Paul Cella tells the story of The Victory of September 11, 1565, which starts with the Knights of Malta:
By the middle of the 16th century, the Knights of Malta had been for decades a particular irritation to the Sultan of the Empire of the Ottoman Turks, then the world’s premier superpower and the imperial power of the Jihad. The Knights were skilled and cunning seamen: the Christian answer to the Barbary pirates whose razzias or jihadist raids had, literally for centuries, terrorized the coastal lands of southern Europe. These pirates were slavers and pillagers, terrors of the sea. How many “sick and sunless” captives were made by them, consigned to the filth and misery of the life of a galley oarsman, can only be conjectured. They made prisons of great oared ships; and the fate of their prisoners was one of wretchedness beyond reckoning. Athwart this menace stood the ancient Noble Order of St. John of Jerusalem. One historian (voicing a consensus of historians) gives them this honor: “in skill, seamanship, and fighting ability there was no single vessel in the Mediterranean that could compare with a galley commanded by one of the Knights from Malta.”The Knights had been founded during the First Crusade, and were for a long while known primarily as the Knights Hospitaller: their first ambition had been to aid the sick and weary among pilgrims to the Holy Land. And indeed much of the meaning of our word hospital derives from their tradition, which accomplished great advances in medical science, particularly on the problem of transmission of disease. By the 16th century the Knights had a solid understanding of the value of quarantines: their own galleys were among the cleanest in the world, owing in part to their practice of deliberately sinking and then retrieving them. But it was only later, well after the Crusading Age, that the order became an emphatically military one; and after the fall of the remnants of the Crusader Kingdoms, the order was forced to the sea, where it would thrive.