History Lesson

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Day is The Jesse Kelly Show. Another hour of The
Jesse Kelly Show on a magnificent Wednesday. As we set
aside politics for this hour and we go ahead and
step back into history, we get ready to do the
Siege of Malta Part two. I'm hoping I'll make it
the final part of the Siege of Malta. And then

(00:23):
final hour we're gonna have Selena Zita and we'll do
emails and we'll talk about commies and filtrating your business
and all kinds of other things. And I wanted to
remind you tomorrow is Ask Doctor Jesse Thursday, because I
am out on Friday, so you got to email your
questions in to Jesse at jessekellyshow dot com. Now, the

(00:46):
thirty second recap you're going to get from last night
is the Nights of Saint John. They're given a horrible
windswept rock known as Malta right underneath Sicily. They begin
fortifying it. There are four locations on it. They're fortifying
the Ottoman Empire. The Muslim Empire is growing, they are

(01:08):
taking over things they've taken Constantinople, Christian slash Catholic Europe
is petrified of the coming Muslim storm, and the Ottomans,
having let the Knights of Saint John go once before,
have had enough of their raiding and pillaging in the Mediterranean,
and they land a thirty thousand man force on Malta

(01:34):
and they began to assault Fort number one. It's called
Fort Saint Elmo. Now, in this Fort Saint Elmo, there's
roughly a thousand men. They are not all knights, trained
born in bred warriors at all. There are some knights,

(01:57):
there are some other soldiers, so they're not all completely
you know, untrained. And then there are civilians inside of
the Fort Saint Elmo. Now let's talk about the Ottoman forces.
They have canons, obviously, so that both sides have cannons.
This is the era of cannons and muskets. The Ottomans

(02:18):
not only have cannons, they have a bunch of regular troops,
and they also have elite troops. Now think about them
like this is their special forces types. They're called janissaries.
If you know anything about the Ottoman Empire, you will

(02:38):
know for a very long time they have had tip
of the speared troops called janissaries. Now I want to
pause for a second because This will apply to way
more than this story. This applies to any military engagement
you ever read about or learn about. We obsess over numbers,

(02:59):
We obsess our numbers. They have so many thousand here,
and he has fifty thousand, and they have twenty thousand,
and they have one hundred thousand, and they have the
the But all troops are not the same, not at all.
There are widely, widely different levels of training and experience

(03:20):
and equipment. Just because there are thirty thousand Ottomans and
only seven hundred knights on the island does not mean
there are thirty thousand, trained, equipped, capable Ottomans who are
lions on the battlefield. It does not mean that at all.

(03:43):
The janissaries, however, are trained, equipped, lions, highly highly experienced,
and there's not that many of them because you can't
make that many of them here. The numbers I read
differed wildly. A lot of people say there are in

(04:05):
total about six thousand of the thirty thousand ottomans where janisaries.
That number doesn't matter. These little details are not important.
Just know there are only so many of them, and
then when they're gone, when they're dead, you're back to
fairly pedestrian, regular troops. And on the other side as well.

(04:25):
You know, we said there are seven hundred knights, some
people say five hundred. Again, details don't matter, but there
are other regular troops, some not many, but some. But
they're not knights. They're not guys who live and die
for this Now Fort Saint Elmo. I used pac Man

(04:46):
as an example last night to try to explain the
geography of what you're looking at here. And in pac
Man's mouth obviously is water. It's a great harbor. But
pac Man's nose is Fort Saint Elmo. It is not
some impregnable fortress. The Knights did know they were coming,

(05:08):
and they did build up the fortifications, but it is
not an impregnable fortress. The Ottomans they get their cannons down,
and as I pointed out last night, they began to
dig trenches towards the fort. Trenches are not built in
a straight line. Remember, you have to zig zag in

(05:28):
order to give your troops cover as they inch their
way towards the wall. I mentioned earlier, this is a rocky,
miserable island, and right now it's hot. This island is
south of Sicily. We're in the month of July. It's hot.
Here's the un sexy part of so many battles, so

(05:50):
many battles. Water you have to have it. This is
hard work. Think about the daily life of the Ottoman
soldier or slave. They had many, many slaves. As I
pointed out, you are chipping and chopping away at rock.

