Historians and Geneticists currently do not know where the Maltese people came from. The answer is difficult to find because of several things, such as Malta's invasions, with long parts in time where the population got smaller, before other people from the Mediterranean moved to Malta and married the Maltese. One unusual example of this is the exile to Malta of all of the male population from the town of Celano (Italy) in 1223, the stationing of a Norman and Sicilian garrison on Malta in 1240, the expulsion from Malta of Arabs (presumably, those who refused to convert to Christianity) commencing in 1245, the arrival of several hundred Catalan soldiers in 1283, the European repopulation of Malta that began in the 13th century,