What a great story to stumble across! The adrenalin rose to amber alert. On my part, I believed that all I required was some collateral research to fill in the details and reconstruct some context – like the family name of the noble victims, of the teenage murderer and of the fetching musician for the love of whom Isabella had terminated a blameless family. That, I reckoned, would be quite easy. I was sure I knew where to look.

I went with some persistence through the archives of the Order of St John for 1672, in the expectation of finding there some reference to these extraordinary events, but could not come across anything.

Bartolomeo dal Pozzo, the meticulous historian of the knights and of their land, similarly passed over these murders and the mass executions. It did not happen every day that four people were assassinated and that 12 people, including the stunning teenage daughter of an aristocratic family, suffered the death penalty for multiple homicide.

Beatrice Cenci, the noble 21-year-old beauty executed in Rome in 1598 for killing her father (Francesco Cenci was a nice man with a weakness for battering his wife and raping his daughter) found herself famous throughout Europe for rather less. So why this wall of silence surrounding our Isabella, four times more committed as a murderess than Beatrice?

As a last resort I consulted the correspondence registers of the Inquisitors. These had strict instructions to send secret, even encrypted, reports every week to keep Rome informed of anything notable happening on the island. I was confident I would find these events described there by the new Inquisitor Raniero Pallavicini. But again I drew a blank.

No one in Malta seems to have thought such a headline-gripping crime in the least newsworthy. Sixteen dead in the most tragic circumstances, and no one notices.

By now I was starting to get suspicious, not to say frustrated. Why was the pamphlet published in the north of Italy, and not in Rome, Naples or Palermo, as many Malta chronicles or gossip sheets usually were? Why were the main actors called Ferdinand and Isabella, a stereotyped coupling of names for the last 200 years?

Why does the author fail to mention the surnames of the families involved, when the shocking murders must have been the talk of the town all over Malta? Data protection? Hardly. Suspicious, yes, but still I had no firm reasons for smelling a rat.

The real breakthrough came when perseverance revealed the existence of another pamphlet, printed 50 years later – with an identical story recounted in identical words. But this second time round, exactly the same murders and exactly the same executions did not happen in Malta, but in the city of Marseilles in France – and not in 1672 but in 1723.

The only details different in the second chapbook are the much later date of the alleged murders, the name of the publisher, and the deletion of the killing of the two little children (why?). Otherwise, the story of Isabella and Ferdinando is repeated word for word, whether the author claimed that it happened in Malta in 1672 or in Marseilles in 1723.

The copy held in Turin had been published by Giacomo Monti; the one in the Malta University collection had been issued the same year but from the presses of another editor, Antonio Malatesta, one of the renowned Milanese dynasty of Malatesta printers. It is not possible to establish which of the two was printed first, but I would likely put my money on Malatesta. Copyright was barely in its infancy then.

Hundreds of different pamphlets were published all over Italy, with their title starting Nuova e distinta relazione..., but, as far as I could ascertain, they all recounted true, or predominantly true chronicles. This Malta chapbook may be the only one which is totally fraudulent

So these two reputable printing houses had lent their name to a fraud – highly regarded publishing enterprises prepared to rig a wholly apocryphal fable and pass it off as factual chronicle, “a new and detailed report” – just to milk some money from the imposture off credulous readers eager for titillating, macabre, sensationalist fictions masquerading as morality prose.

In his profession, the publisher Monti (1600-1687) was no paltry dealer in the counterfeit or in the bogus. On the contrary, he had distinguished himself as a very serious Bolognese printer and editor, a leading one, with a prolific cultural production and a specialisation in avant-garde musical scores to his credit. Maybe a dishonest Maltese writer had conned the gullible Monti or Malatesta into publishing as true a hot story wholly fabricated by a luxuriant imagination waiting for a buyer.

In the 1672 Malta pamphlet, the (Maltese?) hack who had actually scripted the fantasy had invented the whole lurid and prurient drama to sell in Italy, relying on the distance between Malta and north Italy, and on the weakness of communications in the 17th century.

The author, with the knowing or unknowing complicity of the publishers Monti or Malatesta, took a risk, banking on the good chances they would get away with it. It seems as if author and publishers did. They succeeded in merchandising their low, cheating immorality as a high morality sermon.

Face it: Malta was chosen as a backdrop for a money-snatching literary scam. Why Malta? Perhaps because it was distant, reputed to be highly civilised, affluent and well-ordered, run by religious knights vowed to piety and chastity. That context and that contrast would have added piquancy to the shock and the scandal – murder in paradise is more outrageous, and glamorous, than murder in the housing estate.

