82

SOME ACCOUNT OF MALTA. No. I.

1. GENERAL REMARKS.

in Malta, and but few springs. The principal defiles and valleys run from south-west to north-east.

About three miles and a-half to the north-west of Malta is another island called Gozo, ten miles long, by more than five in breadth, and of an oval form. It is bounded by perpendicular rocks on all sides, which in one part rise to the height of 570 feet above the level of the sea, and this particular point serves as a landmark to vessels coming from the westward, and is 26 feet higher than any part of Malta. This island has a greater depth of soil, is more undulated, and more fruitful than the former, but offers inlets only for the smaller craft. As a passing observation we may say, that the ancients describe Gozo as being surrounded with good harbours, which tells volumes about the insignificance of their navies.

Ir is as easy to acquire, as it is difficult to give, the first idea of the places and persons that compose any given history, the mere names of which must be repeated again and again, and as often without imparting any information, unless there previously exist in the reader's mind some definite idea of these elements of knowledge-unless there are some tenter-hooks already driven into the brain, as a clever man has quaintly enough expressed himself, whereon to hang fresh facts and after-associations. In the island of Ithaca, an Ionian lawyer, and an educated man, (for he spoke English,) amongst other strange questions, once asked the writer of this paper how far England was from London; and a clerk in an Athenian government office inquired if France were far distant from America; he has In the channel between these two islands is another, also been asked by an English woman, accomplished at her named Cumino, two miles in length, and one in breadth; near this is the rock Cominotto, which name shows the piano, if Athens were in Greece; and has heard another, a very accomplished musician, describe an occurrence as playful way the Italian language expresses size, or any having taken place "in Madeira, or some other town in other common quality, by slightly varying the ends of Portugal." Add to these, the English in general suppose words. To the south of the whole is an uninhabited, rocky Demerara to be an island in the West Indies, and Mexico islet called Filfola or Filfa, about which we know nothing a state of South America; nor is it long since Monmouth more than the Maltese proverb, "See Filfola and die," has ceased to be in Wales. To record errors is almost as meaning, we presume, ironical ecstacy at the beauty of a instructive as to register truths; for men are not apt to barren rock. forget the palpable mistakes of others, while these not unfrequently reflect their own.

Casual oecurrences often bring places and persons upon the surface, as it were, of the public mind; individual attention is drawn to a particular subject by the public prints of the day; fact after fact soon accumulates, and excites surprise that so much interesting material could have escaped previous notice. When her gracious majesty the queen dowager Adelaide went there to pass the winter of 1838-9, thousands asked "Where is Malta?" Upon this "tenter-hook" we will try to hang a few of the most important associations of the place.

It has been supposed that these islands are the remains of a large tract of land which once extended towards the south-west, and which resisted the violence that caused the destruction of the country, of which, if this hypothesis-be true, they formed a part. From the sea, their present appearance is that of flat islands, not visible at a greater distance than twenty-four miles, and at no point rising so high as 600 feet above its level.

2. EARLY HISTORY OF THE MALTESE ISLANDS.
As the plan of the port gave to the reader a more definite
idea of the place than verbal description, so the following
bird's-eye view of its history will show at once the principal
epochs into which the subject naturally divides itself.
B.C. 402. The Carthaginians have entire possession of Malta.
242. The Romans take it from the Carthaginians.
A.D. ? The Goths possess Malta.

533. Belisarius expels the Goths from the island.
870, or thereabouts. The Arabs take possession of it.
1120. Roger, the Norman conqueror of Sicily, expels the Arabs.
1530. The Maltese islands separated from Sicily by Charles the
Fifth, and given by him to the Knights of St. John.
1798. The grand-master of the Knights surrenders to General
Buonaparte.

