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The Siege of Malta

Barbarossa proceeded westward to ravage the coasts and ports Italy, around the Straits of Messina and northward in the domains the kingdom of Naples. But his more urgent objective was Tunis, whose kingdom, now weakened by bloodthirsty rifts in the local Hafsid dynasty, he had promised to the Sultan. He had begun to envisage an Ottoman dominion, under his own effective rule, which would stretch with a chain of harbours along the whole coast of North Africa from the Straits of Gibraltar to Tripoli. On the pretext of restoring to power a fugitive prince of the dynasty, he landed his Janissaries at La Goletta, the neck of the channel which led into the lake harbour of Tunis. Here as a pirate of little account he and his brother, Aruj, had in the past been permitted to shelter their galleys. Barbarossa was ready to mount an attack. But the repute of his name and power was now such that the ruler, Muley Hassan, fled from the city, the claimant to his throne was discarded, and Tunisia was annexed to the Ottoman Empire. It gave the Turks a strategic foothold, commanding from the south the narrow channel which links the eastern with the westerly Mediterranean basin, within easy raiding distance by galley of Malta, where the former Knights of Rhodes (the Knights of St. John) were now based, and of Sicily, an island which had been conquered from here, first by Carthage and later by the Saracens, and which would now surely be the next Ottoman objective in the Mediterranean. The enemy against whom they moved, in 1551, was the Order of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, ejected from Rhodes but now established in the island of Malta. He first captured Tripoli from the knights, to become appointed its official governor. The strategic base of the knights, south of Sicily, it commanded the narrows between east and west, and thus formed the main barrier to the Sultan's complete control of the Mediterranean.As Suleiman well realized, the time had come, in Dragut's words, to "smoke out this nest of vipers." The Sultan's daughter Mihrimah, the child of Roxelana and the widow of Rustem, who consoled and influenced him in his advancing years, urged the campaign upon him as a sacred duty against the infidel. Her voice was echoed by an uproar in the Seraglio, following the venture by the knights of a large merchant ship en route from Venice to Istanbul. The property of the Chief of the Black Eunuchs, it carried a valuable cargo of luxury goods, in which the principal ladies of the harem owned shares. The enemy's great force appeared on the Maltese horizon through if a dawn haze on May 18, 1565.

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