Dan Snow's History Hit - The Siege of Malta: Knights Hospitaller vs The Ottomans

Episode Date: February 12, 2025

This is the story of Suleiman the Magnificent's attempt to conquer Malta, the headquarters of a Catholic military order that had become a thorn in his side. They were known as the Knights Hospitaller, and the siege to come would pit Grand Master Jean de Valette and his force of outnumbered defenders against an elite Ottoman army.For this, we're joined by Marcus Bull, author of 'The Great Siege of Malta'. Marcus takes us through this tale of siege warfare and explains how luck as much as skill helped the defenders to hold out long enough for the siege to be broken.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Matthew Peaty.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.We'd love to hear your feedback - you can take part in our podcast survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on.You can also email the podcast directly at [e-mail].

Picture a late medieval or early modern siege. Picture those towering walls damaged by early cannon. They're topped with soldiers. Among them, guns loaded with cannonballs but also chain shot, which when fired out spins like a scythe at the besieging forces as they advance. Picture that attack coming. Columns of infantrymen, many holding large shields above their head to protect them from the small arms on the walls above. Not just the small arms, the boiling water, the faeces that's pelted down at them.

I'm sure you can imagine the unwieldy, but terrifying siege towers, many stories high, being pushed by gangs of men, roared on by burly sergeants. Drawbridges ready to clatter down on the battlements. On the top level, sharpshooters providing covering fire. Some had primitive firearms, others arrows, rocks from slings, throwing spears.

To combat the threat of fire, those siege towers were clad in soaking wet leather hides, with more water available on hand in casks in the tower to keep them nice and damp. It's a siege which pits two religions, ancient foes, against each other, where prisoners are murdered. Their mutilated bodies floated across waterways on crosses, a taunt about their Christian faith. Muslim prisoners are beheaded in turn, their severed heads fired back at their comrades from the barrels of cannon.

It's not just a siege, but an all-in struggle for a mighty fortress that seemed at the time to hold the key to the strategic balance of this entire region. A milestone in a centuries-long zero-sum struggle between sworn religious foes. This siege as I've described it sounds like some kind of platonic ideal form of siege made for the big screen. An archetype just waiting to be used by filmmakers and novelists. by filmmakers and novelists.

And yet, this is a siege that did actually happen. The Great Siege of Malta in 1565. Now, for centuries, it was regarded as a definitive moment, a decisive moment in the Ottoman-Turkish-Mus Muslim attempt to conquer Europe and a moment of Christian resistance to that conquest. But as you'll hear in this podcast, that interpretation is now being questioned by historians, although it was believed by many at the time and since, including interestingly by the English Queen Elizabeth Tudor, Elizabeth I, who wrote about it as it was happening. She wrote, if the Turks should prevail against the Isle of Malta,

it is uncertain what further peril might follow to the rest of Christendom. Many people believed it was a battle for the future of Europe. And even if that interpretation has now been questioned, what is not in doubt is the ferocity, the scale and intensity of the fighting that took place on that little island during that terrible summer. It is simply one of the most astonishing sieges in history. One that has come to define what we think of in our mind's eye when we hear the word siege. To tell me all about it, I've got Marcus Bull on the podcast. He's Distinguished Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He's just written The Great Siege of

Malta and he's going to tell us why it happened, what happened, and whether, truly, it mattered. Enjoy. And liftoff. And the shuttle has cleared the tower. Marcus, great to have you on the podcast. Thank you. Just try and paint a picture for the audience of how much of a threat or a perceived threat the Ottoman advance through the eastern Mediterranean was. I think the operative word there is perceived, because there was a disconnect think the operative word there is perceived, because there was a disconnect

between the realistic threat posed by the Ottomans to Western Europe and what Western European observers chose to believe, or at least the rhetoric that they ramped up when trying to make a case. The reality was that the Ottoman Empire was, yes, a political organization in which military expansion was built into its DNA, but it also, at the time of the Great Siege in the 1560s, was slowing down, or at least being more selective about the targets it was identifying. about the targets it was identifying. And I think Western European Christian observers tended to hark back to a more aggressively expansive stage in Ottoman military history, 20, 30, 40 years before the fact, and assumed that there was something constant, permanent, about the way that the Ottomans live for relentless expansion.

