The Great Continental Gallivant, Part the Fourth: Malta

So, class, who can tell me about the Great Siege of Malta? Anyone? Anyone? Buehler?
No?
Can anyone tell me about the Siege of Malta during World War II? Hmmmm?
No?
Can anyone here tell me what Malta is?
No, Mr. Larkin, it is not a drink commonly served in soda fountains.
Well, I see we shall have to start from the start and begin at the beginning. [puts on lecturer’s cap and gown]

Malta is a tiny, tiny island in the southern Mediterranean, about 120 square miles if you include the island of Gozo off the northern coast. It possesses a heroic and ancient past, with settlements dating back to the Neolithic Age. In fact, the island possess the world’s oldest free-standing structures: the temple complexes at Ġgantija and Ħaġar Qim, which date to between 3600 and 3200 BCE (as a bit of comparison, Stonehenge was built around 2300 BCE). These temple complexes were erected by the first settlers of Malta, who probably came from Sicily. These settlers were also the first in a long line of possessors of Malta who would be conquered by some greater power. The island became a Greek colony, then a Phoenician one, and then a Carthaginian one, and then passed into the hands of Rome after the Punic Wars. It was on Malta that, according to Acts, Saint Paul was shipwrecked during his journey to Rome, and the Maltese still commemorate the Feast of the Shipwreck every February 10th with great festivity. After the fall of the Roman empire, Malta became part of the Islamic Empire under the Aghlabid caliphate, before being conquered by the Normans in 1091. After that year, Malta flitted between various famous and obscure European potentates, from the Duchy of Swabia and the House of Hohenstaufen to the Kingdom of England, until it was seized as a permanent fief by the Kingdom of Aragon (today’s Catalonia) in 1283.
In 1530, Malta was sold to the Order of the Knights of Saint John the Baptist, also known as the Hospitallers, the last of the Crusading Orders, who had in 1522 been expelled from their fortress-island of Rhodes by the rapidly expanding Ottoman Empire. The Knights of St. John took over the island and turned it into a fortress like Rhodes, and proceeded to use the island as a base of operations in attacks against Ottoman trade and settlements. The Order’s conflict with the Ottoman Empire culminated in the Great Siege of 1565, when an Ottoman army of about 36,000 troops supported by around 12,000 laborers and slaves besieged the Knights in their strongholds on Malta. At that point, the Knights numbered no more than 550, as their order had been decimated not only by their defeat in 1559 at the Battle of Djerba, but also by the Wars of Religion in Germany and by Henry VIII of England’s declaration of separation from the Catholic Church, events which almost totally abolished the German and English forces of the Order. To support themselves in the Siege, the Order conscripted all of the male Maltese population into the army, and were also supported by small reinforcements of soldiers from Spain and Italy, as well as a number of adventurers who came to Malta seeking glory and loot. The defenders numbered, in total, somewhere between 6,100 and 8,500 men. Accurate figures are difficult to obtain, given both the scarcity of extant accounts of the Siege, and also given the chroniclers’ habit of exaggerating the numbers of the Ottomans and reducing the number of the defenders so as to add to the sense of danger and drama.
The Siege began on May 18th of 1565, and battle quite literally did not cease until Spanish reinforcements arrived on September 8th. Historians have described the Siege as the last, dying gasp of crusading spirit, as it not only marked the beginning of the Ottoman Empire’s decline, but also the last battle where the Knights of St. John, or indeed any military-religious order, participated. After the Siege, the Order built the citadel of Valletta, named after the Grandmaster of the Order at the time of the Siege, Jean Parisot de la Valette. This city and all of its fortifications and building still stands, in very nearly the same form as it did when it was built in the 1570s, and is today the capital of Malta.
The island slipped out of history for the next 200 years, until the Napoleonic Wars, when it was captured by the French and then by the British, who added it to the Empire following the war. It remain a colonial possession under the British until 1974, and was during World War II assaulted by the German and Italian air forces. In 2004 Malta joined the EU, and adopted the Euro in 2008.
Maltese culture is, as one might expect, a mish-mash resulting from many centuries of foreign possession. The official languages are English and Maltese, a patois of about 70% Arabic and 30% Italian, and Italian is also widely understood and spoken. The food has been strongly influenced by North Africa and the Middle East, favoring spicier dishes with an emphasis on rice as the grain of choice rather than wheat. The Maltese are 99% Catholic, with only a very, very small Protestant community making up the difference, and religion is a deeply rooted part of daily life. The island is chock full of places to go, see, and experience, and my three full days there were not nearly enough for it all.
