![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/files\/2017\/08\/n4xefqyd.png\")
<\/a>and their pugnacious disposition to both defend the faith\u00a0 and, incidentally, to do hospital work; the Order started providing medical assistance to the Crusaders and pilgrims to the Holy Land as part of the Crusades.\u00a0 The militant medicine men carved quite a niche in the Mediterranean as a self- financed international organization that fed on warfare and (depending on your point of view) piracy, seizing Muslim ships, selling the captives into slavery and confiscating the cargo (a mirror image of what the Turks were doing).<\/p>\nOne of the pivotal military points in the battle between Islam (and especially Suleiman) and the West, occurred in 1565, when Suleiman, then an old man, mustered nearly 50,000 of his finest soldiers and determined to put an end to the predators on Malta. The last straw, according to one of the books I read (but not mentioned by our guides), was the Knight\u2019s seizure of one of the personal ships of Suleiman carrying cargo gathered by the harem, including his favorite wife, for sale in Venice.<\/p>\n
The western victory marked the apogee of the Ottoman empire.\u00a0 Combined with the loss of the Turkish navy in the battle of Lepanto (to which the Knights contributed ships and men) in 1571, the turn of the Turkish tide had begun.<\/p>\n
The Knight\u2019s rule came to an end in 1798 when Napoleon landed and conquered the island, ending the rule of the Order, abolishing slavery, and confiscating church property (to help pay for his futile campaign in Egypt, which included the destruction of the French navy at Aboukir Bay).\u00a0 The conquest led to an uprising, which invited Britain to help overturn the French, and at the Congress of Vienna in 1814, Britain acquired Malta as a colony; it remained so until 1964, when it became independent.\u00a0 In 2004 it entered the EU as the smallest and least populated country, with about 450000 citizens.<\/p>\n Between the Knights and the British, the island acquired a lot of palaces\u2014 The location\u2014\u201ca north African desert with a European civilization “\u2014at the crossroads between East and West and Europe and Africa has made it a potentially important trade entrepot\u00a0 or naval base.\u00a0 For the British, it was the headquarters of the Mediterranean Fleet, important in the 19th<\/sup> century with the development of the Suez Canal, the route to India, and the effort to keep the Russians contained in the Black Sea\u2014not to mention the need for coaling stations.<\/p>\n That location prompted what the Maltese call the \u201csecond great siege\u201d\u2014during the second world war.\u00a0 With the entrance of Italy in 1940 into the war, Malta began to get bombarded the next day.\u00a0 Astride supply lines to North Africa, it intercepted Axis supplies and thus was subject to bombardment and blockade.\u00a0 The island is limestone, which meant a lot of air raid shelters, some of which were built below existing early Christian and Jewish catacombs.\u00a0 One of the catacombs was a cave where St. Paul was supposedly incarcerated after being shipwrecked on the island and The Daze comes partly from the beauty of the sea (the land this time of year is hot and dry), and the visit to Hagad Qim, reputedly I wonder, as we are about to sail for Sicily, if the ancients would have been ready to predict the solar eclipse later this month. I wouldn\u2019t be surprised\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 7 August 2017 It seems appropriate that Carolyn and I started this trip to Europe in Malta, because our last trip here was four years ago, when we ended in Rhodes, since one of Rhodes\u2019 claims to fame was in January 1523, when the island fell to Suleiman the Magnificent, who allowed the Knights of … Continue reading “Daze and Knights in Malta”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":36,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1609","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-malta-and-italy-august-2017"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1609","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/36"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1609"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1609\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8536,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1609\/revisions\/8536"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1609"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1609"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1609"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a>Thus began about a 250-year rule by the Knights of the island of Malta.\u00a0 As <\/a>you might imagine from the narrative, living in this neighborhood required fortification of the harbor, and one of the distinctive features of Malta even today is the incredible array of fortresses guarding the Grand Harbor in the town named <\/a>for the grand master during the siege, Valletta.\u00a0 In the <\/a>period of their rule, perhaps the most stunning building\u2014as you might imagine\u2014is the cathedral of St. John, a magnificent baroque construction distinguished with Caravaggio\u2019s only signed (and largest) painting, the beheading of John the Baptist.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a><\/a>the president\u2019s palace, across from the hotel we stayed <\/a>at, was built by one of the Knights, then became residence of the British governor, and now houses the President of the Republic of Malta. While English was until recently one of the official languages, Maltese (the language of the people) predominates.\u00a0 It has roots in Arabic, as does the country before the <\/a> <\/a>13th<\/sup> century.\u00a0 Indeed, the town of Mdina, another walled city that was the capital of the country, is a medieval fort on a hill; the Knights, being sea goers, sought a city with a harbor, and built Valletta and the other cities on the coast.<\/p>\n<\/a>\u00a0converted folks to Christianity, making Malta (in the Maltese telling) one of the earliest Christian countries (a claim that has to discount almost a thousand years of Arab and other occupation, however; there were several ethnic cleansings).<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a>the oldest free-standing stone building in the world.\u00a0 Archaeologists think it was a temple, around 4000 BC, with arrangements rather like Stonehedge or Cahokia, with holes for the equinox and solstice.\u00a0 There were also some interesting statues found, now housed in the archaeology museum, including the \u201cVenus de Malta.\u201d\u00a0 I saw it.<\/p>\n