Malta, officially the Republic of Malta, is an island country located in the central Mediterranean Sea. It consists of a number of islands, of which Malta and Gozo are the two main ones—south of Italy, east of Tunisia, and north of Libya. Valletta is the country's capital. Malta is the world's tenth-smallest country by area, ninth-most densely populated, and 166th most populated. It consists of a single urban region, because of which it is often described as a city-state. The two official languages are Maltese—recognised as the national language—and English.
The island of Malta has been inhabited since at least 6500 BC, during the Mesolithic period. Its location at the centre of the Mediterranean has historically given it great geostrategic importance, with multiple powers having ruled the islands and shaped its culture and society. Included among these powers the Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Greeks, and Romans in antiquity; the Arabs, Normans, and Aragonese during the Middle Ages; and the Knights Hospitaller, French, and British in the modern era.
Malta came under British rule as a crown colony in the early 19th century and served as the headquarters of the British Mediterranean Fleet. It was sieged by the Axis powers during World War II and was also an Allied base for its area. The country gained independence in 1964, and established its current parliamentary republic in 1974. It has been a member state of the Commonwealth of Nations and the United Nations since its independence, joining the European Union (EU) in 2004 and the eurozone monetary union in 2008. Malta's history of foreign rule and its proximity to both Europe and North Africa have influenced its art, music, cuisine, and architecture. It has close historical and cultural ties to Italy, especially to the island of Sicily, with 66 percent of Maltese people speaking or having significant knowledge of the Italian language. The country was an early centre of Christianity, and Catholicism is the state religion, although the country's constitution guarantees freedom of religion.
Malta is now a developed country with an advanced, high-income economy. It is heavily reliant on tourism, attracting travellers because of its warm climate, recreational areas, and architectural and historical monuments.
Etymology The English name derives from classical Latin , from Latinised forms of the ancient Greek (), of uncertain meaning, possibly from the Phoenician Maleth. The name shared by the Croatian island Mljet in antiquityliterally means "place of honey" or "place of sweetness", derived from the combining form of (, honey or any similarly sweet thing),. and the suffix (). The ancient Greeks may have named the island this after Malta's endemic subspecies of bees.
Other scholars, however, argue for derivation of the Greek name from an original Phoenician or Punic (, ), meaning "haven", "refuge", or "port", in reference to its Grand Harbour and its primary settlement at Cospicua following the rise in sea level that separated the Maltese islands and flooded their original coastal settlements in the 10th centuryBC.. The name was then applied to all of Malta by the Greeks and to its ancient capital by the Romans.
History
Prehistory
Malta was first inhabited between 8000 and 6500 BC with the arrival of Mesolithic era hunter-gatherers, likely from Sicily. Neolithic farmers, also originating from Sicily, are thought to have arrived on the islands by around 5400 BC. Prehistoric settlements dating to the Early Neolithic era include the Għar Dalam cave site in the uppermost layers, associated with domesticated animals. The Neolithic population of Malta grew cereals, raised livestock and, like many other European civilisations, worshipped a mother goddess.
Later, the Maltese started to build megalithic temples. Around 3500 BC, these people built some of the world's oldest existing free-standing structures in the form of the Ġgantija temples on Gozo. Other early temples include those at Ħaġar Qim and Mnajdra. These temples are the oldest free standing megalithic structures in the world, constructed even before the Egyptian pyramids.
After 2500 BC, Malta was depopulated for multiple decades until an influx of Bronze Age immigrants, a culture that cremated its dead and introduced smaller structures called dolmens as tombs. They likely belonged to a different population from the builders of the previous temples. Due to the similarity of these dolmens to small constructions in Sicily, it is presumed that this newer population arrived from there.
Phoenicians, Carthaginians, and Romans
Phoenician traders colonised the islands at some time after under the name of Ann (, ). as a stop on their trade routes from the eastern Mediterranean to the Strait of Gibraltar. Their seat of government was at Mdina, and their primary port at Cospicua on the Grand Harbour, which they called Maleth. After the fall of Phoenicia in 332 BC, the area came under the control of Carthage. During this time, the people of Malta primarily produced olives, carob, and textiles.
During the First Punic War, the island was conquered by the Roman general Marcus Atilius Regulus. After the failure of his expedition, the island returned to Carthaginian control, only to be conquered again during the Second Punic War in by Tiberius Sempronius Longus, a Roman consul. Malta became a foederata civitas (federated state), meaning that it fell within the jurisdiction of the Roman province of Sicily and was exempted from tribute.
Punic influence, however, remained in the islands. Local Roman coinage, which ceased in the 1st indicates the slow pace of the island's Romanisation, as the last locally minted coins bear inscriptions in ancient Greek and Punic motifs, showing Maltese resistance toward Greek and Roman culture. The Roman period also introduced highly decorative mosaic floors.
