Translating the Valletta dream into brick and mortar after the Great Siege of 1565 disturbed profoundly the centres of gravity of most of the island’s power focuses. The Order did its utmost to shift as many of its administrative structures as rapidly as possible to brand-new Valletta, and knights who, till then, lived worked and loitered mostly in the Vittoriosa area were urged, if not arm-twisted, to populate the phantom town as it was being built.

 Encountering some understandable resistance at first, most of the knights eventually fell in line and abandoned the old city. Vittoriosa by name, but ultimately defeated. Relegated to minor status. Vittoriosa still retained most of its maritime and commercial energies, its artisans and its religious exuberance. As far as governance was concerned, it became little more than a dormitory town.

The official move of the Order to Valletta achieved at least two aims – the Hospitallers finally had their new purpose-built city. And they had a conurbation which they could claim as exclusively their own.

Vittoriosa seen from the air.

Malta found itself subdividing into three jurisdictions – the Order under a grand master, the Church under a bishop and the Inquisition under an inquisitor.

Three powers competing for pre-eminence, jealous of their asserted prerogatives, highly resentful of any suspected encroachment. A genteel rivalry that sometimes spilled into aggressive hostility. In its new city, the Order at first accepted no competition – the bishop was to stick to Mdina and the (later) inquisitor, to Vittoriosa. The sanitary corridors between the three cold-war powers could now be set in stone.

And, with the passage of time, mentions of Vittoriosa in the formal records of the Order, mostly the Libri Conciliorum (the minutes of the council’s meetings), start becoming noticeably scarcer and scarcer. I will here focus on three unknown, Vittoriosa-related, narratives.

In his 1703 history, Bartolomeo dal Pozzo, the OCD chronicler of the Order of Malta mentions fleetingly a scandalous 1574 tumulto in Vittoriosa – a commotion, fracas, disturbance – which resulted in deaths and abundant bloodshed.

A Settecento game of football played in a square in Florence.

It all started as wholesome sports, when young knights crossed the harbour from Valletta to indulge in their favourite sport – il giouco della pilotta, pelota in Spanish – a popular, highly athletic, court ball, played by teams using their limbs and a racket. This could possibly be the earliest recorded mention of organised ball sports being played in Malta.

Sadly, a game which ended in tragedy. The young knights traversed the harbour regularly, almost daily, to enjoy their games of pilotta in Vittoriosa. No indication has yet emerged as to where, in Vittoriosa, the ball courts were located.

The Order had stationed in Vittoriosa a contingent of Spanish mercenaries, under the command of Captain Juan Velasquez, entrusting them with the old city’s defence. Bad blood had been building up for some time between the Spanish garrison and the buoyant sportsmen, resulting in frequent brawls and squabbles. And here we are, deluding ourselves that hooliganism was invented by our football louts yesterday.

Grand Master La Cassiere, well aware where the dangerous escalation of the enmity could lead to, thought he could keep the volatile situation under control by resorting to extreme disciplinary and criminal measures.  

Grand Master La Cassiere during whose rule the Vittoriosa ball game fracas occurred.

He identified the leading ‘turbulent and unruly minds’ (cervelli inquieti e discoli) and, in council, condemned them to exemplary penalties, like detention and expulsion from the Order, after a heated, indecorous and resentful debate.

So outrageously disrespectful of the grand master was the behaviour of some, including elders, that a formal resolution decreed that the Bali of Leza, Fra Pedro Mesquita, would be barred from participating in any future affairs of the council unless he humbly and publicly apologised to La Cassiere.

Exceptionally, the minutes of the assembly prove more generous with details of the Vittoriosa tumulto, than does the historian’s narrative. The elders first debated the tragic events during the meeting of July 17, when the usual ‘commissioners’ were delegated to investigate the events and report back to the council. More drastically than that, the elders placed the whole city of Vittoriosa out of bounds for any member of the Order. That made it a criminal offence for any Hospitaller to cross into the geographical boundaries of Vittoriosa. The penalty? Instant expulsion from the Order – ipso facto.

An antique marble tablet prohibiting ball games in a piazza.

In the first week of the following month, the council met again for the proper trial of six of the principal hot heads, all French. After deliberations, the elders expelled from the Order Fra Merieu (Fra Annette de St Germain? Many French knights were better identified by their nickname) and Fra Sebastien de Montferrand, while Fra Solier, Fra Noville, Fra Anieres, and Fra Bottinatere paid their debt to society with two years’ incarceration in the tower.

Shortly later, on August 7, Vittoriosa still remained partially out of bounds for the knights, with the prohibition for them to play ball games in public (ludere ad pilas) still in place, under penalty of forfeiture on one year’s seniority.

Then the predictable and the inevitable followed. The council met again on September 25 to reverse the expulsions of St Germain and of Montferrand. In other words, to welcome the black sheep back to the fold. The elders felt morally convinced that, though the loss of three years’ seniority might not resurrect the victims, it would wash all those inconvenient bloodstains squeaky clean.

Neither the Books of the Council nor the chronicler hint at the reasons underlying the bloodthirsty enmity between the soldiers and the knights, leading to the epic Vittoriosa tumulto. It could have been rooted in age-old racism. All the turbulent ball players were French, all the victims Spanish. France and Spain had been at each other’s throat for most of the century; any pretext then seemed sufficient for the Valois and the Hapsburgs to assault each other.

The Pelota game played in Spain, called Pilotta in Malta.

By its constitutions, the Order respected, or had to appear to respect, an aseptic neutrality in any conflict between Catholic sovereigns. This institutional restraint, though generally contributing to moderate ethnic tensions, did not prevent individual animosity from spilling over into violence. Malta had to witness several tragic instances in which the nationals of His Most Catholic Majesty and those of His Most Christian Majesty matter-of-factly spilled each other’s blood.

The 1570s Books of the Council record a few other references to Vittoriosa. In June 1576, the elders appointed a commission to investigate and report on a formal complaint by the Fiscal Procurator (the Director of Prosecutions) Fra Agostino Genzano about the guards on duty in Vittoriosa, and on the allegations of some misbehaviour in their regard by Fra Ludovico de Zuñiga.

The final entry seems to raise concerns of a more general nature. Alarmed by widespread criminality sweeping through Vittoriosa in 1578, the council met to appoint a commission tasked with investigating the wave of unpunished burglaries and robberies that had become routine in Vittoriosa.