The Great Siege of Malta, Marcus Bull, Allen Lane, £30

‘Nothing is better known than the siege of Malta’, Voltaire said, a remark that Marcus Bull parses in his new account of the great events of 1565. The story of the siege is certainly well-known and has been retold many times over the centuries. So, is there anything new to add? Professor Bull’s account rises to the challenge.

His approach is investigatory, based on a forensic study of all the available evidence and posing open-ended questions. One of the basic difficulties in understanding motives and events is the imbalance in the sources – a torrent on the Christian side, sometimes self-serving and untrustworthy; on the Ottoman side almost nothing by way of eyewitness accounts. The most fruitful source for the latter, The 1565 Ottoman Malta Campaign Register, is a bureaucrat’s ledger of the preparations. Inevitably then, we have tended to view the importance of the siege from the insider’s perspective. While for Christian Europe, the outcome was a huge celebratory triumph, to the Ottomans, it was no more than a temporary setback, a blip.

The book opens by outlining the chaotic violence of the Mediterranean in the mid-16th century: a sea of endless raiding by the corsair states of North Africa and the responses from the Habsburg king and the Knights of the Order of St John. This was an arena in which religious identities could switch back and forth: captured Christian slaves might convert to Islam and then revert, depending on fate and opportunity. Bull’s sketch of the Knights themselves is revealing: a warrior cadre of testosterone-fuelled young noblemen primed for violence in defence of the Faith and touchy about aristocratic protocol. Cooped up on Malta with the remit to fight, the records reveal a litany of charges for rape and murder.

The book casts a critical eye over Ottoman motives in the siege, challenging Christian assumptions of the existential threat of ‘The Terrible Turk’ committed to endless conquest and expansion. It argues that Ottoman policies were more nuanced and strategic, or opportunistic, than their Christian opponents could perceive. The alliance with France to use the port of Toulon in 1543 is a case in point. The immediate motive to proceed against Malta lay in the nuisance value of the Knights’ maritime raids on the seaway from Istanbul to Egypt. Capturing shiploads of haj pilgrims on the way to Mecca was an insufferable afront to Sulieman the Magnificent as guardian of the holy places of Islam. The related threat to the vital grain supply to Istanbul from North Africa was a menace of a different order.

What emerges in this book is a healthy scepticism of many of the standard tropes around Ottoman motives, backed by a careful analysis of the evidence. Why did the Ottomans fail to take Malta? He cites three principal causes: the loss of skilled manpower, the fact that the defenders never quite ran out of essentials, and the full-hearted support of the Maltese people. ‘In the end’, he suggests, ‘the defenders in the Great Siege just about held on because they were very, very lucky.’

Beyond the events of the siege itself, Marcus Bull shifts our angle of vision. He moves the focus away from the claustrophobic arena of the Mediterranean and links the siege’s origins, motives and consequences to a wider global perspective on the age. By the middle of the 16th century both the Ottomans and the Habsburgs had larger issues to attend to. In 1565 the Spanish were establishing a base in the Philippines; the Ottomans were engaged in contesting the Indian Ocean with the Portuguese. At the same time, the Ottomans were certainly aware of the flow of silver into Spain. Bull suggests that the possibility of the Habsburgs strengthening their position in the Mediterranean with the bullion of the New World was a factor in their Mediterranean strategy. The events of 1565 had other consequences. Philip II of Spain, preoccupied with Malta, took his eye off the protestant revolt in the Spanish Netherlands. In such ways the significance of the Malta siege was woven into the global framework of an accelerating world.

The coverage of the siege itself is succinct and full of interesting perspectives. However, perhaps alive to Voltaire’s maxim of ground well-covered, what is not present in this carefully sourced approach to the event is any vivid sense of the actual fighting. The siege was visceral, savage, bloody and dramatic. It is extremely rich in eyewitness accounts of the realities of warfare and how men fought in encounters of a Homeric intensity. These catch the taunts of men shouting at each other over the parapets and expecting to die. This is very much an ‘insiders’ perspective: almost all those who attested to the trench warfare in the summer of 1565 were Christian and their witness may not always be taken at face value, but it was the intensity of these encounters and their reporting that kept Europe on tenterhooks and made the siege famous. The vividness of eyewitness accounts and the speed of transmission across Europe via printed newssheets created a new age of information and made the siege famous to the point that Voltaire could later claim it was old hat.

Marcus Bull’s revisiting of the siege through the eyes of the Ottomans and a global lens that shifts our angle of vision has made a considerable contribution to our understanding of the events of 1565, but a general reader might reasonably also ask for the smell of gunpowder and the sound of human voices – the first-hand experiences of battle: men crouching behind shattered fortifications and fighting to the last.