The Shield and The Sword

by Ernle Bradford

  But, as was almost inevitable, the glamorous reputation that had come to surround the Order ever since the siege of 1565, coupled with a decline in the crusading spirit (something which had happened in Europe centuries before), gradually resulted in a weakening of the Order’s morale. In the original rule of Raymond de Puy members of the Order had been enjoined that ‘whenever they are in a house, or a church, or wherever women may be present, they are mutually to protect one another’s chastity. Neither may women wash the brethrens’ hands or feet, or make their beds, and may the High God protect them and watch over them in this matter.’

  These enjoinments to the chaste life were to have less and less meaning for the young Knights as the centuries passed. The very proximity of Malta to Europe meant that the tone and pattern of life as it was lived on the Continent were quickly absorbed into Malta. And life for the nobility in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe was a far call from the asceticism which the rules of the Order ordained. Drinking, whoring, gambling and duelling were the leisure activities of young nobles, and it was hardly likely that members coming from the easy-going courts of Europe would suddenly put on the face of medieval knighthood. Certainly they would go out whenever required upon the caravans, and certainly they would do battle against the infidel whenever the opportunity offered, but they were not going to wear hair shirts and behave like monks when they were back home in Malta. Rhodes had been cut off, isolated geographically and spiritually from the western world, and it had been possible there to maintain an anachronistic society. Malta was quite different. Before very long even the statutes of the Order, although frowning upon open immorality, more or less admitted that the sins of the flesh existed—and that it was only the open display of them that must at all costs be avoided.

  The following, quoted in Porter’s History, gives a fair indication of the attitude which of necessity had to be adopted towards the private lives of the Knights.

  It has been very rightly ordained that no member of our brotherhood, of whatever position or rank he may be, shall be permitted to support, maintain, or consort with women of loose character either in their own houses or abroad. If any one, abandoning his honour and reputation, shall be so barefaced as to act in opposition to this regulation, and shall render himself publicly [my italics] infamous, after having been three times warned by his superior to desist from this vice, we decree, after the expiration of forty days from the date of his first warning, he shall, if a commander, be deprived of his commandery, and if a simple brother of the convent, he shall lose his seniority. If any member of our Order shall be so barefaced as to adopt as his own a child who may be born to him from an illegitimate connection (such as is not recognised by law), and attempt to bestow on him the name of his family, we decree that all associates of loose women who may be ranked as incestuous, sacrilegious, and adulterers shall be declared incapable of possessing any property or of holding any office or dignity in our Order. And we designate as an associate of loose women not only those who are notorious evil livers and have had judgement passed upon them as such, but also any who, without sense of shame or fear of God, and forgetting his profession, shall entertain and support a woman of doubtful character, notorious for her bad life and evil conversation, or shall reside with her constantly.

  As is quite clear, this injunction was such that one could, in the Maltese expression, ‘Drive a horse and carriage through it or around it.’ The city of Valetta, that monument to the siege and to the greatest Grand Master in the Order’s history, soon became a byword in Europe for the laxity of its morals and the availability of its women. Many a traveller making the Grand Tour during the next two centuries would find himself happily accommodated in Malta with a mistress and a house overlooking the splendour of Grand Harbour. To quote Porter again, whose prose has the true Victorian ring: ‘The streets were thronged with the frail beauties of Spain, Italy, Sicily, and the Levant, nor were the dark-haired houris of Tripoli and Tunis wanting to complete an array of seduction and temptation too strong for aught but a saint to resist…’ And there were few saints among the Knights.

  The notorious promiscuity of the island provoked two reactions. The first was the arrival of the Jesuits bent on reforming the Knights (thus bringing a fourth element into the power politics of Malta), and the second was the widespread dissemination of the pox, or the ‘French disease’ as it was generally termed by all those who did not belong to the Langue of France. A chaste Knight, as another saying has it, was as rare as a black swan. A French visitor writing in the late seventeenth century warned his correspondent that the Maltese pox was the worst in the world, ‘being a compendium of every possible kind’. Earlier in the same century, an English traveller, George Sandys, wrote in his memoirs that ‘there are three nunneries in Valetta: the one for Virgins, another for penitent Whores (of impenitent here are a store) and the third for their Bastards’. The Maltese name Spitiri, a corruption of the Italian Ospedale (the Hospital or Foundling Hospital) is said to derive from the fact that illegitimate children were automatically designated ‘Of the Hospital’.

  Patrick Brydone in his A Tour through Sicily and Malta (1776) recorded witnessing the departure of a caravan of three galleys on its way for a raid on Tunis, and described how the Knights were all waving from the galleys at their mistresses who ‘openly weeping for their departure’ thronged the bastions of Valetta. Despite innumerable efforts over the next two centuries to curb the amount of prostitutes in Valetta the authorities were never successful for long. If the Maltese themselves could be shamed and disciplined into abandoning their trade, then it was only too easy to import ‘hordes of priestesses of Venus from every nation’.

