• De Valette had a daughter
• Perellos contracted syphilis
• Did Pinto die making love?
Noel Grima
It was a very cold evening with pelting rain. Nevertheless, all the chairs mustered in the Throne Room of the Palace of the Grand Masters were not enough for the people who turned up and some people had to stand during the entire speech.
The occasion was yet another lecture in the series being organised by Salvatore Mousù, backed by the President. The reason for such a full attendance was the speaker, Judge Giovanni Bonello, and the title: Deeds and Misdeeds at the Palace – which can probably be understood better in its Italian version: Fatti e misfatti …
Dr Bonello in fact began his speech (I was not physically present, since I was in Brussels, but I have been kindly provided with a recording by the organisers) by saying he did not choose the subject of his talk, which was suggested to him by Mr Mousù.
Nevertheless, deeds are boring whereas misdeeds are anything but and what he was going to tell, he said, was based on gossip, slander, spite – a sort of News of the World as it could have been issued 250 years back.
The Order of St John was a monastic order and had done great work in its past history when it arrived in Malta in 1530. But after this date, it declined. It was to stay in Malta for 270 years and in so many years, things change, as do customs, and even morals. This process is reflected in the lives led by the grand masters.
The following exposition may also be called The Sex Life of the Grand Masters. There is a dividing line – those who came before wigs were adopted and those who came after.
The first grand master to adopt the wearing of a wig was Grand Master Perellos. Before him, the grand masters were very conscious of their monastic origin but after Perellos they became worldly, although there were some exceptions.
The Palace was very much the centre of the grand master’s life: it was not just his residence but also his court of law, including a criminal court. Errant knights were taken to the palace and trials held there.
Those were very violent times, inconceivable in today’s peaceful society. No statistics exist as regards the population but at any time there were between 400 and 600 knights in Malta.
The average in those years was one murder or attempted murder a week. One probable reason for this was that the system of justice was just not working. No justice was to be had from the grand master’s court and so people resorted to private vendettas. Offences that took place went unpunished and so people resorted to murder.
Another factor in those years was the huge number of prostitutes there seem to have been in Malta and every knight’s honour was thus surrounded by so many temptations.
Carasi (a pseudonym for a sympathiser with the French Revolution) maybe exaggerated when he said that two out of every three Maltese women lived full-time or part-time from prostitution. But he was not the only one to say so.
The situation thus was that 500 celibates were besieged by a huge horde of prospective prostitutes and his virtue became very shaky.
The knights took the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience but many times they were the second or third sons of noblemen, pushed to join the Order without having the slightest vocation whatsoever to observe the vows and then finding themselves on this island, cut off from their families and surrounded by so many temptations. Many knights succumbed and even the very old ones succumbed as well.
Another factor: today, when someone is sent to prison, the stigma on him remains even after he comes out of prison. But in the case of the knights, their jail sentences do not seem to have interfered with their career. On the contrary, they resumed their career progress as soon as they were out of jail. Many times they were also reinstated to their posts of honour. That includes many who later became grand masters.
De Valette
There is no doubt that Grand Master Jean de Valette was one of Malta’s greatest heroes. He was the one who, by his leadership and example, led the knights and the Maltese during the Great Siege of 1565.
But he was also a very violent man. At least twice he had been imprisoned for crimes of violence. In one case he was claimed to have used violence ‘con maximo scandalo’ and was condemned to spend four months in the guva.
This was a dry well from which there was no possibility of escape. Food and water were lowered down to the prisoner, who was kept in darkness and damp there. After his four months in the guva, De Valette was exiled to Tripoli for two years but, on his return, his career resumed.
Then another criminal charge was levelled against him, and the case was heard in Birgu – where the Order was residing. The crime in this case was one of violence, but the facts have never been made clear. It would seem he was accused of having smuggled a negro into Malta. Once again, De Valette was tried and condemned.
After the Great Siege, his behaviour worsened – he became paranoid and thought everyone was out to get him. He arrested anyone who dared criticise him and threw them into jail, and even jailed those who dared criticise him for putting his critics in jail!
However, de Valette had a daughter, who seems to have been very lovely. Historians say he held her at her baptism, which seems to imply she was very special for him.
Isabella Guasconi, as she was called, was called the most beautiful girl in Malta. She later married a Florentine man, Stefano Buonaccorsi, who was not a noble.
Buonaccorsi killed his wife because he believed she had been unfaithful to him and subsequently fled from Malta with all her jewels. The Grand Master went berserk. The Council of the Order was called (even though this was a private matter and nothing to do with the Order) and the murderer was sought high and low.
