Original subtitles

In the spring of 1565,

a rumor flew across Europe.

Suleiman the Magnificent, sultan of the Ottoman Empire,

had formed an armada.

His empire already spreads

across the entire Eastern Mediterranean.

Now the sultan sets his sights west.

His goal is to conquer the sea's western basin

and put an end to Christian domination of Europe.

But one tiny island stands in his way.

Malta was often the site of these conflicts

for who was going to dominate the Mediterranean.

Malta is a Christian enclave

and home to the militant order of the Knights Hospitaller.

Suleiman really wanted to eradicate the Knights.

560 men, the last remnants of the crusaders

are now the last defense

against the Ottoman's conquest of the West.

For four long months, Malta will be the scene

of a military and religious confrontation

that will change the course of history.

In the mid 16th century, the world is divided

between the Ottoman Empire under Suleiman the Magnificent

and the Holy Roman Empire led by Philip II of Spain.

The Mediterranean lies at the heart of their confrontation.

The western part of the Mediterranean

is under Spanish and Catholic control.

The eastern part is under Ottoman rule.

The crescent and the cross are engaged

in a trade and a religious war,

from east to west and from north to south,

a clash of terrible cruelty between two major powers.

These two sides believed that they should be

the leaders of the world.

So in every way, in terms of religion, in terms of ideology,

in terms of dynasties, in terms of geography,

these two were completely opposed to each other.

The Mediterranean in the 16th century

is at the center of all economic,

political, and cultural exchanges.

The whole world order is organized around it.

The Ottoman Turks, in alliance with the North African

Barbary States, intend to drive the Christians out.

Knights were a great nuisance.

They were obviously all the time

trying to as much as possible attack Ottoman shipping.

To do it, Suleiman the Magnificent,

head of the Ottoman Empire,

deploys an armada of extraordinary military power.

The Ottoman rulers

thought that it was necessary to take both roads,

which was done in 1522,

and Rome, because once that's done,

Christianity would disappear.

And so they decide to attack Malta,

and once they're in Malta,

they'll go through Sicily, up Italy to Rome.

Geography put Malta where the two empires meet.

So it's quite logical that Malta was going to feature

in this confrontation.

On May the 18th, 1565,

as day breaks over Malta,

the Turkish armada appears on the horizon.

300 galleys with more than 30,000 soldiers on board

head straight for the island.

It's a full-on assault.

The island is home to 20,000 Maltese Christians

and 560 Knights Hospitaller,

warrior monks who have fought for Christianity

in the region ever since the Crusades.

They are under the command

of Grand Master Jean de Valette.

De Valette is devoutly religious

and a formidable military leader.

For months, he's been preparing for the worst.

Jean de Valette .

Jean de Valette's almost sure

that Malta could be attacked in April 1565.

He has been informed by spies in his service

that the fleet will be headed for Malta.

The order used to send spies

all across the Mediterranean as far as the Levant

because there was always this phobia of a Turkish attack.

They were always on the lookout.

And as early as 1563,

they knew that the Ottoman navy was preparing itself.

It was building up.

On the morning of May the 18th,

that threat becomes reality.

Like a huge wave, the Turkish armada breaks over the island.

Jean de Valette's fears have come true.

You would have seen this huge, huge armada of ships

coming towards the island.

As they were approaching, these were not silent.

They would've been very noisy

with cannons firing and drums beating

and trumpets being blown and lots of flags and banners,

a really spectacular but terrifying sight.

Immediately, the alarm would have been raised,

would have fired their cannons.

Maybe what few church bells there were would've been rung.

So immediately people start moving away from the shore

to try to get to the safety of the fortresses.

And as this got closer, of course, the fear grew.

Jean de Valette has just hours

to organize the defense of his island.

He has 560 combat-trained Knights, a few hundred Maltese

who've swiftly formed a militia,

and 450 men sent at the last moment

by the viceroy of Sicily.

The viceroy's help doesn't amount to much.

It's a fraction of what Jean de Valette

has been calling for.

Jean de Valette .

Jean de Valette wrote to the viceroy

thanking him for the 450 men who will help him a lot

to fight against the enemy army.

Absolute sarcasm from the grand master

and obvious annoyance.

They are vastly outnumbered.

30,000 men is a huge number at that time,

and in front of this armada and these troops,

there are a total of 1,700 people

capable of defending the capital of the order in Birgu,

in the center of the Grand Harbour of Malta.

