The complexity and diversity of the Mediterranean Sea and its lands have provided fertile ground for on-going debates on a wide variety of issues, ranging from its unity to its sharp divides, from the importance of human interaction to that of its microecologies. More than half a century of scholarly work and discussion has followed Braudel's monumental work on the Mediterranean, yet there still remains much to explore in order to obtain a clearer picture of how seemingly opposing realities have found ways to function within an environment where politics, religion and the economy are intricately intertwined. This paradox encompasses the different cultures and civilisations that have inhabited this closed space where, simultaneously, they were formally at war and trading with one another.

This book presents a study of Malta, a small but strategically placed island on the central axis of the Mediterranean which in many ways could be considered as the epitome of this contradiction. Malta's central position in the Mediterranean, a few miles from the Sicilian Straits, which were crucial for control of the east–west Mediterranean passage and, after 1530, the presence on the island of the Order of the Knights of St John (1530–1798), made it an active participant in Mediterranean politics and commercial networks. As in the broader context, two opposing realities played a significant part in Malta's economic performance during the early period of Hospitaller rule. One was the Order's major role as a bulwark of Christianity, mainly carried out through its corsairing activities, and the other was its constant trading activity with the ‘infidels’. Malta thus lends itself to the use of case studies which are approached with a micro-historical frame to throw light on larger phenomena taking place in the Mediterranean. Through this methodological approach, which delves into what seem to be the petty details of everyday life, this study arrives at conclusions which ‘highlight the hiatus between the normative institutional level of history and real life on the ground’. By projecting these conclusions into the wider context we can read beyond the institutional framework of economic transactions and observe them in practice.