The Great Siege of Malta by Allen Bruce Ware

Author:Allen, Bruce Ware
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ForeEdge
Published: 2015-10-22T04:00:00+00:00

Men die, other men replace them. Turgut’s successor as governor of Tripoli was Uludj Ali, whose first duty was to carry back the body of the old corsair and return with the city’s munitions that Turgut had refused to bring. Turgut was honored as befitting a man of his stature. No anonymous mass grave for him—the old corsair was wrapped in cloth and laid to rest inside Tripoli’s al-Saraya al-Hamra (Red Castle) mosque that he himself had built for the city. It can still be seen. Fittingly, Turgut shared his last journey with soldiers wounded in the several assaults on St. Elmo, men who would otherwise cram the already overflowing Ottoman hospitals on Malta. Uludj Ali set off on June 25. He missed the Piccolo Soccorso by forty-eight hours.

Uludj Ali (variously known as Uluch Ali, Kiliç Ali Paşa, El Ulucchialim, and to the Italians, Occhiali), born in 1519 as Giovanni Dionigi Galeni, the son of a Calabrian fisherman, was the last of Khairedihn’s great commanders. Calabria, the sharp, rocky toe of Italy with its many inlets and coastal villages, had been a natural haunt for pirates and smugglers since before the days of the Greeks; and if there was little enough treasure to steal, there were always people to kidnap. Galeni was snatched in one of the too frequent slave raids. Rumor—since proven untrue but persistent to this day—held that he was a failed Jesuit, or that he was at least intended for the church, when he was taken by Muslim corsairs.

Galeni was short, squat, scabrous, shrewd, loud-mouthed, and apparently fearless. He was hustled on board the corsairs’ galley and chained to the rowing benches with the rest of the miserable Christians. It was a common enough story of the time; and with no family connections and no money, his only hope of freedom was that a Christian pirate, or the Knights of St. John, might seize the vessel. Until then, endurance, faith, and patience were the chief allies of a galley slave. Galeni may have had all those qualities, but he did not have tact. Where others would row in silence, Galeni spoke out loudly and often, freely criticizing the way the captain and crew were handling the ship. A cruder man might have taken offense at a slave’s backtalk, but Chaifer Rais, who owned the galley, was fascinated by the Calabrian. Something might be made of a man like this.

The story goes that Chaifer Rais brought his ships back home to Egypt and Galeni into his house. He made the Calabrian a proposition. If he would accept the blessings of Islam, his master would take him on as a business partner and give him command of one of his ships. It was a generous offer, and it took a strong man to turn it down. Galeni was never anything but strong, and his Christian faith was still powerful enough to send him back to the oar bench.

What the captain could not force, Galeni’s own temper made inevitable. One day a fellow oarsman, presumably tired of this man’s mouth, insulted him, one guesses grievously.

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