On a dark night in November 1636, a worthless reprobate murdered, with premeditated perfidy, an oil merchant in his home in Vittoriosa. Francesco Scarlatta had been charitably providing assistance, meals and lodging to Nicolò Ciardi, a Sicilian compatriot. Ciardi could think of no better way to settle his debt of gratitude to his benefactor than by taking his life, and all his money too.

Did the murderer act alone? There are indications that he may have been helped by another scoundrel, Gian Biagio Trimarchi, also Sicilian, and by a Maltese, Salvatore Dumez.

I could recount this story as the straightforward chronicle of a sordid seicento murder, an object of morbid curiosity cut out for tabloid readership. But I see it as far more than that – as emblematic of the struggles for supremacy and of the intractable tensions between the three powers that then ruled Malta. By comparison to their craving for dominance, such immaterial considerations as the guilt of the accused or the rights of the victim start looking insignificant, if not wholly irrelevant.

Three exalted dignitaries shared ultimate authority in Malta in the latter times of the Order – the Grand Master, the Bishop and the Inquisitor, divided by their power manias, united by a common obedience to the Pope. The three clashed routinely over conflicts of jurisdiction, precedence, prerogatives, protocol and etiquette. When it was not a three-cornered fight, it was a conflict between two – sometimes, as in this case, refereed or mediated by the third player.

The Ciardi affair and the criminal’s virtual abduction by stealth by the civil police from his inviolate church sanctuary, pitted the Grand Master against the Bishop, with both desperately eager to rope in the Inquisitor on their side, with both brown-nosing him because of his direct hotline with the Pope.

Were it not for two peculiarities, Scarlatta’s would have been just another routine homicide, one in an endless series of many. The centuries of the Order of St John in Malta were extremely brutal, with murder, grievous bodily harm and other crimes of violence almost everyday occurrences, easy come, easy forgotten, as they were elsewhere throughout Europe. Those who fantasise about previous centuries as some lost golden era, had better rethink.

We do not have statistics for either of the two distinct lay criminal courts then active in Malta, that of the knights and the one for civilians, and insofar as the latter, meagre research has so far yielded meagre results. But, if the records of justice in the criminal court of the Order are anything to go by, the rate of homicide in Malta in the 17th century was nothing short of appalling.

The internal criminal system of the Order (the sguardio) only catered for crimes committed by knights, or crimes perpetrated against knights. In Malta, the members of the Order rarely exceeded 600, and yet, even within such a tiny community, the murder rate hovered at an average of one homicide, attempted homicide or grievous bodily harm, per week. One knight killed, or killing, every seven days – sometimes even more. It would be reasonable to assume that a roughly similar ratio of homicidal violence prevailed in the civilian population too.

The Maltese judge Julio Cumbo boasted of having single-handedly sent 120 murderers to the gallows. He lovingly kept note of every notch on his pole, name, surname and date, and his past achievements inspired him to reach higher targets in future exploits.

The homicide of Scarlatta would have joined that of hundreds of others buried in oblivion, were it not for two circumstances. After the murder, realising the police were hot on his trail, Ciardi took refuge inside a church in Vittoriosa. Again, nothing extraordinary in that – the civil authorities had no jurisdiction over churches as the State acknowledged that these enjoyed civil and criminal immunity, and all malefactors were well aware of that privilege and routinely took advantage of it.

The Grand Master, the Bishop and the Inquisitor, divided by their power manias, united by a common obedience to the Pope, clashed routinely over conflicts of jurisdiction, precedence, prerogatives, protocol and etiquette

But the criminal police had had more than enough of that. They plotted a stratagem to lure Ciardi outside the church. On crossing Grand Harbour on his way to the Floriana waterfront, they pounced on him and detained him, rather self-satisfied with the brilliant outcome of their cunning, I would say.

This gave rise to one of those grievous and seemingly never-ending conflicts between the Bishop and the Grand Master, in which the Pope in Rome ultimately had to mediate, cajole and stamp his feet, and which dragged on, with strident acrimony, at least up to March 1639.

The second reason why Ciardi’s humdrum murder for greed remains notable is that parts of the evidence have been preserved.

For some reason I have never managed to establish, most of the early criminal records of the Maltese Castellania (criminal court) seem to have disappeared. Maybe they are still stored somewhere inaccessible, or perhaps they were deliberately destroyed on superior orders, though I prefer not to be much of a conspiracy theorist.

Criminal records usually grow very bulky with the transcripts of all the evidence, documents, reports by experts and written pleadings by lawyers. Over the years they tend to occupy serious amounts of shelf space. I can well imagine registry clerks, desperate where to store the new files, binning the older ones. Whatever the reason, full files of the old processi of the criminal courts remain a major rarity.

In Ciardi’s case, some of the evidence has been preserved – not the original file, but through related transcripts left for safekeeping in the records of a notary at the request of Dr Ascanio Surdo, the judge of the criminal court of Malta, and Dr Palmerino Montana, avvocato fiscale (public prosecutor) of the Castellania, mostly to demonstrate that they had acted in good faith in holding on to Ciardi after his arrest by the police and to ward off the threat of instant excommunication by the Bishop.

Ascanio Surdo, fifth Baron of Cicciano, and, to a lesser extent, Palmerino Montana, then shone as prominent stars in the legal firmament of Malta. The contemporaries of Surdo had nothing but praise for him as one of Malta’s more outstanding experts in civil and canon law of all times. He had acted as uditore (minister with judicial powers) to Grand Master Alof de Wignacourt, and remained active in the law as judge of the Castellania. He died, aged 93, three days short of Christmas 1656, and his remains were buried in the church of the Minor Observants in Valletta. His Statuti of the Order relating to Armamenti (maritime trade and corsairing) were first published in Malta in 1605 and again in Palermo two years after his death. Surdo’s portrait should be among those of eminent Maltese in the corridors of the Old University in Valletta, but has not been traced so far.

