Raymond Mangion, head of the Faculty of Law ’s Department of Legal History and Methodology, leafs through the capitula listed in Stanley Fiorini ’s latest work to trace salient events in Maltese history in the 15th and 16th centuries

The volume refers to the internal communications between at least two classes: the ruling coterie, sheltered and protected within the bastions of Mdina (above), and the ruled masses exposed to the unpredictable in the four corners of the territory. Photo: viewingmalta.comThe volume refers to the internal communications between at least two classes: the ruling coterie, sheltered and protected within the bastions of Mdina (above), and the ruled masses exposed to the unpredictable in the four corners of the territory. Photo: viewingmalta.com

Stanley Fiorini, a leading researcher and medievalist, has provided the specialised expert and the public with the 13th volume in Documentary Sources of Maltese History.

The object of his book is to collate all capitula, printed albeit dispersed, or in hitherto undeciphered manuscripts in one comprehensive volume. This latest publication consists of 54 sets of capitula, half of which are being published for the first time.

The capitula span from 1409 to 1532 and give a general panorama of Malta and Gozo’s needs and remedies – particularly the questions of status, ownership and possession on the one hand and security and concomitant system of coastal vigilance on the other hand – that are granted top priority and assume centre-stage throughout.

The concluding decades of the 14th century Malta and Gozo were characterised by a succession of rebellions that affected the islands, but at the turn of the century matters began to settle down.

The earliest extant capitula of 1409 describe the state of affairs in the Mediterranean outpost when the Maltese and Gozitan Universitates braced themselves to take stock of the more urgent difficulties they needed to tackle, especially the vulnerability and penury of their soft underbelly as far as three somehow correlated problems were concerned.

These were society’s degree of underlying rights and freedoms, common defence interests and collective survival, and the indigenous sterility and poverty, in view of the rulers’ imperial and military exigencies and the (Saracenic and Christian) enemies’ hostile and armed exertions.

Significantly, the Maltese and Gozitans’ first attempts to have their consuetudines embodied in a written document in line with practices in Sicily and elsewhere within the Regnum ascends to the dawn of the XVth century.

This latest publication consists of 54 sets of capitula,half of which are being published for the first time

Indeed, the capitula are not only a documentation of the workings of the domestic Universitates and, thus, of consequent legislatorial seals by virtue of royal determinations of municipal supplications.

They are a priceless testimony of milestones and eventful happenings in local history of the 15th century and the late Middle Ages.

First of all, an initial selection gives a powerful epitome of the Don Gonsalvo Monroy affair, precisely the population’s uprising against one of the last barons along a defilé of greedy magnates to whom, since the turn of the 12th century, the islands had been alienated or disposed of by the suzerain as a curial item generally on auction to the highest bidder in a bid to scrape the barrel clean by relaxing his dues and settling deficits in the demesne’s coffers.

Next, the capitula are a crystal-clear mirror on the massive Moorish invasion, indiscriminate ransacking and tragic carting away of a horde of 3,500 inhabitants as slaves. They also describe the Christian’s aggression and devastation to the detriment of the motherland and whereabouts within the kingdom, exactly in the middle of the first half of the 12th century.

An early body of capitula refers not only to Malta and Gozo’s re-annexation to the demanium in perpetuity but to inside jurisdictional conflicts between Municipal Council in Mdina and the Castellan in Vittoriosa.

Malta’s Universitas is mentioned to have existed a good 300 years before, in the time of King Roger, notwithstanding the fact that it began to retrieve its identity and function as an independent organisation at the turn of the 15th century.

Later capitula reaffirm the Maltese and Gozitan’s people’s ‘Malteseness’ vis-à-vis foreigners of any citizenship completely ignor-ant of the innate vernacular, notably the locals’ preference for fellow countrymen with respect to their appointment as officials to certain high-ranking and sensitive positions, such as syndics and commissioners, especially to be able to converse and communicate in the Maltese language effectively at grassroots level.

