The great siege of Malta: Knights Hospitaller vs the Ottoman empire

Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. In the summer of 1565, the might of the Ottoman Empire faced off against a few hundred Knights hospitala and their allies on the island of Malta. The outcome might have seemed inevitable. But the events of the subsequent siege were far from predictable, as the defenders waged a desperate battle for their homes and their lives. Professor Marcus Bull chronicles the events of this siege in a new book, and Rob Atar speaks to him about this dramatic clash and its far reaching consequences.

Could we begin then by talking about the two protagonists in the siege, beginning with the Knights Hospitala? How had they gone from the Crusader kingdoms in the Middle Ages to then being based in Malta by the mid sixteenth century? Well, by the time of the siege they were already five hundred years old. They begun life in the Holy Land as a religious order of the Catholic Church, devoted to the care of pilgrims to Jerusalem. Then the First Crusade came along and inaugurated a period of control of Jerusalem and parts of the Holy Land by people from Western Europe.

And during that time of Latin Christian or Western European control of the Eastern Mediterranean, the order, perhaps largely driven by the example of the Knights Templar, extended their remit from simply caring for the sick to become a military order. And thereafter they held these two vocations in a kind of tension for the remainder of their active life. As the Western European presence in the eastern Mediterranean retreated, first the loss of Jerusalem, then the loss of Acre, so the Order and its convent or headquarters retreated with it, and they ended up for 200 years on roads. an island tight up against the Turkish mainland. They were expelled from Rhodes by the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman I on New Year's Day 1523, and that inaugurated a period of rather pointless or anxious migration around the central Mediterranean looking for somewhere the order could re-establish itself.

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