So it's a gigantic disproportion.

As the Ottoman ships approach,

Jean de Valette gives the order to gather all food supplies

and collect fresh water.

They must prepare for a siege,

but no one knows how long it could last.

He has only one duty.

He must hold out as long as possible

so that the troops in Sicily are ready

if need be to defend Sicily.

So they cross off Malta right away.

Malta is less than 62 miles from the Italian coast.

Emperor Philip II fears a landing in Sicily

and a threat to mainland Italy.

He cannot afford to send help to Malta.

The small Christian enclave appears to be doomed.

With the Ottoman's military superiority so great,

how can it ever hope to survive?

The men of the order are soldier monks,

and they've sworn a holy oath to fight to the death.

The coming hours will put their courage

and determination to the test.

They knew they couldn't defeat the Turks as it were.

So the idea was you stay behind your walls.

The Turks have to attack these walls,

and they're gonna waste their men and their gunpowder.

Therefore their numbers are going to grow smaller over time,

and de Valette wants to resist.

He will depend on his fortress to save his men.

Since they settled on the island in 1530

after being driven out of Rhodes, the Knights have erected

two main lines of defense in the great port.

First, they reinforced the walls

of Malta's main cities, Senglea and Birgu.

Then they built two forts, Saint Angelo and Saint Elmo,

to defend the harbor.

When the Ottoman fleet arrives in Malta

in front of the port, they immediately realize

that the port is actually fortified

and that therefore it will not be that easy

and that it's not big enough to house the whole fleet.

Built at the tip of the Sciberras Peninsula,

the star-shaped Fort Saint Elmo

is in a highly strategic position.

It can observe and attack any enemy ships

that try to enter the port.

This Fort Saint Elmo protects the entrance

to the main harbor and the entrance to the other harbor,

which is called Marsamxett.

Therefore, the Ottoman sailors cannot enter

any of the ports to anchor.

Every time they try to enter a port,

they're bombarded by Saint Elmo,

so the Ottoman troops decide to destroy Saint Elmo.

The Ottoman strategists realized

that it would perhaps be even easier

and hopefully better for morale

if they could subdue what was seen

to be a very small and weak fort,

and hopefully in doing that,

they would once secure safe anchorage for their fleet.

So Saint Elmo becomes

the attackers' primary target.

To attack, the Ottomans will bypass the main port

and land in the Bay of Marsaxlokk

in the southeast of the island.

In less than 48 hours, they drop anchor

and bring their guns ashore

along with 30,000 soldiers of the best army

of the 16th century world.

But then eventually they go into Marsaxlokk,

and they start disembarking their forces,

men, weapons, animals, and so on.

They start preparing their camp in Marsaxlokk,

and from there, they also start moving their forces

towards the Grand Harbour, because of course they know

that is where they have to fight.

And on the way to the port,

they cross the village of Zejtun,

and the 200 inhabitants of Zejtun

are put to the sword, are killed.

it's a warning of what will happen

if you support the Order of the Hospitallers,

if you resist the arrival of Muslims.

The people of Malta are terrified,

especially of being forced to convert to Islam

if the Ottomans conquer the island.

So they rallied to the men of the order.

It's a sacred union in the name of the Catholic faith,

a true holy war.

The Ottomans continue their march across the island

to Mount Sciberras, the hill overlooking Fort Saint Elmo.

Just three days after landing,

they're ready to bombard the fort.

They take up their main positions

on the heights of Mount Sciberras.

One of the defects of Fort Saint Elmo

is that it occupied the tip of a promontory,

and the high ground, which overlooked it,

that was to the advantage of the attackers

because it allowed the Turkish, the Ottoman guns,

to fire directly into the fort.

They established a very powerful battery

to fire directly on the land front.

Saint Elmo's star-shaped design

is the very latest in 16th century military architecture.

It has a bastion, a ravelin, and a cavalier.

A ravelin is a triangular defensive structure

that protects a vulnerable point of the fort,

in this case, the corners of the bastion walls.

A cavalier is a raised platform that reinforces the bastion

and provides an elevated position for artillery.

In Italy at the beginning

of the 16th century, there is a revolution

in the art of fortification.

They abandon the typical round fortifications

of the Middle Ages in favor of acute angles,

which allow the fort to withstand artillery fire

since sharp angles effectively prevent the fortifications

from collapsing too quickly.

It had a small cavalier,

'cause the space inside was restricted,

so they had to build it outside.

