Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 232 - The Great Siege of Malta

Episode Date: October 31, 2022

An order of knights turned protection racket defend a chunk of rock from an Ottoman force several times their size using the military equivalent of Home Alone tactics. and then people began firing heads out of cannons. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys sources: https://www.historynet.com/no-mercy-malta/ Crowley, Roger (2008). Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, the Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Center of the World

Hey everybody, Joe here from the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. If you enjoy what we do here on the show and you think it's worth your hard-earned money, you can support the show via Patreon. Just a $1 donation gets you access to bonus episodes, our Discord, and regular episodes before everybody else. If you donate at an elevated level, you get even more bonus content. A digital copy of my book, The Hooligans of Kandahar, and a sticker from our Teespring store. Our show will always be ad-free and is totally supporter-driven. We use that money to pay our bills, buy research materials that make this show possible, and support charities

like the Kurdish Red Crescent, the Flint Water Fund, and the Halo Trust. Consider joining the Legion of the Old Crow today. And now back to the show. Hello and welcome to the Lines Up by Donkeys podcast. I'm Joe and with me is not Liamam it's francis hello francis liam liam and i are um i don't know when this this episode is going to come out but liam and i have locked horns because it's the playoff seasons and the cardinals are playing the phillies uh for the first round and i'm not a cardinals i like i'm not really a baseball fan unless it allows me to shit talk people online and then i become a rabid Cardinals fan, especially during playoff season. I'm kind of the same way when it comes to sports.

I mean, I'm a really big hockey fan. But outside of that, I truly don't care. But whenever it's a sport I truly don't care about and people just start shit talking me based on some Detroit sports team that I truly do not care about. I'm like, oh yeah, well, well fuck you we won like i don't know a single person on that team nothing like you you've turned me into this yeah it's the

i you know the detroit tigers i'm sure you know you don't really pay much attention to it but you know it's that it's that like you know midwest um city kind of thing like you don't really have much and so when you have a really good like sports team, you fucking tend to focus on that. Like I live in St. Louis, man. The fuck do we have here?

Not a lot. We got arch and that's about it. We, we shit talk Chicago people all the time, even though Chicago people have a much better city than we do. So we've got the better. You don't even have a football team anymore. Quiet. You, we're going a football team anymore. Quiet.

You were going to the XFL is coming back. The battle Hawks are going to be flying again. So we'll have that. Yes. The glorious XFL. I mean, that is one thing that Vince McMahon is still allowed to be in charge of as far as I know.

I thought the rock bought it. I can't remember. Maybe. I don't fucking know at this point. Detroit had the Red Wings for a really long time and we had the pistons for a short spurt the tigers have made it to the world series i think twice while i've been alive and i've lost both times i don't think they've won a single world series games to have been alive i want to say one of them they lost to us so yes yeah i think the last time they won was like 86 or 87 or something was right

before i was born and then i cursed them and they were doomed for all times um you know what else is cursed sieges that's not a good one um it depends on which size of the siege you're on for it to be cursed there's really no good side of Beyond in a Siege. I can't think of a more wasteful but epic in a good way set piece battle in history than any siege ever. One enemy traps their back against the wall, the other surrounding them

strangling off their supplies or to blast them into submission, storm the gates or attach a bomb to an orc and have them blow up the wall. Generally speaking, the end of a siege is either one that goes down in history as a heroic defense that will ring through the ages, or an unspeakable slaughter that will be followed by a ton of looting, but then will later be glossed over as some national creation myth of some kind.

That's generally how these things go. some national creation myth of some kind. That's generally how these things go. Which I feel like you have a specific scenario to describe on that one. Maybe a few. Born out of a siege. Sometimes, though, you get lucky, and it's both horribly brutal and damn near miraculous that ends with the Defenders winning. Led by some of the worst

people in western christian history the crusaders set against some of the worst people in islamic history the ottoman empire um but they had god and allah at their at their back so i can only and you know technically you go back far enough they're the same god so maybe that's why they all died yeah they're they're they're both uh branches from the same trees i guess it's just god punching himself in the face repeatedly right it's just like no it's my my abrahamic religion no it's my abrahamic religion like guys this is this is you got chocolate in my peanut butter um it's it's kind of the same you guys have kind of the same rules why are you killing yeah but to be fair if you put chocolate and peanut butter that makes the product better right so maybe they should have been meshing them meshing the religions

together you know we could have some uh christian mini minnarts and stuff like that we really could have had something better i feel if we uh if humans could stop stabbing each other in the faces you know you know we do have something better we've bound together we've created it it's called scientology not because the religion's better but because the the guy who leads it uh is is is a whole lot funnier though he is dead uh for just 29.99 that's right uh 29.99 i think would be a hell of a sale i have to tell the story about how i got my my uh my scientologist test one day oh you had like one of those stress tests? I went in. I took the whole battery of tests.

They make you sit down and take an SAT. Did they tell you that you're a chock full of thetans? Yeah. I didn't get to do the thing where I hold on to it. I took the SAT, and then they gave me... My buddy, they were just like, you need more work. They were like, you can buy this book called Dianetics. they my my buddy they're just like you're you need more work so they just like we're like you can buy this book called dianetics and then they were just like you you have like my aura was like

i don't know what it is my aura was better like i was more advanced based on the scientologist sat so uh they offered me a 20 book instead of a seven dollar book i was like i see how this goes it's just business casual astrology. Uh, you know, at least, uh, at least astrology people have incense and smells nice.

Scientology. That's why I said business casual, like instead of like, uh, someone who's kind of, uh, I don't know, like crunchy a bit or whatever is tell it. Like maybe they believe like tea will cure baldness,

which is something that someone I dated once told me. Uh, yeah. They're trying to hit something to you or something i mean i'm balding like there's there's no there's no hint to that like oh no there's a tea that will fix it i'm like i bet there fucking isn't um but like scientology is that same person but dressed as a mormon you know yeah there you go um you bring them to missouri and we'll drive them out too So the topic of today's episode is not Scientology.

We've actually already done that episode once. It's going to be the 1565 Great Siege of Malta, where a few thousand Knights of St. John withstood a siege of tens of thousands of Ottomans for over three months. Now the history of the Order of the Knights, the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem, sometimes known as the Knights Hospitaller, who are weirdly still around today.

