[Malta Month] The Great Siege of Malta by Bruce Ware Allen

I am enthralled by the Great Siege of Malta. It is one of the most engaging historical narratives I’ve ever come across, the kind of story that feels too exciting to be even remotely true. Too long to really work as a movie, it feels perfectly suited to a high drama HBO series – except probably lacking in sufficient opportunities for gratuitous female nudity. It is a story full of sudden dramatic changes in fortune, deaths, betrayals, desperation, and dramatic last stands against all odds. An underdog story of resistance against an unstoppable foe that somehow also manages to show how much that massive foe is struggling against their own difficulties. It is easy to see why it captured imaginations at the time and within months of its conclusion some commentators described it as the greatest siege that ever was.

It is perhaps a little surprising, then, that there aren’t very many books on the siege. For a long time Ernle Bradford’s history, first published in 1961, has been the definitive history. I was therefore pleased to find that Bruce Ware Allen’s The Great Siege of Malta provides a much-needed update to Bradford’s foundational work. While the overall narrative of the siege in Ware Allen’s account doesn’t differ greatly from Bradford’s, the inclusion of a wider range of sources, particularly more Turkish evidence, gives Ware Allen’s version a more well-rounded perspective than was present in Bradford. This is an excellent history of The Great Siege and if you have any interest in the subject, or just enjoy an engaging and exciting historical narrative, this is the first thing you should read!

As is fairly standard with accounts of the Great Siege, Ware Allen begins with Suleiman the Magnificent’s rise to the Ottoman throne and his plan to drive the Knights Hospitaller from their fortress in Rhodes. This successful siege sets the stage for the great conflict many decades later, near the end of the Sultan’s life. Ware Allen also does a good job of bridging the years in between, providing a detailed history of the Knights’ search for a new home, their eventual settlement in Malta, and the struggles they faced in their new home. He also charts the careers of the Barbary pirates, particularly the Barbarossa Brothers, whose disciples would play a key role in the siege and broader Ottoman conflict and diplomacy with major European powers.

This is a traditional narrative history. It is well sourced and very readable, and with the Great Siege there is a ton of narrative to cover so it works well. That said, I’ve now read multiple narrative accounts of the Siege and while I’m engaged every time, I now yearn for some more thematic histories. I want to know how the Siege and its failure fits into broader Ottoman politics, what it tells us about Christian alliances at the time, and the role that groups like the Hospitallers played in the Catholic Church during the Reformation that was raging around these events. Sometimes these ideas manage to peak into Ware Allen’s account, but they are always peripheral to the core story.

This is not a critique of this book, but more a comment of what I hope to see going forward. I think this account of the Siege provides a great narrative basis and could remain the core narrative/political history of the subject for many years to come. I sincerely hope it encourages scholars to start tackling other aspects of The Great Siege in more detail. An event of this magnitude has the potential to teach us about so many aspects of sixteenth-century society.

I also really appreciate how Ware Allen is able to highlight the individuals involved in the siege. While it can at times be a little overwhelming to track all these characters, the writing is good at reminding you of where an individual appeared before and doesn’t just assume that you remember every single name. I also really liked how it highlighted the multi-cultural nature of both forces. It can be too easy to fall into a clash of cultures style account, placing Hospitallers against Turks which misses that the Hospitallers were supported by a multi-national array of mercenaries and Maltese natives while the Ottoman empire was multi-ethnic with many key figures originally of European origin. Ware Allen does a good job of highlighting the various origins of the narrative’s key players which captures some of the messy allegiances present in these conflicts. Great stuff.

The only substantial critique I would offer of Ware Allen’s book is that sometimes when it journeys further afield from the sixteenth century it can make some assertions that I wouldn’t particularly agree with. There is one comment that attempts to draw a parallel between the tactics of the Knights and the Ottomans and those of the ancient Greeks and Persians which feels particularly strained. There are only a handful of cases where this happens and I suspect most people won’t even notice them, so I’m largely nit picking here.

Overall, I really enjoyed Bruce Ware Allen’s The Great Siege of Malta. The Great Siege is a fascinating historic story whose narrative excitement probably overstates its actual impact, but what a great story it is.