Malta's history: an archipelago signed away more often than it was taken

Who built the temples and then disappeared

The islands have been inhabited since at least about 6500 BC. Excavations at Latnija Cave led by the Maltese archaeologist Eleanor Scerri found hearths, stone tools and the bones of an indigenous red deer now extinct. Reaching Malta meant crossing around 100 km of open water, the longest sea crossing by hunter-gatherers so far documented in the Mediterranean.

Neolithic farmers from Sicily replaced those hunters by around 5400 BC. They cleared the conifer forest and wore out the thin soil while a prolonged drought set in. Soil cores taken from the valleys for the FRAGSUS project found a break of roughly a thousand years between those first settlers and the next group to arrive.

The second colonisation came from Sicily around 3850 BC, lasted about 1,500 years, and is the one that built the temples. Construction ran in phases from roughly 3600 BC to 2500 BC, beginning with Ġgantija on the Xagħra plateau in Gozo, whose Maltese name means giants' tower, and reaching its most elaborate form at Tarxien. Hard coralline limestone went into the outer walls and softer globigerina inside where it could be carved, and the surviving reliefs show running spirals, trees and animals. Ġgantija was inscribed by UNESCO in 1980, and five further sites were added in 1992.

Then the culture vanished, around 2350 BC. The archaeologist Caroline Malone treated the survival rather than the collapse as the remarkable part: on that little land the second population managed soil and food for fifteen centuries, and failed when drought became extreme. Between 2600 and 2400 BC, half of those who died were children. Bronze Age arrivals from Sicily left dolmens and the parallel channels cut into bare rock at Misraħ Għar il-Kbir that are still called cart ruts.

How the islands changed hands in antiquity

Phoenicians, possibly from Tyre, began settling the archipelago in the early eighth century BC. Their principal port on the Grand Harbour was Maleth, meaning the port, probably the source of the Greek and Roman names for the island. Carthage absorbed the colony around the middle of the sixth century BC.

The first transfer anyone wrote down was a surrender without a fight. According to Livy, the commander of the Punic garrison gave the islands up to Tiberius Sempronius Longus in 218 BC, as the consul passed on his way to North Africa at the start of the Second Punic War. Under Rome the archipelago sat inside the province of Sicily, acquired its own senate and assembly by the first century and minted its own coinage. The Acts of the Apostles places the shipwreck of Saint Paul on an island named Melite in AD 60, which Maltese tradition reads as Malta.

Byzantium held the islands from about 535. The exception to the pattern came in 870, and it was violent: Aghlabid forces from North Africa besieged Melite, killed its inhabitants, destroyed the city and looted its churches, and marble taken from them went into the castle of Sousse. What followed is the largest gap in the Maltese record, with Al-Himyarī reporting the islands as almost uninhabited until a Muslim community and their slaves resettled them around 1048 or 1049.

Whether anyone stayed through that gap is still argued. The Christian continuity thesis, associated with Giovanni Francesco Abela and dominant in popular accounts, holds that the population was unbroken from the early Christian era. Godfrey Wettinger contested it in the 1970s on the strength of the Arab geographers, who agree that the island remained a ruin without inhabitants, and the linguistic evidence sits with him: Joseph Brincat found no substratum in Maltese beyond Arabic. The language that came out of the resettlement descends from Siculo-Arabic, the variety spoken in the Emirate of Sicily between 831 and 1091, and it is the only standardised Semitic language written exclusively in the Latin script.

Count Roger I of Sicily invaded in 1091 and turned the Muslim rulers into his vassals; his son Roger II completed the takeover in 1127. Malta then spent nearly 440 years inside the Kingdom of Sicily, sold and resold to feudal lords and passed in turn to Swabian, Angevin, Aragonese, Castilian and Spanish crowns. The population stayed largely Muslim for generations: the royal governor Gililberto Abbate counted 836 Muslim families, 250 Christian families and 33 Jewish families in 1240 or 1241. Those remaining had been forced by 1500 to convert and to Latinise their names.

