The battles of the past define the present. This is Shield's High.

The Siege of Malta Part 2. What's the greatest battle in all history?

It's an impossible question to answer, but it's one we think about. It's one that historians can debate throughout all the ages.

Was there one single martial contest that had a greater impact on the world than any other?

There are certainly wars that we think about frequently when we talk of history and the making of the modern world.

World War II, World War I, the Civil War, you go back in history and human conflict is the one constant.

Every society and every age has had periods of warfare that forever changed the world that those nations and tribes and individuals were living in.

If we were compiling a list of the most important battles and for the time in which they took place the most fierce martial contests,

the Siege of Malta of 1565 would have to be on the list.

Voltaire, the timeless French author, said nothing is better known than the Siege of Malta.

If only that were true. It's not a story that is widely taught in American schools and it's certainly in our current era

is inframed as an effort by Islamic conquest to establish a forward operating base for the annihilation of Rome, of Christendom and of the West.

But the Ottoman Sultan at the time, Sulamon, the magnificent certainly thought that those were the stakes.

And the Christian defenders on the island of Malta, the Knights of Saint John, later to be known as the Knights of Malta,

for their incredible endurance and bravery during the Great Siege, understood that it wasn't merely their lives,

but it was their souls and the future of Christendom itself that was threatened by the massive Ottoman invasion of this tiny, rocky island

in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea.

For more of the background on this battle, the run up to it and the great naval commander lost even in most histories of the era,

the Knight and Naval Commander, the ferocious warrior, Romaga of the Knights of Saint John,

please check out the podcast previously released under Shilta'i, the Siege of Malta, part one.

The year of our Lord, 1565, the Ottoman Empire is by far the most powerful entity in the entire Western world.

The forces of Christendom have been pushed back continuously on land and on sea, and there have been numerous efforts by the Sultan

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