The Last Crusaders: The Great Siege

by William Napier

Genres: Action & Adventure; Historical Fiction

Synopsis

One of history's fiercest and most bravely contested battles is brought to life by the author of the Attila trilogy It's 1565, and a small island in the middle of the Mediterranean stands as gatekeeper between East and West. It is about to become the scene for one of the most amazing stories of bravery, battle, and bloodlust—the siege of Malta. Formed in the Holy Land in the 11th century, a small band of knights had long sought a home. Driven from their lands by Ottoman might, they came to rest in Malta from where they watched the Turks and corsairs raid the Spanish empire. As word came from Constantinople that Malta was in the sights of the Ottoman Empire, all of Europe watched as a force of more than 30,000 men besieged the island—itself only peopled by only 500 knights and a few thousand local soldiers. On that small rock an epic struggle was played out, the story of individual men, warriors, and slaves, but also the story of two worlds colliding.

Release date: October 1, 2012

Publisher: Orion Publishing

Print pages: 416

Sample

One last arquebus shot cracked out from the battered walls of Rhodes, followed by the angry shout of a Knight Commander. Then there was silence.

Spread out beyond the city lay the vast army of the Ottomans. The horses of the Sipahi cavalrymen waited in line, snorting and tossing their plumes. The Janizaries rested their hands on their sword hilts, gazing steadfastly out across the wreckage of the plain. The fanatical Bektaşis stood crowded close behind, in the eyes of every one of them a grievous disappointment that the battle was done and they were still living, while their slain brothers were even now with the Prophet in Paradise.

Seated on a magnificent white stallion of Cappadocia, shaded from the mild December sun by an immense, tasselled palanquin of yellow satin, sat the Caliph of the Islamic World. Suleiman Kanuni: The Law Giver. The young Sultan moved not a muscle, never blinked. He waited for the inevitable surrender of the Christians with all the implacable patience of the Drawn Sword of Islam. For it was written that the whole world should finally bow to the religion of the Prophet, and even he, Suleiman, son of Selim, was but a slave of Allah and his purposes.

The fall of Rhodes to his numberless armies was just the beginning.

At last the splintered gates in the Eastern Wall of the city creaked open, and a slow procession emerged.

They raised banners of the Virgin and of the warrior archangel St Michael for protection. First of all came the men, women and children of the city, for whose sake the Knights had surrendered. Barefoot, dusty and half-starved, four thousand of these wretched islanders made their way down to the harbour to beg for a boat to take them … who knew where? A new life, without possessions, without hope. But still alive.

The Turks watched them go. These wretches would have earned a handsome sum indeed, four thousand souls, in the slave markets of Istanbul, even half-starved as they were. Especially the younger girls and boys. But the Sultan had shown himself as merciful as ever, and his soldiers’ only booty would be what they could plunder from an almost unpeopled city.

Not one among the departing had not lost a father, brother or son in the bitter siege.

A young widow, in black from head to toe, stumbled and fell by the roadside. Her small son moved to help her, a child of no more than four or five years, face already scarred and wizened by hunger and disease. A Turk stepped forward to help her. She glared up at him ferociously, and pulling herself to her feet with the fragile aid of her child, she hissed at the Turk,

‘Keep back from me, demon-worshipper.’

The Turk stood back and let her walk on.

After the long and mournful procession of islanders came the knights, some limping, some carrying their brethren on stretchers and litters down to the harbour, and their great carrack, the St Mary, riding at anchor in already choppy waters. Others carried the records of the Order, or its most holy possessions, the right arm of John the Baptist in a gold casket, and the Icon of the Virgin of Phileremos, painted by St Luke himself.

At their head walked the Grand Master, tall, lean, white-bearded, some sixty years of age. Philippe Villiers de l’Isle Adam, son of the highest French nobility, silent and grave in defeat.

He stopped before the Sultan and bowed his head, in acknowledgement of the Sultan’s mercy, and as one fighting man to another.

