that each successive
Grand Master consistently employed to convince the crowned heads
of Europe of the ever-imminent threat from Islam, in the hope
of receiving some solid form of financial assistance, the massive
building programme, indeed tremendous by the nativist norm,
was not undertaken because the island was a constantly besieged
territory, as Braudel would have us believe, but because it
lay in the logic of the warlike exigencies of the character
of the Order. There was no confusion of roles and purposes.
Unlike late medieval Malta's, the new Hospitaller State's interests
and concerns were no longer exclusively internal and inward-looking,
confined to the discomfiture of drifting rudderlessly. The formidable
Hospitaller fortresses built on the island conformed neatly
to the essential requisites of a military headquarters, directly
acknowledging political reality. A most explicit ideological
affirmation of the spirit of the times, they formally dismantled
the inbred medieval structure of political isolation and cultural
insulation, and ironically allowed, indeed encouraged, an unprecedented
movement of peoples with as many ideas and commodities which
in the long term exerted considerable cultural influence on
all sectors and in all spheres of society.
It was a process both complex and interesting,
one that was not confined exclusively to soldiers, sailors,
and cannon, but comprised a much wider circle of enterprising
local and foreign merchants and traders, artists, architects
and military engineers, slaves freshly procured and captives
lately ransomed, corsairs of diverse nationalities, Hospitallers
on their way to or from their European commanderies, ministers
and inquisitors. Within the motivating force of this flow of
people moving lay dangerously novel perceptions of the present
and the future. Scarcely a corner of life in Malta remained
untouched. This is evidenced in part by the enormous amount
of documentation in the archives of the Inquisition. The independent
Tribunal of the Roman Inquisition on the island, itself a momentous
innovation, felt increasingly committed to the maintenance of
Catholic orthodoxy by reinforcing the Tridentine doctrine and
pruning out with all religious scruple not only the slightest
traits of Reformation theology but also those of Muslim
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beliefs and practices, most of which
infiltrated the islands with slaves on board Hospitaller galleys.
Along with a roughly estimated total of 6,000 slaves, employed
as much on the fortifications, arsenals, magazines, and the
galley squadron, as they were in domestic service and within
the local trading community, there was a thriving slave market,
an extremely profitable business which was widely renowned throughout
the Mediterranean. Together with the widespread corsairing activity,
very closely related and as lucrative and rewarding, it too
constituted an important source of contact, a very close link,
with the outside world.
I am inclined to believe that the basis of this continuous progress
towards increasing integration with the outside world was what
D.K. Fieldhouse would call 'the mental attitude' of a wide sector
of the native society. The initial cultural shock which the
Order's forceful presence must have caused within Maltese society
was gradually transformed into a much longer, slower, and barely
perceptible process of shattering the traditional archaism by
exposing, through continuing influence, the islanders' experience
to different degrees of European sensibility as it had never
been exposed before. Their existence had been for centuries
'compressed', if I may be allowed to use Edward Said's expression,
'into that of a subjugated particle', and were destined to remain
politically so for centuries to come, unable to withstand or
resist the new Hospitaller State's 'imperious decrees, its overwhelming
harsh measures, its awesome and seemingly unchecked ability
to do what it wanted according to imperatives' that the Maltese
alone 'could not affect'.(4) But
the striking cultural asymmetry unwittingly lifted the 'bell
jar' under which the indigenous way of life had long lain 'isolated',
'withdrawn and insecure'.
The great sense of movement in and out of Malta cannot be attributed
to any major demographic shift on the island. At least the current
state of our historiography does not permit of such a view for
the early modern period. Nor could this regular flow of people
have been a collective resistance to religious intolerance,
or one driven, like several other migratory movements, by a
strong desire in search of 'a real alternative |
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[4] 4 E.W. Said, Culture
and Imperialism (London, Vintage, 1994), 38, 39.
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