1800. Surrendered by the French to the English.

The Mediterranean Sea is about two thousand miles in length from Gibraltar to Palestine, and the Maltese islands are very nearly half way between these two places. They are a group of low rocky islands, 58 miles, or fourteen hours' sail, in a native boat with a tolerable wind, from the nearest point of Sicily, and 179 miles from Cape Demas, the nearest point on the mainland of Africa. Malta, which is the largest of these islands, is considerably smaller than the Isle of Wight, off the Hampshire coast, being only 171 miles in length, and 94 miles broad. It consists of an immense soft, white, calcareous rock, covered with a thin stratum of earth, seldom exceeding more than a foot in depth; of an irregular form, the south-western sides pre- A Phoenician colony from Tyre is said to have held these sent, for the most part, only perpendicular rocks; the north- islands as early as the fourteenth century before the birth east, however, offers several commodious harbours, and of Christ; and this people used them as a harbour and a Valetta, the present capital, is built upon a tongue of land depôt for the commerce and civilization flowing from the which divides two of the largest of these at the north-East, as they are now used for the same purpose by the eastern corner of the island. Standing on this tongue of merchants of the West, who are sending back, upon a land, with the face towards the north, in front of the be-counter current, the debt of ages, not without the interest. holder, is the tideless Mediterranean, on the norizon of Ulysses, king of Ithaca, one of the Ionian islands, after which may be seen, with a clear day and a good eye, the having taken part in the destruction of the city of Troy in snowy top of Etna, 128 miles distant; upon his right, and the twelfth century B.C., is said to have wandered, amongst consequently eastward, is a magnificent harbour 3400 yards other places, to Sicily, where his companions stole and in length 450 yards wide at its entrance, and opening up killed some oxen that were sacred to a heathen god ; into several convenient inlets, which are land-locked. To alarmed for their safety, they took ship and fled, but were the westward and the left is a smaller harbour, called Mar- wrecked upon a neighbouring island, and all were drowned samuscetto, signifying a place of shelter, where all vessels except Ulysses himself. This island, then called Ogygia, from the East are first compelled to pass an appointed is supposed to have been Gozo, close to Malta. period of quarantine before they are allowed to enter the "Grand Harbour." This sketch of the position and capabilities of the capital of Malta will be made clearer by comparing it with the bird's-eye view given on the preceding page. Marsa Scirocco Bay to the south-east, and St. Julian's, St. Paul's, and that of Melleha to the north-west, complete the list of the smaller harbours.

The point of land on which Valetta stands is 200 feet above the level of the sea, but as it joins the mainland, it becomes considerably lower; and it is only as the southern shore is neared, that the island gradually rises to the height of several hundred feet. To the westward of the city, however, a ridge of land, running north and south, divides the island into two unequal parts. There are no streams

The Tyro-Phoenicians, together with a few small societies of Ionic Greeks, are said to have maintained, under an aristocratic constitution, their independence till the fifth century before the Christian era, when they were assailed by the Carthaginians, to whom, after a feeble resistance, they are said to have submitted. Diodorus of Sicily says that the colonists were very rich; that their houses were large and highly ornamented, and that the people were expert in many trades, and especially for their manufacture of linen [query cotton] cloths, which were held in great esteem for fine and delicate texture. The exact time at which the Carthaginians effected this conquest is not known; they were in possession of the islands, however, in the year 402 B.C. Other accounts say the Greeks succeeded the

Phoenicians, and that it was from them that the Carthaginians wrested them. Like the early history of all countries, the first facts are involved in so much obscurity, that we shall find it more satisfactory to press on to the following epoch. When the Romans conquered Sicily, they took possession of Malta, and erected it into a municipium, which, in their law, denoted that individuals or places were invested with the rights and privileges of a Roman citizen, a title, however, when bestowed upon foreign cities and people, but too often merely nominal in effect. From an oration of Cicero we learn that Verres, a Roman and rapacious prætor of Sicily, was accused, amongst other crimes, of having plundered the temple of Juno at Malta. This is instructive, as telling us the nature of the idolatrous worship then in vogue in the island; but we shall see, when we come to speak of the existing antiquities, that while these Roman fanes have all passed away, together with their creeds, the temples of a far higher antiquity remain until to-day. From this we may safely infer that there was an idolatry more deeply rooted as identified with the associations of an earlier age, which the Romans did not eradicate, and to the very altars of this primeval worship we shall be able to introduce our readers in the sequel.

Figs, melons, honey, cottons, &c., were exchanged, at this time, for corn; the linen cloth of Malta was considered as an article of luxury at Rome. As a curious circumstance, it may be mentioned that in a sepulchral urn, not long since discovered at Gozo, was found a coin of Ancient Britain. According to the superstition of the age, a small piece of money was given to the dead to pay their passage across the waters that divide this life from the next existence, and as Britain became a Roman colony before the birth of our Saviour, this provincial coin, struck, as it was customary, at Rome, might easily have passed with its possessors to any other part of that great empire; and, ultimately, according to their superstition, to the pocket of Charon, the reputed waterman of those invisible and doubtful waters.

