Gozo suffered its most devastating razzia in July 1551, when hordes of Ottoman corsairs overran the poorly defended island, looted everything worth anything, set fire to every place of worship, and enslaved virtually the entire population and garrison, estimated at 5,000 to 6,000 wretches. Captives then represented a most lucrative investment for the corsairs (on either side of the divide): the able-bodied ones would provide free labour for all their working life; more easy money beckoned from the ransom of the prisoners by their families or friends against mouth-watering sums.

The knights defending the Citadel had put up a token resistance. Only one professional gunner – an Englishman – manned the obsolete and crumbling bastions. And he fell early during the ferocious enemy onslaught. The governor of the fortress sought a negotiated surrender. The corsairs accepted, only to breach every covenant agreed upon.

Very gradually, the desertified island started a new lease of life – partly through the slow return of some of the original ransomed Gozitans and, more shamefully, through the encroachments by business-friendly Maltese squatters unable to fight back the lures of the vast and fertile ‘ownerless’ Gozo estates. Many did not see the island’s catastrophe as an immense human tragedy, but rather as an irresistible business opportunity – mors tua, vita mea looked good on the balance sheet.

Court litigation to title all this invaluable real estate became rife with the return to freedom of the original owners or their descendants, some resulting in interminable lawsuits still being litigated during the British period. The Gozitans suffered two razzie, first by their Islamic enemies and later by their Christian brothers. I am not sure which hurt most.

Not surprisingly, the Ottoman looters in 1551 carried away anything economically attractive – from persons to cattle, from agricultural produce to precious gold and jewellery. But, rather inexplicably, it is said they also pillaged the official documentary records of governance, including the volumes of all the notaries who practised in Gozo.

Canon Gio Pietro Agius De Soldanis, the earliest and one of the more fastidious chroniclers of the island, wrote “they set the Matrix church on fire and all the other churches they came across in the country, burning all archives and documents they could find. They saved some documents and carried them to Constantinople where they remain to the present day (riuscirebbe loro condurle in Costantinopoli dove ancora sono custodite).”

De Soldanis, though always diligent, inquisitive and well-meaning, sometimes proves approximate and not invariably accurate. His ‘documents’ statement subdivides easily into five assertions: that the corsairs targeted all the papers they could find; they burned many of them; they saved some; they carried these to Constantinople; and they are still preserved there.

The Gozitan author wrote about the 1551 razzia almost 200 years after the events; he had no personal recollection of what he narrated. Most of the information could be questioned as hearsay. Except for his very last statement – that the documents looted from Gozo were, in his days, still preserved in Constantinople. This he avers as a known contemporary fact.

The accuracy of De Soldanis’s first four assertions today still stares one in the face – virtually all official pre-1551 Gozo documentation has disappeared. This, very noticeably, includes almost all Gozitan notarial records before the razzia. Some barely answerable questions remain: why were uncouth corsairs interested in looting documents? Why would they want to retain them? Is it true that they carried some of the documents to Constantinople? Why would they want to preserve them?

Whatever its credibility and reality, the tradition that a cache of pre-1551 Gozo documents still exists in Constantinople remains alive after almost five centuries.

I tend to agree with Mgr Joseph Bezzina that court litigants did recur to Constantinople for documents “but for testaments drawn up in the late 1700s and early 1800s by a host of Gozitan migrants who had sought work in the thriving ports of Istanbul and Thessaloniki”.

I am here concerned with some concrete steps taken during the British period to retrieve these mysterious and elusive papers. I know of two attempts that were made, one in 1849, another in 1900, which left traces in the National Archives. Both have intriguing backgrounds.

On December 4, 1848, Baron Giuseppe Maria Depiro (1794-1870), still embroiled in litigation about estates in Gozo, petitioned Governor Richard More O’Ferral, the first British Catholic Governor of Malta, to do something about retrieving the documents looted by Sinan Pasha in 1551 and housed in Constantinople. O’Ferral obliged, as “many Maltese families will feel gratified by the successful result”. Though Depiro had a keen and patriotic interest in history which he externalised in two important books he wrote, not a whiff of cultural inquisitiveness motivated similar requests. They pigeonholed under business is business.