Why an emperor gave Malta away for a falcon

Suleiman the Magnificent expelled the Knights Hospitaller from Rhodes after a six-month siege at the end of 1522, and for seven years the order had no home. Charles V, who feared that the fall of Rome to the Ottomans would finish Christian Europe, handed them the Maltese archipelago in 1530. The terms were one falcon presented annually to his viceroy of Sicily, a solemn Mass on All Saints' Day, and an obligation to garrison Tripoli. Philippe Villiers de L'Isle-Adam sailed into the Grand Harbour on 26 October 1530 to take possession, and the knights accepted reluctantly, thinking the island small and desolate.

Two European powers had settled the ownership of an inhabited archipelago between themselves, and the rent was a bird. The order held Malta as a vassal state of Sicily for the next 268 years, made Italian the official language, and built the towns, churches and fortifications that still define the harbour.

What the Great Siege actually decided

The islands were nearly lost first. In 1551 the corsair Dragut landed about 10,000 men, broke off the attack on Malta, crossed to Gozo and carried virtually the whole population of the smaller island, roughly 5,000 people, into captivity. Expecting a return, the order threw up Fort Saint Michael and Fort Saint Elmo inside six months in 1552.

The armada came back on 18 May 1565 and stayed nearly four months. Its size is still disputed: Jean Parisot de Valette put the landing force at 15,000 to 16,000, the order's historian Giacomo Bosio at about 30,000 and the chronicler Francisco Balbi di Correggio at roughly 48,000. Against them stood around 500 knights and some 6,000 footsoldiers, most of the latter Maltese.

Fort Saint Elmo was bombarded from 27 May and reduced to rubble inside a week, yet held until 23 June, resupplied nightly across the harbour. Its garrison of more than 1,500 was killed to a man, and taking it cost the attackers at least 6,000, including half their Janissaries. Both sides then made the fighting as ugly as they could: Mustafa Pasha had the dead knights beheaded and floated across the bay on mock crucifixes, and de Valette fired the heads of his Turkish prisoners into the Ottoman camp from his cannon. Relief of about 8,000 Spanish and Italian troops landed at St Paul's Bay on 7 September, and the Ottoman fleet left on 13 September.

Malta paid with about a third of its inhabitants and the order with a third of its knights, and Birgu and Senglea were levelled. Money poured in from across Europe, and de Valette used it to build a fortified city on Mount Sciberras, the high ground the Ottomans had used as a gun platform. Valletta was never attacked, so its walls were never tested and survive as some of the best-preserved of their period.

How the Order lost its purpose

Once the Ottoman threat receded, the order's reason for existing went with it. Through the last three decades of the eighteenth century the spending of the final grand masters drove the treasury towards bankruptcy, and a revolt in 1775 remembered as the Rising of the Priests captured Fort Saint Elmo before it was put down.

How Napoleon took the islands and lost them

Napoleon Bonaparte's expedition to Egypt stopped at Malta in June 1798 and asked for safe harbour. Refused water, he sent a division to scale the hills below Valletta, and Grand Master Ferdinand von Hompesch capitulated on 11 June. The next day a treaty handed sovereignty to the French Republic, in return for a promise that France would use all its credit at the congress of Rastatt to find the grand master an equivalent principality elsewhere. Ownership of the archipelago changed hands, once again, on paper.

Napoleon stayed six days and legislated hard, abolishing feudal rights and slavery, freeing some 2,000 Turkish slaves and founding fifteen primary schools. The welcome lasted months. French troops began closing convents and seizing church treasures, among them the sword of Jean de Valette, which stayed a century in the Louvre before returning to Malta in 2017. The Maltese rose, the garrison withdrew into Valletta, and when attempts to retake the city failed the Maltese asked Britain for help. Horatio Nelson settled on a total blockade in 1799, and the French surrendered in 1800.

