Her Majesty the Queen and dozens of Commonwealth leaders have gathered in Malta - and with some relief one imagines. Threats have been issued (of course) and security strengthened (of course) but in the whole scheme of things a small Mediterranean island looks like a good idea just now.
Yet even a modicum of historical awareness suggests otherwise for, as we were reminded during our family holiday in Malta, this is an island whose history is bathed in blood. In living memory it was the heroics of the Second World War when, as effectively the allied mid-Med military base the island was mercilessly, but unsuccessfully, attacked by Axis forces.
But the really bloody story of Malta is that of the Great Siege - a historical epic of mind-numbing proportions when the Knights of St John, representing Christian Europe and based in Malta, held out against an Ottoman siege by four or more times as many men through a whole summer.
Soberingly, given the cheap view of life demonstrated recently in Paris, a historian wrote thus, 'The disregard of human life among the Ottoman Turks at this time was almost incredible: to try to attain their end in war they sacrificed thousands upon thousands of men with callous indifference.'
In five hundred years humanity has not learned very much, for all its apparent learning.
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