Were the Knights of Malta glorious heroes or brutal bullies?

Brave, wise, courageous knights – they inspire such romantic notions of gallantry and glory. We heard heroic tales about the Knights of Malta when we visited that Mediterranean island nation, but there’s a dark side too, that isn’t illustrated on the tea towels and fridge magnets.

Officially named “The Hospitaller Order of St. John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes, and of Malta,” the knights are also known as “The Order of the Knights of St. John,” the “Knights of St. John” and the “Knights of Malta.” Whatever you call them, they left a permanent mark on Malta during their 268-year rule.

They built forts, batteries, redoubts, thick city walls, moats and watch towers that we investigated. On the more compassionate and cultured side, they also built hospitals, a magnificent cathedral, a theatre, windmills, and palace-like homes (called auberges) for the knights to live in. And they invaded the culture, the imagination and the legends that continue to attract tourists to Malta today.

We saw as much as we could in two weeks and pieced together their gallant and gory story as we explored.

Valletta’s Old Town

Side streets overhung with enclosed balconies lead down to Valletta’s waterfront.

Massively thick walls surrounding opulence within – whenever we saw that combination, we knew the Knights of Malta had been involved. Fortification was their design motif – imposing, solid, uncompromising, no humour.

The monumental city walls rose before us as we approached the historic core of Valletta, Malta’s capital city. We peered over the railing of the drawbridge-cum-modern-bridge into the deep moat, now threaded with paths and gardens and prettily lit at night. Then we entered Valletta’s Old Town, a UNESCO World Heritage Site that’s built in a grid pattern down a long, defensible peninsula.

When the knights arrived in 1530, Malta was pretty much undefended. Citizens were frequently captured by the Turks and kept as slaves. The knights set about changing that, since Malta was to be their permanent home.

But the knights had barely hung the drapes in their new island home when their strength was tested; 50,000 Turks invaded in 1565, during what’s now called the Great Siege. Led by Grand Master Jean de la Valette, the knights were vastly outnumbered (700 knights plus 8,500 Maltese and European mercenaries) but they won! The victorious knights built Valletta, named for their leader, and stepped up their fortification plans to protect themselves even further. Despite other invasions, the knights ruled Malta until Napoleon Bonaparte expelled them in 1798.

Upper Barrakka Gardens

The Upper Barrakka Gardens look out over a line of cannons poised to defend Valletta’s Grand Harbour.

The Upper Barrakka Gardens offer a splendid view over the Grand Harbour. The knights built the gardens in 1661 atop a defensive bastion on the highest point of Valletta. The paths and flower beds were for the knights’ private use, but were later opened to the public.

We walked past the rows of arches and looked down onto a terrace where a row of cannons pointed over the harbour, just waiting for a boatload of invaders. Today, it’s mostly tour boats and cruise ships, but just in case, one cannon is fired at noon each day.

On the opposite shore, fingers of land pointed towards us – the so-called Three Cities, called by different names that confused us at first: Vittoriosa (aka Birgu), Senglea (aka Isla), and Cospicua (aka Bormla). Also heavily defended with walls and forts, these cities helped the knights guard Malta during the Great Siege. (We got a closer look later when we took a harbour cruise.)

Grand Master’s Palace and Palace and Armoury

The Palace Armoury boasts about 7,000 artefacts, including suits of armour (for men and horses), weapons, shields and some funny helmets that appeared to belong to C-3PO from Star Wars, but were actually 17th-century Italian savoyard helmets. We laughed!

The Knights had begun construction of a largish house for their Grand Master – the top ruler of Malta – before the Great Siege and finished it shortly afterwards. It’s rather plain outside, but the inside began to morph into a palace of sumptuous proportions. Today, it has state rooms, a throne room, stables, chapel, and a smattering of grand staircases. The Grand Master’s Palace is still houses the office of Malta’s president.

Unfortunately, we couldn’t visit since the president had arrived for an important meeting – something more important than letting us in to peruse the tapestries. However, we were allowed to investigate the wing that holds the Palace Armoury.

