At All Costs by Sam Moses Read Free Book Online Page B

Jerusalem, a monastic order that had been founded in Jerusalem as a hospice for pilgrims at the beginning of the Crusades. But the Knights of St. John had turned toward militancy, as the Ottoman Turks threatened western Europe and Christianity with the expansion of their Islamic empire.
    From Malta, the Knights sent their warships after the Muslim corsairs, the privateer pirates who roamed North Africa’s Barbary Coast. Malta’s first Great Siege occurred in 1565, when 40,000 Turks in 181 ships attacked the 9,000 Knights.
    “If the Turks should prevail against the Isle of Malta, it is uncertain what further peril might follow to the rest of Christendom,” said Queen Elizabeth I. It was an historical comment that Winston Churchill might have echoed, except four centuries later the threat came from the Nazis.
    The Great Siege lasted 114 days. With Spanish reinforcements, the Knights prevailed, using their cannons to fire the Turks’ severed heads back across the harbor.
    Thousands died in the bloody fighting, but the duration and firepower of the first Great Siege was nothing compared to the assault by the Axis during World War II. The second siege of Malta lasted ten times as long, with one-ton bombs replacing the cannonballs.
    Having saved the Christian world from Islam, the Knights’ fame spread around the world. They became known as the Knights of Malta and ruled for 268 years. This was Malta’s golden age, as the Knights built churches, gardens, cathedrals, and palaces. Cities rose out of the rock and dust, revealing a timeless architecture in their walls, bastions, battlements, and vaults.
    By now the Knights had been warriors for five centuries, but they didn’t abandon their roots, building one of Europe’s best hospitals in Valletta, the city they created. Eventually, inevitably, they grew decadent, and the Maltese rebelled against their rule, feeling they owed the Knights nothing anyhow, as the Knights had been forced upon them. So when Napoleon arrived in 1798, the islanders supported his takeover. He rewarded them by declaring an end to the Inquisition and the use of judicial torture.
    But the illusion of Napoleon as liberator died overnight, as he immediately looted the magnificent rococo churches and palaces in order to finance his next conquest, Cairo. France was at war with Britain, and Napoleon wanted Egypt for a base to drive the British out of India. He loaded his great three-decker flagship,
L’Orient,
with the Knights’ gold and diamonds and other treasures, and within two weeks he was gone from Malta, leaving a garrison to govern the island with guns.
    Enter the British Royal Navy. The young Admiral Horatio Nelson, commanding fourteen ships, sailed all over the Mediterranean that summer, searching for Napoleon’s fleet, obsessed with finding Napoleon and frustrated by his elusiveness. He finally located seventeen French ships in Egypt’s Aboukir Bay at the mouth of the Nile on August 1; attacking immediately and decisively, he destroyed them in the brutal Battle of the Nile, which lasted two nights and a day.
    Napoleon himself was already gone, but the 120-gun
L’Orient
was there. Her magazine exploded when she was hit by British cannons, blowing blazing bits of wood, gold, jewels, and bodies high into the night sky and raining them down on the other ships. The burst was seen as a flash of orange light twenty miles away. A hunk of
L’Orient
’s mast landed on one of the British ships, and its captain had it carved into a coffin, which he gave to Nelson as a trophy to remind him of his victory, as well as his mortality. Nelson kept it propped open against the bulkhead in his cabin, to remind his officers of his humor.
    Napoleon’s garrison on Malta was later evicted by Nelson’s fleet, with the help of the Maltese people, mostly illiterate peasants led by priests, who this time were the besiegers instead of the besieged. As the Knights had achieved glory by fighting the Turks, the Maltese