Ada: May eighteen, fifteen sixty-five. The horizon fills with sails — an Ottoman armada, around one hundred ninety-three vessels, carrying over thirty-five thousand soldiers under Mustafa Pasha and Piyale Pasha.
Theo: And who's defending?
Ada: A seventy-one-year-old Grand Master, Jean Parisot de Valette. About six hundred Knights, several thousand Maltese militia, Spanish and Italian mercenaries — maybe six to eight thousand men all told.
Theo: Those are brutal odds. Where do the Ottomans hit first?
Ada: Fort Saint Elmo. They expect it to fall in three days. It holds for twenty-eight.
Theo: Twenty-eight days. That must have cost them.
Ada: Thousands. And then it gets savage. When Saint Elmo finally falls, Mustafa decapitates the dead Knights, nails their bodies to crucifix-shaped rafts, and floats them across the harbour at Valette.
Theo: That's grotesque. How do you even answer that?
Ada: Valette answers in kind. He executes his Ottoman prisoners and fires their severed heads back across the water from his cannons. There's no mercy left on either side.
Theo: And this grinds on through the summer?
Ada: All through the heat. The numbers are contested — Ottoman forces estimated anywhere from thirty thousand to forty-eight thousand, and their dead from twenty thousand to thirty-five thousand. But by September, disease, casualties and a relief force from Sicily break them.
Theo: After four months, they just leave?
Ada: September eight. The army re-embarks and sails away, having lost over twenty thousand men to a bare rock. And with the fleet in full retreat, Valette lays the cornerstone of a new fortress-city — Valletta — meant never to fall again.