Nowadays, we lament the decline of press ethics, but surely few journalists or publishers would today dare pass off deliberately a blatant bundle of lies as factual truth, and fear no repercussions, be­cause they succeed in convincing themselves that they concocted their fraud for the promotion of Christian honesty – irrelevant that they hoped to cash in on the gullibility of readers and on their eagerness to be shocked.

The (invented) story of the Malta murders turned out to be the fortunate precursor of a rich line of morality frauds, all recycling exactly the same Malta ‘facts’, but setting them in different cities. It seemed like publishers in Italy had discovered how to turn public credulity into an inexhaustible gold mine.

I have now found these same murders retold twice as happening in Malta in 1672, then as happening in Marseilles in 1680, and again in 1723, and in Nice in 1739 – still sounding plausible almost 70 years after the pioneer Malta scam. Bled to its very last cent’s worth. Quite likely there may be other editions too that I am not aware of.

In truth, the Malta pamphlet almost forms part of a popular literary tradition, perhaps dating back to the troubadours, which fused narratives of current criminal events with gory, frightening, disreputable, magical fantasy. All seasoned with sprinklings of didactic moralism. Shock and edify, amaze and sermonise, scandalise to convert. By the end of the 16th century, this had become a lucrative business, in which the distinctions between real-life chronicle and falsified detail, more often than not, ended quite blurred.

Those who purchased these chapbooks parted with their money knowing that the frisson lay in the contraposition of truth struggling against overflows of creative falsehood. What deception the basically honest narrative may have contained was factored in as added value.

This minor popular literature had turned into a ‘market place of cruelties and marvels’, which satisfied a need to keep up-to-date with current affairs, to be entertained and to be preached at. All this at a time when popular amusement was scarce and generally unsophisticated.

The Malta pamphlet, however, went well beyond the conventions of this literary genre, and disrespected boundaries – on two fronts. The story it recounted did not have one grain of truth about it, and, over and above, it went out of its way to pass off the arrant falsehoods as certified history. It was sensationalist fiction with a counterfeit seal of fact.

Hundreds of different pamphlets were published all over Italy, with their title starting Nuova e distinta relazione..., but, as far as I could ascertain, they all recounted true, or predominantly true chronicles. This Malta chapbook may be the only one which is totally fraudulent.

I noticed how skilfully, if not obviously, the author colour-coded the messages of his prose. The jewels and money Isabella stole from her parents’ home she stored in a small red trunk – red for passion and blood money. She strangled the little children with a crimson cord – crimson being the symbolic colour of the aristocracy, of martyrdom and of penitence. And Isabella requested to be executed in black garments, black signifying death, mourning, annihilation.

Was the author Maltese as he claims? Did he have first-hand knowledge of Malta? Most of the information he gives appears rather generic. The only specific clue that indicates some familiarity with Valletta is a reference to the gate near the garden leading to the Marina – that sounds like an accurate description of Porta di Monte or della marina, adjacent to the only garden in Valletta, popularly known as Ġnien is-Sultan. This gate was demolished in the British period, and Victoria Gate built on a different alignment some distance away in 1885.

Add to that the suspicion that the felucca of the fleeing murderess was sneaking fugitive slaves back to Barbary – an ever-present and typical paranoia of the Knights of St John. The class hierarchy underlying the crimes also sounds correct for a Malta scenario – snotty aristocrats placing sanitary distances between themselves and the moneyed merchant classes.

But, apart from that, very little Malteseness distinguishes the narrative. Not even an oblique mention of the Order of Malta or of its knights whose presence on the island was massive and inescapable.

Even the punishments meted out once the crimes were discovered would have raised some eyebrows in Malta. The only instances I have come across of executioners tormenting death-row prisoners on their way to the scaffold were those that followed the revolt of the slaves under Grand Master Emanuel Pinto de Fonseca in 1749. But then, Pinto insisted in making it clear that no one upstaged him in institutional sadism and spared no effort to prove it. History records no other instances.

Those were violent times, in fact, much more violent than ours – both in the crime and in the penalties. But all the same, the formalities of justice were seen to be complied with. The execution of the nine complicit mariners without trial seems quite alien to Maltese juridical culture.

Sporadically, the records yield rare instances of fast-food justice, but only when someone in authority apprehended the delinquent in flagrante committing some unpardonably heinous crime – like piracy by a Christian turned Muslin, or sodomy, the unmentionable gay infamy – a trial was dispensed with. Otherwise the death penalty always followed due process of law.