If you look around your general area in the United States or in Europe, you might find a weird lodge of Knights Hospitaller. I don't know why. I think they're kind of like shriners now they literally only exist to do like christian charities and probably cover up crimes apparently um they're not knights anymore yeah i don't i don't remember it that sounds familiar i'm getting

shots of uh the uh indiana jones and the holy grail uh that one Last Crusade where the guy's face melts yeah but like no no that's the arc the crusade is the one where he gets the chalice that Jesus drank out of that might be the Templars okay they're different we'll talk a little bit about the Templars

okay that makes more sense yeah I mean the history of the Knights Hospitaller is quite long, literally several hundred years. So I'll try doing a bridge version to take you all the way to how the time they managed to control the island of Malta as an independent, weird little crusader state. So once upon a time, the first crusade happened, which Enote the Christian seizing a pretty large chunk of the Holy Land, including Jerusalem in 1099. After that, a monastic order of Hospitaller was established by

Elastic Gigard for the purpose of, you guessed it by the name, serving in a hospital that had been established back in 603 to care for sick and dying pilgrims. This eventually turned into an armed militia I can't really find

out how or why so we set this up we set up a bunch of candy stripers and then yada yada yada they are now the the first armored irregulars yeah it was eventually formed to escort pilgrims to various holy

sites to stop them from being robbed or murdered or whatever. It kind of turned into a protection racket, but for Jesus, like you would have to pay them for these. So of course it's not like, you know, to escort you to like this monument or, or a site that'll be 20.

I don't know whatever they use back then for currency teeth. But they'd be like, you know, we would really enjoy a donation to our uh our order otherwise you'd go missing on the trail you know but they would protect you so like in essence as long as it actually is protection and sure i mean it's not a mafia protection racket right but as long as you're protected, fine. Sure. I'm not saying it's a great option.

I'm just saying it's an option. It's an option that will lead you to not being stabbed the most, I think. Now, this eventually turned to a very lucrative venture for the Order, as you can imagine, because there were other groups like the Knights Templar, and they kind of fought over who got to escort pilgrims to certain places. And most of this had to do with how the church felt about you. And the church liked the Knights Hospitaller significantly more than Knights Templar. probably more well known. The reason why is because the Knights Templar did all sorts of weird, what do you want to call it? Like rituals and stuff. They're like steeped in ritual to the point of freak the church out.

And that's the Catholic church who, who is completely based on ritual. Like I would be able to go to mass and like not pay any attention, but know exactly when to stay and sit, say the act of contrition, all that stuff. So when somebody else is, this is like you guys a little too much with the mass and the doing everything together,

you got to chill it out. Did you guys have to all get together and do an eyes wide shut thing? Like, uh, there was no sex, uh, that I remember, but,

Catholic churches are not filled with attractive people or young people or, you know, like usually the Catholic church I went to. A lot of men later. The church. So maybe there's something going on in the cafeteria afterwards. I don't know. I never saw it

and nobody invited me. I didn't get to Madison Cawthorn to the church's um coke orgies jesus christ uh god it's terrible um now like a lot of the the rumors about the templars were probably political hit jobs uh maybe a lot of them were told to priests and clergy of the church by the knights hospitaler they did do weird shit, but it's thought that some of it actually wasn't real. And eventually

the Templars were disbanded by order of the Pope in 1300s, and the Hospitallers were not. And that, when you know it, made the Hospitallers more powerful, because there were no more Knights Templar around. So you can probably assume how a lot of those rumors got started. The Templars are weird as

fuck to me, and we might do a series on them one day, but honestly, I don't know. But they're very strange. It's strange to consider that these Catholic orders would have power over areas. But I

guess the Catholic archdiocese do now, because i just think about like the franciscans and the jesuits and everybody now who you know you don't really have that political power when you're a jesuit these days or maybe you do shit i don't know maybe the jesuits run shit all over the place i know they run i mean the current pope was a jesuit wasn't he who's that isn't the current pope wasn't he auit? Yeah, but he's the first Jesuit Pope. It took a while for them to get one. It's because the Jesuits have this irritating habit of going places and helping people,

and nobody really likes that. Can't have that. Whoa, whoa. Living your Catholic values? Get the fuck out of here. whoa whoa living your catholic values get the fuck out of here now uh drusen was eventually lost in 1291 uh and they expelled the knights who quickly began looking for a new home they couched their way through like the kingdom of cyprus for a while before finally deciding on the island of rhodes to be their new home oh there was a problem though that island was held by the

christian byzantine empire and the byzantines were busy falling apart at this point. And the Catholic Church was fine if people, other Christians began to nip away at it and take over their lands and fortresses for themselves. Now, the main reason why the Catholic Church green-lighted the Knights taking roads was because the Byzantines were not enforcing this ban that the Pope had put out for trading with Muslims, because it's very lucrative to have open trade, especially if you're

the Byzantine Empire with Egypt, which is right across the fucking water there. So they just kept doing it. So the Pope greenlit the Hospitaller hospitality invasion and they put an end to that shit. They eventually took over the island where they would again be kicked out in 1522 by an Ottoman invasion led by Suleiman the Magnificent who was so impressed by their bloody defense of the island, he simply allowed the

survivors to leave. Now normally worst case scenario, you're getting your head cut off or crucified. Best case scenario you're getting enslaved. There's also the possibility of being ransomed, especially the actual knights because they're worth money. Even the knights hospitaller who are supposed to take a vow of poverty and chastity and all this other stuff, the church would pay for that to get them back. But this time, they're like, no, you guys can go. We're fine with the island. But this time they're like, no, you guys can go.

We're fine with the island. Now, this made the Knights homeless again and out looking for another hot couch to skip across. And they eventually did get it with Holy Roman Emperor Charles V offering them the Libyan stronghold of Tripoli, which was the Mediterranean archipelago comprised of Gozo, Comino, and the island of Malta. While the islands were pretty much wasteland, rocky, barren, and mostly terrible places to live, which is why the emperor gave them away, Malta did boast two huge harbors, and it was effectively the seafaring linchpin of the entire Mediterranean trade. This would make the knights fantastically wealthy and had the added bonus for the rest of Christendom. It would secure the east-west trade route with people who were by far their best regular

soldiers. Because remember, most armies back then are not made up of trained soldiers. It's mostly levies and the occasional knight. Right. You got like 50 dudes in armor with horses who are just a bunch of rich assholes with a really nice guns. And that's about it. Yeah,

pretty much. And like having the Knights park there. And also the Pope knew that the Knights would enforce the Muslim training ban. Like they were pretty much the only people who would enforce it all the time. And this isn't because they actually believed in it. We'll talk a little bit about that later,

but Suleyman, it turned out really regretted his decision to let the the knights leave roads alive uh because the knights were for a lack of a better term the pope's heavy hitters when other people were corrupt well all right well the knights were also kind of corrupt but in a different way the pope knew that the knights would follow his edicts pretty much without question and they would follow them with extreme violence um whatever happened that's the kind of nights that you need yeah and whatever happened besides that like the the the knight side hustle the pope didn't give a single fuck about now like i already said that the pope was pretty pissed about the trading of uh the the the ban on trading with

muslims everybody was just ignoring so you know the pope sent his knight kneecappers out to enforce it. The knights actively patrolled the waters of the Mediterranean, raiding any Muslim trade ship they could find. And much like the Ottomans and most other people in the world at the time, non-believers would be enslaved pretty much all the time. But not only just Muslims, Jews, and even the occasional non-Catholic Christian would end up as a slave to the knights, who, of course, they would then sell for more money.