I arrived in Malta at 12:40pm via the International Airport in the middle of the island. The Airport is about the same size as South Bend’s, and one of the first clues I had to the size of the island was the fact that the airport and its runways took up a noticeable portion of my map. The airport, like so many of its European kindred, is located far away from civilization, in this case 25 minutes by bus. The Maltese buses deserve recognition for being quite possibly the most unique form of transportation on the European continent. They are nearly all 50-60 years old, relics that once served the United Kingdom and which were moved to Malta during its time as a British possession. The buses now sport bright orange and white paint, and the interiors are plastered with religious postcards and icons, while rosaries take the place of fuzzy dice in the adornment of the rear-view mirrors. The buses are also quite cheap, and one can travel the length and breadth of the island for 50 cents.
I took one bus on a jouncing ride through the countryside to the Valletta bus terminal, then changed buses and went to the suburb of Sliema, which was were my hostel was located. However, the hostel’s reception desk was closed due to renovations and my room key, which was supposed to be located in an envelope on the front desk was nowhere in sight. I was informed that the reception would be open the next morning, and so I checked in to a cheap (35 Euros per night) hotel for that night, and resolved to apply at the hostel again the next morning. Regrettably, the delay meant that I had wasted two hours which I had expected to use for sight-seeing, derailing my plans a little. I had intended to spend my arrival day in Valletta, going to museums and inspecting fortresses, then go inland to the cities of Mdina and Vittoriosa on the second day, then to the island of Gozo on the third day. I scratched my plans Gozo, and decided to go for a long walk along Marsamxett Harbor to clear my mind and calm my nerves. The day was absolutely stunning, 73 degrees Fahrenheit with a breeze coming off the Mediterranean and nary a cloud in the sky. My walk, however, took twice as long as I expected, since Marsamxett Harbor is filled with inlets and marinas along which my path wended, and I arrived in Valletta as the sun was beginning to set. I walked through the city a little, out to the western point of the peninsula, on which crouches the indomitable form of Fort St. Elmo, a relic from the days of the Great Siege, when it was defended for 34 days against relentless Ottoman assault, completely cut off from the rest of the defenders and under unceasing bombardment from cannons which catapulted 300-pound stone balls into the fortifications. Today, part of the fort functions as the Maltese police academy, while the rest houses the War Museum and is usually open to the public. However, as I learned after speaking to a few construction workers, January and February are traditionally months for upgrades and repairs to the historical buildings, and as such both fort and museum were closed to the public. I finished up the evening with a quick dinner in a café, where I rice which had been baked in a cheese crust.
The next day I checked out early and made for my hostel, where I found the reception desk open, and the owner somewhat mystified as to my absence yesterday. Still, everything got sorted out in the end, and I hopped a bus back to Valletta, ready to take in some museums. The first one I went to was St. John’s Co-Cathedral, a church with a dull, sober exterior built in 1571. The plain facade, undecorated with ornaments or sculpture, looks just like all of the buildings around it, with nothing to distinguish it as a cathedral. The interior, however, is decorated in the most lavish exhibition of the Baroque: gilding, frescoes on the ceiling, and gleaming marble in a rainbow of colors. The floor is decorated with marble version of the coats of arms of famous Knights of St. John, embellished with heraldic records of their accomplishments. The church holds ten side chapels, each originally built by knights of a specific nationality. The Order was divided into eight langues (French for ‘tongues’): Italy, Castile, Aragon, Provence, France, Germany, England, and Auvergne. Each langue maintained its own chapel, each own dominated with a massive oil painting of that langue’s patron saint.
In addition to all of the finery which I was now coming to expect of churches in Southern Europe, the Co-Cathedral also has a museum. The museum is housed in the former oratory, which was during the time of the Knights a place for meditation and prayer as well as an office building. The crown jewel of the museum is The Beheading of John the Baptist, painted by Caravaggio during his novitiate in the Order. While he completed the painting just after being adopted into the order (it is in fact signed “Fra Michelangelo Carvaggio”, and is the only signed Caravaggio in existence), he was expelled two weeks later after dueling and seriously wounding another knight. The Order took care to confiscate all of the work he had done while in Malta, and as a result, the museum holds a painting of St. Jerome as well as a small collection of sketches.
Further in are the museum’s collection of sacred artifacts, from the times of the knights: vestments, monstrances, tapestries, and illuminated manuscripts. Much of the former treasure is now gone, carried off during Napoleon’s occupation of the island, but what remains is nonetheless impressive: chasubles embroidered with pounds and pounds of silver and gold thread, depicting scenes from the New Testaments and Last Judgments galore; a cross-shaped reliquary four feet high, cast from solid gold and embellished with precious stones and platinum, which still holds a relic purporting to be the hand of John the Baptist; massive illuminated pulpit bibles, each spanning four feet across when opened and painted with pigments concocted from gold leaf and powdered gems; huge tapestries depicting famous episodes of the Order and from Scripture; and of course the portrait gallery, containing portraits of all Grandmasters of the Order from about 1600 to 1798 and the portrait of the last Grandmaster, Ferdinand von Hompech zu Bolheim, a German from the Catholic Duchy of Württemberg.