Wow! We’ve seen a few armouries in our travels (Madrid comes to mind) and this one was enormous, claiming about 7,000 artefacts. We sauntered up and down the aisles, scanning the German, French, Italian and Spanish items as well as the Maltese. We saw full suits of armour, helmets, breastplates, swords, crossbows, pistols, mortars and cannons, and two late-1400s steel-link mail shirts that had come with the knights from Rhodes.

The knights had clearly moved on from their original healthcare and protective roles, not to mention their vows of poverty, chastity and obedience.

The Order of St. John had been founded in Jerusalem in 1099 to take care of sick and injured pilgrims. Wearing red tunics with a white cross, they provided armed escorts for pilgrims and built an infirmary.

By 1291, the knights were on the move due to military defeats, usually by the Muslim Turks. They left the Holy Land and moved to Cyprus. But 18 years later, they moved again to Rhodes, where they set up shop for two centuries, developing a strong naval fleet to defend the Christian world. In 1523, the Turks attacked yet again and booted the knights out of Rhodes. Homeless for seven years, they finally moved to Malta after the Holy Roman Emperor felt sorry for them and gave them the islands, in exchange for one Maltese falcon per year.

I don’t know about chastity and obedience, but the Knights of Malta certainly weren’t poor, as evidenced by our next stop.

St. John’s Co-Cathedral

The Knights’ wealth is on full display in St. John’s Co-Cathedral (Malta has two cathedrals). The pièce de résistance is Caravaggio’s painting “The Beheading of St. John the Baptist.”

Again, an austere exterior belied a sumptuous interior. The sheer opulence of St. John’s Co-Cathedral was staggering. Starting in the 1600s, the knights began embellishing their basic church in the new fanciful Baroque style. Everywhere we looked, our eyes found silver and gold gilt; umpteen colours of marble; equal-armed Maltese crosses; painted vaulted ceiling; carvings of crowns, shields, helmets, and weapons; and paintings by the best artists, notably Mattia Preti and Caravaggio.

Marble tombstones – about 400 – cover the floor, honouring the more illustrious Knights of Malta. Made of many different coloured marbles, the tombstones’ designs include symbols of victory, triumph, fame and death. Skeletons, sickles and hourglasses represent death; angels of fame blow trumpets.

But the pièce de résistance was Caravaggio’s painting “The Beheading of St. John the Baptist,” which merited its own splendid gold-bedecked room and is his only signed painting. Even more intriguing was the story of how the painting came to be there.

Caravaggio – known for his dramatic use of light and shadow – had killed a man in Rome and went on the lam, a fugitive wanted for murder. In 1607, he landed in Malta and the knights welcomed him – welcomed him! – despite his sordid past. (Or was it because of his sordid past? The knights didn’t shy away from killing and they certainly knew what it was like to roam the Mediterranean.) Caravaggio even became a knight in 1608, after Grand Master Wignacourt finagled permission from the Pope. Boggles the mind.

The fractious artist had resumed painting masterpieces, but soon got into trouble again. A month after becoming a knight, he got into a brawl, injured several fellow knights, and was tossed into prison in Fort St. Angelo. He didn’t languish long, but escaped and fled to Sicily. The knights later held a hearing, during which Caravaggio was officially “expelled and thrust forth like a rotten and fetid limb” from the knightly order, according to hearing documents.   

I guess it was okay to kill others, but don’t ever injure a fellow knight. And we’ll keep that painting of our patron saint, thank you very much.

Auberges for the Knights of Malta

Painted murals in the Gran Salon of the Auberge de Provence are being restored.

The Knights of Malta were organized into eight groups, called langues, representing the different regions of Europe they’d come from: Provence; France; Auvergne; Italy; Aragon and Navarre; England, Scotland and Ireland; Germany; and Castille, Leon and Portugal.

In Valletta, each langue lived in an auberge – like a large manor home/mini-palace. Knights had two rooms each and were helped by a pawn. Unfortunately, many of the auberges were bombed during the Second World War, but some survived.