Slavery, Christian values. Yeah, of course. And by the mid-1500s, the order probably had around 3,000 slaves in Malta alone. They also ran a pretty successful slave market, which is what you want your bastions of Christianity to do. Well, they got these nice harbors. Why wouldn't they also have a pretty successful slave market which is you know what you want your bastions of christianity to do well they got these nice harbors why wouldn't they also have a slave market

yeah what they go hand in hand and is this still is this still kind of like that that it's not like i know during roman times we talked about slavery was just like um you know it's five of us against one of you you're our slave now uh until such time that we deem that we don't need you anymore. And then you can be a free guy or you can buy your way to slavery. Like I know slavery is different throughout the years. And we, we tend as Americans, we tend to think of chattel slavery, but like what kind of slavery is this in this era? I would say it's worse than Roman slavery because at least Roman slavery didn't

have the religious aspect to it, at least Roman slavery didn't have the religious aspect to it, at least not at first. And this one did. So there would be ransoms. People that they knew to be rich would not be kept in slavery. They'd ransom them back to their families or their local lord or whatever.

But if you just happen to be a random Muslim or Christian schlub with no money and you get caught up on the wrong fucking boat you're gonna have a bad day and then uh you know a bad life after that um i think it was possible depending on who captured you to get out but it was very much a person by person basis the knights would sell you into europe Europe and whatever happened to you after that happened to you. Especially because both Islam and Christianity kind of worked their way around ways to rationalize slavery as long as it wasn't one of us.

But since it was kind of like religiously ordained, it was quite worse than the Romans. So to be fair fair i they didn't have gladiatorial games so i guess you have that going for you they weren't they weren't feeding anybody to lions i guess so i mean they probably would if they had a lion laying around like i wouldn't put it past them um but one of the more important things that they got was free reign to do with all of the captured goods from these ships that they raided which meant selling it to the rest of Europe. So that meant the only legitimate way to get any Muslim goods in Europe was to buy them from the knights. So you could see why this is a hustle the knights were way too happy to secure for the Pope. It's like, yeah, we're doing this for Jesus, but also you owe us

350 for whatever goods that you want. Now, the knights didn't exactly have a powerful navy there, but they did kind of become pirates for Jesus at such a level that soon that the Ottoman government was getting pretty pissed and really wishing that they had thrown all these cape-wearing assholes directly into the sea after taking roads. Now, this is probably the coolest guy in the entire episode, is the Ottoman corsair Dragut, who had the badass nickname of the drawn sword of Islam.

He also had a dual job like he was a pirate, but also official naval commander of the Ottoman Empire. OK, so like a like a privateer, I guess, if we we're gonna put it way more official than that um like he was when like suleiman the magnificent needed a naval guy he called dragut but like also when that wasn't the time is off pirating is off time but like at the call of the government if necessary to do some like official pirating gotcha yeah now uh they invaded the island in 1551 uh with the sport of the ottoman navy and army and their army had around 10 000 uh people in it and they decided that malta itself looked like a real son of a bitch to conquer so instead they just kind of spun around and took other knight possessions in the area leaving malta alone now as if to set the

stage as to how war between the knights and the Ottomans would change over time, when the city and the island of Gozo attempted to negotiate terms of surrender, assuming that we'll give you money, you don't burn all of our shit down, the Ottomans completely rejected it. The city fell and every single person minus one monk

was enslaved or murdered. The same thing happened in Tripoli within the same year. Suleiman the Magnificent was very clearly over the knights. What happened to that one monk? I assume he went on to have a successful recording career. I'm not really sure. Successful monkery? Yeah.

He's one of those chanting monks that you can buy CDs from on TV. He makes overpriced Bavarian beer. I have no idea. Now, the Knights knew it was only a matter of time before Suleiman tried to come to Malta to finish the job. He probably should have finished back in Rhodes. And they assumed it would happen within the next year, which that didn't actually end up being the case. However, the fear of an impending invasion led to the grandmaster of the order, a guy named Juan de Omedes, to order all fortifications within the island to be reinforced, as well as the construction of several new forts.

Now, this is probably where it would have ended, but then the Christians attempted a massively failed retaking operation of Tripoli, which just hemorrhaged thousands of people. Now, this cemented Ottoman power in the region by 1560 and left Malta effectively all alone. But Malta was really important. It was a stepping stone to stop an Ottoman invasion of Sicily and then mainland Italy and then the fucking Holy See. It would not have been hard to conduct from there. And it wasn't out of anybody's mind. This is a real possibility.

Not to mention, after the failure that was the attempt on Tripoli, an auto invasion of Papal-aligned Europe, even if they didn't invade Italy, if they took Malta and had this straight wide open, that's going to happen. It's not a matter of if. It's going to happen. Right. They're coming for you. Yeah. The knights in August of 1560 ordered all of their knights in Europe because they had different outposts all over the place, mostly in land that they owned. They just had vast amounts of estates.

They were very, very rich. But they ordered all these guys like, get your ass to Malta. they ordered all these guys like get your ass to malta and then of course kept preying on ottoman shipping with one of their christ pirates by the name of romagos uh finally pissed off the ottoman government just a little bit by capturing the merchant ship owned personally by the chief eunuch of the ottoman court uh which it's a very funny name uh but it's a super important person within the ottoman court uh like this is our most important person with no balls it's a very funny name, uh, but it's a super important person within the Ottoman court. Uh, like this is our most important person with no balls. It's not even a woman.

We had to cut the balls off of a man. That's how misogynist we are right here right now. You gotta love the, the chief eunuchry. Is that, do you think that's something that like people strive for? It's like one day I'm going to be the chief ball chopped off guy. Like,

Oh yeah. The amount of political power that the chief munich uh the chief chief munich the amount of political power that the chief eunuch had was like fantastically large so he was like one of the richest people in the court because he was so influential he was one of the most important mentors to, uh, whoever was on the throne at the time. Uh, it was a pretty, it was a very important job,

which is why as soon as his ship got taken, this was enough for Suleiman the magnificent to launch his fleet towards more like that was his reason for war. I mean that, and like that war was always going to happen, but like that was like, you know what? Fuck it. We're doing it. We're doing

it now. You fuck with my eunuch, you fuck with me, buddy. Just because he's smooth like a Ken doll does not mean that he does not feel pain. That's why I like him. That's why he's my friend, because he's smooth. If I get really depressed, I could skip him across the lake.

