I was first drawn to the Great Siege of Malta, as an academic exercise, by an interest in its many eyewitness sources. How do people caught up in historical events perceive, remember and record their experiences? On a more instinctive level, however, I was powerfully struck by the fact that sieges, especially those doggedly resisted against great odds, occupy a particular place in the historical imagination. It is no surprise that many figure prominently in national myths. The Ottoman assault on Malta between May and September 1565 certainly fits an epic mould: the might of what was probably the most formidable war machine in the world at that time was, after grave setbacks and at great human cost on both sides, withstood by a much smaller force of professional soldiers and Maltese volunteers led by approximately 450 Knights of St John, members of the foremost religious military order to have survived from the era of the crusades. Voltaire famously quipped that the story of the Great Siege was too well known; and in some respects it is indeed a familiar historical ‘property’, its memory enshrined in the modern Maltese capital, Valletta, which was built very soon after the siege so as to prevent such an assault from happening again. But the more I looked into the siege, the more I was persuaded that many of our usual perspectives on it are askew.

The main question one has to address, of course, and the source of many of the misconceptions about the siege, is why. What persuaded the Ottoman sultan, Süleyman I, to commit most of his fleet – about 170 galleys as well as other vessels – and about 40,000 men, of whom about half were frontline troops, to a high-risk venture on the very margins of the Ottomans’ effective operational range? We are hindered by the fact that the Ottoman evidence on this matter is scanty and laconic. But we know enough to work past two shibboleths that have for a long time hindered a proper understanding of what was at stake in 1565.

The first is the rather tired belief that the siege was a signature moment in a ‘Clash of Civilizations’ narrative that pitted Islam and Christianity against one another in a relentless struggle that began in the seventh century, became particularly intense in the period of the early crusades, and was re-energized with the emergence of the Ottoman empire in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Some would argue, of course, that this trans-historical antagonism persists to this day and remains a structural principle of world affairs. One problem – and there are many – with such a sweeping and simplistic approach to the past is that it robs all those who found themselves caught up in the events of 1565 of their individual human agency and pays insufficient attention to the particular historical circumstances in which those people lived. Yes, both the Ottoman regime and vested interests in Christian Europe were practised at stoking confessional antagonisms when it suited their purposes. But their heightened religious rhetoric does not adequately capture why the siege took place.

The second Impediment to our proper understanding of the events of 1565 is that we have traditionally paid too much attention to the alarmist pronouncements of those on the Christian side – popes, the governors of Habsburg, southern Italy and Sicily, western diplomats and not least the Knights of Malta – who had over several decades perfected a hair-trigger response to any and all signs of Ottoman naval aggression. What they feared, or perhaps more accurately affected to fear, was an irresistible domino effect: if Malta, ‘the bulwark of Christendom’ as it was sometimes called, fell, so would Sicily, then Italy and – who knew? – perhaps all of western Europe. The aim of such alarmism was twofold: first, to play on sixteenth-century Christian Europe’s deeply ingrained fear of ‘the Turk’; and more specifically to galvanize the most powerful Christian ruler in the Mediterranean, Philip II of Spain, to prioritize the needs of that theatre against all his other far-flung dominions elsewhere in Europe, in the Americas and beyond.

The notion that Malta was the first domino, though rhetorically appealing to many at the time, does not in fact stand up to close scrutiny. In countenancing an attack on Malta, the Ottomans were pushing their resources – formidable and well marshalled, it is true, but finite – close to the limit. If they had succeeded in taking the island, it is doubtful whether they would have been willing to make the very large investments in men and money necessary to hold onto it beyond the short term. Even as the siege was going on, Philip II wrote to his generalissimo in the central Mediterranean, García de Toledo, to suggest that he could live with the loss of Malta if it came down to it: it could always be recaptured at some later point. Philip’s strategic calculation – that it would be easier to dislodge an exposed Ottoman garrison from the island than confront a large armada with a very good track record of defeating its Christian opponents – made excellent sense. If, moreover, the Ottomans had indeed overcome the resistance on Malta and succeeded in installing a garrison there, the fact that this would have been on the margins of what was feasible meant that talk of their conquering Sicily, let alone Italy and beyond, was entirely fanciful. Wiser heads, including Toledo, knew this perfectly well. But the domino theory was an effective way to make Christian Europe take notice of Malta and care about its fate.

From the fairly few Ottoman sources that survive we gain a sense of more prosaic, but also more compelling and subtle, motivations at work. There was by the mid 1560s a powerful sense inside the Ottoman government of needing to attend to unfinished business. Süleyman was now an old man – he would die in 1566 – and time was short. In 1522, the sultan had granted the Knights of St John favourable terms when, after another epic siege, he had dislodged them from their island fortress of Rhodes. The Knights had slowly but surely recovered from this devastating blow; in 1530 they had established themselves in the Maltese islands thanks to the generosity of the Habsburg emperor, Charles V. This had enabled them to repurpose their proven naval expertise, developed over their two centuries on Rhodes, by operating as corsairs able to sweep the north African coast and push deep into Ottoman home waters in the eastern Mediterranean. Süleyman now had good reason to regret the chivalrous magnanimity that he had extended to the Knights in his younger days.

