Gregorio Xerri was not the only Maltese writing verses at that time. Another early Maltese poet, Pasquale Vassallo, a Dominican friar from Ħaż-Żebbuġ more or less contemporaneous with Xerri, is known to have dedicated lascivious poems to several pretty boys from Mdina, both in Maltese and in Italian, around 1584.

The authorities of the Inquisition who came face to face with this embarrassment needed to leave on record how positively unamused they were. They ordered the homoerotic “canczoni” to be destroyed, after Vassallo had admitted the charges of sodomy, but denied those of heresy. To a certain extent, quite a loss from the standpoint of the history of Maltese literature.

But at least we still know the names of five of the pubescent muses who had fired Vassallo’s lust – at least three of them closely related, no doubt by coincidence, to our Xerri: Andreotto Castelletti (Xerri’s aunt Vincenza had married Gio Franco Castelletti), Giovanni Maria Cassia (Xerri’s wife was a Cassia), Giacomo Leonardo Surdo (Xerri was a Surdo on his mother’s side), Giovanni Maria Zammit and Girolamo Attard. Had these paedophile verses from the cinquecento survived, they would have been the second batch of poems in Maltese after Pietro Caxaro’s renowned Cantilena.

Odd twist of fate that of the four earliest Maltese poets – Caxaro, de Armenia, Xerri and Vassallo – at least three left highly visible evidence of unregulated carnal incontinence. The three appeared eager to confirm Plato’s scathing condemnation of poetry, that emotion-firing sentiment known as the certain enemy of virtue: “Poetry feeds and waters the passions instead of drying them up; poetry lets them rule, although they ought to be controlled if mankind is ever to progress in happiness and virtue” (The Republic, Book X, 29, 36).

It seems impossible to establish how and why this solitary poem by Xerri found itself in the Gian Francesco Buonamico collection of manuscripts. It cannot be a later addition as it occupies one page in a folded sheaf of paper in which all the other sheets were written by Buonamico, and its progressive page number fits perfectly with the sequence of the folios before and after it. It is there because Buonamico wanted it there. This same volume contains some other unknown poems by Buonamico himself, in graceful, fluid Italian, Latin and French – none in Maltese, alas.

Although the Xerri poem comes in a handwriting distinctly different from that used in all the rest of Buonamico’s manuscript and is ‘signed’ Gregorio Xerri Barone di Cicciano, it obviously cannot have been copied onto the Buonamico papers by Xerri himself, as he had died in 1625, and Bounamico was only born 14 years later in 1639.

Buonamico must have somehow come to know of the existence of Xerri’s unique poem on the Great Siege, realised its importance, and asked someone to copy it onto his compilation of manuscripts. Only that way has the poem survived. Incidentally, Buonamico, unlike Xerri, seems to have had no problems with the Order of St John – in fact, he quite likely chose to consider himself as the close equivalent of the Order’s poet laureate.

When did Xerri compose his Inno? We do not know the date of Xerri’s birth, but very likely he would have been a young man during the siege. The verses sound like a sudden and unexpected explosion of joy and of pride, written on the spur of the moment when the adrenalin of the victory by the dwarf over the giant had reached its highest.

If Xerri did not write down the verses in September 1565 immediately after the retreat of the Ottoman armada, some other event, like one of the solemn anniversary commemorations of the victory organised yearly by the Knights of St John shortly after the siege, would have triggered the creative impulse. Much more likely the former.

Xerri attributes the triumph of Christian Malta to the Lord of Hosts and to the Virgin Mary, and although he studiously avoids crediting the knights with any input at all in the lifting of the siege, it so happened that it was also Our Lady of Victory to whom the Knights of St John, like him, ascribed the defeat of the Turks.

The Inquisition tribunal linked Xerri’s name to a curious episode. A contrite Maria Calleja of Mdina knocked on the Inquisitor’s door to expose to him the dire consequences of an idle chat with her neighbour Evangelista. They had talked about the significant number of women then imprisoned for witchcraft, and of how easy it was to acquire magical powers – all one had to do was to offer one’s soul to the devil.

Buonamico must have come to know of the existence of Xerri’s unique poem, realised its importance, and asked someone to copy it onto his compilation of manuscripts

Unguardedly, Evangelista had boasted with Calleja that she had traded both her soul and her body with Satan, a gilt-edged investment that had already empowered her to scrounge money off Xerri. No surprise that the devout Calleja found irresistible the duty of reporting her friend’s Faustian bargain to the Inquisitor. Striking business deals with the devil featured on the list of conducts the Inquisition did not seem keen to encourage.

