Author and historian Roger Crowley will be in Malta for the upcoming History Week event. Dominic Fenech interviews him about his Malta connection and Muslim-Christian politics across the centuries.

The University of Malta’s History Department has teamed up with the Malta Historical Society to support the Society’s annual History Week, which takes place between Wednesday and Saturday and focuses on the Great Siege and the founding of Valletta.

Best-selling author and historian Roger Crowley will be the keynote speaker on the opening night. Crowley’s books include Empires of the Sea which, among other things, deals with the exploits and vicissitudes of the Order of St John and Malta, in particular the Siege of 1565. The book was awarded the Sunday Times (UK) History Book of the Year in 2009 and was also a New York Times bestseller. I caught up with him for a chat.

I understand you have a personal connection with Malta. Will you tell us about it?

My father was a career officer in the Royal Navy and spent a great deal of his working life in the Mediterranean and in Malta particularly. He served on convoys for the island’s relief in 1941 and 1942. In the late 1950s my parents lived in Sliema when my father was posted here. As a child, spending my holidays in Malta was a formative experience. I loved the sea, the historical sites, the evocative warmth of the island. Malta has somewhat followed me home too as I live in the village where Sir Alexander Ball was born.

In your writing, Malta comes across as a small country which has punched above its weight. Is that your objective judgment?

It is. It had to, I believe, with the island’s position at the centre of the sea and its unequalled harbours. In a whole series of imperial contests – the Ottomans and the Hapsburgs, Napoleon and the British, the Axis and the Allies during World War II – the possession of Malta has been critical to great power strategies and so it has been subjected to ferocious assaults and tenacious defence. The outcomes of these engagements have been important to European history. Malta’s significance also stretches deep into the past with its remarkable Neolithic civilisation.

Three of your books deal with important aspects of essentially Mediterranean history. How did you get to be interested in the Mediterranean?

In many respects my interest goes back to Malta; my childhood experience of the Mediterranean world cast a strong spell. I feel that all Northern Europeans have a nostalgia for the bright light of this sea. After school, I spent a couple of summers in Greece and, after university ,a year on and off in Turkey. The other component is maritime history – I’m not a sailor but an upbringing spent around ships and dockyards fed into a fascination with Mediterranean seafaring.

There was usually more to be lost than gained by actually fighting, so there was a great deal of shadow boxing going on

In Empires of the Sea you deal with the seaborne adversity between Christians and Muslims across the 16th-century Mediterranean. However, apart from the Battle of Lepanto, were not both the Ottomans and the Spanish rather overprotective of their fleets and hesitant to risk them?

I think experienced commanders were not so much overprotective, as acutely aware of the risks. Sea warfare involved galleys – low in the water, quite fast, comparatively unseaworthy in bad weather. The outcome of battles tended to be assymetrical: a small advantage could lead to stunning victory or else, catastrophic defeat. These fleets were expensive to build and deploy but the greater damage was the loss of experienced seamen and oarsmen, who were almost irreplaceable in the short term.

The sea war involved a paradox – there was usually more to be lost than gained by actually fighting, so there was a great deal of shadow boxing going on. The Spanish were particularly cautious. Their fleets were always smaller and their destruction could cut off Southern Italy from Spain. In the long run, the costs, the risks and the operational limitations of oared ships led to a stalemate and the end of major warfare.

There’s a school of thought that considers the Great Siege of 1565 as mostly important to Malta, but not so much in the bigger scheme of things. You, however, tend to regard the event as a landmark, maybe a turning point, in Euro-Mediterranean history. What fosters this believe in you?

Like the battle of Lepanto, the Great Siege has been described as a victory that led nowhere. This was, mostly, because the Ottomans were still able to terrorise the western Mediterranean, afterwards.

But I think their check at Malta had long-term consequences. The construction of Valletta locked shut the centre of the sea. Never again did the Ottomans attempt a major maritime invasion of the Northern shores. The likely consequences of an Ottoman capture of Malta are hard to tell, but they could have been dramatic. Their failure ensured that in the long run there would be no Islamic reconquests in Mediterranean Europe. The Great Siege was significant in the establishment of a permanent maritime frontier.

