Picture a bearded man of seventy-one — an age at which, in the sixteenth century, commanding an army was almost inconceivable — personally directing the defence of a tiny island planted right in the middle of the Mediterranean, against the most powerful army on the planet. Asking for no quarter, begging no truce, and never for a single minute thinking of surrender, sword in hand to the very end. That man was Jean Parisot de la Valette, a Frenchman from Quercy and Grand Master of the Order of Saint John of Malta, and his feat in the Great Siege of 1565 is one of the most staggering stories of leadership and courage in all of European history. Take my hand and come with me to meet the iron grandfather whose surname today gives its name to the lovely capital of Malta: Valletta.
A whole life of wars
When the Great Siege of Malta broke out in 1565, Jean de la Valette was no rookie. He was a hardened old veteran, seasoned by decades of fighting against the Ottoman Muslim power that ravaged Europe and the Barbary Moorish piracy that terrorised the Mediterranean. A knight of the Military Order of Saint John of the Hospital of Malta (the famous Knights Hospitaller) from a young age, he had devoted his entire life to the Order and to the war against the greatest and most fearsome enemies of Christendom, the Muslims. Especially the Turks of the Great Ottoman Empire, then commanded by Sultan Suleiman I the Magnificent.
His experience included one brutal episode that marks a man's character forever: in 1541 he had been captured in combat by the pirate Dragut Reis and had spent about a year as a slave in the Ottoman galleys, chained to an oar. He knew, therefore, in his own flesh, what was at stake and what kind of merciless enemy he was facing. That captivity did not break him: it hardened him. By the time he was elected Grand Master of the Order, he was already a living legend, respected and feared in equal measure.
Alarm: the enemy at the gates
In 1565, Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, the most powerful monarch in the world, decided to tear out by the root the thorn that the Hospitallers had become. From their base in Malta, the knights of the Order of Saint John and their seven corsair galleys — the Capitana, the Patrona and the Corona, together with the Sant'Iago, the San Gabriel, the San Rafael and the San Juan — three of them under the famous and fortunate Christian commander Mathurin de Romegas (the one who always carried a little capuchin monkey perched on his shoulder), harried the Turkish-Ottoman sea routes without respite, attacking and plundering their most valuable ships to give the Muslims a taste of their own pirate medicine. The last straw came in 1564, when Romegas captured the Sultana herself, a fabulously rich Turkish galleon in whose holds travelled not only a fabulous treasure but also several pashas, governors and even personal friends of Suleiman himself. That humiliation was what finally made the Sultan explode. Suleiman sent against the little island a colossal armada and army: nearly two hundred ships and tens of thousands of soldiers, including the dreaded Janissaries, the elite infantry of the Empire, made up mostly of Christian boys kidnapped in their raids on European towns and cities and turned into elite soldiers and into the Muslim faith.
And here is one of those paradoxes that only History dares to sign. Even in her lifetime, according to the chronicler Balbi himself, the one who pushed Suleiman hardest to raze Malta — a thorn that had been lodged for years — was his wife Roxelana, the "red sultana": the most powerful woman ever to walk the Ottoman harem, who had entered it as a Christian slave captured as a girl in the Ruthenian lands of the Polish Crown, and whose given name, according to tradition, was Aleksandra Lisowska. It is said that on her death, in 1558, she even left a vast fortune earmarked to fund the enterprise. And her daughter Mihrimah took up the baton: it was she who in 1565 urged her father to launch the conquest of the island, going so far as to offer to fund 400 ships out of her own pocket. In other words: the drive to annihilate the last great Christian bastion of the Mediterranean sprang, mother and daughter, from the blood of an enslaved Christian woman. History, as we know, has a very twisted sense of humour.
Against that overwhelming force, La Valette had a ridiculous handful of defenders: a few hundred knights of the Order and a few thousand Spanish, Italian, English and German soldiers, plus Maltese civilians. The disproportion was crushing, almost comical. Something like 50 Muslim soldiers for every 1 Christian… Any rational observer would have said Malta was already screwed and well and truly done for. But La Valette was no rational observer: he was a man of Faith ready to die before surrendering, and he knew how to spread that Faith in God and that cold, powerful determination to everyone around him.
The leader who always led by example
La Valette's greatness as a leader lay not only in his strategy, which was excellent, but above all in his personal example. He was not a general who directed his men from the safe rear. In his seventies, La Valette was always on the front line, walking the walls, comforting the wounded and rallying the defenders, and in the most critical moments, wielding sword and shield himself and fighting hand-to-hand alongside his men.