To this time and place belong the shipwreck of St. Paul, as narrated in the twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth chapters of the Acts of the Apostles. We are aware that a small island in the Adriatic Sea has sometimes been mentioned as the scene of this part of St. Paul's sufferings, but without any foundation further than the resemblance of the ancient names of the two places. Paul came from Crete, and was on his way to Rome, and Malta was consequently almost in his course, which the other island was not. Paul wintered where he was shipwrecked, together with 275 other persons, and passed from thence at once to Sicily, whereas the smaller and unhealthy Melite of the Adriatic being within half a league of an excellent harbour, and close to a rich mainland, would not have detained all these strangers for such a length of time; nor, having detained them, could they have gone from thence to Syracuse in Sicily, in those times of feeble navigation, without touching at some other port, which, as is evident from the narrative, they did not. Grotius, too, says there was an inscription discovered in Malta, in which the same expression occurred, as is met with in the seventh verse of the twenty-eighth chapter of Acts, "the chief man" of the island, whose father Paul healed; the same Greek word being used by both writers, as if it had been a conventional title of common use. Tradition, also, of the facts, exists in one, and not in the other, of the islands. We have already mentioned St. Paul's Bay; here they say he was shipwrecked, which we believe to be true. St. Paul's Cave is also pointed out to the traveller, and here they say he was imprisoned, but this there is no occasion to receive; the Maltese, however, have ever cherished the general associations with their islands and religion: St. Paul is their patron saint; and although tradition, taken apart from, or in opposition to, other witnesses, is of no value, yet when strengthened by circumstantial evidence, must be allowed to have the weight of an unbroken testimony.

"The barbarous people," then, that showed Paul and his companions no little kindness, were the Roman-Maltese; they kindled a fire, and received every one of the two hundred and three score and sixteen souls, and lodged them courteously, and honoured them with many honours, and when they departed, they laded them with such things as were necessary. This happened A.D. 62, at which time the name of Malta was Melite or Melita.

The Romans maintained their authority over these islands ' until Rome fell under the power of the Goths: these, in

their turn, were expelled by Belisarius, the general, and afterwards the emperor of the East, in the year 533 A.D. The Arabs conquered Malta about 870 A.D., and having lost possession of it for several years, finally recovered it about 900 A.D., and put the Greek inhabitants, who were subjects of the Eastern empire, and their enemies, to the sword. In 1120, Count Roger, the Norman conqueror of Sicily, took these islands, and expelled the Arabs; and they remained attached to Sicily until that island, together with Naples, fell into the hands of Charles the Fifth, emperor of Germany, who granted them to the Knights Hospitallers of St. John, commonly known, at the present day, as the Knights of Malta.

3.

EARLY HISTORY OF THE KNIGHTS OF MALTA.
Then in Palestine,

By the way-side, in sober grandeur stood
A hospital, that, night and day, received

The pilgrims of the west; and, when 'twas asked,
"Who are the noble founders?" every tongue
At once replied, "The merchants of Amalfi."
That hospital, when Godfrey scaled the walls,
Sent forth its holy men in complete steel;
And hence, the cowl relinquished for the helm,
That chosen band, valiant, invincible,

So long renowned as champions of the Cross,
In Rhodes, in Malta.-ROGERS.

ALTHOUGH it is only forty years since these military friars
virtually ceased to exist as an independent order, yet so
little is now known about them that we are compelled to
say a few words concerning their origin, in order to make
the narrative intelligible.

"It is written," says Sir William Segar, "that at the citie of Amiens, in Picardie, a province of France, there was borne a certaine gentleman, who, in his childhood, had bene brought up in learning: and being growen to man's estate, disposed himselfe to the exercise of armes, and therein long time continued. Afterwards, having attained riper yeres, he despised the world, and framed himselfe to a solitarie life, as one fully resolved to live in contemplation, unseene of any but God alone. Having sometime remained in that solitarie sort, a suddaine desire he had to visite the sepulchre where Christ was buried, which shortly after he did. And to the end that he might with securitie passe the barbarous nations, he apparalled himselfe like unto a phi sition; by which meane, without impediment, he performed his jorney. Thus having passed the difficulties of travell in divers strange countries, he arrived at Jerusalem, and being there, fell into acquaintance with Simon, patriarch of that citie, and in lamenting wise enformed him of the oppression and crueltie offered and dayly used by the Infidels towardes the poore Christians in those countreys, whereunto Simon answered, that albeit the Christians in those countreys indured great outrages, yet they of Jerusalem suffered much greater, and should be forced to more, if God did not defend them."

