Review with an Alternative View: Arnold Cassola, Süleyman The Magnificent And Malta 1565: Decisions, Concerns, Consequences, Malta-Siracusa, Morrome Editore, 2017, 126 pages T. M. P. Duggan 1 Abstract: There are a number of issues in this book published in 2017 that this review seeks to address, concerning not only the use made of historical sources, both written and visual and their juxtaposition in a publication; but also the reasons for, the aim and achievements of the Ottoman campaign to Malta in 1565, largely from “the other side”, meaning the Ottoman perspective, different from the Christian-Modern European perspective, for, as Voltaire wrote, Nothing is better known than the siege of Malta. But what does better known actually mean in the context of the 1565 siege? From the Ottoman point of view, there was no “siege of Malta,” there were the 1551 and 1565 punitive campaigns undertaken against the oath- breaking Hospitaller Knights of St. John on Malta. Although repeatedly stated in the Christian accounts of the 1565 campaign from 1565 to today, there is no contemporary Ottoman evidence to indicate the aim of occupying Malta, and so to supposedly to control the Mediterranean or to control the western or central Mediterranean; nor yet, from an occupied Ottoman Malta to attack Sicily and Italy. The 1565 punitive campaign was successful, the Hospitaller headquarters was destroyed, the Knights of St John on Malta were largely dead or severely wounded and the Ottoman phased withdrawal decided in July and begun in the second week of August, was largely completed before the Christian relief force arrived on Malta. Because the Ottoman 1565 campaign aims were not known, a Christian victory was declared when Ottoman forces left the island, producing one of European history’s enduring misconceptions, to rephrase Voltaire, nothing is perhaps better known than the Ottoman 1565 punitive campaign against Hospitaller Malta. Keywords: Hospitaller Malta, 1565, Ottoman punitive campaign, Catholic Propaganda, Historical Sources, Rhodes 1522 It is undoubtedly the case that extensive Christian Catholic and Spanish imperial propaganda was undertaken concerning the 1565 siege of Hospitaller Malta by Ottoman forces - since 1530 an island archipelago in the hands of the Papal Order of the Hospitaller Knights of St. John given from the hand of the Emperor Charles V, King of Sicily, together with the North African port of Tripoli in perpetual fiefdom - in exchange for an annual fee of a single Maltese falcon. The propaganda dating from the siege of 1565 onwards, and which continues today, not least in the re-issuing of Ernle Dusgate Selby Bradford’s 1961, Great Siege Malta, 1565, with its newly added and false subtitle, Clash of Cultures: Christian Knights Defend Western Civilization Against the Moslem Tide, 2 and which was hinted at by Roger Crowley in 2008 in remarks such as, – all Christian accounts of the matter have the ring of invention 3 - has tended to obscure the actual reasons for, and the context and conduct of the Ottoman siege 1 Lecturer, Art Historian, Akdeniz University, Mediterranean Civilisations Research Institute (MCRI), 07058 Campus, Antalya. tmpduggan@yahoo.com https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3042-7489 I wrote an article published in the Turkish Daily News, 09-03-2001, p. 18, entitled, “The siege of Malta and Antalya Province - bringing history to life with Ottoman archival material,” citing from Professor Arnold Cassola’s publication entitled: The 1565 Ottoman Malta Campaign Register, P.E.G., Malta, 1998; we briefly met at the 450th year anniversary conference organised by Heritage Malta on the Siege of Malta in 2015, and in 2020 the author asked me to write a review of his 2017 publication. 2 On this see Duggan 2020. 3 Crowley 2008, 130.