'Approaches to Medieval Malta'

Author: Anthony T. Luttrell

Publisher: The British School at Rome, London / 1975

Pages: 70

This paper is reprinted from Medieval Malta, Studies on Malta before the Knights, edited by Anthony T. Luttrell and published by the British School at Rome (London 1975).

Medieval Malta had no chronicler of its own, and it is unlikely that a contemporary attempt was made to write its history; certainly no such work has survived. There are references to Malta and Gozo in a number of Latin, Greek, Arabic and Hebrew writings, but most of these are extremely brief and general, or they deal with particular incidents.

The most important account is contained in the letter sent by the Emperor Frederick II in reply to Gilibertus, his agent in Malta, in about 1241.

The earliest real descriptions of Malta and Gozo result from their connection with the Knights of St John; the report made by the Knights commissioners in 1524 before the Order accepted the islands in 1530 is now lost, but details from it are preserved in summary.

The earliest description available, running to some 4,000 words, is that by the Hospitaller Jean Quintin, written in Malta in 1533 and first published in Lyon three years later.

Writing in the classicizing style then in vogue, Quintin concentrated on the island's ancient history and remains and thus his utility for the medieval historian is limited.

Interest in the struggle with the Turks, which culminated in the dramatic siege of Malta in 1565, ran high during the 16th century and led to much writing and publication, though this literature has yet to be systematically exploited as a source of information about Malta's medieval past.

The first and in some ways still the most coherent attempt to cover the whole history of medieval Malta appeared in the Descrittione Di Malta, published in 1647 by a notable scholar, antiquarian and collector, the Maltese Gian Francesco Abela, vice-chancellor of the Order of St John. 

Abela, who was interested in language, place-names, archaeology, folklore and natural history, has justifiably been called the "Father of Maltese Historiography" and the "Founder of the Malta Museum".

His history, one of the very first books printed in Malta, was reprinted in Latin in 1725 in the 15th volume of Johannes Graevius' Thesaurus Antiquitatum et Historiarum Siciliae and it was re-edited at Malta, in two volumes entitled Malta Illustrata by Giovannantonio Ciantar.

Ciantar went blind before the publication of the first volume in 1771 and died before that of the second in 1780, so that the revised edition probably contained more errors than the first.

Born in 1582, Abela was very much a man of his time, educated at the University of Bologna and much interested in classical remains and pseudo-philological speculation.

His work was written in Italian and conceived in the encyclopaedic manner, being subdivided into libri and notizie.

For the earlier medieval period Abela used published chronicles and histories such as those of the historians of Sicily, Rocco Pirri and Tommaso Fazello, often copying their errors uncritically and without always naming his source.

For the post-1350 period he employed documents found on the island and transcripts from Palermo already available in Malta, publishing lists of place-names, churches, convents, bishops, officials and notable families.

Abela used unreliable material and he introduced into his work an extensive mythology, a good deal of which survives both as popular folklore and, unfortunately, in learned works whose authors still tend to regard him as quasi-infallible.

For two centuries or more Abela's history continued to hold the field, and a third edition, never published, was initiated in 1842. The Gozitan scholar Agius de Soldanis wrote a history of Gozo in 1746.

Meanwhile the 18th century Maltese priest, Giuseppe Vella, had produced his notorious Arabic forgeries which, though soon exploded, continued to influence the historiography of Muslim Malta even after the publication of Michele Amari's great work on Muslim Sicily and of his Italian translation of the Arabic texts upon which it was based.