Therefore, the rhetoric surrounding the Great Siege is sometimes out of kilter with the reality, which isn't to say that if you're on the ground in Malta in the middle of 1565, you didn't feel yourself in the middle of enormous history under grave threat. But the way in which the order of Malta itself and its Spanish overlords tried to build up support to aid in the defense of Malta was to suggest that Malta was the first step in a grand Ottoman strategy, which would lead them to the conquest of Sicily. They would work their way up through Italy, and ultimately, all of Western Europe was at stake. I don't think that's even remotely feasible, and people knew it, that the Ottomans would have been hard-pressed even to hold on to Malta had they won it, let alone contemplate Sicily and Italy.

I think they were attacking Malta as a bit of unfinished business. Their Sultan Suleiman was growing old. Malta and the Knights of St. John on it had been a thorn in his side for years. And I think this was a last bit of, let's deal with this persistent problem once and for all. They failed. And the fact that they never really tried to come back to Malta, even though they could have perhaps taken it a year later because the defences were ruinous, suggests that ultimately this wasn't really a major strategic goal.

It was more a kind of vendetta. It was a big feud against the Order of St John. That was largely what drove them. Let's talk about the Order of St. John. That was largely what drove them. Let's talk about the Order of St. John. Who were they? Well, at the time of the siege, they'd already been around for nearly 500 years. They were a venerable order of the Catholic Church with origins in Jerusalem. They had developed an interesting and unusual two-facing personality. They were both a hospital order that cared for the sick and for pilgrims, and they were a military order modeled on the order of the

temple, the Templars. And they were able to hold those two seemingly contradictory roles in a kind of creative tension. They were a socially top-heavy order. The great majority of their membership at the time of the siege, there would have been about 1,400 knights around Europe, were the sons of high-status aristocratic families, predominantly in southern Europe. Under them were auxiliary personnel, sergeants and priests. But demographically and in terms of social importance, this was a very aristocratic, blue-blooded, elitist order. There were some nuns, but it was predominantly a male order that prided itself on a tradition of resolute holy war

on the frontiers between Christianity and Islam, which it inherited from its earlier history, first on the mainland of Palestine in Syria, then on the island of Rhodes, from which it had been ejected 45 years before the siege. And in a sense, had that mandate rebooted just before the siege by the great reforming Council of Trent, the Catholic Church's attempt to react to the Reformation, and one small part of Trent's pronouncements had been to vindicate, to re-legitimize the vocation and existence of the Order of St. John.

So it was trying to rediscover itself. It had taken a very big hit in the Reformation because much of Northern Europe, its properties and membership in much of Germany, in all of England and Scotland, had disappeared. It had been thrown back onto a Romance-speaking Southern European core. It had been given the islands of the Maltese archipelago when it had been evicted from Rhodes. It wasn't yet really convinced that Malta would be its permanent home.

But nonetheless, the siege presented it with an opportunity to rediscover itself, to vindicate its historic sense of mission. And indeed, the way in which it celebrated their victory as they saw it after the siege and appealed for funds around Europe was built on this idea that the order was back. It had discovered a kind of legitimacy and purpose which was in danger of ebbing away over the previous two or three generations.

We're back in the business of holding back or driving back the forces of Islam. Okay, and they've been given Malta and the surrounding islands to run. I mean, they're, how would you describe it? A religious oligarchic state? Yeah, I think oligarchic is exactly the word. Like all ultimately medieval religious orders,

it had an incredibly elaborate constitution and hierarchy. But essentially, it was an oligarchy of old men based in Malta, in which the grandmaster, a crazy autocratic figure, a monarch, effectively, surrounded by the equivalent of a privy council. Though there were sometimes rumbles of discontent from the ranks of the knights, sometimes serious, but by and large it was run as an autocracy or oligarchy perhaps in the interests of performing this mandate. It was ultimately answerable to the Pope, but on Malta it was in a funny position because it had been given the Maltese islands by Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, in his capacity as King of Spain.

And therefore, the order was, to some extent, beholden to the Spanish monarchy at the time of the siege. And the expectation was that it would be the Spanish king, by then Philip II, if Malta were to be saved, who would galvanize the resources to bring relief. So we've mentioned the Ottomans a little bit. Suleiman the Magnificent has been ruling over the Ottoman Empire. He's taken it to their maximum extent. He's marched to the gates of Vienna.