Close by the Grand Master stood another, much younger Knight of St John. Like the rest he wore a long black gown sewn with a white cross, the habit of peacetime. Yet his eyes now fixed on the Sultan with an implacable spirit of opposition.

No man looked directly at the Sultan, least of all an infidel. A Janizary stepped forward instantly, vine stick grasped tight in his right hand, ready to strike.

‘Lower your eyes, Christian!’

Outrageously this young knight continued to stare full in the face of the Sultan. At last Suleiman himself turned his head slightly and returned his gaze. The Knights of St John had been defeated, their fortress home destroyed. And yet in this one’s eyes, there burned an emnity as deep as the Pontic Sea.

A brother knight, of the English Langue, limping badly from a wound to his left thigh, a rust-red bandage bound tightly about it, clapped his hand hard on the shoulder of the first. Yet still the young knight stood staring, like a hound fixed on its prey.

Then a commanding voice rang out from the head of the column.

‘La Valette! Walk on, sir!’

It was the Grand Master himself, looking back angrily.

Chastity, poverty, and – hardest of all – obedience. For the knights were as much monks as soldiers. The young Frenchman dropped his gaze from the Sultan, Lord of the Unbelievers, as the Master of his ancient order had commanded, and moved slowly on. His English brother knight fell in behind him, a faint smile on his lips.

‘We will fight again, Fra Jean,’ he murmured. ‘Do not doubt it.’

The knight called La Valette said nothing. Eyes staring ahead at emptiness, jaws set like iron.

The knights could have fought on at Rhodes.

Many times before, over five long centuries, they had fought the Armies of Islam to a standstill, and to the death. In 1291, at Acre in the great Crusades, they had fought and died almost to the last man. When the armies of Al-Ashraf Khalil finally broke into the city and began the steady slaughter, the last of the Palestine Hospitallers took their stand in a single dungeon. Just seven brothers were left, each still swinging his sword though mortally wounded, drenched in his own blood, white-faced. All died there. Seven knights, fighting in a tight circle, back to back. And perhaps another twenty or thirty jihadis, strewn around them.

These Knights Hospitaller, these Knights of St John – they were the Bektaşis of Satan.

They were the mad dogs of Christendom.

But at Rhodes, it was not only their own lives they would sacrifice, but the islanders’ too. Fishermen, farmers, merchants and priests, wives and children, infants in arms. What right did the knights have to condemn the whole island to death? None. Not when Suleiman had promised them safe passage to leave, and merciful treatment of any islanders remaining.

Besides, Villiers knew that the fighting was done.

For six long, desperate months, the knights and the people had known nothing but the deafening roar of cannon, the crack of handguns, the hiss of seething, bubbling pitch on castle walls, the ring of steel, the hollow clubbing sound of shield on skull, the stench of blood and burning oil and ordure, the haw of mules, the squeal of pigs, the half-crazed barking of dogs.

Finally there were so few men left to fight. There was no more gunpowder, not a sword left unblunted or a shield undented, and there was the Sultan of the Ottomans offering safe passage.

With grieving and grace, Villiers de l’Isle Adam accepted the terms of surrender.

As the old knight and his men limped away down the stony road to the harbour and Suleiman watched them go, he was heard to murmur, ‘It is with some regret that I drive this valiant old man from his home.’

But they were destroyed as a fighting force. Without a homeland, with not a single fortress to their name, they who once commanded a chain of mighty forts and commanderies right across the Holy Land, the fiercest defenders for Christ – they were no more to be feared now than a toothless old dog.

‘They are out of their time,’ said Suleiman that evening, addressing his vizier. He placed his bare feet in the silver bowl for the slavegirl to wash. ‘They are …’ The scholar Sultan searched for the right word, and found it in the Greek. ‘They are an anachronism.’

The vizier looked nonplussed.

