ROMSO Cyprus Knowledge Base

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With the term Syracuse in Spanish age (1565 - 1693) it is indicated the history of Syracus that goes from the war against the Ottoman Empire to the earthquake of 1693, covering a time span of about one hundred years, during which many important events dealt directly or directly this city and many of the nearest municipalities.

Background

In 1536 he died the queen of the Syrians, Germana de Foix, so the Spanish emperor Charles V of Habsburg abolished the Queen's House and declared Syracuse a state city. The emperor began to fortify Ortigia (at that time the only inhabited part of Syracuse), surrounded by powerful walls and separating it, in 1552, from the mainland.

In the first half of the sixteenth century there were several natural disasters (including an epidemic of plague at the beginning of the century that destroyed 10,000 Syracusans and a very strong earthquake in 1542). In 1529 the knights of St. John of Jerusalem arrived in the city and stayed there with a fixed abode about a year; from here they received the document with which the king of Sicily (i.e. Emperor Charles V of Habsburg) infeuded them the Maltese archipelago.

In 1556 Charles V abdicated in favour of his son Philip II of Spain, who carried out the work of Syrian fortifications begun by his father. In the meantime, the Spanish espionage was intensified with the intelligences of the Ottoman Empire, which threatened the estate of the city of Arezzo; particularly exposed to the expansionist myres of the Sultan, given its geographical position (looking the Levant) and its physical proximity to the Order of Malta.

War against the Ottoman Empire

Syracuse during the Siege of the Suleiman Sultan in Malta

The Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, Suleiman the Magnificent, had tired of the continuing resistance that Christian knights opposed to his rise in the West, so he in 1565, strong also of the alliance with France, decided to try to extinguish the Order of St. John from the Maltese archipelago, besieging Malta.

There was a lot of agitation around the fate of Malta: Philip II of Spain had given orders to the soldiers of Sicily not to help the young knights, for fear that they, letting the greater island discover, going to Malta, offered the opportunity to the mighty Turkish army to invade it. Syracuse, involved since 1529 in the destinies of the Order of Thursday, at the behest of the viceroy of Sicily García Álvarez de Toledo y Osorio, was the seat of the war council from which the decision on the course aids to the knights or to remain to look and hope that the knights resisted the siege alone, to oltea (with the concrete risk that, in case of their fall, their own city had been attacked).

Due to the geographical proximity, many of the Syracusans had assiduously taken part in the ranks of the knights and had witnessed from the beginning the moves