Napoleon's Egypt: Invading The Middle East - Reenactor.ru

10 NAPOLEON’S EGYPTfounded in Jerusalem and a fixture of the short-lived Crusader kingdoms in theLevant before the Muslims forced them to the western islands, were a holdoverfrom a feudal, chivalric, and religious past. Now they were on the verge of beingfinished as a military force, victims of the Enlightenment.Bonaparte opened negotiations with the fortress capital of Valletta, offeringto buy off the Knights. Faced with vastly superior French forces, the GrandMaster negotiated for himself a comfortable retirement and then opened hisdoors to Bonaparte, who thus took one of the more impregnable fortresses inEurope without firing a shot at it. Bonaparte later remarked, “The place certainlypossessed immense physical means of resistance, but no moral strengthwhatever. The Knights did nothing shameful; nobody is obliged to perform impossibilities.”17 Captain Moiret said that he and others in the advance guard enteredValetta on 12 June, and the next day the troops from the fleet followedthem. He, too, felt that Valetta, the chief town and port of northeastern Malta,should have been able to hold out far longer. “We were a little surprised,”Moiret admitted, “to find ourselves in possession of so fortified a city.” Unlikehis general, he branded the defenders poor soldiers, badly led.What he did not say was that about half the Knights were French, and mostof them had refused to fight. In addition, when the revolutionary governmentcame to power after 1789, it gradually took property and wealth away from theold aristocracy and the Church. Since the Knights had received support fromthese sources, the French Revolution had fatally weakened their financial position.Bonaparte put Hompesch on a pension in Germany and offered many ofthe older French Knights the opportunity to return to France with a stipend.The Knights were not so much defeated as bargained down to surrender. Thejunior cavalry officer Nicolas Philibert Desvernois, from Lons-le-Saunier nearGeneva, estimated the total cost to France at 3 million francs.During the week before the French departed, Bonaparte set up a local administrationand Republican constitution, declared Malta a French dependency, andarranged for students to go to France. He also took with him the younger Knights,incorporating them into his army. He closed all the churches and had their goldand silver treasures melted down for bullion and appropriated the treasury of theKnights. Captain Say, who wrote the earliest published memoir of the expedition,observed, “The possession of that island assures control of the commerce of theLevant.” (The “Levant,” or the “rising,” refers to the southern shores of the easternMediterranean, the place where, from a European point of view, the sun rises.)Bonaparte had the irons of the Turkish and Arab slaves kept by the Knightsbroken, and boarded them on his vessels with a view toward releasing them in