The Arab conquest

Abstract

The Arab history of Malta is usually treated in general surveys of Maltese history as a Dark Age. Data for this early medieval period are less than fulsome, and there survives no indigenous Chronicle; but Byzantine and Arab sources permit a coherent analysis of the events surrounding Malta's transition to Islam in 870. In fact the real Dark Age is the period of clear-cut Arab sovereignty, from 870 to 1901, for which we have very little evidence indeed. Curiously, what are usually termed the Norman and Swabian periods yield more evidence of Muslim Malta than the explicitly Arab period.