Malta

• 1. Introduction

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  Malta sits in the Mediterranean Sea between Sicily and North Africa, an archipelago 80 km south of Italy, 284 km east of Tunisia, and 333 km north of Libya. Its capital, Valletta, is the smallest capital city in the European Union by both area and population. The whole country covers just 316 square kilometres, making it the world's tenth-smallest by area and the ninth-most densely populated. Some sources treat it as a single urban region and call it a city-state. People have lived here since at least 6500 BC. Across those millennia the islands passed through the hands of one power after another, each leaving a mark on the language, the faith, and the stone. How did hunter-gatherers reach a place that demanded a hundred-kilometre sea crossing? Why did a Holy Roman Emperor hand these rocks to a religious order for the rent of a single falcon? And how did a colony bombed nearly to ruin end up wearing a medal on its own flag? The answers run through honey, sieges, and shipwrecks.

• 2. Place Of Honey

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  The name Melítē, the ancient Greek root behind Malta, literally means "place of honey" or "sweetness." One theory holds the Greeks named the island after its endemic subspecies of bees. The same name was shared in antiquity by the Croatian island Mljet. Other scholars trace the name to an original Phoenician or Punic word, Maleth, meaning "haven," "refuge," or "port." That reading points to the Grand Harbour and the settlement at Cospicua, founded after a sea level rise in the 10th century BC separated the Maltese islands and flooded their original coastal homes. The English form arrived from Italian and Maltese, by way of medieval Arabic Māliṭā and classical Latin. Malta is attested in English from the late 16th century. English Bibles long preferred the Vulgate Latin form Melita, including the 1611 King James Version, while the 1525 Tyndale Bible used Melite instead. The 1611 translators were writing about a place whose deeper past would only be revealed much later, in a cave on the main island.

• 3. The Long Crossing

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  Latnija Cave, excavated under the Maltese archaeologist Eleanor Scerri, held hearths, stone tools, and a wide range of animal bones, including now-extinct indigenous red deer, fish, marine mammals, and edible marine gastropods. The Mesolithic hunter-gatherers who left them likely came from Sicily around 6500 BC. To reach Malta they crossed roughly 100 km of open water, the longest known sea crossing by hunter-gatherers in the Mediterranean. Earlier theories blamed these first arrivals for wiping out the dwarf hippos, giant swans, and dwarf elephants. Recent work suggests those animals died out thousands of years earlier, and none were found alongside the earliest known hunter-gatherers. The claim that Neanderthals occupied the island is widely rejected. Neolithic farmers, also from Sicily, are thought to have arrived by around 5400 BC, growing cereals, raising livestock, and worshipping a fertility figure. Their successors would raise structures that still stand today.

• 4. Temples And Cart Ruts

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  Around 3500 BC, megalithic temple builders on Gozo raised the Ġgantija temples, some of the oldest free-standing structures in the world. Other early temples rose at Ħaġar Qim and Mnajdra, built in a distinctive trefoil design and used from 4000 to 2500 BC. Tentative evidence suggests animal sacrifices were made to a goddess of fertility, whose statue now sits in the National Museum of Archaeology in Valletta. Equidistant grooves cut across several sites are called "cart tracks" or "cart ruts," the most prominent at Misraħ Għar il-Kbir, nicknamed "Clapham Junction." Wooden-wheeled carts may have worn them into the soft limestone. The temple culture vanished around 2500 BC, possibly from famine or disease. After that the islands lay depopulated for decades until Bronze Age immigrants arrived, a people who cremated their dead and built smaller dolmens. The similarity of Maltese dolmens to Sicilian ones again pointed back across the channel. The next visitors came not to settle the land but to trade across it.