(06:12):
You need food and you need water. Even if you
don't care about the lives of your slaves, and that's
oftentimes how slaves are treated. You still don't want them
to die. You need them digging. You have to feed them,
You have to give them water. And it's an island
surrounded by salt water, and there's not much water on

(06:34):
the island. And guess what else I didn't tell you
this last night. There are sources of fresh water on
the island wells. Do you know what the knights did?
What da Volette, he's the leader of the knights. Do
you know what he did before the Ottomans got there.
He took dead animals and dropped them into all the

(06:55):
freshwater sources that were outside of the fort. Obviously, as
you you've just figured out now that water is rotten.
Your men can't touch it, or your men will get
sick and die. It is a race against time. Every
single siege always is a race against time for both sides.

(07:18):
The people inside only have so much water, only have
so much ammo, only have so much food. That people
outside only have so much water, only have so much ammo,
only have so much food. The Ottomans start chopping away
and chipping away with these trenches, inching closer and closer
and closer to Fort Saint Elmo. But sieges are not

(07:42):
always static things. This is a talk we have about
politics all the time. You can't just hide behind your walls.
If they're pounding on your walls, or almost ready to
start pounding on your walls, you are going to have
to sally forth. You are going to have to leave
your walls and try to fight them off, keep them
off of the walls. And they are doing this, they're

(08:05):
riding out from Saint Elmo when they can, usually at night.
They're trying to kill as many Ottomans. They're attacking the
trenches as you can imagine. So you have those trench workers,
think what terrible luck this would be. You get stuck
on trench duty. You're hot, you're thirsty, you're tired, your
back hurts. You're chopping away at rock all day and

(08:25):
you look up in time to see a night riding
down on you, shoving a sword into your face. It
is up close, it is personal, and it is a
war of hatred. But the lines continue to get closer
and closer to Fort Saint Elmo. Now the cannons have

(08:46):
gotten close enough to Fort Saint Elmo. They start knocking
the walls down. But here's the problem. They're hitting the
top of the walls, and they are knocking the mid
to top of the walls down. But you can't send
your troops over. If it's just the top of the

(09:07):
walls down. You are going to have to send troops
into the walls. You've got to attack the foundation. Now
along comes one of the real, allegedly great leaders of
the Ottomans. Dragot is his name to worry about, remembering
that his nickname stands for tell me how cool this
is the drawn sword of Islam. That's kind of cool, right,

(09:30):
you gotta be honest, that's kind of cool. And I
know no one's rooting for the Ottomans right now, but
that's kind of a cool nickname. Dragot notices the cannons
are not firing right. He's a hands on type. You
don't earn the nickname drawn sort of Islam because you
sit on your hands. And so he charges up to
the Ottoman lines to say, hey, idiots, lower the cannons.

(09:53):
We have to hit the foundation. We have to hit
the bottom of the walls to drop it. Good for Dragot,
But there is a reason many militaries don't send their
commanders out like this. Drawoot catches a bullet in the back.
It is the Jesse Kelly Show on a fantastic Wednesday,

(10:13):
Oh hopday. If you missed any part of the show,
you can download at iHeart, Spotify iTunes. Ask doctor Jesse
Thursday tomorrow. I'll get your questions emailed into Jesse at
Jesse kellyshow dot com. So the Ottomans are inching closer
to Fort Saint Elmo. Pacman's nose right, and I already
mentioned his mouth is full of water. It's the great harbor.

