The planners and leaders of this conflict were astonishingly old by the standards of the time

The planners and leaders of this conflict were astonishingly old by the standards of the time. The contest for Malta brought together the collective experience of an enduring generation of potentates, admirals and generals, literally hundreds of man-years of voyages, raids and wars. Suleiman, La Valette, Don Garcia and Mustapha Pasha were all in their seventies . Turgut, preparing to sail from Tripoli, was reckoned to be eighty. Their lives stretched back to the fifteenth century. It was as if all the experience and all the war in the trackless sea had shrink to a single spot.

R. Crowley, Empires of the sea: the final battle for the Mediterranean, 1521-1580 (2008), 114-5