The Knights never had more than six or seven galleys at their disposal, usually fewer, but they consistently punched above their weight. Their success as raiders ashore but more particularly as pirates out at sea threatened Süleyman’s prestige in two ways. In the first place, the Knights routinely preyed on vessels carrying Muslim pilgrims to Egypt en route to the holy places of Islam in the Hijaz. Since the Ottomans’ defeat of the Mamluk empire in 1516-17, which amongst other territories brought them Egypt, the northern shores of the Red Sea and western Arabia, the sultans had styled themselves as the particular protectors of that pilgrimage, the hajj. Second, the Knights threatened the most important economic lifeline of the Ottoman empire, the sea lane between Istanbul and Alexandria, and beyond it, via the Red Sea, the world’s richest trade routes in the Indian Ocean. The Knights’ corsairing galleys had, in fact, scored some particularly spectacular successes against Ottoman merchant ships in the two years before the siege; to concentrate the sultan’s mind still further, members of the court elite had had financial stakes in the captured vessels. The Ottomans’ primary aim in attacking Malta was, then, to annihilate the troublesome Order of St John once and for all, not to gain more territory.

We gain a deeper understanding of what was at stake when the Ottomans attacked Malta if we broaden our perspectives beyond the cockpit of the Mediterranean. 1565 was a signal year in global history. There were, for example, the first stirrings of the Dutch Revolt against Spanish rule that would soon persuade the Habsburg monarchs to direct more of their resources to northern Europe and away from the Mediterranean. In this same year, the Ottomans were experimenting with a newly aggressive posture, animated by confrontational religious rhetoric, towards Portuguese trading interests in the Indian Ocean, their aim being to gain a greater share of the spice trade. And in 1565, too, a small Spanish fleet from Mexico established a base in the Philippines; later that same year, in truly remarkable feats of seamanship, members of this expedition solved the last great puzzle of oceanic navigation in the age of sail, which was how and on what latitude to cross the Pacific from west to east. In the process a system of commercial links was soon established, through the medium of the famous ‘Spanish Galleons’, that would introduce Chinese and Japanese goods to consumers in the Americas and Europe as well as monetizing the sleeping giant of the Chinese economy.

It was also in 1565 that a Spanish expeditionary force under the command of one of Philip II’s most trusted naval commanders, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, destroyed a newly-created French settlement at Charlesfort in what is now north-east Florida. The decisive attack on the French fort, and the massacre of most of its several hundred inhabitants, took place about a week after the Ottoman forces, more than 5,000 miles away, had finally withdrawn from Malta. To some extent the Spanish were motivated by the thought that they were eliminating the threat of Protestant heresy penetrating the Americas, for many, though not all, of the French settlers were Huguenots. But what weighed even more heavily on their minds was the fear that, once established in their Floridian base, the French would be able to intercept the annual flotas, the Spanish silver fleets that were forced by prevailing winds and currents to sail northwards from Cuba through the channel between the American mainland and the Bahamas before picking up the westerlies that propelled them across the Atlantic. Advances in the technology of extracting silver from its ore had begun to increase the yields from the Spanish silver mines in Peru and Mexico; in addition, Philip II had recently ordered a panel of naval experts, including Menéndez, to devise a system that better co-ordinated and protected the various stages by which the silver got from the mines in the Americas to the dockside in Seville. In destroying Charlesfort, the Spanish in the Caribbean were doing exactly what the Ottomans had been attempting in attacking Malta – eliminating a troublesome maritime rival that could, in ways hugely disproportionate to its actual fighting strength, disrupt the flow of wealth along the vulnerable sea lanes on which the two empires, Habsburg and Ottoman, depended.

The more I placed the Great Siege in a global framework, however, the more I confronted a paradox: that although we need to open up our perspectives in order to understand the events of 1565 to the full, the story of the siege is in one sense an enduringly ‘small’ one, in that it properly belongs, not to the Knights or the Habsburg empire, but to Malta and its people, then and now. The 5,000 or so Maltese who fought and died alongside the Knights and the professional soldiers made the difference. It is fitting that today the most prominent memorial to the siege is a striking and dignified if rather austere sculpture in the heart of Valletta. In recent times the monument has doubled up as a shrine to the crusading journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, who was assassinated in 2017 – a reaffirmation of the powerful hold that the Great Siege, like so many other sieges in other places, has on the popular imagination and the stories that people tell about their pasts.

Marcus Bull is Professor of Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the University of North Carolina and the author of The Great Siege of Malta.