The Auberge of Castille now houses the Prime Minister’s offices, while the Auberge of Provence shelters the National Museum of Archaeology, which we visited to learn about Malta’s prehistoric people and temples.

After seeing the temple sculptures and monuments, we poked our heads into a room that I’m not sure was ready for visitors. Lined with faded but delicately painted murals, the room whispered about previous glory days. It had been a refectory and banquet hall for the knights; those who looked up would have seen coffered wood panels between the ceiling beams. At one end is a musicians’ gallery, added later during the British colonial period. Scaffolding on the far wall was set up for experts to restore the wall murals.

The eight langues are represented on the Maltese cross – each of the four equal arms has two points. Or, the eight points represent the eight Beatitudes from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Or both… Take your pick amongst the legends.

Floriana Mall

We walked along the Floriana Mall, admiring the fountains and statuary, on our way to and from Valletta’s Old Town. 

Our accommodations in Valletta looked out over Floriana Mall – a long skinny garden of trees, flowers, fountains, sculptures and walkways that looked particularly pretty lit up at night.

Called simply “The Mall,” it was built by Grand Master Lascaris in 1656 as a recreation ground for the knights. Lascaris wanted to keep them busy, since his mantra apparently was “wine, women and song sap virility.”

The name “Mall” came from a game called “maglio” played by the knights. They pushed a large wooden ball along a path with a heavy mallet, somewhat like croquet. Whoever reached the target in a pre-determined number of strokes won, somewhat like golf.

If the knights were so engaged in wine, women and song, then their vows of chastity and obedience were somewhat suspect too.

Fortifications around Valletta’s Grand Harbour

As a potential invader, would you want to attack Malta?

Getting out onto Malta’s turquoise waters is recommended all over the country but is a must in Valletta so you can appreciate the fortifications from a different perspective – the perspective of a potential invader.

Aboard a tour boat (no cannons) run by Malta Sightseeing, we learned a lot as we cruised past yacht clubs, a Second World War naval base, Maltese navy vessels, grand hotels, the Upper and Lower Barrakka Gardens, enormous shipyards and drydocks that service ships headed for the Suez Canal, and a new cruise-line terminal.

A row of warehouses, built by the knights, had doors painted according to the contents: yellow for wheat, green for vegetables, blue for fish and red for wine.

In line with their original role to provide health care, the knights built a quarantine hospital for all incoming visitors or captured slaves, long before anyone figured out the ships’ rats caused the illness plaguing them. Another hospital held up to 1,000 patients. The knights provided the best medical and surgical care available then; many sick and injured people travelled to Malta for healing.

Forts squatted on all the major points – Fort St. Elmo at the tip of Valletta, Fort Manoel (named for a Portuguese Grand Master), Fort St. Angelo (where Caravaggio had languished) and Fort Ricasoli (dilapidated now, so many movies are shot there). One watchtower had an eye and an ear sculpted on the sides, to remind guards to watch and listen.

But the walls – those massive, steep, unforgiving walls sprinkled with watchtowers – dominated everything. I tried to imagine scaling them. The majestic Grand Harbour does look mighty impregnable from the water. 

But wait… who actually laboured to build those fortifications?

Slavery and the Inquisition

Each of those oars in the water would have been attached to a slave who provided the muscle power.

The knights fought enemy Turks and Barbary corsairs (privateers, i.e. paid, government-endorsed pirates) from North Africa to prevent Christians being taken into slavery. But during our two weeks in Malta, we heard nary a whisper about the reverse. Whenever the knights won a battle, they enslaved their captured enemy prisoners too.

Slavery had existed in Mediterranean countries from ancient times. But the Knights took it to new heights. Eventually the Maltese economy and the knights’ wealth depended upon the plunder of goods, treasure and slaves. “The slavery pursued by both Christians and Muslims within the Mediterranean is therefore sometimes called ‘faith slavery,’ which was fiercest within the Mediterranean for it was there where Christianity and Islam met,” according to the article “Noble Slavers.”

