Politics and power in Grand Master Verdalle’s Statuta Hospitalis Hierusalem (1588)

Abstract

By 1581, the Order of St John had been on Malta for just over fifty years. It had survived the loss of Rhodes in 1523, seven years of homelessness and the Great Siege of 1565, and had founded the new city of Valletta. Yet for all its residual strength, the Order was nearly tom apart by an internal power struggle during the summer of 1581. It took the determined intervention of the papacy to avert disaster, and the man assigned the task of picking the pieces was Fr Hughes Loubens de Verdalle (1582-95). This paper focuses on the policies and authority of this grand master, whose reign of thirteen years was marked by an increasingly absolutist drive to assert the powers of his office. The new grand master embarked on an ambitious architectural and iconographic programme, which included the production of a lavishly illustrated new edition of the statutes of the Order, the Statuta Hospitalis Hierusalem (in short Statuta) of 1588. This paper adopts a 'visual culture' approach in which the documentary and non-written sources are considered alongside each other with the aim of forming a more holistic understanding ofVerdalle's politics and power and the role of the Statuta therein.