Travelogue 1131 – 29 April
Strange Bedfellows

The negotiations over Malta in the 1520s were fascinating. The Knights Hospitaller were homeless, having been expelled from Rhodes by the forces of Suleiman the Magnificent in 1522. They were officially guests of Clement VII, who was an honorary Hospitaller himself. They had installed themselves in Italy, and their Grand Master, rather grandly named Philippe Villiers de l’Isle Adam, travelled Europe more or less begging for a home for their order.

The idea of Malta was raised early on, suggested by the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. The Knights were surprisingly picky about the offers made them. They refused Cerigo, Elba, Suda in Crete, Minorca, Ponza and Ischia. They weren’t too crazy about the Malta idea when it was first brought up in 1524. The harbours were good, but the soil was infertile; there wasn’t enough running water. The natives barely grew enough food for themselves. So they took a pass. It’s amazing to remark all the doors that still opened for the old Crusading order. It demonstrates something of the power of the medieval paradigm of Christian knights and lords, courts and privilege, surviving well past their practical lifespan, into the commercial age.

In 1527, the German troops of Charles V sacked Clement VII’s Rome in a bizarre narrative turn during a dispute among these two allies against Protestantism. The German troops who dominated this army were in mutiny against Charles over lack of pay. Many of those soldiers (of the Catholic emperor) were Lutheran, and they found a certain righteousness in doing violence to the papal city. Charles V had been unhappy with Clement because of his politicking against the emperor in northern Italy. He had never intended an attack on Rome, but he found himself holding a terrible power over the Church, a power he was not going to disavow or sully with apologies or defences.

It's one of the sad ironies of history that a nice guy pope was elected just as the Lutheran cry of “anti-Christ” was reaching a crescendo. A century of decadence in the Vatican was laid on the shoulders of this cultured and moderate man. He did what he had to: he paid off the German soldiers, he surrendered territory to the Emperor, and he bided his time.

He didn’t abandon the Knights Hospitaller. He interceded with Charles on their behalf when the Grand Master finally decided to negotiate in earnest for Malta. The Knights wanted autonomy. The emperor sought feudal servants. In the end, Charles decided he could forego all traditional tribute but the gift of one Maltese falcon every year.

Travelogue 1130 – 25 April
The Knights

Suleiman the Magnificent came to power in 1520, almost seventy years after the Ottomans had taken Constantinople. The Turks had become a force for Europe to contend with. Before the end of the same decade, Suleiman and his armies would be laying siege to Vienna.

In 1522, it was the island of Rhodes that would fall to the Turks. The Christians had held on there remarkably long, considering that it was just off the coast of Asia Minor, already surviving one siege in 1480. The enemy the Turks faced on that island was the order of the Knights Hospitallers, who had retreated there from Palestine two hundred years before. They were still a formidable force.

Suleiman was triumphant, riding a wave of manifest destiny for the Turks. With the graciousness of a conqueror who had history behind him, he offered clemency. He allowed the Knights Hospitallers to leave the island in orderly fashion after their defeat. They moved to Italy first, but they moved again when they were gifted Malta by Charles V and a pope who was himself a Knight.

Suleiman ruled the Turks until 1566, roaming Hungary, challenging the Persians, taking war to the Abyssinians. In 1565, the Turks paid a visit to the Knights Hospitaller again, besieging Malta unsuccessfully. I’m thinking a few people sighed with relief when Suleiman passed away a year later. It wouldn’t be until 1683 that another attempt at Vienna could be mounted.

Advance a few generations, and the Knights of Malta are led by their 54th Grand Master, a proud man named Alof de Wignacourt, a French nobleman who had fought in the siege of 1565. He was much revered by the Maltese and by the Knights, resolute and generous. He built fortifications and an aqueduct. He was a patron of the arts. In 1608, he obtained permission from the pope to admit an artist into the order who would normally not have been eligible. He would not have been eligible because he had been charged with murder in Rome and was fleeing justice.

Within months, Caravaggio would be on the run again, having participated in, or perhaps instigated, a brawl in which a number of Knights were injured. Fleeing to Sicily, he would leave behind in Malta a number of brilliant pieces, like “The Beheading of St John the Baptist” and several portraits of Wignacourt, one as St Jerome writing and one standing beside a pretty page boy, suggestively looking at the painter. The canvases are huge, rich in the dark colours of a century.

Travelogue 1129 – 13 April

Bombs in the East

Bombs are dropping in the Middle East, and I’m reading about the invasion of Egypt. That’s the invasion in 1798, the one that most people know about from the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. The conquest of Egypt was the odd and disfigured brainchild of two men, Napoleon, inspired by his fetishist reading about Alexander the Great, and that cunning old fox and consummate survivor, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord. The idea had, in fact, been bandied about since the 1770s, since before the Revolution, but it took the overheated atmosphere of the Revolution to bring gravity to the crazy. (We think we live in a time of extremism. Many of us could measure our likely survival in the furnace of 1790s Paris in terms of weeks.)

Napoleon had survived the Terror, his Jacobin credentials bonafide. He had served Robespierre’s regime in suppressing rebellion in the south of France. He had survived the reaction after Robespierre’s fall, although just barely. Then the Directory had entrusted him with the Italian campaign, which had made him a celebrity. Now he schemed with Talleyrand to cut an Alexandrian figure in the exotic East. It didn’t work out so well.

Napoleon and his army were made for the big set pieces, and when they were offered opportunities for those, they won. They ‘conquered’ Egypt. But it was an ephemeral sort of victory. After the artillery went quiet, there was plenty of culture shock to go around. The day-to-day news was awfully modern in tone. Napoleon stepped clumsily all over Muslim sensitivities. The Egyptians proved quite impervious to the grand ideals of the French Revolution. Furthermore, as a people who had been ruled by Greeks, Romans, Turks, and Mamluks for quite a few centuries, they showed a disappointing lack of interest in the romance of a new Alexander. They resisted. Horatio Nelson appeared with the British fleet shut and down the Nile Delta. The French were trapped while the locals rebelled and the Ottomans prepared an offensive. So far from home, the enlightened conquerors turned rather quickly into cruel oppressors. Many people died for the sake of this vanity project.

There was a strategy of sorts behind it. The French had visions of disrupting English trade with the East, of establishing for themselves a trade route along the future course of the Suez Canal, of fomenting resistance to the Brits all the way to India. Napoleon had an image of Alexander on banks the Indus River etched indelibly into his imagination.

But the only waters Napoleon crossed were the Nile and the Mediterranean. He crossed each first in triumph and then in disgrace. His triumphs in the Mediterranean were in Malta and Crete; he swept up these islands like forgotten treasures, as he had gathered ancient cities in Italy several years before.

The Revolution boldly positioned itself as new, as opposed to all things medieval. Napoleon inherited this mission and executed it with a vengeance. He walked the continent as Reaper to all institutions feudal, aristocratic, religious, or mercantile. In the previous year, he had brought down the thousand-year Republic of Venice. In 1798, he invaded the shores of Malta, bringing modern war to the Knights Hospitaller. They couldn’t resist him. After the French took over, the order left the island, many to settle in Russia as guests of the czar.