De Valette was consumed with grief and did everything her could to find Buonaccorsi, but he had completely disappeared.
Historians say this was a terrible blow to the Grand Master, who visibly declined, suffered from melancholia and died fairly soon after.
La Cassiere
Grand Master La Cassiere was a kindly and good grand master but the knights rebelled against him and dethroned him because he tried to ban their mistresses from entering the newly-built Valletta.
The knights would not have this. They surrounded and invaded the palace and took the old man to St Angelo. According to testimonies from those times, the old Grand Master was jeered all the way to jail by the prostitutes.
La Cassiere was also paranoid and accused one Antonio Bonello (who may or may not have been a predecessor of Judge Bonello) of trying to poison him. Bonello never admitted the crime or any plot and after spending years in prison was rehabilitated.
Verdalle
Grand Master Verdalle was a tragic figure – he was a Frenchman who started his reign after the rebellion against La Cassiere. He asked the Pope for a special honour sin order to intimidate the rebellious knights into obedience so the Pope appointed him a Cardinal.
But he too had a past to live down, having been tried many times for crimes of violence. In 1577, for instance, he was prosecuted for taking part in a violent brawl and later on, the Inquisitor opened a case about him regarding heresy. He was the only grand master to be made a cardinal and he was tried for heresy!
Valletta and the Palace itself have many relics of Verdalle: many of the coats of arms to be found in the Palace include a wolf, for his full surname was ‘Luben Verdalle’ and his coat of arms features a wolf.
One such coat of arms is on the circular shallow steps of the Palace itself. The guides and the guidebooks give a variety of reasons for these shallow steps, but most are just legend. Some say they were made shallow to allow sedan chairs to be carried up them; others that the knights used to go upstairs on their horses and others that the steps are shallow because the knights wore constricting armour.
None of these are true: the real reason is that Grand Master Verdalle suffered badly from gout and it is recorded that he begged the architect to make the steps shallow.
The knights reported to the Pope that Verdalle used to lock himself in a room in the Palace and spend his time gambling. He was also accused of breaking the rules of fasting and of not believing in relics.
The Pope sent the list of the charges to the Grand Master, who replied to the Pope: “I am very old and very sick and my only entertainment is to play games of chance, but we gamble for pennies and we never swear” (another charge against him). He was thus gambling on the doctor’s orders!
A true story about Verdalle regards his Column of Fame that he erected in Palace Square.
When Verdalle was called by the Pope to be made a cardinal, not everyone was happy. One reason for this decision by the Pope may have been because the Pope was trying to mount another crusade and hoped for help from Malta against the Turks.
The Dean of the College of Cardinals was Cardinal Colonna, who was very angry that Verdalle had been made a cardinal. The custom was for the Dean to hold a dinner in honour of a new cardinal and at the dinner to honour Verdalle, Colonna sat with a wolf cub under his feet all through the meal. This showed Cardinal Colonna’s contempt for the wolf.
Verdalle never forgot or forgave him for this. Back in Malta, he ordered a column to be erected in Palace Square with a wolf on top who seemed to be defecating on the column (Colonna). Verdalle even left money in his will for the regular maintenance of the column.
Martin Garzes
Grand Master Martin Garzes was a very well-mannered grand master but shortly before he was appointed to the position he had faced criminal proceedings in which he was accused of having beaten a married woman with the hilt of his sword and broken her jaw.
He was sentenced to two months in prison and ordered never to approach the woman.
Vasconcellos
Grand Master Vasconcellos’ reign was one of the shortest of the grand masters in Malta.
He too was accused of crimes of violence before he became grand master. In fact, he was prosecuted twice. The first time he was accused of using violence against another knight and the grand master ordered him to reconcile himself with the other knight but Vasconcellos refused. As a result, he was placed under house arrest and no more action was taken.
He was later arraigned and charged with taking part in a duel. The Order’s attitude to duels was ambivalent and one duel took place inside the Palace itself. In this particular duel, Vasconcellos was the second and the duel ended badly. Officially, taking part in a duel was considered a crime and could lead to expulsion or a jail term.
De Paule
Grand Master De Paule was the 13th grand master in the Order’s stay in Malta and he was quite unlucky with his chroniclers.
He was a very old man when he became grand master but, nevertheless, was besotted by a Flaminia Valenti, according to Fabio Chigi who was Inquisitor in Malta at that time and later became Pope Alexander VII, and who kept the Pope in Rome fully informed about the grand master’s amours. Usually his reports were very accurate.
Inquisitor Chigi tried hard to stop the grand master’s alliance with the Valenti woman, to no avail.
