Fall of a fort: Malta, 23 June 1565.

Fall of a Fort: Malta, 23 June 1565

I have today acquired a beautiful piece of art, a fitting Christmas gift which besides its inherent artistic beauty also captures a dramatic episode in Malta’s history.  A three dimensional painting by my old schoolmate and established artist John Busuttil Leaver featuring the Fall of Fort St. Elmo during the Great Siege of Malta on 23 June 1565.

The Fall of St. Elmo.  An epic story of courage, a glorious chapter in a siege which pitted the superior strength of over 35,000 besieging Turkish Ottoman forces against an inferior force of around 6,500 defenders comprising 3,000 Maltese soldiers together with 500 Knights of St. John and a mercenary army of around 3,000 Spanish, Italian, Sicilian, Greek and other nationalities from the Spanish Empire.

The Siege was meant to be a foregone conclusion.  The cream of Ottoman Sultan’s Suleiman the Magnificent’s forces pitted against a ragtag army of Knights and untrained troops seeking shelter behind the walls of rapidly repaired battlements on a sun-baked, rocky island located on the front-line of two warring faiths.  A Siege whose significance was far greater than the tiny island on which it was fought.  For both sides knew that Malta held the key to the control of shipping between the East and West Mediterranean.  Coupled with the fact that whoever held Malta and its deep water harbours could use it as a base to attack Christian Europe.  Via the island of Sicily, 100 kilometres to Malta’s north, whose exposed coastline earned it the title of Europe’s soft underbelly: a very descriptive term which cuts no corners in explaining Europe’s vulnerability to attack should Malta have fallen to the Ottomans.

The Ottomans reached Malta on 18 May 1565 having set sail from Istanbul with a fleet of 193 vessels at the end of March.  After disembarking in Marsaxlokk and reconnoitering, they took stock of the defences which they needed to subdue: the inland town of Mdina with its crumbling walls, the town of Birgu with its strong walls and the bulwark of Fort St. Angelo and the newer settlement of Senglea with its new walls and its stronghold of Fort St.Michael.  The final obstacle consisted of a small, but modern star-shaped fort called St. Elmo guarding the entrance to the island’s two deep water harbours at the tip of the Sceberras Peninsula.

Turkish opinion was divided when it came to deciding which of the strongholds to start besieging.  The commander in charge of the land forces, Mustapha Pasha, was all for going straight for the strongest defences, in the belief that once the strongest defences fell, the rest would give up without a fight.  But his co-commander in charge of the Sultan’s fleet, Piali Pasha, insisted that tiny St. Elmo should be the first target, as its downfall would enable him to protect his precious fleet inside a safe harbour.  Piali’s opinion prevailed and tiny St Elmo, with its small garrison of Knights and infantry faced the Turkish onslaught.

The Turks initially estimated that the tiny fort, cut off as it was from the rest of the defences, and facing the incessant firepower of their artillery coupled with the pinpoint accuracy of their snipers, would fall within a matter of days.  What they did not reckon was that the defenders, led by the wily Grandmaster of the Knights Jean de la Valette, were quietly replenishing the beleaguered garrison with men and munitions under cover of darkness by crossing over with small boats in the darkness of the night while the Turks were resting after a day’s bombardment, and ferrying the wounded over the Fort St. Angelo.

However, the fall of St Elmo was considered by all to be a matter of when and not if, and de la Valette’s protracted game was only meant to waste Ottoman lives, ammunition and time before the assault on the main defences began.  In this, the tiny Fort and its defenders emerged with the greatest of honour for they managed to withstand a horrific, one-sided siege not for the few days as per the original estimate, but for a full, astounding  36 days of non-stop bombardment which stopped only for assault upon assault by crack Janissary troops to take place against the puny fortress and its small force of defenders.

The painting portrays the final moments of the Fort on 23 June 1565.  It is still flying the Knights’ banner as its stricken defenders make one last attempt to delay the unstoppable flow of besiegers: frustrated men wishing to avenge the death of  6,000-8,000 of their comrades, including half of their elite Janissaries and the famous veteran corsair, Turgut Re’is.

The Great Siege of Malta was far from over when St. Elmo fell on 23 June. It was to go on until the 8 September when the Turks finally abandoned their plans and set sail for Istanbul which they were to re-enter under cover of darkness to hide their shame at failing to take their prize.

However, the resilience of Fort St. Elmo played a very important part in the Siege’s final outcome.  It drained the Ottomans of their crack troops, gained the defenders five precious weeks and ultimately delivered a strong blow to Turkish morale.  In fact Mustapha Pasha himself is reputed to have stood on the ruins of St. Elmo gazing across the waters of Grand Harbour and the impregnable ramparts of Forts St. Angelo and St Michael uttering the words, “If the son has come at such a cost, what are the parents worth?”