The order of that time has guns

but does not have the artillery strength

of the firepower of the Ottoman Empire,

which for their part has a lot of cannons

and especially what are called basilicas,

huge cannons that send very destructive heavy balls.

On the 22nd of May, 1565,

60 guns start bombarding Fort Saint Elmo

from both land and sea.

And they created a fronted bombardment.

The tactics was a period of a number of days

of bombarding the fort, and then infantry assaults

would try to breach the walls.

Jean de Valette directs Malta's defenses

from his headquarters in Fort Saint Angelo.

From his window, he can see the incessant bombardment

of the fort that he himself built.

The Ottomans are confident that the siege of Saint Elmo

will be over in a few days.

The fortress will fall.

The idea is to break the walls

but also break the defenders through,

again, through the stress,

because there's almost no break, no respite.

They keep bombarding and shooting,

bombarding and shooting as well as launching soldiers

to attack the walls of Saint Elmo.

From the word go, they attack with full force,

but the Ottomans haven't thought to secure

and close off all possible access to the fort.

They've left wide-open gaps,

and Jean de Valette takes full advantage of them.

De Valette is actually able to send fresh men

and supplies into the fort.

So for a while, it's like a blood transfusion almost

that is stopping Saint Elmo from bleeding out completely.

It's only later when the important figure

of Dragut arrives at Malta in early June

that he says to his colleagues, "This has to stop."

And so they put cannons down by the sea

that stops this transfusion of men into the fort.

Dragut is the leader of the Barbary armies.

The Barbarians are from North Africa

and have formed an alliance with the Ottoman Empire.

It was Dragut who in the winter of 1564

asked Suleiman the Magnificent

to mount a joint attack on Malta.

Barbarians have an important role,

first of all, because they are the ones

who will contribute to the advance,

to the conquest of the West of the Ottomans.

As the two empires push their borders,

the 16th century has seen an explosion

of privateer activity in the Western Mediterranean,

with the Barbary pirates, the Ottomans,

and the Knights Hospitaller

fighting a relentless trade and religious war out at sea.

The Knight's Hospitaller regularly attack

and loot Ottoman ships,

which are loaded with luxury goods from the Far East.

Hospitallers and Barbarians

are in some ways dependent on each other.

They are both vassals of an empire, extremely good at sea,

and very active as privateers.

But it is religious outrage that drives Dragut.

So Dragut does not tolerate

the boarding of ships carrying pilgrims

and considers that attacking men, women, and children

going on pilgrimage in this way is an offense to Islam.

The holy war reaches boiling point

on June the 3rd, 1565.

In the early morning, after more than 10 days

of incessant bombardment,

the Ottomans launch an assault on Fort Saint Elmo,

led by their elite soldiers, the Janissaries.

They're all young men from the former Christian provinces

freshly conquered by Suleiman the Magnificent.

They were forcibly converted to his Islam

but are now fanatically loyal to the sultan.

So the Janissaries are trained

in assault warfare.

They're gunners, but they're used to assault.

By sound of the guns

and the sound of the music and the screams they make.

If you see a Janissary arriving at you,

you know it's scary.

You know you have to be prepared

because these men were very, very tough individuals.

They went into a fight not completely careless

of their lives, but certainly very, very, very determined.

The elite Ottoman army heads into battle

driven by an almighty anger,

but the star structure of Fort Saint Elmo

makes their assault a deadly business.

Atop the walls, the garrison of the fort

fires at them relentlessly.

What we need to know

is that in bastion fortifications,

we have this kind of glacis between the two walls.

There is a lot of space in that ditch

where you are under permanent enemy fire,

so there are far more deaths on the side of an attacker

than on the side of the besieged.

So Muslim soldiers

are killed very regularly.

During the first two weeks of the siege,

more than 1,000 Ottoman and Barbary soldiers are killed.

On both sides, conditions are brutal.

The Maltese sun blazes down.

There's little water for the fighting men,

but the blood flows freely.

Just two weeks into the siege,

the men in Saint Elmo have already lost half their number.

They know they will die

because they are 150 inside the fort.

In front of them, there are 10,000 people.

But they hold out. They hold out well.

The Ottomans may be surprised

by the Christian resistance, but inside the fort,

the Knights can feel their strength waning.

But you know, Saint Elmo is like almost a place

that's slowly being flooded,

not with water, but with soldiers.

The Ottomans are squeezing it

until eventually they will manage to suffocate it.