  Chapter 24

  SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

  Although the relationship between the Knights and the Maltese was nearly always a somewhat distant one, there can be no doubt that under the autocratic rule of this foreign body the Maltese islands flourished in a way they never had before. From being an ‘obscure rock’, a small archipelago of insignificant islands whose natives spoke a tenth-century dialect of Arabic, Malta became one of the most famous places in the Mediterranean. As the headquarters of the most powerful and richest fraternity in Europe, whose Grand Masters vied with one another for the splendour of the monuments that they left behind, Malta became a jewel-box of architecture. Fountains sparkled at its street corners; the magnificent Auberges of the various Langues competing in grandeur and magnificence gleamed white under the southern sun; an aqueduct brought down water from the rocky hills where the ancient city stood; and ramparts and forts sprang up at every corner of the island. Great underground granaries ensured that, if ever the Turk came again, the population would be more than adequately fed on the grain that came down regularly from Sicily. All of this prosperity was reflected in the villages of the Maltese themselves where great churches, large enough often to be called cathedrals in most countries, dominated the small cube-shaped, North African style houses of the countrymen. Village competed against village in the splendour of the festas in honour of their patron saints, a large part of the money for these extravaganzas, so dear to Mediterranean hearts, being provided by the public treasury. The island had indeed become ‘Malta of gold, Malta of silver…’

  The money for fortifying and embellishing the island did not only come from the Order’s holdings and commanderies in Europe. It was also a by-product of the lucrative corso, those caravans or excursions against the Moslems in which the Knights could enjoy the sense of fighting for their Faith at the same time as acquiring valuable plunder—silks, spices and slaves, precious metals and gems, together with more mundane but equally acceptable cargoes such as wine, grain, and fruit. The agriculture of the island itself improved greatly during these centuries with the benefit of improved irrigation, the introduction of better types of vines, the extensive cultivation of citrus fruits (Maltese blood oranges became famous throughout Europe), and—at a later date—the introduction of cotton. The latter was for quite a lo
ng period to dominate the island’s economy and Maltese sails became renowned throughout the Mediterranean both for the quality of the cloth and for the skill of the island’s sailmakers.

  The prosperity of Malta was in marked contrast to the condition of most other Mediterranean islands during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. All those in the East which had come under the sway of the Ottomans slumbered in dusty dejection, their spirits broken by the taxgatherers from Istanbul and by regular forfeiture of their young men and women: some to the Janissaries and others to the homes and harems of their masters. Corsica far to the north, although administered in theory by the Republic of Genoa, was in fact farmed out to an unscrupulous commercial corporation, the Banco di San Giorgio, which wrung from the island all that it could and put nothing back in return.

  Sardinia, a subject state of Spain, was equally exploited and the misery of its inhabitants provoked innumerable revolts which were stamped out with callous brutality. Both of these islands were ill-protected and lay too far from Malta for the Knights to shield them—as they did Sicily—with the result that they were regularly visited by the Barbary corsairs who regarded them almost as their own provinces which they could enter freely and loot at their pleasure. Sicily itself was little better off, for the Spanish viceroys bled the island dry, while themselves living in their comfortable court at Palermo regardless of the sufferings of the peasantry.

  In marked contrast to all these areas of the Mediterranean—areas which from their natural wealth and resources should have been comparatively prosperous—the little archipelago to the south presented a scene of orderliness, comfort, richness, and even splendour. Although Maltese historians have often enough decried the Order of St John, pointing to its aristocratic exclusiveness and the droit de seigneur attitude that the Knights were inclined to display towards their womenfolk, the fact remains that no other island in the Mediterranean was so well-governed or so prosperous. In the accounts of numerous European travellers one comes across their pleasure, and indeed astonishment, at finding after the squalor and poverty of Italy and Sicily the well-ordered state of Malta. Thackeray, although writing in the nineteenth century when the island had come under British rule, only echoes the views of many predecessors:

  Nor does [Valetta] disappoint you on a closer inspection, as many a foreign town does. The streets are thronged with a lively comfortable-looking population; the poor seem to inhabit handsome stone palaces, with balconies and projecting windows of heavy carved stone. The lights and shadows, the cries and stenches, the fruit-shops and fish-stalls, the dresses and chatter of all nations…the shovel-hatted priests and bearded capuchins; the tobacco, grapes, onions, and sunshine; the signboards, the statues of saints and little chapels which jostle the stranger’s eyes as he goes up the famous stairs from the Water-gate, make a scene of such pleasant confusion and liveliness as I have never witnessed before.