I need a man with no body hair, and that's the person I'm putting in charge of things because it's the 1600s and that's how we duced it. Suleiman the Magnificent stated from the very beginning that there would be absolutely no quarter given, and despite the obvious

territorial gains and how cool that would be, one of the main goals of the invasion was to finally destroy the Knights Hospitaller. Malta was plan B. Plan A was kill all the fucking knights. And to do that, he assembled one of the largest fleets the world had seen up until that point, at least in the region, consisting of hundreds and hundreds of ships. So I've seen the number go from 250 to 400.

And on board were 40,000 soldiers from the elite janissaries to arcubusers you can say it it's fine yeah the arcubusers yeah uh which is you know we do you are talking about like a lot of building fortifications and everything i have to imagine like that there is some kind of canon system like rudimentary like because you know we're talking about knights canons are very very very very real at the point like are cute like we're still talking about knights so it's it's like that that smash up of time between like medieval and we've got our horses and our lances and then like a chunk of lead just gets just canoes your skull from yeah meters yeah it's a very weird time where you can see a guy in full plate mail

sword fighting a guy then someone gets shot in the fucking neck by a musket like it's a fucking star trek transporter episode or some shit like just all of the all we're just gonna get now a space alien's gonna come down it's a harriet it's a it's a turtle dove novel that's what that's that's the reference i needed like there's thousands of cavalry all the way down to tens of thousands of what were called, quote, volunteers from around the Ottoman Empire. These were just dudes with pointy sticks, mostly. Now, the quality training and equipment of these men generally degraded from where I started of the elite Janissaries all the way down. Meaning, you know, when you get down to the volunteer, it just means like Frank, the guy from the local shop who

is now armed with an axe or something. There's also tons of artillery, tens of thousands of rounds of ammo, and thousands of pounds of gunpowder. So, you know, Molt is in for a bad time. Though my favorite people have to be what they're called, the Leilars?

I don't know. I don't speak fucking Turkish, nor will I ever, despite how many times they've tried. Now, this is the 1500s equivalent of like an Ingemasi attacker or like a suicide attacker. drugs, be virtually naked, wear almost no clothing, and charge directly into enemy fortifications on a suicide run in the hopes of smashing through or creating a hole in the enemy defenses to open up for the people coming in behind them who were not off their minds and drugs. Now this normally

failed, but the important part is, they tried. Wait a minute, is this person exploding too, or is it just one guy runs in on berserker mode and It's just pretty much a berserker mode and it's just pretty much berserker it's like it's a whole group of berserkers effectively like they get ripped to their good like i've seen people say that it was a hallucinogen that they took i've heard also people say it was alcohol i don't know how much alcohol you have to drink to make you want to

make you want to go fucking do that uh maybe they're just doing a bunch of crocodile and then charging at enemy lines but uh yeah i don't know what drug you'd have to get me on to just be like just go fucking buck wild up there with a sword bro just uh see how it goes like at least at least put some some like gunpowder on the dude's back like blow a hole in something literally don't just be like hey why don't we just send this one guy all fucked up on acid in to see how he does. And look, I know that hindsight is 20-20. I understand that we look upon, we stand on the shoulders of giants with the knowledge of tactics that we have. It just seems looking back in time at this, just be like, just send some dudes all fucked up in to see how they do like why

wouldn't you just do that with all your people just everybody let's all do drugs and go crazy like why just do two or three people who fucking knows man everybody probably has lead poisoning at this point too so lead poisoning and their blood their blood is just like mostly thick and black for some reason yeah this is the time this is the height of Ghosts in the Blood, so who knows what's going on. I mean, there's also the possibility you give them the wrong kind of drugs, like you accidentally give them PCP and then they just immediately spin around and tear

your face off. We accidentally gave them the gas station spice and hopefully they'll eat some Ottoman faces. It's like all the stories of when Hannibal was invading Rome with the elephants

turn around and stampede through his own men. But it's just a fucking naked psycho who is chewing on your soldiers. But now, by the time that the Ottoman invasion force is being assembled in 1565, the vast Hospitaller spy network through their empire and others kind of alerted that the knights grandmaster

that it's finally going to happen like shit's about to hit the fan so in preparation the knights and their slaves and the civilians that were there overall on Malta went into overdrive they harvested every crop on the island even the ones that weren't ripe

anything that they couldn't bring into the fortifications was immediately burned or otherwise destroyed. And during the Battle of Rhodes, despite the fact that the knights were fighting quite hard and holding the walls, they figured out that the Ottomans were just resupplying off the land around them. So it made it so they could just camp outside

for a really long time. And they wanted to make sure that could not happen again. Malta was a barren wasteland and there was barely any fresh water at all. There was only one source, and it was at Marsa, which is under night control. So when he heard the invasion was coming, the Grand Master ordered water from that source to be stored in thousands and thousands of clay pots, and then stored within the secure walls of their fortifications and then dumped tons of dead animals into the source, poisoning it.

So it couldn't be used by anyone other than the people that had taken water from it before they did that. Well, even they're not going to be able to use it. It's like we've already taken water out of it and now we've just fucked our own water source. So have fun with that too.

Yeah, I mean, fuck it. At this point, they probably assume they're going to lose. They just don't want to, like, well, if we can't live on this island, nobody else can either. Yeah, just, you know, middle fingers the entire time. Fuck y'all. Fuck us. Fuck you. Now,

despite this, the Grand Master knew that the knights probably were not going to win the battle by force of arms. He knew they were standing on a barren rock in the middle of the ocean, so his plan was to simply wait and hold out as long as they could and wait for winter to set in. Provisioning an army in Malta at all at a good point of the year was really hard to do. And one as large as the one that the Ottomans were sending was impossible. The Ottomans would have bring literally everything they would need during the

era where that just was not done. People forged. That's how they had armies in the field. They forged for food, they forged for water on top of looting, which a lot of forging is just looting with a fancy new name. But doing this over the winter there would have been suicide. So they figured we hold into winter, they have to leave. There's no way they can stay. But even with this, the Ottomans were very confident that it would not take that long to win. This is from the article, No Mercy at Malta by Justin Lyons. Quote, Malta, 17 miles long by nine miles wide, was weakly garrisoned and had been hastily fortified.