Suleiman would have smiled, if smiling had not been inappropriate for one of his dignity.

‘They belong to the ancient world, the old centuries. In these days, the new kings and rulers of the Christians have no sympathy for such – heroics as theirs. The Knights of St John are an embarrassment to them. The Genoans, the Venetians, the French – they would rather trade with us, buy our silks, sell us their grain.’

‘And their armaments,’ the vizier murmured.

Suleiman paused to admire the slavegirl. The softness of her hands, the falling curtain of her hair.

‘Quite so. Though the knights themselves remain our enemies, they are powerless now. The wider Christian world has moved on. It has lost its appetite for war with Islam. It prefers silks, and spices, and gold. It is also bitterly divided against itself, these Catholics and Protestants endlessly fighting each other over the intricacies of their barbarous faith.’

‘Yet we ourselves wish them nothing but peace.’

‘Of course.’

Suleiman allowed the slavegirl to dry his feet. He looked up at his vizier, eyes smiling.

‘Nothing but peace.’

In the city, the Bektaşis were celebrating the triumph of Islam.

First they attacked the Church of St John. They gouged lumps of plaster out of the brightly painted walls with their crescent yatagan daggers, they spat and urinated and heaped curses on these foul images of the idolatrous Christian dogs. They had confused a Jewish prophet with the unspeakable, the immeasurable, all-seeing, all-knowing Divine. What blinded slaves of Shaitan and his deceits!

They overturned the altar and smashed it to fragments; they flung outside all the relics, ornaments and crucifixes and burned them in a heap in the square. Happily, their religious zeal coincided with their love of lucre, a coincidence often found among men. For some of the Christian ornaments and reliquaries abandoned by the fleeing townsfolk were of finest silver and gold, and readily taken as booty.

They smashed open the ancient tombs of the Grand Masters in the crypt of the church, hoping to find treasure. In vexation at finding nothing but plain wooden crosses and old bones, some seized these crosses and bones and ran about the streets, using them as clubs. Some especially in the grip of religious fervour found the hospital where a few sick still lay, too ill to be moved, and beat them to death in their beds, raping the women first before killing them.

At dawn on Christmas Day, Suleiman himself rode into the city, sending word that order should be restored. His men had had their reward for victory. He approved of the cleansing of the Christian church, and ordered it to be turned into a mosque, with prayers to Mecca to be said five times daily from tomorrow. But the others had betrayed his own promise of fair treatment. He ordered those who had attacked the hospital to be disembowelled and beheaded, all stray dogs and pigs to be killed, and the streets to be thoroughly cleaned.

He gave another order, which caused surprise among his Janizary guards, but could not be disobeyed. He ordered that the magnificent carved stone escutcheons of the Hospitallers, all along the principal thoroughfare of the city known as the Street of the Knights, were not to be destroyed or damaged in any way.

At the moment that Suleiman rode into Rhodes on Christmas Day, it was said that Pope Hadrian was celebrating Mass in St Peter’s, Rome. As he raised the chalice, a cornerstone fell from the roof above him and smashed to the ground close by.

They said it was an ominous sign that one of the key bulwarks of Christendom had been lost.

From the tilting decks of the St Mary, rolling through unforgiving winter seas, the knights looked back not only at lost Rhodes, but at the snow-capped Taurus mountains beyond, the whole of the Levant, the ancient heartlands of Christianity. So many knights, Hospitallers, crusaders, had fought and died to regain those lands for the Cross, over nearly five long centuries. Now all of it was lost.

They sailed west, and three weeks later, Villiers stepped ashore at Sicily with his handful of faithful knights, and all the islanders there to meet him knelt bare-headed in honour of fallen greatness. The knights knelt too, giving thanks to God that they had survived the dangerous winter voyage.

It was a cold day, and the January wind ripped at a tattered banner the knights brought with them. At one point the wind seemed about to tear the banner free altogether and hurl it contemptuously away, until one knight stood and planted the staff more firmly in the wet sand.

