The Great Siege of Malta, by Marcus Bull
The military phenomenon of the siege, Marcus Bull reminds us, has a long history in the western literary tradition. And yet, despite their famous literary instances, such as the siege of Jericho as detailed in the Old Testament or the siege of Troy as recounted in Hector’s Iliad, they often only make up part of a wider military campaign – a chapter in a wider story rather than a stand-alone event.
Yet sieges, in their clear binary oppositions, can also bring a clarity to the otherwise fogginess of war. The Great Siege of Malta, as recounted by Marcus Bull in his new book, certainly fits this bill, pitting the eventually unsuccessful Ottoman Empire against a force led by the Knights of St John, or Knights Hospitallers, one of the military orders that had emerged during the Crusades. ‘I have decided to send an armada that includes many warships to occupy Malta’ declared the Ottoman Sultan, Suleiman the Magnificent, in early December 1564. Partly motivated by the Knights’ disruption of pilgrim journeys, their threatening of the Empire’s most important maritime route of communication, and stalking of commercially viable shipping, in less than a year the great siege had begun.
Its ebbs and flows are recounted by Bull in all their ferocious military detail. But the book is not just for military buffs, for it also includes broader contextual chapters which help orientate the reader and make sense of the siege – two at the start of the book given a sense of the history and development of the opposing sides, appraising their relative strengths and weaknesses, whilst one towards the end of the book situates the year of the siege, 1565, in a wider, global, historical context.
Despite it being ‘great’, the siege has faded from popular memory, though Bull’s readable and entertaining work will surely revive interest. He navigates the difficulty of the source material well, which, for this subject, poses particular challenges due to the overwhelming majority of the surviving records having been written from a Christian perspective, and with little on the Ottoman side.
In his retelling, Bull also makes space for other interesting themes. For example, one of the consequences of the siege was that it provided an opportunity for those Hospitallers who had diverged from the high ideals of the Order to redeem themselves through military service. Thus the reader discovers Gregorio de Adorno, a formerly imprisoned murderer who achieved a redemption of sorts for his bravery during the Ottoman assault of Senglea. Another would be the contributions of the Maltese to their own defence, which Bull explores. Indeed, it would be amongst them that the greatest impacts of the siege would be felt ‘years after the Ottomans sailed away’.
James Sewry is a medievalist and serves on the board of The Historian.
