Arguably the ‘Maltese’ academic who acquired the widest fame in the baroque age throughout Europe was Antonio Bosio “the father of modern archaeology” or, if you prefer “the Christopher Columbus of the catacombs”, as Pope Karol Wojtyla referred to him. As much as we know about his multiple achievements, we still do not know about his life.

There are dark areas so far unchartered, some deliberately obfuscated, others steamrolled by time, the provident oblivion-builder. Who was his father? Who was his mother? Where was he born?

Early Maltese authors, desperate to enlist Bosio in the pantheon of those whose talents glorified the motherland, were as loud in their claims that Bosio was Maltese, and they were stingy in saying why. High on assertiveness, thin on evidence. They abused those who wanted Bosio to be Roman, but did not go out of their way to demonstrate he was Maltese.

This is an attempt to establish Bosio’s profile in a firmer grounding of historical research. The controversy on Bosio’s nationality raged from early on.

Around 1650, the Maltese lawyer Fabrizio Cagliola in a most extraordinary memoir records stories told by Lillo ‘the Blond’, a well-read bandit who had found refuge in Gozo, and who had once been one of Bosio’s servants in Rome. Lillo referred to his master as Roman. As if! Cagliola’s client Gabriello Pulis promptly interrupts him: “He was not Roman at all, but Maltese. He only claimed to be Roman because he acquired Roman citizenship.”

“I’m so glad to learn,” Lillo obliges, “that from Malta emerged a sapling adorned with such rare virtues and qualities, especially his love for truth, which, one could say, was the only reason behind his intelligence and his will power.”

Fra Giannotto (Giovanni Ottone) Bosio Jr, a leading Italian knight of Malta, left a very ambivalent mark in history. He is remembered for taking part in the Great Siege and being the Vice-Chancellor of the Order in Malta and receiver of the Order in Rome; less so for being a convicted murderer, for his philandering with maids he employed, and may I add, for fathering illegitimately the great Antonio Bosio.

The years following the Great Siege of 1565 were turbulent ones for the Order of St John in Malta. The deaf and decrepit Grand Master Jean de La Cassière, who regularly fell asleep during Council meetings, was finding it increasingly difficult to keep his knights together, and what began as discontent started ratcheting up into mutiny and revolt.

The majority of the knights, particularly the younger ones, lacked the patience to wait for death to relieve them of La Cassière, disciplinarian, divisive and doddering; they gradually coalesced into an ugly movement intent on deposing him. Strident passions prevailed on either side, tempers flared.

The entrenchment of knights in the opposing camps, those loyal to the Grand Master, and the mutineers, became more vocal and more violent.

Fra Giannotto whipped out his sword and ran it through a Romegas supporter, killing him almost on the spot

The breaking point came when the discontents, who had roped in the redoubtable Fra Mathurin Lescaut ‘Romegas’ as their leader, formally deposed and imprisoned the Grand Master in Fort St Angelo. La Cassière appealed to the Pope in Rome, as the supreme head of the Order of Malta.

Pope Gregory XIII summoned both him and Romegas to appear before him in Rome to plead their case. Romegas and La Cassière sent separate delegations of knights to pave the way for their masters’ later visit to the papal city. This was in 1581.

Fra Giannotto Bosio, a loyal and vocal supporter of the old head of the Order, formed part of the Grand Master’s advance delegation in Rome. Giannotto would obviously support La Cassière: the Grand Master had just given him the Commandery of Villanterio near Pavia.

The whims of fortune had it that at noon on Sunday, July 30, 1581, three delegates of La Cassière, including the Bosio brothers, came across the envoys of Romegas in St Peter’s Square in Rome. Liberally they exchanged insults and threats, and eventually came to blows in a mighty brawl under the bemused glare of the Swiss guards. Fra Giannotto whipped out his sword and ran it through a Romegas supporter, the Neapolitan Fra Francesco de Guevara, killing him almost on the spot.

Both Giannotto and his brother Fra Giacomo, later the great historiographer of the Order, ended wounded and fled Rome in a panic.

Predictably, Pope Gregory XIII failed to betray much amusement. He saw this murder of Guevara, brother of the Duke of Bovino, on hallowed ground and with both aggressor and victim bound by religious vows, as a sacrilegious outrage, and instantly ordered the arrest and punishment of Giannotto and Giacomo.