(10:36):
And I told you last night that you need to
picture two teeth coming out the bottom part of his
jaw towards the back of his jaw. Those are peninsulas
controlled by the Knights. Fourti fied peninsulas The reason I
bring this up is this. Maybe you've been wondering, if
you're the Ottomans, you have all these ships, ships with

(10:59):
cannons and things like that on them, why don't you
just sail the ships into the Great Harbor and start
shooting at Fort Saint Elmo from the other side. Well,
remember the Knights have cannons two and those two teeth,
which we will get to, there's fortifications on there. You

(11:23):
can't just sail your ships into the Great Harbor and
start firing at Fort Saint Elmo, because then those two
teeth are gonna start firing their cannons at your ships.
Here's a little foreshadowing which is gonna happen anyway, and
you are gonna lose your ships. Keep this in mind,

(11:45):
the Ottomans are not home. The Ottomans are a long
way from home. They are currently south of what is
now Sicily. They have to when this is over, get
all the way back to what is now Istanbul. That's
a long sail and you need boats. So they have

(12:06):
to keep inching their way towards Fort Saint Elmo. Now
they do. It is a hard, brutal slog, but they
finally find themselves at the walls of Fort Saint Elmo.
They start knocking holes in the walls of Fort Saint Elmo,
big ones walls their troops can pour through. In fact,

(12:28):
not only can their troops pour through them, they're knocking
down outer walls, and they're bringing their cannons up and
now shooting cannons practically point blank at the inner walls.
What's happening inside of Fort Saint Elmo couple different things.
They are charging forward whenever there is a gap in

(12:49):
the wall, and there is brutal, vicious hand to hand
sword and spear combat where bodies are stacking up inside
of the gaps when they are not in the gaps
at night, I told you there were civilians inside of
Fort Saint Elmo. Everybody, including the civilians, they're grabbing mattresses, curtains,

(13:15):
whatever you can grab to throw it in the gap
that was just created for when the Ottomans come back
the next day and know this everybody by now everyone
in the fort, both sides, they know Fort Saint Elmo
is going to fall at this point in time. The
Knights they send somebody across the harbor to dave Lette.

(13:41):
In fact, dave Lette send someone to them too. Dave
Lette send someone to them, the knights across the harbor,
and they say, hey, we can't hold this fort anymore.
Can we abland? Can we abandon it now? Can we
abandon it and come to the other Can we come
down to the tee? Can we come down to the

(14:01):
other fortifications. Dava Let tells them, no, you have to stay.
Why was he just a jerk? You may have been
a jerk, I don't know. But every day the Ottomans
were being occupied with taking Fort Saint Elmo. The fortifications

(14:22):
on the two teeth were getting bigger and stronger and better,
bigger and stronger and better, and dava Let needed Fort
Saint Elmo to hold out as long as humanly possible.
He essentially ordered them to die. Now the fighting continues,

(14:43):
and it's bad, and it's ugly, and people were dying
on both sides. Eventually Fort Saint Elmo does fall. This
was something the Ottomans needed to happen in a few days.
It took them a month to take what should have
been a few days. You're running out of food, you're

(15:03):
running out of water, and more importantly, remember those janissaries
I brought up the Ottoman elite troops. You took one
of the forts, and you lost half your janissaries. By
the time it's done, the Ottomans have lost roughly six
thousand of their men, and the Knights have lost about

(15:27):
a thousand out of about the three thousand they have. Yes,
they lost Fort Saint Almo. The Knights did. It was
unbelievably costly for the Ottomans. You can argue. I would disagree,
but you can argue, as of this point right now,
the Ottomans have already lost the Siege of Malta. They

(15:49):
lost too many of their elite troops. They lost too
much time, too much food, too much water, too many
cannon balls. You should probably pack it up and head out.
That's not an option, as you can probably imagine, if
you're an Ottoman commander, you really don't want to cruise
on back across the ocean and tell Suliman the Magnificent

(16:13):
that your thirty thousand troop expedition is a huge failure
and you were unable to dislodge those pesky Christians. That's
a good way to find your head on a spike.
It is the Jesse Kelly Joe on a wonderful Wednesday.
Setting aside politics, Doc and some Moore Siege of Malta.
Now let's get right back into it. The Ottomans have

(16:36):
taken Fort Saint Elmo. Remember I told you in the
beginning there were four fortified locations on this island. Number
one is gone. Now they have to worry about the teeth.
I told you this island. You need to picture it
like pac Man. In the mouth is the Great Harbor,
and Pacman has two gigantic teeth in his bottom jaw.