A trip to the past. Visiting my Birgu…..

A trip to the past.  Visiting my Birgu…..

Late last winter, I was enjoying a rare evening of solitude. My wife was abroad at a conference and my children were both out with friends. That gave me a solid three hours of being on my own and the dilemma of what to do with the time.

I settled on visiting Vittoriosa, the town where my paternal grandmother used to live and where I can recollect countless moments of joy and nostalgia from my childhood. Armed with my trusted Leica, I drove there and parked my car behind the Maritime Museum.  Citta Vittoriosa, the victorious city: a romantic name bestowed upon it after the lifting of the Great Siege of 1565.  But popularly known as il-Birgu, a corruption of the Italian borgo or burg: the town beside the mighty Castle by the Sea – Castrum Maris or Fort St.Angelo.

It was already dark when I got there, but the place was well lit. It was early enough for some shops to still be open and for some, but not too many, people to still be doing their rounds.

I walked up the steps to the left of St Lawrence’s church, past the chapels and the church buildings and found myself at the corner of the square. It was then that 40-year-old memories started to flood my thoughts. I was back in the mid 1970s; a ten year old visiting my Nanna Karmena and all the ghosts from that past suddenly swam into my conscience.

Very few of the places and shops I remembered survive today, although the buildings are still the same. In one corner I saw the shop that used to house Sophie’s Bazaar, a small establishment which virtually stocked everything you cared to buy. Opposite Sophie’s an old door stands guard over where Pawlu’s first butcher shop once stood. Pawlu, my father’s cousin, eventually expanded the business and moved to a bigger shop, now a wine bar, at the other end of the square. Mifsud’s Garage, the chauffeur driven service Ta’ Billurasu still advertises its original services but the shop itself now sells household goods.

Moving on, I climbed the hill towards St Dominic’s church and priory. Many of the little shops of my childhood are now wine-bars and restaurants, and Sur Tonin’s old Pharmacy has been redone. The Inquisitor’s Palace, abandoned, dark and scary in my childhood is now skilfully restored and a fully functional museum. My favourite pasturi shop, where little clay figurines of saints and religious figures were occasionally purchased, is now a confectionery.

I climbed down again, through the side streets. I walked past a garage: a third of a century ago it was Nini’s grocery, where I would be sent on minor errands to buy 50gms of ham, a bottle of milk, a smear of kunserva tomato puree on some wax-paper. I walked down the hill to the Maritime Museum. Zahra’s barber shop used to be there, and, at the foot of the hill, the Rose, Shamrock, Thistle Bar, overflowing with intoxicated, rowdy British sailors. All are gone now and only the ghosts in my mind remained.

I walked to the seafront, past my late Grandmother’s flat. The yachts have replaced the Royal Navy and instead of the foreign sailors Ix-Xatt now attracts other outsiders: young Maltese who barely knew the place existed before it became chic and fashionable.

Vittoriosa has changed, mostly for the better. It is now more organised, cleaner, beautiful, and prouder perhaps. It is better known and popular. Formerly part of the impenetrable south, it is now a landmark. This is in no small way due to its people, proud of their little city as they are.

As I walked the little streets however, with their flower pots and their period light fittings, I could not but reminisce of when it was cruder but more real. And somehow, I preferred that blemished past to the synthetically beautified present. Strange thing nostalgia.

Malta’s Grand Harbour

Malta’s Grand Harbour

Growing up as a child before the arrival of computers and video games consoles, feeding one’s imagination rested on creating fantasies by reading books and comics, watching the two black and white television channels which were available and going to see the occasional movie.  Living in 1960s and 1970s Malta with relatives who had lived through the bombings of the Second World War, scars of which were still visible all around, military matters constituted a never-ending source of history, mystery and adventure. Couple this with my paternal grandmother’s seafront house on the Vittoriosa waterfront, with its constantly changing and omnipresent activity by the British Royal Navy and the picture becomes complete.

One of my past-times as such a child of the 1960s and ‘70s was to draw imaginary islands which I would populate with cities, hills, valleys and small villages surrounded by fields.  My islands would also feature bays and beaches, cliffs and coves and the ubiquitous airports and road networks.  But by far, the most impressive of features which my imagination would impose on my imaginary rocky outcrops surrounded by the deep blue sea would invariably be their harbours.

These harbours would inevitably be deep water and capable of hosting the most impressive of fleets.  They were embraced by the elongated arms of solid rock, on whose foundations impregnable fortresses and battlements, guarding the entrance through the narrow harbour-mouth stood.   Inside, they were subdivided into a number of smaller but similarly impressive basins, between which, tongues of land overflowing with walled citadels and castles would protrude.  My imaginary harbours also invariably hosted the island’s capital city and were obviously the centre of all political, commercial and military activity with the rest of the island being devoted to the countryside, the villages, the cliffs and the beaches.

