A History of the Crusades (54 page)

As at Rhodes, the corso contributed to the island’s employment and economy. The Maltese corso was not crude piracy; nor was it the standard privateering licensed by a public authority under legally valid rules but without religious distinctions. It was rather a form of holy warfare limited, in theory though frequently not in practice, to attacks on infidel shipping. Authorized by the master, who received ten per cent of the booty, and strictly regulated by a special tribunal, it permitted Hospitallers and others to invest in piratical expeditions by arming a ship and dividing profits made from booty and ransoms. There was great spoil in the Aegean and the Levant, as operations moved from Tripoli to the Peloponnese, to Rhodes, and to Cyprus. Attacks on Venetian shipping in particular repeatedly led to diplomatic confrontations and to the sequestration of the Hospital’s incomes in its priory of Venice. The Hospital took part in many major sixteenth-century campaigns and in the Veneto-Turkish wars between 1645 and 1718, but after 1580 the emphasis shifted to the corso. Like its North African counterparts, Malta became a corsair state whose vessels were active along the Maghrib coasts where they confronted a
Barbary counter-corso in conflicts which occasionally extended into Atlantic waters. Maltese sailors and investors participated fully in the corso, while Hospitaller brethren not only financed the vessels but served on them; of 483 known eighteenth-century ventures some 183, or 38 per cent, were under Hospitaller command. The growing predominance of the French, with their Turkish entente, constrained the Hospitallers to reduce their Levant operations and diminished their prizes. Down to 1675 there were still some twenty to thirty active corsairs, but from then until 1740 the number fell to between ten and twenty; and thereafter there were even fewer, with no licences being issued for the Levant. Only after the crisis of 1792 was the corso briefly revived. By then the Hospital was, with considerable success, policing and pacifying the seas rather than conducting a morally justified religious war, but the order was still performing a useful activity which fostered western commerce, particularly as it forced Ottoman subjects to seek safety by sailing on Christian shipping.

The Hospital’s institutions remained static. Its field of administration, which extended far beyond the island order-state, depended predominantly on the master. Between 1526 and 1612 the chapter general met, on average, every six years, but from 1631 until 1776, when a financial crisis finally proved compelling, it was never summoned. The Hospital, never seriously reformed, became ever more autocratic, its masters even seeking forms of sovereignty. The southern French monopoly of the mastership had been broken in 1374, and subsequently there were Iberian and Italian as well as French masters; in the eighteenth century two Portuguese, Antonio Manoel de Vilhena and Manoel Pinto de Fonseca, ruled between them for some forty-six years, Pinto for thirty-two of them. The election of a ruler for life ensured continuity, stability, and an absence of child or female successions, but the seniority system encouraged longevity and produced a gerontocracy throughout the upper echelons of the administration. The master’s extensive incomes and patronage enabled him to win influence, to pack committees, or to elect knights through his own magistral grace, and he could therefore become unduly autocratic. Such behaviour led
to the deposition in 1581 of the master, Jean l’Évêque de la Cassière, who had sought clumsily to restrain lawless behaviour among the brethren; he was only reinstated after a major upheaval and a visit to Rome.

The French, with three of the Hospital’s seven provinces, clung instinctively to the lands, commanderies, and incomes on which their survival depended. There was scandalous, but irresistible, royal interference in the priory of France, and in general the system of promotions developed into a complicated bureaucratic competition permitting pluralism, absenteeism, and other abuses. Widespread intervention, especially in appointments, by popes who failed to withstand pressures from rulers and other individuals played a significant part in undermining the morale of all the military orders. Nepotism was inevitable; in an extreme case, the great-nephew of the Hospitaller master Adrien de Wignacourt received the commandery of Lagny-le-Sec at the age of 3 in 1692 and still held it on his death eighty-two years later. Manoel Pinto de Fonseca was received at the age of 2 and died, as master, aged 92. Yet the Hospital was by no means decadent. It remained strong in Aragon and Bohemia, in parts of Germany, and in Italy, especially in Naples and Sicily. By 1583 when of some 2,000 brethren there were only 150 sergeants and 150 priests, the knights had become decidedly predominant. In 1700 there were still about 560 commanderies in France, the Iberian peninsula, Italy, and the empire.