It was the knight called La Valette.

The banner showed the Holy Mother with her crucified Son. Weather-beaten, salt-stained and torn, it bore the motto,

Afflictis spes uniea rebus.

In adversity our only hope.

‘All present, bow the knee!’

‘Bow the knee and bow the head, before the Sultan of the Ottomans, Allah’s Viceroy on Earth, Lord of the Lords of this World, Possessor of Men’s Necks, King of Believers and Unbelievers, Emperor of the East and West, Majestic Caesar, Seal of Victory, Refuge of all People, the Shadow of the Almighty, the Destroyer of Christendom!’

Any who did not bow his head would lose it. All bowed.

Now almost seventy years of age, Suleiman the Magnificent, ruler of the most powerful empire on earth, turned carefully on the high dais and sat back upon the richly gilded, crimson cushioned Throne of the Caliph. Before him, more than a hundred courtiers, viziers, eunuchs and pashas bent low in obeisance. He waited for some time. It was at his word, his whim, that they might arise again, and none other. Let them remain bowed until they stiffened and ached. Let them remember.

At last he gave the nod, and the assembled commanders of his empire stood upright once more.

He surveyed the Hall of Audience, hushed with soft Persian carpets, lit with fine silver filigree lanterns, hung with silks and tapestries. He knew almost everything, but let them think he knew all. His great dark eyes rested on many a face in turn. His once handsome features now sagged, riven with lines of care, and more private sorrows. But he was Sultan and Emperor still.

In the past four decades, had he not conquered from the Pillars of Hercules to the Black Sea, from the heart of European Christendom to the shores of India? Tomorrow he would have his crier give out his list of conquests once again. Let none think this ageing Emperor was finished yet, or ripe to fall. Let them remember.

‘By the will of Allah, the compassionate, the merciful, Conqueror of Aden, Algiers, Baghdad, Belgrade, Budapest, Rhodes, Nakshivan, Rivan, Tabriz, and Temesvár!’

His kingdom stretched from Austria to Egypt, from Algiers to Tartary and the debatable lands beyond. His galleys ruled the seas from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf. Only once, in 1529 before the walls of Vienna, had his army been halted. But he was young and foolish then, and had learnt much about the arts of war in the intervening years. Now in his last decade – for a dream of the Prophet had told him he would rule for another ten years yet – he would complete the task appointed to him. He would turn back upon the ancient enemy, Europe, now so weakened and divided. He would at last avenge the shame at Vienna, the insult of the Crusades, and complete the destruction of Christendom.

At the start of next year’s campaigning season, as soon as the first signs of spring appeared, he would march his army to their final victory upon the plains of Hungary, and beyond. Meanwhile the Muslim inhabitants of Spain would rise up in revolt, tying up the greatest of Christian powers in internal civil war, and his allies in Tunis and Algiers, the North African corsairs, would fall upon Sicily, the heel of Italy, and before long, Rome itself …

But first to business, and the afternoon’s tiresome petitions.

All the women departed, being unfit to hear or understand the business of rulership, and all the men except the day’s petitioners and Suleiman’s chief officers.

Today, one petition was different, the news both better and worse.

It was Kustir Agha, Chief of the Black Eunuchs, who approached the throne.

‘Kustir Agha, loyal servant. Speak.’

‘Gracious and Imperial Majesty, may you live a thousand years, and leave a thousand sons.’

Suleiman made a gesture of sharp impatience.

‘Gracious and Imperial Majesty,’ went on Kustir Agha, ‘we have suffered a grievous loss.’ His breathing was tight, and not just owing to his girth. ‘The Sultana, a rich galley, the richest I owned. With its cargo it was worth 80,000 ducats.’

‘Allah afflicts us all with his storms.’

‘Majesty, it was no storm. It was Christian pirates. It was … our ancient enemy. The Knights of St John.’