Whilst engaging in this past-time I was unaware of one basic fact: the heavy, subliminal influence which Malta’s Grand Harbour was having on my perception of what a harbour should look like.  Decades later, I today understand more than ever before the importance and significance which this harbour has had and will continue to have on Malta’s prospects.

The name Grand Harbour, bombastic as it may seem to those who do not know it, evokes images of greatness.  To the Maltese it is simply il-Port il-Kbir, similar to the Italians’ Porto Grande or Great Harbour.  But it is the English version with its connotations of grandness, which comes closest to home in appreciating the true wonders of this natural basin, which has ensured that Malta grows larger than life over the centuries to eventually become the sovereign European state it is today.

In my library I have a nineteenth century Dictionary of Geography that describes the Grand Harbour as follows:

“La Valetta is,  from its excellent harbour, of great importance as a naval station and a commercial town.  The Grand Harbour, on the south-east side of La Valetta, is one of the finest bays in the world.  This beautiful basin is divided into five distinct ports, all equally safe, and each capable of containing a considerable number of vessels.  The entrance is hardly a quarter of a mile wide, and is commanded on either side by strong batteries. ……”

This short entry contains a host of terms describing this harbour: excellent, finest, beautiful, distinct, safe.  And indeed it is, for not only does this harbour deserve each individual adjective extolling its greatness, but it actually deserves them in their accumulated totality.

For a harbour can be beautiful but lack safety.  It can be distinct but not excellent or the finest.  Grand Harbour is all of these combined, which is what makes it so special.  For it is a natural marvel, which gives the impression of having been purposely designed to be one of the finest harbours in the world. And all of this on an almost insignificantly small island-state which can fit very comfortably within the confines of London’s M25 ring-road.

The Grand Harbour consists of the confluence of a number of individual valleys, some very small, and some quite big by Maltese standards, which all drain into the same bay.  However, the geology of the place, coupled with millennia of the carving action of water flowing through the soft limestone, have meant that each valley has carved out its own individual little basin, thereby making the Grand Harbour a collection of creeks rather than a single port.

Thus individual valleys on the Cottonera side have carved out Rinella Bay, Kalkara Creek, Dockyard Creek and French Creek.  But by far, the valley which has had the largest influence on the Harbour’s formation is the one draining at Marsa: a valley which drains rainwater along the huge watercourses originating in the Siggiewi/Zebbug/Rabat/Mdina highlands and flowing through Attard, Qormi and Marsa.    This valley has carved a deep channel that extends for one kilometre from inner Marsa to the harbour mouth where the breakwater is located.

But this is not enough!  Under normal circumstances, the effect of such valleys, great as they are within the Maltese context, would only have led to the formation of a series of shallow bays with beaches rather than a deep-water harbour.  Grand Harbour actually owes its very existence to a more catastrophic event in Malta’s geological history, as a result of which the entire island was raised in a lopsided fashion through the actions of a massive, underwater tectonic upheaval so that it now slopes in a west to east direction. This explains why most of Malta’s west coast is composed of high sheer cliffs while the east coast consists of indented bays and harbours that dip into deep water quite rapidly.

The upheaval described above caused the shallower bays and harbours on the eastern side of the island to be submerged quite heavily, forming the wonder which is the Grand Harbour.  Without this upheaval, the area currently housing the harbour would currently most probably be an extensive valley system gently shelving into the sea somewhere where the breakwater currently stands.

Before the interventions of man, the area around the Grand Harbour must have been a joy to behold.  Ancient oak woodlands would have stood on the high grounds where Valletta, the Three Cities and Corradino Heights currently stand.  The cliffs leading down to the sea would have sustained bushes and other maquis vegetation, whilst more difficult to visualize would have been the marshes and small islands prevailing in the wetland area between Marsa and Qormi, parts of which were actually beneath sea level thereby retaining pools of brackish water in a veritable Mediterranean saline wetland all year round.

With the arrival of man from Sicily around seven thousand years ago, the area around Grand Harbour started to change as evidenced by the Neolithic remains in Kordin and nearby Tarxien.  This besides other settlements which must also have existed in the highly built Cottonera conurbation which has been developed and redeveloped on numerous occasions over hundreds of years ensuring the obliteration of any previous signs of very probable earlier human activity from the Punic, Roman and Arab periods.

