Today, many visitors to Malta include a visit to the Neolithic temples at Tarxien in their itinerary. They may also pass through St Paul’s Bay, and see in the distance St Paul’s Island, where the apostle was shipwrecked whilst being taken to Rome as a prisoner. What few will fail to appreciate will be the impressive fortifications around Valletta and the Grand Harbour, and the much older fortifications at Mdina, the old capital well inland.
These are just two surviving examples of a long history, from a time when Malta was close to the cradle of civilization and at the centre of the known world. The opening of the Suez Canal in the nineteenth century was to transform the Mediterranean from a backwater to one of the main commercial routes.
Malta consists of the mainland of Malta itself, the island of Gozo to the north, with that of Comino in between Malta and Gozo, with the latter providing much of the food for Malta’s dense population. In 1940, the population was around 280,000, with the Maltese islands, including Manoel Island, virtually a suburb of Sliema, and the unpopulated islets of Cominotto, Filfla, St Paul’s Island and Selmunett, having a total area of no more than 127 square miles. Even then, the population density was far greater than that of the Netherlands or Belgium.
Inevitably, Malta could not feed itself, but even so maintained a far higher standard of living than most other Mediterranean countries by virtue of its earnings as a major base for the British armed forces, including the major dockyard. The Royal Navy used the dockyard as its main naval base, but it also had ships moored on the other side of Valletta from the Grand Harbour, in the Marsamuxetto, with its offshoots such as Sliema Creek and Pieta Creek.
For those who have not visited Malta, there is an understandable tendency to look at the population density of Malta, in 1940, with an average of more than 2,200 persons per square mile, and imagine it to be completely built-up. In fact, the densely populated areas were extreme examples of urban development, with urban areas accounting for just 14.5 square miles and accommodating ninety-four per cent of the population. Around forty per cent of the population lived in what was known as the inner harbour area, effectively the ‘Three Cities’ of Vittoriosa, Cospicua and Senglea, the capital Valletta, Floriana and Sliema, including intervening areas between Valletta and Sliema such as Pieta and Msida. The outer harbour area accounted for another twenty-four per cent, and can be regarded as towns such as Birkirkara, Hamrun and Paola. The remaining 30 per cent lived in the other urban areas, such as Mdina and Rabat – which adjoin one another – and in towns such as Mosta or in casals, a cross between a town and a village such as Birzebugia or Mellieha. The remaining six per cent lived in small villages or on small farms.
At one time, Malta’s small farms had produced the wide variety of food that any population needs for its survival. Imports were always important given the large population, for such small islands meant that Malta’s farms could only provide at best less than a quarter of the food needed. Nevertheless, substantial changes in agriculture took place between the two world wars as Maltese agriculture began to specialize. The economic imperatives for doing so were clear, but the specialisation was to have tragic implications once the siege began. For example, in 1918, the Maltese had 20,000 acres producing grain, but by 1942, this figure was down to 12,000 acres, even under wartime conditions that dictated what farmers could grow and had converted additional ground to agriculture. The reason for this sharp fall in grain production was the decision between the wars for many farmers to switch to grape vines, a much more profitable crop. Another profitable crop had been potatoes, and despite its need to import food, by 1938 Malta had been able to export 24,000 tons of potatoes, especially to the Netherlands where a type of large potato grown in Malta was very popular. The swings and balances of international trade are dictated not just by taste and opportunity, but what will grow. Malta’s thin soil was useless for germinating potatoes, so the seed potatoes had to be imported, and every year some 4,000 tons were brought in, mainly from Northern Ireland, which had a climate far better suited to this particular crop.
The might of the naval base facilities and the dockyard was in stark contrast to the commercial port facilities. This was natural, for with a small population, smaller than that of many British cities, massive shiploads of supplies and extensive port facilities to receive them had been simply unnecessary, at least in peacetime. Traditionally, Malta had seen supplies arrive in small quantities, manageable for the limited port facilities, in small craft, many of them still worked by sail, from Italy, Sicily and Tunisia. The weakness of these arrangements were that in wartime they no longer existed, and convoys of large ships would have to be fought through to Malta from either Gibraltar, having first steamed through the Bay of Biscay from the UK, or Alexandria. Convoys dramatically reduced merchant shipping losses during both world wars, but they have the one disadvantage that ports are left idle between convoys, and then extremely busy and extremely crowded; in effect, too busy. This leads to another problem, for with supplies coming at intervals in substantial quantities, good storage is needed, and it needs to be safe from enemy action. Crowded docks and harbours are in themselves tempting targets for an enemy.