He's conquered all sorts of territory in Southeast Europe and islands in the Eastern Mediterranean, like Rose, that you've mentioned. It's important for us to remember, I mean, they were extraordinary maritime power. One of the great strategists of all time, I always think is Barbarossa, the famous Ottoman commander in the Mediterranean. And they've done things like link up with the French. And I mean, they were dominant naval power in the Mediterranean, I suppose. But you mentioned that this is a sort of vendetta. Why particularly? Is this just a nest of very nasty anti-Islamic folk

who the Sultan wants to get rid of? I think they could dress it up as holy war. That was always a gambit available to the Ottomans to be Ghazis, to cast themselves as leading a holy war against infidels. But in reality, I think the siege was an exercise in clearing house. The Knights of St. John, or the Knights of Malta,

we can now call them, were, amongst other things, part of a culture of corsairing in the central and western Mediterranean, the whole of the Mediterranean. Corsairs were, at least by their own likes, licensed licensed formerly acceptable pirates. They were pirates who had been given facilities or gave themselves license to both capture shipping or to raid coasts and take slaves. Slavery was one of the big stories of the 16th century Mediterranean, and interdiction or capturing of ships was the other. And the Knights of St. John did it, as indeed many other coastal powers in the Mediterranean along the North African coast, many Italian coastal cities and others. The Knights of St. John, though they were a quite small naval operation, punched above their weight. They knew the eastern Mediterranean very well from their time at Rhodes. Two things

happened to the Ottoman Empire in the generation before Suleyman came to power. The most important was that Suleyman's father, Selim, had taken what is Syria, Palestine, and crucially Egypt from the Mamluk regime, which was in decline. This was the game changer, perhaps the single most important fact in 16th century world history. And I would put the discovery of Americas underneath this, because it gave the Ottoman Empire access to the wealth of Egypt in itself, but also the access to the wealth that came through Egypt up the Red Sea, the spice trade from the Indian Ocean and beyond. This made the route between Alexandria, the port through which all this spice trade came, and Istanbul a vital maritime link for the Ottoman world. Also, that same conquest,

which extended into parts of Arabia, gave the Ottomans control of the holy places of Islam, Mecca and Medina. And that gave them responsibility for supervision of the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca that devout Muslims are expected to take, and responsibility to protect pilgrims. and responsibility to protect pilgrims. In the early to mid-1560s, it looks like the Knights of St. John had pivoted from grandiose schemes of territorial expansion to a more realistic marshalling of their resources towards their Corsairian naval activities. And they had recently captured both valuable Ottoman cargo vessels traveling between Alexandria and Istanbul. And they had severely disrupted the movement of pilgrims by sea on the way to the holy places. This therefore threatened the Ottoman regime both financially and also in terms of its ideology and prestige. So I think it was in their capacity as glorified pirates that the Order of St. John

were attacked. This was ultimately the threat. It was a double whammy of threat of both money and image as far as the Ottoman regime was concerned. So this is an imperial policing action. It's not the first step on a great expedition to conquer the rest of the world. No, it's actually a very realistic, hard-headed impulse that Solomon is aging. He had perhaps been too generous to the order when he'd let them go from roads, when he patched roads from them on New Year's Day, 1523. They had remained a thorn in his side. Why not have one last push to be rid of them? I'm not sure they would know what to do with Malta. They would have probably abandoned it. It would have been too costly in men and money to maintain. But they have had the satisfaction of

ridding themselves of this pesky thorn in their flesh. He sends a big old fleet, doesn't he? It's a huge force to deal with the thorn in their flesh. Well, it is a huge force as an amphibious force, but the fleet of 170 frontline galleys, perhaps another 50 or 60 smaller, oared craft and cargo ships and others, delivers about 20,000 to 25,000 frontline troops, a large number, and certainly far more than the defenders had available to them. Compared to the sorts of numbers that the Ottomans would have been able to throw

against the Habsburgs of Austria in Central Europe or against their Iranian rivals in Anatolia. This is a quite small army, but as an amphibious force, it is enormous. And that is itself an indication that this wasn't just a gestural effort. Let's see if we can get lucky. Enormous amounts have been invested in it

in terms of men and materiel. The trouble was that to get those 20,000, 25,000 frontline troops there, of which the majority were elite Janissaries and Sepahis, the two corps that represented the frontline troops of the Ottoman military machine, that to get them there, you had to have a lot of people rowing the galleys. They could perform auxiliary roles. They could drag cannon around. They could build fortifications.

