A history measured in millennia
Few dogs can claim so old a pedigree. The Maltese has charmed traders, poets and aristocrats for the better part of three thousand years.
Dogs of the harbour towns
Small white companion dogs appear again and again around the ancient Mediterranean — on Greek pottery, in Roman writing, and in the trade that moved through the island of Malta and the port towns of the region. The breed almost certainly takes its name from those harbours, where merchants are thought to have prized the little dogs as gifts and companions.
A favourite of the courts
By the Renaissance the Maltese had become a fixture of European nobility. It sat for portrait painters, travelled in the sleeves of fine coats, and was recorded admiringly by naturalists who marvelled that so small a dog could carry itself with such spirit.
Into the modern era
The breed we recognise today was refined through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when kennel clubs set down a written standard describing its size, its carriage and its pure white single coat. Through every change of fashion the essential dog has stayed the same: a gentle, devoted companion built to share a human life at close quarters.