After I exited the cathedral it was only a short walk to the Palace of the Grandmasters. The Palace was constructed in the 1570s and served as the residence of the Grandmasters of the Order until their demise in 1798, and as the residence of the British colonial governor until Maltese independence in 1974, when part of it was designated as the Presidential Residence, while the rest (the former chambers of the Grandmasters and several halls on the ground floor) were converted into the State Museum and Armory, respectively. To enter the Palace, one proceeds through a tunnel-like gate past two guards-of-honor and into the Royal Albert Gardens (named after Prince Albert of England, and part of a late 19th century British project to beautify Valletta by installing public gardens in the old fortifications. More on that later). There you buy your tickets, either for the State Museum or the Armory (reasonably inexpensive at 4 Euros with student ID, and the price covers the invaluable addition of an audioguide for the Armory). As Italy had quite exhausted my enthusiasm for frescoed Baroque rooms (which is all the State Museum really consists of) I went to the Armory, which is housed in the former refectory halls of the Palace. It consists of two chambers, one devoted to armor, the other to weapons. I’ll not spend an undue amount of time disgorging all of the information I learned there, but the pictures are up on the webalbum and they have captions to explain them. I will only remark that the Armory’s collection pales in comparison to the Waffenkammer in Vienna, but I’ll get to that further on down the road.
After leaving the Armory the time of day was approaching 3 pm. I boarded a bus for Vittoriosa, one of the oldest cities in Malta and the location of the old headquarters of the Knights of St. John. This was the city besieged by the Ottomans during the Great Siege of 1565. At that point, Malta was very sparsely inhabited indeed, with only two places that were really inhabited: the citadel of Mdina and the Three Cities (Borgo, L’Isola, and Bormla). The Three Cities held the headquarters of the Knights of St. John, located in Fort Saint Angelo, a looming castle built of the same tan stone as everything else on the island, and they bore the full brunt of the Ottoman assault: constant bombardment by the artillery which enfiladed them on literally every side, and daily onslaughts of tens of thousands of soldiers, drawn from every corner of the Ottoman Empire, from Greece to Hungary to Persia to Arabia Felix. The siege was a grueling, gory affair which lasted for more than a hundred days, from June to September of 1565.
While the Knights were in the end victorious, the Three Cities lay in varying states of ruin, from the complete desolation of L’Isola to the relative stability of Borgo. The Knights decided to build a completely new fortress-city to house their order against the possibility of another siege like that of 1565. That city was Valletta, and it became the capitol of Malta.
The Three Cities were rechristened respectively Vittoriosa, Senglea, and Cospicua, and dwindled in importance as the business of the Knights moved across the Grand Harbor to Valletta. Now they serve as undiscovered relics of Malta’s past.
The Vittoriosa bus terminal (like all other Maltese bus terminals, nothing more than a parking lot with a closed ticket kiosk) is located right across from the main entrance to the city: the Gate of Provence, so named because it was defended by those Knights who were from Provence. All of the Three Cities’ defenses were so divided, with those areas which were likely to come under heavy assault staffed with Knights whose langues were robust in number. Now, the Provencal Gate stands much as it did during the 16th century, a sloping barrier about 40 feet tall and more than a hundred feet thick at its base. The narrow, barely two-lane street that passes through the Gate of Provence winds its way under the sober and judgmental facades of buildings which have survived for over 600 years until emptying into Victory Square in the center of the town.
I spent my time wandering among alleys shadowed by the sunset, looking up landmarks and buildings. The most famous part of Vittoriosa is Fort Saint Angelo, the oldest part of the defenses of the Knights. It is built on a man-made island, connected to Vittoriosa by a small footbridge and a narrow stone aqueduct, and is, like the rest of the defenses, built of the tan Maltese stone. It was also closed, and apparently had been so for over a year due to massive renovations. The fort was closed to the public for a long time, before an attempt was made in the 1970s to turn it into a resort hotel. That venture failed miserably, leaving behind a half-constructed swimming pool and a great deal of structural damage. The current work on the fort is being done with the eventual goal of opening the entire structure to the public as a museum commemorating the Knights of St. John and the Great Siege of 1565.
After I left Vittoriosa, I went straight for my hostel, turning in early in anticipation of a long day in the morning.