But in a sense, the Ottomans were condemned to take a lot of non-combatants to the island with them to use up precious food and water on what is a very small, barren, dry island. So in a way, the clock was running from the moment they arrived off Malta in May 1565. Because yes, the numbers were impressive, but they were committing to a campaign on a small island with very few resources that they couldn't live off the land. They would have to bring basic supplies in from both North Africa and from the Eastern Mediterranean. So they were always vulnerable.

This was a campaign on a tight clock. And the fact that they were able to prolong the campaign for four months is ultimately evidence of the Ottoman Empire's extraordinary command of logistics and organization, Ottoman Empire's extraordinary command of logistics and organization, which was ultimately what gave them the advantage over their Western European rivals, was that all early modern governments were dreadfully inefficient. Money would get lost in transit. Supplies would sort of fritter away. People would desert. The question was how well Yuan could do to at least mitigate the worst effects of that inbuilt inefficiency. And the Ottoman Empire definitely developed systems which reduced those inefficiencies to a much greater extent than their Western European rivals. So the net effect was that they could organize themselves to contemplate something like the Siege of Malta, even though they were at the

very limit of the operational range of their galleys in a summer campaign season, is evidence that they were perhaps the only people who could have done it. And the fact that they persisted for four months is again evidence of their powers of organization and persistence. This is the Dan Snow's History. We're talking about the siege of Malta. More coming up. Well, there were more seizures, but more of this podcast coming up.

I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes,

who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. So they get a foothold on Malta. Tell me about the defences and how the campaign takes shape. Well, there are four defensive positions on Malta. And really, the phrase the Siege of Malta or the Great Siege of Malta evokes a classic siege type, forces arrayed around one single walled position. It was a little bit more

complicated than that. The Knights of St. John, various Spanish troops and Italian troops, they had either been given by the Habsburgs or had paid for, and importantly, a large number of Maltese militia volunteers, were tasked with defending four positions. And the score at the end of the campaign season would determine the ultimate result. In the event, one of those four fell, a fortress called St. Elmo, the other three held, though two came close to it. So ultimately, that represented a victory for the defenders, insofar as a victory, if you are defending in a siege, is not to lose. Three of those four positions were clustered around the Great Harbour area of Malta,

which visitors to Malta today would be very familiar with. If you're looking from the modern city of Valletta, which was then just a bare rock peninsula, you'd have St. Elmo at the tip of that peninsula, and then the twin peninsulas perpendicular to you of Birgu and Senglia pointing towards you. Those are the three Grand Harbour fortified positions. A fourth was in the interior of the island, the ancient capital of Dina, which was threatened at times, but was basically not in the front line to the extent that Grand Harbor was. The point was that for the Ottomans, this was an amphibious campaign. They had to keep their navy and their ground forces as close together as possible. This is

the first law of amphibious warfare. And therefore, they had to concentrate on those defenses, which the Order had, in most cases, rather hastily and inadequately erected in the 10 or 15 years before the Great Siege. In the event, they just about held, though it was a very, very close-run thing. So it was a siege.

It was a siege of four places at various times and with varying levels of intensity. One fell, three survived. So St. Elmo falls. Yes. What's the secret there? Is it Turkish bombardment? Is it the fact they were able just to smash the walls with cannon?

Yeah. St. Elmo was the weakest point. Its value lay in guarding the Grand Harbor and its sister harbor on the other side of the peninsula, Masamshed. If it fell, the Ottomans would be able to bring their fleet into Masamshed and have the fleet available very close to where the action was on land. So it was important. It clung on for about five weeks, facing formidable bombardment. And the standard

narrative of the siege is that every day that St. Elmo survived, it was buying more time for the defenders in the other larger fortresses to improve their defenses, to organize themselves. And this is the way in which the Order and its Grand Master Jean de Valette approached it. It was a kind of sacrifice to buy time. Something like 19,000 or 20,000 cannon shots were fired at it. This was a tiny, weak fortress. The fact that it survived for several weeks was nothing short of miraculous. In the long run, perhaps the greatest significance of the fact that the Ottomans were held up for more than a month taking St. Elmo was that a disproportionate number of their frontline troops, especially the Janissaries, were killed in that phase of the operation.

