Intellectual, Philosopher, and Auditor
The political philosophy in Malta during the Enlightenment (1786-1798) was epitomized in the person of the uditore Giovanni Nicolò Muscat. Muscat was born in Valletta in a very poor circumstances. He was brought up by his aunt, who paid for his studies. With the help and good counsel of uditore Belli, Muscat, as a lawyer acquired a good clientele.
In 1763 Muscat had flouted public opinion by marrying Maria Salomone, a poor widow with three children, and much older than him. Besides his three stepchildren from his wife’s first marriage, he had two children from her second marriage: Paula and Dr Pietro Paolo. Although Maria was much older than him, she survived him when he died in 1803.
Uditore Muscat, considered as an intellectual, was a professional administrator, an avid reader of the natural law philosophers, and a presumed freemason. He had been a defender of clerical interests at the start of his legal career and was on his guard not to infringe on the rights of the Holy Office. Later on he came to symbolize the government’s stand against the church.
When Muscat was nominated Avvocato del Principato, he was not ill-disposed towards Papal jurisdiction, in fact he had even dedicated a sonnet in honour of Bishop’s Rull vicar-general, Canon Giovanni Maria Azopardi-Castelletti.
But some time later, Muscat seems to have changed his attitude, and produced various resolutions offensive to the church’s liberty. Muscat was profoundly immersed in the culture of the Enlightenment.
During the reign of Grand Master De Rohan, church-state relations degenerated to such an extent, that in 1792 Muscat went to Naples to seek the support of the king. On the other hand, when Pope Pius VI threatened to sequester the lands of the Order in the Papal States, the Grand Master dismissed this ‘declared enemy of the pope’ from his post of Avvocato del Principato.
Muscat put a strong defence against the charge of being a fomenter of dissension between ‘Stole and Sword’. He said that in the exercise of his difficult office, he had never intended to violate the Church’s laws, because he adorned the church with all his heart, and in whose name he wished to die. Eventually, the Pope, by his brief of 3 April 1792, thanked the Grand Master and reminded him that he had demanded that Muscat should only be removed from his posts of Advocate-General and auditor. On 23 April of the same year, the news broke out that Muscat had been reinstated in all his offices except that of Avvocato del Principato, where he was succeeded by Dr Asciach.
Late in July 1792 Muscat left the island on a speronara accompanied by the fleet of the Order to meet the Neapolitan Government with the hope of being installed again in his post. The Grand Master still supported him wholeheartedly and, despite his assurances, he had allowed him to take part in the High Court of Justice with all the authority he had previously enjoyed. On his part the Grand Master gave him letters of recommendation as well as money. Before his departure, Muscat summoned all the judges in an extraordinary session, advising them how to proceed in his absence. Muscat believed that he would return triumphantly to his office after fifty days. In Naples Muscat met Acton, the Foreign Minister. He arrived in Malta late in October, and went straight to the Grand Master, who welcomed him warmly.
But on 2 November Grand Master De Rohan warned Muscat not to exercise his influence any more. When the new Inquisitor Mgr Carpegna arrived in Malta on 24 January 1793, he had to face the machinations of Dr Muscat. Muscat apologized before Inquisitor Carpegna for his past conduct and declared that whatever he might have done contrary to the interests of the Holy See, had been committed on the express orders of the Grand Master, who wanted no one to exercise any jurisdiction over his subjects.
On 15 July Muscat sent a memorandum to the Pope, and a copy of this to De Zelanda and the Inquisitor. Muscat admitted that he was subject to mistakes, but his intentions had always been upright. He said that he had nothing more at heart than the good of society and of the Santa Sede for whom, despite all the misfortunes suffered, he showed all respect and blind submission. Inquisitor Carpegna agreed to let Muscat visit him, and this meeting occurred on 10 September. Muscat, after justifying his past conduct, boasted that he was sure that His Holiness would reintegrate him into offices and asked Mgr Carpegna not to put obstacles in the way. In his reply, the Inquisitor did not mince his words and formally charged him with having tried to harm the rights of the Santa Sede.
