Posted on 10/06/2014 11:16:24 AM PDT by Dqban22
THE SEIGE OF MALTA
History's bloodiest siege used human heads as cannonballs By JAMES JACKSON 07 July 2007
A hot and fetid June night on the small Mediterranean island of Malta, and a Christian sentry patrolling at the foot of a fort on the Grand Harbour had spotted something drifting in the water.
The alarm was raised. More of these strange objects drifted into view, and men waded into the shallows to drag them to the shore. What they found horrified even these battle-weary veterans: wooden crosses pushed out by the enemy to float in the harbour, and crucified on each was the headless body of a Christian knight.
This was psychological warfare at its most brutal, a message sent by the Turkish Muslim commander whose invading army had just vanquished the small outpost of Fort St Elmo - a thousand yards distant across the water.
Now the target was the one remaining fort on the harbour front where the beleaguered, outnumbered and overwhelmed Christians were still holding out: the Fort St Angelo. The Turkish commander wished its defenders to know that they would be next, that a horrible death was the only outcome of continued resistance.
But the commander had not counted on the mettle of his enemy - the Knights of St John. Nor on the determination of their leader Grand Master Jean Parisot de la Valette, who vowed that the fort would not be taken while one last Christian lived in Malta.
The rest of the history
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-466818/Historys-bloodiest-siege-used-human-heads-cannonballs.html
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
>> I was there on a land tour <<
Did you walk across the water? Or drive?
Angels in Iron.
A lot of good aspects to the story. The defense of the city at the other end of the island, which faked having 5 times its number by dressing women and children in “armor,” is also pretty cool.
The Mongols, in about a century, managed to kill about 10% of the world’s population.
No other group has ever come close to that record.
The Nazis, for example, killed perhaps 20M people, and the Commies perhaps 125M, out of a population of perhaps 2.5B.
That’s 0.8% for the Nazis and 5% for the commies.
Thanks. I’ll check it out. “The Religion” is fiction, but a rip roaring read.
Of all the stops we made, it was the one that surprised me the most. Had no idea what Malta was about first time we went. So glad we signed up for a tour that took us Mdina, the old capital, then walked over to Valleta and walked on those steps that were built the way to accomodate the Knights. We were sorry we only had a few hours to be there.
I believe Game of Thrones was filmed there for one of their seasons.
So Ghenghis and his grandson win the Hell-bent award.
Flew Lufthansa to Frankfurt from San Francisco (10 hours).
Traveled on our own to Rome. Picked up the tour there.
We were on a bus; the bus drove on to the boat...to the "toe of the boot." WHAT a fabulous time we had. I went with girlfriends.
My first question was, of course: "Where's the Maltese Falcon?" :o)
I listened to some Maltese words on "Davidsbeenhere" and it sound VERY MUCH like Arabic. My husband and I lived in Saudi Arabia five years so I KNOW what it sounds like. I even took some classes on speaking it.
A few more DAYS would've been even BETTER.
Yes, Valleta was very nice, very interesting. First time we were there we went to an old church that had the hand of someone, ohmigosh, can’t remember the specifics. Second time we went, we took a carriage to tour the town. Darn ship just didn’t spend a lot of time in Malta. MDina was very interesting, it was an enclosed city, but by today’s standards, it would just be a bunch of enclosed buildings.
Yeah. The Siege of Leningrad comes to mind.
because the Masons have been inventing history to credit themselves for 200+ years.
there is s difference between historically verifiable facts and something published with no extra sources in the last 200 years.
For example, when you consider most historical events, she have multiple sources from/around the time of the event.
Also, will you state you are not a freemason of some degree?
Ping to an important piece of history.
I just really don't see where masons tie into this whole thing.
Yup.
What I find weirdest are those people who seem to think the Nazis set some sort of record for people-killing efficiency, when they were actually pretty pathetic in that category.
Multiple times the Mongols captured a city with a surviving population of perhaps 500,000. The people would be captured, bound and marched out. Perhaps a half dozen would be distributed to each soldier in the 100,000 Mongol army, and on a signal everybody would chop heads. Then build a pyramid with them.
They’d ride away, leaving the bodies lie, and send a group back in a couple of weeks to slaughter any who had managed to hide in the ruins.
IOW, they’d routinely kill perhaps 500,000 people in just a few minutes. With the only added expense the labor of resharpening their swords and axes.
Compare that to the Nazis, who hauled victims all over Europe wasting desperately needed transport resources, and then at Auschwitz managed to hit a peak “production” of only around 20,000 per 24 hours, if I remember the numbers right.
People today seem to think really mass killing requires technology and industrial methods. In actual fact all you need is a whole bunch of enthusiastic killers.
The "enthusiastic killers" thought they were doing RIGHT.
After Genghis, his GRANDSON took over the killing. It took Asia a L-O-N-G time to recover from the invasions of the Khans.
Yes. Large areas of central Asia had been heavily populated and highly civilized for millenia. The Mongols destroyed these civilizations and to a very considerable extent they have never recovered.
In fact, the same is probably true of Iraq. Highly civilized and heavily populated, one of the world’s greatest areas of civilization for at least 5000 years continuous. Conquered by dozens of groups over the millenia. Irrigation systems destroyed, etc.
The irrigation systems were always patiently rebuilt by the surviving peasantry and civilization revived.
Then the Mongols rolled through. Destroyed the irrigation systems AND killed the peasantry. The area has never fully recovered. BTW, this horrendous tragedy occurred during the Crusades, which is why for over a thousand years Muslims pretty much ignored the Crusades. They were, by comparison to the Mongol invasion, a minor irritant.
At one point Genghis implemented a policy of killing the entire Chinese population to free up land for grazing the Mongol flocks and herds. A captured Chinese official talked him out of it before it had gone too far. He convinced GK he’d make more by leaving the Chinese alive and exploiting them than by killing them. IOW, herding people has a higher ROI than herding animals.
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