Hospitaller Malta

• 1. Introduction

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  Hospitaller Malta began with one of the strangest rental agreements in history. In 1530, Emperor Charles V handed the islands of Malta and Gozo to a displaced military order in exchange for a single Maltese falcon delivered each year on All Souls' Day to his representative, the Viceroy of Sicily. For the Order of Saint John, recently driven out of Rhodes after a crushing Ottoman siege, this was not a triumphant homecoming. It was a consolation prize. Malta was small, exposed, and surrounded by enemies. What happened next spans nearly three centuries: a golden age of art and architecture, one of the most dramatic sieges in Mediterranean history, a brief and peculiar Caribbean empire, and a slow unraveling that ended when Napoleon arrived and the knights barely lifted a sword in their own defense. Who were these knights? Why did a small island become the focal point of a struggle between Christian Europe and the Ottoman Empire? And how did a bankrupt military order manage to outlast empires, pirates, earthquakes, and revolutions before finally losing the place they had defended so ferociously?

• 2. The Falcon Fee

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  Seven years of wandering preceded the Order's arrival in Malta. After the Ottoman siege of Rhodes in 1522, the Knights of Saint John had no permanent home and moved from place to place across Europe. When Charles V finally offered them Malta, Gozo, and the North African port of Tripoli, the arrangement was formalized with the most theatrical of annual payments: a single Maltese falcon, to be sent on All Souls' Day to the Viceroy of Sicily. The Order was technically a vassal state of the Kingdom of Sicily, though its actual independence would grow considerably over the following centuries.

  The knights settled first in the town of Birgu, rebuilding the ancient fortress there into what became Fort Saint Angelo. New buildings went up, the town's defenses were reinforced, and the Order began minting its own coins. The symbols of a state were taking shape on a very small island.

  That arrangement with Tripoli proved short-lived. In July 1551, Ottoman forces probed the harbor at Fort Saint Angelo, found it too well defended, and then attacked Mdina and Gozo before finally capturing Tripoli in August of that year. The loss stung, but it also concentrated the Order's attention on strengthening what remained. Forts Saint Elmo and Saint Michael were constructed, and the town of Senglea grew up around the latter. A natural disaster compounded these military pressures: sometime between 1551 and 1556, a tornado tore through Malta, destroying at least four of the Order's galleys and killing 600 people. It remains the worst natural disaster ever recorded on the island and one of the deadliest tornadoes in history.

  Charles V offered the Order a third territory in 1553: the city of Mahdia in what is now Tunisia. The Order's own commission concluded that it would cost too much to hold, and the offer was declined. The emperor responded by ordering the Viceroy of Sicily, Juan de Vega, to burn Mahdia rather than leave it for Muslim forces, and de Vega punished the Order's refusal by cutting off wheat exports to Malta. Grandmaster Sengle brought in the engineer Vincenzo Vogo to upgrade the island's mills so the population could survive without imported grain.

• 3. The Great Siege

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  In 1565, Suleiman sent an invasion force of roughly 40,000 men to drive the Order from Malta. They faced approximately 700 knights and 8,000 soldiers. The odds were staggering, and the early weeks of the siege confirmed what those odds suggested. Most of the cities were destroyed. About half the knights were killed. On the 18th of August, Grand Master Jean Parisot de Valette faced a council urging him to abandon Birgu and Senglea and retreat to Fort Saint Angelo. He refused.

  The Viceroy of Sicily delayed sending reinforcements, apparently paralyzed by orders from Philip II of Spain that left the decision ambiguous enough to be his own responsibility. A wrong call could expose Sicily and Naples to Ottoman attack. He had, notably, left his own son with de Valette, which makes his hesitation all the more striking. He held back until the battle had nearly resolved itself through the unaided efforts of the garrison.