The Christians' food and water supplies

are already dwindling.

They may not even live long enough to defend themselves.

There was in those days a sort of unwritten rule

that it's okay to resist in a siege,

but if things are desperate, you really should give up.

And if you don't give up at the right moment,

then you cannot expect mercy,

and this is the message the Turks are giving.

You know, it's like, this was ridiculous,

Saint Elmo resisting for so long.

You know, you've passed that point which is acceptable.

Take your chance now.

Give in, abandon the fort?

This is the painful option facing the men of the order.

It is one that goes against their vows

to lay down their lives for God.

But after more than two weeks of relentless assaults

and bombardments, their determination is faltering.

The garrison writes a letter to Jean de Valette.

They tell him they want to leave the fort

to save their lives.

The letter is delivered by a Maltese soldier

who swims at night to the Grand Master at Fort Saint Angelo.

Some of the Knights literally sent a letter

to the Grand Master telling him,

"Let us go and attack the Ottoman forces,

at least die honorably, rather than be consumed here

trying to defend this position, which is going to fall."

On June the 9th, 1565,

Jean de Valette receives the letter.

He calls for a council of the order

and decides to send three Knights at night by boat

to sneak into the fort and evaluate the situation.

The three Knights, a Spaniard, a Frenchman,

and an Italian represent the order's international factions.

They must decide the future of Saint Elmo

and the men who defend it.

But in a dramatic turn of events,

the three experts can't agree on how to defend the island.

The Spaniard and the Frenchman say the fort can't be held,

while the Italian insists the defense must continue.

The Grand Master decides

in view of what has been said by the commissioners

that they must hold the fort.

The longer Saint Elmo holds out,

the more time the cities have to organize their defenses.

He changed the commander of the fort

to make sure that his orders are complied with.

So in this way, he managed to ensure

that the fort was defended for as long as possible.

He reminds them that they took vows

and that God offers them here

the best way to honor their vows.

As both monks and soldiers,

they know their duty.

They will remain in Saint Elmo.

They will also die there.

It's this idea that you're really fighting for God,

for your church, and for your people.

So all of these together help explain why they resist.

On June the 15th,

the Ottoman and Barbary troops

make their final advance on Fort Saint Elmo.

In three days of fighting,

they managed to conquer both the ravelin and the cavalier.

Their goal is to build a bridge

with galley masts that they will attach to each other

to make a bridge to enable them

to get into the fort of Saint Elmo.

They built a bridge, a wooden bridge, in two positions.

One was just behind the ravelin,

and another was at this pier on the land front,

which came to be known as the post of Colonel Mass.

And here, they sought to create their mate

and concentrate their artillery fire, create bridges,

and repeatedly then they sought to scale the walls

in these two positions.

By June the 18th,

the situation on both sides is deteriorating.

If the Knights don't die in battle,

they're sure to die of thirst and hunger.

They know they're beaten,

but they continue to fight to the last man.

The Knights in Fort Saint Elmo

also have some reserves of ammunition

and also bombard the enemy.

During one of the bombardments,

a cannonball hits a large rock

where Dragut, who supervises the operations, is located.

When hitting the rock, a splinter hits Dragut's temple,

and Dragut falls, fatally injured.

Dragut is wounded in the head

on June the 21st and dies two days later.

His death is a turning point in the Great Siege of Malta.

While the Ottoman and Barbary forces

are more numerous and better armed than the Christians,

the death of their talismanic warlord

is a bitter blow to their pride,

and it shows the grim determination of the besieged.

In one month, more than 19,000 cannon shots

have been fired at Saint Elmo's walls.

Inside the fort, everything is blood, dust, and devastation.

The dead bodies are collected

and are used to fill in the gaps of the walls.

The flasks of powder on the dead

are emptied to fill those of the living.

They really fight with the last ends.

They have almost nothing left, no more powder reserves,

no more arquebus guns, no more weapons that work.

They're going to fight hand to hand and bare-handed

with their bodies, bare hands and with cold weapons,

and they know it's the last night.

On June the 23rd,

the Siege of Saint Elmo finally ends.

The attackers enter the fort

through the open holes in the ravelin.

The final assault lasts for six hours.

In their last moments, the last 10 men of the order

enter the chapel, exhausted.

They have come to die under the cross.

At the very end, the last defenders are cornered

in the chapel of Saint Anne in Saint Elmo.

