Fort St Angelo was one of the great symbols of the Order’s power in Malta. That is what makes 1798 so striking: the walls were still there, but the will behind them had gone.
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The Knights of St. John’s Surrender in 1798 and What It Says About Institutional Decline
Malta’s fortifications were among the strongest in Europe. A long succession of military engineers had shaped its bastions, curtain walls, and batteries over nearly three centuries. Vauban himself signed off on the plans for Fort Tigné, and recommended Fort Manoel be built, but he never visited Malta—the actual work was done by Chevalier Tigné, Floriani, and a string of other engineers over decades. One French officer estimated after the occupation that properly defending the island would require at least 15,000 men. In 1565, fewer than 9,000 knights and Maltese fighters had held these same walls against an Ottoman siege force of over 30,000 for nearly four months.
And yet on June 12, 1798, the entire fortress fell to Napoleon Bonaparte in barely two days. The French claimed they lost just three men. Maltese sources tell a different story. At Fort Tigné, the Cacciatori regiment threw back three French assaults before being overwhelmed, and at Fort San Lucian the garrison held out for over a day. But none of that changed the outcome. A place that had resisted the full might of Suleiman the Magnificent surrendered to a fleet that was merely passing through on its way to Egypt.
What actually brought Malta down was rot from the inside. The Order was broke, riddled with traitors, ignored by potential allies, and led by a man who couldn’t bring himself to believe the danger was real until it was too late. I came to this story through a set of research papers—particularly an unpublished Syracusan account edited by Grazio Ellul, and Roger Vella Bonavita’s work on the failed British negotiations with the Order—and what kept striking me was how little the actual fighting mattered compared to the decades of decay that preceded it.
How the Order Got to This Point
The Sovereign Military Order of St. John of Jerusalem had been wandering since its founding during the First Crusade in 1099. Expelled from the Holy Land, then from Rhodes by Suleiman I in 1522, the Order had settled in Malta in 1530 under a grant from Emperor Charles V. For over two centuries the knights made the island their fortress—the “bulwark of Christendom” against Ottoman expansion in the Mediterranean.
By the late eighteenth century, however, that crusading purpose had grown hollow. The Order’s naval power had collapsed. Its revenues had been devastated by the French Revolution, which confiscated the Order’s vast estates in France—properties that had once funded the bulk of its operations. Other European states imposed wartime taxes on the remaining estates. Grand Master Emmanuel de Rohan, who died in 1797, had spent his final years borrowing heavily just to keep the government running.
His successor, Ferdinand von Hompesch, was the first German to hold the office of Grand Master. He inherited an empty treasury, depleted plate and jewels, and a garrison of roughly 330 knights—mostly French and Italian—supported by about 3,000 soldiers and sailors and a similar number of largely untrained militia. This was actually fewer men than the Great Siege defenders had commanded in 1565. The Syracusan chronicler Giuseppe Maria Capodieci, who gathered his account directly from expelled Sicilian knights passing through Syracuse in the weeks after the surrender, described how even the basic military supplies had been compromised. According to his informants, cartridge cases were found filled with charcoal instead of powder, cannon balls of the wrong caliber had been distributed to sow confusion, barrels of gunpowder had been deliberately dampened, and the cartridges that were handed out to soldiers turned out to be half-filled, with musket balls too large to fit the guns. Some of this is probably exaggeration—the expelled knights were hardly neutral observers, and blaming sabotage was more dignified than admitting they’d been outmatched. But too many of them told the same stories independently for it all to be sour grapes.
Hompesch Gate carries the name of the last Grand Master, which gives it an odd place in this story. It feels like a monument to a system that was already collapsing by the time his name was set in stone.
Napoleon’s Groundwork
Napoleon did not simply arrive at Malta’s doorstep and demand entry. His agents had been preparing the ground for years. As early as November 1797, he wrote to the Directory from Milan: “I have sent Citizen Poussielgue to Malta under pretext of inspecting the Levant, but really to put a last touch to our designs upon that Island.” This is from Napoleon’s own correspondence, so there’s no ambiguity about intent. It gets worse: Poussielgue’s relative was Captain of the Port, which gave the spy network an inside line on the state of the fortifications, the garrison’s strength, the mood of the population, and which knights might be open to switching sides.
Poussielgue’s report back to Napoleon painted a bleak picture: the Order was decadent and its military forces tiny, there were barely enough munitions to last a week, and the Maltese population was badly treated enough that many would probably welcome a change of government. He recommended taking the island by force rather than attempting to buy it.