  The best indication of the island’s prosperous and healthy condition is to be found in its population figures. In The Story of Malta Robin Blouet comments:

  During the next two and a half centuries [after 1530] the knights of St John spent lavishly on fortifications, ordnance establishments, new towns, palaces and villas. The Maltese prospered on this spending and on the spending necessary to maintain the high standard of living which the knights enjoyed. During the Order’s rule the number of Maltese increased fivefold, new trades and industries were developed and the islands became the home of one of the most prosperous communities in Europe…

  One source of the island’s wealth lay in the slave trade. In their early days the Knights had been content if they could but fill the oar-benches of their galleys and have a work-force of slaves available for building and maintaining the fortifications. Gradually, however, as they acquired a surplus, they began to follow the practice of the Turks, the Tunisians, and the Algerians. Slaves were regularly sold to traders from Genoa, Venice, and other Italian cities. Even as late as the eighteenth century there were still about two thousand slaves employed in Malta. They were either Turks captured from Ottoman trading or fighting vessels, Arabs or Berbers from the North African coast, or Negroes who had themselves been enslaved to the oar-benches of Arab galleys.

  The chronicles of historians of the Order such as Bosio and Vertot reveal quite clearly that, even if the lives of the Knights had lost the salt tang of asceticism in Malta, they still remained the finest seamen afloat. In action after action the Cross of St John triumphed over the Crescent, and the news that the Maltese galleys were cruising off the Barbary coast was enough to send all the Moslem sea captains scuttling back to their ports and harbours. In 1638, for example, six galleys of the Order came up with a Turkish convoy underway from Tripoli for Constantinople. The Turkish merchant ships were escorted by three large men-of-war, sufficient had they been well handled to drive off the much lighter and less heavily armed galleys. But the Knights pressed home their attack with such efficiency, and diverted the fire of their opponents so successfully, that they managed to capture not only the whole convoy but the men-of-war themselves. An action which, in theory at any rate, should certainly have been won by the Turks was turned into a triumph for the Knights, even though their cost in dead and wounded was a high one.

  It was actions like these that enabled the Order’s small fleet to exercise for decade after decade an influence throughout the Mediterranean quite disproportionate to its size. Two years later, on an offensive sweep off the Tunisian coast, the Order’s galleys even managed to burst into La Goletta, the fortified harbour of Tunis, and cut out from under the guns of the fortifications six corsairs’ ships. Such an action was successful not only in its immediate result but in its long-term effect of demoralising the enemy. Had a similar raid been made upon the harbour of Valetta by the Turks there can be no doubt what the result would have been. Watchtower after watchtower along the coast would have reported the enemy’s advance, the galleys would have put to sea to meet them, and every gun commanding the entrance to Grand Harbour would have been manned within minutes of the first sighting reports. The whole of Malta was run like a large warship; a floating fortress anchored in the centre of the Mediterranean. Close to North Africa though it lies, south indeed of the latitude of Tunis, Malta was not permitted to relax into the languorous torpor of the Lotus Eaters.

  In 1644 the Knights captured a large Turkish galleon in which, among other distinguished passengers, was none other than a sultana of the imperial seraglio. The Sublime Porte was sufficiently irritated and disturbed to dream of reviving the ambition of the great Suleiman, and attempt another invasion of Malta. But nearly a hundred years had passed, and the power of the Ottoman was not what it had been in the days when the whole of Europe seemed to he helpless before the onrushing Janissaries and the innumerable galleys of the Ottoman fleet. The Grand Master at this time was a Frenchman, Jean de Lascaris, who on receipt of the news that a serious attack was threatened against Malta despatched messengers to all the commanderies in Europe requesting the immediate presence of every available member. The invasion scare, like so many others throughout the years to come, proved false. No Turks advanced over the blue acres of the Ionian to attempt what Suleiman the Magnificent had failed to achieve. The last real invasion in fact, although only on a modest scale, had taken place in 1615 when sixty galleys had come to the assault of Malta and had landed several thousand men. They had been daunted, however, by the immensity of the fortifications and by the inaccessibility of any suitable harbours. (All the bays and inlets were now dominated by watchtowers or fortresses.) After a few inconclusive skirmishes the raiders had withdrawn.

  Although Malta was often enough in the future to raise the alarm throughout Europe that the island was threatened, this served more to remind absent Knights and others of their responsibilities—financial and otherwise—than to arouse any great interest among the European powers. Most of them in any case had already established a modus vivendi with the Ottomans. As early as 1536 Francis I had conclude
d a Franco-Turkish alliance, this at a time when the Turks were without doubt Europe’s greatest enemies. In later years, as Sir Godfrey Fisher writes in Barbary Legend, there arose