Back to reviewing after a bit of a hiatus! This time I'm reviewing The Great Siege of Malta by Bruce Ware Allen. I've read a few books on the Siege of Malta over the past couple of years and while this one isn't a mind blowing revelation, I think it is probably the best narrative history currently available. Full review below:

​

I am enthralled by the Great Siege of Malta. It is one of the most engaging historical narratives I’ve ever come across, the kind of story that feels too exciting to be even remotely true. Too long to really work as a movie, it feels perfectly suited to a high drama HBO series – except probably lacking in sufficient opportunities for gratuitous female nudity. It is a story full of sudden dramatic changes in fortune, deaths, betrayals, desperation, and dramatic last stands against all odds. An underdog story of resistance against an unstoppable foe that somehow also manages to show how much that massive foe is struggling against their own difficulties. It is easy to see why it captured imaginations at the time and within months of its conclusion some commentators described it as the greatest siege that ever was.

It is perhaps a little surprising, then, that there aren’t very many books on the siege. For a long time Ernle Bradford’s history, first published in 1961, has been the definitive history. I was therefore pleased to find that Bruce Ware Allen’s The Great Siege of Malta provides a much-needed update to Bradford’s foundational work. While the overall narrative of the siege in Ware Allen’s account doesn’t differ greatly from Bradford’s, the inclusion of a wider range of sources, particularly more Turkish evidence, gives Ware Allen’s version a more well-rounded perspective than was present in Bradford. This is an excellent history of The Great Siege and if you have any interest in the subject, or just enjoy an engaging and exciting historical narrative, this is the first thing you should read!

As is fairly standard with accounts of the Great Siege, Ware Allen begins with Suleiman the Magnificent’s rise to the Ottoman throne and his plan to drive the Knights Hospitaller from their fortress in Rhodes. This successful siege sets the stage for the great conflict many decades later, near the end of the Sultan’s life. Ware Allen also does a good job of bridging the years in between, providing a detailed history of the Knights’ search for a new home, their eventual settlement in Malta, and the struggles they faced in their new home. He also charts the careers of the Barbary pirates, particularly the Barbarossa Brothers, whose disciples would play a key role in the siege and broader Ottoman conflict and diplomacy with major European powers.

This is a traditional narrative history. It is well sourced and very readable, and with the Great Siege there is a ton of narrative to cover so it works well. That said, I’ve now read multiple narrative accounts of the Siege and while I’m engaged every time, I now yearn for some more thematic histories. I want to know how the Siege and its failure fits into broader Ottoman politics, what it tells us about Christian alliances at the time, and the role that groups like the Hospitallers played in the Catholic Church during the Reformation that was raging around these events. Sometimes these ideas manage to peak into Ware Allen’s account, but they are always peripheral to the core story.

This is not a critique of this book, but more a comment of what I hope to see going forward. I think this account of the Siege provides a great narrative basis and could remain the core narrative/political history of the subject for many years to come. I sincerely hope it encourages scholars to start tackling other aspects of The Great Siege in more detail. An event of this magnitude has the potential to teach us about so many aspects of sixteenth-century society.

I also really appreciate how Ware Allen is able to highlight the individuals involved in the siege. While it can at times be a little overwhelming to track all these characters, the writing is good at reminding you of where an individual appeared before and doesn’t just assume that you remember every single name. I also really liked how it highlighted the multi-cultural nature of both forces. It can be too easy to fall into a clash of cultures style account, placing Hospitallers against Turks which misses that the Hospitallers were supported by a multi-national array of mercenaries and Maltese natives while the Ottoman empire was multi-ethnic with many key figures originally of European origin. Ware Allen does a good job of highlighting the various origins of the narrative’s key players which captures some of the messy allegiances present in these conflicts. Great stuff.

