For the past 60 years the main book in English on the siege of Malta has been Ernle Bradford’s quatercentenary publication. It remains a good read but is a monument of amateurism at every level, from the macro-political to the micro-tactical. Marcus Bull’s new book handsomely redresses the balance and vindicates the high professionalism brought to the Order of Malta’s historiography by the late Prof Jonathan Riley-Smith, whose pupil the author is.
As a work of history, Marcus Bull’s book is at the other end of the scale from Bradford’s, so much so that one could almost quip that he makes the siege of Malta a peg on which to hang a comprehensive review of world history in the year 1565. That would be an exaggeration, but there is one chapter which, after glancing at what was happening in China, Japan and India, proceeds to an in-depth description of the stirrings of revolt in the Spanish Netherlands and the beginnings of Spanish imperial rule in the Philippines and on the coast of Florida. Drawing these strands together, the author judges: “it is fair to say that in 1565 the world became significantly more joined up than ever before”. Coming closer to the immediate subject, there is a chapter devoted to a close study of the Ottoman Empire, an area generally shirked by historians of the Order of Malta, who have been content to view the Turks from afar simply as the enemy.