Suleiman’s eyes hardened. Kustir Agha must tread very carefully indeed.

‘It was the Sultan’s clemency that allowed the Knights to survive and live on after Rhodes,’ said Kustir. ‘An act of clemency in perfect obedience to the teachings of the Prophet, peace be upon him. Yet these Christian savages showed no gratitude. They took to that barren rock of Malta and grew again in power. This latest insult is only one of hundreds. It was the galley of the Chevalier Romegas that committed the insult.’

Suleiman nodded almost imperceptibly. He knew all about this Chevalier Romegas. Perhaps the most dangerous sailor on the White Sea.

‘And with this 80,000 ducats, what will they do?’ Kustir rolled his eyes and held his arms wide. ‘They are celibate men, they have no families, they buy no luxuries. They do not live in fine palaces, nor wear pearls and silks. They live for one thing only. To wage war. With these 80,000 ducats stolen from us, they will only buy new weapons, more powder, build higher the fortifications of their island home. Commit ever greater depredations on your Majesty’s subjects. While the captive master and crew, our Muslim brothers, shiver with prison fever in their rock-cut dungeons, or are driven at the end of a whip to man their galleys.

‘Most Gracious Majesty, there is only one response to such provocation.’

Suleiman allowed a long silence. The deep red sunset of an October evening began to illuminate the slender minarets and high crescents of Istanbul. Then he called forward another man.

‘Mustafa Pasha!’

From the crowd of courtiers and petitioners stepped a tall, lean man with a face darkened by the sun. Old and yet anything but infirm, he strode forward like an arrogant young Janizary, black robe billowing. Others hurriedly made way for him.

Veteran of wars from Persia to Hungary, Mustafa Pasha had been captured once by the Christians, and served an astonishing four years as a galley slave in the fleet of the great Genoese admiral, Andrea Doria. Most galley slaves were lucky to survive a year, before their exhausted bodies were tumbled over the side of the ship for the fish. Four years. Of any man who has served as a galley slave, they said, something hard and hate-filled enters into his soul. And Mustafa Pasha already had a heart and a soul of iron on the day he was born.

He escaped the galleys of Andrea Doria by beating the one-legged bosun to death with his own wooden leg, while still chained to the bench. He then levered off his own manacles with the leg, smashed open the heads of four more overseers, strangled a fifth with his whip, jumped over the side and swam ten miles to the Albanian coast. Forty-eight hours later he was scouring the Adriatic in his own warship. He found the galley he’d served on for those four bitter years and sank it, not rescuing even his former fellow slaves from their chains.

He was said to have killed over two hundred men with his own hands, fathered more than fifty sons, daughters too (though they had never been counted), and amassed a private fortune of more than a million ducats. Now seventy, the same age as the Sultan, he fought with the sword every morning for two hours against the finest Janizaries. Only last month he had sliced off a man’s hand. The Janizary, now retired, displayed his stump at the gates of the city to passers-by, with mingled sorrow and pride, saying that he had lost his hand to none other than Mustafa Pasha. People gazed in awe and gave him silver pennies.

Mustafa Pasha stopped abruptly before the Throne of the Caliph and bowed low. Stood swiftly again. A grey moustache and pointed beard, deep-set eyes, and the great hooked nose of a bird of prey, so that many whispered that Arab blood ran in him. He did not look directly at the Sultan, naturally, but he held his head high and haughty nonetheless. His face was deeply lined, and there were sword cuts and gunpowder burns visible on his strong, thick-veined right hand.

‘You are keen to share with us your view of the Knights Hospitaller?’

Mustafa needed no further encouragement. Nor did he trouble with Kustir Agha’s grandiloquent flatteries. His voice sounded deep and harsh, filling the great audience chamber.

‘The Knights we know of old. And this accursed rock of Malta, their new base, stands between you and your rightful possessions. From this rock with its great harbour – the finest in all the White Sea – their lean galleys come out like wolves to attack our ships, enslave our brothers, steal our cargoes.