The Roman Inquisition in Malta had played a leading role in making sure the Xerris remained neatly stacked on the right side of orthodoxy. In 1563, Gregorio’s uncle Antonio Xerri had been prosecuted by bishop Domenico Cubelles for possession of two named books by Calvin and another one by Luther, detestable works which he had borrowed from his neighbour Falson.

The Inquisition would not particularly recommend as bedtime reading what Antonio Xerri had in his secret library: neither Calvin’s seminal Confessions of Faith, first published in 1536, nor his Institutes of the Christian Religion (co-authored with William Farel also in 1536), even less Luther’s famous 1525 sermon On the Gospel. The dreaded Cubelles had found Antonio guilty and fined him 250 uncie.

Thankfully, by then, barbecued heretics were no longer being served during popular entertainments in Malta, though the wiser law-and-order big shots shook their heads in disapproval and had their reservations as to what all that flabby leniency would be leading to.

Twelve years later, Inquisitor Piero Sant’Umano had an even more chilling encounter with the Xerris. Some good soul must have reported Gregorio’s father, Gio Francesco, accusing him of sympathising with heretics and heresy. The inquisitor, fittingly embarrassed by the umano demotion which his surname advertised, ordered the suspect to be tortured on the rack.

The town of Cicciano, near Naples, of which Xerri was the fourth baron.

The poet’s father steadfastly denied all the charges, and took advantage of his right to summon four witnesses to attest to his Christian virtue. Discreetly overlooking his love-children, four ecclesiastics turned up to certify Gio Francesco as a paragon of evangelical piety, and the inquisitor eventually had to release the accused for lack of evidence, no doubt grudgingly.

For 22 years of his life, Gregorio Xerri exercised the very highest civil office a Maltese person could aspire to during the rule of the Order – that of Capitano della Verga or Ħakem, in six separate stretches starting from 1584 up to 1623 (in the University portrait he is shown holding the rod of office in his hands). This was an elective, if mostly ceremonial, post reserved for the leading Maltese personalities, and Xerri’s repeated election indicates that his peers, for 22 years, considered him the person best suited to represent Malta in the civil government, the Notabile Università.

On another three occasions the Mdina jurats elected Xerri treasurer of the Università. And for 15 years Grand Master Alof de Wignacourt invested him with the post of Secreto – the uppermost office of trust charged with the administration of the grand master’s vast properties, with all the advantages, prerogatives, temptations and opportunities, material and political, that this position of power entailed.

The records show Xerri was not particularly quick in turning the other cheek. In an age when precedence and prerogatives were seen as the equivalent of honour and self-respect, all to be defended to the last drop of blood, Xerri found himself one of the main actors in a public scandal that was anything but small.

The feast of St Gregory, March 12, was the one for which all the big guns turned up, civil and ecclesiastical, in full pomp and circumstance, and the protocols of precedence had to be respected scrupulously in all their most minute details throughout the ceremonies held in the outskirts of Żejtun.

In the 1622 procession, the cocky Don Filippo Borg of Birkirkara, confident in the invulnerability of his status as vicar of the good but ailing Bishop Cagliares, attempted to jump the queue and place himself in a position more eminent than that of the Archdeacon of the Cathedral, Don Salvatore Guzman. The high Mdina prelate would have none of that nonsense, and pushed Don Filippo resolutely aside.

Scorned but not abashed, the vicar walked to the back of the procession and edged himself in front of the Ħakem, Gregorio Xerri. The fourth Baron of Cicciano too would not put up with this or any other slight, and hurled Don Filippo violently away cum magno scandalo. The least a Captain of the Rod could do, we should at least reach consensus on this, when the survival of his very honour was at stake.

Later generations best recalled the memory of Xerri for his lavish testamentary bequest in favour of charitable causes – the cumulo di carità - for providing marriage dowries every year to 20 indigent brides-to-be, called vergini. The cumulo also helped orphans, and saw to the distribution of grain to the poor of the city on the feast of St Barnabas.

Why Barnabas, patron saint of Cyprus, whose feast day fell on June 11, appears to me quite problematic. St Barnabas, like St Publius, is not mentioned even once in the 1575 Dusina visitation report.

Frontispiece of the volume of manuscripts in which Xerri’s poem is included (private collection, Malta). Right: The Xerri coat of arms (private collection, Malta).

