The Monks of War

by Desmond Seward

  Under the Order's benevolent despotism the Maltese grew rich from the Levant trade and from cotton. An English tourist, Mr Brydone, wrote of Valetta's streets in 1770 as being 'crowded with well dressed people who have all the appearance of health and affluence'. Bread was cheap, its price carefully controlled. The streets were swept and policed, health regulations were far in advance of their day, and the penal code was surprisingly enlightened. There were almshouses for the aged poor and an orphanage. This benevolence extended to the European mainland. In the 1770s Henry Swinburne came across a hospice in Puglia which the Order had recently founded for humble travellers, offering them free food, beds and stabling.

  Throughout the eighteenth century the Knights of Malta continued to see plenty of action at sea, ships of the line supporting the galleys after 1704 though never replacing them. In 1716 the Order joined Venice and the Papacy in a last Holy League, which made a gallant attempt to save the Morea. Between 1723 and 1749 Fra' Jacques de Chambray sailed on thirty-one caravans, taking over eleven prizes and amassing a spoglio of 400,000 livres. Fra' Pierre-André de Suffren de Saint-Tropez, formerly captain of a galley, served with the French Navy during the American War of Independence, outsailing and outgunning a British fleet far larger than his own in the Indian Ocean in 1782–3. (He was rewarded with the title of Vice-Admiral of France and has been called with some justice the greatest of all French naval tacticians.) The Order's own navy sailed with those of Spain and Portugal in 1784 to shell Algiers, while until the last decade of the century its caravans patrolled the Mediterranean and guarded the Italian coast.

  Part of the Adriatic coast of southern Puglia is known as the 'Difesa di Malta' on account of its contribution to the island. (In 1775 the Knights built a masseria or fortified manor house of that name near Ostuni; it still stands amid the olive groves.) The Order owned particularly rich estates in this area, shipping wine, corn, oil and almonds to their island home, together with valuable revenues. The locals did not begrudge them. For centuries Moslem slave-raiders had come here in search of prey, no woman daring to walk along a lonely beach. Nothing reassured the Pugliesi more than a glimpse of a black galley flying a red flag with a white cross.

  Some historians claim that the reduced activity of the Order's navy during the late eighteenth century indicates decline. The reverse is true. It was inactive because it had been so successful. The pirate states of North Africa no longer bothered to build large ships because they knew that these would inevitably be caught or sunk by Maltese galleys. As soon as the Knights left Malta, Algerian piracy revived, becoming a major threat to merchant shipping in the Mediterranean – an eloquent tribute to the Knights' policing.

  The Order of Malta's standing remained high in every Catholic country, its priors and bailiffs ranking with the great nobles of the land. If the Prince Grand Prior of Germany ruled only a very modest little state at Heitersheim (near the Alsatian border in what is now Baden Württemberg) and was overshadowed by the Hoch und Deutschmeister, his opposite numbers in France, Spain and Portugal were scions of the reigning dynasty; in the ill-starred year of 1789 the Duc de Berry became Grand Prior of France, while Charles III of Spain made his son Prior of Castile, and in Portugal Dom Miguel, grandson of Mary I, became Prior of Crato. At a more modest and local level, an important bailiff such as the Prior of St Gilles in Provence or the Prior of Barletta in Puglia enjoyed enormous influence.

  The Knights still saw their life as a spiritual calling. On Malta during the last decades of the seventeenth century half a dozen of the older brethren lived permanently in a retreat house created for them by the Jesuits, serving 'Our Lords the Sick' daily in the Sacred Infirmary, saying the Office punctiliously and practising mental prayer. The Vie de Messire Gabriel Dubois de la Ferté, published at Paris in 1712, is the life of their leader. Born in 1644, he served in Louis XIV's army as well as in the Order's navy during the campaigns of Crete and the Morea, captaining a galley, before being given shore jobs on Malta. Having received the minute commandery of Le Breil-aux-Francs in the depths of the French countryside, he found it in ruins but soon made it a centre of prayer and alms-giving. He said Office in its chapel every morning, giving food and medicine to beggars before going out to nurse the lonely and forgotten. He sat by the bedsides of men whose maladies stank so horribly that no priest could bear to go near them.