Meaning that when they swung around to the other side of Grand Harbor and began the siege in phase two of the peninsulas of Birgu and Senglir, their frontline troops were depleted. And this may have made the difference in the long run. They just didn't have enough of the trained, hardened, experienced veterans to make the difference in the killing zone of the front line when they came face to face with the defenders. When St. Elmo falls, there are atrocities

and prisoners are beheaded and all sorts of disgusting things are done. Is there a religious element? I mean, is this bloodier and more horrific than fighting going on between Christian powers in northern Central Europe at the time, for example? Charles V and King Francis are always at each other. But is there something different about this fighting? I think there is.

What happens particularly is when St. Elmo finally falls, the Ottomans very demonstratively, visibly desecrate the bodies of the leadership, the knights who had fallen there. trying to alter the mood music. They've been frustrated by St. Elmo. They now face the, on paper, more formidable task of reducing the remaining fortifications that stand in their way. And they need to galvanize their own men. And one of the ideological tricks of the Ottoman regime was to be able to ramp up the language of holy war, knowing that the other side would very happily respond in kind, and they do. Valette orders his cannon to fire the heads of beheaded Turkish prisoners back in a kind of crude tit-for-tat. And at that point, one senses that, yes, this was always a holy war. It would be impossible for a knight of the order of the Catholic Church and the Ottoman Empire to come to blows without this being a heavily religious moment.

But from that point after St. Elmo, I think that holy war rhetoric goes up a notch and becomes much more important. So now they turn their attention to these other two forts around the harbour. You talk in the book about this being one of the greatest artillery bombardment possibly at that point in history. I mean, is this important in the history of warfare just because of the use of artillery? Yes. The Ottomans brought about 70 cannon to prosecute the campaign.

Virtually all of them are then brought to bear after St. Elmo falls on the defenses of the two peninsulas. Artillery warfare had really taken off over the previous 40 or 50 years, perhaps earlier, perhaps in the early Italian wars involving the French as early as the 1490s. One of their great strengths as a military machine was that the extent of the empire as it had grown by Suleiman's time meant that it controlled regions that individually and collectively supplied it with the materiel of 16th century warfare very effectively, including tin for bronze, which was imported from England of all places. It had the wherewithal to develop sophisticated shipbuilding and gun-making facilities. So the cannon arrayed against the defences around Grand Harbor were ultimately evidence of the Ottoman Empire's

luck with the natural resources at its disposal, and which had also allowed it to grow into a formidable naval force. So yes, it would be wrong to say that this was, I feel like, a revolutionary moment in the history of artillery warfare. But it was an affirmation that if even amphibious warfare could now be conducted with the full might of the Ottoman artillery park arrayed. And yet they got blown out of the Indian Ocean by Portuguese cannons and ships. I don't understand it.

I don't understand it. It's so strange. Anyway, let's keep on Malta here. These artillery pieces are battering these walls. Are there kind of ferocious infantry battles going on here as well? People launching themselves into the breach? The story of the siege is really punctuated by what the Christian sources called the great assaults. Wave after wave, often lasting five, six hours, picking their way through the rubble field, which their own artillery had created. The defenders didn't have that luxury and they would gradually tire and weaken. So even if the first wave would be

sacrificed, the hope was that the Christian defenders would ultimately be overwhelmed by sheer persistence. Though the Christian sources often talk about the Ottomans throwing two, five, ten thousand people into a great assault, in reality it must have been done in smaller bursts, and that made the difference, because you couldn't throw thousands of people across a rough rubble field fighting their way up a slight incline where the walls had been towards the improvised defenses created by the defenders. You'd have to do it in small groups, or those groups would break up as they struggled their way up through the rubble.

So the defenders simply had to devise ways to channel these successive waves into small compact killing zones where the disparity numbers would be neutralized and deal with them bit by bit. They couldn't defend themselves against thousands, but if they could channel a few dozen at a time into a space, they would deal with them, rest as well as they could, wait a few minutes, deal with the next wave, deal with that, deal with the next wave. And you see in all the Christian sources an obsession with the relative number of casualties day by day, like a running score. We only lost 70 today, they lost 250. And it becomes an attritional war in which they're keeping score, and they can do so, even though the attackers outnumber the defenders about four or five to one,

they can do so by exploiting the fact that Ottomans ultimately could not make their enormous advantage in numbers tell where it mattered, which is in the killing zone on the edge of the fortified line. It didn't matter whether there were 10,000 soldiers half a mile away. The Christians were able just to manage those killing zones in a way which meant that they survived, more or less. You listen to Dan Snow's history, more on the Siege of Malta after this. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries.

