Malta's role in Mediterranean affairs : 1530-1699

Abstract

The centrality of the Maltese Islands - very nearly at the geographical centre of the Mediterranean - has in the past rarely corresponded with any significant role in the affairs of the region. Such an apparent contradiction stems from the nature of communications between Mediterranean communities before the advent of those technological innovations that began to impinge on world affairs from the latter decades of the 19th Century. Prior to that technological advance, shipping had been the principal means of keeping Mediterranean communities in touch through the pursuit of trade, migration and the upheavals brought about by wars. Yet for most of the time, shipping conducted its mediating role unspectacularly and even - one may say - anonymously. Only in the course of the 19th Century was the notion of a closed-season for shipping (generally running from mid-November to mid-March) gradually abandoned, and then only by the larger craft. We still tend to lose sight of the fact that until well into the 18th Century, the vast majority of shipping kept to well-defined coastal lanes, hugging determinedly to the shores, afraid to trust itself to the wide open expanses, associated in folk memory with the treachery of the sea. If we now try to locate Malta in this kind of marine topography, we find that it lies ‘off the beaten track’, away from the coast-hugging trade routes. Thus most of Malta's cultural tradition tended to develop in relative isolation - witness the phenomenon of isolated flourish of Chalcolithic Malta (the Temple Culture of 4000 B.C. to 2500B.C.). Renowned personages, as likely as not, reached it when storm-d riven off their course - as St. Paul and possibly Ulysses. The Carthaginians, even while their armies were threatening Rome itself during the Second Punic War, never attempted to recover Malta, although very likely the Punic inhabitants would have welcomed them as fellow-nationals. In the course of the 9th Century A.D., the Arabs almost overlooked Malta at the very height of their supremacy in the Mediterranean; they ultimately turned to capture it in a kind of after-thought, or mopping-up operation, 50 years after swooping on Crete, 25 years after conquering Sicily - although in net geographical terms, Malta lay much nearer to N. Africa. Events were able to take this determinate course because, at the time, the geography that really counted was the one established by the lanes of communication - and these in effect by-passed the Maltese Islands. As a consequence of this situation, Malta came to be nearer to Europe, simply because it happened to lie nearer to the communication-lane running along the southern coast of Europe. Its old and intimate ties with Sicily are an inevitable corollary to the same situation. So we may indeed say that for most of its past, Mediterranean history flowed along the channels of communication delineated by the trade-routes - for trade was sure to follow the quickest, the easiest and the safest routes.