‘Your Majesty plans the conquest of Christendom. But you will do nothing unless you first capture Malta, and exterminate once and for all these dogs of St John. It is time to wipe the Knights off the face of the earth, as you would wipe out the rats in your barn.’

There was an uneasy silence. Mustapha had come perilously close to criticizing Suleiman’s previous clemency. But if anyone was permitted such lèse majesté, it was this ancient warrior.

Suleiman stroked his trim beard. ‘Tell us more.’

Mustafa gestured widely, his robe filling like a sail. ‘This barren rock is the key to the western Mediterranean. You cannot mount any naval operations beyond it with safety.’

‘Our galleys have sailed many a time beyond Malta and returned.’

‘Many more have never returned. Like Kustir Agha’s precious, though under-defended ship,’ his lip curled, ‘the Sultana.’

Kustir Agha blinked furiously but said nothing. Mustafa Pasha had a foul temper. None crossed him, all meekly accepted his sneers.

‘The island of Malta dominates those narrow straits between Sicily and Africa, only sixty miles from coast to coast. An Ottoman galley might pass through, but an entire armada, such as will be needed for the final conquest of Christendom – no. Those sea wolves would wreak havoc upon us. Their flagship, the Great Carrack, is the most powerful warship in the White Sea. With my own eyes I have seen it. Alone it could destroy a dozen of our galleys.

‘The Sultan will never conquer the rest of Europe without first conquering Malta.’

Suleiman’s eyes were old and haunted. ‘Forty-two years ago I drove the Knights from Rhodes. They fought bravely, and in my munificence I let the survivors depart with honour.’ His voice became steely again, he sat straight-backed. ‘Yet it is in the book of Ibn Khaldun, the book of prophecies, that the armies of Islam will come by sea, and ultimately the lands of Christendom will fall to them. For all men in time will bow the head to Mecca.’

He turned to a slave. ‘Bring me the map of Ptolemy.’

In a trice, a wide table was brought and a great map spread out.

It was a map made by the Greeks, centuries ago, and many a time Suleiman had traced its outlines with rapt attention to detail. Here would be a good place for a new city, a new Ottoman capital of the West. Here was a fine harbour, here an enchanting island in the ocean stream, fit for the palace of a conqueror. Everywhere he saw dreams of conquest and glory. He, Suleiman, Padishah of the White Sea, the Red and the Black. Now he narrowed his eyes upon the tiny island of Malta. They said you could walk across it in three hours. This speck of grit in the Ottoman oyster.

He raised his head again and addressed the gathered crowd with inimitable authority. Every word was heard, to the back of the vast chamber.

‘Allah has prepared this for us: that the Christian idolaters should fight against each other and never come to alliance. The Franks have treated with us in secret, they will not lift a finger to save Italy, Spain or Austria. These territories are ours for the taking. Soon the cry of the muezzin will sound in Vienna, and then in Rome. That great charnel house of saints’ bones that they call Saint Peter’s, we will make into a mosque, as Hagia Sophia is now a mosque. We will bring even France under our sway, Paris will bow the head to Mecca – the French willingly obey a conqueror, for the sake of peace and wine. And finally England, which is ruled by a mere woman, and the cold islands beyond. All this will come to pass during our reign. All will be ours, submitting to the law of the holy Koran.

‘One empire, one faith, one leader.’

The hall was filled with the murmur of war.

‘But first,’ he raised a hand, ‘as I have always said – first, we shall conquer Malta. It is written.’

By candelight that very evening, a much smaller meeting took place. Around a marble-topped table in an upper room, the map of Ptolemy again before them, just three men sat in counsel. Suleiman on a raised chair, to his left Mustafa Pasha, and to his right, Piyale, admiral of the grand fleet. Where Mustafa was a cunning Anatolian peasant risen to the heights by ruthlessness and ability, the aristocratic Piyale, little more than half Mustafa’s age, smooth and charming, had been raised in the Imperial Palace itself. He also made the cunning move of marrying Genhir, one of the Sultan’s granddaughters.

