This week, in 1565 on the
island of Malta, the massive Turkish army (about 48,000 strong) attempted to
take Fort St. Michael. The defenders, who
had lost nearly half their original strength of 8,000 total soldiers, were
divided as to strategy. The Council of
Elders had voted for retreat, but Jean Parisot de Valette, Grand Master of the
Order of Saint John, the Knights of Malta, vetoed the vote. The Turks made many minor assaults and sustained
bombardment of Fort St. Michael (as well as other defenses). They finally brought in several siege engines
and a massive siege tower.
In all cases, it was not the
brave soldiers and knights who defeated these attacks, but the
but the clever Maltese engineers who tunneled out through the
rubble. Using point-blank cannons filled
with chain shot, the Maltese engineers destroyed the siege engines and defeated
the Turkish hopes of seizing Fort St. Michael.
The massive Turkish army,
demoralized by the brutal beatings they’d taken over the previous two months
from defenders they’d been told would be swept away within days, were now faced with increasingly bad weather, and the threat of
reinforcements.
The moral of the story? Engineering—it’s like math, but louder!
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