I refer to the report entitled “The Order ‘was not in decline’ when the French came” (TMIS, 29^th May). It deals with the talk Wirt Ghawdex had invited me to deliver a week earlier at the lovely, fairly recently restored, medieval Santa Cecilia chapel in Ghajnsielem, Gozo. The report is regrettably marked by gross historical errors and other inaccuracies which simply betray the reviewer’s unfortunate lack of understanding of the subject, unwittingly distorting in the process the entire argument I had so diligently endeavoured to reconstruct. Had I not personally talked to the learned gentleman inside the chapel at the end of the session, I would never have been able to tell, from what he wrote, that he had been present at the talk. In no way does the review reflect, even remotely, the substance of the talk. What I had essentially tried to discuss were ideas, in the first place, not the individual historians entertaining them. I have also tried to place these visions of the past firmly within the wider context that provides considerable empirical evidence to support them or at least to make them look convincingly plausible.

The gentleman reporter does not agree with my interpretation. That is no surprise; rather, it’s absolutely understandable. However, what surprises me is the explanation he puts forward. I cannot see why the influence the Enlightenment could have had on certain members of the Order should have, with any modicum of conviction, sowed the seeds of irreversible decline within the Institution. In that case, shouldn’t other cultural and intellectual movements, like the 12^th and 15^th century renaissances be similarly blamed? Shouldn’t the Scientific Revolution of the 17^th century be also considered to have been in part as responsible for the Hospital’s alleged gradual deterioration? It is the surviving empirical evidence which should ultimately determine, or indeed dictate, our concept of the past. Moreover, I do not see the relevance of the Order’s crisis that followed the fall of Malta in 1798 through the early decades of the 19^th century to the state of the Hospitaller Institution on the eve of the Bastille episode, which is generally held to have marked the beginning of the great French Revolution. Through its remarkable powers of resilience, the Hospital succeeded in surviving every serious crisis it experienced, especially those of 1187, 1291, 1522, and 1798. Far from a series of marked stages in the Institution’s long-term history of decline, these were starkly defined stages in its continuous process of change.

 

Victor Mallia-Milanes

University of Malta