GIFT IDEA Gourmet hamper by Heritage Malta

News / Malta / Heritage Malta

December 2022 - February 2023

MALTA

A Taste of Victory

Long before before Al Jazeera, Sky News and CNN round-the-clock news bulletins, news maps were an early form of reporting. Conveying visual information about geography and military manoeuvres, they began to appear in Italy and Northern Europe in the early 1500s, a period of constant conflict in which military technology evolved rapidly.

News maps captured contemporary, episodic events in cartographic, often schematic plan or aerial view, and were published either as they unfolded or shortly thereafter. These early newsreels took the forms of woodcuts or combinations of engraving and etching, printed on single sheets of paper. Their main aim was to inform heads of state and interested parties on the progression of events and to shape public opinion. As artworks, these humble maps would serve as a blueprint for commemorative battle murals in halls of state. The demand for cartographic snapshots of current events resulted in advances in surveying and measured representation.

Approximately fifty news maps were published in 1565 during and following the four-month Great Siege of Malta. No other sixteenth-century event, not even the 1529 Siege of Vienna, garnered as much interest or generated as many news maps as this closely monitored epic triumph for Christendom. Published a few months after the siege had concluded, Mathias Zündt’s detailed overview of the Great Siege, a map he etched and engraved in Nuremberg in 1565, entitled ‘Gewisse Verzaychnus der Insel und Ports Malta’ summarizes the entire sequence of events. Zündt’s map was financed by Nuremberg’s city council, which according to Jessica Maier in her article published in the Renaissance Quarterly Journal*, ‘clearly had an established tradition of procuring celebratory images of Christian victories.’

On the 11th of September 1565, Grand Master de Valette placed an order for Burgundy wine, just as the Ottomans were being chased from Maltese soil by the Gran Soccorso relief force from Sicily. Valette was planning a sumptuous supper to celebrate the lifting of the Great Siege. Heritage Malta has recreated elements from this momentous occasion in a refined, gourmet hamper for you to gift this Christmas. The hamper features a bottle of Chablis Burgundy wine, along with exclusively commissioned pecorino cheese, pork salami, semolina and flour ‘ship’s’ biscuits (modern-day galletti) along with limited edition prints of Zündt’s map and a brief historical account of the celebratory meal and its context, packaged in a bespoke presentation box.

*Renaissance Quarterly, Volume 75, Issue 2, summer 2022, pp. 459 - 507 To gift the gourmand in your life order here: heritagemalta.mt/store/ great-siege-victory-hamper/