The governor wrote a long dispatch to his superior in London, Earl Grey, taking on board Depiro’s arguments and endorsing vigorously the request for action: “There are many records relating to property in these islands in the possession of the Turkish government which it would be most desirable to recover… It is often necessary to refer to these documents and obtain attested copies which is attended with difficulty and expense. It has occurred to me it may be possible to induce the Turkish government to restore them, through an application made by the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs.”

Earl Grey did not sleep on O’Ferral’s request. On April 16, 1849, he answered formally – though one can detect a trace of peevishness in his tone: The British ambassador in Constantinople has made enquiries “from which it appears that no such documents as those supposed to have been taken from the island of Gozo in the year 1551 are in existence in that capital”. In shorthand: don’t waste my time.

The British Ambassador in Constantinople Sir Stradford Canning (1786-1880) could not resist a snide racist comment: what do you expect from the Turks? The absence of records is “but too probable by the lapse of time and the indifference of all Turkish authorities to other records but those of their own government”.

This was the first attempt I know of, but hardly the end of the story. In 1900, Governor Sir Francis Grenfell officially raised the matter again, asking the same queries. To me, it seems obvious that no one on the official side was aware that the self-same issues had been raised 50 years earlier. The Palace bureaucrats roped in a couple of heavyweights – the historian Mgr Alfredo Mifsud at the Malta end and, in Constantinople, Dr Lewis Mizzi (1847-1935), an international lawyer, confidante and legal consultant to the Sultan of Turkey.

A fat dossier housed in the National Archives still preserves all the exchanges, correspondence, notes and documents. The file opens with a letter written in Constantinople by Mizzi addressed to a Mr Blech (Edward Charles Blech, the British Consul) on May 16, 1900. Mizzi, who had settled and worked in Constantinople since the early 1870s, laments that searching for the looted Gozo archives, for the past 20 years “has been one of the many ungrateful tasks it has been my lot to grapple with”. He had originally been given that assignment by Sir Henry Houlton, Secretary of the Malta Government. Mizzi laments that “I have lost any amount of time and expenses” in this 20-year-long quest.

Mizzi then starts dropping names – of important Turkish dignitaries he harried to find answers, all friends of his, even the sultan himself, several ministers, including Hubhi Pasha, who was “a great antiquarian”. He went through “an immense quantity of papers collected from every part of the capital”. Mizzi recorded his pleasure in learning that the Governor of Malta was now taking the matter in hand to have the question studied at the Malta end.

With more detailed information from Malta, Mizzi added, he believed he would convince the sultan to return the looted documents to “my dear island”. Wistfully, he concludes “if I have given the matter so much attention, I did so because I took, in times gone by, great interest in the history of my country in general and of the Maltese nobility in particular”.

The governor then took on board Mgr Mifsud, librarian and erudite historian, not in the brown-noser cast of which Malta never registered a deficit. His long reply proved, overall, rather inconclusive. He mentions the Dominican friar Antonio Calafato, who claimed he saw the looted documents when on a mission to Constantinople before 1867 and confirmed their existence to A. (presumably Achille) Ferris, another reputable historian.

Mifsud adds that a copy of a document existing in Constantinople belonging to one of the pre-1551 Gozo notaries was made about 40 years earlier and was seen by Dr (Alfonso) Portelli Carbone (1863-1932), an obstetrician and professor of medicine. This subject was once debated in the Council of Government, but Mifsud could not trace the record.

Mifsud adds a curious sliver of info. He suggests that the looted documents could have ended in Palermo rather than in Constantinople, as some Ottoman corsairs were attacked and vanquished by French vessels after leaving Gozo.

Portelli Carbone, asked for confirmation by Mifsud, confessed he recalled nothing as he was only seven years old when the alleged sighting happened. Mifsud rounds off with another rather racist observation: “Having regard to the way in which books and documents were and are preserved in the Turkish capital, even if these archives were really taken to Constantinople they must, by this time, have become quite unreadable and therefore of little value”.

