![]() The Knights accepted the offer reluctantly because compared to Rhodes, Malta was a small, desolate island, and for some time many of the Knights' leaders clung to the dream of recapturing Rhodes. As a proviso, Charles also required the Knights to garrison Tripoli on the North African coast, which was in territory controlled by an Ottoman ally, the Barbary corsairs. Between 15, the Knights lacked a permanent home, until Charles offered them Malta and Gozo in return for one falcon sent annually to the Viceroy of Sicily and a solemn mass to be celebrated on All Saints Day. Seven years earlier, at the end of 1522, the Knights had been forced from their base on Rhodes by the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent after a siege of six months' duration. John of Jerusalem had become known as the Knights of Malta since 1530, when on October 26 of that year, Philippe Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Grand Master of the Knights, sailed into Malta's Grand Harbor with a number of his followers to take claim of the island, which had been granted to them by Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. This Order of the Knights Hospitaller of St. However, without setting aside the importance of the battles that did take place, such a telling of history should not omit examples of cooperation, scholarly exchange, and trade that also characterized relations between these two sides throughout the Medieval period. It was, as fictional accounts re-tell, a dramatic event and one that can certainly be represented as an heroic defense of a Christian island against Muslim aggression. On the one hand, this battle can be represented as an epochal episode in Christian- Muslim relations as conflict ebbed and flowed, in a wave-like motion, across the Mediterranean. The failure of the siege did little to alter the balance of power and left the Hospitallers free to continue their self-assigned task of policing the Mediterranean of pirates, since the loss of the last Crusader state had made the task of defending Jerusalem redundant. Rather, it was the climax of an escalating contest between the Spanish and Ottoman empires for control of the Mediterranean, a contest that included a previous attack on Malta in 1551, by the Turkish corsair Turgut Reis and which, in 1560, had resulted in the utter destruction of the Spanish armada by the Turks at the battle of Djerba. Nevertheless, the siege should not be viewed in isolation. ![]() Voltaire may have exaggerated when he said, "Nothing is more well known than the siege of Malta," but it unquestionably put an end to the European perception of Ottoman invincibility and marked a new phase in Spanish domination of the Mediterranean. The siege, one of the bloodiest and most fiercely contested in history, was won by the knights and became one of the most celebrated events of the sixteenth century. The Siege of Malta (also known as the Great Siege of Malta) took place in 1565, when the Ottoman Empire invaded the island, then held by the Knights Hospitaller (also known as the Sovereign Order of Saint John of Jerusalem of Rhodes and of Malta, Knights of Malta, Knights of Rhodes, and Chevaliers of Malta). The siege of Malta - Arrival of the Turkish fleet Matteo Perez d' AleccioĢ,500, plus 7,000 civilians, and 500 slaves Part of the Ottoman wars in Europe and Ottoman-Habsburg wars
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