Knights of St John in Malta: Valletta and the Three Cities

Walk into St John’s Co-Cathedral in Valletta and the ceiling alone will stop you mid-step: a barrel vault of gilded stone carving, painted almost entirely by hand, commissioned by men who had spent their careers at war. That contrast, between austere military vocation and extraordinary artistic patronage, is the key to understanding the Knights of St John, the religious-military order who ruled Malta for nearly 270 years and built much of what visitors come to see today. Both of Odyssey Traveller’s Mediterranean Islands small group tours spend five days on Malta and Gozo, tracing this history from the Grand Harbour bastions of Valletta to the fortified towns known as the Three Cities.

An Exiled Order Finds an Island

The Order of St John had already lost two homes before it came to Malta. Founded in Jerusalem in the 11th century to care for pilgrims, the Knights Hospitaller were driven out of the Holy Land in 1291, then out of Rhodes by Ottoman forces in 1522 after a six-month siege. For eight years they were, in effect, a state without territory. In 1530 the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V granted them Malta, along with Gozo and the North African outpost of Tripoli, in exchange for a token annual rent: a single Maltese falcon, presented to the Emperor’s representative each year. It was a modest-looking arrangement for an island that would become one of the most fought-over pieces of real estate in the Mediterranean.

The Great Siege of 1565

The Knights had barely settled when Suleiman the Magnificent decided Malta was too well positioned, at the narrow waist of the Mediterranean between Sicily and North Africa, to leave in Christian hands. In May 1565 an Ottoman fleet estimated at more than 100 ships and 30,000 men landed on the island, facing a garrison of a few thousand Knights, Maltese militia and mercenaries under Grand Master Jean Parisot de la Valette. The fighting centred on Fort St Elmo, guarding the harbour entrance, and on Fort St Angelo across the water in Birgu. St Elmo fell after weeks of bombardment, but its defenders’ resistance bought time for reinforcements to arrive from Sicily. By September the siege had failed, and the Ottoman fleet withdrew. The victory made La Valette’s name across Europe and gave the Order the confidence, and the funding from Christian rulers grateful for a Mediterranean spared, to build a new capital that could never be besieged so easily again.

Building Valletta: A City Designed by Soldiers

Construction of Valletta began in 1566, on the Sciberras peninsula that had been Ottoman gun positions the year before. La Valette laid the foundation stone himself, though he died before the city bearing his name was finished. Unlike most European capitals, which grew organically over centuries, Valletta was designed in one sustained effort on a strict grid, with streets angled to funnel cooling sea breezes through the city and bastions engineered by leading military architects of the day. The Grandmaster’s Palace, now the seat of Malta’s President and, until 2015, of its parliament, anchored the city’s civic life, while St John’s Co-Cathedral, deliberately plain on the outside, was where the Order poured its wealth into the interior you see today, including Caravaggio’s The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist, the only painting he ever signed. Caravaggio was himself made a Knight of Malta in 1608, during a brief and turbulent stay on the island, though his fall from grace and expulsion came almost as quickly as his admission.

Valletta earned UNESCO World Heritage status largely on the strength of this concentrated, deliberate urban planning, and walking its streets today, from the Upper Barrakka Gardens down to the waterfront, still follows the route the Knights themselves used to move between palace, cathedral and harbour. Our guide to things to do in Valletta covers the city’s key sites in more depth if you’re planning your own visit.

The Three Cities: Where the Knights Actually Lived First

Before Valletta existed, the Knights governed from Birgu, the fortified town now more often called Vittoriosa, together with its neighbours Senglea and Cospicua. Collectively known as the Three Cities, these settlements across the water from Valletta bore the worst of the 1565 siege and still carry a different atmosphere from the capital: narrower streets, fewer crowds, and a density of Knights-era architecture that Valletta’s later development has partly smoothed over. Fort St Angelo, at the tip of Birgu, was the Order’s original seat and command post throughout the siege, and it remains one of the most evocative fortifications on the island precisely because it predates the more polished capital across the harbour. For travellers with an interest in the period, the Three Cities often reward more time than their modest size suggests.

Mdina and Rabat: The Older Capital the Knights Inherited

Not everything of historical weight in Malta belongs to the Knights’ era. Mdina, the fortified hill town known as the “Silent City,” had already served as Malta’s capital for centuries under the Romans, Byzantines and Arabs before the Order arrived, and it kept much of its civic and religious importance even after Valletta was built. The Knights largely left Mdina’s noble families to their own affairs, which is part of why the town today still feels closer to a walled medieval enclave than a military headquarters. Immediately outside its walls, Rabat carries an older layer of history again, associated with the tradition that St Paul was shipwrecked on Malta around 60 AD and preached from a grotto here, and the catacombs beneath the town are among the largest Christian burial complexes in the Mediterranean. Seeing Mdina and Rabat alongside Valletta and the Three Cities gives a clearer sense of Malta’s layered past than the Knights’ story can provide on its own; readers curious about Malta’s even earlier prehistoric temples, which sit outside this period entirely, will find that covered separately in our article on Malta’s megalithic temples. Later in the same itinerary, Sicily’s own Valley of the Temples at Agrigento tells a very different, Greek chapter of the same broad interest in ancient religious architecture.

The End of the Order’s Rule

The Knights’ Malta lasted until 1798, when Napoleon Bonaparte’s fleet, en route to Egypt, stopped at Malta and took the island with barely a fight. By then the Order had grown wealthy and increasingly detached from the military discipline that had won it the Great Siege more than two centuries earlier, and it offered little resistance. The British took control from the French in 1800, and Malta would remain under British rule until independence in 1964. What the Knights left behind, though, is largely what still defines the island’s historic core: Valletta’s fortifications and palaces, the Three Cities’ waterfront defences, and a body of art and architecture well out of proportion to the size of the territory that produced it.

Seeing It in Sequence

The Knights’ history in Malta makes most sense seen in the order it happened: Birgu and the Three Cities first, then Valletta as the fortified answer to 1565, then Mdina and Rabat as a reminder of everything the Order inherited rather than built. That’s broadly the sequence both of Odyssey’s Mediterranean Islands tours follow during their five days on Malta and Gozo: the Three Cities on Day 2, then guided visits in Valletta on Day 3 and Mdina and Rabat on Day 4, rather than trying to piece the story together site by site on your own. If you’re mapping out how Malta fits into a longer trip, our Malta itinerary for mature travellers sets out the full five-day sequence, and our complete Mediterranean Islands itinerary shows how it connects to Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica across the full 25-day tour.

For travellers who find this kind of layered, contested history more compelling than a beach itinerary, Malta rewards the time. The stonework of Valletta and the Three Cities was built by people who expected, reasonably, to be attacked again, and that pressure produced some of the most complete fortified cityscapes left in Europe. Seeing them with a guide who can point out what the Knights built out of necessity versus ambition, and where later empires simply took over what the Order left behind, changes how the whole island reads.