The Pope “was overtaken by such indignation that he condemned the two Bosio brothers to capital banishment, with the confiscation of all their properties, their expulsion from the Order, the loss of their seniority, and the forfeiture of all they had received from the Order”. The goods confiscated included a fine collection of works of art, which the Pope distributed among his friends.

It was only through the intervention of the subsequent Grand Master, Loubens de Verdalle, that another pope, Sixtus V, by an apostolic letter dated June 28, 1585, granted an amnesty to Giannotto Bosio for the murder.

On the strength of that letter, the Council reinstated him in the ranks of the Order of St John in the sitting of December 5, 1586.

An important Neapolitan historian, Luigi Volpicella, in 1875 published in Naples a book on this murderous brawl: Fra Francesco de Guevara, ovvero un duello nel decimosesto secolo.

The knight of Malta killed in St Peter’s Square had joined the Order of St John in April 1551 and went on to distinguish himself by his fearlessness in the Great Siege. Grand Master Jean de Valette had entrusted de Guevara with the defence of Fort St Elmo, where he had been grievously wounded.

He was renowned for running around, heartening the other defenders with a crucifix in one hand and sword in the other. History credits him with the invention of the torchioni, thick mattresses placed against the bastions which somehow softened the impact and the damage caused by the huge Turkish cannon balls.

Though de Guevara was ultimately responsible for the downfall of the two Bosio brothers, Giacomo generously ack­nowledged the many virtues of the Neapolitan when he later came to write his monumental history of the Order of Malta.

He just stopped short of recording that his own brother had assassinated him.

The younger Giannotto too was present in Malta during the Siege. He proposed and oversaw the building of a bridge between Birgu and the fort of St Michael, which turned out to be most useful to the defenders.

But probably his most lasting contribution to the Siege was the deciphering and transcription of the copious manuscript notes and chronicles of the warfare kept by the Order’s clerk Agostino di Santa Maura, which enabled Giannotto’s brother Giacomo to write such a vast and comprehensive history of that event.

Santa Maura’s manuscript notes are today regrettably untraced. Albert Ganado asserts that Giannotto lost an eye in the Siege, but does not give the source for this information.

Fra Giannotto, who joined the Order in 1563, cultivated other passions, besides his vocation to bloodshed. In Malta he had been having a clandestine affair with a servant, described in an early document as an ancilla Afra – an African maid.

The word ancilla can mean both household servant and female slave. Afra, again, is another ambiguous word, meaning both African and black. In the Malta context, it usually means Moorish, North African.

The affair was necessarily clandestine because, as a professed knight, Giannotto was sworn to the solemn vow of chastity. The statutes of the Order looked very unkindly on breaches of this discipline, prohibiting knights from acknowledging their illegitimate offspring and, on paper, inflicting drastic punishments on those who frequented the ways of the flesh. Of course, like many other restraints, this rule often ended more honoured in its breach than in its observance.

In fact, one of the sorest grievances of the younger knights which contributed massively to the revolt against La Cassière was his insistence on enforcing the chastity rule among members of the Order, and his banishment of prostitutes.

A smidgen of irony there: Giannotto who murdered for La Cassière and was expelled from the Order for standing by the dour enforcer of chastity, was himself a major culprit against the rule enforced.

The information that Antonio was Fra Giannotto’s illegitimate son comes from a very reliable source. The historian Dal Pozzo says so expressly in his Historia: “Antonio Bosio, born in Malta, son of the Bali Giannotto, was adopted by his uncle Giacomo and brought up in Rome by him.” I would say this to be about the only time that one of the two official historians of the Order – Giacomo Bosio and Bartolomeo dal Pozzo – ever disclose expressly in clear language the illegitimate birth of the son or daughter of a knight of St John. There were ever so many others, but their names or paternity never turn up in dispatches.

Even more curious and more predictable than this exception is the fact that when count Gianantonio Ciantar in 1780 came to compile his list of illustrious Maltese personages, he proudly included Antoinio Bosio, and copied word for word what Dal Pozzo had written about the great archaeologist. Word for word, that is, except for one piece of glaring self-censorship: he deleted the phrase “son of the Bali Giannotto”. Ciantar may well have done a service to decorum, but an ill-service to historical truth.