Within Malta itself, a network of Jacobin sympathizers—Capodieci’s account puts them at five to seven thousand. I’m skeptical of the higher end, but even the low number is a lot for an island this size. They included members of the Maltese nobility, the bourgeoisie, and the upper clergy, concentrated mainly in Valletta and the Three Cities. Capodieci speaks of “continual internal plots and revolutions” and “a strong plot, fomented by some knights, merchants, and barons who held secret meetings with the French to establish Democracy.” The threat was no secret to everyone. As early as 1784, Bailì Pignatelli had written to Naples warning of “some seditious principles” and describing Malta’s condition as “the object of vultures, that are ready to devour it.”
June 1798
On June 7, 1798—the Feast of Corpus Christi—lookouts spotted the first sails on the horizon. By evening, 72 vessels had been counted, including three frigates. Within two days, the full armada came into view: approximately 300 ships, including 27 warships and the massive 120-gun flagship Orient, with Napoleon himself aboard. The fleet carried about 54,000 men including sailors.
Napoleon demanded entry to the harbor for his entire fleet to take on water and supplies. The Grand Master’s council, meeting in haste, offered the standard compromise under neutrality laws: four warships at a time could enter the harbor, with no shore leave. This was precisely the refusal Napoleon wanted. As one of his officers noted, it “gave the necessary pretext for a quarrel.”
The French plan called for simultaneous landings at four points around the island. General Desaix would take the southeast at Marsascirocco. General Vaubois would land at St. Julian’s, nearest Valletta. General Baraguey d’Hilliers would take the northwest at Mellieha and St. Paul’s Bay. General Reynier would seize Gozo. The landings began before dawn on June 10. Berthier’s orders, which survive, are detailed down to the number of rounds per man (sixty) and the number of flints (six).
Malta’s coastal towers were meant to spot danger before it reached the harbour. By 1798, the real danger was not only out at sea, but already inside the institution meant to defend the island.
How It Fell Apart
The fighting, such as it was, lasted less than a day in most places. The coastal towers and batteries, undermanned and undersupplied, fell quickly. St. George’s Tower, garrisoned by 60 Cacciatori, fired only a single shot. The battery at St. Julian’s never opened fire at all—its shells were found to be filled with earth and charcoal, the commander a traitor. Fort Rohan held out for twenty-four hours before capitulating. The Grenfell account says Gozo fell within half an hour of the French landing, its commander having deserted. Other accounts describe a longer process spread across several forts on the island. Either way it was fast.
The militia, finding themselves unsupported and suspecting betrayal by their own officers, turned on the knights. Capodieci recorded that the conspirators had spread the rumor that the knights themselves had invited the French fleet and deliberately disarmed the forts. Enraged Maltese killed one knight and seriously wounded another. Several French, Spanish, and Italian knights openly defected to Napoleon’s side.
The Bailì de Suffren, commanding Senglea and the Cottonera lines, left his own account of that night. He’d been sending soldiers to other forts all day until he was down to 180 men and the bourgeois militia, and he was paying the workers who moved cannon into position out of his own pocket because there was no one else to pay them. The militia demanded cartridges, and when he told them he’d distributed all he had, some of them answered “with the greatest insolence” and threatened to take command themselves. He gave them two barrels of powder, some paper, and bullets. He had no more made cartridges. By eleven at night he was making rounds and found 150 men where there should have been 300. At one in the morning an officer arrived to say he’d nearly been killed at his own post. By two-thirty, armed militiamen came and told Suffren they wanted all the ships sunk. He tried to argue with them. One said if he found Suffren in the streets he would shoot him. So Suffren retreated to the town with his remaining 18 soldiers, found the gates shut, and had to wait until four in the morning to get inside. When he finally reached the Grand Master’s Palace he learned the council had already voted to capitulate.
The convention was signed on June 12—aboard Napoleon’s flagship, not on Maltese soil. Hompesch himself never signed the document, a detail the British press noted at the time. The articles promised the Grand Master a pension, protected the Maltese Catholic faith and property rights, and pledged no extraordinary taxes.
The Red Tower looks out over the north in a way that makes it easy to imagine why this coast mattered so much. In a story about 1798, it is a quiet reminder that Malta was built to watch the sea.
