A nice view spoiled

Before leaving Malta behind on my blog this year I think that the single most shocking moment for me came when I realised the history of this beautiful bay by which we walked several times.  The bay I expected to remember when I left Malta was the one where Paul was shipwrecked but it proved difficult to set that over against the grotesque story of this bay in the Great Siege (referenced in my previous post).

On one grim day of that siege the headless crucified corpses of some Knights of St John were floated over the bay to terrorise their allies.  In retaliation, the knights, having beheaded many Ottoman prisoners, fired their heads from cannons back across the bay.

As we enter Advent, this is a good time to remember that the coming of the Light of the World has never ceased to be necessary - for however blue the sky, darkness is never far away.

No Island is an Island

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.