Mustafa was speaking, sharing his limitless knowledge of the White Sea.

‘It will be a distant campaign. The island is almost a thousand miles away’ – he traced a bony finger over the blue-tinted sea of the map – ‘and has no resources. Not a timber, not a stick of firewood. We must take everything.

‘Aside from the harbour, dominated by the Castle of the Knights, San Angelo, Malta is no more than a bare sunburnt rock, some ten miles across. A wind-scoured mountaintop between Europe and Africa, its roots on the bed of the White Sea. A merciless desert of thorn scrub, a few carob trees, no rivers. Other inlets on the east side, a small harbour to the south, shallow bays to the north, but to the west, towering, impassable cliffs. A handful of wretched villages, and an ancient city in the heart of it. Note well this city’s name: Mdina.’

‘The Arabic for city,’ murmured Piyale.

‘For three hundred years,’ nodded Suleiman, ‘this island was under Islamic rule. And as Islamic law teaches, a land that has once been under Islam, is always under Islam.’

He waved his hand for Mustafa to continue.

‘Rainwater is collected in cisterns. Now it will be raining, but by March the rain will stop, and not fall again till autumn. The island lies further to the south than even Algiers or Tunis. In summer the sun can kill a man in armour.’

‘We know the number of knights?’ asked Piyale.

Suleiman knew everything, from the name of the French king’s new mistress to the private finances of the Pope.

‘There are some four hundred knights now stationed at Malta,’ he said. ‘As many again might answer the call from Italy, Spain, France and Germany. The Hospitallers still have commanderies and estates across Europe. But many of those “knights” are farmers in all but name. We will face eight hundred knights at most.’

‘And our Army of Malta will number forty thousand,’ said Mustafa.

Sultan, general and admiral contemplated these figures with satisfaction.

Mustafa resumed. ‘The inhabitants other than the knights are a decrepit and ancient Maltese nobility in Mdina, and an ignorant village peasantry, devoted to Christian idols. Raids by the North African corsairs have only made them more ardent in their un-belief.

‘A harsh and worthless land, then, but for those dogs of St John who must be destroyed, and the great harbour, which must be taken. It will be our base for the southern conquest of Europe. The war requires planning and supplies, yet its course will be simple. First the harbour will be captured, then the knights destroyed, and the population slaughtered, enslaved or exiled. Slaughter is satisfying, but slavery enriching.’

Suleiman almost smiled. A typical maxim. ‘We should seek to rupture the island’s water cisterns,’ he said.

‘Majesty.’ Mustafa nodded. ‘Cannon will be needed for this, and to reduce fortifications. Dragut’s knowledge of the island would also be useful.’

Suleiman looked up.

‘Dragut?’

Mustafa smiled. ‘Dragut. The very sound of his name is a weapon of terror in Malta.’

Father Matthew was saying Mass when they heard the horses’ hooves approaching.

The priest had been about to bless the bread – hoc est enim corpus meum, that holiest moment. But he stopped and instead prayed silently that the hooves would pass on.

There was a frightened silence in the small oak-panelled room, lit only by candlelight. Father Matthew with his head bowed, lips moving, beside the table spread with the bread and wine. Sir Francis Ingoldsby, white-haired, broad-shouldered and bow-legged, with his four children behind him. The eldest, Nicholas, and his sisters Susan, Agnes and Lettice. The servants behind them. The October wind moaning in the chimney, the flames in the fireplace dancing in torment, the thin rain pattering against the leaded windowpanes. Ironshod hooves on the road.

The listeners barely drew breath.

Then the horses’ hooves clattered to a halt outside.

At once there was movement in the room. Father Matthew took up the silver chalice and drained it and wrapped it up in a cloth along