When De Paule was on his deathbed, Chigi pleaded with him to mend his ways but De Paule replied he wanted to die in her arms. Fabio Chigi’s reports to Rome were very scathing about “this doddering old fool and his Flaminia”.
De Paule also arranged to have his confession heard by his chaplain, Fra Giovanni Bartolotti (after whom the crypt under the Oratory of St John’s – the Bartolotti Crypt – is named).
This priest was a very scandalous person who had many daughters and brazenly admitted to the fact. De Paule defended Bartolotti and it was to him that he confessed on his deathbed.
Eventually, according to Fabio Chigi’s report to the Pope, Flaminia was not present when the grand master died.
Flaminia Valenti was thus left without a protector and she tried to charm his successor, Grand Master Lascaris, mainly through hypocrisy, said her detractors. She was disappointed by the new grand master and ended her days in the nunnery for reformed and old prostitutes, the Repentite.
Lascaris
The image the Maltese have of this grand master is that he was an austere and rigid disciplinarian. But his younger days tell a different story.
Every convent had to have a protector to take care of its needs. When he was a young knight, Lascaris was one such protector of a female convent. According to an outraged builder who was working nearby and who could see over the convent’s walls, he could see this knight protector playing around with the nuns, groping them while they threw eggs full of flour at him.
Later Grand Master Lascaris became a very serious person and even today the Maltese have an expression – wicc Laskri – to denote someone who is a strict disciplinarian.
But there could also be another meaning for this expression. For Lascaris was the first grand master to put his face on coins, so maybe the Maltese were referring to the coins with this expression.
Nicolas Cotoner
This quiet grand master was a patron of the arts and St John’s is full of his munificence. It was he who commissioned Mattia Preti to decorate the cathedral.
He was described as taking his religious duties very seriously – going to church, hearing Mass, saying his prayers, etc. But according to Inquisitor Ranozzi, who reported to Rome, he had frequented prostitutes when young and he was also said to have continued the practice in his old age.
He was also the grand master who built the first closed balcony in Malta, the one that goes around the Palace’s side, and this turned out to be a godsend to him as he could spent hours in it noting who was talking to whom down below and thus finding out who was plotting against him.
Adrien de Wignacourt
One must distinguish this grand master from his brother, Alof. Grand Master Adrien de Wignacourt was one of those who took advantage of the departure of the Order’s galleys from Malta, when the sailors and the crew on the vessels left their wives back at home and at the mercy of the knights.
But one day, a vessel came back before it was due and the husband came home. Wignacourt was caught in flagrante and had to jump from a window to escape the angry husband.
When he became grand master, one of the first laws he passed was that all vessels entering Grand Harbour had to fire a shot as they did so – so that everyone would be alerted! And to reinforce this, he also ordered that sailors were not allowed to disembark until daybreak, if they arrived at night.
Perellos
As stated earlier, Grand Master Perellos was the first grand master to wear a wig. He consorted unashamedly with women, even when he was in his 90s. Every day, he used to hold coffee mornings for beautiful women and spent a lot of time chatting with them and he was always ready to take their sides against their husbands.
He had two major mistresses: one was Donna Florinda, better known as Madame Mutet. She was probably French and was his established mistress.
When he replaced her with a younger girl, he treated Mutet in a very gentlemanly manner. Her family was of a very low social class, but he gave her property, titles and jobs to keep her quiet. The second mistress, a young girl, he lodged in the Palace itself and he saw she was kept very well. He was not at all stingy with her, although he was stingy in many other ways. For instance, the grand masters subscribed to the main broadsheets from Europe but Perellos cancelled the subscriptions and read the copies of other subscribers.
The new girl was easily manipulated by anybody and it was said that if you wanted something from the grand master, all you had to do was to go through her. They probably had to pay her for her services.
When Madame Mutet was Perellos’ mistress, the bishop tried hard to dissuade him from what was a public scandal. When the grand master took no notice, the bishop wrote to Rome and the Pope ordered Perellos to give her up.
Grand Master Perellos contracted syphilis and was ‘cured’ by mercury. It was this cure, however, that killed him as one of the side effects of the treatment was mercury poisoning. Nevertheless, he died a very old man.
As for Madame Mutet, she may have given rise to the Maltese phrase ‘Kollha mutetti’ – full of airs – though equally this may have been derived from the Italian word ‘mossette’.
Perellos was also involved in another dubious episode – when a knight lampooned him, he had him arrested, tortured and exiled.
