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The Winged Lion and the Eight-Pointed Cross
The papers reprinted in this volume focus on the extraordinary and multifaceted relationship between two Christian States: the Republic of Venice and the Island Order State on Hospitaller Malta between 1530 and the late 1790s. It was marked by three distinct phenomena — military cooperation along with other Western allies against the Ottoman Empire; direct mutual confrontation, at times even leading to war; and commercial cooperation. A fourth phenomenon, this time involving the wider Mediterranean context within which the two interacted, concerns the idea of decline. Some of the papers that follow question the validity of the traditional view that the Mediterranean and Venice were in decline by the sixteenth century and that the Hospitaller Order, claimed to be in decline by the eighteenth, had given up Malta to the French as a result.
This book will appeal to all those interested in Crusading Orders and the history of the Crusades, as well as the history of Venice, Malta, and the Mediterranean in the early modern period.
Victor Mallia-Milanes is Professor of History, former Head of the Department of History and Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Malta. His special research interests include Venice, the Hospitaller Order of St John, Malta, and the Mediterranean in the early modern period, on which he has published extensively. His publications include Venice and Hospitaller Malta 1530-1798: Aspects of a Relationship; Hospitaller Malta 1530-1798; In the Service of the Venetian Republic; Lo Stato dell’Ordine di Malta, 1630; and Valletta: Malta’ Hospitaller City, and Other Essays.
PREFACE
The papers reproduced in the present volume tell the story of the relationship between two Christian States in the early modern Mediterranean — the Republic of Venice and the Hospitaller Order State of Malta. Three distinct yet neatly interwoven realities determined the general pattern of this relationship. The first was military collaboration with other Christian States against the Ottoman Empire, especially whenever the security of Venice’s stato da mar and her commercial interests were at stake — as happened, for example, over Cyprus, Crete, and twice over the Morea. The second reality concerned the mutual confrontation between Venice and the Hospitallers, generally on matters pertaining to piracy and privateering activities under cover of the eight-pointed Cross.
In such cases, Venice reacted not only in her own interests, but ironically also in those of the Ottoman Empire. More often than not, in retaliation, the Republic imposed the sequestro over the vast landed estates constituting the Order’s Grand Priory of Venice. Between 1536 and 1741, Venice confiscated the Order’s property in the Veneto eleven times. On two of these occasions, in 1584 and 1741, the two States were at formal war with each other. Commercial cooperation between the two marked the third reality. It was as late as the mid-eighteenth century that the Republic had her first resident ministry established on the Order State of Malta, long years after other kingdoms or principalities had done so. Since then, relations between the two changed solidly for the better, determining healthier mutual understanding. From traditional foes they became trading partners, reaching a fruitful bilateral trade agreement in the 1760s and later renewed. The papers that follow discuss each of these issues in detail.
Directly relevant to the main theme of the present collection is a related fourth issue, one that involves not only Venice and the Hospital, but also the Mediterranean, the wider framework within which the two States interacted. It concerns the controversial concept of decline. Historians, including myself at one stage, have almost invariably claimed that all three — Venice, the Hospital, and the Mediterranean — had been in a clear state of decadence from the sixteenth century onwards, a view traditionally taken for granted. Decline is a gradual physical or moral deterioration, or both, a progressive degenerating process of change from within. Applied to the Mediterranean, Venice, and the Hospital, this traditional assumption will remain essentially dubious and weak, until new convincing and authentic evidence is produced. Decline and evolution are neither synonymous nor interchangeable concepts. Unlike decline, change is the quintessence of life; only the dead never evolve. History is the unbiased record of life past in all its existing forms. ‘There is nothing I admire more’, wrote Kathrine Rundell, ‘than evolution’.
INTRODUCTION
Mare Nostrum. Mare Internum. The sea which knows no decline. Today’s sea is yesterday’s sea, the sea of Antiquity. A living soul which has never lost its ‘power of breathing’. A timeless civilising space, ‘of multicultural action’, as recently defined,! ‘with a shared history, a shared heritage’. Confined, as it has always been, by austere mountains” and with narrow access through the awe-inspiring Pillars of Hercules, its surrounding coastal and shoreline terrains are, as they have always been, inhabited by communities of diverse languages, beliefs, cultures, and traditions. This great,> middle* sea has had since time immemorial its own character, its own personality, with a distinct identity entirely its own. It enjoyed the same features, then as now, ‘its shape, its architecture, the basic realities of its life’> — peaceful and pronounced tranquility, brilliant sunshine, and serenity; rough, grave, and grim moments of violent turbulence, heavy rains, and instability.
Small fishing boats traverse its extensive floating surface, as do luxury liners. Every island, large and small, every inlet, every stretch of sandy beach, every coastal city, exposes its fraught history. Over long centuries, the forceful image of its distant past kept perpetually turning into its present which instantly dissolved once more into the past, revamping it into a different psyche. Thus metamorphosed, it would assume a new role, sustaining its ever youthful spirit — ‘nothing ever disappeared without trace: sooner or later everything surfaced once more’.® Today’s Mediterranean, the product of all the previous cycles in its evolution,’ is a defiance — audacious, provocative, inspiring — to those narrative historians who often tell the traditional tale of its decline.