The only substantial critique I would offer of Ware Allen’s book is that sometimes when it journeys further afield from the sixteenth century it can make some assertions that I wouldn’t particularly agree with. There is one comment that attempts to draw a parallel between the tactics of the Knights and the Ottomans and those of the ancient Greeks and Persians which feels particularly strained. There are only a handful of cases where this happens and I suspect most people won’t even notice them, so I’m largely nit picking here.

Overall, I really enjoyed Bruce Ware Allen’s The Great Siege of Malta. The Great Siege is a fascinating historic story whose narrative excitement probably overstates its actual impact, but what a great story it is.

​

This review is part of an extended discussion of the Siege of Malta in my blog I'm doing for all of August which I've dubbed Malta Month. I'm reviewing games about the Great Siege of Malta and I also wrote up an abridged history of the siege, for those that might be interested. It's only just started but I'll be adding more content every week. You can check it out here: https://www.stuartellisgorman.com/blog/category/Malta+Month

Other than the primary sources I’m looking for books that can give me insight on the lives, culture and customs (religious or other) of early Germany/Germanic Tribes. Also books on the languages of early germany

Batvia's graveyard by Mike Dash is still the most readable historical novel to the general public.

I don't even like Nautical history, like if you said oh here's a true tale about a Dutch ship that crashed outside of Australia before Australia was colonized, Is have ignored the recommendation.

But this book is better than Master and Commander series.

I like that there's a place here for me to share my half-baked thoughts on my reading.

I was here a few weeks ago to ask for a recommendation for an economic history of the Great Depression. I've since finished Lords of Finance, and can say it remained as fascinating and readable in the second half. I don't know if anyone here has a recommendation that explains the economics. I've seen Golden Fetters and Friedman's Monetary History mentioned elsewhere. Maybe I just need to supplement with an economics textbook.

I've also finished Rana Mitter's Forgotten Ally, which I've been in and out of for ages. I once saw someone describe a book as a mile wide and an inch deep, and I think that describes this one pretty well. I got as far as World War II in Spence's The Search For Modern China and there wasn't much in Forgotten Ally that I hadn't learned there. The principal exception is Mitter's focus on Wang Jingwei's story, which had some dramatic moments and seemed like an important part of the larger story. Can anyone recommend a longer, more detailed book on the Second Sino-Japanese War, maybe going as far back as the conquest of Manchuria?

I've been listening to the audiobook of Vladislav Zubok's Collapse on my commute for a little bit, and recently finished it. I wish I'd gotten the actual book. It's a granular political history of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and there are enough names, and enough of them were new to me, that it's impossible to follow listening. It's miles away from the story I learned growing up, which gave some credit to Western actions. In Zubok's telling, Gorbachev is the central figure. He established alternate sources of power in the republican parliaments, he delegitimized his own state by opening the archives and revealing its past crimes, and he refused to use force at every juncture as the republics took more and more power for themselves. The highlight of the book is the chapter (chapters?) on the August coup. I didn't know before how important the coup was in precipitating the final collapse, or how intense it was, full of violence, drama and tension.

After Collapse, I started listening to Svetlana Alexievich's Secondhand Time: The Last Of the Soviets, a book I'm still listening to. I thought I was getting an oral history of the fall of the Soviet Union and the post-Soviet era, but it's not quite that. I've warmed up to it. Sometimes it's a little impressionistic and writerly for me. It's a collection of people's reminiscences, going back to the Civil War era, as well as other material. Sometimes Soviet history is just in the background of these stories. All together, Alexievich fulfills her intent perfectly: to paint an emotional portrait of the Soviet and post-Soviet era. It answers a question I've had since Anne Applebaum posed it in Gulag and never answered: did people actually believe this stuff? The answer is an emphatic yes. My favorite chapter so far discusses the suicide of Sergey Akhromeyev following the failure of the August coup, and makes it feel like a microcosm of the whole momentous event. And then there's one little tidbit I have to mention. In a sea of Communists and democrats, Alexievich interviews one old-fashioned antisemitic, Russian Orthodox nationalist officer. The officer mentions the Dulles Plan, a nefarious plot by CIA director Allen Dulles to destroy Russia by corrupting the youth, etc., etc. It's a conspiracy theory I'd never heard of. But it sounded almost exactly like the Communist Rules for Revolution, a nefarious plot by Lenin to destroy the United States by corrupting the youth, etc., etc. We each have a nearly identical conspiracy theory about the other. I thought that was a pretty neat symmetry. The audiobook is well acted.