The Nelson Letter
On June 20—just eight days after Malta’s surrender—Admiral Horatio Nelson wrote a letter to the Grand Master from HMS Vanguard off Messina, promising he was making “all possible dispatch” toward Malta “with a full determination to prevent your Island from falling into the hands of the common enemy.” The original is in the Public Library of Malta. He asked Hompesch to assemble all available ships for a joint operation. It arrived too late. By then, Napoleon had already stripped the island’s churches of their gold and silver—Capodieci puts the haul at about eighty quintals of silver and two hundred pounds of gold, not counting the gems—loaded it onto a frigate bound for France, and sailed east.
The thing that frustrates me about this part of the story is that it didn’t have to happen. Britain had known about Malta’s value for years. As early as 1792, a Foreign Office memorandum had spelled out the strategic calculus in plain terms: in French hands, Malta would give them command over Mediterranean trade; in British hands, it would serve as “a great warehouse” and military stronghold. Vella Bonavita’s paper traces the whole sorry back-and-forth in detail—Grand Master de Rohan offered Britain full use of Malta’s harbors, troops, and fleet in exchange for a subsidy of just £100,000, and the Viceroy of Corsica, Sir Gilbert Elliot, turned him down flat because he figured de Rohan was already anti-French so there was no point paying him for it. Colonel Mark Wood, writing to Dundas in 1798 after the horse had bolted, estimated that Malta would have been cheap at ten times that price.
What Happened After
Napoleon spent barely a week in Malta, but he remade the island in his image: abolishing the Inquisition, freeing slaves, introducing the Code Napoleon, dismantling titles of nobility, and burning the Order’s archives beneath the newly planted Tree of Liberty. He left behind a garrison of about 6,000 men under General Vaubois and sailed for Egypt.
The French promised to respect the Maltese Catholic faith and property rights. They did neither. Capodieci’s informants told him that families hid their daughters, churches were stripped, and “the greater part of the inhabitants were unhappy.” Not a single French cockade was seen in the countryside, despite orders under harsh penalty.
On September 2, 1798—barely three months after the surrender—the sale of sacred objects from the Carmelite Church in Mdina sparked a spontaneous insurrection. The French commandant was stoned to death. Within days, the uprising had spread across the island, driving the French back behind Valletta’s walls. The Maltese, initially armed with little more than farm tools, stones, and hunting weapons, laid siege to the very fortifications that had so recently failed to keep Napoleon out. That siege would last two full years, until the French garrison, starved and exhausted, finally capitulated on September 5, 1800. General Graham’s tribute to the Maltese fighters afterward: “Without arms, without the resources of war, you broke asunder your chains.”
Looking back at the whole thing, what strikes me is how little the actual fighting in June mattered. Malta didn’t fall to Napoleon’s army. It fell to years of bankruptcy, espionage, and the slow draining away of loyalty and competence that left the Order unable to mount even a token defense when the moment came.. The knights had survived the loss of Jerusalem, of Acre, of Rhodes—every time picking themselves up and finding somewhere else to make a stand. But those earlier disasters had come from the outside. What happened in 1798 came from within, and there was no recovering from it. Napoleon, for his part, knew exactly what he’d done. Years later he summed it up: “C’est dans Mantua que j’ai pris Malte.” (It was in Mantua that I took Malta.) He meant that the real conquest had happened through agents and bribes and intercepted letters, long before his fleet showed up. The walls of Valletta were as strong in 1798 as they had been in 1565. That turned out not to matter much.
Sources
The main primary source I’ve used is the Capodieci account, an unpublished manuscript (Ms. Qq. F. 231, Biblioteca Comunale di Palermo) written in Syracuse on July 24, 1798, and edited by Grazio V. Ellul in Hyphen. The Bailì de Suffren’s account of the capitulation is reprinted in Sir Francis Grenfell’s lecture on the Malta expedition, which also includes Berthier’s official French report and an itinerary of Nelson’s fleet compiled by Prince Louis of Battenberg. For the British diplomatic background, I’ve relied on Roger Vella Bonavita, “Britain and Malta 1787–1798,” Hyphen. The British press coverage is from Anthony Vella Gera, “An Eventful Two Years in the History of Malta as Recorded in the British Press,” Storja ’98. Henry Frendo’s “Czars, Knights and Republicans” (Storja 2003–2004) covers the Russian angle. The standard modern account is Carmelo Testa, The French in Malta (Midsea Books, 1997).