This "certaine gentleman," who was no other than Peter the Hermit, was afterwards sent by the patriarch of Jerusalem to the pope, and temporal powers of Europe, to solicit succour for the Christians of Palestine, "and many great kings and potentates consented to take in hand the recovery of the Holy Land from the oppression of the Infidels." Hence arose the first crusade, the foremost body of which consisted of an undisciplined rabble of 60,000 fanatics, whose path was marked with every species of intemperance, and who were finally cut to pieces by the Turks, upon the plains of Nice, one of the chief cities of the Turkish kingdom of Roum, which then extended from the Hellespont to the frontiers of Syria. But others were behind, and Nice was soon invested by an army of 100,000 knights, including their attendants, besides 600,000 pilgrims, able to bear arms. In seven weeks that city surrendered, and in June of the following year, 1099, the standard of the cross was planted on the walls of Jerusalem.

Two hospitals for the relief of pilgrims had already been founded at Jerusalem, while it was yet under Turkish thraldom, by some merchants of Amalfi, in Italy, one of which was dedicated to St. John, a patriarch of Alexandria. This latter, which had hitherto been a secular establishment, now, in the enthusiasm of the period, became a monastic order: the hospitallers abjured the world, and formally dedicated themselves at the altar as the servants of the poor and of Christ. Gerard, the father of the order, died in the year 1118, or 1120, and was essentially a man of peace; but Raymond du Puis, an ambitious warrior, was chosen as his successor, and, without absolving the monks from their former obligations, to meet the exigencies of the

times, he added others equally arduous. He organized them into three classes, differing in birth, rank, and office: the first consisted of knights of justice, of patrician ancestry, whose duty was to fight; the second of priests, to perform the services of religion in church and camp, and to minister to the sick and wounded; the third class, named Sergens, served either in the battle-field or the hospital, as required. Each brother, at his profession, took vows of chastity, obedience, and poverty, all of which were broken in the latter times; and the knights further solemnly swore to defend Christianity with their swords. Their banner was a white cross on a red field, and hence they were often called "the White Cross Knights."

In consequence of the crowd of knights that rallied under this standard, it soon became necessary to divide the order .nto separate nations, or languages, or tongues, as they have differently been denominated, which at first were those of Provence, Auvergne, France, Italy, Arragon, Germany, and England. The government of the order was strictly aristocratic, the master, afterwards called the grand-master, being president of the council, and in the exercise of supreme jurisdiction. Princes supplicated to be buried in the habit and harness of these warrior monks; kings were proud to be enrolled under their victorious banner; and Alfonso the First, king of Arragon and Navarre, having no offspring, named the Knights of the Hospital and Temple (an order similar to the former) heirs to both his crowns,u deed which the subjects of those kingdoms very properly set aside.

In 1187, Jerusalem was taken by Saladin, and the knights, after the entire loss of the Holy Land, in 1291, withdrew to Cyprus. Here they remained eighteen years, when, snatching the Isle of Rhodes from the Saracens, in 1308, they settled there, and for more than 200 years were known by the name of the Knights of Rhodes. Time, however, had not softened the bitter rancour between the Christian and the Turk; and on the morning of the first of January, 1523, the order was compelled to abandon Rhodes to Solyman the First, surnamed the Magnificent, emperor of the Turks; but not before they had endured a long series of disasters with great physical and moral fortitude, and had been deserted by all those "great kings and potentates" of Christendom, who had, in an earlier age, lavished the blood of their subjects upon the sepulchre of Christ in order to convert, by the robbery of conquest, and the wholesale massacres of people, Infidels, to that religion which says, "Peace, peace to him that is far off, and to him that is near."

