The Great Siege: Malta 1565

Remembering the treatment that had been accorded the Knights and soldiers of St. Elmo, the Maltese inhabitants of Senglea took no prisoners. Hence there arose the expression (used in Malta to this day) 'St. Elmo's pay' for any action in which no mercy is given.

In Malta, the Wars of Religion reached their climax. If both sides believed that they saw Paradise in the bright sky above them, they had a close and very intimate knowledge of Hell.

Their vessels,’ he had been told, ‘are not like others. They have always aboard them great numbers of arquebusiers and of knights who are dedicated to fight to the death.

In that century, a man adventuring by sea in the Mediterranean was likely to find the wheel of fortune turn full circle in a matter of a few hours. Dragut, greatest of all the corsairs after Barbarossa, saw La Valette when he was a galley slave and secured for him slightly more favourable conditions. Eight years later, when Dragut himself was captured by the Genoese admiral Giannettino Doria, Valette happened to be present. He sympathized with the corsair’s anger and remarked: ‘Monsieur Dragut—it is the custom of war.’ To which Dragut wryly replied, ‘And change of Fortune.’ Valette’s own captor, Kust-Aly, was in turn taken by La Valette, then chief admiral of the Order’s fleet, in 1554, and sent to the oars along with twenty-two other prisoners.

There were about 12,000 inhabitants in Malta, most of them poor peasants speaking a kind of Arabic dialect.

It was they who had given the island the name Maleth, ‘A Haven’, which was later corrupted by the Greeks into Melita (‘Honey’) from which the modern name of Malta derives.