I do not want to overwork the misogyny rampant in this booklet or to indentify it as in any way typically Maltese – but there it is. The narrative mentions four women – Isabella, the old retainer, the nurse and Isabella’s mother – the first three bracketed as monstrously wicked, the fourth as inadequate and unfeeling. But identifying in women the fountain of all sin and evil was not a particularly Maltese trait. It permeated stealthily the medieval Judeo-Christian ethos, and later too.

Not surprisingly for a woman-swatting author like ours, the source of all evil must almost always be traced to the inability of women to master their lascivious instincts. The writer of the pamphlet does not dwell on this at length, but lets drop the telltale hint that Isabella’s desire to be with Ferdinando was “driven by the sensuality that had enslaved her”.

It was lust that had turned a well-bred teenager into a murder appliance in overdrive. Her insane frenzy, her homicidal fury were the consequences of that overwhelming carnal passion.

The 1487, Malleus Maleficiarum, that delightful do-it-yourself instructions manual meant to instruct the Inquisition, justified the persecution of witches on the grounds of the unquenchable sensuality of women: “carnal lust which is, in women, insatiable”. Women, by the order of nature, were “more carnal than men”.

The avid scholar William of Malmesbury, who died c. 1143, also endorsed this view. For him, women were “perfectly lascivious, setting no boundaries to their debaucheries”.

To be deemed credible, Isabella had to be seen to conform to these sexist stereotypes. Inevitable stereotypes which spared no one. An Italian who visited England in the early 16th century wrote in amazement how phlegmatic, unloving and unlustful Englishmen generally were. With one proviso: “But I say this of the men, for I understand it is quite the contrary with the women, who are very violent in their passions.”

St John of God (1495-1550) had no hesitations: “The lust of women is putrid, and far more suffocating than it is in men.” The poet Alexander Pope too, in his Moral Essays, recorded that “men, some to business, some to pleasures take / but every woman is at heart a rake”.

And shortly before the alleged murders, the Englishman Daniel Rogers, who died in 1652, had decreed that women “have not been only extremely evil in themselves but have also been the main instruments and immediate causes of Murther”. Poor defenceless manhood has consistently been “the victim of sex-driven women, temptresses governed by their womb”.

Many of the early moralists agreed that, all the long way from Eve onwards, the sexual depravity and physical weakness of women has led men to destruction and sin.

As a man, I feel vulnerable and victimised. I must remember to have a word with my lawyers about compensation.

The (invented) story of the Malta murders turned out to be the fortunate precursor of a rich line of morality frauds, all recycling exactly the same Malta ‘facts’, but setting them in different cities. It seemed like publishers in Italy had discovered how to turn public credulity into an inexhaustible gold mine

Incidentally, whether by coincidence or not, it would be difficult to establish, immediately after the alleged multiple homicide, if Malta genuinely did hit the headlines when a group of 100 slaves boldly tried to escape Grand Harbour on a French vessel they had hijacked in the port.

The Grand Master (who, from the vantage point of his garden belvedere overlooking the harbour, had personally witnessed the entire drama unfurling) gave immediate orders for their vessel to be chased, and his fast ships succeeded in seizing the fugitives.

To spare others being tempted into mimicking anything so untoward, each of those captured slaves had his nose and his ears chopped off. What they did with a hundred surplus noses and twice as many leftover ears is not recorded.

This was one of the reasons why nose reconstruction surgery was then flourishing in Calabria, led by the masters, the Vianeo brothers, who built an extensive plastic surgery empire, probably the first in Europe, in Tropea, today only renowned for its pungently sweet red onions. Their business prospered courtesy of duels, leprosy, terminal syphilis, and noses lopped off in punishment. The strikingly handsome Cesare Borgia had sacrificed his youth to brothels and his nose to syphilis. Many others who had made the same choices had ended with a hole where their nose was meant to be.

The author of the Malta pamphlet may or may not have found some inspiration from this episode of the mass escape from Malta attempted by slaves, but he almost certainly did from the widely publicised murder of two little children committed by Lucia da Varignana and her trial in Bologna in 1672 – exactly the year when Isabella was supposed to have killed the two infants in Malta and the pamphlet was published.

In prison awaiting execution by hanging, the convicted murderess cheated. With a heartless lack of consideration for the expectant crowds pressing round the scaffold, da Varignana rather unsportingly took her own life. But the Bologna authorities were not ones to be put off by such impertinent trivialities as death; they arranged for her to die a second time. Publicly and with the right solemnity they executed her corpse.

(Concluded)

Acknowledgements:
I cannot fail to express publicly my gratitude to Mark Sammut, Maroma Camilleri, and Scelza Ricco and Roberta Perinetti of the Biblioteca F. Patetta of the law faculty in the University of Turin, and Mary Samut-Tagliaferro of the University of Malta library, for their support.