Thousands of documents are stacked on the shelves of national collections waiting to be read. But unless Malta invests in more Latin palaeographers, chunks of the island’s history could remain a mystery, palaeographer Samuel Azzopardi tells Sarah Carabott.

When news of the arrival of the Grande Soccorso spread in the besieged Vittoriosa just an hour before midnight on September 7, 1565, the “desperate” residents burst into song recalling the liberation of the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt several centuries before.

The Grande Soccorso – or Great Relief – saw the arrival of some 8,000 Spanish and Italian soldiers to fight off the Ottoman assault during the Great Siege of Malta.

This detail about ordinary people in a story that is often told from the perspective of those who ruled the island came to light when a local palaeographer was transcribing the note, found in notary Giacomo Baldacchino’s 1565 volume.

Similarly – from a 1565 volume by notary Bartolomeo Axisa – we know that at least six men from Dingli were employed by the Mdina jurats to watch over a herd of cattle in the Mdina ditch with the promise they would be paid only at the end of the war.

Notarial volumes of the time also document injuries suffered by locals – including Pietro Aquilina from Rabat, who, together with his business partner Crispino Bugeja supplied wine and wheat to soldiers in Mdina.

Aquilina was wounded in the leg and since his health deteriorated, a formal record was made of the monies still owed to him by the governors in case he died.

Baldacchino, Axisa, Aquilina and Bugeja’s stories have been preserved for posterity after they were translated by an expert. However, thousands of other stories could remain untold unless more people in Malta learn Latin.

The notarial archives collection alone includes over 20,000 volumes (about 2km of shelving) that are yet to be transcribed and translated in full.

Many of them have not even been consulted for any form of research.

Other collections – including at the Curia, Cathedral and National archives – also host a phenomenal amount of documentation from the Middle Ages to the early modern period.

Samuel Azzopardi. Photo: Matthew Mirabelli

Course starting this October that teaches Latin from scratch

There are currently very few people in Malta who understand the language, and even fewer who are able to transcribe and translate text in Latin, so the Notarial Archives Foundation together with the Malta Classics Association, will be holding a course, starting this month, that teaches Latin from scratch.

At the end of the course, students will be able to sit for international exams, and if there are enough interested people, the foundation and association will organise courses at higher levels.

“It is worrying that there are between 10 to 15 people who know Latin in the country well enough to do independent research, and another four who are able to read documents through experience and practice.

"Unless more people opt to learn the language, we will just have these documents that no one can read or understand populating our archives,” Azzopardi, who also heads the Malta Classics Association told Times of Malta.

According to University of Malta data, between 2018 and 2022, two candidates obtained an O level in Latin, two passed an A  level Latin exam, and another four successfully sat for an exam in Latin at Intermediate level.

The shortage of Latin palaeographers is also present abroad, meaning it is unlikely that experts can be flown over to transcribe and translate local documents.

Can Google Translate, AI help?

Azzopardi said that in order to translate a 500-year-old document in Latin, the reader will first need to understand the handwritten text with all its abbreviations, which could either be particular to the writers themselves or even the region.

Some notaries even spelt whole words in their own way, such as caussa instead of causa (cause).

The text will then need to be translated. While tools such as Google Translate could be useful as they could provide a general idea of the content, they could also be misleading as the tool does not understand the context the document was written in.

Latin, Azzopardi says, is a very intricate language, with nouns constantly changing depending on their role in a sentence (declensions).

In decades to come, AI could help in decoding the documents, but the process will be long, and in the meantime, AI tools in themselves require palaeographers to ‘train’ them.

Right now, there are only two qualified palaeographers working with the Notarial Archives Foundation (NAF) at the Notarial Registers Archive (part of the National Archives) – one of whom is Azzopardi himself.

Azzopardi studied Latin privately before enrolling for a Bachelors in Classics at the University of Malta.

He spent some time working as an archivist with the Archdiocese of Malta and volunteered with NAF, which is where he met historian Joan Abela, who instilled in him “a sense of urgency to take it upon myself and help save the stories of daily life in historical documents”.

He eventually read for a Masters in Late Antique, Islamic and Byzantine Studies at the University of Edinburgh sponsored by the government and then joined the National Archives of Malta as a paleographer.

“During my time at the archives I noticed that lawyers and notaries are among the main researchers at the archives as they would need transcriptions of deeds for their research for modern contracts or court cases.

“This means that there is a real applied need of understanding Latin that goes beyond the joy of research.”

If you are aged 16 and up, and are interested in the course, get in touch on courses@nafmalta.org