The history of Malta

Malta is a small archipelago in the middle of the Mediterranean, about 90 kilometres south of Sicily, whose position between Europe and North Africa has drawn one power after another to its harbours. Its first farmers raised some of the oldest stone temples on earth. The islands were then held by Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans, Byzantines and Arabs, whose speech became the Maltese language, before passing to the Norman and later Aragonese kingdoms of Sicily. From 1530 to 1798 they were ruled by the crusading Knights of St John, who defeated an Ottoman siege in 1565 and built Valletta. After a brief French occupation Malta became a British colony and naval base, endured heavy bombing in the Second World War, and won independence in 1964. It joined the European Union in 2004.

Hunter-gatherers seem to have reached Malta from Sicily by about 6500 BCE, and farmers followed around 5400 BCE, bringing sheep, goats, cattle, pigs and cereals, as part of the spread of the Neolithic Revolution across the Mediterranean. Studies of ancient soils suggest that the first farming population did not last, and that a second wave of settlers arrived from Sicily around 3850 BCE.

These people created one of the most remarkable cultures of prehistoric Europe. From about 3600 BCE they built great megalithic temples, beginning with Ġgantija on Gozo and continuing at Ħaġar Qim, Mnajdra and Tarxien on Malta, older than the pyramids of Egypt. Many have lobed chambers arranged around a central passage, and they contained carved altars, spiral decorations and statues of very large human figures, often called "fat ladies" and sometimes thought to represent fertility. The underground Hypogeum of Ħal Saflieni, cut into the rock over many centuries, served as a burial place for thousands of people. The temple culture lasted about 1,500 years before it disappeared around 2350 BCE, possibly because of drought and the exhaustion of the islands' thin soils. Bronze Age newcomers who cremated their dead and built dolmens took their place.

Phoenician traders from the Levant settled in Malta early in the first millennium BCE, using its harbours as a stop on routes to the western Mediterranean. Their culture, part of the world of Phoenicia, left inscriptions, tombs and temples, and the islands later came under Carthage. During the Punic Wars Rome raided Malta and in 218 BCE took it for good. Under the Roman Empire Malta was attached to the province of Sicily and kept its own local government; the Roman town of Melite stood on the site of present-day Mdina, and wealthy families built villas with fine mosaics. Punic speech and customs survived for a long time alongside Greek and Latin.

According to the Acts of the Apostles, the apostle Paul was shipwrecked on Malta around 60 CE while being taken to Rome for trial, and Maltese tradition holds that he converted the islanders to Christianity. Large Christian catacombs survive from the late Roman period. After the Western Roman Empire collapsed, the islands were briefly held by Vandals and Goths before the general Belisarius brought them under the Byzantine Empire in 533. Byzantine Malta was a small garrison outpost governed from Sicily, and little is known about it.

During the Arab conquest of Sicily, Muslim forces of the Aghlabid emirate took Malta in 870 after a hard fight with the Byzantine garrison. Medieval Arab writers described the islands as left almost empty afterwards, and they were resettled in the mid-eleventh century by Muslims from Sicily, in the period of the Fatimid Caliphate's influence in the region. The settlers brought irrigation, new crops such as cotton and citrus fruit, and the Siculo-Arabic language from which modern Maltese developed. Maltese, written today in the Latin alphabet, is the only Semitic language that is an official language of the European Union, and many place names and family names date from this period.

In 1091 the Norman Count Roger I, conqueror of Sicily, landed in Malta and forced its Muslim rulers to pay tribute; full Norman control followed in 1127 under his son Roger II. For the next four centuries Malta belonged to the kingdom of Sicily and passed with it from the Normans to the German Hohenstaufen dynasty, to the French house of Anjou in 1266 and, after the uprising of the Sicilian Vespers, to the Crown of Aragon in 1282. Christianity was gradually restored. The Emperor Frederick II deported or forced the conversion of many Muslims in the 1220s and 1240s, and by the later Middle Ages the population was Catholic, though it kept its Arabic-derived language.

Malta was often granted as a fief to nobles and admirals, and in 1428 the islanders paid a large sum to buy back their rights from a feudal lord on the promise that they would stay under the direct rule of the crown. The local nobility, based in the walled town of Mdina, governed through a town council, the Università. Through the marriage of Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella, Malta became part of the Spanish realms inherited by the Habsburgs.