4. COMMENCEMENT OF THE MODERN MILITARY IMPORTANCE OF MALTA.

TOUCHING at Candia, the knights of St. John passed to Messina, in Sicily, where the viceroy invited the grandmaster, in the name of the emperor, Charles the Fifth of Germany, to make that city his home; but an enemy, as ruthless, and more subtle than the Turk, drove them forth once more in search of a refuge. The plague suddenly made its appearance; and to escape the contagion, which they had probably themselves brought from the east, they took ship nearly as precipitately as they had done at Rhodes, and sailed to Baia, in the Gulf of Naples, carrying the disease along with them, of which several knights of distinction died at sea during the passage. After a protracted sojourn in Italy, the emperor, Charles the Fifth, ceded for ever to the grand-master and religious fraternity of St. John, "in absolute title and fee simple," all the castles, fortresses, and isles of Tripoli, Malta, and Gozo, upon various stipulations which are foreign to our present subject.

No sooner was this cession rumoured of, than commissioners were sent by the order to survey their new possessions which now consisted of the Maltese Islands, and the town of Tripoli on the coast of Africa. According to this official report, which is a valuable authority, Malta is described as nothing better than a shelterless rock of soft sand-stone, called tuffa, six or seven leagues long and three or four broad. The surface of the rock was scantily covered with earth, but of so coarse and arid a kind that grain refused to vegetate in it. It produced, however, abundance of figs, melons, and other fruits, besides cotton and cummin, which, together with honey, were exchanged by the native traders for corn with their Sicilian neighbours. The island had no rivulets, and except in the interior, it was destitute of springs-consequently the inhabitants, as at the present day, had to store up the rain in cisterns. Fuel was so

scarce that wood was sold by the pound; and the natives usually dressed their food on fires made with thistles, or cow-dung dried in the sun. The Citta Notabile, or capital, occupied a rising ground in the centre of the island, and The was a paltry, miserable, and defenceless place. fortifications which commanded the harbours were insignificant and in ruins. The population was, at this time, about 12,000; but an uncultured soil, and the rapacity of corsairs, who made constant descents upon the island, sweeping away whole families into captivity, kept the inhabitants in constant fear and produced the natural results of insecurity.

Gozo was described in the same report as separated from Malta by a channel about a league and a half wide, in the midst of which were two islets called Cumin and Cuminot. According to the survey, Gozo was eight leagues in circumference, destitute of harbours, and environed by shoals and reefs, but withal blessed with a fertile soil. The inhabitants amounted to about 5000, who dwelt like the people of Malta, in casàls, or villages. Their only defence from the corsairs was a badly fortified castle built on a hill.

Constant attacks of Saracens and Turks had completely desolated these islands and their dependencies, and the impoverished inhabitants could barely provide themselves with the necessaries of life. In the year 1516, only fourteen years before this time, all the revenue which the Imperial Governor could wring from them was forty ducats.

The first step to the possession of Malta by the knights was the delivery of the castle of St. Angelo which commanded the most commodious part, to a proper officer under a temporary governor and a captain-at-arms, who was followed by the grand-master himself, Villiers de l'Isle Adam, at the end of the year 1530. It is said that his fortitude almost deserted him when he beheld upon this sterile spot no edifice superior to a fisher's hut, save a dilapidated andalmostuntenable fortress. He immediately threw up a few defences around the insignificant casàl or village which had risen close to the castle of St. Angelo, and at the same time marked out a position for his future capital.

In hopes, however, of a settlement in more fruitful Greece, the order attacked Modon, a town in the Morea, in the following year, 1531, and their conduct in this and similar expeditions should warn us against indulging our sympathies too freely with this or any other self-constituted body of men, who, under the name of religion, or the conventional honour of the world, have worked out the mixed motives of human nature, but motives are too subtile for us to analyze, and chivalry has not yet been judged by its fruits. No natural impulse is so welcome to the individual, no popular enthusiasm is so contagious, as that which offers outlets for the worst of human passions. No fanaticism that has been preached to man has ever been attended with such universal consent as the Crusades, and none ever presented such an amount of crime in the agents, and of suffering in those against whom the contest was waged; and of all the half-monastic, half-military orders which owed their origin to these Crusades, none ever possessed such national power and social responsibilities as the Knights Hospitallers of St. John. While this order was abandoned by the bad and the dastardly of its own society as well as by the puissant nations which left it to struggle single-handed, as at Rhodes, against the empires of the East, we cannot restrain our sympathies from the spectacle of physical endurance and of moral courage which they presented at that period; danger indeed had purified their ranks, and at the last dauntless hearts evinced supreme self-control in closing a sanguinary war, when they could no longer shield those around whom they had stood as a wall of steel, after the stone ramparts of Rhodes had been battered into dust by the tremendous Turkish cannonade which Solyman the Magnificent had forced on with the words, "I myself am fully resolved here to conquer, or end my days; and if I depart from this resolution, let my head, my fleets, my army, and my empire, be for ever accursed and unfortunate." But, no sooner had these troubles passed away, than the very first action which follows betrays the looseness of the convention, which not only allowed, but recognised, in lieu of pay to its soldiers, rapine and violence bought with wholesale murder. We read that, under the fair colours of honourable commerce, these knights, with the sanction of their grand-master, entered the port of Modon, corrupted the captain of the harbour by bribery, intoxicated the Turks who garrisoned the tower of