Muscat’s efforts to free himself from the fetters of Rome were difficult to materialize in the harsh realities of the time. His attempts included ‘diplomatic Machiavellism’, and putting Naples against Rome. Papal interference, however was not the only obstacle that this typical agent of the Englightenment in Hospitaller Malta had to face. Muscat, while affirming his faithfulness to Catholicism, rejected the idea of the Church as a perfect society and attributed to her only purely spiritual functions and values. Muscat was deeply and personally influenced by the ideas and writings of the time, which put him in the mainstream of the European Enlightenment. To translate all his programme into action was a difficult task, and his ‘reform of Malta’, failed to materialize. Yet his vision of an ‘independent’ country and the awakening of national consciousness remained as steadfast as ever.
Muscat, who had been appointed judge in 1794 by Grand Master De Rohan, was involved as one of the jurats just before the disimbarkation of the French, when he and many others met at the Banca Giuratale in Valletta to see what could be done under those circumstances. On the night of the 11 July 1798, Muscat formed part of the Maltese delegation on the Orient, discussing the capitulation of Malta with Napoleon.
Many months later, at the height of the siege, Muscat found himself in deep trouble with Vaubois who told him that he had been informed that he was saying many things which could be detrimental to the war effort. ‘Beware of your words and actions’ Vaubois sternly warned him, ‘because if I find you guilty of the least offence, I shall punish you publicly to make a terrible example of you’.
In mid-November 1799 Vaubois allowed Muscat and his family to leave Valletta for the countryside. On arriving there, Muscat was immediately apprehended by the Maltese and was thrown in Comino Tower. A few days later he was transferred to the prison in the Gozo citadel. Some time later he was freed from prison and was forbidden to leave Gozo.
During the British administration Muscat was appointed vice-president of the Courts and knighted with an annual pension of £182 for his past services during the time of the Order.
In a researched article published in Melita Historica in 2016, Giovanni Bonello, claimed that ‘besides being an undoubtedly acute jurist au courant with contemporary liberal and enlightened thinking, he (Muscat) was also a relentless political opportunist, a fawning boot-licker when his personal interests were threatened and, like many of the Grand Master’s uditori, possibly not averse to some massive corruption too – the model primordial switcher.’ According to this research, ‘newly discovered documents – wills, codicils and inventories – enable us to fill in the last major biographical lacunae’. Gio Nicolò Muscat has an undisclosed and amazing story of rags to riches. His wills and inventories, recently discovered at the Notarial Archives, bear witness to a fast-track accumulation of wealth that is rather problematic to explain. His moveable holdings included paintings by Rembrandt, Correggio, Antonio Tempesta and Mattia Preti. His land holdings comprised an undivided half of the huge Palazzo Britto in West Street, Valletta, houses and gardens in Lija near Palazzo Preziosi and fields in Imrieħel, together with important gold, jewels and silver objects.
Muscat was a compulsive writer and publisher of sonnets, which he printed at his expense at the government printing press, starting in 1758 and persisting at least up to 1780. At the age of 41, Gio Nicolò Muscat published a series of sonetti to celebrate Grand Master Rohan’s solemn entry into Mdina in 1776. He also authored some of the May cantatas performed to music infront of the Grand Master’s palace.
In the conflict between the Order and the papacy, to the claims by Rome to have final sovereignty over the Order of St John and the governance of Malta, he supported the civil power against the ecclesiastical encroachment.
Nothing we know of Muscat shows him as anything but a ruthless careerist, a lackay of the powerful, anxious to be in the good books of anyone in a position to advance his ego and his fortunes, a man of inflexible ambitions and flexible principles, who always turned exactly when the wind turned, a toady by nature, by design and by default. When the Order ruled supreme, Muscat strove to be seen as the great champion of the order. When the French, the enemies of the Order took over, Muscat became the great champion of the French. And when the British, the enemies of the Order and of the French, took over, Muscat, never one to let you down, became the great champion of the British. He never failed to worship at the altar of whoever happenned to be on top.
Gio Nicolò Muscat died in Malta on 2 March 1803. He lived and passed away next to Ta’ Ġieżu church in St. John street Valletta, where he asked to be buried; he was on very amicable terms with the Franciscan Frairs Minor who ran the church.
In 2018, Prof. Frans Ciappara published a study entitild Church-State Relations in Late-Eighteenth-Century Malta: Gio Nicola Muscat (1735-1803).
This biography is part of the collection created by Michael Schiavone over a 30-year period. Read more about Schiavone and his initiative here.