It would seem that the plant—perhaps because of its dark colour rather like congealed blood—was more of a homoeopathic remedy than a scientific one. An analysis carried out in 1968 by the British Naval Hospital at Bighi in Malta disclosed no curative properties in the plant at all.
Quite apart from the work in the hospital the medical service of the Knights was also carried out at sea. No galley or sailing vessel belonging to the Order ever left Malta without a doctor, a surgeon and an assistant surgeon on board. One of the reasons why the Order’s ships suffered less from disease than those of most other maritime powers was the fact that strict attention was paid to cleanliness and hygiene. This in itself was difficult enough, for the average galley (which might be no more than 125 feet long between perpendiculars) had to provide accommodation for about 500 men. There were thirty to thirty-five knights, 300 oarsmen or more, and 200 soldiers, as well as a number of sailors, a professional pilot, and artificers such as carpenters and riggers. It was small wonder that the great plague first reached Europe via some Venetian galleys coming from Egypt and making their first port of call at Messina in Sicily. The records of the Order show that, even with their attention to medical care, fevers were common among the crew. Since medical definitions were in their infancy it is almost impossible to know what is meant by ‘malignant fevers’ although this may well have been malaria which has been prevalent in many parts of the Mediterranean right up to the twentieth century. The Maltese galleys suffered also from undulant fever carried in goats’ milk, a disease which was so prevalent in the island that it was for a long time commonly known in Europe as ‘Malta Fever’.
Sufferers from ‘contagious diseases’ as well as venereal diseases were not allowed to embark in the Order’s vessels although, with the limited medical knowledge and inspection of the time, some sufferers must inevitably have come aboard and passed on their ailments to others. Despite the fact that the oarsmen had their heads shaved, lice and fleas inevitably abounded under the cramped conditions in a galley. So beautiful at a distance to the eye, the galley with her flags and banners, her bright colours, her gingerbread work and her lean greyhound lines was in fact a breeding ground of disease.
One observer commented: ‘It is not necessary to look far to find an extreme contrast with the galley’s appearance. At the very moment that the galley dazzles one’s eyes with her sculptures, her draperies and her movement through the water, she horribly affronts one’s nostrils, and exudes throughout her whole length the utmost misery…’ It was not until canvas finally triumphed over the oar that it was possible within the increased breadth and depth of a sailing ship to introduce healthier and more humane conditions for both officers and crew. The young sprigs of European nobility who came out to Malta and did their first ‘caravans’ in the galleys very soon became acquainted with a harshness of life that was unknown even to a European peasant of the time.
The Order’s obligations to their duty as Hospitallers was far from confined to their work in Malta alone. They provided in the Mediterranean the first equivalent to what would now be an international ‘mercy’ or relief force. In January 1693, for instance, when the town of Augusta in Sicily was destroyed by earthquake five galleys were immediately despatched to render all possible assistance to the local inhabitants. This particular earthquake had also caused a considerable amount of damage in Malta (an island which is relatively free from seismic disturbances), yet the Order nevertheless attended to its Christian duties, taking surgeons and medicines, food and clothing to the Sicilians. Similarly in 1783 when the seaport of Reggio in Southern Calabria together with Messina in Sicily had been devastated by an earthquake the Order’s whole fleet was despatched to aid and succour the survivors.
The records show that the Sacred Infirmary in Valetta sent aboard the ships the best surgeons in the island, together with twenty medicine chests, a great number of tents to accommodate the homeless, and some 200 beds. It is evidence of the wealth and prosperity of Malta under the rule of the Knights that an island so small could afford to render assistance to its considerably larger neighbour. On this occasion the Bourbon government at Naples was so embarrassed at its own inefficiency, when contrasted with the active humanitarianism of the Knights, that a protest was delivered to Grand Master Emmanuel de Rohan, stating that the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies had never asked for help and requesting the Order to withdraw its ships. De Rohan replied that his Order was doing no more than it had done for centuries, ‘helping all Christians in distress’. This reply seems to have mollified King Ferdinand, for no further obstructions were placed in the Knights’ way and they were allowed to set up a temporary hospital in Messina for the relief of the sick and injured.
