The Great Siege of Malta - by Marcus Bull (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Even as the great siege began it was understood by both sides to be an epic - a potentially decisive encounter between an uneasy assortment of soldiers, native Maltese, adventurers and Knights Hospitaller on a strategically crucial but near waterless island and a vast, seemingly all-powerful Ottoman armada. With three quarters of the Mediterranean's coasts already in the hands of the Sultan and his allies, all eyes were now on Malta.

This superb new account of the siege emphasizes the crucial importance of the siege while at the same time putting it in a far wider context. While since mistakenly recast as a climactic battle between the West and the East, it was also much more interesting and nuanced than that - both sides had many other interests and priorities beyond Malta. Süleyman the Magnificent had conquered and subsumed regions from Hungary to the Persian Gulf; Philip II was building an empire in America and Asia.

Drawing on a wide range of eyewitness stories, Marcus Bull gives a vivid sense of the period's technologies, values and assumptions. It was a grim world built on the labor of many thousands of disposable galley-slaves, shockingly brutal forms of warfare and religious absolutism. But it was also a world filled with the most extraordinary new discoveries and ideas. Both these worlds come together in the siege and in this book.

Review Quotes

An engrossing new study... Bull's account of the siege itself is lucid and dispassionate. He has a sharp eye for bombast - representing the failed defense of St Elmo as a heroic act of self-sacrifice, for example - that might obscure uncomfortable truths... Bull has set himself a challenging task: to convey the drama of the siege and the myths that grew out of it while downplaying, if not denying, suggestions of its wider historical importance. It's a difficult balancing act, but one he pulls off with aplomb -- Mathew Lyons, Literary Review

This is an enjoyable book, written by a skilled historian who has read very widely... Everyone will learn something from reading Bull's work -- Noel Malcolm, Telegraph

Marcus Bull's revisiting of the siege through the eyes of the Ottomans and a global lens that shifts our angle of vision has made a considerable contribution to our understanding of the events of 1565... his approach is investigatory, based on a forensic study of all the available evidence and posing open-ended questions... the coverage of the siege itself is succinct and full of interesting perspectives -- Roger Crowley, Engelsberg Ideas

'Impressive, deeply researched... Rather than pursue old religious agendas and messianic readings of the triumph Bull places the siege in a broad global economic and political context -- Andrew Lambert, Naval Review

Thorough and propulsive -- Michael Prodger, New Statesman

A vivid account of a close-run thing ... peculiarly fascinating -- David Horspool, The Oldie

Thoughtful and incisive... a great strength of Bull's book is precisely that he often dissents from received opinion... he has provided an impressive reassessment, rich in penetrating insights, of a major moment in the history of the Mediterranean -- David Abulafia, TLS

An epic account... [a] no-nonsense, myth-busting book... [Bull] writes with knightly brio and packs a great deal of local and global history into his authoritative book -- Pratinav Anil, The Times

About the Author

Marcus Bull is Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Professor of Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the University of North Carolina. He has written extensively on Europe from the tenth to the sixteenth century with a particular emphasis on crusading in all its many forms.