Great Siege of Malta

Suleiman's expedition landed in May 1565 to take the island the Knights Hospitaller had held since Charles V gave it to them, and began by reducing Fort St Elmo, a small star fort covering the harbour mouth. St Elmo was supposed to fall in days; it held for a month and cost the Ottomans thousands of men, including their best siege commander. That month was the siege, because it bought Valette time to strengthen the two peninsulas across the water, which then absorbed assault after assault through the summer heat. A relief force from Sicily finally landed in September and the Ottomans re-embarked. Malta remained in Hospitaller hands for another 233 years.

Voltaire's line that nothing is better known than the siege of Malta is itself part of the problem: the event was a European propaganda triumph within months, and the standard narrative descends from Francisco Balbi di Correggio, a soldier-poet inside the walls whose account is vivid, partisan and the basis of nearly everything written since. Historians now treat the claim that Malta stopped Ottoman expansion in the western Mediterranean with caution, since Ottoman fleets operated freely there afterwards and Lepanto was still six years away. The Maltese share of the defence was written down for centuries in favour of the knights and has been substantially recovered by modern scholarship. Excavation and survey around St Elmo and the Birgu land front continue to turn up siege-period ordnance, and the fortifications Valette's successors built with the ransom of victory are now a World Heritage site.