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20.06.19 Petkov, The Maltese Dialogue

20.06.19 Petkov, The Maltese Dialogue


The ability to travel across time and eavesdrop upon the conversations of people past proves to be an experience that many, at least occasionally, fantasize about. The work under review here--Fra Giuseppe Cambiano's manuscript treatise Informatione dell'Institutioni, Privilegj, et Obblighj della Religione de Cavalieri de Rhodi hoggi di Malta(c.1554-1556), translated by Kiril Petkov as The Maltese Dialogue--comes close to taking us down an intriguing memory lane. Picture this: an autumn evening in Venice, the year is 1552, and four gentlemen are gathered together. They are the Piedmontese Knight of Malta, Commander Fra Giuseppe Cambiano, and three Venetian patricians, the Knight of Malta Fra Giustiniano Giustiniani, Girolamo Querini and Bernardo Giustiniani. The subject of their discussion: the history, institutions and projects of the Order of St John the Baptist, a military-religious order of the Roman Catholic Church whose roots lay in the pre-Crusading decades of the Holy Land, whose brethren were known as the Hospitallers, and whose headquarters in the mid-sixteenth century was in the central Mediterranean island of Malta. Their conversation--argues Petkov--formed the basis of the treatise in the form of a dialogue penned by Fra Cambiano a few years later. Though never published, manuscript copies of it were in circulation, particularly in Venice. The main exchange occurred between Fra Giustiniani and Fra Cambiano in the form of a question and answer session, with the former probing the latter. As Fra Cambiano tried to satisfy the curiosity of his interlocutors, history and myth, fact and opinion, came together to proffer an intimate glimpse into the circumstances and mentalities of the mid-sixteenth-century Mediterranean, as attested to by stories such as this one:

[Cambiano to Giustiniani] Our Order held and possessed six of seven islands round

about Rhodes … On the mainland, there was the castle of San Pietro, with its

unconquerable fortress. … In this castle, there was a marvellous breed of dogs,

who could tell Christians from Turks [i.e. Muslims] by their odor. Every day, they ran

in the fields around the castle, and if they happened upon a Christian, they nuzzled

him and led him to the fortress, but if they found a Turk, they mauled him brutally. …

...given what we know about other dogs performing so many marvellous deeds, it is

not impossible that the dogs of the castle of San Pietro would be able to discern

between a Turk and a Christian by the way they smell (79).

The Mediterranean was a theatre for Christian-Muslim confrontation, a reality that informed daily life for many who lived on its littoral and islands, yet the drama that unfolded was far too complex to be pigeonholed into a genre of a clash of civilizations. Indeed, Fra Cambiano himself acknowledged that based on what he had seen and experienced in Tripoli in North Africa, Christians and Muslims could also find common ground:

...many Moors lived with us, fought our enemies in our service with such fervor

and loyalty as if they were Christians, and provided us with horses and other war

materiel. ...there are many Arab camps feuding with one another, and part of

them would be favorably inclined toward us (107).

The Maltese Dialogue presents Fra Cambiano's treatise, in published form at last, after nearly 450 years from its composition. The book consists of a thirteen-page introduction by Petkov that provides a lucid framework, followed by a transcription of the Italian-original text, an annotated translation into English, a bibliography and index. The transcript and translation are mainly based on the British Library (MS Add. 8277) copy, in conjunction with the copy at the Archivio Apostolico Vaticano (Misc. Arm. II 81), and other variants. Fra Cambiano hailed from a Piedmontese middling noble family who served local rulers and developed a long-term connection with the Order of Saint John. His career, as summarised by Petkov was impressive: "A Knight of the Grand Cross, he served as the Order's Receiver and Procurator General in Rome, where he was the official ambassador to the papacy" (2). He was one of the Order's ambassadors to the Council of Trent (1546-1563), and as a seasoned diplomat, he was probably deeply involved in the negotiations between the Order and Venice during the 1550s, at a time when the ever-complicated relationship between these two was at a particularly low point. Fra Giustiniani, a Venetian and also a Hospitaller, was considered by the Senate of Venice as the Order's representative to the Republic, and would therefore have also been in the thick of the diplomatic action in those years. Not much is known about the other two Venetian patricians that make an appearance in the treatise, Girolamo Querini and Bernardo Giustiniani.

Petkov describes Fra Cambiano's treatise as "a publicist and polemical history with a contingent agenda"(5). It drew upon documentation but even more so on the personal experience and recollection of Fra Cambiano to present a clear story of the Order for an external readership, with a specific focus on Venice. Hospitaller-Venetian relations were colourful and turbulent, as was to be expected of an ancient institution and an ancient city with generally conflicting--but occasionally overlapping--interests in the Levant. Their diametrically opposed views in relation to the Muslim world generated a long, thorny relationship, for while the Hospitaller (mainly) sought war, the Venetians (mainly) sought trade. A few years after Fra Cambiano's treatise, in the 1580s, the Senate of Venice dubbed the Hospitallers as 'corsairs parading crosses', indicating Venice's scepticism of the religious sincerity of Hospitaller activities. [1] Still, there were points in common between the two. Venice, with its traditional religious-institutional independence from Rome, often saw the Hospitallers as a potential papal fifth column within its territory. Yet the Hospitallers were also ambivalent about their relationship with the papacy from which they derived their jurisdictional supra-national status, with all its benefits, but at the price of having to accommodate regular and not seldom papal demands.