Medieval sources make clear references to the emergence of the Castrum Maris, or “Castle by the Sea” as the forebear of today’s Fort St. Angelo. This stronghold in the middle of Grand Harbour led to the development of Malta’s first extensive maritime town, the castle’s burg or Borgo.  This town was to later expand into the three distinct entities collectively known as the Three Cities of Vittoriosa, Cospicua and Senglea.  Around this time, one of the most important economic activities in Malta was state-sanctioned piracy, with the Grand Harbour being the base for the ships which embarked on these ventures in an open manner and on which taxes were paid to the authorities depending on the returns from each trip! Apart from this, some of the most famous of medieval events to take place within the Grand Harbour which are worth mentioning are the 1283 naval battle which saw the forces of Spanish Aragon oust the Angevins from Malta and the 1425 uprising by the Maltese against their feudal lord Don Gonsalvo Monroy resulting in the imprisonment of his wife Donna Costanza in the Castrum Maris as a hostage.

The arrival of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem in 1530, who were granted the Maltese Islands and the Port of Tripoli in Libya by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles the Fifth of Spain, against an annual rent of one peregrine falcon, led to the huge transformation of the Grand Harbour. The initially reluctant Knights, whose long-term vision consisted of the eventual recapturing of the much bigger and greener island of Rhodes from the Ottomans, commenced the fortification of the harbour by strengthening the medieval castrum which was renamed St. Angelo, fortifying the borgo and constructing two additional forts, namely St Michael in Senglea, a peninsula parallel to Birgu which they also encircled by a wall and St Elmo, at the tip of the Sceberras Peninsula guarding the harbour mouth.

The successful outcome of the Great Siege of 1565, during which the Knights and the Maltese repelled a 30,000 strong Ottoman invading force, led to the Knights’ decision to establish Malta as their permanent home.  The building of Valletta and its suburb of Floriana and their impressive network of fortifications, the expansion of the Three Cities and their subsequent encirclement by the impregnable Cottonera Lines and the huge amount of shipping which the new city state of the Knights started to attract saw the Grand Harbour reach its zenith.   The Harbour steadily increased in strategic importance, benefiting from the dual advantage of location and strong defences, until the decline of the Order of the Knights in the late eighteenth century first led Napoleon’s French and subsequently Nelson’s British to take control of the Island, particularly on the realization of the fact that whoever controlled the Grand Harbour effectively controlled shipping movements in the whole Mediterranean.

The advent of the British Royal Navy, not only gave a new lease of life to the Grand Harbour as the base for Britain’s Mediterranean Fleet, but also led to its industrialization through the strong expansion and development of the ship-repair yards first developed by the Knights.  The Dockyards were to become synonymous with the social, economic and political history of the Grand Harbour during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and were to provide employment to the thousands of people who lived in the districts surrounding the harbour.

The Harbour witnessed strong military activity during the Second World War including incessant dive bombing sorties on military and merchant shipping by the German and Italian air forces, attacks on its ship repair facilities as well as a daring Italian e-boat attack on the defensive net blocking its entrance which was thwarted by a well aimed defensive artillery response which literally blew the attackers out of the water.

The post war years led to the gradual decline of the Grand Harbour.  The closure of the British Military base and the departure of the Royal Navy in 1979 was the first step followed by the gradual decline in merchant shipping movements as Marsaxlokk Harbour steadily developed as the alternative cargo hub for Malta.  The downsizing and eventual closure of the ship repair yards and their replacement by a leaner, privatized operation almost led to the eventual demise of the harbour in the first decade of the new millennium.

However, like a phoenix, Grand Harbour is rising once more from the ashes. From cruise ships to super-yachts and from extensive refurbishments to ambitious regeneration projects, the area around Grand Harbour is once again at the heart of Malta’s quest to redefine itself anew for yet another time during its long and chequered history.

Tourism is playing a major role in this latest version of the Grand Harbour: tourism activity which recognizes the natural and historical importance of the harbour and its environs as the Island seeks to attract ever increasing quantities of tourists embarking on city-breaks.  Thus, the Harbour and its surroundings become a focal point in themselves, rather than a curious addendum to the experience of a tourist who visits primarily for the island’s coastal charms.

Grand Harbour has, over the centuries, had a very huge impact on the economic, political and social development of Malta and Maltese statehood.  I have always maintained that without its Grand Harbour and its central Mediterranean location, Malta would have been reduced to the same status as its smaller, almost unknown, Italian neighbours of Pantelleria and Lampedusa: with peripheral tourism activity sustaining a small population of fishermen and subsistence farmers.

Meanwhile it continues to be a joy to behold.  Whether experienced from three hundred metres up through the window of a descending aircraft, from the deck of a cruise ship as it sails by the impressive battlements or from vantage points such as Valletta’s Barrakka Gardens, Senglea Point or Bighi, it is indeed impressive and a source of pride for the Maltese.  And after more than fifty years of endless visits, I have to confess that it is one of the few places in Malta which continues to give me a tingling sensation at the back of my neck every time I view it!