The British Army’s main base was at St Andrews Barracks, but there were other barracks scattered around the island, including those for the Kings Own Malta Regiment and the Royal Malta Artillery, the two locally-raised regiments.
The Royal Air Force had its main air station at Hal Far, also used by the Fleet Air Arm when carriers put into the Grand Harbour. Close to Hal Far was the seaplane and flying boat base at Kalafrana. The RAF also had the new airfield at Ta’Qali, close to the walls of Rabat and Mdina. This had originally been planned as an airfield for Imperial Airways, already even in the late 1930s looking forward to the day when flying boats would be superseded by ever more capable landplanes on the colonial routes, and with Kalafrana was used by Italian commercial air services to Malta. Luqa was also under construction when war broke out in September, 1939.
It is believed that the Maltese archipelago was once part of a land link between what is now Europe and North Africa, and remains found in the caves at Ghar Dalam support this since they are of animals known to have migrated from Europe to Africa. More positively, it is known that Malta was inhabited by man as early as 4000BC, and that there was a Neolithic community on Malta by 3000BC. There are more than thirty Neolithic sites on the islands, and doubtless more have been buried under the extensive urban and village development.
A turning point in the history of Malta was the arrival of the Phoenicians. Their extensive trading activities spread along the entire coast of North Africa and to present day Italy. Whether or not they saw Malta as a trading centre, the Phoenicians would certainly have used the many harbours as places of refuge from the often severe Mediterranean storms.
Next came the Carthaginians, believed to have been the first to colonize Malta. When Hamilcar surrendered to Rome in 216BC, the islands fell into the fast expanding Roman Empire. Between them, the Phoenicians and Carthaginians provided the basis of the Maltese language, Malti, also sometimes known as Phoenician Maltese, although over the centuries, this has been modified with the addition and adaptation of Italian and English words.
When the Roman Empire collapsed, Malta remained nominally under Roman rule until the arrival of the Arabs in 870. Nevertheless, Christianity survived the Arabs until they in turn were expelled from Malta by Roger the Norman, Count of Sicily, in 1090, who gave Malta the red and white flag. Malta remained part of Sicily for more than 400 years, and as the ruling families in Sicily changed, so too did those of Malta, so that the Normans gave way to the Angevins and then to the Aragonese. Charles V of Spain gained Malta by marriage, and he then granted possession of Malta and Tripoli on the coast of North Africa to the Knights of the Order of St John of Jerusalem, after they had been forced to leave their island retreat of Rhodes, to which they had fled with the fall of Jerusalem to the Turks.
Charles had commanded the Knights to defend Malta and Tripoli ‘as an outpost of Christianity on the Barbary Coast of North Africa’. Notwithstanding this instruction, the Knights were later to lose Tripoli to the Turks in 1551.
The Knights had arrived in Malta at Birgu, now known as Vittoriosa, on the eastern side of the Grand Harbour, and it is not surprising that their first settlement was here. The Knights were accommodated in ‘houses’ depending on their nationality or langue, known as auberges, which have often been described as being akin to colleges at universities such as Oxford or Cambridge. Birgu had many fine buildings, even at this early stage, and seven of these were taken over as auberges. This even included an Auberge d’Angleterre, despite the fact that Henry VIII had dissolved the English langue in his reforms of what had been the Roman Catholic Church in England. To protect the Grand Harbour, the Knights established a fort at the tip of Monte Sceberras, Fort St Elmo, but lacked the time and the funds to construct similar forts at the Three Cities side of the Grand Harbour, or at the Sliema side of the entrance to the Marsamxett Harbour.
The Ottoman Empire was in the ascendant at this time, and the balance of power between Christians and Moslems was delicate indeed. The Knights appealed for additional men, and soon their number swelled to 641, with no less than 164 from Italy, with just one, Sir Oliver Starkey, ignoring official disapproval, coming from England. In their surge forward, the Turks attempted to take Malta, culminating in the Great Siege of 1565. The siege started on 18 May, when the winter storms were well past and with the prospect of making the defenders face the searing heat and water shortages of the summer months.
In a brutal campaign, no less than 8,000 Turks died attempting to take Fort St Elmo at the entrance to the Grand Harbour. It was not entirely one-sided, with 1,500 of those defending the fort also killed, including around 100 knights, whose corpses were beheaded and the heads tied to planks and floated across the harbour as a threat to those still resisting. The Great Siege lasted for four months, doubtless involving great privation in an island where water has always been a scarce resource, before the Turkish forces withdrew after losing around 20,000 men against 9,000 amongst the defenders, who then, as almost 400 years later, included many Maltese as well as the Knights and fighting men from other parts of Europe. The end of the siege was celebrated throughout Europe, with masses sung in all Roman Catholic churches.
