Valletta (Civ6)/Civilopedia

Valletta, located in the Republic of Malta, was founded in 1566 AD by Jean Parisot de la Valette, the 49th Grandmaster of the Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of Saint John of Jerusalem of Rhodes and of Malta. This after the Knights Hospitaller had withstood a siege and invasion of the island by the Ottoman Empire a year earlier. (Malta had been given in perpetuity to the order by Charles V of Spain in 1530 to serve as a bulwark against the Ottoman tide.)
To build and fortify the new city and the island, Valette requested help from the kings and princes of Christendom. And it was forthcoming … obviously their thinking was that it was better for a bunch of militant zealots to face the oncoming Muslims than their own troops and ships. Pope Pius V sent his own military architect to design the fortifications, and Philip II of Spain gave ships and weapons. Others donated large sums of money to sponsor churches and barracks and port facilities.
The town, with its fine harbor and strategic location, was to weather centuries of warfare, even unto the Second World War. The Knights assumed the duties of policing the Mediterranean shipping lanes between Christian Europe and the Levant, fighting the Barbary corsairs and other pirates. They also set about freeing Christian slaves, mostly by raiding Ottoman shipping themselves. But the rise of Genoa, Venice and Pisa, and later the Protestant Reformation, eroded much of Valletta’s financial support.
Thus, in 1798 when Napoleon captured Malta while en route to invade Egypt, only Naples and the British seemed much concerned. A couple of years later the Maltese rose in rebellion against the French garrison; the victorious rebel leaders presented the island to the British, requesting that it be made a dominion of the empire. The 1814 Treaty of Paris confirmed British control, under whose thumb it remained until independence in 1964.