(16:59):
These are eninsulas that jut out into the Great Harbor,
and they are fortified. There are civilians here, there are
the rest, essentially the rest of the Knights here. They
have been building fortifications and preparing for a long time
for these Ottomans to come. Remember I said before, if
you're the Ottomans, you can't just sail your boats right

(17:23):
into the harbor because the fortifications are going to blow
your boats out of the water. But if you're the Ottomans,
you understand your boats are a force multiplier. They can
carry troops, they have cannons on them. You need your
boats into the tonsils. Essentially, you need to get your
boats into the harbor. But you can't bring them in
through the mouth. What to do? What to do? Well,

(17:46):
this is something the Ottomans have done before history nerds
will know this. It's part of what they did at
the Siege of Constantinople. The Ottomans were they were wonderful engineers,
and they were really great at combat. They figured out
how to haul gigantic boats over the land. And they

(18:07):
do picture how unbelievably labor intensive it would be to
no construction and equipment. Right, there's no engine. They hauled
their boats essentially pac Man's forehead. They hauled it down
over pac Man's forehead and landed their boats back into

(18:29):
pac Man's back by pac Man's tonsils. Now they have
their fortifications. Okay, so let's go over to the teeth.
I told you the teeth are jutting out the bottom
of pac Man's job. These are the two bottom peninsula fortifications.
The Ottomans bring their cannons and their troops over land

(18:50):
and they start doing the same thing to these peninsulas
they started doing to Fort Saint Elmo, digging in trenches,
cannons and they start bombarding the place. The Ottomans, now
I'm not going to say desperate at all. But they're
looking at the clock, and this is going to be

(19:12):
important for our purposes here. It's not just food and
water that's presenting problems for them. Back in the day.
We don't think about this as much now, but seed travel.
Back in the day, the day of sail, the day
of the ore was very, very seasonal. When the weather

(19:33):
got bad in the Mediterranean, when it got cold, when
winter came, the winds were not right, the waves were
not right. You couldn't just hop on the water anytime
you wanted to hop on the water and just go
sail wherever you wanted. It didn't work that way. Yeah,

(19:54):
the seeds started in the summer. It's closing in on fall.
Because of this, the Ottomans have to take some chances
they probably wouldn't otherwise take. They bring the boats in
and they decide they're going to try something. The troops
that are underneath the teeth, they're going to try to

(20:17):
throw them at the walls while at the same time
doing a landing using the boats, doing an amphibious landing
using the boats by the back tooth, essentially by the
back tooth. They try it. They think things are going well.

(20:39):
Things would have been going well, but there was something
they didn't quite plan on the boats. The Knights, like
I said, they had been making preparations. Part of those
preparations were they had been putting up underwater spikes and

(21:00):
in anticipation of the Ottomans coming to do it, coming
to do exactly what they were going to do. The
boats can't get all the way to the beach. They
stall out in the water. Now you're unloading your troops
and they're wading in under fire, and they're dying in droves.

(21:21):
They're dying in the water, they're dying on the beaches. Honestly,
I just they need to make a movie about this.
I really hope the rumors are true that Mel Gibson's
making a miniseries about this. They are dying well. Now
the Ottomans try to press the issue and they decide
they're going to try to sail their boats around the

(21:41):
back tooth, around the tip of it. They're looking and
they're thinking, well, their cannons aren't going to get to us.
The Knights had prepared for that too, They had at
sea level cannons the Ottomans didn't know about. They start
to sail the ships around the tooth and lo and

(22:04):
behold there are night cannons waiting for them, like a
like a rabbit jumping right into the mouth of a
hungry lion. These cannons start smoking the Ottoman ships right
out of the water. And remember, reinforcements aren't coming for

