Fra Mathurin Lescaut, called Romegas, owner of a famous monkey.

Fra Mathurin Lescaut, who no one called by his real name but by his nick Romegas, could truthfully claim to be one of the most celebrated and daring seafarers in the long history of the Knights of Malta and of the Mediterranean: “The only one who could outshine Dragut.” So renowned that when a number of disaffected knights conspired to overthrow the doddering Grand Master Jean de la Cassiére in 1581, they could think of no one better to showcase their grievances and their mutiny than the redoubtable Romegas.

This French corsair, hardened by many a sea battle, carried with him a domesticated monkey – as a pet and a companion, on the newly built galley Santa Fede. Not that he lacked company. He is reputed to have fathered at least six illegitimate children when in Malta – to confirm to anyone who doubted it that no Muslim corsair, no political rival and no silly vow of chastity stood in his way. His mischievous little pet was to be recorded in history in a bizarre and terrifying episode that ended tragically for hundreds of others. The historian Giacomo Bosio says that the primate was kept on board Romegas’s galley. Another biographer adds “as a pet”.

The night of October 23, 1555, when Fra Claude de la Sengle ruled as Grand Master of Malta, saw one of the fiercest tempests ever to hit the island, a storm of apocalyptic proportions which wrecked unprecedented havoc in the harbour area. “A sudden hurricane and a water spout, accompanied by a huge tidal wave and screaming high winds from the southwest, veering suddenly to the west and northwest, accompanied by torrential rainfall” battered the Grand Harbour. This atmospheric freak, Bosio notes, local mariners call tifone (typhoon), adding that no one would believe that what occurred in 1555 could happen in what many counted as the most secure harbour in Europe.

Monkeys as Judges of Art by Gabriel Cornelius von Max.

The four proud galleys of the Order lay berthed in a line between Birgu and Senglea, ready to leave for Messina. The hurricane destroyed everything. It dismasted all the ships of the knights and capsised them. The massive flagpole that flew the Order’s banner from Fort St Angelo landed as a projectile in far-away Rinella Bay. Some of the smaller ships and boats the turbulence lifted high in the air and hurled inland. In all, this impeto meravigliosissimo only lasted half an hour, and then subsided suddenly and totally. Once over, one could hold a lighted candle in the middle of a street and the flame would not even flicker.

Voluntary rescuers saved some crew, freed them from the ropes, the rigging and the dormitory tents which had been erected on deck for the complement of soldiers, and made them vomit what sea­water had flooded their lungs. When the loud cries and the wailing of the crowds that flocked to the Birgu marina somewhat quietened down, knocking could be heard coming from inside the hulls of the capsized galleys. These were then secured by heavy ropes to prevent them from sinking, and the shipwrights prised away some planks from the overturned keels – many men climbed out from where they had been imprisoned in large air bubbles that had been trapped in the upturned hulks “like Jonas out of the belly of the whale”.

The very first to leap to a safe exit was Romegas’s pet monkey, and this earned it a loud round of applause – end-of-tension relief. Romegas too escaped alive, after having spent his long confinement with only his head above the water and the rest of his body immersed in the freezing sea. This misadventure took a heavy toll on his impressive physique – he was about 30 then: the neurological coordination of his hands failed, and he lived the rest of his years with a tremor so marked that he could not raise a glass to his lips without spilling half its contents.

Contemporaries agreed this hurricane to have been the greatest calamity to have hit the Order of St John since its expulsion from Rhodes and the loss of Tripoli. Two young knights, 300 Christian crew and soldiers and 300 Muslim slave rowers perished; most of the captive oarsmen drowned chained to the ships’ benches. Even burying that monstrous accumulation of corpses proved to be a daunting logistical challenge. The historian does not detail how or where they were disposed of. By a series of bold mechanical feats, the engineers of the Order eventually managed to refloat and make sea­worthy three of the sunken galleys – the Santa Fede, the Santa Maria della Vittoria and the San Michele Arcangelo, but the San Claudio, named after the Grand Master, had suffered irreparable damage and had to be broken up. Man-made global warming, no doubt.