the mole, and only did not take the city by giving them- | selves up to every species of violence against property, and life, and honour. Booty to an immense value was carried away to Malta, and while the men, who never injured them, were slaughtered with savage fury, their wives and daughters, to the number of eight hundred, were torn from their homes, and in all this, the knights themselves, "sworn to chastity, obedience, and poverty, as servants of the poor and of Christ," were the chief spoilers. These are the fruits of chivalry. Thus was the banner of the white cross knights tainted again and again.

The pope having refused to countenance the divorce of Catharine of Arragon from her husband, Henry the Eighth of England, the latter sequestered the possessions of al! of his subjects who adhered to the see of Rome. Under these circumstances some of the English knights of St. John adjured their order; others, named Ingley, Adrian Forrest, Adrian Fortescu, and Marmaduke Bohus, perished on the scaffold; others died in prison, and the remainder sought an asylum at Malta. The act of the English legislature, by which the order was abolished in our own country, and the property belonging to it confiscated, was dated in the year 1534. L'Isle Adam, the grand-master, received our countrymen, the refugees, with considerable kindness. He was the most illustrious head that ever ruled the knights, and dying in the same year, worn out with care, they wrote upon his grave, "Here lies virtue triumphant over misfortuné."

After various predatory attacks upon Greece and the northern shore of Africa, the history of which belongs to that of the order of St. John, rather than to the history of Malta, but all of which were marked with the same atrocious acts as those they did at Modon,-now the Turks were victims, and if these were too powerful, the Jews were devoted to pillage, and now from the Moorish coast maidens of the most illustrious families were reduced to the basest bondage by the Spanish and German soldiers, hired by the order to carry out their ambitious designs, and paid, let it never be forgotten by the reluctant lovers of chivalry, by the property, by the freedom, and the honour of innocent and defenceless females, bought with the blood of their natural protectors. "It would, indeed," says an historian of the order of St. John, "be a breach of historical candour not to state, that the warfare was characterized on both sides by sanguinary ferocity. If the Turk and the Moor were cruel and merciless, so was the Christian knight. It was a war of reckless bloodshed and brutal spoliationa series of legal outrages, which humanity chronicles with regret." After a series of these attacks, and to revenge them, a Turkish fleet arrived off Port Musceit, now called Marsamuscetta, or the Quarantine Harbour, in July 1551. The rocky tongue of land which bounds this port towards the east, and upon which we said the present capital stands, was then called Mount Sceberras. Besides the old capital in the interior of the island, the bourg, or town, was the only place of shelter, capable of holding out any length of time against the invaders. This bourg was protected by the castle of St. Angelo, and after inspecting its capabili ties from Mount Sceberras, Sinam Pasha, the general of the Turkish army, preferred, as an easier task, attacking the Citta Notabile in the interior, which was badly garrisoned, and would probably have at once fallen into the hands of the Turks, had they not listened to a false rumour that a Christian armament, under Andrew Doria, the great Genoese captain of his age, was on its way to succour the knights. Sinam immediately raised the siege, and left the island, making, however, a descent upon Gozo, carrying off considerable booty, and sweeping its inhabitants into slavery. Sailing from Gozo to Tripoli, the Turkish expedition took that place, which thenceforth ceased to be one of the dependencies of Malta.

