History · Malta

Malta: The Fortress in the Middle of the Sea

Temple builders older than the Pyramids, a Semitic language on a Catholic island, the Knights of St John and the Great Siege of 1565, the George Cross of the Second World War, and a small EU state

By Worldlore Editorial · 10 September 2026

A deep natural harbour ringed by golden-stone fortifications and church domes, seen from a garden terrace
The Grand Harbour of Valletta, built by the Knights of St John from 1566. Malta's central Mediterranean position made it valuable to every power that could reach it. (Txllxt TxllxT / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0)

A crossroads too useful to leave alone

Malta is a tiny archipelago in the centre of the Mediterranean — about 80 kilometres from Sicily and 300 from North Africa — with some 540,000 people packed into a little over 300 square kilometres, making it one of the most densely populated countries in the world. Its position, astride the sea lanes between Europe and Africa and between the eastern and western Mediterranean, has meant that almost every power in the region has, at some point, wanted it.

A short history

  1. c. 3600–2500 BCE

    The temples

    Megalithic temple builders raise Ħaġar Qim, Ġgantija and others.

  2. c. 800 BCE

    Phoenicians

    Then Carthaginian and, from 218 BCE, Roman rule.

  3. 870–1091

    Arab Malta

    Two centuries of Muslim rule shape the Maltese language.

  4. 1530

    The Knights

    Charles V grants Malta to the Order of St John.

  5. 1565

    The Great Siege

    The Knights repel a large Ottoman invasion.

  6. 1566

    Valletta

    A planned fortress city is founded.

  7. 1798–1800

    French rule

    Napoleon takes Malta; a Maltese revolt drives the French out.

  8. 1814–1964

    British colony

    A key Royal Navy base.

  9. 1940–1943

    The siege

    Malta is bombed relentlessly and awarded the George Cross.

  10. 1964

    Independence

    Malta becomes a sovereign state.

Temples, and languages

Between about 3600 and 2500 BCE, a temple-building culture on Malta raised some of the oldest free-standing stone structures in the world — older than Stonehenge or the Pyramids — and then vanished.

Massive rough-hewn limestone slabs forming the chambers of the Ħaġar Qim temple, on a coastal ridge
Ħaġar Qim, one of Malta's megalithic temples. The culture that built them collapsed around 2500 BCE. (Diego Delso / Wikimedia Commons)

Phoenicians settled Malta around 800 BCE; then came Carthage, Rome — where Maltese tradition places the shipwreck of St Paul and the island's conversion to Christianity — and Byzantium. The Arab conquest of 870 brought two centuries of Muslim rule that gave Malta its language: Maltese is a Semitic tongue, descended from the Arabic of that period, now the only such language written in the Latin alphabet, and spoken on a thoroughly Catholic island.

The Knights, and the Great Siege

The Normans took Malta in 1091, and for four centuries it was a poorly defended fief of the Kingdom of Sicily. In 1530 Emperor Charles V granted it to the Knights Hospitaller of St John — recently expelled from Rhodes by the Ottomans — for the token rent of one falcon a year.

A 16th-century painting of the Ottoman fleet and army besieging the harbours and forts of Malta in 1565
The Great Siege of 1565, in a fresco cycle painted for the Knights. An Ottoman army of tens of thousands besieged the island for nearly four months; the Knights held, checking Ottoman expansion in the western Mediterranean. (Matteo Perez d'Aleccio / Wikimedia Commons)

After the siege, the Knights built Valletta — a planned Renaissance fortress city funded by donations from across Catholic Europe — and spent the next 230 years turning Malta into a baroque naval base, living off their European estates and raiding Muslim shipping. By the 1790s the Order was decadent, and the French Revolution had seized its main source of income.

French, then British

Napoleon took Malta without a fight on his way to Egypt in 1798. French rule lasted two years before anticlerical measures and looting provoked a Maltese revolt, which, with British naval help, forced the French out. Malta then passed to Britain, becoming a colony in 1814 and the headquarters of the Royal Navy's Mediterranean Fleet — a fortress colony whose dockyard was the main employer, and whose politics were dominated by a long fight over language: Italian, English or Maltese.

The George Cross Island

Malta's position made it vital in the Second World War for cutting Axis supply convoys to North Africa, and from June 1940 it was besieged and bombed for over two years — one of the most intensively bombed places of the war.

A merchant ship of the Malta convoy under way, with the coast in the distance, August 1942
A Malta convoy, August 1942. By mid-1942 the island was close to starvation; the arrival of the battered Operation Pedestal convoy is a national epic. King George VI awarded Malta the George Cross, now on its flag. (War Office official photographer / Wikimedia Commons)

Independence, and Europe

Malta became independent on 21 September 1964, a republic in 1974, and free of British forces in 1979. Its politics polarised sharply between two parties — including the confrontational Labour governments of Dom Mintoff, who leaned toward Libya and the Eastern bloc. Malta joined the European Union in 2004 and the euro in 2008, liberalised socially in the 2010s, and built a fast-growing economy on finance, online gaming, tourism and the sale of citizenship.

A makeshift protest memorial of flowers, candles and photographs at the foot of a monument in Valletta
The memorial to Daphne Caruana Galizia in Valletta. The investigative journalist, who had exposed high-level corruption, was killed by a car bomb in 2017; the case forced the prime minister's resignation in 2020. (Ethan Doyle White / Wikimedia Commons)

What Malta carries

Malta's history is written in stone — the temples, the bastions of Valletta, the war-damaged towns — and all of it follows from geography. A rock in the middle of the sea, it was held by the Knights as Christendom's frontier, by Britain as a naval base, and is prized now as an EU member state with a passport for sale. The strategic value that made it a fortress is the same value it trades on today.

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