In not quite so historical reading, I started The Kingdoms by Natasha Pulley last night and found it to be a little...worrying I guess is the word? It's alternate history fiction, so the bar for realism is lower, but our primary setting seems to be a version of 1898 where Napoleon was not only victorious but conquered Britain and Ireland. That's a stretch I think, but something I'm prepared to buy into for the sake of an interesting story. It's the other decisions that trouble me. I did find it a bit weird that Scotland is apparently the hotbed of resistance (so much for the Auld Alliance) but I suppose I'm prepared to accept rebellious factions in the far north.

What really bothered me was the portrayal of slavery. In the book our protagonist is an amnesiac and discovers that he is a slave, in London, in 1898. His ethnicity has been vague and I haven't read very far, but I do get the impression he is meant to be non-white. However, the book does mention the mass enslavement of the Welsh in passing at one point. This seems to fundamentally misunderstand both nineteenth century slavery and especially its legacy within France. I have two main issues:

Firstly, we seem to be completely discarding the intertwining of racism and slavery that so fundamentally underpins the practice in modern Europe. White people generally did not enslave other white people. By making slavery a shared experience across all races it feels like the book is kind of buying into myths of white slavery - commonly applied to the Irish as a way of critiquing the notion that non-white people have faced greater suffering at the hands of colonial powers than anyone else did. "Mass Welsh enslavement" really doesn't feel very far removed from "the Irish were slaves too", which is a pretty classic white supremacist talking point and popular myth...

Secondly, the book really seems to buy into this belief that the British Empire was instrumental in the abolishment of slavery and that without it slavery would have continued it unabated. Slavery was abolished everywhere in France during the French Revolution. Napoleon revived it but only in the colonies - not within Europe - and then it was finally abolished under Napoleon III. Now, there's plenty of discussion to be had about the end of the international slave trade and how effectively proclamations banning slavery were actually enforced - practices in the French Congo sure looked a hell of a lot like slavery for example - but the notion that a Napoleonic Dynasty in 1898 would be practicing wide scale slavery in Britain seems extremely far fetched and a little troubling. This idea that Britain was uniquely abolitionist isn't really supported by evidence - for example, Britain largely supported the Confederacy during the American Civil War in the 1860s, y'know, the guys who were so pro-slavery they started a civil war.

I've only read the first few chapters and maybe I'm getting myself too twisted up about an alt-history work of fiction, but honestly it's sent up enough red flags for me that I don't think I want to continue, which is too bad because the writing is pretty good and the core narrative seems interesting.

Any recommendations for good books on Tunisian history either ancient or up to the 20th century?

Can you recommend me books about Spain history starting from 15th century until civil war, please?

Just finished reading "The Lessons of History" by Will and Ariel Durant. Does anyone have any similar recommendations?

Looking for a recommendation on entry level reading (or something generally accessible) on the resumption of inter-regional trade and re-adoption of currency in post-Roman Western Europe during the Late Iron Age and beyond.

Otherwise, I would generally be interested in other good recommendations on history of trade and economics or proto-economics.

Winter war campaigns in Russia.

I am looking for books, papers, articles, videos, podcasts which cover exclusively on why there were military failures of invading armies in Russia during winter. Yes, the books available in it are excellent like Dominic Lieven's. But I am specifically looking for micro details on these failures. Something which goes into the actual reason why in these failures.

Invading armies of interest are: Napoleonic, Mongols and of course Wehrmacht.