  On the 23rd of August came what proved to be the besiegers' last serious assault. The wounded joined the defense. And yet the Ottoman position was itself deteriorating. With the exception of Fort Saint Elmo, the fortifications still stood. The garrison had repaired breaches through the night. Ammunition and food were running low on the Ottoman side, and disease had spread through their crowded quarters over the brutal summer months. A significant blow had landed on the 23rd of June, when the skilled corsair and Ottoman admiral Dragut was killed. The commanders Piyale Pasha and Mustafa Pasha, by contrast, were judged careless: they had a substantial fleet that they used decisively on only one occasion, and they made no attempt to intercept Sicilian reinforcements.

  On the 1st of September the Ottomans made their final effort. It was feeble. When word reached them that Sicilian reinforcements had landed at Mellieħa Bay, they broke off the siege without knowing the force was actually very small. They left on the 8th of September. When the dust settled, the Hospitallers had 600 men still capable of bearing arms. Of the Ottoman army at its peak of roughly 40,000, only about 15,000 eventually returned to Constantinople.

  The siege was later commemorated in frescoes by Matteo Perez d'Aleccio in the Grandmaster's Palace in Valletta. Four of his original oil modellos, painted between 1576 and 1581, can still be found in the Cube Room of the Queen's House at Greenwich in London. The victory is sometimes described as the last occasion in which a force of knights won a decisive military engagement.

• 4. Valletta and the Golden Age

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  After the siege, the Order chose permanence. A new capital was built and named after the Grand Master who had refused to surrender: Valletta became the Order's headquarters in 1571 and remains Malta's capital to this day. For the next two centuries, the islands went through what historians describe as a Golden Age, marked by a surge in arts, architecture, and improvement in Maltese society.

  Water infrastructure came early. Between 1610 and 1615, the Wignacourt Aqueduct was constructed to carry water from Dingli and Rabat to Valletta. It remained in use until the early twentieth century, and most of its arches are still standing.

  Fortifications expanded across both islands through the seventeenth century. Large sections of Gozo's Cittadella were rebuilt between 1599 and 1622. The Grand Harbour area gained the Floriana Lines and Santa Margherita Lines in the 1630s and 1640s. The Cottonera Lines were added around the Santa Margherita Lines between 1670 and 1680, though lack of funds left them unfinished for years. Fort Ricasoli was built to guard the harbour entrance, and both Fort Saint Elmo and Fort Saint Angelo were reinforced. Coastal watch towers spread outward from the capital: Grand Master Alof de Wignacourt built a series of six bastioned towers, additional towers were added under Grandmaster Lascaris, and more again under his successor de Redin. The last coastal tower, Isopu Tower, was built in 1667 during the reign of Nicolas Cotoner.

  The eighteenth century brought Baroque architecture to the fore, most closely associated with two Portuguese Grandmasters: António Manoel de Vilhena and Manuel Pinto da Fonseca. De Vilhena remodeled Mdina in the Baroque style and added Fort Manoel and the Manoel Theatre. He also gave the developing town of Floriana the honorary title of Borgo Vilhena. During Pinto's reign from 1741 to 1773, notable Baroque structures including the Auberge de Castille and the Valletta Waterfront took shape.

  In 1693, an earthquake damaged many buildings on the island, particularly in Mdina. The old cathedral there, originally built during the Norman occupation of Malta, was demolished and a new Baroque cathedral construction began in 1697.

• 5. Naval Power and Corsairing

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  From 1530 to 1798, the Order waged a sustained naval campaign against Ottoman shipping in the Mediterranean, reaching its peak intensity between 1660 and 1675. This was the Maltese corso: a systematic practice of harassing Ottoman vessels, capturing Muslim sailors as slaves, and seizing goods. It became a significant source of income for the Order and a source of employment for the local Maltese population.

  In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the Order's navy was at its peak. Its ships joined other European fleets in formal naval engagements, including the action of the 28th of September 1644 and the Battle of the Dardanelles in 1656. Earlier, in 1571, the Order had participated in the Battle of Lepanto under the command of John of Austria. Corsairing remained an important part of the Maltese economy until the early 1700s, when its commercial and strategic role began to fade.