(22:24):
the Ottomans. As the ships are going down, the troops
on the ships are going down with them, and your
forces are being depleted, and they're being depleted rapidly. Okay,
now I know you're thinking, aw all is gravy? Looks
like the Knights have it. Not at all. This has

(22:45):
been a tail of a lot of hardship for the Ottomans.
But remember the Knights only have so much food too,
only have so much shot to ammunition for their rifles
for their cannons. They only have so much water too. Yes,
they had tried to provision themselves, and they had done
very well, but they are in a real pickle. And

(23:08):
those Ottoman cannons are still falling, and the Knight's walls
are dropping. They are dropping, and they are dropping rapidly.
And if the Ottomans get through the walls, well that's it.
The Ottomans start throwing themselves crazily at the walls, and
now they're digging a tunnel underneath them. Like I said,

(23:34):
the Ottomans are great at this. The Knights, they don't
figure out that the Ottomans have tunneled completely underneath their
walls until it's almost too late. But they eventually do
figure it out. What do they do. There's really only
one thing you can do in that situation. You have

(23:55):
to dig down inside of your city. Remember this is
all by hand, and you have to dig a counter
tunnel looking for their tunnel under the ground ancient technology.
They find them. They meet under the walls of the

(24:17):
Knights in the dark with muskets and swords and spears,
and they have a nasty hand to hand combat war.
In the pitch. Black people have died in terrible scary ways. Right,
A nasty hand to hand combat war takes place in

(24:39):
the tunnels, and the Knights prevail. The Knights prevail, they
carve the whole thing in. Now the Ottomans have they
have no choice but to throw themselves against the walls. Now,
many people, many people to this. They believe that God

(25:03):
stepped in repeatedly at different times to save the Knights.
Maybe you are skeptical that maybe you believe that what
happens next is one of the main justifications people will
use to say, Oh my gosh, God saved them, He

(25:24):
saved them. I'll tell you what happens next. It is
the Jesse Kelly Show. Remember tomorrow is ask Doctor Jesse Friday.
You need to get your questions emailed or asked Doctor
Jesse Thursday. You need to get your questions emailed in
now the Jesse at Jesse kellyshow dot com. The Ottomans
are trying to attack from the sea and the land.

(25:47):
Jewish producer Chris was unclear on that, so I'm worried.
I haven't been clear on that. It is mainly a
land attack on the peninsulas. They're under the teeth. That's
where all the bombardment's coming. That's where the trenches are coming.
They're just trying to mix in as much of the
ocean as they can while they have the boats. And
the Knights are crumbling the walls. I shouldn't say the

(26:08):
knights are crumbling. That's probably not fair. The walls are crumbling.
They're running out of men, they're running out of food,
they're running out of walls. They are hopelessly outnumbered. Still,
even though they've killed legions of these Ottomans, and the
Ottomans are smashing the walls, and the Ottomans can taste victory.

(26:29):
Pause on that member. I told you there were four locations,
pac Man's nose, pac Man's two teeth, and then Mdina
pac Man's tonsils. It's not necessarily exactly there, but you
get what I'm saying. It's inland a little bit Indina. Well,

(26:49):
Indina is aware they have a very very tiny force there,
a tiny force there. Indina is aware that the two
Teeth are in dire straits and if those fortificationations fall,
it's over. The island will be taken. It's over. So
they decide to send out a reconnaissance unit. Not a

(27:11):
big unit, not a massive force. They're just going out
to sniff around. Where are the Ottoman forces, what's the
camp look like. Let's try to get word to this
or that. Before I get to any of that, I
do have to clarify how much hatred there is between
these sides, because this part is important. Remember I told

(27:34):
you that Fort Saint Elmo fell. Remember I told you
that earlier, many many years earlier, when Rhodes fell. Suliman
the Magnificent had let the Knights go, and he was
angry that they were now fighting him when Fort Saint
Elmo fell. But the Ottomans took the few knights who