No doubt the capitula are a formidable solid or probative testament of the first major struggle for self-determination and auto-nomy and an embryonic assertion of a national consciousness. They were forwarded by way of explicit complaints and appeals against the continued physical absence of Pope-nominated ecclesiastical dignitaries who resided abroad (owing to the natural development of the diocese in Malta and Gozo), in particular in Sicily, greatly at the mercy of his religious flock while they derived fat benefices from the islands and, ultimately, caused issues of inheritance as to entitlements to the spoils, at times amounting to thousands of ducats, of the deceased clergymen.

The roll started from the bishop himself at the top of the hierarchy, because half his mensa was located in Sicily, and ended right down in the pecking order with minor clerics living and carrying out their pastoral duties overseas.

A pressing and rapid order of capitula characterise the earliest and latest actions and enactions while noteworthy interludes crop in over a century of capitula.

They are so eloquent and rich in nodes of information that the reader may shift focus on varied themes and evoke in his mind the plight and experience of the forefathers of a State marking its ‘modern’ genesis.

For instance, clusters of capitula shed light on the institutional opportunism and insecurity that prevailed internally as a result of the sovereign’s alternation of pawning, forfeiture or redemption of offices, remarkably captaincies, secretie and gabelles once the islands as an entity were reintegrated within the realm.

Or else, features of capitula show a tendency of the drafters to couch demands in a hyperbolic tongue from which one could deduce the psychological composure of the Maltese and Gozitans that was one of fear and incubus, in the light of the predominating precarious circumstances arising from the dictates of the Spanish courts.

The volume contains a table of the dossier of capitula that is also accompanied with the designation of the ambassadors of the Universitates. Unavoidably, it pinpoints, against the background, the names of protagonists in the course of the turbulent ebbs and flows of 15th-century Malta and Gozo within the wider Mediterranean and peninsular contexts.

The compilation spells out the names of personalities who figured in Maltese and Gozitan daily life in a period that was to mark a turning point in the medieval story of a people under an extraneous and expansive domination. It demonstrates the interplay that went on in ‘ruler-ruled’ relationships at two levels, namely the trans-boundary interactions between his majesty and his subjects and the internal communications between at least two classes, that is to say the ruling coterie, sheltered and protected within the bastions of Mdina, and the ruled masses exposed to the unpredictable in the four corners of the territory.

Capitula indicate convincingly that the circumvallated elites, conspicuously the closeted political aristocrats, often used such instruments as an efficacious weapon of control to safeguard and enforce their narrower demands by resolving what claims ought to be inserted or left out.

The final bunch of capitula deal with the natives’ final relations with the Jewish community, its crucial expulsion in 1492, and the official advent of the Order of St John in Malta and Gozo in 1530.

The Malta Universitas’s majori voce bear witness to the uproar that took place as soon as rumours had reached it in 1524 that the archipelago was being assessed as an imminent suitable operating seat by title of noble enfeoffment for the reconnoitring hospitallers in the wake of their ousting from Rhodes two years before. Over the next five years, in the interval, not a whisper was heard coming from the agenda and direction of the Municipium despite the blatant infringement of several time-honoured prerogatives, preserved guarantees and ratified promises, and all the writing on the wall. The capitula are absolutely silent.

Each councillor seemed to be hearing for the first time about the unilateral cession when the matter was a fait accompli or, better, a pre-empted diktat from above. The charitable and chivalric institution was already getting down to business and impacting on the Mediterranean sea-girt soil, even blinding the gentry by celebrating the feast of its patron St John the Baptist.

The knights emasculated forthwith the ancien régime that was ensconced within the city on the inland hillocks, once the eight-pointed cross’s sacred warriors entrenched their headquarters at Vittoriosa, rooted a new, more directly controllable Universitas in the harbourside and heralded the end of the former governing corporation and autonomy.

That Grand Master Philippe de Villiers L’Isle Adam wanted to run and command Malta and Gozo as he pleased without any interference from anyone was patently clear to all and sundry. He was at the behest of a fresh force that immediately wielded its tactics and stratagems by espousing an unashamed policy of divide et impera as a step towards the deposition of the death-rattling town jurats. These partly manifested their pride and made a manu forti resistance and partly bowed their heads and took a conciliatory attitude in reaction to the arrival of the holy garrison and to the ushering in of a novel administrative situation in the country.

Sign up to our free newsletters

Get the best updates straight to your inbox:
Please select at least one mailing list.

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By subscribing, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing.