Bonaparte and the Knights of Malta
‘Why not seize Malta?’ Napoleon asked Talleyrand, ‘We could be masters of the Mediterranean’. By Christopher Hibbert.
'Why do we not seize Malta?,’ General Bonaparte asked Talleyrand in September 1797.
‘The inhabitants, 100,000 in number, are very much in our favour and are thoroughly dissatisfied with the Knights... We could be masters of the Mediterranean.’
Bonaparte wrote from Passeriano in Venetia, where, as a conclusion to his military triumphs in Italy, he was negotiating with the Austrians the peace that was to be known as the Treaty of Campo Formio.
Already he was dreaming of new and greater conquests, of schemes in which the capture of a small Mediterranean island would play but a minor, preliminary part. He was dreaming, in fact, of a French empire in the Orient. Feeling, as he put it himself at St Helena, as though the earth were fleeing from beneath his feet, as though he were being ‘carried to the sky’, he had visions of himself as the conqueror of the Levant, the inheritor of the empires of the East.
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