A history of Malta by date, from the temples to the euro

Malta fits into 316 km², and yet its history is one of the most tightly packed in Europe. What gets me is the density. In a single morning you can go from a temple that’s over five millennia old to a 1943 bunker without getting in a car. Here’s the history of Malta by date, with where to see each chapter today.

Before anything was written down

The cave at Għar Dalam holds bones of Ice Age elephants, hippos and red deer, some more than 160,000 years old, from before any humans reached the islands. People arrived much later. Heritage Malta dates the Maltese Neolithic to 5900-2500 BC, and that’s when the temples went up.

UNESCO places them in the fourth and third millennia BC and ranks them among the first free-standing stone buildings raised anywhere on earth. There are six inscribed complexes (seven temples), and the sequence I’d follow is set out in the megalithic temples of Malta. The Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum belongs to the same world, a burial site cut into the rock and in use from around 4000 BC, where UNESCO estimates some 7,000 people were laid to rest.

Phoenicians, Romans, Arabs and a famous shipwreck

UNESCO lists Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Byzantines and Arabs before the Knights. The best place to see those layers on top of each other is Tas-Silġ in Marsaxlokk, which Heritage Malta calls the site with the longest history of use in the islands. It began as a prehistoric temple and became a Phoenician sanctuary of Astarte, then a Roman one, then a Christian basilica and finally an Arab-period cemetery.

The Romans called the town that’s now Mdina and Rabat Melite. Tradition has St Paul shipwrecked here around AD 60, and outside Melite’s walls lie the earliest archaeological traces of Christianity in Malta, which I cover in Malta’s catacombs. VisitMalta dates the Arab conquest to 870 and credits it with a lasting mark on the language, the living legacy you hear in every street.

From Sicily to the Knights of St John

Until 1530, says VisitMalta, Malta was an extension of Sicily, ruled by the Normans, the Aragonese and whoever else held the bigger island. Then Charles V granted it to the Order of St John, who had been driven out of Rhodes by Suleiman the Magnificent. Spain’s foreign ministry adds a lovely detail, the rent. It was one falcon a year, sent to the Viceroy of Sicily on All Saints’ Day.

The Knights stayed 268 years. Who they were, and what they left behind on almost every street corner, is in the Knights of Malta.

1565 and the city built after the siege

The episode that changed everything was the Great Siege. In May 1565 an Ottoman fleet surrounded the islands. Fort St Elmo held out for a month and fell on 23 June, and the rest of the summer was fought around Fort St Angelo and Birgu. On 8 September the Ottomans gave up. UNESCO says the siege captured the European imagination and mobilised the resources to build a new city, Valletta, founded in 1566 on a grid plan. I’ve told the full story with numbers and places in the Great Siege of Malta.

The two centuries that followed belong to Baroque Malta. The Inquisition arrived in 1574 with Pietro Dusina and lasted over 224 years, although Heritage Malta points out it resorted to torture in under 1% of its cases.

How did Malta end up British?

In 1798 Napoleon took Malta on his way to Egypt and the Knights left. The French didn’t last long. The Maltese turned to Britain for help, and the islands were blockaded in 1800. No official source I’ve read gives the exact day the French left, so I won’t invent one.

British rule lasted until 1964, and VisitMalta notes that the Maltese adopted Britain’s systems of public administration, education and law. You’ll feel it in small ways, like the three-pin plugs. My favourite trace is the Main Guard facing the Grandmaster’s Palace, a guardhouse the British used from 1814, where soldiers painted the walls right up to 1972. In 1919 came the Sette Giugno riots, which Heritage Malta links to scarce, expensive bread and new taxes, and in 1921 the palace hosted Malta’s first constitutional parliament.

The war, independence and the euro

Between 1940 and 1942 Malta was one of the places hit hardest by bombing anywhere in the world, according to Heritage Malta, and the second siege ended in Allied victory in September 1943. On 15 April 1942 George VI awarded the George Cross to Malta, and the Constitution requires it on the flag. There’s more in Malta in the Second World War.

Then come the dates that are now national holidays. Independence on 21 September 1964. The republic on 13 December 1974. The closure of the last British base on 31 March 1979, Freedom Day. The EU adds the other two, membership on 1 May 2004 and the euro on 1 January 2008.

Reading the story without a book

If I had five stops to walk through Malta’s past, they’d be these. The National Museum of Archaeology for prehistory, the Rabat catacombs for the Roman era, the Grandmaster’s Palace for the Knights, Fort St Elmo for both wars and the Inquisitor’s Palace in Birgu for everyday life under the Order. Heritage Malta’s Multisite Pass gets you into all of them for €60, and I can’t think of a better use of a rainy day in Malta.