This Slaughter Was One Of Malta's Most Epic

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Jumping back 50 or so years and we find the order known as the Knights Hospitaller. Similar in origin to the better known crusading order of The Templars, but rather than abandoning the religious pursuit of taking back the holy lands and eventually being exterminated by the French in 1312, the Hospitallers island hopped around the Mediterranean fighting any Muslims or other Christian heretics they could find.

In the middle of the 16th century, the Knights Hospitaller had set up shop on the Mediterranean island of Malta. They were gifted the island by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, in exchange for a falcon every year! It was here that they set their sites upon the Ottoman Turks, a devoutly Muslim empire that at the time controlled the majority of the Mediterranean coastline. From their island base on Malta, the Knights routinely intercepted and destroyed all the Ottoman shipping they could find. Some sources describe them taking over 3,000 Muslim and Jewish slaves during the course of their naval engagements.

Eventually, the Ottomans had had enough and dispatched one of the largest fleets since antiquity to capture Malta and destroy the pesky Knights Hospitaller once and for all. In total, the Ottomans amassed almost 50,000 troops. All just to take on what at most could have been 2,500 Knights and around 7,000 Maltese civilians. The Ottomans took their victory as inevitable. It was perhaps this overconfidence that led to their utter defeat.

The Ottomans strategy started with trying to capture the Fort St. Elmo as a secure landing point for their armada. The battle to take it from the Knights was a bloody affair lasting almost a month. The Ottomans finally captured it but after a month of sieging the Fort was essentially reduced to rubble. Moreover, Jean Parisot de Valette, the Grand Master of the Knights, had ordered the harvesting of all crops in order to starve the invading Turks. He also had all the wells poisoned before they retreated from Fort St. Elmo. Altogether, the battle to capture the Fort cost the Turks around 6,000 men.

Jean de Valette wasn’t quite finished yet though, he executed all his Turkish prisoners and had their heads fired from cannons at the Ottomans. The Knights managed to survive through four months of sieging, before the Ottomans finally broke the main walls. What the invading Ottoman forces found were the last several hundred remaining Knights who railed around de Valette and cut a bloody swath through the Turks. A Spanish relief force of 8,000 soldiers finally landed and the Turks were forced into a hasty retreat back to their boats. Their invasion of Malta - a complete failure. Recent historical analysis shows the Ottomans lost around 10,000 men, not including hired mercenaries.

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