Ancient Maltese words have a close but unsuspected link to the monkey kingdom. One example would be makakk, used to profile a cunning, sly person

This episode comes with some special interest from a linguistic point of view. Bosio could have chosen from a number of Italian words to characterise Romegas’s pet monkey, but opted for a rather unusual one: gatto mamone or maimone, which in his times, in the south of Italy, meant a small monkey but, as gatto mammone predominantly came to refer to a mythological creature, an enormous and terrifying cat that haunts the popular imagination to this day. Bosio’s reference to Romegas’s monkey as gatto mamone coincides with the origin of the Maltese word gedmejmun, wiċċ ta’ gedmej­mun, still used in our times for mischievous, ugly or broody people. Gketmeimuna for monkey already features in Giovanni Pietro Agius de Soldanis’s vocabulary.

Albrecht Durer painted a monkey in shackles next to the Virgin Mary.

The rendering gatto mamone for monkey does not appear at all widespread in early Italian literature. Apart from Bosio’s history, it occurs in the work of a very renowned knight of Malta: Fra Sabba da Castiglione (1480-1554). His best-selling guide to fine behaviour, Ricordi, published in the year he died (25 editions and reprints in less than 60 years followed), dedicated a whole unrelenting section to the inordinate vanity of women and men who spend hours in front of a mirror striving to beautify themselves – sometimes with lamentable results. When it comes to depilation of the eyebrows, Castiglione remarks that the outcome sometimes resembles un gatto mamone nuovamente venuto dall’India – probably India as in America.

Some other ancient Maltese words have a close but unsuspected link to the monkey kingdom. One obvious example would be makakk, used in Maltese to profile a cunning, sly person who will take advantage of another’s good faith or credulity – kemm hu makakk, mhux nieqes mill-makakkerija. This no doubt derives from the Italian macaco, a species of monkey, always associated with wily shiftiness.

I rather suspect that even the Maltese word xifajk, plural xjafek, has a simian connection. Professor Joseph Aquilina tentatively explained this word of unknown origin as a euphemistic alteration of xitan but does not attempt an etymology. I believe it could be otherwise. In Italian (and other languages too) the sifaka is a popular species of monkey. I may be wrong, but I suggest – just speculating – that xifajk, meaning mischievous, unruly, could possibly relate to the Italian sifaka.

And babbu too, a simpleton, one easily deceived, Aquilina originates from Sicilian. It has no obvious connection with the Italian babbo, daddy. Sicilian babbu comes from old Italian babbio, low Latin babbius, today more commonly turned to babbeo – a simpleton. All words which share DNA with babbuino, the baboon ape.

Monkeys in the Kitchen, c. 1640.

Aquilina has accepted as Maltese words gorilla, gurilla “a person with an ugly repulsive face”. I believe that following the Italian fashion, gorilla now also stands in for bodyguard or bouncer. And babun, babwin, ximpanzì, from the large primates, have also found a place for themselves in the Maltese vocabulary. Strangely, sky larks and shore larks are known in Maltese as alwett. In Italian, the word alouatta refers to the howler monkey.

Not to mention two Maltese surnames: Galagona (or Garagona) and Simiana. The first, recorded in Malta in the 16th century but now extinct as a family name, referred to several species of monkeys (of the Galago genus). The painter Bartolomeo Garagona, a tired Maltese follower of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, was born from a Rhodiot father and a Maltese mother. Simiana, on the other hand, means related to, deriving from, monkeys.

