian peninsula, capturing many of the locals and their cattle. The garrison at Otranto made a sortie and drove off the Turks, killing many of them and freeing some of the prisoners.

  By that time Gedik Ahmet had landed the rest of his army, estimated to number 18,000. He then sent an Italian-speaking envoy into Otranto offering terms of surrender, and when these were rejected the pasha threatened the city with ‘fire, flame, ruin, annihilation and death’. Gedik Ahmet then positioned his siege guns and began bombarding the city, which was only lightly defended, its small garrison having no artillery to fire back at the Ottomans, while at the same time his cavalryman laid waste the surrounding countryside, putting all they encountered to the sword.

  Word of the Ottoman attack quickly reached the court of King Ferrante at Naples, where it was feared that this was the beginning of a full-scale Turkish invasion of Italy. Niccolo Sadoleto, the Ferrarese ambassador to Naples, wrote on 1 August to inform Duke Ercole I d’Este of Ferrara.

  This morning four horsemen have come [to Naples], riding at breakneck speed from Apulia and the region of Otranto. They have gone to find the lord king at Aversa, where he went yesterday evening, and they have brought him the news of how the Turks have landed at Otranto with 150 sail, and have made three assaults upon the castle. The news is all over Naples. I have no certain information, however, except that the lord king has in fact returned posthaste from Aversa within the hour.

  Soon afterwards Sadoleto added in a postscript that the report of the Ottoman landing was true, and that ‘the number of ships is uncertain, but the armada is so great that it is believed to contain all the vessels that were at Rhodes!’. That same day Sadoleto wrote to Duke Ercole saying that he thought that King Ferrante would soon ask all his allies to help him to repel the invaders, who besides attacking Otranto had taken three villages in the vicinity. He reported that a horseman had arrived from Taranto ‘who says that there are more than 350 vessels, and that the Turks have attacked the castle of Otranto and ranged as far as Lecce, burning villages, taking prisoners and killing little children as though they were dogs…’.

  Luca Landucci, a Florentine apothecary, viewed the Turkish attack on Neapolitan territory as a blessing to his native city. He noted in his diary that Duke Alfonso of Calabria, son of King Ferrante of Naples, had intended to do much evil against Florence but ‘by a great miracle it happened that on the sixth of August [sic], the Turkish army came to Otranto and began to besiege it; so it was necessary to leave our neighborhood, at the king’s command, and return to defend the kingdom…’.

  On 2 August King Ferrante wrote to summon home Duke Alfonso, who was with his troops in Siena, which the Neapolitans had been trying to take. Ferrante then wrote to inform Pope Sixtus that the enmity between the various Italian states must be put aside because of the common danger posed by the Turkish invasion. Otherwise, he warned, he would throw in his lot with the sultan and work for the destruction of all the other states in Italy.

  The Signoria of Venice had been making efforts to maintain peace with the Ottomans. On 3 June 1480 the Senate had instructed Zaccaria Barbaro, their new ambassador to Rome, to avoid Venetian involvement in the anti-Turkish alliance then under discussion among the Italian states. At the same time the Signoria was trying to avoid attempts by the Ottomans to involve Venice in an invasion of Italy. On 23 August 1479, during the Tuscan War, the conflict between the Kingdom of Naples and its allies against those of the papacy, Gedik Ahmet Pasha had sent an envoy to the Senate suggesting that the Venetians join him in an attack against King Ferrante and the Pope, both of whom he declared to be the worst enemies of Venice. The Senate politely declined the suggestion, remarking that ‘Venetian merchants had suffered no losses either in the papal states or in the Neapolitan kingdom’.

  The defenders at Otranto were able to hold out only until 11 August, when the Ottoman infantry poured through a br
each in the walls and took the city by storm. All the older men of the city were put to the sword, while the younger men and women were enslaved, 8,000 of them being shipped off to Albania. It is estimated that 12,000 of the 22,000 inhabitants of Otranto were killed by the Turks. The aged archbishop of Otranto, Stefano Pendinelli, remained to the last in the cathedral of Otranto, praying for divine deliverance as the Ottoman soldiers slaughtered his congregation. One Italian chronicler says that the Turks sawed the archbishop in two on the high altar of his cathedral, although a more reliable source suggests that he died of fright. The Italian chronicler goes on to say that Gedik Ahmet Pasha had 800 of the townspeople beheaded when they refused to convert to Islam, leaving their remains unburied on the eminence now known as the Hill of the Martyrs. All the martyrs were canonised in 1771 under Pope Clement XIV, and their skulls are still displayed in the cathedral.

  After the fall of Otranto the Ottoman cavalry plundered the surrounding region, which was abandoned by all the Italian men capable of bearing arms, leaving only women, children and old men, many of whom were slaughtered. The cavalry extended its raids as far as Taranto on the west and northward to Lecce and Brindisi, so it appeared that Gedik Ahmet was going to use Otranto as his base for a wider invasion of Italy.

  King Ferrante, after sending a courier to inform the Pope of the Turkish invasion, quickly mustered an army, which left Naples for Apulia on 8 September. His son, Alfonso, withdrew his troops from Tuscany, and by the end of the month he too headed for Apulia. By the time the Neapolitan forces reached Apulia the Ottoman troops had withdrawn from the surrounding countryside and retired within the walls of Otranto. By then Gedik Ahmet Pasha had returned to Valona with a large part of his army, leaving a garrison of only 6,500 infantry and 500 cavalry in Otranto under Hayrettin Bey, the sancakbey of Negroponte, a Greek convert to Islam who was fluent in Italian. When Ferrante tried to negotiate with Hayrettin Bey he was told that the sultan was not only going to keep Otranto, but that he also demanded Taranto, Brindisi and Lecce. Hayrettin went on to say that if these demands were not met the sultan himself would appear the following spring, leading an army of 100,000 troops and 18,000 cavalry, along with a powerful artillery corps, with which he would conquer all of Italy.