  A man who slept in a hayloft and who was known to hand his shirt to a tramp, Fra' Gabriel none the less lived up to his social position, dining with the local gentry. When he died in 1702 they mourned him deeply and believed he had been a saint. A committed hospitaller, his life showed what the vocation could mean. Under a contemporary engraving of Fra' Gabriel is written

  De la Croix du Sauveur, je tire ma Noblesse –

  J'en fus le Religieux, I'Enfant et le Soldat.

  J'en fis tous mes plaisirs et toutes mes richesses

  Par elle je vainquis le Grand Turc au combat.

  ('From the Saviour's Cross I draw my noble blood – from it, as page and as soldier I was a monk. I accounted it all my joy and all my riches – by it I overcame the Grand Turk in battle.') This is the authentic voice of the true Knight of Malta.

  Among other brethren of this type, Fra' Gaspard de Simiane la Coste (who lived half a century before Fra' Gabriel) stands out. He built a hospital for galley-slaves at Marseilles, nursing them himself and preaching the Gospel. He refused to leave them when the plague came in 1649 and died of it.

  The Order inspired a highly readable historian in the Abbé Vertot, whose Histoire des Chevaliers Hospitalliers de S. Jean de Jérusalem was published in 1726. He wrote for the general public, adapting Bosio and dal Pozzo, and is often inaccurate, but he provided an enjoyable introduction to the story of the Knights. His book had great success and was even admired by Edward Gibbon.

  The Teutonic Order survived the loss of Livland and also that of its rich Venetian commandery in 1595. During the same year, 1595, the then Hoch und Deutschmeister, Archduke Maximilian of Austria, was able to send 100 Knights to Hungary at the head of 400 horsemen – to fight the Turks. He summoned a chapter-general to Mergentheim in 1606, which inaugurated a revival of the Order's spiritual vocation. Henceforward, brethren had to perform their novitiate at specified houses, while every commandery had to have a resident priest.

  During the seventeenth century a Teutonic Knight's military calling became that of an officer in the Holy Roman Emperor's army, serving against the Turks in the wars to free the Balkans. They helped to defend Vienna in 1683, and twelve years later founded the famous 'Hoch und Deutschmeister Regiment'. During the eighteenth century the brethren produced some distinguished field marshals, notably Guido von Starhemberg, Philipp von Harrach and Maximilian von Merveldt.

  A Westphalian, born in 1764, Count Max von Merveldt served as a hussar against the Turks before entering the Order in 1791. He then fought in the Revolutionary Wars against the French, winning the coveted Maria-Theresa Cross for his gallantry at Neerwinden. During the Napoleonic Wars he was prominent as both cavalry commander and diplomat, becoming Feldmarschall Leutnant and Austrian ambassador to St Petersburg. In 1808, after his commandery had been secularized by the French, he was dispensed of his vows and married. Merveldt died in 1815 when he was Austrian ambassador to London, his widow declining the offer of a state funeral at Westminster Abbey.

  Although bereft of its Baltic lands, the Teutonic Order retained enormous prestige in Germany and the Habsburg domains, where it still possessed twelve bailiwicks. The Hoch und Deutschmeister took precedence over Prince Archbishops, while the Komtur of Coblenz and the Komtur of Altshausen ranked ex officio as Counts of the Empire. Admission was much sought after– magnificent commanderies in the Rhineland, Westphalia, Austria or Bohemia made enviable homes for pious bachelor noblemen – but required sixteen quarterings of German nobility. The Order's little state on the Tauber river in Württemberg, ruled from Mergentheim (now Bad Mergentheim), consisted of some forty square miles of farmland with
perhaps 200,000 inhabitants. Like that of most princely courts in Germany during the Age of the Baroque, life at the Hoch und Deutschmeister's court was a comfortable round of religious services, card games and hunting parties. His imposing 'Fürstenhof at Mergentheim was a massive schloss, patrolled by a handful of white-uniformed lifeguards.

  The Teutonic Knights never forgot their lost lands, making a formal protest when the Elector of Brandenburg took possession of East Prussia on the extinction of his cousin Duke Albrecht's line in 1618, and again when the Elector crowned himself 'King in Prussia' at Königsberg in 1701. They too found a fine historian. In 1784 the Komtur Wilhelm Eugen Josef de Wal published the first volume of his monumental history of the Teutonic Order, which was dedicated to the Hoch und Deutschmeister of the time, Archduke Maximilian Franz. Wal, who wrote in French, is the Teutonic Vertot. His purpose was to justify the Knights' historic calling and to glorify their achievements. The Komtur was more scientific and less of a popularizer than Vertot, going straight to the primary sources, such as the chronicles of Petrus von Dusburg or Pusilge. In his view, articulate brethren had a duty to make known their order's traditions. He is still surprisingly readable.