  The Order's reach at one point extended far beyond the Mediterranean. On the 21st of May 1651, it acquired four islands in the Caribbean: Saint Barthélemy, Saint Christopher, Saint Croix, and Saint Martin. These were purchased from the dissolved French Company of the American Islands. The islands were administered under the governorship of Phillippe de Longvilliers de Poincy until his death. In 1665 all four were sold to the French West India Company. The episode made the Order of Saint John the smallest state to colonize the Americas. It was also a brief and isolated venture: when those Caribbean islands passed back to French hands, the Order's presence outside the Mediterranean ended entirely.

• 6. Internal Crises and Sovereignty

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  The politics of Hospitaller Malta were not always between the Order and external enemies. In 1574, Pope Gregory XIII sent Pietro Dusina to Malta to mediate between the Grandmaster and the Bishop, establishing a Roman Inquisition there that replaced the older medieval inquisition previously run by the Bishop of Palermo.

  In 1581, a more dramatic internal rupture occurred. A dispute between the General Convent of the Order and Grandmaster Jean de la Cassière escalated into outright mutiny. La Cassière was locked inside Fort Saint Angelo, and the knight Mathurin Romegas was elected in his place. Pope Gregory XIII sent the envoy Gaspare Visconti to resolve the crisis, summoning both la Cassière and Romegas to Rome. Romegas died within a week of arriving. La Cassière was restored to his position but then also died within a month in Rome, ending the standoff through attrition. Hugues Loubenx de Verdalle was elected Grandmaster in January 1582.

  A more constitutional conflict came in 1753, when Grandmaster Pinto formally proclaimed the sovereignty of the Order over Malta, challenging the nominal authority of the Kingdom of Sicily under King Charles V. The dispute was resolved on the 26th of November 1754, when relations between Sicily and the Order returned to normal. From that point, Sicily exercised no practical control over the Maltese islands, and Malta under the Order functioned as a sovereign state in all but name.

  The 1749 Conspiracy of the Slaves added another layer to this picture of internal instability: Turkish slaves held by the Order had been planning to revolt and assassinate Grandmaster Pinto, but their plan leaked before it could be executed and was suppressed.

• 7. Decline and Expulsion

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  The final decades of the eighteenth century brought compounding crises. Pinto's lavish governance had drained the Order's finances and made it unpopular with the Maltese. In 1775, during the reign of Francisco Ximénez de Tejada, a revolt known as the Rising of the Priests broke out. Rebels captured Fort Saint Elmo and Saint James Cavalier before the uprising was suppressed. Some of its leaders were executed; others were imprisoned or exiled.

  In 1792, the French Revolution delivered the decisive financial blow. The revolutionary French government seized all the Order's properties and revenues in France, pushing an already bankrupt institution into severe crisis. When Napoleon arrived in Malta in June 1798, the Order possessed enough fortifications to resist a prolonged siege. The knights chose not to fight. They surrendered almost without resistance, and the French occupied Malta.

  The occupation lasted until 1800, when Maltese revolutionaries aided by Great Britain forced the French out. Malta became a British protectorate. The Treaty of Amiens in 1802 specified that the islands should be returned to the Order, but Britain did not comply. When the new Grandmaster Giovanni Tommasi demanded that British Civil Commissioner Alexander Ball hand back the Grandmaster's Palace in Valletta, Ball responded that Britain was authorised to keep troops on the island because some powers were still not recognizing Malta's independence, and that the palace could not be vacated. Malta formally became a British colony under the Treaty of Paris in 1814 and remained so until independence in 1964.

  The Order itself dispersed across Europe after losing Malta. Its last formal territorial possession, the Principality of Heitersheim, was annexed by the Grand Duchy of Baden just months before the Holy Roman Empire dissolved on the 12th of June 1806. By the early nineteenth century, the Order had redirected its purpose toward humanitarian and religious work, and in 1834 it established its headquarters in its former embassy in Rome, where the Sovereign Military Order of Malta remains to this day.