Malta of the Hospitallers : Malta's Renaissance centuries?

Abstract

The Renaissance was a civilisation; its centuries were civilising centuries. It is necessary to have a very clear idea of the most outstanding features of this phenomenon, of the nature of each of these to be able to trace them, and if traceable on Hospitaller Malta, to identify them and evaluate them. There are no sharp dividing lines in history, no sudden ruptures between what went before and what came after. Strong elements of continuity prevailed at every stage in any slow process of transition. It is therefore no longer acceptable today to view the Renaissance, as the influential Swiss historian Jakob Burckhardt did, as having constituted a complete break with the Middle Ages. Elements of permanence and durability there certainly remained, dragging characteristic features of late medieval times into the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and probably later. Moreover, notwithstanding the literary meaning of the term, this great cultural movement also involved much more than rebirth or renovation. It engaged clear elements of innovation. It was precisely the collective force of these three major essentials - the persistent medieval, the revived ancient, and the novel - which gradually ushered in early modernism. Nor can the structural changes which in fact marked early modern times be attributed solely to the Renaissance. Peter Burke calls the movement 'a link in a chain'. There were other formative links, other contributory forces - the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution, industrialization, and the Enlightenment, which steered all the way to the Modern Age. It was then the French Revolution of 1789 which ultimately signed the death warrant to times past. For early modern Malta, the Hospitaller Order of St John constituted the predominant force of transformation. In 1530 this multi-national institution, which owed its origins to long years before the preaching of the First Crusade, settled on late-medieval Malta. By the end of the eighteenth century, when this same institution was evicted from the central Mediterranean, it left behind a completely different island. The following pages will seek to understand the nature of these changes within the context of the three-pronged Renaissance movement which, by the mid-sixteenth century, it may have already evolved through Mannerism into the Baroque. But there was much more to the Renaissance or the Baroque than works of art and architecture, than literature and music. It was a way of life in its totality, an attitude of mind. It is this definition which shall be adopted in the following assessment exercise. How much of late-medieval Malta was still recognizable by the time the Hospitallers were forced to leave? How much of the changes that occurred were a revival of past cultures and civilizations? How novel to Hospitaller Malta were the structures and reforms introduced by the Knights of St John? How much nearer to enlightened, revolutionary Europe was the island in 1798 than it had been in 1530? Within this proposed framework, the present dissertation will be divided into three chapters. The first is an attempt to reconstruct the main features which are known to have characterized late medieval Malta. This is considered necessary to be able to identify and assess the changes that occurred in the two-centuries-and-a-half of Hospitaller rule later. This is precisely the focus of Chapter 2. It endeavours to evaluate the long-term structural changes that Malta and the Maltese experienced from 1530, when the Knights of St John settled on the island, to 1798, when they were evicted by Napoleon Bonaparte. Chapter 3 then discusses the main issue of the present dissertation, arguing that the 268 years the Hospitallers ruled over their central Mediterranean principality were for Malta its 'Renaissance centuries'. This is novel ground, adopting an innovative approach to Hospitaller Malta. As such, the present dissertation is offering a reading which may well be fraught with hidden dangers. If it succeeds in giving rise to a serious debate, it would have achieved its purpose.