In their long pleadings, preserved in the records of Notary Ralli of July 23, 1637, Surdo and Montana, in the hope of warding off excommunication, give no less than 18 reasons to justify their arresting Ciardi after he came out of the church. You can almost hear their teeth chattering.

These notarial documents dovetail remarkably into the numerous letters and dispatches from Malta sent to Rome by Inquisitor Fabio Chigi on the Ciardi murder and its aftermath, studied by Mgr Vincent Borg. Many of these internal Inquisition dispatches are written in cipher to ensure secrecy should they fall in unauthorised hands, but Mgr Borg had access to the decoded transcripts housed in the Vatican archives.

The accent in the documents discovered lately in the Notarial Archives is on the violation by the Bishop of the rights of the lay criminal courts, rather than on the State’s violation the Bishop’s prerogatives or on the delinquencies of Ciardi. These papers are more concerned with the acrimonious battles of jurisdiction between the rival claimants in which every side tried to score points, many garnished with threats of instant excommunication.

The guilt or innocence of the suspect or any consideration for his victim do not feature prominently – it is enough to refer and to dismiss the murdered man a miserabile. Often old documents in Italian refer to a person killed by a criminal as miserabile – wretched. The Sicilian was just the small mouse the big cats had a ball playing with.

The Ciardi case ruffled feathers so badly that to preserve the evidence and the chess moves for eternity, a notary, Michele Ralli, was commissioned, and presumably paid, to immortalise the progress of the power fall-out that followed the blood-soaked saga, in pages upon pages of curial script.

The evidence of Scarlatta’s murder and the subsequent confrontation between Grand Master and Bishop, contained in the notarial archives, runs into at least 61 folio pages. This is not the right medium to summarise it in any detail, though it would be grand material for a history student’s case-study dissertation.

In brief, here are the facts:

In November 1636, at night, a Sicilian oil merchant was murdered in proditorio et appostato modo (in a treacherous and deliberate manner, see Maltese apposta) by Nicolò Ciardi. The two had dined together in the merchant’s home in Vittoriosa, and Ciardi had waited for Scarlatta to fall asleep. In his slumber, he killed the merchant and robbed him of all his belongings. He then dumped the corpse, naked, in a public road.

The records do not seem to specify how Scarlatta was killed. Firearms were then acquiring ever increasing popularity as weapons for homicides, though the use of daggers and stilettos still prevailed. Scarlatta is a typical, though uncommon, Sicilian surname.

The evidence of Scarlatta’s murder and the subsequent confrontation between Grand Master and Bishop, contained in the notarial archives… would be grand material for a history student’s case-study dissertation

The murder of the oil trader left substantial traces in three important Maltese archives. I have already mentioned the Notarial Archives and those of the Inquisition, but the homicide also features in the archives of the Order of Malta, housed in the National Library. A long report in the minutes of the Council of the Order of August 31, 1637, summarises the cases of Ciardi and Trimarchi. Nicolò Ciardi is here referred to as “padron Cola Ricciardo” – the padron seems to indicate that he was the owner-captain of a boat.

“Undoubted evidence compiled by our criminal court shows that the miserabile Francesco Scarlatta was treacherously murdered for the purpose of robbing him of his money, by Padron Cola Ricciardo, his compatriot, at a time when the victim was charitably hosting him at table and had also given him his own bed to sleep on. This traitor, after having committed the detestable murder, fled immediately to the Greek Church in Birgu”. The records of the Order make clear the belief of the police that Ciardi did not act alone but involved in the killing his accomplices Trimarchi and a Maltese called Salvator Dumez.

A coeval petition vividly portrays the precarious state of law and order in Vittoriosa in 1638. Don Grazio Calleja and Antonio Calleja jointly entreated the Grand Master to do something about the lawlessness that was taking over Vittoriosa and making the city unliveable.

They could no longer take the rampant criminality, the unrestrained violence that was becoming habitual. Vittoriosa had been falling in the hands of “malandati che non hanno timore di Dio” (delinquents who have no fear of God). The least the Callejas expected from the State was an increased police presence and a more earnest concern for public order. Hope springs eternal. The authorities decreed the petition on August 21.

The police of the Castellania investigated diligently and discovered that Ciardi was hiding inside the Greek church of Vittoriosa where he could not be apprehended. This was probably Our Lady of Damascus, close to the parish church of St Laurence, though Vittoriosa had another two Greek chapels. He then moved in secret to the church of the Carmelite friars fronting Vittoriosa Wharf.

In time, Ciardi believed he had organised his escape to Sicily and embarked on a boat that headed for Floriana sotto i padri capuccini, but was captured by the Castellania police in the middle of Grand Harbour. It later became clear that what he foolishly believed to be his flight to Sicily had been nothing but a stratagem plotted by the police to lay their hands on the murderer outside the boundaries of ecclesiastical jurisdiction.

Bishop Miguel Balaguer’s fury at having the carpet pulled from under his feet knew no bounds; he claimed that his jurisdiction over Ciardi could not be neutralised by trickery and by the use of false and dishonest ruses. Ciardi had to be immediately handed back to the church.

Grand Master Jean Paul Lascaris subscribed to a different school of thought. He would, wouldn’t he, seeing that the trap to ensnare the murderer out of the Carmelite church had no doubt been authorised by him. No lowly lay subordinate would dream of provoking the ire of the Bishop in a matter so scandalously explosive, without pre-guaranteed protection from his boss.

(To be concluded)