Fort St Angelo guarding the harbour at the tip of Vittoriosa (Birgu), the quintessential view of Malta from the capital, Valletta and its Grand Harbour.
Many assume that the Knights built it for the Great Siege of Malta, but in fact when the Knights of St John arrived in Malta, they found the harbour under the watch of the crumbling ‘Castrum Maris’ which dated back to the 12th Century.
Having been expelled from Rhodes by the Ottoman Turks, Emperor Charles V of Spain granted the Knights “that barren rock”, Malta, where “grain refused to grow”. Not having any other better options, the Knights accepted this and immediately set about reinforcing the fort to protect themselves from attack, building the D’Homedes Bastion in 1536. In 1541, leading Italian military engineer Antonio Ferramolino arrived from Bergamo and strengthened the walls of this castle, created an elevated platform or ‘cavalier’ and numerous bastions around the peninsula. Importantly, he cut through the dry ditch to create a moat separate the castle from the rest of the Birgu peninsula. The De Guirial Batteries were added at the tip of the fort at sea level to protect the entrance to Dockyard Creek.
Fort St Angelo has always been of great importance because of its strategic position and the role it has played throughout Maltese history, particularly during the Great Siege of 1565 when it held out against unceasing attacks thanks to the bravery of the Knights and Maltese, giving it great emotional significance for the Maltese people.
In 1609 the famous painter Caravaggio, convicted of injuring a knight in a brawl, was imprisoned at St Angelo, possibly in its ‘guva’, a well-shaped prison cell. It is thought that Caravaggio’s escape from St Angelo and Malta was arranged by the Knights in order to avoid embarrassment.
Fort St Angelo, as it became known, remained as it was until 1687, more than a hundred years after the Great Siege. Grand Master Gregorio Carafa worried that the fort would not withstand further attack so he brought Don Carlos de Grunenberg, a Flemish colonel and military engineer who was impressed by the fortification and recommended specific improvements to reinforce it, paying himself for the construction of four gun batteries on the side of the fort facing the entrance to Grand Harbour. As a result, one can still see his coat of arms above the main gate of the fort.
By the arrival of the French in 1798, therefore, the fort had become a very powerful fortification including some 80 guns, 48 of which pointed towards the entrance of the port during the Maltese blockade of the overthrown French when the Fort served as headquarters of the French Army.
The British did not carry out major changes to the fortress that they renamed HMS St Angelo. The fort suffered considerable damage during World War II when the fort suffered 69 direct hits between 1940 and 1943 but was later restored. Nazi propaganda had famously claimed that “HMS St Angelo has been hit and sunk”.
In November 2001 the upper part of the fort, including the Castellan’s house and the Chapel of St Anne, was handed by the Maltese Government to the Sovereign Military Order of Malta to be used to further the Order’s humanitarian works [1]. Given the Order’s recognised status as a sovereign state, those parts of the Fort being used by the Order effectively constitute part of an independent state, over which the Maltese Government has no jurisdiction, like the status of the Vatican within the Italian State.
St Angelo’s Grey Lady Ghost
Fort St Angelo is supposedly haunted by the Grey Lady, a mistress of the Aragonese lord of the Castello, Giovanni di Nava.
The story goes that she protested at not having the same status as De Nava’s wife, and fearing that the affair would become public, he ordered his guards to have her removed. Instead, the guards killed her and sealed her body in the fort’s dungeon. Upon hearing that the guards had killed her and not sent her away, De Nava ordered them to be killed as well.
The ghost of the Grey Lady was first seen in the early 1900s; it is said that this followed the finding of skeletons during some restoration works in a sealed dungeon. She was seen and heard by both Maltese and English men, as well as by children who called her “the nice lady” as she was said to look very beautiful yet very sad [2]. An exorcism then took place, and the Grey Lady was not seen again until World War II, when she supposedly saved some soldiers’ lives from aerial bombardment when a group of men convalescing there reported their room turned cold, and a lady floated into their room. She waved her arm at them indicating she wanted them to leave the room with her. They followed her and as they left, a German bomb hit the room. The women disappeared and the soldiers told the story of the Grey Lady of Fort St Angelo saving their lives from certain death [3].
No one has seen her since the war. Maybe it’s because no one has been in mortal danger in Fort St Angelo.
References:
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_St._Angelo
2. https://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20090316/life-features/malta-s-most-haunted.248980
3. http://www.unexpectedtraveller.com/Blog/secret-grey-lady-st-angelo/
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