In a later memo, librarian Mifsud adds some useful info: Canon Fabrizio Pontremoli had instructed Notary Domenico Portelli to transcribe the records of five notaries active in Gozo from 1419 to 1551 ‒ Andrea de Benjamin, Pietro Mannara, Guglielmo Sansone, Giacomo sive Pino Saliba and Gio Antonio Sansone. These transcriptions, made in 1632-34, were to be found “in the Malta Government office of the Notarial Archives in Strada Britannica”.

Mizzi was no Mr Nobody. On the contrary, he counted as one of the more controversial figures of the late Victorian and early 20th century. A younger brother to Fortunato Mizzi, guru of the Maltese patriotic movement, and an uncle of Enrico Mizzi, leader of the Nationalist Party and later prime minister, Lewis represented the polar opposite to all they stood for. He prided in being the black sheep of the family – viscerally pro-British, lackey of the colonial authorities, and beneficiary of his subservience to the Empire.

I will recount three hardly-known stories which concern him. He had lived and worked in Constantinople as a successful lawyer for most of his life. In 1917, he returned to Malta and later entered politics on the lists of the pro-colonial Constitutional Party, a candidate for the Paola district. As part of his electoral campaign, he announced he would be donating valuable objects to raise funds for the building of the huge new parish church. These included a work of art by Rembrandt, two exquisite amber cigar holders said to have been given to him by the Turkish Sultan Mehmet VI as part-payment for professional work, and a ‘carillon tower’, whatever that meant.

To complicate matters, the architect of the new Paola parish church, Gużè D’Amato, also happened to be standing as electoral candidate on the same district, but for the adverse Nationalist Party. Those in charge of raising funds did not put Mizzi’s precious cigar holders up for sale on the antiques art market, but instead organised a raffle with the amber trophies as prize. This offended Mizzi mortally – he saw this as a political snub by the Nationalist D’Amato to demean and ridicule his generous donations. A nasty political crisis resulted. Simon Mercieca recently wrote about this bizarre but significant incident in ‘The story of two Rembrandt paintings’, Treasures of Malta, No. 87, Summer 2023.

And, when the British military authorities charged Lewis’s nephew Enrico with criminal sedition in 1917, he faced a British court martial. Enrico was arm-twisted to retain his uncle Lewis as his defence counsel. In his memoirs, Arturo Mercieca, later chief justice, has nothing flattering to say about Lewis’s professional behaviour. Mercieca dismissed Lewis Mizzi as one “who had built a certain reputation as a lawyer in Turkey, which he immediately lost in Malta where we measure values according to merits and demerits”.

Commenting on Enrico Mizzi’s trial, Mercieca adds “the uncle, his defence counsel, later had the shamelessness to write to Strickland’s daughter (Mabel), for political reasons, that his nephew had deserved to be executed by firing squad. To such extremes does partisan passion lead. Good for him that, on his death bed, he repented and asked for, and obtained, forgiveness”.

The fact he had defended Enrico when court-martialled obviously preyed on Lewis’s mind. In a public speech four years later, the lawyer claimed he had accepted the brief, but only to attempt to convince Governor Methuen to pardon and deport to Libya his “confounded nephew” who was nothing but “a fanatical fool”.

Dominic Fenech surpasses Mercieca in slamming Lewis Mizzi. He discloses a top-secret memorandum Mizzi sent Governor Congreve, ostensibly about Italian infiltration in Malta, but in substance “to denounce all his brothers and sisters and their children as traitors”. He expected his authorship never to be revealed as “his life would be in danger”. Predictably, it was instantly leaked.

Lewis explained why he had defended Enrico Mizzi in the court martial: he hoped the case would be dropped to deprive that “upstart nephew of his of the chance to become a hero”.

Lewis also quoted from a letter he had just written to Mabel Strickland “about how deeply my damnable nephew hated England, even more, if it is possible, than I hate him… Enrico should have been shot long ago, instead of being turned into a national hero by that stupid trial”.

 

Acknowledgements:

Thanks to Joan Abela, Lisa Attard, Mgr Joe Bezzina, Leonard Callus, Daniel Cilia, Marco Farrugia, George Hyzler, Anthony Mifsud and Theresa Vella for their unstinting assistance.