A Note on the Sources and Acknowledgments

Europe followed the siege of Malta closely in the summer of 1565, and reports of greater or lesser accuracy spread across the continent with remarkable speed, and were translated, pirated, retranslated, and eventually and for the most part discarded. The market was proven—sixteenth-century Europe had a fascination with all things Ottoman—and more substantial printed accounts followed soon after the last Muslim ship had left the island. The Frenchman Pierre Gentile de Vendôme published his Della Historia di Malta in Italian in 1565, a work that suffers from the haste of its execution. Anton Francesco Cirni (aka Cirni Corso), a prolific author and a member of the Great Relief, based much of his book (Comentarii d’Antonfrancesco Cirni Corso, 1567) on his own experiences and on interviews with veterans. Giovanni Antonio Viperano, a Sicilian cleric and literary critic living in Messina during the siege, made his tour of the postsiege island and published De Bello Melitensi Historia in 1567. The Genoese spy Bregante appears to have followed the Ottoman fleet and observed events from the Ottoman side, reporting his findings in five crabbed pages for his spymasters in Genoa. His account ends abruptly in July (he would live until 1571) and generally corroborates Western accounts. The most exhaustive near-contemporary account comes from Giacomo Bosio, brother of the influential knight Antonio Bosio, with whose help he gathered the raw material that bolsters the monumental Dell’Istoria della Sacra Religione et Illustrissima Militia di San Giovanni Gierosolimitano (1602). The most compelling of accounts, however, is without question by Balbi di Correggio, an Italian mercenary who cobbled his personal experiences and observations into La Verdadera Relación de todo lo que el año de M.D. LXV ha succedido en la Isla de Malta (1566 and 1568). There are two English translations, one by Major H. A. R. Balbi (1961) and one by Ernle Bradford (1965).

Ottoman accounts are few, in part because no one likes to dwell on a defeat, in part because the Ottomans were not a print culture (printing presses were banned until 1729). Selaniki and Peçevi, two historians, wrote years after the fact, and Malta was only a portion of their overall work. Both authors are long overdue for translations in full, though happily, relevant sections have made it into Italian.

The siege was the subject of the moment, and as such, mention of it can be found in archives across Europe. Much of the writing is trivial, redundant, or just plain wrong, but there are still small, and perhaps large, gems to be found. Many of those already unearthed have found their way into the secondary literature. Two modern works that have taken great advantage of these nuggets are Fernand Braudel’s The Mediterranean and the World of Philip II and Kenneth Setton’s The Papacy and the Levant. In addition to making for compelling reading in their own right, they have provided a treasury of source notes enough for a respectable library of new books. For the siege of Malta in particular, no serious student can ignore Stephen C. Spiteri’s encyclopedic account, The Great Siege: Knights vs Turks, MDLXV—Anatomy of a Hospitaller Victory. Add to these the many and varied explorations and observations of other scholars, and it quickly becomes clear that the siege of Malta is a story still open for retelling.

For fueling the current effort, I owe thanks to the staff of the New York Public Library, most especially the Rare Book Room; New York University; Butler Library of Columbia University; Rockefeller Library of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Frick Art Reference Library; Library of the Museum of Natural History in New York; Newberry Library of Chicago; Bibliothèque Nationale de France; the Library of Congress; Falvey Library of Villanova University; Alexander Library of Rutgers University; Northwestern University Library; Firestone Library of Princeton University; Walsh Library of Seton Hall University; the staff of Westport (Connecticut) Public Library; Leighann Cazier of Millburn (New Jersey) Public Library; and most particularly, Patrice Kane and Vivian Shen of special collections in the William D. Walsh Library of Fordham University. For help in tracking down and forwarding some hopelessly obscure material, Fausto Amalberti and Prof. Giuseppe Felloni of Genoa; Stewart Tiley of St. John’s College, Oxford; Trent Larsen of Brigham Young University; William Thierens (whose website, http://melitensiawth.com, provides a wealth of Maltese material from rare scholarly journals); Maria Smali and Irini Solomonidi of Gennadius Library, Greece; Thomas Jabine of the Library of Congress; Mary Paris of Amherst, Massachusetts; Barry Lawrence Ruderman of BLR Rare Maps (La Jolla, California); and Pierre Joppen of Paulus Swaen Old Maps (St. Petersburg, Florida).

For help in disentangling some of the more clotted sixteenth-century Spanish, French, Italian, and Turkish, Prof. María Antonia Garcés, Prof. Gretchen van Slyke, Prof. William J. Connell, Prof. Nicola Melis, Adela Jabine, and Andreas Bacalao; for answers to obscure questions, advice, criticism, and general encouragement, Judge Giovanni Bonello, Prof. Steven C. Spiteri, Prof. Geoffrey Parker, Prof. John Guilmartin, and Prof. Helen Vella Bonavita. Particular thanks are due to Niccolò Capponi and Prof. Emrah Safa Gürkan, whose close reading of the manuscript caught any number of errors of fact and challenged a few interpretations. Any remaining errors of detail or of translation are my fault entirely.

For the transformation of the manuscript into a book, thanks must go to Stephen Hull and Susan Abel at UPNE, to the copyeditor Elizabeth Forsaith, and to my agent, John Rudolph of Dystel and Goderich.

Finally, for living alongside the entire project for far too long, all gratitude goes to my wife, Blacknall Allen.