This generally shared assumption is pure historical fiction, as is its process of readjustment, claimed to be a dark, gloomy, silent withdrawal. Is this perhaps what Horden and Purcell, in their introduction to The Corrupting Sea,® chose to term an ‘ignorance of fundamentals’? Decline is a gradual process of internal deterioration in physical or moral strength or in both, not an ever-evolving sequence of conversions. It was not the spread of cancerous cells from within that had caused the loss of the sea’s global preeminence in the sixteenth century, but internal and external coercive forces that gradually drove civilised Western Europe away from the Mediterranean towards the North and the Atlantic.
To the great Age of Discovery or Exploration, historians generally attribute such positive features as a wider knowledge of the world, easier means of communication, and extensive trade networks. And perhaps rightly so. But the lure of gold, the determination to gain access to lucrative new resources and markets, the seductive appeal of global supremacy, and the enticement of new vaster territories, turned that same great age into an even more formidable one of exploitation and destruction of indigenous cultures and freedoms, into an age of religious intolerance, slavery, inequality, and imposition, of aggressive economic and political dominance, often violently; indeed, of colonialism.
Every stage in life possesses deep within itself seeds of potential long-term structural changes, capable of reproducing a partial or complete conversion from the prevailing phase into another. The end result may not necessarily be a better phenomenon. It may not necessarily be worse, either. It is simply a different product. At every phase in its evolution, the Mediterranean remained as vigorous and as active as ever in a strikingly fresh, unfamiliar, and unprecedented way. At every stage there is indeed ‘the presence of the past’.? Change is the quintessence of life: only the dead never revamp their image and adapt to new conditions. No change has ever taken the vigour, shine, and lustre off the unique qualities of the Mediterranean Sea, its dynamism and the strong elements of continuity with its traditional vibrant human past — its ‘permanent realities’ and their ‘determining influence’.!° Does it require profound foresight to surmise that by the end of the next century the Mediterranean will almost certainly be different from how it is today? Would that imply that the sea is currently experiencing a process of decadence and degeneration?
In a similar fashion, historians have attributed the end of the Venetian Republic in 1797 and the Hospital’s loss of Malta the year after, both at the hands of the vicious little soldier from Ajaccio, to the enervating process of decline which, so they claim, gradually wore them out until it almost paralysed them. Here I have to part company with these historians, for neither the fate of Venice, nor that of the Hospital, can be convincingly attributed to any weakening process that sprouted up from within. Napoleon’s vindictive intervention was an event, a purely external and spiteful intrusion, that ushered in the next phase in the city’s, and the Hospital’s, necessary mutation.
While Marco Polo was travelling to China, marvelled by the hitherto unknown glories of the East, the Order was attempting to conquer Rhodes, ready to assume a new role. Over the /ongue durée the fall of Acre in 1291 and the consequent forced exit of the military orders from the Holy Land remoulded, indeed reinforced, the Hospitaller institution, helping it attain an unprecedented larger scope of military, economic, and political action in a wider world. Its settlement on Malta in 1530 marked yet another stage forward in the historical evolution of the Hospitallers, gradually converting their Order State into a near principality.
The fall of Hospitaller Malta, as I have had the opportunity to discuss elsewhere, was the direct effect of the French Revolution, its abolition of the French monarchy, which was the Order’s major patron, and its confiscation and sale of all Church lands. These included the Hospital’s vast estates, first in France and then, when the revolution spread beyond the kingdom’s borders, in other European states. These properties had been the Order’s economic lifeblood. Their expropriation temporarily debilitated the institution to the severe extent that it could not offer Napoleon, as it had offered the Ottomans in 1565, hardly any serious resistance.
Hospitaller Malta was given up virtually without a struggle. Reduced to its essence, however, the real significance was the destruction of the Island Order State which the Hospital had created first on Rhodes and then had it consolidated further on Malta. For the Hospital, an ever changing and ever evolving institution since the early 1070s, the loss of Malta in 1798 was one other moment of reorientation and redefinition. Its vitality was shown in its response to the consequent crisis that followed. The Order did not look back in an endeavour to grind time to a halt or, worse, to move it back. It understood, as it always did on previous crises, the reality of the time. That understanding prompted its move, as Braudel so excellently remarked, ‘in history’s direction and at history’s pace, instead of trying in vain to slow it down’.!! The real Hospital ‘would survive, it did survive’ to the present day. !”
The same claim has also been made for the overthrow of the Venetian Republic. Men are we, and must grieve when even the shade Of that which once was great is passed away.
William Wordsworth’s idea behind these lines is shared by several historians. But is that idea sensitively correct? Is it historically accurate? The event of 12 May 1797, the extinction of the Venetian Republic, was an abortive success, the Corsican soldier’s deceptive achievement. It has one meagre significance. The man whose heart was ‘crammed with arrogancy, spleen, and pride’,!* and whose ambition drove him beyond the limits of human decency, had succeeded in dissolving and extinguishing the Venetian Republic. But the Republic was not Venice, in the same way as the French monarchy, overthrown on 21 September five years earlier, was not France; nor was Venice the Republic, in the same way as France was not the ousted Bourbon dynasty.'
