What is it?
Sam Spade, describing the Maltese falcon in “The Maltese Falcon”
The stuff that dreams are made of…
Fast Facts
- Named for: Greek meli (μέλη) for honeyed. There are native bees.
- Capital: Valletta
- Long/Lat: 35.5 N/14.3 E , 6700 mi East/11 hours East of CV. Nearly directly south of Liechtenstein.
- Population: 520,000, or 9x Castro Valleys
- Size: 122 sq mi, 8x CV. The population density and size of about 10 CVs.
- Avg temp in April: 62 F/16 C (CV-like)
- Median household income: $60,000, also high on a world standard
- Ethnicity: 78% Maltese, meaning a mix of Italian, Spanish, Arab, French etc.
- Main industries: Tourism, banking. In theory, limestone, but not too much.
Unlike Liechtenstein from yesterday, Malta is a tiny dot of great strategic importance. It’s in the Mediterranean, just south of Sicily and Italy but just East of Tunis and North Africa. Tunis was the springboard for the Phoenicians, who advanced sailing and the alphabet, but they were more traders than conquerors. The Romans took over in their turn, as did Hannibal and the Carthaginians. The Goths and Visigoths came through, followed by Islam sweeping across southern Europe and northern Africa. And that’s just the first half of their story of civilization.
It was a place of launching dreams of conquest or re-conquest. When the Crusaders made their move to “take back” land, they pushed from Europe south, establishing footholds in the Mediterranean from Venice and the Riviera to islands like Malta and Cyprus going down to Jerusalem. There were multiple waves of Crusades in the Middle Ages, and, at some point, a group of Benedictine monks built a hospital to minister to the wounded and sick Christian Crusaders. This was the Order of the Knights Hospitallers, affiliated with St. John. Their surcoat with the white cross against the red background is the inverse to the Knight’s Templar, but both captured the idea of a monastic order, beginning from ministering to the sick and needy, yet grounded in a military base.
The Hospitallers tunneled underneath Malta extensively, which came in handy during sieges in the 16th century, when they were pushed off their island of Rhodes back to Malta. As an island without natural resources, Malta is rocky and barren, hard to attack, but low on food and water. A successful naval blockade would cause extensive damage. The Knights Hospitallers were both respondent to the House of Aragorn from Spain, as well as to Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor.
The Knights Hospitaller used a plain Latin (straight) cross, although after the design was created in the Amalfi coast and bestowed by Cosimo de Medici for special service, it became associated with Christian military virtue.
The other special symbol of Malta was in the form of tribute paid to the Holy Roman Emperor. A single Maltese falcon (along with money because they had it) was sent to the emperor. It added to the mystique of the knights, who continued until later “world wars” washed over the islands. Napoleon took them, and later the British, who stationed troops there in the 1940s much as the Crusaders had, 800 years earlier. There was a second siege, a second group holding the rock against the Germans and Italians.
The falcon as an idea intrigued mystery writer Dashiell Hammett. Even before the island made it back into the news, Hammett wrote a novel about the frantic scramble for a precious statue that resembled the falcon. There was a story of its provenance hearkening back to the times of emperors, which launched the search for the bird.
There were two versions of the film made, one pre-Hays Code that captured more of the scandalous behavior of the dame who seduces Spade and of the gay men that Spade confronts. The later 1941 version with Bogart, Mary Astor, Sydney Greenstreet, and Peter Lorre takes out references to Caspar Guttman’s “boyfriend” and puts more clothes on Mary Astor. Otherwise, everyone is lying to everyone else, all the time. Even the falcon, finally found, is a lie–perhaps. The dreams of wealth evaporate as everyone lays siege to the bird, in the same way that everyone has laid siege to the rock. Hard to acquire and just as hard to keep.