In 1530 the Habsburg emperor Charles V gave Malta to the Knights Hospitaller, a military religious order founded during the Crusades, in return for the symbolic annual tribute of a falcon. The knights had been driven from Rhodes by the Ottoman Empire in 1522. They settled around the Grand Harbour, fortified the town of Birgu, and used their galleys to attack Muslim shipping.

In May 1565 Suleiman the Magnificent sent a great fleet and army to take the islands. Under Grand Master Jean de Valette, about 500 knights and some 6,000 soldiers, many of them Maltese, held out for nearly four months, losing Fort St Elmo but holding Birgu and Senglea until a Spanish relief force arrived from Sicily in September. The victory of the Great Siege was celebrated across Catholic Europe. Valette founded a new fortified capital on the Sciberras peninsula in 1566, named Valletta after him, and the knights spent the next two centuries building bastions, churches, palaces and hospitals, among them St John's Co-Cathedral, where the painter Caravaggio worked in 1607 and 1608. The order also profited from corsair raids, and Valletta had a slave market where captured Muslims were sold or forced to row the galleys.

By the late eighteenth century the order was in decline. In June 1798 Napoleon, on his way to Egypt, seized Malta almost without a fight, expelled the knights, abolished feudal privileges and freed the slaves. His garrison's taxes and attacks on the Church provoked a Maltese uprising in September 1798, and with British, Neapolitan and Portuguese help the rebels besieged the French in Valletta until they surrendered in September 1800. The Maltese leaders asked for British protection, and the Treaty of Paris of 1814 confirmed Malta as part of the British Empire at the end of the Napoleonic Wars.

Malta became a key base of the Royal Navy, and its importance grew after the Suez Canal opened in 1869. The dockyards employed thousands of Maltese. During the First World War the islands cared for so many wounded soldiers that they were called the "Nurse of the Mediterranean". Economic hardship after the war led to riots on 7 June 1919, the Sette Giugno, in which British troops killed four people, and in 1921 Malta was given a parliament with self-government in local affairs. Politics was dominated by the "language question", the struggle between supporters of Italian, the traditional language of the educated classes, and of English; the constitution was suspended in 1933 amid tension with Mussolini's Italy, and in 1934 Maltese and English became the official languages.

When Italy entered the Second World War in June 1940, Malta, within easy reach of Sicilian airfields, became one of the most heavily bombed places on earth. Italian and German aircraft attacked the harbours and towns in some 3,000 raids, aiming to bomb and starve the islands into surrender, because British submarines and aircraft based there were sinking Axis convoys to North Africa. Food and fuel ran desperately short, and supply convoys, above all Operation Pedestal in August 1942, suffered heavy losses. On 15 April 1942 King George VI awarded the George Cross to the island collectively, and it now appears on Malta's flag. The siege lifted after the Allied victories in North Africa in November 1942, and in 1943 Malta was a base for the invasion of Sicily.

Self-government was restored in 1947. In 1956 the Labour Party of Dom Mintoff won a referendum on integrating Malta into the United Kingdom, but the Nationalists boycotted it, and the plan collapsed. Malta became independent on 21 September 1964 under the Nationalist prime minister Giorgio Borg Olivier, with the British queen as head of state. Mintoff, in power from 1971, made Malta a republic within the Commonwealth on 13 December 1974, and when the defence agreement with Britain expired the last British forces left on 31 March 1979, now celebrated as Freedom Day. Malta adopted a policy of neutrality and non-alignment. In December 1989 it hosted the summit between George H. W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev that signalled the end of the Cold War.

The Nationalists, in office from 1987, applied to join the European Community, a divisive issue, and after a narrow referendum vote in 2003 Malta joined the European Union in 2004 and the euro in 2008. Tourism, financial services, online gaming and shipping became the mainstays of a fast-growing economy, and Malta has received many migrants crossing from Libya. Divorce was legalised after a referendum in 2011, while abortion remains almost entirely banned.

The Labour Party has governed since 2013. In October 2017 the investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia was killed by a car bomb; the investigation into her murder led to mass protests and the resignation of Prime Minister Joseph Muscat in January 2020. His successor Robert Abela won elections in 2022 and, after calling a snap vote, on 30 May 2026, when Labour became the first party to win four consecutive general elections. Myriam Spiteri Debono became president in April 2025.