As in the Sacred Infirmary itself, where great attention was paid to a wholesome diet, the Order’s fleet was given far better rations than was customary in other navies during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Bread, vegetables, biscuit, oil and wine were all issued to the crew—wine especially when the oarsmen were showing signs of flagging in the long hot calms of Mediterranean summer, or if they were called upon for a special burst of speed in order to come up with an enemy. Fresh meat, ‘beef on the hoof’, was always embarked before leaving Malta and whenever possible, as the cattle were slaughtered, replacements were obtained at other ports of call. Poultry was also carried on board and chicken broth, as well as eggs, enlivened the diet. A basic iron ration of biscuit, salted meat and fish, together with wine and oil, meant that any galley could if necessary stay at sea for two months without provisioning.
The crews of Mediterranean galleys, whether Maltese, Genoese or Venetian, were lucky in one respect compared with the French, Dutch, English and Spanish operating on the long ocean voyages to the New World and the Far East. Their voyages never took them far away from land for any great length of time, with the result that they were nearly always able to revictual within a fortnight or so with fresh fruit and vegetables. Scurvy, that plague of the East Indiamen and the Atlantic trader, scarcely ever bothered these Mediterranean sailors. Their simple healthy diet, coupled with an indulgent climate, meant that despite the cramped conditions aboard they were in many respects better off than the sailors of the North. It must always be borne in mind that, because the galley was basically so fragile a craft, the sailing season was never very long. During the hard gales of winter and the rainy seasons of autumn and spring, the galleys were laid up and their crews were all ashore.
Chapter 26
DECLINE…
During the eighteenth century the Order of St John, although it never actually slumbered, went into a slow but steady decline. The fact of the matter was that the Order which had been formed to assist and protect Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land inevitably lost its raison d’être as The Age of Reason supplanted the Ages of Faith. Protestantism had long ago cost the Order one of its most powerful members in the dissolution of the Langue of England, and Lutheranism generally had made massive inroads throughout Europe on what had once been the monolithic stability of the Catholic Church. In the eighteenth century the onslaught of the philosophers and savants in France—the principal source of the Order’s members and finances—was bound in the long run to bring a weakening of resolve and a gradual loss of faith. But, over and above all this, it was the decay of Ottoman power and of militant Mohammedanism that induced a similar situation in the Order of St John. If Malta was, as the traveller Patrick Brydone described it, ‘the epitome of all Europe’, it must inevitably therefore have come to epitomise a Europe where the crusaders were hardly a memory, and where the concept of militant Christianity and an eternal war against the enemies of the Faith were almost incomprehensible.
The fact that the Order, even at its most lax and worldly, never quite forgot either its vocation or its historical role may perhaps be traced to the influence of the small island which was its home. The term ‘insular’ has become almost synonymous with conservative, and in Malta the Knights had one of the most conservative societie
s in the world. The people themselves were devout Catholics, ‘More Catholic than the Pope’ as they have subsequently been known to boast, and as a community largely composed of peasant-farmers, fishermen and boat-builders, they inherited the innate conservatism of these age-old patterns of life. It was among the Knights rather than among the Maltese that the new ideas stirring in Europe began to circulate: fashionable cults such as Mesmerism, the scepticism of the French philosophers and, at a later date, even the downright atheism or agnostic deism of Voltaire. It is more than doubtful that Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary of 1764 ever got into the island (and it would certainly have been impounded and burned had it done so), but ideas are less easy to check. The questioning of the credibility of many of the Bible stories, both in the Old and New Testaments, coupled with a hatred of religious intolerance whereby people kill one another in the name of different theological systems—these were part of Voltaire’s legacy to the new Europe that was in due course to spring from the French Revolution. Even Malta of the Knights could not be completely cut off from the intellectual ferment that was brewing in Europe in the second half of the eighteenth century.
