'Magic in Malta: Sellem Bin al-Sheikh Mansur and the Roman Inquisition, 1605'

Authors: Alexander Mallett, Catherine Rider and Dionysius A. Agius

Publisher: Brill

Pages: 574

Generally speaking, books about history have tended to be wide ranging and present a whole panorama about one particular place or time.

Now we are seeing books about history drop the wide-ranging approach in favour of a micro-historical approach that studies the lives of individuals in detail.

Such an approach tests the conclusions of the larger quantitative studies, although it is always open to the charge of being selective and unrepresentative.

This study focuses around one person, the Egyptian Sellem Bin al-Sheik Mansur and his trial in Malta in 1605.

In the spring of that year a number of Catholics living in Malta appeared voluntarily before the office of the Roman Inquisition in Malta and each claimed that Sellem had performed magic for them.

This was just a few years after the Great Siege of Malta when the island was engaged in a huge effort to recover from the damage of the Siege and to build the new city, Valletta. The island was thus experiencing a huge influx of foreigners, comparable to what we are seeing these days, and not just tradesmen from Sicily and Italy but also Muslims from nearby countries.

In the Three Cities and Valletta, languages blended and ways of life were disrupted and reshaped - much to the dismay of the Catholic Church, which felt its foundations unsettled and under threat. In those days the universal church was reeling under the outbreak of Protestant Reform and the Council of Trent had marked the Catholic Counter-Reformation and the introduction of the Roman Inquisition.

In Malta, the emphasis was more on countering superstition than on fighting the Reformists. As this trial was to show.

Sellem was around 40 years old but some years before this he had injured himself and couldn't row any more. He used crutches to get around and thus he was forced to find other sources of income. He made a name for himself by performing magic to help ordinary people tackle everyday problems of life, mostly related to love and illness.

Among the Maltese who asked for his help there was Matteo Magro from Zurrieq whose wife was suspecting he was seeing another woman; Marco Mangion, a tailor from Valletta, who suspected a woman had put a spell on him; Berto Briffa from Qormi, who also suspected someone had put a spell on him, and other cases.

However Sellem was also accused of practising other, more learned types of magic. Vittorio Cassar, son of Glormu, the architect of St John's, claimed that Sellem had taught him a form of divination called geomancy, which involved questions about the future.

Vittorio claimed that Sellem had taught him that divination involved drawing dots in random patterns and then interpreting the results to answer questions about the future.

Vittorio also gave the Inquisition a treatise he claimed to have written under Sellem's direction on which the slave 's name is written in Arabic on the first page.

Furthermore, he claimed that Sellem had offered to teach him a form of magic called Reuchania, which involved summoning up demons.

Later witnesses, such as French Knight of the Order Pietro la Re went further and claimed that Sellem had actually called up demons for him and recited incantations from a book of magic.

With this information the Inquisition's tribunal investigated, charged and eventually punished Sellem. The punishment was rather tame, except for the strappado which involved raising him up from his arms tied behind his back. This was done a few times but called off when Sellem began sweating.

Then he was sentenced to be paraded around Birgu and Valletta before being tied to a pillory in Valletta's main square for an hour. Part of the punishment was not carried out because of a storm. After this, he was returned to the Inquisition's prison and then disappeared.

Sellem did eventually admit to practising healing and love magic for some of his accusers but he also said he did not really know magic and his spells were "jokes" or faked which he made up to earn money from gullible Christians.

He also told the Inquisition that he had learned astrology from his father in Cairo. He repeatedly denied knowing how to call up demons and said he never owned a book of magic

Sellem's trial is just one of the tens of thousands of Inquisition proceedings preserved in the archives in Mdina, from the late 16th to the late 18th centuries, ranging from full trials of hundreds of pages to individual depositions of just one page.

This volume is the main product of a UK Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies and the Department of History at the University of Exeter.

The editors were Alexander Mallett, Associate Professor in the Faculty of International Research and Education; Catherine Rider, Associate Professor in Medieval History at the University of Exeter and Dionysius A. Agius, emeritus Professor of Arabic Studies and Islamic Material Culture at the University of Exeter.

Among the articles in this interesting book, one can also find those by Joan Abela, Dionysius Agius and Frans Ciappara.