At the outset of the siege, the order Grand Master had 600 knights and servants at arms, around 1,000 Spanish foot soldiers, harquebussers, and a few thousand Maltese militias and irregulars under his command. These were distributed in three forts, St. Michel at the peninsula of Sanglea and St. Elmo on the peninsula of Escobaris and St. Angelo on the peninsula of Birgu. That's their only fortifications, really. They had no means to reinforce themselves. Everything they had on the island was all they had. They had no reserves to speak of. And so tens of thousands of Ottoman soldiers would be landing on their beaches. This could have been pretty easily taken care of until the Ottoman military got really Ottoman.

And by this, I mean, fell apart over petty beefs. It's not an army until you have infighting man especially um i mean the way it was built was based on tradition soliman had split the ottoman command in three ways with nobody having overall command of the operation and all of them having to independently answer to him simultaneously. So at first, it was actually split two ways. It was the commander of the army, Mustafa Pasha, and the commander of the navy, Piyali Pasha. Then Dragut showed up, who is a different naval commander, who was also given an equal say in the matter, and the two were supposed to defer to him when they didn't agree on something however

he also could disagree with them and then they would also have to go through soliman so you can see how this does not work i mean look there's there there's times when you know power sharing is really important um and i'm gonna go ahead and say that the siege of a barren rock in the middle of nowhere is not one of those times it seems um especially like what what is there to disagree on just are we all gonna camp out here and fuck with these guys or not like if you're the sieging army you could just fuck off and go get more like you have ships they have a harbor fuck off go get more stuff bring it back like i'm confused as to why this is a problem i mean i'm not an ottoman in the in

the 1500s either so you know they've had fundamental differences in what they wanted to do um but this is probably why when the ottomans landed uh uncontested mind you because the knights were safely in their fortresses they immediately began to fuck shit up for starters they just left the city of medina untouched uh as a by i use the term city loosely here um because it's small uh despite the fact it was hardly fortified untouched yeah i mean it was hardly fortified and it was the base of the knights cavalry um and it was also their main communication link to sicily and therefore their only communication link to the outside world. So they left a raiding force just chilling in there as well as their communication network open, which I understand that a communication network back then is a guy on a horse or a

guy in a rowboat, like taking a letter back and forth. But still. But you still need that guy and he still needs a horse. He's very important. Like asking for reinforcements, which is what they did. Me and the other Navy guy are not agreeing on something. Get the guy with the horse. We got to figure this out.

Instead, it was argued by the Naval commander that they absolutely had to moor their ships at the Grand Harbor due to sea conditions in the south of the island. Now, the Grand Harbor was protected very, very well by Fort St. Elmo. And Fort St. Elmo was then in turn supported by the strong points on Burgu and the Sanglia peninsulas. They could all fire at it. It was mutually supporting. And you can look at a map of the peninsula and you can see how it makes more sense. Now, all three of these positions could attack the Ottomans while they were assaulting Fort St. Elmo. And they would have no choice but to take Fort St. Elmo before attacking anything else

because he wanted to land in the Grand Harbor. In order to do this, the Ottoman force would have to land on Marsa, which is on the other side of the island, march overland, dragging all of their artillery and ammo with them to set up their attack on Fort St. Elmo. So it's very, very stupid.

It all sounds incredibly dumb. Yeah, it was the idea of the naval commander where the army commander Mustafa wanted to land in a different spot, completely ignore Fort St. Elmo, assault Medina, then Fort St. Angelo and Michel over land. So they could ignore the hardest fort.

This would have made any attack on Fort St. Elmo largely pointless, so they could skip it. He apparently changed his mind when the naval commander insisted that Fort St. Elmo would fall in only a couple of days. It does not. I've heard that one before. Literally any time someone on this show says,

it'll fall in two days or five days, you can bet it's going to be like months. We're just going to roll in. They're going to roll over. It's going to be perfectly all right we're we're just gonna roll in they're gonna roll over it's gonna be perfectly fine we're not gonna have any resistance uh and that but wait it gets worse yeah now first the ottomans finally in position on the crest overlooking fort san elmo had to chisel fighting positions and gun spots out of bare rock while getting shot at when they finally opened fire they they smartly did one thing well, and that is they attacked one wall at a time, massing all of their fire until that wall

would give way. However, even with that, it took nearly a month of constant bombing for the wall facing them to actually give out. But even that was only the beginning with the entire siege grinding to a stalemate. So much of the fort was on fire at any given point it actually helped fort st angelo bring fire support onto the attacking ottomans uh as otherwise it would have no way to see them because you know it's like flashlights existed like this the city was on fire so thoroughly they could use it as like a torch in the middle of the night to bomb the Ottomans. We don't have spotlights, but what we do have are a bunch of thatched roofs that we can light on fire to really light up the night for us.

According to Francisco Balbi, who is a Spanish soldier fighting for the Knights quote, the darkness of the night then became bright as day. Do the vast quantities of artificial fires. So bright indeed, as we could see Fort St. Elmo quite clearly. The gunners at Fort St. Angelo were able to lay on and train their pieces on the advancing Turks who were picked out of the light of the fires. Congratulations, you've played yourself.

Now, this is where Dragut showed up and was given equal command. And as soon as he got there, he's looking around at everything and like what what are you doing this is very stupid see it's a good thing they brought in the the third guy because apparently the first two were just not really uh not really a good brain trust i'm gonna say now probably the dumbest part is by attacking one fort at a time they were being attacked by three forts at a time. And they also left the other forts unblockaded and sieged in any way. That meant the other forts could send men and material to Fort St. Elmo to keep it going, which is what they were doing. the siege the naval commander was terrified of going anywhere near fort st elmo's guns which left the entire open uh open ocean completely free of any kind of enemy so the knights at not

would the knights would wait for night to fall and then simply would float up uh behind fort st elmo and small convoys of boats completely uncontested to reinforce and rebuild the fort from that day's bombing now incredible move i'm gonna go ahead and say like fort from that day's bombing. Now, Dragoot. Incredible move, I'm going to go ahead and say. Like, a siege, but let's not actually siege it. What if we do a siege, but in a peninsula sort of fashion? We leave one side open. I mean, there's four sides, but what if we just do three? That should be fine, right?

We don't need... Yeah, that'd be fine. We have two Navy guys, but we don't need an actual Navy out there, right? No, not at all. Now, so Dragoot fixed this by ordering his own patrol boats to go into the harbor at night as well as to bring more guns to the north and the south of the fort where they could shell it from

three sides rather than just one, which is what he's been doing. In short, he actually turned into a siege. But even with that, the fort held for weeks longer. Virtually everyone inside was wounded in some way or the other two knights were so badly wounded they couldn't stand so they ordered themselves to be strapped to chairs and

then set in front of doors so they could just swing at people with their swords as people came through you know what baller you know i gotta i got i got a lot of respect for the um i can still swing a sword my My arm still works. The, uh, yeah, you know, black night of Monty Python,

uh, and the Holy grail, you know, I've got come back here. I'll fucking bite your ankles off. Got to respect it. Philip, put me in my stabbing chair.