The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. Such an extraordinary example of the force-multiplying nature of fixed defences, of these kind of defensive structures, and as you say, leading the attackers into these horrific, narrow defiles and cutting them down.

How close do the Ottomans come to victory? I think perilously close. It's impossible to gauge because we don't know what would happen had this moment gone differently and so on. But I think the margins were incredibly fine. I think the best evidence of that is the attitude of Jean de Vallette, the Grand Master leading the defense. Several times in the later stages of the siege, he positioned himself in command of a kind of flying squad, which would rush in the aid of any particular point in the defenses that was under particular strain. And at several points, he threw himself forward, exposing himself and his members of his high command around him.

Now, after the fact, this was spun as evidence of his fortitude, of his leadership qualities. I think it was really acts of desperation or resignation. He didn't want to be taken alive, and he was convinced that today was the day that it will collapse. He was sacrificing himself, but luckily he survived. Out of the story could be reworked as an example of his resilience and bravery. The fact that Vallette, I think, was convinced more than once that the game was up is evidence that the margins were incredibly fine. The defenders were just very, very lucky. A number of things did make the difference. The story of 16th century siege warfare around the world, certainly around Europe,

is punctuated by plague or other epidemic disease. The defenders were fatally weakened by disease. plague or other epidemic disease, that the defenders were fatally weakened by disease. Miraculously, though there is evidence that epidemic disease raged through the Ottoman camp, it doesn't seem to have affected those on the inside. That would have been lights out. They were able to preserve their water supply. The systems were never damaged by the Ottoman bombardment, and though water was running very low by the end, it never ran out. That would have been a game changer. And also, again, though supplies were running low by the end of the siege, the defenders were able to preserve at least some of their stocks of gunpowder.

So that at one point, they fired a mine towards the end as if to show off the fact that they had gunpowder to spare. At one point, one of their powder mills blew up. Mid-siege, sabotage was suspected. But even that huge setback ultimately didn't mean that they ran out of that basic resource of 16th century warfare. So between the absence of disease, the availability of water, at least to some degree, and they were able to produce gunpowder in some quantities right

to the end. Those are the difference makers. It's shocking to think that more Ottomans would have died because of disease, because of terrible disease, because of misunderstanding the nature, how to maintain and drink clean water and all that, dealing with the consequences of all the waste products produced by that massive army camping and temporary lodgings. More people were probably killed by disease than by Christian shot and steel. I think that's right. And the sad irony of it is that the Ottoman armed forces, the army in particular, had a reputation amongst Western observers for being far more attentive to matters of hygiene and medical care than Western armies. They were ahead of the game. Even they could not mitigate being forced to live on a cramped island with very little water. And once disease takes hold in those sorts of situations, there's inadequate medical science and it cannot be

stopped. But the Ottomans, in fairness, were always an object lesson in their other wars, in at least a superior attention to matters of hygiene and medical care. Well, they had to be. They had to be. Great reason for their enormous success. What brings the siege to an end? I think two things. The headline is that finally, the forces of Habsburg Europe, especially in those parts of Italy, which were under the control of the Habsburg kings of Spain, are able to call together a coalition of forces from which a relief force known as the Grand Secorso or Great Relief, about 8,000 or 9,000 strong, lands on Malta in early September 1565, meets the Ottoman forces in a running battle in the center of the island, forces them back onto their ships. The survivors of that debacle aboard the Ottoman galleys and they sail off.

In reality, I think there's evidence that the Ottomans were already beginning to disengage from Malta even before the Grand Sercorso arrived. The defenders were seeing them starting to take down gun emplacements and to withdraw to more distant positions. And I think in reality, the Ottomans would have had to have, even if the Grand Succorso had never happened, the Ottomans would have had to, I think, made a decision. Do we tough it out over the winter, which would have been almost impossible, or do we withdraw? And I think they would have withdrawn. Don't forget that the siege took place before a great reform in the Christian calendar, the result of which was that when we think of the siege ending in the first half of September 1565, in meteorological terms, that is equivalent to later September today. So they were pushing closer towards autumnal weather conditions.

