Hospitallers III

1530-1650 CE

From 1530 to 1650 CE, the Hospitallers found their final fortress — driven from Rhodes by Suleiman's armies, gifted Malta by a Habsburg emperor who needed someone to guard Christendom's southern flank. Behind the limestone walls of Birgu and Valletta, the knight-monks built a citadel that broke the greatest Ottoman siege of the century, their galleys hunting Muslim corsairs across the same waters where Saint Paul had once been shipwrecked.