The stabbing chair. Bolt me to my stabbing chair. I wish to hit them with my sword. Scoot me closer. I wish to hit them with my sword scoot me closer i wish to hit them with my sword that would totally be me in like a current kind of situation it's like lash me to my rolly um my rolling office chair and just push me towards the front door and i'll uh i'll deal with it from there strap me to my gamer chair and give me an ar wheel me down the stairs. You don't have to strap me in, man. I'm already stuck to this gamer chair.

Oh, God. Now, after 31 days, the fort finally fell. This cost the knights 1,500 men, all of them dying in defense, but costing the Ottomans at least four times as many as their own. Even Dragoon, the most powerful naval commander the empire had known, got clapped by a cannonball. His head was taken clear off his fucking shoulders the best part was it was probably his own cannonball that did it and you gotta love you gotta love like you know if you get shot today uh you know in a war

you're being shot with like very high tech rifles that you know you can aim precisely if you know what you're doing like back then it's just like i don't know put put a bunch of explosives behind this like solid chunk of something and just hurl it that direction and maybe we'll kill somebody like i imagine this is even before exploding artillery shells so no they were just balls of steel yeah you're just getting like here's a bunch here's a hundred guys you're just getting like a cannonball is just creaming through it and you're just hoping to either not get hit or get hit to a point where you don't even notice it it's like the only options dragoo the drawn sort of islam got clapped by like an illiterate farm kid uh like packing a whole bunch of powder he's not entirely

sure what it is into a tube that was hammered out by another slightly more illiterate farm kid and then packing it full of rocks and shit. Look, I think you and I both know that illiterate farm kids can be a motherfucker sometimes. So yeah, you just give them a tube full of explosives and everything works itself out. Yeah, I paid him off candy. So it worked. Pissed at literally everything that could have gone wrong did mustafa or the heads of every night to be cut off their bodies to be crucified and then chucked into the harbor

where he knew that they would eventually float by the other night positions for them all to see and be scared of however he must have forgot he was dealing with a literal religious militia because not to be outdone by the scale of brutality the knight's grandmaster jean valet ordered every ottoman they had in captivity slave or prisoner of war to be beheaded then he had the heads loaded into cannons and fired at the ottoman army okay which i think is just gonna be mostly pink mist at that point i don't i can't imagine that the head held up i was gonna say like and maybe you know, maybe you kind of put like a little plate behind it so that it kind of

forces it out. But one way or another, you're just really getting like misting when you're on. You're just bathing your gun crews and viscera. Yeah. Like this is why you keep a couple of catapults around to, to hurl. So when you got to hurl a body,

you need some low velocity stuff. So you don't, so you keep the integrityl a body, you need some low velocity stuff. So you don't, so you keep the integrity of the meat together. And so it hits somebody, you know, kill, kill a motherfucker with a motherfucker is what you're going for here. If,

if there's one thing we care about in this podcast, it is the integrity of the meat. Yeah. You gotta, if you're gonna, if you are going to hurl a body at somebody, you can't, you can't obliterate the body you're gonna lose every like all the the psychological trauma that you're trying to do

you're gonna lose out on all of that you gotta put the head in a sabo container of some kind that discards after you fired at the oncoming turks that's what i'm working on currently now because it took so long to capture saint el, it was already at the peak of the summer, which in Malta can easily get above 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Notably, a bad time to be standing around doing war stuff outside. Of course, this led to Ottoman troops to drink the poison wells. And, you know, now they weren't if they weren't dying from flying bits of iron or heat stroke, they're now shooting out their own insides and dropping dead. Dying via bits of brain from your buddy.

Yeah, or like a skull shard that survived from the fired head. Exactly. As the Ottoman army began to get its ass kicked by the sun and with no clean water to speak of, they marched over to start their attack on Birgu and St. Glea strong points, only to discover that the knights had still managed to reinforce and resupply them as well when they were distracted. As the Ottomans got closer, they actually heard church bells and celebrations of the men inside singing prayers at them, which has to be really disheartening if you're the attacker when you roll up on some guys who are supposed to be losing and they're just like having a party you gotta you gotta uh respond with a call to prayer at five in the morning either seeing that this march sucks or thinking that the positions have

been reinforced by way more than just the 600 men that they had been mustafa sent a message to grandmaster valet offering him the same terms he had previously gotten on roads despite the fact that suleiman had ordered no quarter be given. Mustafa's like, you know what? I'm fucking done here. Let's just see if we can take this island over and make these guys move again. If you pack your shit and leave, we'll be cool, but we're keeping

the island. But this time, Grandmaster Valet told him that the only land that he would give the Ottomans was a ditch to throw their dead into. Mind you, this guy's like 70 years old. Gotta, gotta love like 70 is old for this,

this period. So 70 is, it's a rough fucking 70, man. Like a 70 years, 70 years old in the 1500s. You've been a knight your entire life. Like that's a rough looking 70.

That's a dude who's like looking to die he needs to die he's ready for it and fuck you come do it motherfucker yeah now probably really hoping he wouldn't stop to be doing this shit well into july mustafa launched a two-prong attack against sanglia and burgu where the ottomans unfortunately learned that the knights had developed their own version of the fucking Navy Seals. They rolled up and there was a bunch of really badly written books. The knights militiamen, who are called

irregulars sometimes, depending on what you read, but they weren't full knights. They had built a ton of underwater barriers and chucked them into the sea, which had stopped the Ottoman amphibious attack. They create like a traffic jam in the water, just far enough away from the beach where these guys can land.

