Palace Armoury

5,000-piece medieval arms and armour collection in the Grand Masters' Palace

The Palace Armoury occupies the southern wing of the Grand Masters' Palace on Republic Street and holds one of Europe's most significant collections of medieval and Renaissance arms and armour. The 5,000-piece collection includes complete suits of armour for individual Grand Masters, Ottoman weapons captured at the Great Siege of 1565, and a remarkable range of period firearms, pikes, and swords. The armour is displayed largely as it would have been in the original armoury — ranked in rows, as if a standing army had just removed their equipment.

Unlike the state rooms of the palace, the armoury was purpose-built for this function and the scale of the collection is impressive. The Knights required every knight to maintain a complete suit of armour throughout their life in Malta, and the resulting accumulation over two centuries of occupation produced one of the great arms collections in Europe. Tickets cover both the armoury and the state rooms.

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A story
Among the 5,000 pieces in the Armoury is a complete suit of armour made for the child Grand Master Alof de Wignacourt, who at the time of the Great Siege was only 14 years old. The collection also includes armour captured from Ottoman soldiers at the siege — some of it still bearing damage from the battle — making it a rare surviving artefact of one of the defining military confrontations of the 16th century.