Aspects of crime and punishment in the early decades of seventeenth century Malta

Abstract

The purpose of this dissertation is to analyse some of the most important aspects of crime and punishment in the early decades of seventeenth century Malta. It does not aim at presenting an exhaustive account of all the laws and trials pertaining to the period studied. The existence of a vast mass of available evidence, a lot of it in the verbose Latin characteristic of the period, has entailed a great deal of selectivity in the choice of argument in certain spheres. In other sections, however, the extant documents have proved inadequate for a definite and comprehensive account of crime and punishment in seventeenth century Malta. In fact, in my search for sources, my biggest disappointment was in not finding the records of the criminal court of the Castellania for this period. Even though at a cursory glance the scope of this work might appear too broad~ certain aspects such as jurisdictional quarrels between the Order, Bishop and Inquisitor receive only peripheral consideration. The main theme of this dissertation is quite specific. Emphasis lies on the various types of crime that were committed as well as the punitive machinery that was adopted during the period studied. For this reason, the dissertation has been divided into three main chapters.. The first chapter studies the laws issued by Lascaris which regulated the lives of all those who were not members of the Order. The approach adopted is a comparative one as Lascaris legislation is continuously compared with previous and successive laws. In the second part of this same Chapter, I have studied some of the laws governing the knights during Lascaris times. Although in this chapter central importance has been placed on the judicial manuals: the last part contains a brief survey of the crimes actually committed by the knights and the way that they were punished. The chapter dedicated to the Bishop is divided into two distinct parts: the first deals with crime and punishment as revealed through Balaguer's synod while the second part studies crime and punishment in the actual trials. The same subdivision into theory and practice has been made in the third chapter dealing with the Inquisitorial court.