Now, it's partly strategic because it's in a sense

the best-defended place ultimately,

but I think it's also very symbolic that it's in the church

that they make their last stand with God.

One by one, the last 10 soldiers

of Saint Elmo have their throats cut.

As their bodies bleed dry,

the Ottomans celebrate their death.

On top of that, what the Ottomans do,

they also take some of these bodies.

They crucify them, and they float to them on the water

from Saint Elmo to Birgu.

So the people in Birgu see this horrible sight

of this floating bodies on the water, decapitated,

their stomach is open, reaching them.

Again, the message is,

this is what is going to happen to you.

Jean de Valette-

The Grand Master John de Valette,

who's a tough person, takes the Turkish prisoners

he has captured, has their heads cut off,

puts the heads in a catapult,

and the catapult sends the heads back onto the enemy camp

that's right in front of them.

It has taken one month,

more than 10,000 dead,

and thousands of cannon shots to capture Saint Elmo.

The incredible resistance of the Christians

has been matched by the extraordinary determination

of the Ottoman and Barbary attackers.

For the Ottomans, the capture of Saint Elmo

is an initial victory,

but the fight for Malta is far from over.

Now, the next phase of the siege will begin,

the attack on Malta's fortified twin cities,

Birgu and Senglea.

Now that Saint Elmo has fallen,

the Ottomans will be able to close the port completely.

They will build a bridge of boats attached to each other

by galley antennas to close between Saint Elmo

and the other side of the harbor near Birgu.

They completely close the entrance

of the port, and they completely isolate

the two cities from the outside world.

Every day now,

the vise is tightening a little more,

and the face-off between Christians and Muslims

is increasingly ruthless.

Both sides know what their opponent is capable of.

The attack on the cities begins

in a climate of total terror.

On June the 24th, the whole Turkish camp

moves behind the cities of Birgu and Senglea,

leaving only cannon batteries on Mount Sciberras.

That allows them to put the cities

between the hammer and the anvil.

On the one hand, they are bombed from the seaside,

and on the other, they are attacked from the land.

It takes two weeks for Suleiman

to reposition his forces.

The soldiers and guns have a new target.

The brunt now off of the Ottoman army

was going to fall on Birgu and Senglea.

The strategy was going to be quite similar,

so bombardment from high ground,

digging trenches to get near the walls,

and digging mines to get under the walls.

This was the typical strategy of any siege,

but especially of Ottoman siege

because they were excellent at this kind of strategy.

In early July, the bombings begin again.

Unlike at Saint Elmo, the siege now targets

the inhabited cities of the island

and the civilian population.

Women, children, the elderly, the people of Malta

must prepare to defend themselves.

And this time in his headquarters at Saint Angelo,

Jean de Valette is at the heart of the assault.

Jean de Valette's first decision

is to have all the dogs in the cities killed

to prevent their barking,

giving away the location of the houses.

A dog that howls, that is afraid and that howls,

will draw immediate cannon fire.

Attacking a city is an art of its own.

The civilian population is as much a target

as the defending soldiers.

Break their morale, and the city will fall.

From the top of the steep streets of Birgu and Senglea,

the Maltese watch the attacking army board their galleys

at the far end of the large port.

Then, on July the 15th, 1565,

6,000 men launched their attack.

It's a spectacular strategy that the Ottomans use.

So they are going to attack Senglea from the land,

but they also want to attack it by water.

Now, to do so, the Ottomans start moving boats

from the harbor of Marsamxett into the Grand Harbour,

but they move them over land.

The Knights, of course, saw these boats appearing,

and they made their preparations.

One of the preparation was to create a barrier in the water.

Technically it's called a palisade.

It's a simple defense,

wooden piles bound together. then driven into the seabed,

but it's also a moment of military genius

from Jean de Valette.

On paper, the Ottoman strategy looks perfect,

but Jean de Valette knows

the Ottomans have an Achilles heel.

They don't know how to swim.

So he uses the palisade to force them out of their boats

just a few feet from the mainland

and within range of the city's defenses.

The men who are inside

are forced to get off the boats,

pass the palisade, and swim, then walk ashore.

So they risked drowning on the one hand,

and if they do not drown,

they will be much slower to move.

And being slow to move, they fall much easier targets

for arquebuses and for shooters

who are positioned on the walls.

And there is the fighting all day

on the water and on land,

extremely brutal and ferocious.

Most of it, it's hand to hand,

guns and swords and so on.