They would have had to have quit very soon. The Grand Sique also provided that final push, but I don't ultimately think it was the reason why the siege ended. The siege was ending as the relief force arrived. As you say, survival, therefore a victory for the defending side. It's always said, what are the great sieges of history? Certainly in its intensity and drama as it was going on, it seems like it was, but does it matter? Does it leave a big strategic footprint, imprint on subsequent history? It is very important, but its importance is symbolic rather than strategic. When the knights regroup and attempt to ensure

that there is never a restaging of the Great Siege by fortifying the peninsula of Shibarass and building what is now the capital of the modern state of Malta, Valletta, they build the siege into their mythology by using the language of claiming that they have become what they called the bulwark of Christianity or the bulwark of Europe. This was a phrase that they banded around a lot. We were the front line defending Europe as a whole from the Ottoman menace, I think it was largely a rhetorical posture. Once Valletta had been built and the defences of Malta enormously improved,

the chances of the Ottomans trying to restage the events of 1565 were slim. There were scares, invasion scares, into the 17th century. But I think the chances of the Ottomans trying again, their opportunity was only a year after. The fortifications were still ruinous. Half the knights were dead or severely injured. They missed their chance. So I think it was a symbolic moment. It achieved a lot of its longer-term resonance by being twinned with the Battle of Lepanto six years later. It becomes the first part of a kind of double act, a one-two, which demonstrated that finally Western Europe, Mediterranean Europe, was able to organize itself

and to meet the Ottomans on equal terms, if not better. I think the Great Siege benefited from being linked to Lepanto and thereby assumed a significance which in isolation it probably didn't deserve, at least in real strategic terms. Its symbolic importance was enormous. That is important. I mean, is it fair to see the twins of Lepanto and Malta? So Lepanto, great naval victory won by a sort of Christian alliance off the west coast of Greece. Were they right to say this represents a new chapter in Mediterranean history, that the era of slow grinding advances by the Ottomans say it's going to come to an end. Is that fair to see them

together like that? The most famous victim of the corsairs around this time was Miguel de Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote, who fought at the Panto, was injured at the Panto. who fought at Lepanto, was injured at Lepanto. And he writes that, though he had personal reasons to look back regretfully on Lepanto, he lost the use of one of his hands, he wrote that it was the day when Christian Europe regained its confidence. It learned not to be afraid of the Ottomans again.

And he was writing that some decades later. So I think, yes, it was important. The Ottomans remained active in the central and western Mediterranean for 10 or more years after Malta. But eventually they and the Hapsburg kings of Spain realized that they were being sucked into an expensive arms race that neither of them really needed or wanted. Both of them wished to engage elsewhere and to divert resources away from the Mediterranean. And so by about 1580, the tension is dying down, which is to say that the Mediterranean doesn't become a safe place. The culture of Corsairian is still there.

It re-emerges in a way after the great powers have partly withdrawn from the central Mediterranean. Malta is the last moment in this decisive change, but it is a signal moment in a process whereby the two great powers of the 16th century Mediterranean, the Ottomans and the Spanish Habsburgs, eventually agree to disagree, to draw rough lines of demarcation, and to more or less leave each other alone, or at least to allow themselves to pursue a war through small surrogates. The Order of St. John on Malta and the various North African corsairs in what is now Libya, Tunisia, and Algeria, over which the Ottomans had some kind of overlordship,

but were ultimately left to do their own thing, to make a living from corsairing. Another indication of that is that from about 1580, you see the beginnings of Northern European traders, the English and the Dutch, muscling their way into the Mediterranean to pick up the spice trade from ports in the east. And muscling is the right word because these would be armed. They'd have to fight off corsairs. They're displacing the Venetians, the historic carriers of that spice trade.

So you get the sense that the Mediterranean is now being plugged into larger global economic circuits. The Ottomans at the other end begin or develop systems to tap more effectively into the spice trade coming through from the Indian Ocean. So the Mediterranean is no longer the center of attention. It's simply one important part of a much larger global circuit movement of goods in which many different players, the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean, the English and the Dutch in the Atlantic, they're all starting to be much more joined up. And in that sense, the siege was one of the last hurrahs of an older world in which people fought over the Mediterranean for itself.

And then it becomes part of this much larger joined up world. What an interesting way of looking at it. Thank you very much for that. Tell everyone, Marcus, what is your book called? It's called The Great Siege of Malta. Go and get it, everybody. It's fantastic. Thank you very much for coming on the podcast.

Thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you very much. you