Almost everywhere the habit of Malta with its eight-starred cross conferred the highest degree of nobility. In Italy, with its political fragmentation, the Hospital helped to preserve a pan-Italian caste of nobles who shared a background of birth and manners and a common educational experience in the Maltese convent. These men knew each other as members of an extended multinational club, access to which they limited through the device of family control of the commandery in
jus patronatus
and by an ever more rigid system of proofs of nobility. The gradual shift from horse to galley, the general proletarianization of the arts of war, and the emergence of non-aristocratic service bureaucracies at court all tended to marginalize the older nobility whose
honour and chivalric ideals had been displayed through the outdated sword. While lively debates redefined and modified concepts of nobility, the European aristocracy not only utilized the military orders to define and defend its own status, seeking to exclude newer nobilities or patriciates from entry into the orders and thus from their commanderies and benefices. In the Teutonic Order and the Hospital this noble corporatism functioned in the priories and provinces outside their order-states, but on Malta, as earlier in Prussia and Rhodes, the closed oligarchic caste, which originated outside the order-state, largely refused entry to the indigenous Maltese élite lest it develop into a disruptive dynastic element within the order’s government.

Hospitallers enjoyed considerable prestige in the West and many of them had close and influential family and political contacts with rulers and courts in their home provinces. Papal jurisdiction was no mere theoretical bond; indeed support, and sometimes damaging interference, from Rome continued to influence Hospitaller policy. Eighteenth-century accusations of high-living, immorality, and inactivity were not always unjustified but they were strikingly similar to criticisms repeatedly heard in the fourteenth century and indeed earlier. Despite its real institutional defects, the Hospital did not embody a decayed medieval ideal being lived out in a state of terminal anachronism. The number of brethren actually rose from 1,715 in 1635 to 2,240 in 1740. The early-modern nobility was often well educated, and the Hospital attracted entrants with a remarkable and vigorous range of thoroughly up-to-date military, diplomatic, scientific, and artistic interests and talents, men who were well-read and active throughout western Europe and as far afield as Russia and the Americas. The library in Valletta reflected the breadth of this culture which was both practical and theoretical. An early example was the humanist Sabba di Castiglione, who collected classical sculptures while stationed on Rhodes, was sent as ambassador to Rome, and retired to his commandery in Faenza where he founded a school for poor children.

As in all the orders, the Hospitallers’ vows were being interpreted more loosely and the common liturgical life of the commandery had increasingly been abandoned. Commanders were
often absentee, farming out their commandery as a predominantly economic unit; they could build up considerable personal wealth and leave part of it outside the order on their death. Hospitaller representatives attended the great reforming council at Trent where, however, the issue for them was not their own internal reform but the successful defence of the exemptions of the brethren and, above all, of their non-professed dependants from episcopal jurisdiction. Yet there were strong devotional concerns among Hospitallers which developed, especially in seventeenth-century France, in collaboration with the Jesuits and other modern movements unleashed at Trent. Some Hospitallers were actively engaged in charity, welfare, and missions, in the redemption of Christian captives in Muslim hands, and in contemporary pious and spiritual works; they sought paths by which the non-priestly religious could pursue a Hospitaller vocation that was both sanctified and military. All this overlapped with the maintenance of the knightly function on Malta, where there was a symbiotic exchange between priory and convent which ensured that Malta was in close touch with contemporary thought.