It was not until the Great Siege ended that the Knights decided to create a new capital, Valletta, named after their new leader, Grand Master De La Vallette, and replacing the older capital, Mdina, or Notabile, in the centre of Malta. The choice lay between leaving Malta altogether or of finding a means of improving its defences. The Knights were unsure which to do, but La Vallette, and the majority of European Christian opinion, took the view that the Knights should stay, and Malta remain an outpost of Christianity especially after the fall of Tripoli. The construction of the new city, sometimes described as a ‘city built by gentlemen for gentlemen’, involved scraping the top of Mount Sceberras, which ran most of the length of the Sceberras Peninsula, which would be fortified so that a city could be built inside, commanding the entrance to both the Grand Harbour on the east, and the Marsamxett Harbour on the west. That this was to be no minor architectural adventure can be realized from the fact that the idea was supported by Francesco A, Michaelangelo’s assistant, and by Gabrio Sarbelloni, Philip II of Spain’s assistant. Even so, the costs were overwhelming and La Vallette nearly abandoned the project, but the plan was saved by generous contributions from the Roman Catholic crowned heads of Europe, grateful for the valour of the Knights in resisting the Turks.
Laparelli drew up the outline plans, while a Maltese architect, Gerolamo Cassar, attended to the detail and the actual works. The new city included new auberges for the different langues of the Order. Work started in 1566, by which time the new city had already been named Valletta in honour of the Grand Master. Originally, it had been intended to flatten the ridge forming the top of Monte Sceberras, and use the rubble to build up the sides inside the city wall, so that basically the new city would have been flat, but the pressure of time and the cost of this work meant that the ridge remained, and in Valetta the streets running east-west from the top of the ridge, from what is now Republic Street and the parallel Merchant Street, fall away towards the fortifications overlooking the harbours on either side.
Meanwhile, as the Knights deserted Birgu, the town had the name Vittoriosa to commemorate the great victory.
This was the time of great glory for the Knights and for Valletta, which was the focus of attention throughout Christendom, but it was short-lived. A major setback to Turkish ambitions was only a short time away, at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. After this, Malta was far less important, and Christendom seemed less in need of a bastion. In short, while the donations continued to flood in from the rest of Europe, Malta was increasingly forgotten, and instead of being the focus of attention was seen as a backwater, if it was remembered at all. This was before the construction of the Suez Canal, which once more put Malta on one of the world’s most important trading routes.
With Egypt in his sights and realizing the strategic significance of Malta’s position, Napoleon sent the French Army of the Orient to Malta, arriving in the Grand Harbour in June, 1798. In contrast to the determined resistance offered to the Turks, Napoleon’s forces were able to take the island almost unopposed. Not just the fortunes of the Knights, but also their morality, were at a low ebb at this time. They were no longer what might have been described as almost a caste of warrior monks, having neglected their military training and their vows of celibacy. Despite having provisions and water for eight months as a result of the lessons learnt during the Great Siege, little resistance was offered. The Knights had lost their previous Grand Master, the French de Rohan, the previous year, and his successor, the German de Hompesch, was distinctly lacking in warlike qualities. Worse still, there was internal dissent, the French Knights holding the new Grand Master in contempt. Even so, the failure to take action is hard to believe since the French Knights had lost their property in France during the French Revolution, and despite this reached an accommodation with Napoleon’s generals. Just three days’ debate preceded the admission of the French admiral, Brueys, and his fleet into the Grand Harbour. All of this might not have happened had the British not been in the wrong place. The then Rear Admiral Nelson had been hunting for the French, but his orders were to close the Straits of Gibraltar because the Admiralty had feared that the French would sail from Toulon and through the Straits to mount an invasion on the south coast of England.