A further confirmation that Antonio was the illegitimate son of a knight of Malta comes from a brief issued by Pope Clement VIII on July 10, 1604. Antonio had petitioned the Pope to ‘legitimise’ him, that is, turn his bastardy by birth into legitimacy by sovereign prerogative “per rescriptum principis”.

The Pope accepted, noting that “those born illegitimate but who are adorned by many virtues, should not be shamed by the stains of their birth”.

The Pope added that he had come to know that Antonio had “a fault of birth, from an unmarried father and an unmarried mother, that is to say, from a knight of the Order of St John of Jerusalem...”

From that day onwards, Antonio could legally take on the surname Bosio, though he may have been using it long before, through his formal or informal adoption by his uncle Giacomo Bosio.

At exactly the same time that Giannotto’s intimate relationship with his servant or slave was in full swing and he was discovering the dubious pleasures of fatherhood, the knight was disclosing his substantial incomes from religious endowments in Malta.

1575, when his son was born, also happened to be the year when Mgr Pietro Dusina was carrying out his meticulous Apostolic visitation of the diocese of Malta. Giannotto is repeatedly mentioned in it, and so are his multiple ecclesiastical benefices. It was most unusual, incidentally, for a knight of Malta to be on the payroll of both the Order and of the Bishop of Malta.

Fra Giannotto cultivated other passions, besides his vocation to bloodshed. He had been having a clandestine affair with a servant

There is something mysterious here: why the exception? One source hints that Giannotto had started off with the vocation of becoming a priest of the Order of Malta, but had half way through switched to joining the Order as a knight.

Bosio gave evidence in person in front of Dusina on February 19, 1575, at the Inquisitor’s Palace in Birgu.

Addressed as Magnificus ac Reverendus Frater Joannes Othus Bosius, he declared he had received minor orders (the tonsure) on March 17, 1560, (three years before becoming a knight) and was then the recipient of incomes from church benefices in St Paul’s Bay, another in Cataffè or Uataffè in Birmiftuh, another at Degebè (ta’ Dbiegi?) or Gandolfo, and another at Alban, otherwise known as Curtin Samat, which yielded 60 gold ducats a year.

Bosio also declared that he was too busy serving as the Grand Master’s secretary to find the time to recite the holy office of the canonical hours prescribed by the Council of Trent in 1563.

Dusina’s report, whose tone usually witnesses a clinical detachment from the problems of the diocese, makes an exception for Bosio: and not because he admitted neglecting the duty to recite the holy office inherent in his ecclesiastical benefices. Giannotto was also rector of St Gregory’s parish church of the Greek community in Birgu. Though this rectorate was endowed with a very substantial income, Giannotto spent nothing on the maintenance of the church or for the religious services in it, Dusina comments with uncharacteristic acidity.

All this may leave an impression of Bosio as an irreverent hedonist. But then other episodes point in the opposite direction. In April 1588, the elderly Italian Fra Francesco Lanfreducci Sr invited a number of knights to dinner, Giannotto among them. Lanfreducci, who always found it difficult to suppress an outspoken impertinence, at one time blamed three people for all the troubles of the world: Moses, Jesus Christ and Mohammed. Giannotto rose in anger to reproach his blasphemous host and theatrically swanned out on the other guests in a huff.

The matter ended with Lanfreducci hauled before the Inquisition, Bosio a principal witness.

The following year, Giannotto again appeared before the Inquisitor as witness for the prosecution concerning something said round a dinner table, a case against a Franciscan friar accused of socialist heresy: he was reported to have held while having lunch with the Grand Master and Giannotto, that neither Christ nor his apostles possessed property in private or in common. I don’t believe Giannotto got all that many dinner invitations after this.

Where Giannotto Bosio, one-eyed or otherwise, was carrying on his affair with his ancilla Afra is not recorded, but quite likely it was in a house where the Grand Master’s Palace in Valletta now stands. The town planners of the new city of Valletta had destined the area today occupied by the Auberge de Castile for the palace of the Grand Master, but de Valette’s successor, Pietro di Monte, had preferred to stay in the private corner-house of his nephew Eustachio (where the Attorney General now has his offices).

Fra Giannotto Bosio lived exactly next door to the residence of Eustachio and his uncle the Grand Master. He had bought his property on September 20, 1569, facing St George’s Square, now Palace Square. Giannotto’s house eventually ended incorporated in the footprint of today’s Palace.

(To be concluded)