In 1632 Johann Friedrich Breithaupt published in Frankfurt am Main a book which was, up to then, the most detailed description of Malta.
It was only 15 years later that Gio Francesco Abela published his Descrittione di Malta.
Before these two books we must mention the book by Hieronymus Megiser, a collection of Maltese words and phrases published in 1606, and before that Jean Quintin D'Autun's Insulae Melitae Descriptio in 1536.
The last mentioned book was published before the Great Siege of Malta but the siege made Malta's name famous all over Europe where before it had been just a lonely outpost off Sicily.
For this reason and also because the situation in the centre of the Mediterranean had improved, people with means started to travel in the area. Thus was born the Grand Tour.
We can speak of two distinct waves of travel, broken off by the 1592 plague.
Already in the late 16th century Malta emerged from the previous limitations and heavy dependence on Sicily and the Spanish hemisphere. This was caused in part by the massive appearance of the English and the Dutch in Mediterranean trade.
These developments found ready response in Malta by open-minded and refined French grandmasters such as de Verdalle and Aloph de Wignacourt who, despite the suspicions of the Roman Inquisition against the influx of Northerners and new ideas, managed to put Malta towards a new "de-Sicilianised" and cosmopolitan Malta.
When Breithaupt saw Malta it was well on its way towards prosperity and cosmopolitanism.
Originally, the book Malta Island of Christian Heroes was 222 pages long but the part dedicated to Malta is only 100 pages long. This is because the author describes the whole voyage he made with the brothers Von Streitberg and the Marschalck Von Ebeneth, three young nobles that he acted as chaperon to and guide of.
Before they arrived in Malta they visited Messina and Palermo and on their voyage back to Germany they visited Naples.
The first part of the section on Malta is rather a straight description of the new city Valletta, with a splendid description of St John's which in those days was being changed from the austere forbidding church to the majestic triumph of the Baroque, branching out to the two palaces of the grand master, Boschetto and San Anton.
Then the author gets lost in a minute description of the rules of the Order. It is clear from the book as a whole that he is full of admiration for the Order and the Knights.
Thus he never mentions, for example, the problems the Order had with the sexual adventures of the Knights, nor the rather touchy relations with the popes, nor the recurrent problems with the Maltese.
The book, by well-known experts of German influences in Malta's past, can also serve as a source book of anything about Malta written in German.