Why the Maltese chose British sovereignty

Malta became a British protectorate voluntarily in 1800, and this is the one juncture where the islanders were the party doing the choosing. The Treaty of Amiens returned the islands to the knights in 1802 and required Britain to evacuate. The Maltese protested and acknowledged British sovereignty instead, subject to conditions they set out in a Declaration of Rights of their own, and the arrangement was ratified by the Treaties of Paris of 1814 and 1815. Malta became a Crown Colony on 23 July 1813. Plague arrived that year on a ship from Alexandria and killed 4,486 people, 4% of the population.

What Britain wanted was the harbour, and the dockyard became the colony's economic mainstay. Business boomed during the Crimean War of 1853 to 1856 and again after the Suez Canal opened in 1869, but prosperity rose and fell with British military spending, and in the troughs the overcrowded islands were poor.

Political rights came slowly and were withdrawn repeatedly. The constitution of 1835 gave a Council of Government whose members were nominated; elected members appeared in 1849; and in 1887 Malta acquired representative government with an elected Maltese majority, revoked outright in 1903. On 7 June 1919, riots over the price of bread ended with four Maltese killed by British troops, an event kept as Sette Giugno. Self-government followed in 1921, was suspended between 1930 and 1932 after the Church imposed mortal sin on voters of the governing Constitutional Party, and was withdrawn again in 1933 over a budget vote for teaching Italian in elementary schools.

Italian had been the official language since 1530 and the only language of the courts. In 1934 Maltese was declared official, and the Letters Patent of the 1936 constitution left Maltese and English as the only two, settling a dispute that had dominated politics for half a century. The arithmetic is stark: in 1934 only about 15% of the population spoke Italian fluently, so of 58,000 men old enough to serve as jurors just 767 qualified by language.

What the wartime siege cost the islands

The Royal Navy moved its Mediterranean Fleet headquarters from Valletta to Alexandria in October 1939, over Winston Churchill's objections, on the reasoning that Malta was too exposed to air attack. When Italy declared war on 10 June 1940 the islands held a garrison of fewer than four thousand soldiers, about five weeks of food, roughly forty-two anti-aircraft guns and four Gloster Sea Gladiators for which three pilots were available. The population was around 250,000, and by the 1937 census most of it lived within 6.4 km of the Grand Harbour.

Those were the districts that were bombed. The first raids came on 11 June 1940, eight of them in a day. Over two years the Luftwaffe and the Regia Aeronautica flew about 3,000 raids and dropped 6,700 tons of bombs on the Grand Harbour area alone. In the first four months of German operations from January 1941 the Luftwaffe destroyed more than 2,000 civilian buildings, against some 300 in the Italian phase, and by the end of 1941 roughly 70% of the island's churches were rubble. Casualties ran to 330 killed up to December 1941, then 820 over the four months that followed.

King George VI awarded the George Cross to the island as a whole on 15 April 1942, and a depiction of it has been on the flag and the coat of arms ever since. The turn came that August with the Operation Pedestal convoy: nine of its fourteen merchant ships were sunk, and the tanker Ohio was torpedoed on 12 August and bombed the next day before two destroyers brought her into the Grand Harbour on 15 August with 11,000 tons of petrol still aboard. Convoys in November and December carried enough to last into 1943, and the siege ended.

About 30,000 buildings were damaged or destroyed, among them 5,524 private dwellings. The invasion of Sicily was launched from the Lascaris War Rooms under Valletta in 1943.

Why Malta nearly joined Britain outright

Self-government was restored under the 1947 constitution, and women received the vote on 5 September 1947. What followed was a straight argument between two answers. Dom Mintoff's Labour Party wanted either full integration with the United Kingdom or self-determination; Giorgio Borg Olivier's Nationalists wanted independence with the dominion status Canada, Australia and New Zealand held.