The chronicles tell that, during one of the most desperate assaults, when a key position was about to fall and the men were faltering, the iron grandfather himself took up a pike and threw himself into the thick of the fighting, surrounded by Islamic troops, even being wounded in the leg. His presence in the danger, his absolute refusal to take shelter in the fortress of Castel Sant'Angelo, electrified the defenders. How could men give up or flee when they saw their septuagenarian chief fighting in the front rank? La Valette's example alone was worth a thousand speeches, and all words were superfluous.
Soldiers, not a single step back!
La Valette's iron will was put to the test in the most painful episode of the siege: the defence of the fort of Saint Elmo. That fort was already doomed because of the overwhelming number of enemies and cannons pounding it day after day, and everyone knew it, but its resistance was vital to buy time and finish the defensive works of Birgu and Senglea. La Valette made the harshest decision, to sacrifice its garrison, demanding that they hold to the last man in order to bleed and wear down the enemy. When the defenders of Saint Elmo, aware that they were going to die, asked to be evacuated, La Valette refused: they must resist, he explained, for their Faith and for the common good, and to save the lives of their families and friends. And resist they did — oh, how they resisted — until every last one fell.
That strategic coldness, terrible but necessary, saved Malta: Saint Elmo withstood the Turkish assaults far longer than expected, 31 days, and cost the enemy precious time and sky-high casualties, on the order of 8,000–10,000 men. And among those thousands of Ottoman corpses there was one that must have tasted like glory to La Valette: Dragut Reis himself — the corsair who almost a quarter of a century earlier had chained him to a galley oar — was blown apart by shrapnel at the foot of the very walls of Saint Elmo he had set out to storm. Destiny, when it wants to, closes its circles with perfect aim. La Valette proved that a good leader must sometimes make heart-rending decisions for the good of the whole. As when he was forced to sacrifice all the dogs of the city, whose continual barking confused and exasperated the sentries on watch atop the walls. And he answered the enemy's psychological warfare with implacable harshness, matching them in cruelty when he had to, so as never to show weakness.
The Turkish enemy beheaded and dismembered dozens of his own men and hung the remains on wooden crosses that they then threw into the sea?! He answered by beheading all his Turkish prisoners and then firing their heads with the cannons into the enemy camp…
The man who probably changed the history of Europe
Against all odds, Malta held. After almost four months of infernal siege, decimated by casualties, disease and the (at last) arrival of a Spanish relief army from Sicily, the Ottomans withdrew, defeated. The little island and its aged Grand Master had stopped the greatest naval and military power of the age. It was a victory that resonated across all of Europe, which breathed a sigh of relief at seeing the Ottoman advance halted in the western Mediterranean.
In honour of his feat, the new fortified city built on the island after the siege received his name: Valletta, today the capital of Malta. Few men have the honour of giving their name to a capital, and fewer still for so well-deserved an achievement. Jean de la Valette died a few years later, in 1568, leaving behind one of the most solid military reputations in all of history.
The figure of La Valette embodies, like few others, valour, leadership and absolute determination. An old man who, when the whole world gave his cause up for lost, decided that, with God's help, he would never surrender, and by his example dragged a handful of men to achieve the impossible. If it has fascinated you, the complete tale of the Great Siege of Malta of 1565, with La Valette and all its protagonists, is in my book «Malta 1565». History as you were never told it.
Per Aspera, Ad Astra.
✠ David S. Matrecano
Ibiza, 14 July 2026
Sources and references
- Francesco Balbi da Correggio, The True Account of All That Happened in the Year 1565 on the Island of Malta (1567), the chronicle of an eyewitness to the siege.
- Historical context: Order of Saint John of the Hospital, Great Siege of Malta (1565), Suleiman the Magnificent, defence of Saint Elmo, founding of Valletta.
This article contains NO fiction
The facts — La Valette's career, his captivity in the Ottoman galleys, his election as Grand Master, the disproportion of forces in the 1565 siege, his leadership on the front line, the harsh decision over Saint Elmo, the final victory and the founding of the city of Valletta that bears his name — are documented in the chronicle of Francesco Balbi da Correggio, an eyewitness, and in the general historiography of the Great Siege. The narrator's comments and opinions are part of the personal artistic and literary voice of the author David S. Matrecano. The author's novel «Malta 1565» is historical fiction based on these real events; this article sticks to what is documented.