Grand Master Jean de Valette's

plan works perfectly.

The July the 15th assault on the city of Senglea

is a disaster for the Ottoman and Barbary camp.

More than 1,000 soldiers perished that day.

The blood and the red silk of the Janissaries' coats

mingle in the waters of Malta.

Although the attackers are better armed and more numerous,

the besieged know their territory

and are fighting to defend their home.

The siege drags on through a scorching and bloody summer.

The enemy bombardments are so violent,

they can even be heard from Sicily.

Malta's women and children play an important role.

They make homemade bombs designed by Jean de Valette.

They are small pieces of fabric that are cut

in which they put powder that they close with a rope

that makes a long fuse.

They dip it in the pitch, light the fuse,

and when it reaches the pitch,

it heats up, and it explodes.

Now, remember, the Janissaries in particular

have these big costumes which easily catch fire.

So again, the brutality of it, people are burning alive

and then burning people around them in the process.

Somehow the Knights and the Maltese

manage to resist this attack on Senglea,

and by the end of the day, the Turks have to pull back.

So it's a very, very impressive moment in the siege.

With each new attack,

the violence on both sides intensifies.

After two months of siege, the Christian camp

is still hoping that reinforcements will come from Sicily.

This hope feeds their determination not to surrender,

but is it a vain hope?

Do the Spanish Crown and it's representative,

the viceroy of Sicily, really intend to help Malta?

In mid-July, the Ottomans encircle

the island with their galleys,

suffocating the Christian enclave even more.

To this encirclement of the cities

is added the establishment of galley rounds

and patrols all around the island.

About every six hours,

15 Ottoman galleys go around the island,

which prevents any landing of the enemy fleet.

On July 25th, a rumor runs through the streets

of Birgu, help is arriving.

Even Jean de Valette himself is hopeful.

De Valette is hoping all throughout

that Spain will come and help.

One date that they had in mind possibly

was the 25th of July, because that is the Feast of Santiago,

the patron saint of Spain.

So on that date, they were looking out for help,

but of course it does not arrive.

Philip II of Spain and his representative,

the viceroy of Sicily, has neither the men

nor the material to save Malta.

Most likely, the viceroy thinks

that Malta will fall and that if Malta falls,

the Turkish armada will not go back to Istanbul.

The next stage will inevitably be Sicily.

He strongly fears that after the fall of Malta,

the invigorated Turkish army will come to Sicily,

and if they come to Sicily,

he needs all his strength to fight the Turkish army.

No help will come.

On August the 7th, the Ottoman Admiral Mustafa Pasha

decides to end the Christian resistance once and for all.

He sends 12,000 men to attack Birgu and Senglea.

The two cities are ready to fall.

Three weeks of incessant bombardment

have weakened the walls.

Now they begin to crumble.

The Turks storm the Bastion of Castile to the rear of Birgu

and raise their standard over it.

Still in early August, it is hot as hell,

and this sweaty Knight rushes to the Grand Master

and almost collapses and shouts,

"Help Castille, Your Lord must rescue Castille!"

And the Grand Master understands that Castille

is the bastion that is being threatened.

He catches his great helm and says,

"My lords, today is the day we go,"

and he goes like this.

And he arrives at the Bastion of Castille shouting,

"I am here, my children, I am here!"

And he charges into the assault.

The arrival of the Grand Master

gives strength to the Knights and also the Maltese,

who shout, "The Grand Master is here!

The Grand Master is here!"

He fights, he is even injured in the thigh

by an arquebus shot.

He is physically injured.

Jean de Valette's valor

becomes a legendary moment in the siege,

but like most legends, there's more to the story.

So in reality,

it was not so much the intervention of the great master

that repelled the assault as it was the Maltese sappers

who managed to blow up a mine,

thus scattering the Turkish positions

and allowing the Christians to recover the advantage.

But it proves a crucial turning point

in the Great Siege of Malta.

Although the Ottomans were undermining

the walls and the Christians' morale,

and though militarily they were defeating the Christians,

the fact that they were pushed back

would have brought doubt in the Ottoman ranks.

At that moment, they have doubts and say to themselves,

"We will never win."

I think that's when it changes.

The fight for the Castilian stronghold

claims the lives of more than 2,000

Ottoman and Barbary soldiers.

On the Christian side,

there are only 400 soldiers left alive,

but the men of the order and the Maltese people

remain determined to save their fortress.

While in the Ottoman camp, weariness and doubt have set in.