  During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the military orders of Spain and Portugal turned into convenient civil lists which provided their Knights with titles and pensions, even if in theory they were bound to recite a simple daily Office. Despite their decline, they remained prominent in Iberian life for many years to come. In 1625 there were 949 Knights of Santiago, 306 of Calatrava and 197 of Alcántara. Twenty years later, together with the Knights of Montesa, they founded the Regimento de los Ordenes, which survived in the Spanish army into the present century. Grandees continued to wear the habito or choir mantle with pride – in his self-portrait, Velasquez ostentatiously placed the red sword-cross of Santiago on his doublet. Clerigos and commanders lived according to their rules until the eighteenth century, when they grew impoverished and their priories fell into ruin. (The castle of Montesa was destroyed by an earthquake in 1748.) The military tradition was preserved by insisting that Knights must be army officers with eight years' service – many were Irish émigrés. Candidates had to show four generations of paternal and maternal nobility.

  In Tuscany the Order of Santo Stefano was active until the late seventeenth century. One of its grand masters, the Grand Duke Ferdinand II (1621–70), sent galleys manned by his Knights to raid Greece and North Africa. He had statues of himself and of the Order's founder, Cosimo I, cast from captured Turkish cannon and placed outside the conventual church at Pisa, which was already filled with infidel trophies: standards, scimitars and shields. The island of Elba became the order's naval base. However, when the Tuscan Knights sailed with the Holy League in 1684, it was not only their first expedition for many years but their last. The cause of their decline was the pathological inertia of the effete Medici Grand Dukes. Even so, they retained a certain prestige, the title of Count being conferred on those who founded commanderies – which was how the Count of Monte-Cristo supposedly acquired his title in Dumas' novel.

  Three new 'religions' were active in the Mediterranean during the seventeenth century. They were modelled on Santo Stefano, their Knights being allowed to marry. The Order of SS Maurice and Lazarus, established in 1572, was based on the leper-knights' former commanderies in Piedmont. The dukes of Savoy provided grand masters. Its Knights, who wore green cloaks with a white-and-green cross 'botonny', equipped and manned galleys, besides financing lazar houses. (Membership was a prerequisite for anyone who hoped to become a Knight of the august Piedmontese court order of the Annunziata.) In France the old leper knight commanderies were appropriated by Henri IV to create an 'Order of Our Lady of Mount Carmel and St Lazarus'. Louis XIV tried in vain to make it a rival of Malta, appointing as its Grand Master the Marquis de Dangeau, whose principal achievement was to devise 'habits' of white satin enhanced by purple cloaks.

  The most interesting newcomer was the Constantinian Order of St George. Although claiming Byzantine origin, this had been founded in the sixteenth century by a family of Greek exiles from Albania called Angeli, who persuaded the Papacy to recognize its head as Pretender to the Eastern Empire. In 1680 some of its Knights fought for King John III Sobieski of Poland against the Turks at the relief of Vienna. In 1698 the grand mastership of the Order was bought from the last of the Angeli by Francesco Farnese, Duke of Parma. From 1717 to 1719, a Constantinian Regiment of 2,000 musketeers and grenadiers in royal-blue uniforms with red facings, officered by ten Knights, campaigned against the Turks in Dalmatia and Albania – the only time it went into action. In 1734 the grand mastership passed to the royal house of the Two Sicilies. Its cross was a gold-edged red cross fleury with a gold chi-rho monogram, its choir mantle sky-blue.

  The last military religious order to be founded was the Bavarian Order of St George, Defender of the Faith, in 1729. The founder was the Elector Charles Albert (later the Holy Roman Emperor Charles VII) and the statutes were approved by Pope Benedict XIV. They were later amended by the Elector Charles Theodore in 1778. The Grand Masters were the Heads of the House of Wittelsbach, in later years kings of Bavaria, while the Grand Priors were Princes of the Blood. The membership consisted of 100 of Bavaria's most distinguished Catholic noblemen, who had to show thirty-two quarterings. The Order's cross was eight-pointed like that of Malta, with a gold ball at each point and a white border, a gold medallion in the centre bearing a representation of St George.

