The Maltese corso in the fifteenth century

Abstract

The Maltese islands, located in the narrow channel that separates Sicily from Tunisia, served as a base for corsairs and privateers well before the arrival of the Order of St. John in the sixteenth century. In the early thirteenth century, the Genoese count of Malta, Enrico Pescatore, used the island to attack Pisan and Venetian interests in the central and eastern Mediterranean, while an intervention in Malta by Frederick IV of Sicily in 1372 was possibly provoked by piratical activities against Genoese ships by the captain of the island. The archipelago, part of the kingdom of Sicily since the Norman conquest in 1127, was drawn into the Aragonese orbit from the late thirteenth century. Late medieval Malta and Gozo were peripheral, but by no means isolated, outposts of the crown of Aragon, largely cut off from the main trade routes that traversed the Mediterranean, and exposed to attacks from the crown’s enemies. The intention of this paper is to describe the political, social and economic context that made the Maltese islands a fertile ground for corsair activity in the central Mediterranean during the fifteenth century. [excerpt]