Integration got as far as a formal offer. At Round Table talks in London in December 1955 the British government agreed to give the islands three seats of their own in the House of Commons, to move Maltese affairs from the Colonial Office to the Home Office, and to leave the Maltese parliament in charge of everything except defence, foreign policy and taxation.

The referendum on 11 and 12 February 1956 returned 77.02% in favour. The Nationalist Party and the Church boycotted it, turnout was 59.1% of the electorate, and the opposition was able to call the result inconclusive. British members of parliament worried aloud about the precedent for other colonies, and the Admiralty was reluctant to keep paying for dockyards it needed less each year. After a decision to dismiss forty dockyard workers, Mintoff declared in 1958 that the Maltese people's representatives were no longer bound by their obligations to Britain. He resigned on 21 April 1958, the governor declared a state of emergency, and Malta went back under direct colonial administration.

Malta was the only British colony where integration with the United Kingdom was ever seriously considered, and later British governments ruled it out for the remaining overseas territories, Gibraltar included. The Malta Independence Act followed a 1961 constitution that recognised a State of Malta, and a new constitution was approved by 54.5% of voters. The State of Malta came into being on 21 September 1964 as a constitutional monarchy with Elizabeth II as queen, and joined the United Nations on 1 December 1964.

How the republic has governed itself since

Labour won the 1971 election by just over 4,000 votes and set about renegotiating everything. Capital punishment for murder was abolished that year, and civil marriage was introduced and homosexuality and adultery decriminalised in 1973. Constitutional reform made Malta a republic on 13 December 1974, with the last governor-general, Sir Anthony Mamo, as its first president; an act of parliament the following year abolished all titles of nobility.

The military agreement with Britain expired on 31 March 1979, the base closed, the last British forces left, and the date is kept as Freedom Day. Losing the rent meant finding it elsewhere, and Malta turned south: Libyan loans covered part of the shortfall, Arabic was briefly compulsory in secondary schools, and the Mariam Al-Batool Mosque opened in 1984. The anthropologist Jeremy Boissevain observed in 1991 that after nine hundred years of being linked to Europe the country had begun to look southward. The friendship was uneasy: in 1980 a Libyan gunboat forced an oil rig drilling for the Maltese government to stop work, and the case went to the International Court of Justice in 1982. Malta adopted neutrality as policy that year.

The sharpest domestic crisis was arithmetical. In the 1981 general election the Nationalists won an absolute majority of votes while Labour won a majority of seats under the single transferable vote, and Labour governed the full term while the Nationalists boycotted parliament. Constitutional amendments in force from January 1987 guaranteed a party winning most votes a majority of seats, and the mechanism was needed again in October 1996.

Europe took fourteen years. Malta applied on 16 July 1990, the application was frozen when Labour returned to office in 1996 and reactivated after the Nationalists came back in 1998, and the Helsinki European Council accepted Malta as a candidate in December 1999. The referendum of 8 March 2003 produced 53.65% in favour. Accession on 1 May 2004 forced Malta out of the Non-Aligned Movement, and the euro replaced the Maltese lira on 1 January 2008.

Social law moved late and then quickly. Divorce was approved in a consultative referendum on 28 May 2011, when Malta was one of only three places in the world without it, and on 14 December 2021 Malta became the first European Union member state to legalise recreational cannabis. The severest test of the institutions came from a murder. Daphne Caruana Galizia, a journalist investigating the Panama Papers and the government's inner circle, was killed by a car bomb near her home at Bidnija on 16 October 2017. The arrest of the businessman Yorgen Fenech in November 2019 brought protests and the resignation of the prime minister, a minister and the chief of staff.

For most of recorded history the question of who owned Malta was answered somewhere else, by people who had never seen the place. The islands have spent six decades answering it themselves, at the ballot box: on the constitution in 1964, on Europe in 2003, on divorce in 2011. That is a short run of self-government by the standard of the temples, and an unbroken one.