Valletta, and the siege it was built to survive

In the summer of 1565, an Ottoman fleet estimated at somewhere around forty thousand men arrived off Malta to remove, once and for all, the small but troublesome garrison of the Knights Hospitaller, a military-religious order that had been using the island as a base to harass Ottoman shipping since being granted it by the Holy Roman Emperor a few decades earlier. The Knights, numbering only a few thousand alongside Maltese irregulars, held out through nearly four months of siege, the loss of the fort of St Elmo and appalling casualties on both sides, until a relief force finally arrived from Sicily and the Ottoman fleet withdrew. The Great Siege of Malta became, almost immediately, one of the most celebrated defensive victories in European history, and it changed how the Knights thought about the island's defences for good.

Rather than trust to fortune again, the Order's Grand Master, Jean Parisot de Valette, decided to build an entirely new fortified city on the Sciberras peninsula, the high ground overlooking the harbour that the Ottomans had used to bombard St Elmo. Construction began within a year of the siege ending, and the new capital took the Grand Master's own name: Valletta. It was laid out on a grid, unusually orderly for its time, with bastions and curtain walls designed by leading military engineers of the day to make the mistakes of 1565 structurally impossible to repeat.

A city built by soldiers, and it shows

Valletta's defences are still, in large part, what a visitor sees first: the Upper and Lower Barrakka Gardens sit atop bastions that once carried cannon, and the walk from the main gate into the old city still climbs through the kind of layered fortification that was meant to slow an attacking army at every turn. Inside those walls, the Knights built with a wealth that reflected their status as one of Europe's most prestigious military orders, most visibly in St John's Co-Cathedral, whose plain limestone exterior gives no hint of an interior covered almost floor to ceiling in gilded baroque carving, paid for by knights from across Catholic Europe competing, in effect, to outdo each other's chapels.

The Order itself was organised into langues, groupings of knights by nation, each responsible for a stretch of the city's fortifications and each competing for the prestige of the finest auberge, or lodging house, along Valletta's main thoroughfare. Several of those auberges survive and are still in use today, repurposed as government offices and museums, their façades a reasonably reliable guide to which European nation's knights had the deepest pockets in the years just after the siege.

The harbour the whole city was built to protect

The Grand Harbour itself, which the Great Siege was fought to hold, remains the reason Valletta sits where it does. Deep, well sheltered and easily defended from the high ground on both sides, it has been used by fleets since Phoenician and Roman times and served as a major Royal Navy base through both world wars, a role that brought its own devastating bombing during the Second World War, when Malta as a whole was awarded the George Cross for its endurance under siege from the air rather than the sea this time.

Across the water from Valletta, the Three Cities, Vittoriosa, Senglea and Cospicua, were where the Knights actually lived and fought before Valletta existed, and they took the brunt of the Great Siege's bombardment for exactly that reason. Vittoriosa in particular, older and quieter than the capital, still holds the Order's first headquarters and a warren of narrow streets that give a clearer sense of what a sixteenth-century Mediterranean garrison town felt like before the engineers got involved and drew Valletta up on a grid.

Valletta today is compact enough to walk in a day, though the old city's streets, several of them built as covered staircases up the peninsula's slope, are better suited to spring or autumn than the height of a Maltese summer, when the same limestone that gives the bastions their honey colour also holds the heat rather effectively.