So when the Ottomans did attempt their seaborne assault against St. Glea, they slammed into those barriers, putting them in place. Then the irregulars who are waiting on the shore armed only with small knives, dove into the ocean, climbed into their ships and began stabbing the living shit out of them. Or, failing that,

hugging them and falling backwards into the water where they drowned them. Oh, I guess because they're wearing all that armor. Yeah, I mean, these guys were, like, specifically very good at swimming. So, like, you know, most people back then probably couldn't swim. These guys just held you underwater

until the fucking bubbles stopped. Now, after these men were destroyed by, I don't know, the core of swamp creatures or whatever, Mustafa sent in 800 of his elite Janissary Corps to finish the sea landing. And that is when the Ottomans discovered that the knights had hidden dozens of cannons at water level under strict order to not fire or reveal themselves until someone floated into point-blank range. When they did, the Janissaries and their ten ships' worth of men were smashed into a

fine paste within seconds by canister shot. Hell yeah. It's around here that I realized that the Knight's defense system was a gritty reboot of Home Alone. And it's one that, deep down, we all want to see. What if Macaulay Culgan had a cannon the wet bandits get dragged into the bathtub while kevin mccallister vents all of his abandonment issues with a knife

call me netflix instead of instead of strapping me to the stabbing chair strap me to the top of the stairs so that i can drop the paint can on their heads when they come through yeah when another assault failed mustafa again pulled his men back and decided to simply shell the fort. By this point, the Bergu and Sanglia had been ringed by about 65 different siege guns, and the result was one if, if not the biggest bombardment in the world that had seen up until that point, with some sources claiming that well over 100,000 cannonballs were lobbed at the two positions. The Ottomans were able to breach the first wall, only again to find out that the knights had planned for it.

When the walls were breached, then the Ottoman infantry poured in, and once inside, they found themselves trapped against barriers in a hallway as the knights had constructed an elaborate obstacle course for them to try to get through, all while funneling them into dead ends where they were subject to constant crossfire and sword attacks from the knights it was the lights out skit from jackass forever they did the uh they did the thing uh at the entry control point where you have to drive like through barriers to get through so makes it forces you to slow down just did that but with like knights yeah and people like slicing down at

them and shooting them at point blank range with muskets and crossbows and if that wasn't bad i know i know like technically we don't gotta hand it but i gotta hand it to the uh to the crusader knights here they uh they had somebody who knew what the fuck they were doing yeah i like i'm johnny knoxville and this is the night's hospitaler as he turns the lights off like that's the first thing that came to my mind was that skit from Jackass Forever where they turn the lights off and then funnel them into the room with like pans hanging from the ceiling

and mouse traps and shit like they just did that instead of drinking horse cum you're drinking out of the like poisoned water well I'm Johnny Knoxville and this is water well it's just like I mean the horse cum comes sterile it's fine there's probably water in there it'll be all right now if that wasn't bad enough the knight cavalry from medina which still had not been taken care of appeared and raided the ottoman supply camp including the

field hospital they slaughtered everyone they could get their hands on which is a little ironic when you consider that they were the knights' hospitaler. Then 11 days... Our hospitals, not their hospitals. Yeah, exactly. 11 days later, the Ottomans snuck up and detonated a mine against the fort's walls, blowing it to shit and pouring infantry into the

breach. Now, by this point, the knights were so shorthanded that anybody who could grab a weapon ran out to defend the hole that had been blown in, I assume an orc from the second Lord of the Rings film. One of these defenders included 71-year-old Grandmaster of the Knights, Valet. And like we said, this isn't 71 years old in 2022 years. This is the 1500s. That is a hard 71 years to live. But he grabbed a pike and began stabbing people in the face, somehow not reducing his bones to a fine powder while doing so and he also apparently had no idea that when the grand masters around the rest of the knights fight harder so after he plugged one breach by stabbing

it he would run around rallying knights um and like getting them to fight harder and harder all while probably also fighting off a heart attack. I was going to say, God bless him, man. If ever I had a general that would run out there in front of the battle with us. 71 years old. 71 years old, just with his body riddled with so many fucking parasites, nobody can count. Probably he's been stabbed or shot a couple of times in those years.

Still going at it. That man is gnarled. Yeah, he looks like an old tree, probably. This is the beginning of the Ents, right here. You become old enough that you just turn into a slow-moving tree. Yeah. Now, the town elders

of the area wanted the knights to abandon the area and said pull their forces into Fort St. Angelo. But Valet was starting to think that the Ottomans were getting desperate and losing the will to fight as things got worse. And he was proven correct when they began to roll up some old-timey siege engines

like rams and towers that had seriously fallen out of favor since the expansion of gunpowder in Kansas and the military. But that told him that he had burnt through all of his ammo like Mustafa had, or the cavalry raid had destroyed much of it. These siege engines were countered immediately by night sappers who would tunnel under their own walls, set mines, and then blow them up under the Ottoman

army as they got closer. I don't even know how Mustafa felt at this point, but after suffering another loss to a half-dead old man with a pointy stick, he turned his army around and planned an assault on Medina where he could take out the cavalry. But by now, it was the end of August. And his real goal was to make Medina his winter quarter. So he was actually going to try to stay there over winter. And this almost certainly would have been successful as Medina had been largely unsupplied and hardly defended outside of a few cavalry. So an attack on it would have fallen quite quickly, though Mustafa is clearly not so good at his job, so maybe not. But then the defenders again hit them with another trick. The cavalry inside the fort knew if we do this, if we let these guys stroll up on us, we're going to lose. We need to make them

think that there's more of us in here and we have all of the supplies that we could possibly need for another siege. So as the Ottomans stake their camp down on the far side of the artillery fire, way outside the range of night artillery in preparation for the coming siege the defenders loaded their cannons and let them rip anyway obviously these landed nowhere near the onman army they they also had virtually no ammo only like five shots per cannon but their goal was to trick the onmans into thinking like wow look at these guys firing pointlessly into the air with no chance of hitting us they must have a lot of fucking ammo in there otherwise why would they be wasting it so these guys have they have sappers

they have special ops and now they have psyops too this is yeah this is an impressive kind of uh situation that the knights templar got going on sorry Sorry, the Knights Hoplite. Hospitalers. Hospitalers. Yeah, I mean, it kind of tells me that at this point, Mustafa was done. They literally fired two or three rounds of ammo

wildly into the air as a trick. Against a motherfucker? Yeah, he took it as like a big middle finger, like being fired out of a cannon at him. And this gave him pause as the, as the Ottoman commanders continued to bitch and complain with one another, though,

