A History

Norman Davies wrote [Europe: A History (1997) Oxford University Press, page 78] wrote, “the islands of Malta present two historic puzzles – their language and their megaliths. The former is Semitic, of mediaeval Arab provenance. It is the only Semitic language to be written in Latin script. (Romantic philologists once linked it with ancient Phoenician). The megaliths are far older. The principal sites at the temple of Ggantija on Gozo island, and at the unique subterranean hypogeum or ‘collective burial chamber’ at Hal-Saflieni, dating from c.2400 BC. The earliest rock-cut monuments were constructed a millennium before.

The procession of civilizations through Malta reads like a shorthand guide to European history. After the Neolithic cave-dwellers, who built the megaliths, and the Bronze Age Beaker Folk, came the Carthaginians (from the seventh century BC) and the Romans (from 218 BC). Gozo is often identified as ‘Calypso isle’, where Odysseus was stranded. St Paul was shipwrecked in a bay named after him, north of Valletta, in 60 AD. Allocated to the Eastern (Byzantine)Empire in 395 AD, Malta was then ruled successively by Arabs (from 870), by Normans (from 1091), by the Knights Hospitallers (from 1530), by the French (from 1798), by the British (from 1802) – and from 1964, belatedly, by the Maltese themselves.”

In 1556, Malta withstood a four-month Ottoman siege, a historic event which is commemorated to this day. Two hundred years later Voltaire remarked “rien n’est plus connu que la siège de Malte.” The French historian Fernand Bruadel wrote: “At the risk of lapsing into sensationalism, I am tempted to say that Malta, or rather the sudden arrival in Malta of the Turkish fleet in May 1565, hit Europe like a hurricane.” Braudel went on to describe the consequences of the defeat suffered by the Ottomans in Malta as “one of the great events of the century” [Fernand Braudel (1995), The Mediterranean, University of California Press, pages 1014-1020].

Malta also endured a second epic siege during World War II when more than 15,000 tonnes of bombs were dropped on the islands by the Axis powers in 3,343 air raids. Thousands of civilians and military personnel were killed or wounded, while most towns and villages particularly in the harbour area were turned into rubble. The islands had to be supplied by sea using merchant ships guarded by flotillas of battle ships to shield them from heavy aerial attacks from land bases. They entered the Mediterranean through the straits of Gibraltar before proceeding on their way to Malta. Despite the huge losses in lives and ships, enough amounts of military supplies, food and fuel managed to trickle in and just about kept the civilian population alive and the defence efforts going. For the courage shown by its people, Malta was awarded the George Cross, but for generations after, peace and the avoidance of war became one of the most cherished values of the people.