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To a man in search of renewal and redemption, it must have been an inspiring sight. An entirely new city, built of honey-coloured limestone that glowed pink in the sun, Valletta had been constructed at breakneck speed in just forty years. After the turmoil of the Great Siege, the knights realized that they had to fortify the narrow headland known as the Xiberras Promontory, which connected the island’s two principal harbours. The construction of the new capital by an army of slaves, on the steepest incline of the headland, had been an immense undertaking but once complete it meant that the knights’ principal garrison was all but impregnable. It was named in honour of Jean de la Valette, Grand Master during the siege. The pope’s best military engineer, Francesco Laparelli, was responsible for the plan. The sheer stone fortifications of the citadel rose directly from the craggy outcrop of the island itself, with the sea acting as a moat on both sides.

Within its walls, Valletta was laid out on the Renaissance model of the ideal city. The principal architect responsible for the buildings was Girolamo Cassar, who was from Malta but had studied in Rome. His palaces and churches were designed to reflect the knights’ ideals of Christian sobriety and military discipline, with long, severe façades of rusticated stone. The streets were laid out in a grid, with nine thoroughfares running across the peninsula and twelve running from top to bottom. Their strict geometry was softened by gardens and fountains, providing shade and water. Getting from the harbour end of Valletta, up the steep hill to the centre of town, and to the grand Cathedral of St John, was hard work even for the fittest. (Centuries later, the club-footed English poet Byron would bid farewell to Malta with the words ‘adieu, ye cursed streets of stairs’.)

Approaching Malta for the first time, Caravaggio was surrounded by symbols of the island’s fierce rule of law. On the first promontory on the left of the harbour was the forbidding spectacle of a gallows. Within the harbour itself, prominent on the left-hand side, was the Castel Sant’Angelo, where many of the most famous events of the siege had taken place. By the time of Caravaggio’s arrival, it had become a prison for disorderly knights. Another hallowed site from the recent Maltese past was the Castel Sant’Elmo, where so many members of the order had lost their lives in 1565. A late sixteenth-century German visitor to Malta, Hieronymus Megiser, noted that some of the rocks there were still visibly sprinkled with gore. The stains were pointed out with pride by his Maltese hosts, as the glorious blood of Christian martyrs.

Malta was a remote and harsh place, rocky and sun-parched, unlike anywhere Caravaggio had ever known. But it was also fertile, having been famous since antiquity for the quality of its cotton – Cicero had had his clothes made on Malta – as well as for the sweetness of its honey and its bounteous quantities of almonds, olives, figs and dates. As Megiser noted, the island encompassed two utterly distinct societies, ‘Malta Africana’ and ‘Malta Europeana’. The world of the indigenous islanders had remained unchanged for centuries. Its people were dark-skinned, spoke a language incomprehensible to Europeans and lived in humble settlements much like the tribal villages of nearby coastal north Africa. Cosmopolitan Valletta was utterly different, a flammable blend of extreme Christian piety, simmering military aggression and barely contained sexual dissipation.

To the English poet and adventurer George Sandys, who unknowingly followed in Caravaggio’s footsteps four years later, the two Maltas were indeed worlds apart:

The Malteses are little lesse tawnie than the Moores, especially those of the country, who go halfe-clad, and are indeed a miserable people: but the Citizens are altogether Frenchified; the Great Maister, and major parts of the Knights being French men. The women wear long blacke