Introduction : the religion and the land

Abstract

In Figure 1.1, a knight hospitaller of the Order of St John genuflects in front of his grand master, his arms crossed upon his chest indicating his reverent submission as he receives the administrative responsibility for a commandery. This was the nomenclature for a unit of property pertaining to the Order as a military- religious institution within the framework of the Roman Catholic Church. The grand master was the source from which all the authority in the Order flowed. He was the guardian of its assets. An individual knight hospitaller did not own a commandery but was its administrator. This attitude was encapsulated in the Latin motto above the image, an adaptation from Corinthians 6:10: ‘as if they possessed everything, and had nothing’. Yet, the brethren had to be repeatedly reminded of their status as administrators and not proprietors. Like the rest of pre-industrial society, land constituted the Order’s financial backbone; hence, the careful management of these assets, which varied from small dispersed plots of land to large contiguous landed estates, and buildings in cities, was crucial for the successful operation of its Common Treasury.

between the Hospitallers and the communities inhabiting these lands. While as a religious organisation, the Order administered the commanderies across Catholic Europe, in Malta, it managed lands as the government of these islands, the grand master being the lay prince of an evolving Island Order State. The many dimensions of the Order (landowner, aristocratic, military, religious, and sovereign) embedded it within the dynamic political framework of early modern Europe. In 1655, Cardinal Mazarin told Louis XIV of France that the Order was ‘an army whose function was to fight the enemies of Christendom and to work for the uni cation of Christian princes’. In 1682, the Order’s Ambassador to the Holy See, Fra Marcello Sacchetti (1644–1720), had to reiterate to Pope Innocent XI the importance of ensuring that the Order’s properties remained exempt from taxation by the European crowns since these sustained the defence of the Christian Republic against the Ottomans. Approximately a century later, Fra Louis-Marie-Auguste d’Estourmel, Receiver of the Order in Paris, is thought to have used Hospitaller funds to aid the Royal Family in its attempt to escape Paris. The royal flight failed, and soon the collapse of the French monarchy, the confiscation of the French commanderies by the Revolutionaries, and the Order’s expulsion from Malta by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1798 brought about a major crisis in its history. This chapter seeks to draw some general contours around this multilayered tapestry as a means to approach the subject of The Religion and the Land.