Sometimes the knights held slaves for ransom or sold them to other Christian countries. The slave market had been held in St. George’s Square, just outside the Grand Master’s Palace. But most slaves remained in Malta. The strongest males manned the oars of the knights’ warships; others did agricultural work or built those massive fortifications. Female slaves did domestic work. About 80 percent of slaves were Jewish or Muslim; just 20 percent were Christian.

Likewise – and I’m aware I’m using today’s values to judge the knights of 400 years ago – the knights’ heroism is tarred by their enthusiastic participation in the Inquisition from 1574 to 1798. We did not have time to visit the Inquisitor’s Palace across the harbour in Birgu, but presumably we’d have learned about the tribunals used to combat heresy, blasphemy, witchcraft, and other anti-Catholic dangers such as Protestantism or Islam. Punishments included penances, torture, life imprisonment or execution. That seems contradictory to the knights’ healthcare role.    

Mdina

Mdina’s narrow streets open onto plazas, such as before St. Paul’s Cathedral, with its beautiful domed ceiling.

We left Valletta and headed to the northwest end of Malta’s main island where we visited some prehistoric temples, the Blue Grotto, and some lovely beaches. But there’s no escaping the influence of the Knights of Malta.

The hilltop town of Mdina was Malta’s capital before the knights arrived, but they substantially increased its defences, using those slaves to turn the walled town into a fortress with ramparts, surrounding ditch, bastions and gunpowder magazines. They rejigged and rebuilt the old medieval gate and rebuilt a signalling tower, Torre dello Standardo, that warned surrounding villages about approaching danger.

We investigated the artwork and holy hardware (silver chalices and monstrances) in the Mdina Cathedral Museum and then visited the Metropolitan Cathedral of Malta (aka St. Paul’s Cathedral). This was Malta’s first cathedral, until St. John’s in Valletta was upgraded to Co-Cathedral. We admired the gorgeous gilt-edged domed ceiling and the many paintings of St. Paul, who’d been shipwrecked on Malta in 60 AD.

We enjoyed getting lost amongst the narrow, winding streets. We (okay, me; Bill wandered ahead) stopped to read information panels about Mdina’s illustrious buildings. The knights slapped their coats of arms on palaces, gates and churches that they rebuilt.

Red Tower and other watchtowers

The knights built a chain of watchtowers to scour the sea for invading Turks and Barbary corsairs.

The knights built 31 watchtowers along the coast of Malta’s main island (also called Malta) and the smaller islands of Comino and Gozo, plus a smattering of inland towers. Many can still be visited.

Built in the 1600s and 1700s to keep an eye peeled for enemies, the towers are in sight of each other so the knights who manned them could relay warning signals back to Valletta. Red flags, bonfires at night and sometimes cannon fire signalled approaching enemies.

We stopped first at the Red Tower, officially called St. Agatha’s Tower, at the north end of Malta island. The squat square tower has turrets on each corner, a drawbridge, four-metre-thick outer walls, a water cistern in the basement that could supply 50 guards under enemy siege for up to 40 days, and cannons on the roof.

After perusing the displays, I climbed the circular staircase to the gun platform on the roof. Squinting into the sunshine, I could see across the channel to Comino island’s similar St. Mary’s Tower. The cannons on both towers could have hit enemies in the channel.

We visited Comino later, but St. Mary’s Tower was closed for renovations. Errant knights were often sent to man the watchtowers on Comino and Gozo as a form of punishment.

Knights guarding Comino also kept watch for poachers of the wild boar and hares that the Grand Masters jealously protected. Any poachers could serve up to three years as a galley slave. The knights also built army barracks and St. Mary’s Battery on Comino.

On Gozo, knights stationed in the Dwerja Tower not only watched for enemies, but also anyone who tried to scale the vertical cliffs of Fungus Rock, an offshore islet, to steal a parasitic plant called Cynomorium coccineum (not a fungus at all). The healthcare knights prized it for dressing wounds and curing dysentery. Thieves faced tough punishments.

