A penultimate crisis : the Order of St. John, Malta and the French Revolution

Abstract

The eighteenth century is a century of change, otherwise known as the century of Enlightenment. This means that only by the end of this century has the age-old medieval line of thought finally come to its demise with the beginning of a chain of revolutions. Throughout Europe these revolutions will place action upon the words of the great philosophes of the age of light. Once France, the first to experience physical change in 1789, was in flames with these ideas of liberty, it was only a matter of time before all Europe sought to follow suit. Malta, ruled by the Prince Grand Master, was no exception. Scottish traveller Brydone wrote the following on the Order of Malta in 1770: ‘This institution, which is a strange compound of the military and the ecclesiastic, has now subsided for near seven hundred years, and though I believe, one of the first-born, has long survived every other child of chivalry.’ The implication was that the institution was doomed soon to die. Cavaliero puts it bluntly that ‘In the growing complexity of European politics, the existence of an international order of chivalry engaged on a crusade, became an anomaly which was difficult to reconcile with a Europe of Governments who had long since tacitly agreed on abandoning wars of religion.’ Though Malta never formally experienced anything on the scale of the Revolution of 1789 in France, it was a microcosm of change. Reform was primarily sought after by the sovereign Order of Malta itself. The Chapter General of 1776 was a product of this heartfelt need for reform, prevention of a repetition of previous insurgencies, and a feeling of fear from what was still to come. The main aspect could be seen in an attempt to the resolution of an internal struggle that took place since the early years of the century between Church and State. In this sense we may view the years of Grand Master de Rohan as a by-product of Enlightened Monarchy and the result of his predecessors, mainly Pinto and Ximenes. His reign on the throne of Malta would thus be oriented towards one goal, the consolidation and integrity of the Order in the age of change and de Rohan can thus only be understood and interpreted in the light of this struggle between the old and the new. In my study I am focusing on the effects, short and long term, that resulted in the Order’s loss of Malta in 1798 with very little effective resistance. How would these events be traced back to the years of de Rohan and the Revolution? I will attempt to determine if 1798 presented only a military confrontation with Napoleon that the knights avoided to engage in, or if the battle for the Order’s survival had long been lost since the years of the French Revolution. To understand this I will analyse not just the exterior threats to the Order’s survival, but also the interior struggle that rendered the Order incapable of successfully confronting these exterior threats. The traditional account of events hold three main factors that were responsible for the surrender of the islands; all three can be traced back to the above mentioned occasion. The first is the fall of the monarchy in France, which led to the loss of protection the Order was receiving from a foreign ‘great power’. The second is the loss of land and revenue which put the Order in a serious financial crisis. The third is the spread of Revolutionary ideology which led the local population and some knights to rebel against the Order’s government in Malta. I will analyse all three claims and attempt to prove or disprove them through the sources and possibly come out with a revised sequence of events.