Despite the traditional rivalry between Venice and the Order, the Hospitallers were the most constant allies Venice had during the Second Venetian–Ottoman War (1499–1502/03) and the War of Candia (1645-1669). They also shared certain jurisdictional characteristics--remarked upon by Fra Cambiano--such as both being "republics" of aristocratic Christians. In a bitter-sweet twist of fate, the Republic and Hospitaller Malta would both be undone by the same foe, Napoleon Bonaparte, at the close of the 1790s. It is within this long-term history of Hospitaller-Venetian relations that Fra Cambiano's text needs to be viewed to be properly understood.

The treatise can be viewed as consisting of three parts:

The opening part, about one quarter of the whole, is the first detailed early modern

historical précis of the Order's past since its inception. Then comes the second part,

comprising the bulk of the treatise, about half of the total, which present a concise

summary of the Order's constitution, institutional and legal organisation, election

procedures, recruitment of knights, rituals of instalment, and financial matters. The

remaining part, about one quarter of the total, is a polemical segment arguing for the

benefit of the Order's abandoning of Malta and relocation to Tripoli (6).

The aim of the first part was to emphasize the Order's long-term and continuing role as the defender of Christendom against Islam. The second part, Petkov argues, was intended for Fra Giustiniani as "an aid that would help him educate his fellow [Venetian]-patricians about the Order's purpose" (7). In this way, it was hoped, relations between the two sides might improve as the Venetians would come to realise that their confiscation of the Order's properties in Venetian domains was harming the ability of the Order to fight Islam and keep Europe safe. Why did the Venetians confiscate Hospitaller properties, known as commanderies? It was their way of punishing and pressuring the Order to regulate its naval and corsairing activities when these had an adverse impact on Venice and its subjects. Fra Cambiano was hoping, it seems, that Fra Giustiniani would, through the former's instruction, convince his fellow Venetians to see past all this. As subsequent events show, Fra Cambiano hoped in vain.

The third part is intriguing because of its proposal that the Order should transfer its headquarters from Malta to Tripoli. In 1530, Emperor Charles V granted a lease over the Maltese islands and the town of Tripoli to the Order of St John, the latter having lost its previous headquarters in Rhodes in 1522. Neither Malta nor Tripoli were in a fit state of defence when the Hospitallers stepped ashore and there were misgivings within the Order about simultaneously managing too such distant outposts. There was a 'Tripoli party' who made the case for the transfer of the Convent (as the headquarters of the Order was referred to) from Malta to Tripoli, which move was only halted by the Ottoman seizure of Tripoli in 1551. What Fra Cambiano's text tells us is that the story did not rest there, and there were those, like him, who still believed in the Tripoli option. In fact, Fra Cambiano stated in his treatise that he hoped Jean de Valette would become the next grand master (which in fact he did in 1557) precisely because he knew that de Valette was keen on the Tripoli plan (111). In the end circumstances curtailed the possibility of such action, yet in his writing Fra Cambiano provides us with intimate insights into Hospitaller mentalities at a particular moment in time, which official documentation may seldom be able to capture.

Petkov's Maltese Dialogue presents us with a fascinating work that has much to offer to those interested in the dynamics of the Mediterranean, and the Mediterranean world at the dawn of the age of Philip II, a moment of transition from the medieval to the early modern. The bibliography is comprehensive and relevant, which shows in the careful framing of Fra Cambiano's work by Petkov, though reference to works such as Victor Mallia-Milanes (ed.), Lo Stato dell'Ordine di Malta 1630 (Taranto: Centro Studi Melitensi, 2017), could have rendered this framing even stronger. In terms of vocabulary, it would have been preferable if "commenda"(14, passim), the term used for a Hospitaller property, would have been rendered into the standard English word "commandery" rather than "commendatory" (3, passim). Finally, this reviewer would have been interested to know the reasoning behind Petkov's decision to call his book The Maltese Dialogue. The Hospitallers were "the Knights of Malta" in so far as the island lent them a berthing space, a name, and a jurisdictional identity, but the Order could and did exist beyond a physical place. The text has something to say about Malta, but is not really about Malta. "A Dialogue on The Knights of Malta" might have better proclaimed what this book is about, i.e., the history, institutions and politics of the Hospitaller Order of St John of Jerusalem in the mid-1550s. These minor reservations do not take anything away from Petkov's achievement in his book, which in the true spirit of Fra Cambiano, offers us a precious guidebook to the Order of St John and the Mediterranean. Indeed, by the end of it, I felt that Fra Giustiniani's concluding observation was a perfect mirror of my own opinion on the book: "...if there is anything else you would like to say, pray say it on the way back, because there is hardly another thing I would be more pleased to hear about" (113).

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Notes:

1. Victor Mallia-Milanes, "Corsairs Parading Crosses: the Hospitallers and Venice, 1530-1798," in The Military Orders: Fighting for the Faith and Caring for the Sick, ed. Malcolm Barber (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1994), 103-112.