The corollary of this interchange was that the arrival of the enlightenment, and even of freemasonry, among the knightbrethren on Malta increased disaffection with the
ancienrégime
. Masters frequently quarrelled with bishops, papal inquisitors, and representatives of the Maltese people and clergy. The three French provinces, with their often well-managed estates and forests, produced about half the order’s foreign incomes and ensured the French a major share in office. As its military function evaporated and its incomes dwindled, the order dabbled in somewhat desperate schemes such as those involving Russian, British, and American alliances, the foundation of an Ethiopian company, the creation of a Polish priory, the purchase of estates in Canada, and the acquisition of Corsica; the Hospital purchased three Caribbean islands in 1651 but had to sell them in 1665. In 1792 the National Assembly confiscated the Hospitallers’ goods throughout France, with potentially disastrous financial consequences; in 1798 Napoleon met little resistance and drove the vacillating
German master, Ferdinand von Hompesch, and his brethren from a supposedly impregnable Malta. Roughly 200 of the 330 brethren on the island were French and, despite the background of demoralization and unpreparedness, many of the French were ready to resist. Firm leadership and better tactics might have saved Malta, but defeatist and alarmist groups worked for surrender. The few Spanish Hospitallers refused to fight. There had recently been indications of popular discontent with the order; some Maltese troops failed to fight, there was panic and confusion in Valletta and isolated incidents of mutiny and sabotage. A group of Maltese nobles pressed for negotiations and the master seems, mistakenly perhaps, to have feared an uprising of the order-state’s populace.

France and Spain, the order’s greatest supporters, had turned against it, and aid was available only from the two non-Catholic powers of Russia and Britain. It was scarcely in the French interest to remove the Hospital and lose control of the island to an enemy, as in fact occurred. The French had benefited commercially from the Hospitallers’ policing of the central Mediterranean and from the use of Malta’s port, but some French brethren were too royalist and some revolutionaries in Paris too dogmatic. The confiscations of 1792, which soon extended to Switzerland, Italy, and elsewhere, were probably decisive. The order was effectively protecting the Mediterranean, and even after 1798 it might have found a function in the armed conflict waged in North Africa for several decades by the European powers and even by the United States of America. Yet for many observers a sometimes arrogant society of aristocratic religious had come to appear largely irrelevant in an age of revolution, not so much because Malta was ungovernable or indefensible but because the underlying basis of the order-state, its enjoyment of extensive lands and privileges in the West, was no longer acceptable.

The Teutonic Order actually maintained a minimal military function after the fall of Malta in 1798. It had lost Prussia in
1525 but it kept properties and incomes in many Catholic, and even some Protestant, parts of Germany proper. After 1525 the German master’s headquarters was at Mergentheim in Franconia where for several centuries a combined
Hoch- und Deutschmeister
ruled over a petty baroque court with the status of a German prince. Meanwhile Livonia, where the order still controlled many towns and fortresses, turned largely Lutheran, but the Catholic brethren fought on, particularly in opposition to the Orthodox Russians but also against resistance from the Livonian populace. In 1558 Ivan the Terrible launched renewed Russian invasions of Livonia and the brethren lost Fellin two years later. Then in 1561 the last Livonian master, Gotthard Ketteler, also turned Protestant and secularized the order-state; parts of Livonia went to Poland and the ex-master became hereditary secular duke of Curland and Semigallen. By 1577 the whole Teutonic Order was reduced to 171 brethren.

Mergentheim was no
Ordensstaat
but it enjoyed the independence of a German principality under masters, notably Maximilian of Habsburg from 1595, who were often members of the Austrian ruling house. The Teutonic Order maintained the old machineries of chapters general and strict proofs of nobility. There was much discussion of territorial claims, even in Prussia, and compromises with the Protestants who had taken many commanderies; great emphasis was laid on ancient tradition and German aristocracy. Shamed perhaps by the example of noble German colleagues who were active on Malta, the Teutonic knights repeatedly advanced schemes to defend a fortress or even to move the whole order and to fight the infidel on the Hungarian frontier, as they had occasionally done in the fifteenth century. Some brethren invoked the old medieval tradition of the
Baumburg
‘tree castle’ of Torun where the brethren supposedly crossed the Vistula and, having no buildings of their own, fortified themselves against the pagan Prussians in a great tree; yet, when from 1595 Maximilian of Habsburg succeeded in sending a few individuals against the Turks, they were really serving as members of the imperial court rather than of a military order. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Teutonic knights required thirty-two quarterings of nobility and
maintained the vow of celibacy. After 1606 all Teutonic knight-brethren were supposed to perform a three-year period of military service, but in reality they could devote themselves to the management of the commanderies, to administration in the Mergentheim bureaucracy, or to a career in a standing army. From 1648 Lutherans and Calvinists had equal rights in what became a uniquely triconfessional order.