Grandmaster Jean De Valette, the Knights Hospitaller and the Great Siege of Malta 1565

The Knights Hospitaller, or Knights of St. John were a military religious order founded in the Holy Land in the 11th Century. Initially they ran a series of hospitals, but eventually they began to escort and protect pilgrims. Upon the expulsion of all crusaders from the Holy Land, they eventually made their way to Cyprus, then Rhodes, which they lost to the Ottomans after a valiant resistance. Almost extinct, but their maritime skills desperately needed by civil war torn Christian Europe to protect its vulnerable Mediterranean coast, they were given Malta as a base, which in 1565 was to become to the Ottomans what Stalingrad was to the Germans in WW2. This video documents the obscure origins of the Knights of Malta as they had come to be known; their withdrawal from the levant following the failure of the crusades and their eventual triumph and unifying effect on Europe in the defence of Malta against the greatest armada and amphibian invasion in history till DDay. Their leader John Parisot d