5. COMMENCEMENT OF THE GRAND SIEGE of MALTA BY THE TURKS.

low, the knights contented themselves with erecting a castle
at the extremity of that promontory, and another on Mount
St. Julian. The first, then called Fort St. Elmo, and the
other Fort St. Michael, thus named after similar towers at
Rhodes. The next grand-master, Claude de la Sangle, made
very considerable additions to Fort St. Elmo at his own
expense, and so completely fortified the peninsula of St.
Michael, which, like that of the Bourg, juts out into the
Grand Port, that, in honour of him, it was designated the
Isle de la Sangle, and has ever since borne that name.
While these works were in progress, Malta was devas-
tated by one of the most terrible hurricanes that ever burst
over that port. The waves, heaped into mountains by con-
flicting blasts, rolled with irresistible fury into the harbour;
four galleys were sucked into the vortex of a whirlpool;
the houses near the shore were thrown down, and even the
Castle of St. Angelo tottered to its foundations. In half an
hour the wind subsided as suddenly as it had risen, but in
that short space of time six hundred persons perished.
The grand-master La Sangle died in 1557, and was suc-
ceeded by John de la Valette, one of the most illustrious
commanders the order ever possessed. Shortly after the
commencement of his reign, five Maltese galleys took a
Turkish galleon, which had on board some females belong-
ing to the household of the emperor Solyman. This was
the greatest insult that could be offered to a Turk. The
Kislar Aga and the Odalichi urged vengeance; the Iman
of the Grand Mosque publicly invoked him to redeem the
slaves; the people lifted up their voice, and Solyman,
fanned into wrath, solemnly swore by his beard to extirpate
the order.

The forces of the island consisted of 700 knights, besides serving brothers, and about 8500 soldiers. In anticipation of an attack, a great iron chain, supported on casks and beams of timber, was carried across the mouth of the harbour of the galleys, and John de la Valette was at his post. He fulfilled, at one and the same time, the duties of the hospitaller, the private soldier, the engineer, the artillerist, and the captain of the host. One hour he was busied in the hospital, the next superintending the pioneers, and frequently grasped the mattock and the spade by way of example. "A formidable enemy," said he, speaking to a full conclave of his knights, "are coming like a thundercloud upon us; and, if the banner of the cross must quail to the unbeliever, let us remember that it is a signal that Heaven demands from us the lives which we have solemnly devoted to its service. He who dies in this cause dies a happy death; and, to render us worthy to meet it, let us renew at the altar those vows which ought to make us not only fearless but invincible in the fight." The solemn ceremonial followed,-the eucharist was partaken of,-tem poral pursuits and gratifications were for the time renounced, private animosities were abandoned, and bending in devoted brotherhood before the symbol of their faith, they vowed to perish rather than let that be profaned, forgetful that their own bad passions had polluted it at Modon and at Coron, at Goletta and at Tunis.

The mistake was in turning against the unbeliever the
zeal that should have burnt within and purified themselves;
but it was no false alarm which had driven them to their altar.
The Turkish fleet, consisting of 159 oared vessels, having
on board 30,000 soldiers, under the command of the pashas
Mustapha and Piali, arrived May the 18th, 1565. A squad-
ron of store-ships, carrying the heavy artillery, horses and
munition, accompanied the fleet. In the course of that and
the following night, the whole of the Turkish army disem-
barked, and Fort St. Elmo was the point at which the attack
was first commenced. Ramparts were raised by means
of wooden platforms, and on the 24th of May, a battery of
ten guns, each of which carried a ball weighing eighty
pounds, two sixty pound culverins, and a basilisk of enormous
dimensions, which threw stone bullets that weighed one
hundred and sixty pounds, were brought to bear upon the
fort. Every shot told, but the fort still held out.
single attack the Turks lost 300 chosen men, and the

COMMISSIONERS were about this time (A.D. 1551) ap-order a third of that number and twenty knights.
pointed to superintend the construction of military works,
and Leo Strozzi, Prior of Capua, a man of great natural
talents and vast experience, was of eminent service in these
matters. Port Musceit being entirely without defence, it
was proposed that a new town should immediately be built
upon Mount Sceberras; but as the treasury of the order was
Achievements of the Knights of Malta, by ALEXANDER SUTHER-
LAND Esq., to whose book we are indebted for the principal facts in
the history of that order.

In a

One of the means of defence is a curious instance of the barbarous warfare of the age. Large hoops, made of light wood, after being dipped in brandy, were rubbed over with boiling oil, and then covered with cotton, soaked in a combustible preparation, two ingredients of which were gunpowder and saltpetre. This operation was repeated three times, allowing each layer of cotton to cool before it was covered by another; and when the hour of battle came, these hoops were set on fire, and thrown into the midst of the