Recently, the Chamber of Advocates has decided to champion a more cultural cause than those with which it is normally associated.
Though still strictly speaking legal in nature, the merits of the decision taken to restore a surviving copy of the cornerstone of the Maltese legal system are far from being merely academic. Indeed, through this restoration, the chamber has made a tangible, significant contribution to the preservation of our island’s national memory.
The famous Del Dritto Municipale di Malta (Malta, 1784), often affectionately referred to as the Codice de Rohan, is the first proper codification of laws the island ever had. Its predecessor, the Leggi e Costituzioni Prammaticali (Naples, 1724) better known as the Codice de Vilhena, was not a proper codification, but rather a collection of ad hoc legislation brought into force from time to time.
In 1776, Grand Master Emanuel de Rohan Polduc, one of Malta’s more enlightened absolute sovereigns, convened a chapter general during which legislative reform was high on the agenda. De Rohan intended to carry out the necessary reforms through a thorough restructuring of the courts and by revising laws.
Initially, the Grand Master looked beyond our shores for an able jurist to take on the mammoth task.
The last time the book had received some desperately-needed care was in the 1920s
But, following a deeply unfriendly spat between his choice, Giandonato Rogadeo, and the rest of the island, De Rohan turned instead to Federigo Gatto and Antonio Micallef, a professor of civil law at the University of Malta.
The code includes sections regulating crimes such as homicide and rape, civil matters, and even commercial and maritime affairs. It includes laws on duels and slavery, but did away with the laws on torture still present in the Codice de Vilhena. Hundreds of copies were printed and the Codice, or at least parts of it, were used well into the British occupation of the island, making it one of the most instrumental publications ever printed on our island.
The restoration of the book must have been challenging, to say the least. The last time the book had received some desperately-needed care was in the 1920s when it was inappropriately bound preventing the book from being opened freely and fully. The paper is luckily far from brittle, but suffered greatly from the careless use of sticky tape intended to plug up the considerable wormholes scattered throughout.
The overall poor condition of the book, ironically exacerbated by the repairs, meant that the book had to be taken apart entirely.
The tape was laboriously scraped off the paper and the wormholes painstakingly filled in. Once the pages had been taken care of, the book was reassembled and stitched back together. Finally, it was rebound in dark leather with the Grand Master’s coat of arms stencilled in gold.
Following a decision by the Chamber of Advocates to restore the Library on its premises, members of the Junior Chamber discovered this copy of the ‘Code de Rohan’ whilst volunteering to catalogue the books. On their initiative a sponsor was sourced and this project was possible thanks to the generous financial support of Camilleri Preziosi Advocates.