Newcomers were now active upon the Mediterranean sea, the British and the Dutch among them, and it was clear that even though the Order had almost entirely gone over to sail by the early eighteenth century the maritime balance of power was shifting. By 1705, when the Spaniard Ramon Perellos was Grand Master, the navy of the Order consisted of five ships-of-the-line and only five galleys. But the trouble about the new and far heavier sailing vessels was that, though they needed less crew to man them, they were enormously expensive to build and to maintain. Perellos was an extremely rich man and like so many other rich Grand Masters during this period spent lavishly from his own resources in the Order’s interests. It was calculated when he died that he had spent nearly a quarter of a million scudi out of his own pocket, mainly upon the navy. Even so, the Order was immediately compelled to raise an immense loan with the Bank of Genoa, which could only be met by a general tax on all its lands. The Order was living above its income, and its income was dwindling.
The great new maritime powers who were beginning to interest themselves in the trade and affairs of the Mediterranean did not have that respect for the Order of St John which its Catholic neighbours had accorded it over the centuries. They were rather inclined in their bluff, northern—and, one must remember, Protestant—manner to treat these noble defenders of the Faith in a somewhat cavalier fashion. Here, for instance, is the Rev. Henry Teonge again, writing about his visit to Malta aboard HMS Assistance in 1675:
This morning wee com near Malta; before wee com to the cytty a boate with the Malteese flagg in it corns for us to know whence wee cam. We told them from England [and] they asked if wee had a bill of health for prattick viz entertaynment, our captain told them he had no bill but what was in his guns mouths. Wee cam on and anchored in the harbour betweene the old toune [Birgu] and the new [Valetta] about nine of the clock, but must wait the governours leasure to have leave to com on shoare which was detarded because our captain would not salute the cytty except they would retaliate. At last cam the consull with his attendants to our ship, (but would not com on board till our captain had been on shoare,) to tell us that we had leave to com on shore six or eight or ten at a time, and might have anything that was there to be had, with a promise to accept our salute kindly. Whereupon our captain tooke a glass of sack and drank a health to King Charles, and fyred seven gunns, the cytty gave us five again, which was more than they had don to all our men-of-war that cam thither before.
It is interesting to note from a further page in the chaplain’s diary that, when a number of Knights of the Order visited the English ship, the chaplain was used as an interpreter, the lingua franca being Latin.
Throughout this period, from the late seventeenth century to the close of the eighteenth, the Order kept on building assiduously. Malta is in fact a giant stone-quarry (‘The whole world might come here to sharpen its knives,’ D. H. Lawrence was later to remark), and from neolithic times onwards it seems as if this mass of easily-quarryable stone has induced a paroxysm of building in the island’s inhabitants. It was not only chapels and churches, palaces and summer resorts, dykes and ditches, towers and forts, but works of immense complexity like the extension of the Valetta fortifications into the area and suburb of Floriana. Most impressive of all, and not in fact entirely completed until the nineteenth century by the British (who had by then become guardians of Malta), were the Cotonera lines. These were named after the Spanish Grand Master Nicolas Cotoner, who almost exhausted the treasury in his determination to raise a huge linear defensive system to protect the Three Cities of Birgu, Cospicua, and Senglea from the south—guarding those slopes from which the Turks had made their main attacks during the siege of 1565. Designed by the distinguished military engineer, Maurizio Valperga, these were a huge semicircular ring, designed to shelter up to 40,000 people (almost the entire country population of Malta), and having a circumference of 5,000 yards. As Quentin Hughes writes: ‘The foundation stone was laid by the Grand Master on 28 August 1670, and a flowing inscription recording the gift of the works by Cotoner was placed over the arch of the Zabbar gate, which leads the main road into the Cities. The Grand Master announced his undertaking to the princes of Europe and received, in exchange, their disapproval of his extravagance and criticism of the size of the new fortifications.’ The Cotoner lines remain to this day one of the most impressive works of fortification in European history.
There can be no doubt that these works provided continuous and useful employment in the island, but it would be difficult to justify their existence. By the eighteenth century any real Ottoman threat to Malta had almost entirely faded. It is quite true, as we know from the records, that even into the late eighteenth century the traveller by sea to Malta was never entirely free from the danger of being taken prisoner and enslaved by one of the Barbary corsairs who, despite the Order’s vigilance, still roamed the Middle Sea. But these were individual ships or at the most small squadrons. They were certainly never capable of transporting and landing the kind of army that would have been necessary to threaten Mdina even, or Birgu or Senglea, let alone the giant walls and defences of Valetta.
One of the most unusual Grand Masters of this period was the Portuguese Manoel Pinto, who reigned from 1741-73—the longest reign of any Grand Master in the Order’s history—dying at the age of ninety-two. Remarkable though he was, and in a sense quite unlike any other Grand Master—being more of a sovereign monarch than in any way primus inter pares—Pinto somehow represents the Order in the eighteenth century better than most of his predecessors or successors. Patrick Brydone, who met Pinto a year or so before his death, describes him as follows:
He has now been head of this singular little state for upwards of thirty years. He received us with great politeness, and was highly pleased to find that some of us had been to Portugal… He is a clear-headed, sensible little old man; which, at so advanced a period of life, is very uncommon. Although he is considerably upwards of ninety, he retains all the faculties of his mind in perfection. He has no minister, but manages everything himself; and has immediate information of the most minute occurrences. He walks up and down stairs, and even to church, without assistance; and has the appearance as if he would live for many years. His household attendance and court are all very princely; and as grand master of Malta, he is more absolute, and possesses more power than most sovereign princes.
This observation was accurate enough, and a portrait of Manoel Pinto by the French artist Favray shows him clad in scarlet, pointing with a royal gesture to a crown. It is symbolic of the change that had come over the Order, and indicative of his own aspirations to all the dignity not of a prince of the church, but of a king.
Pinto’s long reign, quite apart from the general circumstances of the time, undoubtedly did much to accelerate the Order’s decline. His authoritative manner, his regal pretensions, hi
s determination to rule without the assistance of ministers or council, all contributed to a feeling of hopelessness, since all the offices appeared to be vested in him. The other senior Knights and Grand Crosses abandoned their own ambitions for advancement in the face of this seemingly indestructible old man. More often than not in the Order’s long history Grand Masters had been elected who were already of an advanced age, with the result that the office was quite often turned over every few years. But Pinto who, on reading his obituary notice in a Paris journal when he was seventy-seven, only laughed and remarked, ‘Ah, then it is not Pinto but his shade who rules Malta,’ completely changed the normal pattern. Like a giant old tree, beneath whose shade nothing can grow, he effectively stifled all ambition in those around him.
Perhaps the most important event in Pinto’s reign was an attempted insurrection by all the slaves in the island. Both those who were employed ashore as house servants, as well as those in the galleys, were in the conspiracy. The plot was betrayed by a Jew, himself a member of the conspiracy but who had fallen out with some of his fellows, who unveiled the whole plot to the Grand Master. Sixty of the ringleaders were hanged, and the security regulations were rigidly tightened up, even the house slaves being compelled to retire at night to the bagnio or slave quarters. Pinto was accused by later chroniclers, anxious to find some excuse for the disaster that finally overtook the Order, of every kind of malpractice, from misuse of the Order’s funds and other public moneys, to gluttony and even sexual excess. Ovide Doublet, who became French secretary to the next Grand Master but one, Emmanuel de Rohan, maintained that the old man had died in flagrante delicto with his mistress, and attributed the entire breakdown of the morale of the Knights to the vicious influence of Pinto. This of course was absurd, but it was natural enough for a Frenchman, seeking to excuse what was indeed a predominantly French organisation, to place the blame on one of the ‘odd men out’, a Portuguese. Manoel Pinto, in fact, seems to have been a severe old disciplinarian, an ascetic who conformed punctiliously to his religious duties, and who would tolerate no backsliding or religious unorthodoxy among the young Knights. It was probably as much for this as for his unprecedented longevity that he was hated while alive, and maligned when dead.
The Shield and The Sword Page 23