The Knights Hospitaller of Malta — crusaders who handed Napoleon their island without a fight

The Knights Hospitaller — the Order of St John of Jerusalem — had been a sovereign crusading state for nearly five centuries, and they lost their last realm in June 1798 not in battle but by capitulation. When Napoleon Bonaparte’s fleet, bound for Egypt, appeared off Malta, the Order that had famously withstood the full might of the Ottoman Empire in the Great Siege of 1565 surrendered the island in barely two days. Grand Master Ferdinand von Hompesch zu Bolheim signed away Malta on 11–12 June, and the knights were expelled. The Order survived as an institution, but its 268-year reign over Malta — and its existence as a sovereign power — was over.

What fell was one of the oldest continuous institutions in Europe. Founded around 1099 in Jerusalem as a hospital for sick and poor pilgrims, the Order militarized over the following century into one of the great crusading brotherhoods, fighting across the Holy Land. After the loss of the crusader states it ruled Rhodes as an independent island state from 1310 until Suleiman the Magnificent expelled it in 1522–23. In 1530 the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V granted the homeless knights the Maltese archipelago, in return for the annual tribute of a single falcon. From Malta the Order fought the Ottomans and the Barbary corsairs at sea and built the fortress-city of Valletta, becoming a sovereign, aristocratic, multinational military power in the central Mediterranean.

By the late eighteenth century that power had hollowed out. The Order’s reason for being — holy war against Islam — had faded as the Ottoman threat receded and Europe secularized. Its income depended on estates scattered across Catholic Europe, and the French Revolution’s confiscation of its French properties in 1792 gutted its finances and split its membership. Many of the knights were French, their sympathies and their nation now at war with the very monarchies the Order embodied. The brotherhood that defended Malta in 1565 had become an indebted, divided, and increasingly purposeless relic.

The mechanism of the fall was the collision of that decayed institution with a modern revolutionary army. Napoleon, sailing for Egypt, needed Malta as a base and knew the Order was weak and riddled with French knights unwilling to fight France. He demanded entry, manufactured a pretext when it was refused, and landed overwhelming force. The fortifications were formidable but the will to use them was gone; French knights would not fire on their countrymen, the Maltese population was unenthusiastic, and Hompesch proved an irresolute leader. Within forty-eight hours the Order capitulated, surrendered Malta and its sovereignty, and accepted expulsion — a state lost almost without a shot.