Malta

Crossroads of the Mediterranean, from the world's oldest temples to a modern European republic.

Malta's history is the history of a tiny but coveted archipelago at the centre of the Mediterranean, fought over and shaped by every power that dominated the sea around it. Its earliest inhabitants raised the megalithic temples of Ggantija, Hagar Qim, Mnajdra and Tarxien between roughly 3600 and 2500 BCE, monumental stone buildings that rank among the oldest free-standing structures on Earth, and hollowed out the subterranean necropolis of the Hal Saflieni Hypogeum. Phoenician traders and then Carthage held the islands before Rome took them in 218 BCE; Christian tradition dates the islands' conversion to the shipwreck of the Apostle Paul around 60 CE. Arab rule from 870 gave Malta its Semitic language, the Normans brought it into the orbit of Sicily in 1091, and in 1530 the Emperor Charles V handed the islands to the Knights of St John. The Knights' repulse of the Ottomans in the Great Siege of 1565 and the founding of Valletta made Malta a Christian bastion. Napoleon seized the islands in 1798, but a Maltese revolt and British power confirmed British rule by the Treaty of Paris in 1814, turning Malta into a great naval base whose heroism under siege in the Second World War won the whole island the George Cross. Malta gained independence in 1964, became a republic in 1974 and a neutral state after the British left in 1979, and joined the European Union in 2004.