Ta’ Kola Windmill, Gozo

Ta’ Kola Windmill’s original wooden machinery from 1725 is still intact.

The knights introduced windmills to Malta, bringing designs from Rhodes. Ta’ Kola Windmill is one of the few that survived from the knights’ reign. Built in 1725, it ground cereals into flour. When the wind was right, the miller blew through a triton shell to let villagers know it was time to bring their grains.

Malta and Gozo also had mills powered by hand and mule, although the grinding mechanism was the same as the windmills, with two hard stones crushing the grains. Steam-driven mills eventually superseded them all.

Today, Ta’ Kola is a folklore museum. An interesting exhibit explained the high importance of bread in the Maltese diet. Up to 75 percent of daily caloric needs for the lower classes came from the coarse brown wheat-and-barley bread they ate. (The upper classes ate refined white bread – actually not as healthy!) The knights ensured a sufficient supply of bread at affordable prices. No info on the slave diet. 

Cittadella, Victoria, Gozo

The view from atop Cittadella’s walls was far-ranging; less so from the Old Prison cells.

Victoria is the town at the centre of Gozo, and within Victoria is the hilltop Cittadella – another fortified enclave thanks to the knights. Within Cittadella is a big church, several small museums, and the Old Prison, built around 1548.

In 1551, before the Great Siege, the Turks raided Gozo and took almost the entire population of 5,000 as slaves. Hundreds of citizens escaped by scaling down Cittadella’s walls. And then there was Bernardo de Opuo – a legendary heroic knight.

During the raid, Bernardo killed his wife and two daughters rather than have them become Turkish slaves. He later died in the battle. It’s not clear if he’s legend or real, but there’s a plaque honouring him, which we saw in the Gozo Museum of Archaeology.   

The knights substantially beefed up Cittadella’s defences after that, similar to Mdina’s, constructing bastions, magazines and a battery.

While troublesome or rowdy knights were exiled to Gozo’s lonely watchtowers, duelling or murder earned them prison time. Touring the Old Prison – with its rather generously sized cells and prisoner graffiti on the walls – was our favourite part of Cittadella.

The most famous Gozo prisoner was Jean de la Valette, who cooled his jets in the Old Prison for four months after attacking a lay man. He later became Grand Master. At least the knights didn’t hold a person’s past against them…

Civilians were also sent to Gozo prison. Women guilty of injuring or being violent with other civilians could be incarcerated for at least 10 years.

Personally, I preferred the less-busy, quieter Gozo to the main island, so I would have happily gone there… well, maybe not for 10 years, but the week we spent on Gozo was excellent.      

Napoleon ended Knights of Malta’s rule

Napoleon, to his credit, abolished slavery and the Inquisition in Malta.

By the late 1700s, the knights’ power was waning as fighting Muslims became less de rigueur. When Napoleon came calling in 1798, the knights couldn’t withstand a prolonged defence and quickly surrendered to the French troops, who then expelled the knights.

Napoleon did what he always did – denude art galleries and churches of their treasures. But on the other hand, he abolished slavery and the Inquisition in Malta. Gotta give it to him for that.

By 1800, the British had driven the French out of Malta. It became a British protectorate and then a full-fledged colony from 1813 to 1964. 

Knights of St. John today

Maltese crosses are everywhere in St. John’s Co-Cathedral, and all over Malta.

The military role of the knights may have faded away, but the Order of St. John still exists. Rome is now the headquarters for its international charity work.

If the Maltese cross looks familiar, you might be a Brit, Canadian or Portuguese. St. John Ambulance in Canada and other British Commonwealth countries, as well as the Bombeiros da Cruz de Malta (volunteer fire and medical emergency workers) in Lisbon, are all descendants of the Knights of St. John, aka Knights of Malta.

Indeed, the Order of St. John is the oldest charity in the world… now minus the slavery and torture.

So, were the Knights of Malta glorious heroes or brutal bullies? As with most stories, a bit of both.

We visited Malta in September and October 2024. Find out where we are right now by visiting our ‘Where’s Kathryn?’ page.