Since May, they've been facing unexpected resistance

from the Christian camp.

They need a break from the constant fighting.

You can almost imagine the trenches

of the First World War.

You know, when you had British and French

and Germans on the other, sometimes they were very close

that they could talk to each other.

And we know there were these moments

where they were talking to each other, the common soldier.

There's even these nice episodes

where a Turkish soldier goes across,

gives them I think it was a pomegranate,

and the Maltese give them a loaf of bread, for example,

a little bit of fraternity almost,

but both sides were desperate.

Malta has been totally isolated

from the world since the end of July.

The Crown of Spain and the viceroy of Sicily

have heard nothing from the warrior monks.

But finally, at the end of August 1565,

Philip II of Spain is able to rebuild a fleet

and an army to go to the aid of the Christian enclave.

What will he find?

Will he find a very strong Ottoman army?

Will he find an island that has already fallen?

Will he find an island that has already become Muslim?

What will he find?

In the early morning of September the 8th,

a cannon shot from Saint Elmo frightens the Ottoman camp.

It warns the Muslims

that there's a Christian army coming for them.

95 galleys have set sail for Malta under the Spanish flag.

And this cannon shot that announces

the arrival of relief long awaited and finally arrived

is followed by a raging of bell sounds.

The bells had stopped ringing at the time of the siege,

and suddenly they ring out loud on this very symbolic day

for Christians since September the 8th

is the day of the birth of the Virgin.

The Spanish had taken a long time to come.

When they come, they come in style.

You know, this is Spain now saying,

you know, "We're an empire too, you know,

where we can show our muscle," and they do.

And again, it's a bit of psychology, really.

You're sending in 10,000 fresh soldiers,

very experienced soldiers against a Turkish Ottoman army

which is now depleted sick, tired,

because, and the message is really, you know,

"Just go, it's not worth fighting."

By now, the Barbary forces

are almost entirely wiped out,

and the Ottomans have lost thousands of men.

What's more, September always brings storms

in the Mediterranean,

and the flat-bottomed Ottoman galleys have a shallow draft

that prevents them from sailing in bad weather.

They'll have to get going, or they'll never be able

to reach their home port of Istanbul.

On September the 8th, the viceroy of Sicily

sets foot on Malta, and Jean de Valette tells him

the story of the bravery of his troops.

The Grand Master welcomes them.

We must appreciate the irony,

brings them in and makes them walk through this crowd

of starving and wounded people,

inevitably causing a fairly justified sense of shame

among Christian and Spanish dignitaries.

The same evening, the viceroy of Sicily

writes to the king of Spain,

"It is true that if we had come earlier or a month before,

we would've avoided all these deaths.

There's nothing left to eat on the island.

The island is destroyed.

The port is destroyed, ravaged. There's nothing left."

We know it's a forfeit victory.

There was a heroic defense beyond even what I would say

human thought can imagine, but it stops there.

It was not a military victory, but it was a moral victory,

and that's what made it so significant.

An essential moral victory,

one Jean de Valette will use to rally support

to rebuild his order and his island.

He says, "We fought by ourselves.

We won by ourselves because we are still part

of that race of men who know and whom God protects

and that we fight for God."

So he makes himself the champion of the crusade,

the armed arm of Christ.

He represents himself as the only bulwark of Christianity.

The order became the bulwark of Christianity.

They needed to show Christianity

that they were still relevant

and that Malta was acting as a frontier land

for the advance of the infidels.

On September the 12th, 1565,

Suleiman the Magnificent recalls his fleet.

The Knights Hospitaller have managed

to repel the best army in the world.

After the Siege of Malta, Jean de Valette would build

the city that now bears his name.

Today, Valletta, the Maltese capital,

sits on Mount Sciberras

in the shelter of the walls of Fort Saint Elmo.

After the Great Siege of Malta,

the European powers would send colossal financial aid

to support the Christian enclave,

which now protected them from Ottoman conquest.

Malta is the definitive

and southernmost protection of all Christendom.

From now on, everything stands thanks to Malta.

The Christian world starts there,

and that is what gives Malta its importance.

Malta was a relief for the Christian side,

which then six years later

was followed by the Battle of Lepanto, 1571,

which is another great Catholic Christian victory.

The Great Siege of Malta

followed by the Battle of Lepanto

would be the decisive victories

that kept the northern shores

of the Western Mediterranean Basin

in the hands of the Christian world.