  Whatever some historians may imply, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were far from being a Baroque sunset for military orders. They flourished right up to the destruction of the ancien régime. If less austere than when they were in the Holy Land or on the Baltic, they nevertheless continued to produce not only fine soldiers and fighting seamen but dedicated religious as well.

  VIII

  SURVIVAL – AGAINST ALL ODDS

  1789–1995

  'The last aristocrats, men from a single social and even religious caste whose very existence is not suspected by the man in the street.'

  Roger Peyrefitte, Chevaliers de Malte

  17

  SURVIVAL – AGAINST ALL ODDS

  Although the military religious orders no longer wage war, most of them survive in some form. They have done so despite a savage and sustained onslaught by the French Revolution, by Napoleon, by Hitler and by Marxist Socialism, not to mention intermittent attacks by a whole host of lesser enemies. The Knights of Malta have proved best at weathering cruel storms, not least because of their hospitaller tradition and religious calling. Ironically, another of the reasons for their survival also explains why they have acquired so many enemies: the fact that they provide the last defendable bastions of hereditary nobility. They alone preserve the mystique of rank and birth in a world which finds aristocracy not merely alien but incomprehensible. For the military orders are the final refuge of the ancien régime.

  Predictably, the French Revolution was hostile to military orders. There were demands for the suppression of French commanderies, numerous pamphlets attacking 'monks in arms'. The commanderies survived for a time because of the value of France's trade with Malta, but in 1791 it was discovered that the Order of Malta had subsidized Louis XVI's unsuccessful flight to Varennes. The suppression of the three French Grand Priories which ensued, and the consequent loss of revenue, were a very serious blow to the Knights.

  In 1797, when he was planning his expedition to Egypt, General Bonaparte reported

  400 knights and at most a regiment of 500 men are the only defence of La Valette's city. The inhabitants, numbering more than 100,000, are well disposed towards us and hate the Chevaliers who can no longer feed themselves and are dying of hunger. I have purposely had their Italian property confiscated. With Malta and Cyprus we will be masters of the Mediterranean.

  It would give the Corsican parvenu – who once described the Order as 'an institution to support in idleness the younger sons of privileged familie
s' – real pleasure to destroy this maritime Bastille. On 9 June 1798 a French fleet appeared off Valetta with 29,000 troops on board.

  If the shrewd and courageous Emmanuel de Rohan had still been Grand Master, Malta might well have survived even an attack by Napoleon Bonaparte. But Rohan had died in 1797 and his successor, Fra' Ferdinand von Hompesch zu Bolheim, titular Bailiff of Brandenburg, was little more than a petulant figurehead whom the Knights elected merely because he was a German, in the vain hope that this would endear their Order to the Habsburg Emperor at Vienna. Hompesch announced that he had no military skills, handing over the defence's conduct to the Congregation of War, which meant that the Knights were led by a war office instead of a general. Moreover, there were enemies within the walls; not French, as has been claimed by Francophobes or misinformed historians, but Spaniards whose country was an ally of France. The Spanish envoy ordered Spanish Knights not to fight, and they refused to take any part in the defence. Later the envoy welcomed the invaders.

  Although many of the 250 brethren on the island were too old to bear arms, others were ready to fight to the death, and especially French Knights embittered by the Revolution. Their mistake was attempting to defend all Malta and Gozo instead of withdrawing inside their impregnable fortifications, where they could have held out for three months or until the English Mediterranean fleet arrived. Had they done so, the attackers would certainly have sailed on. But early reverses in small engagements demoralized the Maltese, who began to desert. Some Knights were undismayed, such as the Bailiff de La Tour du Pin and 16 young brethren who manned the guns themselves when their troops fled, or the Bailiff Tommasi who tried to make a stand with unarmed men, or the bedridden old Bailiff de Tigné who had himself carried on to the walls. Then the Maltese mutinied, and the citizens begged the Grand Master to make peace. Hompesch lost his nerve, asking for an armistice. (La Tour du Pin was convinced that German freemasons had ordered him to surrender.) Bonaparte entered Valetta on 12 June and the Knights were swiftly evicted from Malta. If anyone was to blame for their humiliating collapse, it was the Grand Master Hompesch.