The annals of medieval warfare record a conflict of especial interest to those who love sea history—for every important clash in this war was a naval battle. And from it, there arose a figure who stands out as the greatest naval commander of the High Middle Ages, a seemingly natural-born tactician who never suffered a defeat and whom some historians speak of in the same breath as the likes of Nelson and Lysander.
And if Roger of Lauria is less of a household name than those other titans, it is because the war in which he blazed such a victorious course is shrouded in the mists of the byzantine medieval Mediterranean power-politics of a long-gone century. It was a fight for control of Sicily by rival claimants—the house of Anjou and the house of Aragon.
Charles of Anjou’s rule of Sicily had been marked by oppression and overtaxation until a rebellion finally broke out in Palermo in 1282—right around the time of evening prayers, or vespers.
Pedro III of Aragon, who also had a claim to the Sicilian throne, entered the fray on the side of the rebels, and the War of the Sicilian Vespers was on.
The Aragonese fleet proved its naval superiority over the Angevins from the war’s outset. Charles of Anjou thus ordered a new fleet to be built at Marseille and commanded by a fresh pair of admirals, Guillaume de Cornut and Bartolomé Bonvin.
Their first mission came in the summer of 1283: sail for Malta—just south of Sicily and strategically vital to the war effort—to relieve an Angevin garrison besieged in the Castrum Maris (“Castle by the Sea”), the iconic bastion that still overlooks Malta’s Grand Harbour and is known today as Fort St. Angelo.
With the Angevin fleet’s arrival, the rebel forces laying siege to the castle pulled back, and the Marseillais admirals beached their galleys beside the castle along Galley Creek (or Dockyard Creek, in the current parlance). They backed the vessels onto the shore so they faced outward, ready either to defend the position or to slip back into the water with alacrity.
Meanwhile, Aragon’s new admiral, Roger of Lauria—still untested, but soon to prove an inspired choice—had learned of the Angevins’ advance on Malta and set sail from Messina, Sicily, in hot pursuit.
The Aragonese fleet was the finest in the Western Mediterranean at the time, its galleys larger and better designed, its crews well fed and taken care of and, above all, eager to fight and highly capable thereof. The oarsmen were Sicilians who knew all too well the boot-heel of Angevin rule; to them, it was personal. Each galley was manned as well with Catalan crossbowmen—Europe’s deadliest—and fierce almogavar infantry, tough-as-nails fighters from the raw Spanish frontier regions bordering Muslim territory. Clad in protective leather and armed with javelins and war-cleavers, they were surefooted mountain men tailor-made for battle on a slippery rolling deck.
Arriving at Malta, Roger sent in scouts with muffled oars to reconnoiter after dark. They spied the enemy fleet aligned along the beach around the bend beyond the castle. Rather than launch a surprise attack, the new admiral did something that confounded the chroniclers of the time: He roused the enemy from slumber with blaring trumpets and pounding drums.
Some opined it was chivalry—not wanting to stoop to attacking the foe in his sleep. Some opined it was tactics—even with the element of surprise, to attempt to launch an assault in the narrow confines of Galley Creek, right under the shadow of the castle, would put Roger’s force in a treacherous position. Either way, the cacophonous fanfare stirred up the Angevin hornets’ nest and drew them out. Roger arrayed his galleys in line abreast across the harbor mouth, and at daybreak on 8 July 1283, the Battle of Malta began.
The Angevin galleys, their marines now joined by armored knights from the castle, hewed to the standards of medieval galley warfare. The ancient methodology of ramming the enemy had faded away. Now, the main gambit was to shower the enemy line with a relentless barrage of projectiles until it was softened up enough to close in for the kill. This the Angevins proceeded to do—but it was a curiously one-sided affair.
They threw everything they had at Roger’s galleys for hours, pummeling them with crossbow bolts, javelins, arrows, stones, and pots filled with burning pitch and blinding lime. But, with the exception of his crossbowmen, Roger commanded his men to lay low and hold off. They took cover and endured the ceaseless hail until midday, when suddenly, they realized that the enemy was now throwing random objects such as the mortars and pestles used to grind the lime they’d been hurling. The Angevins, in short, had run out of ammunition. Now, and only now, Roger ordered the attack.
The Aragonese galleys stormed into the enemy line. The continuous fatal volleys of the Catalan crossbowmen rained down on the Angevin crews along with javelins, stones, and pots of soap to slicken the decks. The Sicilian oarsmen took up weapons and poured onto the enemy galleys, along with the fearsome almogavars, who made easy work of the stumbling, armor-encumbered knights. It devolved into a slaughter. Admiral de Cornut was killed, while Admiral Bonvin managed to escape with a handful of survivors.
Fourteen of the 19 Angevin galleys had been destroyed; more than 3,500 Angevins were killed and 1,000 captured. Roger’s casualties were under 300, and he lost none of his 18 galleys.
In his first taste of fighting at sea, he cannily had employed what a later world-famous king of the boxing ring would dub the “rope-a-dope” strategy. And after Malta—at Castellammare in 1284, at Les Formigues and the Col de Panissars in 1285, at the Battle of the Counts in 1287, at Cape Orlando in 1299, at Ponza in 1300—Roger of Lauria would go on, often against overwhelming odds, to achieve one masterful victory after another, joining history’s pantheon of great naval commanders.
Sources:
Phyllis G. Jestice, “Malta, 1283,” in Michael Spilling, ed., Battles of the Medieval World, 1000–1500: From Hastings to Constantinople (London: Amber Books, 2006), 108–15.
Lawrence V. Mott, “The Battle of Malta, 1283: Prelude to a Disaster,” in Donald J. Kagay and L. J. Andrew Villalon, eds., The Circle of War in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 1999), 145–72.
Ramon Muntaner, The Chronicle of Muntaner, Lady Goodenough, ed. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1920), vol. 1, 185–96.
Steven Runciman, The Sicilian Vespers: A History of the Mediterranean World in the Later Thirteenth Century (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1958), 242–47.
Charles D. Stanton, Roger of Lauria (c. 1250–1305): ‘Admiral of Admirals’ (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2019), 1–4, 147–59.