Drago was dead by now, um, about what to do about this. Apparently well supplied and dug in garrison. That's when something really changed. That is an 8,000 man relief force under spanish command finally showed up to the island to reinforce it now mustafa looking around and seeing that well three quarters of my army is dead wounded or currently shitting out their own blood

i should probably go home at least he found you know i'm glad took a while, but I'm glad that he saw that like, hey, maybe I should stop feeding people into a meat grinder now. Well, it's because he saw that he was going to lose. It wasn't that the meat grinder was no longer what he wanted or what he was prepared to do, but a meat grinder that he would win. And now with the Spanish showing up, he would have lost because he showed up with 40,000 or so men, but a quarter of them or three quarters of them were dead or not able to fight at this point from catching a cannon powered tooth to the skull from a fired severed head. Or they drank the fucking water that had dead animal ice cubes in it. And their insides are tearing themselves apart but he's like i i gotta go home is it we're done here yeah but it wouldn't be that

easy uh because as mustafa got aboard a boat he left his men behind to like pack everything up like yeah you break down the camp we're getting out of here so mustafa safely sails away however the crew the spanish crusaders who just showed up like, well, we're not going to let them do that. And charged into the Ottoman army who was just trying to pack their bags while they were trying to retreat and killed almost anyone who wasn't good, like fast enough to get the fuck out of there. Now, can't can't really can't really blame them. No, you don't get to leave just because you're packing your bags. You've been here for three months. We're not friends. Yeah, this isn't like, oh, we've set up a commune and it's not working,

so we're all just going to go back to our normal lives. The Ottomans have been rejected from the polycule. Yeah, you're not being rejected from the polycule. You fucking murdered a bunch of people. Yeah. Now, the siege was obviously bad for the ottomans but it was virtually apocalyptic for the island of malta a full one quarter of the civilians on the island were dead virtually everything was reduced to corpses and rubble and the knights lost a third of their men as well now malta stayed under knight

control if you want can you guess when like without looking it up, how long this occurred is going to be wild. How long did these knights run things? I'm going to say 1872. Well, they surrendered to Napoleon. They surrendered the island without a fight to Napoleon. During the, like, after, I believe he was consul at the time he wasn't i don't think he's the emperor yet but yeah now didn't he get uh exiled to malta isn't that one

of his no he was saint helena and uh yeah i mean he was he was exiled to two different islands uh but saint helena is arguably the more famous one i'd say um now arguably the hero of the battle is grandmaster Valet, who I'm sure most people probably assume that he went on to seize an incredible amount of political power because he just saved, quote unquote, saved the Christian world.

Maybe get the knights in as kings or something. But nope. Three years after the battle, he died after being accidentally shot by a friend while they were out hunting. I cannot confirm or deny whether Dick Cheney was the Grandmaster's friend or not. But yeah, that's how he dies. Not that that's important.

I just thought it was weird. Like he survived all of that, got shot accidentally in the back by a friend while hunting. Is this the 70-year-old guy? Yeah, he'd be like 74 at this point. Hey, you know, I still managed to die of violence. Just stupider violence. Accidental surprise violence. Now, that is the great

siege of Malta. Francis, we do a thing on this show called Questions from the Legion. If you'd like to ask us a question from the Legion, donate to the show. Ask us via message or a ping on Patreon or the Discord. we occasionally ask them as well today's question from legion is as podcasters i assume you listen to a lot of podcasts

what are some things um what are some things you occasionally hear while listening to podcasts that pisses you off um i actually have a really good one for this because i just experienced it like today um i was listening to a show i'm not going to say which one it was. Normally, I listen to shows like ours. We don't work for Spotify or a network of some kind. We don't run ads. 99% of the shows I listen to, obviously, Your Show, Trash Future, Punta Vista, Knowledge Fight, shows like that I really, really enjoy. None of them have ads. And if they do have ads, it's like our ad at the beginning of the show

where it's like, maybe donate to the show. But someone recommended this. I'll say it was a history podcast to me, but it was one of the big network ones. And every episode is like 45 minutes long, but 20 minutes of that is fucking commercials.

And it's unlistenable. It's the first time I've tried to listen to a show like that in forever. Probably when I listened to fucking Serial back when podcasting was new. But I have never heard so many ads on a show. It's 50% ads. It's a complete unlistenable mess. And they're all over the place. They'll have an ad at the top of the show, go into the show's intro, ad, come back from the ad. It's horrible. I could not listen to it. I think I had... Back when I did Commute and I listened to a lot more podcasts, I listened to StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson. And, you know, he wasn't as annoying and pedantic as he is on Twitter, which we all hate. But it was the same thing. It was ads all the time.

The thing that I dislike, and I briefly listened to one of those murder, you know, one of the murder podcasts, right? Where it's like two women talk about, you know, breathlessly talking about, you know, a serial killer or whatever. And the thing that pissed me off about that, and I know my show has like, we have like 10 minutes of dad chat in the beginning. That is to be expected at this point.

People like the dad chat. It's just me and Naples shooting before we get to whatever we're talking about but this one it was like a podcast that was like an hour and a half long which already i want to check out of that i don't like any podcast more than you know beyond like an hour ish uh and then also it was they would just bullshit for like 45 minutes and it's like i don't you are a podcast that is about something specific. I need you to talk about that something specific. Or at least, as Nate does, say, hey, if you want to skip our dad chat, go to this time.

Yeah, I try to stay on topic most of the time. But every once in a while, we go in like wild tangents. But also like... No, not for 45 minutes. That's ridiculous. No, that's not a tangent. That's a whole podcast episode. Exactly.

So that's the thing that always irritates me is, one, like you said, the ads. I hate ads. And there's no good way to do an ad. It's just always jarring and takes you out of whatever you're doing. I'm glad we've never done ads i toyed with the idea for at one point it always sounded like it was going to turn into exactly what what you're saying and like it was just like you can make like way more money it's like but i'll have a bad i'll have a bad product and unfortunately when we were both emailed by like people that

work for spotify and i remember that like like oh yeah you could uh put six to eight ads in your show is what we recommend like six to eight ads in an hour of podcast that's fucking insane yeah that's too much that's too much too much talking has to uh has to go on there and that and and again it, it really takes the flow away from the conversation. And I don't, I don't have the grifter gene inside of my head. I can't, you know, throw away something that I've worked on and that I like, and that other people like just to make more money. Um, you know, that, that being said, if somebody wants to buy my podcast for $10 million, it is for sale for that, that price. I feel like I would sell it for $10 million. I feel like that's fine. Speaking of that, plug your show. Yeah. So notably not making $10 million

yet for me. We have What a Hell of a Way to Die. It's a podcast about tangentially about military stuff at this point. Nate and I are just old dudes now and we just uh kind of talk about that but we also talk military stuff uh i get military writers i get people on we talk about army shit but from like not a weird right wing chud kind of mentality we don't like the army and we talk about how much we don't like the army a lot so if you're into that what a hell of a way to die give money to the patreon buy stuff from the store it's all there there. And while you're doing that, check out my books. I have a new one out called The Frontier Corps. If you have Kindle Unlimited, you can get it for free.

And I've heard it called a book. But yeah, seriously, if you like military sci-fi, check it out. Like I said, it could be literally free. But Francis, as always, it's always a joy to have you on the donk cast.

Um, and until next time, don't siege Malta, uh, dump corpses in your local water supply to keep away the Turks.