The Maltese had exchanged one set of rulers, the Knights, for another, the French. The deeply religious Maltese resented the attacks of the French Republicans on the Church, and in particular the looting and despoliation of individual churches. Worse still, French officers were billeted on Maltese families, heavy taxes were imposed, and promises to pay pensions to the dependents of those Maltese impressed into French service were broken. When the Maltese saw the remnants of the French fleet, defeated by Nelson at the Battle of the Nile on 1 and 2 August, 1798, enter the Grand Harbour, they could see French weakness for themselves. An uprising followed, with the French garrison besieged in Valletta by the Maltese. Emissaries were sent to seek help from either Sicily or Naples, but instead they fell in with one of Nelson’s captains, Saumarez, who immediately communicated with Nelson. By this time, the French were besieged by the Maltese in Valletta. Siege and blockade by the British followed, albeit intermittently as demands on the British and the need to confront the French took ships away from Malta. Finally, in December, 1799, Nelson sent the 30 and 89 Regiments of Foot, the predecessors respectively of the Lancashire Regiment and the Royal Irish Fusiliers. The following year, the Maltese put themselves under British protection, asking Britain to take over their islands. At first, despite being in the full flood of colonial expansion, the British resisted taking Malta over, largely because the King of Naples maintained that he was Malta’s original sovereign, and that the British were simply protecting it for him! It was not until 1813 that the British accepted their new colony, and this arrangement was formalized the following year under the Treaty of Paris, when Malta became a British colony. The first Governor and Commander-in-Chief, Sir Thomas Maitland, had been appointed in 1813. As probably the only colony to have positively opted for British rule rather than as the result of exploration or conquest, the Governor ruled on behalf of the Sovereign with the assistance of an advisory council composed mainly of Maltese citizens.
At the outset, the British made a major blunder that was to have repercussions more than 100 years hence. Maitland was ordered to issue his proclamation, placing Malta under the British Crown, in both English and Italian. The hope appeared to be that the latter would gradually fall into disuse, but instead, Italian became the language of the upper classes and of the courts, with many Maltese coming to regard Italy as a more suitable ruler, while the Maltese language became the tongue of the kitchen, of the farmers and fishermen. The British acquiesced in this process, even though, as Italy struggled towards unification, the implications were increasingly serious given Malta’s strategic position as a major British naval base.
The opening of the Suez Canal on 17 November, 1869, restored Malta’s importance, although this time it was not as a bastion of Christianity, but as an important staging post for ships on their way to and from India, the Far East and Australia. Sailing ships could not easily use the Suez Canal, but steamships could, and steamships needed coal, so Malta became a coaling station, even though in Malta, as in many other places, such as Aden for example, the coal itself had to be imported. The Victorian Royal Navy took the defence of the Empire and of trading routes seriously, and from this time on Malta’s vital strategic position ensured a strong naval presence and the dockyard became the largest employer on Malta.
Even though Italy was one of the Great War Allies, the conflict showed for the first time that Malta could be threatened. It was in many ways the saving of the British connection, as some 20,000 Maltese joined the Royal Navy and the British Army, seeing service in many of the theatres of this, the first global conflict. More than 25,000 beds were made available in Malta for sick and wounded Allied troops, doubtless many of the early arrivals having come from the ill-starred Gallipoli campaign.
The end of the war brought an economic depression to Malta, worsened by the cuts in the Royal Navy as the depression years began to bite, and the Treasury stuck rigidly to the ridiculous ‘Ten Year Rule’.
It might be supposed that all was harmony in the time that followed. The Maltese obtained a limited form of self-government in 1921, but this was reversed when the constitution was suspended in 1930, restored in 1932 and suspended yet again the following year. The lack of harmony was caused by controversy over the relationship between the all-powerful Roman Catholic Church in Malta and the state, and by concern over the slow development of Maltese as a written language, partly as the result of Italian being used as the language of the upper classes and by the courts. The advisory council used English for its transactions and reports. In fact, during the first four decades of the twentieth century, Maltese had become the language of the kitchen. The use of Italian even extended to street names, with the main thoroughfare in Valletta becoming the Strada Real.
Meanwhile, Mussolini had taken power in Italy, and in 1933, Hitler finally took absolute power in Germany. The Abyssinian crisis of 1935 started to ring the alarm bells, and the Mediterranean Fleet was reinforced and plans made for attacks on the Italian Fleet. Had the League of Nations been more decisive, had it not been undermined by French reluctance to impose sanctions on Italy, or by British reluctance to stop the Italians using the Suez Canal to supply their troops in Abyssinia, modern day Ethiopia, the history of the twentieth century could have been different. As it was, unchallenged, the dictators became more belligerent.
While the Second World War delayed any further constitutional progress until 1947, it did finally resolve the language question, with Italian being replaced by English and Maltese. The Strada Real became Kingsway, and even after the adoption of the title Republic Street, some of the businesses based there still retained Kingsway in their titles.