In 395, when the Roman Empire was divided for the last time at the death of Theodosius I, Malta and Sicily fell under the control of the Western Roman Empire. As that empire declined during Europe's Migration Period, Malta was conquered or occupied a number of times. In 454, the islands were subdued by the Vandals and the Ostrogoths (Germanic tribes) in 464. In 533, Belisarius, a Byzantine general, and his army went to conquer the Vandal Kingdom in North Africa, and reunited the islands under Byzantine rule. Little is known about Byzantine Malta: the island depended on the theme of Sicily and had Greek governors and a small Greek garrison. Although the bulk of the population continued to consist of the old Latinised dwellers, Malta's religious allegiance oscillated between the pope and the patriarch of Constantinople. Byzantine rule introduced Greek families to the Maltese collective. Malta remained in the Byzantine Empire until 870, when it was conquered by the Arabs.
Arab period and the Middle Ages
Malta became involved in the Arab–Byzantine wars, and its conquest is linked with the Muslim conquest of Sicily that began in 827 after Admiral Euphemius killed Constantine V. The Muslim chronicler and geographer Ibn ʿAbd al-Munʿim al-Ḥimyarī recounts that, in 870, following a violent struggle against the defending Byzantines, the Arab invaders—first led by Halaf al-Hadim and later by Sawada ibn Muhammad—pillaged the island, destroying the most important buildings and leaving it practically uninhabited until it was recolonised by the Arabs from Sicily in 1048–1049.
Malta was a settlement for Banu Matkud, a vassalised tribal city state of the Berbers, from Misrata during both the Fatimid Caliphate and the Aghlabid dynasty. It is uncertain whether this new settlement resulted from demographic expansion in Sicily, a higher standard of living in Sicily, or the civil war that broke out among the rulers of Sicily in 1038. The Siculo-Arabic language from Sicily was adopted on the island, eventually evolving into the Maltese language. Norman conquest
The Normans attacked Malta in 1091 as part of their conquest of Sicily.Previté-Orton (1971), pg. 507–11 Their leader, Roger I of Sicily, was welcomed by the Christians, who came out from Muslim rule. Malta became part of the new Kingdom of Sicily, which also covered the southern Italian Peninsula. The Catholic Church was reinstated as the state religion, with Malta under the Archdiocese of Palermo, and some Norman architecture sprang up around Malta, especially in its previous capital, Mdina.
Because of the strategic importance of the islands, they were particularly coveted, and it was during this time that the men of Malta were militarised to fend off attempted conquest. King Tancred made Malta a fief and installed a count of Malta in 1192. The early counts were privateers of Genoese ancestry.
The kingdom passed on to the German Hohenstaufen dynasty from 1194 until 1266. As Emperor Frederick II began to reorganise the Sicilian kingdom, Western culture and religion started to exert their influence more intensely.Blouet, B. (1987) The Story of Malta. Third Edition. Malta: Progress Press, p.37-38. Malta was declared a county and a marquisate, but its trade was destroyed and for a long time it remained solely a fortified garrison.
A mass expulsion of Arabs occurred in 1224, and the entire male Christian population of Celano, Italy in Abruzzo was deported to Malta in the same year. In 1249, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II decreed that all remaining Muslims be either expelled from Malta or compelled to convert.. In 1266, the kingdom passed to the French Capetian House of Anjou,. melitensiawth.com but high taxes made the dynasty unpopular in Malta, due in part to Charles of Anjou's war against the Republic of Genoa, and the island of Gozo was sacked in 1275.
Crown of Aragon and the Knights of Malta
Malta was ruled by the Catalan House of Barcelona, the ruling dynasty of the Crown of Aragon, from 1282 to 1409, which aided Aragonese Malta in the Sicilian Vespers in the naval battle in Grand Harbour in 1283. Relatives of the crown ruled Malta until it formally passed to the Crown of Aragon.
Early in the Aragonese ascendancy, the sons of the monarchs received the title Count of Malta. During this time, much of the local nobility was created, but by 1397 the bearing of the title of count reverted to a feudal basis with two families fighting over the distinction. This led King Martin I of Sicily to abolish the title, but it returned a few years later. The Maltese, led by the local nobility, rose up against Count Gonsalvo Monroy although they voiced their loyalty to the Sicilian Crown, which impressed King Alfonso V of Aragon to the extent that he did not punish Malta, and chose never to grant the title to a third party, moving it back under the crown's control.
On 23 March 1530,Denaro, Victor F. (1963). . Melita Historica. p. 22. the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V gave the islands to the Knights Hospitaller under the leadership of the French Philippe Villiers de L'Isle-Adam,de Vertot, Abbe (1728) The History of the Knights of Malta vol. II (facsimile reprint Midsea Books, Malta, 1989). for which they had to pay an annual tribute of a Maltese falcon.El halcón maltés regresará a España dos siglos después . El Pais (14 August 2005). Retrieved 1 May 2017. These knights, a military religious order also known as the Order of Saint John and later as the Knights of Malta, had been driven from the Greek island of Rhodes by the Ottoman Empire in 1522. The Knights ruled Malta until 1798. During this period, the island's strategic and military importance grew as the Knights' efficient fleet launched attacks from this new base, targeting the shipping lanes of the Ottoman territories around the Mediterranean.