The title of the lecture was somewhat mystifying: what else can be discovered from Malta’s archives?
Speaking to an appreciable crowd at Victoria’s Il-Haġar Museum last Saturday, Judge Giovanni Bonello proved this statement.
Confining himself to just one century or so, and delving into the archives of the Order’s criminal court, he has unearthed a wealth of information about wrongdoing by the Knights of the Order of St John and their punishment.
The punishment, in these cases, consisted of being sent to Gozo. Gozo in the 16th and 17th centuries was almost uninhabited and did not have many amenities: being sent there was punishment enough.
But Gozo had not just a prison, but also the dreaded guva, the bell-like well with just one hole at the top, from which people could not escape and where the culprit would be obliged to stay for as long as the Grand Master so desired.
Actually, Gozo had no fewer than three guva, which have not yet been found. Malta has no fewer than five, of which the only one that is known with some certainty is that at Fort St Angelo which is said by tourist guides to be the one to which Caravaggio was condemned.
This, Judge Bonello said, is a hidden work of art because its walls are covered with inscriptions by the many knights held there. With nothing to do, they turned to carving – their own coat of arms or that of the Grand Master, or else phrases from the Bible.
Judge Bonello disproved the story told many times by guides – that Caravaggio escaped from the guva. No one escaped from the guva. Caravaggio must have been imprisoned in the Fort for his initial crime was brawling, common enough in those days. He was kicked out of the Order for escaping.
Anyway, Gozo was the Order’s Guantanamo. Knights were sent there to be imprisoned in the guva, or in the castle. Gozo also served as the mental asylum for the knights.
The first knight who was sentenced to Gozo’s guva was Fr Giovanni Ortis who was sentenced to two years for fighting with another knight.
Another knight sentenced to the guva was Sir George Aimer, a British knight, and the hero of the battle for Rhodes, who became almost a criminal in Malta and who was declared insane and sentenced to the guva so that such a hero would not have to face justice.
Two eminent personages have graced the Gozo guva. The first was no less than Grand Master Jean de Valette, who was later to be the hero of the Great Siege and who gave his name to the new city.
De Valette was sentenced to four months in the Gozo guva. The case for which he was sentenced is very complex and he had a very complex character, where faith and violence fought for domination. Nor was he a model knight – he fathered three children before he became Grand Master.
The case for which he was condemned concerned a great scandal for which he was not only condemned to spend four months in the guva but also two years in exile in Tripoli which, at that time, belonged to the Order along with Malta.
Another eminent prisoner was Sir David Ganter, one of the very few English knights remaining in the Order after the Protestant Reformation. He was sentenced to the guva and later expelled from the Order for killing a prostitute.
Later on, he returned to England but was identified as a Catholic, arrested and dragged through the streets of London before he was quartered and killed.
He was beatified and later canonised in the 1920s because martyrdom, it was held, purified a person from all sins.
In all, 25 knights were sentenced to the Gozo guva until it fell into disuse in the second half of the 17th century.
The use of the guva was introduced by Grand Master d’Homedes. Grand Master de Valette, in turn, sent two people to the Gozo guva. One of these two had insulted the Commission sent by Pope Pius V to oversee the building of Valletta.
In 1555 a knight was caught in flagrante with the wife of a noble. He was sentenced to one year in the guva and one year in the Castello.
In 1548 another knight was convicted for raping a young girl and his servant was condemned for attacking the girl’s servant when he tried to defend her. The knight was sentenced to three years in the guva.
Another knight was found guilty of appearing stark naked in public. He was sentenced to eight months in the guva on bread and water and was later condemned to the galleys for behaving indecently on a galley near Tripoli.
A knight who was sentenced to the guva in 1542 later became the Admiral of the Order.
In 1542 a knight was convicted of fighting in the Church of the Annunciation in Birgu and sentenced to six months in the guva.
A knight was condemned to one year in the guva for kicking a Maltese worker.
The third guva in Gozo was in a very decrepit state. Two knights who had fought a duel were condemned to spend 12 months in close proximity to each other in it.
The longest sentence to the guva was for three years. The culprit in this case was a knight who had put up derogatory posters against the Grand Master in Birgu.
Gozo was also used as a place of exile. In 1541, a knight who had killed a prostitute was sent to Gozo to cool his ardour.
In 1559, that is after the Turkish razzia in Gozo, a knight who had wounded another knight in a fight was sent to Gozo for a year and was also ordered to pay all medical expenses, ‘unguento et medicinali’ of the victim.
One knight had come to Malta with the Piccolo Soccorso during the Great Siege. But, being quite obese, when he landed he could not run fast enough to avoid the Turks and so was caught.
The longest exile to which a knight was condemned was a period of five years in Gozo, but this knight later became ‘honourable’ and was appointed as the Order’s Admiral and later an ambassador.
Mention is sometimes made in the archives of a regular prison in Gozo, but we do not know where this is. There is an old prison attached to the cathedral but this does not seem likely to have been used by the knights, who were very particular about being associated with the common populace.
In one of the most notable cases, two knights were found to have dressed up as women and entered St Lawrence’s church in Birgu, sitting with the women. A tumult followed when these two were revealed with one of them being expelled from the Order and the other being sent to prison.
In 1548, that is three years before the Turkish razzia, the Order’s Council decided to build a new prison in Gozo. Among the earliest residents there were Spanish and Italian knights, who were always at loggerheads with each other.
No one, as said earlier, ever escaped from the guva but some did escape from the Order’s prison. No knight was ever condemned to death by the Order, not even for killing someone. In such cases, the Order first unfrocked the offending knight and then let the civil authorities carry out the death sentence.