It was a great honour for me to contribute to a book recently published in honour of Professor Alain Blondy. I have known Professor Blondy since my university days.
The late Fr. Peter Serracino Inglott and my tutor Professor Victor Mallia Milanes introduced me to him just after I had completed my master’s degree. Fr Peter had invited me to the Farmhouse - at the time it was also his residence – to lunch, where Professor Blondy was also present. It was on this occasion that Blondy invited me to go and study in Paris. I still treasure his helping hand to settle down in Paris and find my feet.
When invited to contribute to this festschrift, I decided to write on an offshoot of my studies. I have focused on the demography of Paola in the 19th century. The choice fell on Paola as a result that, in Paris at the National Archives, I came across a very interesting map of the Grand Harbour. The town of Paola features extremely well in this map. Secondly, and this is a detail which is not very much known, part of Casale Paola came under the parish of Cospicua and Cospicua was the focus of my Ph.D studies. The rest of the territory was under the parish of Tarxien. But still this locality had a distinctive identity at least after its foundation in 1626.
What strikes me most about Alain Blondy is his love for Malta. He has worked and is still working to promote Malta in France. He has written numerous books, including a tourist guide which I consider the best guide that we have about our island. Not only does he cover the traditional places that tourists usually visit but he refers to each and every town and village. He has visited every nook and cranny of our island on foot and this is when he discovered a lost medieval chapel in is-Simblija.
But I digress. Tribute to Alain Blondy is a fitting testimonial to an erudite scholar. The contributors to this tome are both local and foreign personalities. Incidentally, Blondy’s thesis d’état was on Grand Master Pinto and as expected there are a number of papers on this historic period. Frans Ciappara looks into the Roman inquisition and how it exercised social control on the island between 1743 and 1798. Stephen De Giorgio writes about the responsible and important post held by the commander of the artillery within the military hierarchy of the Order of St.
John. Anthony Pace speaks about the historic connection that the British architect, George Whitmore had with Malta and Greece and reveals how Maltese stone was exported to Corfu and used to harmonize new structures there such as The Palace of St Michael & St George and the monument to Sir Thomas Maitland. While Charles Xuereb returns with another provocative paper investigating the collective memory of Valletta through its centuries of history.
Mgr. John Azzopardi has written about religious paintings commemorating the two sieges; the Moors in 1429 and the Great Siege in 1565. He also refers to one of the paintings which is at the Church of Saint Paul at Rabat where Blondy today is a parishioner.
Evelyn Baluci speaks in detail about the St. Publius altar frontal now kept at the Wignacourt Collegiate Museum in Rabat Malta. This museum, in particular its archives, have been a treasure trove for Blondy. The correspondence of the Rector of this College, Abbé Savoye was the source of another book written by Blondy. Konrad Buhagiar has written about the nineteenth century painter Ippolito Caffi whose life and connection with Malta fascinates him. Medieval paintings are the subject of Mario Buhagiar’s and Charlene Vella’s papers. Buhagiar speaks about Our Lady of Filérimos, which after having gone missing was rediscovered by a very admirable person, Richard Divall, the Australian Knight of Malta. Charlene Vella’s work focuses on a painting of a Madonna and Child attributed to the school of Antonello da Messina. Other papers on art are by Sante Guido and Cynthia De Giorgio. Guido refers to specific priceless objects belonging to the Order that have been tampered with over the years. De Giorgio gives an interesting theological overview of the famous tapestries at the Conventual Church of Saint John.
Four other interesting papers are by Carmen Depasquale, Henry Frendo, Ugo Mifsud Bonnici and Salvino Busuttil. Like me, Depasquale too has benefitted from Alan Blondy’s support during her studies at the Sorbonne. She wrote about Maltese migration to French Guiana in 1763. This interlude in our migration history is not well known. Frendo has a paper on Malta as a Mediterranean crossroad of culture, while Mifsud Bonnici in his Preface recalls his friendship with Blondy - Blondy was instrumental in the Sorbonne bestowing an honoris causa on Mifsud Bonnici. Be that as it may, Mifsud Bonnici has also contributed a paper on the need for more jurisprudential independence; food for thought. Last but not least, we have Salvino Busuttil’s paper on the national income in Malta between 1946 and 1960. This was his last academic contribution for, in the meantime, this great Maltese gentleman passed away.
No festschrift would be complete without the contribution from foreign scholars. I cannot start without hailing three academics who are today my personal friends. I made their acquaintance during my studies in Paris. The first one is Xavier Labat Saint Vincent, who did his doctoral dissertation with Alan Blondy. Labat Saint Vincent worked on French commerce with Malta in the eighteenth century. This time, Labat Saint-Vincent writes about the civil war that ravaged Tunisia between 1729 and 1745 and how the infighting was being reported in diplomatic correspondence from Consulates in Malta, Tunisia and Sousse.
Professor Jean-Pierre Poussou was president of the Sorbonne Paris IV when I was there. He is a leading expert on the history of towns and urban development and a world authority on the history of the city of Bordeaux. I used to enjoy his lectures and my study on Paola would not have been possible without his courses.
The third academic is François Moureau. He needs no introduction in France. He is a retired professor of the Sorbonne and a leading world expert on historic literary texts, which includes the jargon of the travel accounts and eighteenth century propaganda material. In this paper, he analyses the ambiguity that some of the pamphlets, published in the eighteenth century, expressed with regard to the redemption of Christian slaves.
Slaves are again the subject of a paper by Ismet Touati. Touati studies Algerian slaves in Malta in the eighteenth century. The subject of slavery was also discussed by Gregory Woimbée who writes about the baptism of a young Turkish slave. Such baptisms were very common in Malta and one comes across a number of Turkish slaves being baptized in the parish records of Valletta and the Three Cities. Thomas Freller discusses the conversion of a Moroccan prince to the Christian faith. Muhammed el-Attiz converted to Christianity and became a Jesuit.
Anthony Luttrell is a leading historian on the history of the Knights of St. John. This time, he gives us the story of Chaucer’s English Knight and his Holy
War. Jean-Bernard de Vaivre discusses from a French perspective this same period, that is, the period when the Knights of Saint John were still in Rhodes. He speaks about the help that the Duke of Bourgogne, Philippe Le Bon, gave the Order of Knights of St. John, in particular during the time when the Ottoman army conquered Constantinople in 1453. The subject of the Order of Saint John was also discussed by Michel Vergé-Franceschi, a leading expert on the history of Corsica. Vergé-Franceschi takes us to the early modern period as he writes about the figure of Le Marechal de Tourville, who was also a Vice-Admiral on France and a Knight of Malta. Caroline Chaplain returns to the subject of the Knights focusing on art and discusses the transfer of paintings and copies of paintings between Malta and Provence.
Congratulations go to the Fondation de Malte for such an interesting and stimulating publication. This book is a deserving tribute to this great man and I am proud to have been one of the contributors in honour of Professor Alain Blondy’s sterling work for the Maltese nation.