Even the generic words xadin, xadina hide some linguistic indicators. The literal term for the monkey animal is Semitic, but for metaphorical, symbolical derivatives of ‘monkey’ or ‘monkey behaviour’ we rely on Romance words: makakk, xifajk, tixximjotta. The word xadin has, over the years, acquired different meanings or connotations: ape or monkey, ugly (ikraħ daqs xadin, wiċċ ta’ xadina) sly, crafty (ħażin daqs xadina fuq xkaffa) and to mimic or to flirt (jixxadinja). Jixximjotta from Italian scimmiottare also conveys imitation, copying. During carnival, one taunted the other with the nonsense rhyme “Maskerat tini perlina ghax warajk għandek xadina”. An old saying goes: ix-xadin tlibbsu qalziet, xadin jibqa. And another: il-mera m’hiex ħabiba tax-xadina. Today xadin has gained a new, below-the-belt undertone, wholly unprintable.

What superficially looks like a curio from the zoo or the portrait of a pet, is, under the surface, an emblem of the vow of chastity, of lust controlled

Monkey effigies have always been pregnant with symbolism. Disregarding the heavy cultural imagery attached to apes and monkeys in Egyptian, Eastern and Far Eastern civilisations, we can concentrate on times and places closer to us. Though Eastern monkey symbolism has been imported to some extent by the West too; take the Japanese three monkeys, one covering its eyes, one its mouth and the other its ears. That poses a heavy moral dilemma: better not to see, not to hear and not to say anything? Or is it only monkeys who are, by choice, deaf and mute, and fail to speak out when it is their duty to?

Monkey in a Box Cage, 17th century. Private collection, Malta.

In early Christian Europe, the monkey portrayed evil. Closely resembling the human species, it reflected man’s effigy of his baser self. That explains why it was sometimes shown with a mirror on its head facing the viewer. It personified the devil himself (diabolus est Dei simia – the devil is God’s monkey, proclaimed the fiery Tertullian who got rather tetchy when contradicted). Later, more specifically, the monkey asserted itself as the metaphor for invasive carnality, unbridled lechery. Though monkeys were not indigenous to Europe, they turned into a favourite motif in Romanesque, Gothic and Renaissance religious sculpture and painting to personify sinful vice, or more specifically, the capital sin of lust. The fact that some monkeys have long tails added weight to their phallic profiling.

Not only in art, but in linguistics too. The poor mandrill ape ended being identified with anything oversexed, compulsively coition-oriented – see the Italian mandrillo still current today for a man obsessed with copulation. Not solely a popular perception. Even a leading zoologist like the German Alfred Brehm (1829-1884), tossing aside any shred of scientific objectivity in favour of moralistic populism, branded the mandrill apes as “caricatures of the devil, allegories of vice, satanic monsters, creatures intrinsically repugnant”. It may be me, but something makes me suspect that Brehm did not quite like them.

In fact, I have a vague speculation as to why the historian Bosio gave so much prominence to Romegas’s monkey. For having betrayed La Cassière, Bosio hated Romegas with a passion and made sure he did nothing to hide it. The knight’s openly lecherous life, his serial illegitimate children off the conveyor belt made his close and public association with a monkey, the symbol of lust, damning and compulsory. That could have been Bosio’s subtle, less than compassionate, revenge on the one he perceived as the traitor his Order and his Grand Master.

Apes in chains symbolise lust vanquished, chastity trium­phant. Take Albrecht Dürer’s renowned engraving of The Virgin Mary and Child, with a monkey in shackles prominently at their feet – a visual rendering of the attributes of Mary: Mater castissima and Regina virginum.

A painting of a monkey in a box-cage, with a chain round its neck, may represent just that: a portrait of a favourite pet the owner wanted to keep the memory of. But as this unusual 17th century picture of a chained Barbary macaque has been in Malta for a long time, are we allowed to read into this image some deeper symbolic meaning? If this painting had once belonged to a knight of Malta (or to a person in holy orders), then it would be safe to assume that what superficially looks like a curio from the zoo or the portrait of a pet, is, under the surface, an emblem of the vow of chastity, of lust controlled. Today we can barely cope with the intricacies of medieval and baroque symbolism, far more complex and pervasive than anything current in present times.

(To be concluded)