By what was undoubtedly a coincidence, this cumulo had been formally founded in 1569 by our poet’s father Gio Francesco Xerri (yes, the one later persecuted by the Inquisition for heresy, here listed with the Cittadini della Notabile), and by Luca de Armenia, the other Maltese poet of the Great Siege. They had organised and corralled all those, mostly Maltese, who had made vows to give charities should their island not fall to the Turks or should they survive the horrendous hostilities.

There were 85 of them, all men, listed by full name and surname. Actually, the inventory of benefactors also includes one woman, who, being a woman, was not considered relevant enough to be mentioned by name. The document dismisses her as “the wife of Salvo Montagnes”. This says a lot about gender equality. I know her name was Imperia, Vella before marriage, but not thanks to the official listing.

Authors singled out Xerri’s bequest, estimated at 30,000 scudi, for its generosity. All this notwithstanding, Count Giovan Antonio Ciantar failed to consider Xerri a candidate for inclusion in his alarmingly bloated inventory of Uomini illustri di Malta, which also allowed a minuscule presence of women despite the fiercely mis­ogynist statement the heading wanted to make.

Of the four earliest Maltese poets – Caxaro, de Armenia, Xerri and Vassallo – at least three left highly visible evidence of unregulated carnal incontinence

The records also mention Xerri as a founder-member of a pious confraternity, that of Corpus Christi, erected in the Mdina Cathedral. His name appears together with that of the leading Notabile families: Cumbo, Surdo, Caxaro, de Noto, Manduca, de Lagone and others. Of course, the Mdina cathedral was then nothing like the baroque glory we admire today, and we know very little as to what the Siculo-Norman structure looked like before it was, rather wantonly, pulled down in the late 17th century.

Today Mdina has a baroque masterpiece, but the price we paid for it was the obliteration of the only medieval cathedral in Malta, one that could possibly have resembled those of the roughly coeval Monreale and Cefalù in Sicily. I rather feel we may have been shortchanged by the replacement.

Xerri comes across as someone we could still easily identify today: brimming with rhetorical religious fervour, but not to the extent of caring about getting unmarried girls pregnant; hush-hush resistant to autocratic government, but not when that government pointed a lucrative job his way; making plenty of dubious money privately, but then making plenty of posturing charity publicly. The word that comes to mind starts with hypo, and no, it is not hypothesis.

Our poet died on June 10, 1625 (on the eve of St Barnabas!), and by his will endowed the cumulo co-founded by his father, with a lavish bequest by which he was to be remembered long after his death.

Gio Francesco Abela states that with his passing away, the Xerri family became extinct. I bet he was buried in the Xerri chapel inside the Dominican church of Our Lady of the Grotto in Rabat which he had constructed and funded during his lifetime. But this is only a guess.

We can establish that his spouse Imperia Xerri survived Gregorio from the fact that on January 27, 1627, she drew up a will in the records of Notary Bernardo Azzupard. Differently from her husband, who piloted his devotions through the Dominicans, Imperia left her benefices to the Franciscans Minor Conventuals of Rabat. She willed in favour of this order a number of houses to endow the celebration of two Masses weekly on the altar of the Immaculate Virgin Mary and one Mass every week at the shrine of Our Lady of Graces in the Ta’ Gieżu Rabat church.

Inno della Vittoria
Dio Signor degli Eserciti noi vincemmo;
Dio Signor onnipotente noi trionfammo.
Nostra è la vittoria, a Voi sia sempre gloria.
Gloria al Padre, al Figlio, allo Spirito Santo.
Donzelle maltesi venite al tempio
Venite in bianca veste
Venite per lodare e benedire il Signore.
Nel calore del nostro giubilo
Ti lodiamo, o nostro Publio;
Fanciulli, giovani e vecchi
Correte, correte all’ Tempio
Gettate rose e viole con vera allegria
All’ altare di Maria.

Gregorio Xerri
Barone di Cicciano

Hymn to Victory
O God, Lord of Hosts, we conquered,
O God, almighty Lord, we triumphed.
Ours was the victory, may glory be always yours
Glory be to the Father,
the Son and the Holy Spirit.
Maltese damsels, come to the temple
Come in your white garments
Come praise and bless the Lord.
In the warmth of our elation
We praise you, O Publius of ours.
Children, youngsters, old people
Run, run to the temple
Throw roses and violets with sincere joy
On the altar of Mary.

Gregorio Xerri
Baron of Cicciano

(Concluded)

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Olvin Vella and Mark Sammut for advice, to Bernadine Scicluna and Heritage Malta for assistance with the photograph of the portrait of Gregorio Xerri, and to Joan Abela for references and transcriptions from the Notarial Archives.