• 5. Phoenician To Roman

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  Phoenician traders colonised the islands under the name Ann sometime after 1000 BC, a stop on routes running from the eastern Mediterranean to Cornwall. Their seat of government sat at Mdina, and their primary port at Cospicua on the Grand Harbour, which they called Maleth. After Phoenicia fell in 332 BC, Carthage took control, and the islanders cultivated olives and carob and made textiles. During the First Punic War the Roman general Marcus Atilius Regulus conquered the island in harsh fighting, only for it to fall back to Carthage. It was taken again in 218 BC during the Second Punic War by the consul Tiberius Sempronius Longus. Malta became a Foederata Civitas, exempt from tribute and Roman law, within the province of Sicily. Its capital was renamed Melita. In AD 58 Paul the Apostle and Luke the Evangelist were shipwrecked here, and Paul stayed three months preaching the Christian faith. The Acts of the Apostles names the island Melitene. When the Roman Empire split for the last time in 395, Malta followed Sicily into the Western Empire, and harder times soon came.

• 6. Arabs And Normans

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  In 870 the Arabs conquered Malta after a violent struggle against the defending Byzantines, an event tied to the conquest of Sicily that began in 827. The chronicler al-Himyari records that the invaders, led first by Halaf al-Hadim and then by Sawada ibn Muhammad, pillaged the island and left it nearly uninhabited until Arabs from Sicily recolonised it in 1048-1049. The Arab Agricultural Revolution brought new irrigation, cotton, and fruits, and the Siculo-Arabic language took root here, eventually evolving into Maltese. The Normans attacked in 1091 under Roger I of Sicily, folding Malta into the Kingdom of Sicily and restoring the Catholic Church as the state religion. Contrary to legend, Roger did not tear a strip from his red-and-white banner to create the Maltese flag. King Tancred made Malta a fief and installed a Count of Malta in 1192. A mass expulsion of Arabs came in 1224, and in 1249 Frederick II decreed that all remaining Muslims be expelled or convert. Rule then passed to Aragon, and with it came new masters who would change the islands' fortunes entirely.

• 7. Knights And A Falcon

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  On the 23rd of March 1530, Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, gave the islands to the Knights Hospitaller under the Frenchman Philippe Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, in perpetual lease for an annual tribute of a single Maltese Falcon. These knights, the Order of St John, had been driven from Rhodes by the Ottoman Empire in 1522. They ruled Malta and Gozo from 1530 to 1798. In 1551 around 5,000 people of Gozo were enslaved by Barbary pirates and taken to North Africa. In 1565 the knights, led by Jean Parisot de Valette, withstood the Great Siege of Malta by the Ottomans, repelling them with Portuguese, Spanish, and Maltese help. Afterward they strengthened the fortifications and built a new city, Valletta, named for Valette. Watchtowers rose along the coast, the Wignacourt, Lascaris, and De Redin towers, named for the Grand Masters who ordered them. The knights' power had declined by the late 1700s. Their reign ended when Napoleon captured Malta in 1798 on his way to Egypt, and a new struggle over the islands was about to begin.

• 8. From Empire To Republic

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  Napoleon resided at the Palazzo Parisio in Valletta during 12-the 18th of June 1798, abolishing feudal rights and slavery and reorganising administration before sailing for Egypt. The French garrison he left grew unpopular for its hostility to Catholicism and its pillaging of churches, and the Maltese rebelled. Britain blockaded the islands, and General Claude-Henri Belgrand de Vaubois surrendered the French forces in 1800. In 1814, under the Treaty of Paris, Malta officially became part of the British Empire. After the Suez Canal opened in 1869, its position between Gibraltar and Egypt made it a key stop on the route to India. During the First World War it was called the Nurse of the Mediterranean for the wounded soldiers it housed. On the 7th of June 1919 riots over the cost of living, known as Sette Giugno, ended with British troops killing four. In the Second World War Malta endured heavy bombing, and on the 15th of April 1942 King George VI awarded it the George Cross on a collective basis, a depiction of which now appears on the flag. Malta gained independence on the 21st of September 1964 and became a republic on the 13th of December 1974. It joined the European Union on the 1st of May 2004 and the eurozone on the 1st of January 2008, and today three of its sites stand on the UNESCO World Heritage List.