The Corsair War

Malta is remembered as the island that stopped the Ottoman Empire during the Great Siege of 1565. Behind the celebrated bastions, however, lay a harder and more complicated truth: the Knights of St John were not simply defenders. From the Grand Harbour, they conducted an aggressive maritime war, hunting Ottoman commerce, raiding hostile coasts, capturing vessels, and sustaining an extensive economy built upon prizes, ransom, forced labour, and enslavement. The Corsair War reconstructs this struggle from the fall of Rhodes and the Order’s arrival in Malta to the Great Siege, Lepanto, the long war for Crete, and the eventual decline of the Maltese corso. It follows famous commanders such as Hayreddin Barbarossa, Turgut Reis, Jean de Valette, and Mathurin Romegas, while also recovering the lives of Maltese pilots, foreign sailors, merchants, soldiers, captive rowers, enslaved families, ransom brokers, and harbour workers. It reveals how maritime law transformed seizure into lawful prize, how naval caravans trained generations of knights, and how Valletta became both an impregnable fortress and the headquarters of organised maritime predation. This is a history of rival empires, religious warfare, commerce, survival, and moral contradiction. Moving beyond the familiar heroic legend of 1565, it presents Malta as one of the central armed marketplaces of the early modern Mediterranean-a place where cross and crescent confronted one another, but where merchants, prisoners, money, and information continued to pass between the opposing shores.