Teeny Malta in wars of giants – new insights

Malta and Holy War,

by Carmel Cassar,

published by Kite Group, 2025

By comparison with the Ottoman and Spanish armed behemoths, a rock barely 120 square miles tiny may seem a historical irrelevance, an inaudible yawn in a raging hurricane. And yet it was to play a defining role, punching well above its weight.

Historians have, so far, been generous in their explorations of how Mediterranean events shaped our history. Carmel Cassar aimed higher, with ambitions more Braudelian – he explores how Malta helped shape the broader histories of the Mediterranean and, to an extent, of late-Renaissance and early modern Europe. I believe this to be the first time a project of such daunting breadth has been attempted.

The unyielding conflicts between Spain on the west and the Ottomans on the east, for military, cultural, economic, ideological and demographic supremacy characterised many centuries of European history. Spain and Turkey played unchallenged primadonna roles but others too elbowed in, proving minor, though not insignificant actors. Malta not last among them.

Portrait of Grand Master Alof de Wignacourt and his Page by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1607-1608), Musée du Louvre, Paris

In reductive shorthand, the conflict aimed to settle ancient scores between Christianity and Islam, with Malta firmly planted on the side of the cross. In reality, the ideological veil masked struggles for supremacy of power – military muscle propping economic hegemony, all ennobled by the alibi of eternal salvation. The threat of Islam as common enemy had a vital unifying function; it fortified the sense of national identity into a factor of cohesion; it cemented diverse, even naturally conflicting, classes of the population.

The fact that during the relevant period, Malta was ruled by crusader Christian knights, reinforced its unquestioned fate as part of the Spanish-Catholic bloc, its obsessive compulsions to vanquish the infidels. The strong, unhesitating religious faith of the natives provided all the momentum necessary to justify centuries of reciprocal hate and revanche.

It was the time when religion inflamed more passions than ethnicity. It served to accentuate what divides rather that search for what unites. Ecumenism appeared as feeble defeatism, a devaluation of how right we are and how wrong everyone else must be.

Cassar has piloted a masterly journey through these centuries of unrelenting war, sometimes cold, often incandescent. His archival research, almost fanatical, has fired him into teasing thousands of small tesserae together, to create a grandiose mosaic of Malta in the godly Spanish world view; Malta at the forefront of the confrontation with infidel Islam. Today this sounds like jaded irrelevant chronicle but, for centuries, it nourished the creed that energised the Mediterranean and south-eastern Europe.

The Ottoman raid on Malta in July 1614. Detail from the painting The Beheading of St Catherine attributed to Giulio Cassarino. Courtesy of the Żejtun Parish Museum 

The Great Siege of 1565, about which perhaps too much has been written, not surprisingly features in Cassar’s book. I am glad that the author helps lay to rest the fable that the Order built the new city of Valletta because of the Great Siege. The truth is exactly the opposite – the Great Siege happened to pre-empt the building of a fortified city on Mount Sceberras. 

Cassar has succeeded in wedding mega history and micro chronicle, with apparent ease and fruitful issue – a daunting task, masterfully executed

The Order had decided to build the new city long before the siege. The Ottoman strategists understood that the moment the planned fortress-city occupied the promontory between the harbours, the island would become virtually impregnable. They hurried to strike before that occurred.

Very welcome proves the attention the author dedicates to the less publicised Ottoman incursion on 1614 whose significance may have, so far, been underestimated.

Besides the standard narrative by the historian Bartolomeo dal Pozzo, Cassar has unearthed an invaluable relazione by an eyewitness, Fr Filippo Cariddi S.J., the rector of the new Jesuit college in Valletta, the cradle of our university. Cariddi, a Jesuit from Messina, wrote his report immediately after the invaders left the island. The man and his career have hardly been studied so far. His short stay in Malta, from November 1612 to December 1614, could repay pursuing.

Map of Alosio Gili Isola di Malta, c. 1615-1634, depicting the Ottoman razzia of 1614 with landings in Marsaxlokk [Żejtun] and later at Mellieħa Bay. Copper engraving. Albert Ganado Malta Map Collection, MUŻA (Heritage Malta)

Cariddi’s report, unexploited so far, provides a detailed and throbbing narrative of the devastation, the violence, the confusion inflicted by the Ottoman invaders on the Maltese countryside and villages, the sacrilegious vendettas meted on the Mellieħa sanctuary and on the Żejtun parish church, the disciplined resistance by the knights and the chaotic heroism of the native Maltese. All exciting information, in mint condition.

Corsairing featured very heavily on the agenda of both sides, perceived as furthering the greater glory of God or of Allah. And, if punishment of the enemy could be made to coincide with a good investment, like turning contempt of the infidel into gold and silver, neither side turned their noses at it. Corsairs would secure a place in heaven and would also cram their treasure chest with doubloons or akçe. What was there not to like?

Pirates and corsairs exercised identical occupations – merciless plundering on the high seas but with one formal difference: corsairs were licensed by the state, pirates were freelancers. A piece of paper turned pirates from hostis humani generis, enemies of mankind, into crusaders of the faith. Provided, that is, they shared part of the loot with the monarch. Such were the vagaries of international maritime law.

Cassar singles out by name a few corsairs operating from Malta, some ferocious, many unprincipled, all greedy. They came from the ranks of noble professed knights spoiling for a fight and craving for a windfall, and from motley nationalities who considered robbery not merely lawful but laudable, if it targeted the enemies of God. 

St Paul as Defender of Christianity in Malta, sculpture at the entrance to Greeks’ Gate, Mdina.

The exploits of Malta-based non-Hospitaller corsairs such as Magrine, Alfonso de Contreras, Pietro Zelalich and Giuseppe Preziosi remain legendary. Even Guglielmo Lorenzi, the martyr of the Malta revolt against Napoleon, started life as a corsair.  It is no coincidence that Malta battled with Leghorn and Tripoli to be acknowledged the most hyperactive nest of pirates and corsairs in the whole Mediterranean.

Other buccaneers rose from the dregs of all nationalities – Spanish, Italian, Slavs, British, French – not to overlook native Maltese talent. Some laced violence with greed so successfully as to enable them to purchase titles of nobility from cash-strapped sovereigns.

Through a phenomenon I will not attempt to understand, the most ruthless were the renegades, former Christians who ‘turned Turk’ – see the calabrese Ulucciali, the nobleman Scipione Cicala who became Sinan Pasha, Hasan Veneziano and the Englishman Jack Ward. Their mirror images, Muslims who switched to become Christian pirates, were almost unknown.

Cassar has been fastidious, no, manic, in his studies and the results show. A look at his obese bibliography records that his research obsessions are incurable, both in the realms of world academia and that of domestic publications and archives. It is my private bad luck that he overlooked my research on Alfonso de Contreras (2005) and the effects of the 1614 raid on Żejtun and on a son of Girolamo Cassar (2022).

Cassar has succeeded in wedding mega history and micro chronicle, with apparent ease and fruitful issue – a daunting task, masterfully executed.