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Vilhena
Grand Master Vilhena was a doer and a just grand master. But when a chaplain of the Order, Fra Giovanni Francesco Farrugia, for reasons which may have been to do with spite, reported to Rome that the grand master was involved in a ‘scandalo abominevole’ and led an incestuous life, Vilhena never forgave him and even tried to have him imprisoned for life. Any attempts to rehabilitate him failed and he was still in prison when Vilhena died. He thus spent 11 years in prison and was only released by Velhena’s successor as grand master, Pinto.
Pinto
Dr Bonello described Grand Master Pinto as being the Maltese answer to Silvio. He was another grand master who lived to a ripe old age, but all his life he was very lascivious.
Before he became grand master, he had established a relationship with a Signora Paolucci and he continued this relationship when he became a grand master, keeping her in luxury.
His lengthy reign was one long, non-stop story of entertainment and the brazen flaunting of the rules. At the Manoel Theatre, the box next to that reserved for the grand master was openly reserved for his mistresses, known as his ‘Beniamine’.
According to Ovidio Doublet, Pinto died making love to his mistress. Doublet was to become secretary to the next grand master but it is rather difficult to believe that a 92-year-old was really up to making love.
Dr Bonello’s lecture, as was said earlier, was given in the Palace’s Throne Room and it was in that very room, said Dr Bonello, that some of the most outrageous events in Pinto’s time were held.
The cuccagna was a special treat on feast days, when a pole was erected in Palace Square, from the top of which were suspended various items of food and young men were allowed to clamber up the pole and grab as many items as they could.
This was very popular, even though inevitably there were injuries.
According to Carasi (a French author who criticised the Order) on some occasions all the doors leading to the Throne Room were closed and the competitors stripped naked and climbed the pole erected in the room, at the top of which would be gold and silver objects.
The grand master and a select few knights would sit and watch.
(The only thing that Dr Bonello omitted from Carasi’s account is that the participants were women).
The orgies that followed were incredible. It was, Dr Bonello remarked, Malta’s answer to Bunga Bunga.
Ovidio Doublet describes how, up to the very end, Pinto continued to abuse the rules and thus became the model for any kind of abuse on the part of the knights.
Many honest Maltese found themselves unjustly exiled from Malta because they had a beautiful wife who became the object of desire of some knight or other.
Grand Master Pinto was also an egomaniac: it was he who alone, without any authorisation or consent, exchanged the grand master’s open crown of office for a closed one, thus denoting full sovereignty.
Nevertheless, he was a great grand master and in his reign the Order reached the apex of its time in Malta, and poverty on the island abated.
Ximenes
This was a very balanced grand master who, before his elevation, was not known for either his virtues or his vices.
But a certain Don Gaetano Mannarino was against the Order, and led a campaign against the Order remaining in Malta. He compiled a list of senior knights who lived in open concubinage – and at the top of that list was Ximenes.
De Rohan
Grand Master de Rohan was a kindly and gentle but not very strong ruler.
By all accounts he was a decent fellow but he was said to have had two mistresses: one was the wife of the French surgeon Craine, Anne Marie, by whom de Rohan had a daughter, Antoinette, who the good doctor agreed to bring up as his own.
Later on, Antoinette Craine became an ardent republican and hated the Order. When Napoleon ended the knights’ reign in Malta, the first person he went to visit in Malta was Antoinette Craine, who was called by some contemporaries “that vile prostitute”.
Exactly why Napoleon went to visit her is not clear. She later joined the Revolution – this discarded daughter of a grand master and hater of the Order.
De Rohan later fell in love with his own niece, Anne de Migny, the daughter of his younger brother and was said to have lived openly with her as his wife.
She died under the British and there is some good evidence that Tom Maitland, who ruled Malta then, ordered De Rohan’s tomb to be opened at night and Anne to be buried at his feet.
Hompesch
The last grand master of the Order in Malta was a very unfortunate person, but he was beloved by the Maltese. He spoke Maltese perfectly and could even distinguish between the various dialects of the villages.
He also had his mistress, and this one was Maltese – Natalia Farrugia – and he visited her regularly.
The good grand masters
There were also some good grand masters.
Despuig was considered to be a saint and the Order even attempted to have him canonised. He seems to have been a man of great spirituality.
Alof de Wignacourt was also reputed to be a very worthy person and there are no stories about him.
At the end of his lecture, Dr Bonello posed the question of how many of these stories we are to believe. Some come from official reports by the Inquisitors. The source of others is mere gossip. Others may come from people with some agenda in mind. Carasi, for instance, clearly has an anti-Order agenda, since he was very much in favour of the French Revolution, but he describes Valletta very well.
The next lecture in this series will be on Monday, 27 February at 6pm at the Palace and will be by Sandro Debono, the Curator of the National Museum of Fine Arts, who will speak about the lunettes at the Palace with old views of Malta.