Before the rise, spread, and consolidation of her empire, Venice was there. The Republic was simply the form of government ‘the eldest child of Liberty’ had adopted to govern the city. Admittedly, long before 1797, Venice no longer controlled the trade of the East. Nor were her wealth-laden galleys creeping any more to her shores along the Grand Canal to distribute their rich cargoes to the Latin West. But the power of that city, divested of the Republic, remained extreme. Today, Venice, through her glorious past which Napoleon had miserably failed to obliterate, masters the whole world through a more diffused trade — tourism.'>
For Braudel, Venice’s ‘withdrawal’ was not ‘a sudden catastrophe’; nor was it ‘the logical consequence of human errors’ — implying that Venice was not to blame for her fall from the outstanding position she had been enjoying as ‘queen at the heart of Europe’. It was neither determined nor provoked ‘from within’ the Republic. Rather, as in the case of the Mediterranean and the Hospital of St John, it was an unavoidably passive recipient of outside threatening assaults over which the Adriatic city had no control. In 1516-1517, for example, Turkey’s conquest of Syria and Egypt deprived Venice of her ‘direct control of the zone on which depended the very life of the Republic’ — her rich commerce in spices, pepper, silk fabrics, and other similar commodities.'° The world was gradually moving slowly but steadily away from the Middle Sea.
There were other devious forces at work, like ‘the growth of the nation states.’!? There was Spain, there was France, ‘both with imperial ambitions’; there was the mighty Ottoman Empire itself, against which Venice had exhausted all its technical resources. There was also the political disunity of Italy (‘a divided Italy, torn apart by internal struggles’). Within this context, her victories, including the battle of Lepanto, ‘the greatest naval triumph [the Venetians] had ever achieved’,'® promised no reassuring future. Cyprus was lost in 1572, Crete in 1669, and the Morea in 1718.!° But to attribute the event of 1797 to decline is misleading.
While Venice’s ambiguous attitude towards Constantinople was neither coherent nor consistent, the Ottoman Empire seemed to exert great influence on its political life and often determined its attitude towards the resourceful military Order of the Hospital. The history of this triangular relationship (Venice, Constantinople, and central-Mediterranean Malta, the Hospitallers’ conventual island headquarters from 1530 to 1798) in early modern times is a polyphony of echoes and contrasts, with destructive tensions provoking the prevailing atmosphere between them. The purpose of the present introduction is in part to reconstruct a profile of this complex relationship, one that is exhaustively documented as the collection of papers that follow will illustrate.
To protect their highly ambivalent attitude towards the impulsive and unpredictable Ottomans, the equally impetuous and wily Venetians would distance themselves from the alleged horrors attributed to the Hospitallers’ piratical activities in the eastern Mediterranean and along the North African coast on Muslim trade, merchants, and villages to feed the widely renowned slave and ransom market on Malta. Appearing to be close to the Hospitallers, whom the Venetian Senate once dubbed ‘corsairs parading crosses’, and to their Maltese subjects was too dangerously daring. Propinquity in this sense would trigger, as it often did, an immediate Ottoman reflex.
Trade and the islands making up its stato da mar, were potential prey. The distance which the Venetians kept from Hospitaller Malta expanded not only over the widespread corsairing activities, but also on how to deal with plague manifestations. For long years there were abysses separating the two. Relations between them were marked by alternating rising and falling feelings, by good, poor, or hostile attitudes. On two occasions, war between the two darkened the otherwise apparent blue skies.
The Order of St John was as devious and shrewd a force as Venice was. ‘Fashioned on a propitious site,’ the Adriatic city grew ‘into an immense spider’s web that extend[ed] across a vast lagoon to form a singular unity’.*° The Order saw the light of day in Jerusalem in the midst of shrines, holy places, pilgrims, and merchants from Amalfi some two decades before the First Crusade until it gradually evolved into a religious-military institution. Like an octopus, it spread its tentacles out across Christian Europe. The history of both is similar in their long-standing determination to move forward whatever the circumstances and in their characteristic obstinacy not to yield to experienced seemingly fatal disasters. In their own “unquestionably wondrous’ ways they have survived, like the Mediterranean, to the present day — the Hospital through the retention of its original charitable mission; Venice through its ever-expanding kaleidoscope of dense touristic swarms.
‘Venice is not dead,’ writes Braudel, ‘it has not fallen into thin air after having gradually and inexorably lost the dazzling colours of its ancient power.’*! Both Venice and the Hospital grew wealthy, militarily mighty, and diplomatically powerful. The former succeeded in building a Mediterranean empire; the latter in turning the same great sea into a living theatre for its unending dramatic performances. It was also on this stage that the two came in endless encounters. Both weathered multiple crises; both considered themselves preeminently ‘a bastion of Christianity against the infidel Turk’.
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