The Great Siege of Malta

Összefoglaló

'An epic account... myth-busting... Bull writes with knightly brio and packs a great deal of local and global history into his authoritative book' Pratinav Anil, The Times<BR><BR>A major new history of the epic siege of the island fortress of Malta<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>This superb new account of the siege emphasises 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.<BR><BR>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 labour 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.