The Gozo University Group (Grupp Universitarji Għawdxin) organised a public talk at Il-Ħaġar in Victoria as part of Gozo Week. The lecture was delivered by Charles Dalli, a history lecturer at the university’s Faculty of Arts, specialising in the medieval period.

In Raiders and Rebels in Medieval Gozo, Dalli highlighted the 14th and 15th centuries in Gozo before the arrival of the Order of St John after their expulsion from Rhodes. He focused on Gozo, highlighting acts of rebellion with repercussion well beyond the island’s shores and raiders that added to a pattern of peril and instability which threatened the island’s social continuity.

Charles Dalli

Dalli said there was a dearth of documentation locally and all researchers had to depend mostly on fragmentary sources overseas. This meant certain aspects remained dubious. He mentioned instances where the surviving documentary evidence, especially about the relationship between the Maltese islands and Sicily, had received contrasting interpretations.

Dalli first treated the attacks on Gozo by the Ottomans, while he also quoted instances where the ‘enemy’ was a Christian leader, piracy being a popular occupation ‒  licensed and taxed.

In the second part of his lecture, Dalli mentioned specific individuals, discussing the surprisingly long list of occasions when the inhabitants of Gozo and Malta, or both, revolted against their rulers. For example, he suggested the idea that the movement against Gonsalvo Monroy, the Aragonese ‘Count of Malta’ who had bought these rights from the king, actually began in Gozo.

He also treated a recent argument, which was misquoted or applied out of context a reference to an Egyptian compilation.