Valletta in the context of "Maltese language"

Malta, officially the Republic of Malta, is an island country in Southern Europe located in the Mediterranean Sea, between Sicily and North Africa. It consists of an archipelago 80 km (50 mi) south of Italy, 284 km (176 mi) east of Tunisia, and 333 km (207 mi) north of Libya. The two official languages are Maltese and English. The country's capital is Valletta, which is the smallest capital city in the European Union (EU) by both area and population.

With a population of about 542,000 spread over an area of 316 km (122 sq mi), Malta is the world's tenth-smallest country by area and the ninth-most densely populated. Various sources consider the country to consist of a single urban region, for which reason it is often described as a city-state.

Hospitaller Malta, known in Maltese history as the Knights' Period (Maltese: Żmien il-Kavallieri, lit. 'Time of the Knights'), was a de facto state which existed between 1530 and 1798 when the Mediterranean islands of Malta and Gozo were ruled by the Order of St. John of Jerusalem. It was formally a vassal state of the Kingdom of Sicily, and it came into being when Emperor Charles V granted the islands as well as the city of Tripoli in modern Libya to the Order, following the latter's loss of Rhodes in 1522. Hospitaller Tripoli was lost to the Ottoman Empire in 1551, but an Ottoman attempt to take Malta in 1565 failed.

Following the 1565 siege, the Order decided to settle permanently in Malta and began to construct a new capital city, Valletta. For the next two centuries, Malta went through a Golden Age, characterized by a flourishing of the arts, architecture, and an overall improvement in Maltese society. In the mid-17th century, the Order was the de jure proprietor over some islands in the Caribbean, making it the smallest state to colonize the Americas.

A debtors' prison is a prison for people who are unable to pay debt. Until the mid-19th century, debtors' prisons (usually similar in form to locked workhouses) were a common way to deal with unpaid debt in Western Europe. Destitute people who were unable to pay a court-ordered judgment would be incarcerated in these prisons until they had worked off their debt via labour or secured outside funds to pay the balance. The product of their labour went towards both the costs of their incarceration and their accrued debt. Increasing access and lenience throughout the history of bankruptcy law have made prison terms for unaggravated indigence obsolete over most of the world.

Since the late 20th century, the term debtors' prison has also sometimes been applied by critics to criminal justice systems in which a court can sentence someone to prison over willfully unpaid criminal fees, usually following the order of a judge. For example, in some jurisdictions within the United States, people can be held in contempt of court and jailed after willful non-payment of child support, garnishments, confiscations, fines, or back taxes. Additionally, though properly served civil duties over private debts in nations such as the United States will merely result in a default judgment being rendered in absentia if the defendant willfully declines to appear by law, a substantial number of indigent debtors are legally incarcerated for the crime of failing to appear at civil debt proceedings as ordered by a judge. In this case, the crime is not indigence, but disobeying the judge's order to appear before the court. Critics argue that the "willful" terminology is subject to individual mens rea determination by a judge, rather than statute, and that since this presents the potential for judges to incarcerate legitimately indigent individuals, it amounts to a de facto "debtors' prison" system.

The University of Malta (Maltese: L-Università ta' Malta, UM, formerly UOM) is a public research university located in the towns of Msida and Valletta, which serves as the flagship and national university of the Republic of Malta. It offers undergraduate bachelor's degrees, postgraduate master's degrees and postgraduate doctorates. It is a member of the European University Association, the European Access Network, Association of Commonwealth Universities, the Utrecht Network, the Santander Network, the Compostela Group, the European Association for University Lifelong Learning (EUCEN) and the International Student Exchange Programme (ISEP).

In post-nominals the university's name is abbreviated as Melit; a shortened form of Melita (a Latinised form of the Greek Μελίτη).

Pie postulatio voluntatis (English: The Most Pious Request) is a papal bull issued on 15 February 1113 by Pope Paschal II, in which the Pope formally recognized the establishment of the Knights Hospitaller and confirmed their independence and sovereignty. Today, the document is preserved at the National Library of Malta in Valletta, Malta.

Malta is an island in Southern Europe. It is the largest and most populous of the three major islands that constitute the Maltese Archipelago and the country of Malta. The island is situated in the Mediterranean Sea directly south of Italy and north of Libya. It lies south-east of the smaller islands of Gozo and Comino. The island is 27 kilometres (17 mi) long and 14.5 kilometres (9 mi) wide, with a total area of 246 square kilometres (95 sq mi). The capital is Valletta, while the largest locality is Rabat. The island is made up of many small towns, which together form one larger urban zone with a population of 409,259. The landscape is characterised by low hills with terraced fields.

The 1813–1814 Malta plague epidemic (Maltese: l-epidemija tal-pesta tal-1813–1814) was the last major outbreak of plague on the islands of Malta and Gozo. It occurred between March 1813 and January 1814 on Malta and between February and May 1814 on Gozo, and the epidemic was officially declared to be over in September 1814. It resulted in approximately 4500 deaths, which was about 5% of the islands' population.

The plague outbreak had begun in Constantinople in 1812 and it spread to other parts of the Ottoman Empire, including Egypt. The disease was imported to Malta from Alexandria on board the brigantine San Nicola in late March 1813. Some of its crew members had contracted the disease and died, and although the vessel and crew were quarantined, the disease spread to the local population since infected cargo from the vessel was stolen and sold in Valletta. The disease appeared in the city in mid-April, and the outbreak was severe by mid-May.