(27:57):
were left alive. They chopped off their heads, they disembowed them,
desecrating the corpses. Then as an insult to Christianity, they
nailed them to crosses, without heads and without guts, and

(28:19):
then they floated them across the water back to the
other forts. This is this is a military orders. What's
that feel like if you're standing on the fort and
you see the headless, gutless corpse of your friend with
a little religious insult on top of it, floating at you. Yeah,

(28:44):
the Knights didn't take it well? How not well did
they take it? They took all the Ottoman prisoners they had,
or a bunch of them. I heard all, and I
heard a bunch. I don't know which is true. And
they chopped their heads off, and they loaded their heads
into the knight's cannons, and they started firing the heads

(29:06):
of the captured Ottoman prisoners back towards the Ottoman lines.
This is the degree of hatred we're dealing with and
I saved that little story so you can understand what
is at stake. As the Ottomans are now knocking down
the walls of what are essentially the last two fortifications.

(29:28):
You with me, this is hand to hand. Deve Alette,
who is the leader, is not hiding out in his
command post. He is crossing swords with Ottomans on the walls. Bloody, nasty, screaming,
horrible hand to hand cannons. It's as bad as you
can imagine. Back to Mdina, back to the recon force.

(29:53):
This force rides out just sniffing around, and by God's providence,
by accident. I don't know what you want to say.
I wasn't there and I haven't asked God about it,
they come across a gold mine. They come across the undefended,

(30:16):
relatively undefended Ottoman camp, the camp where the cooks are,
where the wounded are being treated, where all their supplies are.
The recon unit, by accident, stumbles into the Ottoman camp
and they promptly start slaughtering everyone in the camp and

(30:38):
then burning everything down on fire. Remember, at this exact moment,
the Ottomans are plowing through the walls, getting ready to
win the entire island. They turn around and their camp
is on fire.

Speaker 2 (30:55):
They freak out, call out the attack, which you would,
and go charging back toward the This is happening in
the matter of an hour, people say minutes, it depends
on what you believe. Minutes away from Malta falling, they
ride back towards the camp.

Speaker 1 (31:14):
The reconunit gets out. It is a horrible, horrible thing.
The Ottomans now they're probably completely defeated, they've lost another
four to six thousand, but they don't feel like they
can just quit. They have to try something else, anything else,

(31:35):
So they ride towards Mdina pac Man's Tonsils. Mdina is
to say lightly defended would be putting it mildly. There's
almost no one there. They have almost no cannonballs, so
they take everyone they do have, including defenseless civilians. They
stand them on the walls and dress them up like soldiers,

(31:59):
and then they take the few cannon balls they have
and they shoot them at the Ottoman force when the
Ottomans are out of range. Why they want the Ottomans
to think they're loaded with cannonballs. We have as many.
We have so many, we'll shoot them at you before

(32:20):
you even get close enough. The Ottomans, by now their
spirit is broken. They get shot at from out of range.
They see all these air fingers quote troops on top
of Mdina, and they say, screw this, We're leaving. They

(32:43):
start marching back towards the other two teeth. I will
wrap this up. It'll probably take me five minutes, and
then we'll get back to politics in just a moment.
But for all intents and purposes, the siege of Malta
is pretty much much broken. It's mop up time. Now.
Before we mop up, let's do a little bit of

(33:07):
good Let's uh not forget about the widows and orphans
we just had. I am sure you saw another cop ambushed,
ambushed in a courthouse. It's terrible. Who cares for these families?

(33:27):
When cops die in the line of duty, when firefighters
die in the line of duty? How how do you
even pick it up and move on? Tunnel to Towers
has been standing alongside these families for over two decades.
Remember remember they built them an entire community in Florida
so they could live together. They're paying off mortgages for them.

(33:52):
Real genuine care of widows and orphans. As we are
commanded to do. Eleven bucks a month from you is
all they've ever asked for. Donate to tunnel the towers
give it automatically. You never know it's gone. T the
number two T dot org T two t dot org.

(34:16):
We'll be back.