2 Tari - Jean de Vallette

Jean de Vallette served as Grand Master from 1557 until his death in 1568, and it was under his command that the Order repelled the Ottoman siege of 1565 — an engagement involving some 40,000 Ottoman troops against a garrison of roughly 6,000 Knights and Maltese soldiers. The siege's failure is widely considered one of the decisive military reversals of the sixteenth century, and coinage struck in the years immediately following carries the weight of that moment in institutional memory.

The Tari denomination derives from the Arab tari, a monetary unit that had circulated in Sicily and southern Italy for centuries before the Knights adopted it for their own issues on Malta.