In your books, Christian-Muslim relations are almost a defining motif of the Mediterranean in early modern history, and before. Do you think that this history in any way enlightens our understanding of the West’s relations with political Islam today?

It’s certainly part of the long back story to modern times. The deep cultural memory in parts of Europe of ‘the Turks at the Gate’ has shaped views of Islam generally, and dealings with Turkey over the EU in particular. The Ottoman- Christian struggle has, I think, been co-opted into a continuous jihad/crusade narrative reconstructed after 9/11. It echoes on an emotional level but, I wonder if the latest forms of radical political Islam regard the Ottoman period very favourably.

The Ottoman claims to the title of Caesar and the tolerance extended to Christians and Jews within the empire – the Pax Ottomana – doesn’t seem to fit comfortably with the actions and ideology of Isis.

Your narrative also highlights the deep rivalries that existed within the Christian camp. To quote an example, the sack of Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade, or the vicious hostility between Venice and Genoa. Doesn’t this break the symmetry of a bipolar Christian-Muslim divide?

It clearly cuts across simplistic ideas about Christians versus Muslims. The development of European city states and nation states ensured that secular interests did conflict with religious ones. Venice was always ambivalent about ‘Christian’ ventures: they wanted to trade with both sides.

The French allied themselves with the Muslim Ottomans, against their Catholic rivals in Spain, for a long period in the 16th century. The papacy found it extremely difficult to galvanise all Christian peoples against ‘the Turk’. The protestant reformation heightened these splits. At a deep psychological and cultural level, however, the visceral fear of the advance of an alien people into Europe was widely shared. Even protestant England was saying prayers for Malta during the siege of 1565.

Even protestant England was saying prayers for Malta during the siege of 1565

In your recently published book Conquerors, you break out of the Mediterranean. Did you choose that path because you have said what you had to say about our sea, or was it time to start looking at the beginning of the end of Mediterranean primacy?

A bit of both, I think – though I’m sure I’ll return to the Mediterranean. I was interested in the decline of Venice and the threat to its trade. Much of this came as the result of the Portuguese pioneering a sea route to India and outflanking the Venetian spice trade so I decided to follow their ships to India. I was interested from a maritime history point of view in writing about sailing ships encountering very different seas, and the resulting developments in cartography and navigational techniques.

You have been described as one of the greatest narrative historians around today, and I should be the first to agree. Is there a secret to your style of fast-moving narrative?

That’s flattering. I look firstly to focus on intense clashes in history and to write from different points of view, switching from one to the other. I’m interested that I have been accused of both anti-Christian and anti-Muslim bias.

I look for gripping eyewitness accounts and plentiful first-hand evidence – I like to hear the sound of human voices from the past. It also means that history after the invention of printing tends to be richer – people just wrote more. In general, it’s easier to write a gripping narrative about a shorter time span – a siege, a battle – than about a 500-year period. Another thing I’ve become aware of is the need to deal carefully with background information. My aim is to write well-researched history for general readers, but there’s always a certain amount of initial need-to-know background. I’ve learned over time not to set out this material in a lump, but to try to filter it in along the way – it simply makes for better reading.

Which of your books is your preferred one and why?

Of course, I like all my books but Empires of the Sea probably remains the favourite. The 16-century is such a dramatic period in Mediterranean history. It involved titanic battles (the sieges of Rhodes, Malta and Famagusta, the carnage of Lepanto), leaders with ambitions to rule the world, pirates and pirate kings – and great eyewitness accounts.

Do you have a favourite writer, historian or other, of the Mediterranean?

Many, but to name one, Fernand Braudel’s massive The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II has been hugely enriching. My books tend to be event-led – the bit Braudel considers least important. But I love his epic range: geology, geography, climate, transport, trade, economics, agriculture.

Briefly, what will you be talking about during the history conference in Malta?

My talk will be an attempt to sum up the larger historical significance of the Siege in Mediterranean and European history. I’ll look at what the Ottomans were trying to achieve and what the consequences of their failure were for both sides, also the political and cultural echoes across Europe.

Roger Crowley will be giving a talk titled ‘The Mediterranean’s Vienna: the Impact of the Great Siege on European History’, on Wednesday at 6pm at the Inquisitor’s Palace, Vittoriosa. The talk is open to the public.