Malta as seen by foreigners during the period of the Order and the early years of British rule, 1530-1815

Abstract

It is with great pleasure that those who love the history of the Maltese islands look at the progressively increasing number of works which are being written every year on a wide variety of topics concerning Maltese history. This is undoubtedly a very good thing, but even so there remain three fields of history writing which have not yet been engaged in. The first is that no general study of Maltese history, especially on the span of time heralded by the arrival in Malta of the Order of St. John and terminated by the official take over of the island by the British, has been accomplished in recent years. Secondly, the works of foreign writers, travellers or otherwise, on contemporary Malta have received a very scanty attention, though a few have been published separately in Maltese newspapers and historical journals. Thirdly, however, no attempt has yet been made to study these works together in a single work in order to draw a coherent structure of the Maltese islands out of them. I undertook to write this study on the basis of these three ideas. This study is a general work inasmuch as the foreigners who wrote on the Maltese islands, especially the travellers, jotted down a great deal of information about life on the islands; and, since the work is ·wholly based on what foreigners noted on the islands, one can also claim to have made the study of' such works by these particular authors as it was possible to find in Malta. The choice of the period extending from 1530 to 1815 was deliberate; although there were two sudden changes of rule during that time, the post-1798 era was in many ways an extension of the preceding age as the new rulers promised to uphold the old Constitution, and so any changes that occurred can be viewed in the same light.