(Warning: graphic content)

One cannot even dream of trying to better Godfrey Wettinger’s truly monumental history of slavery in Malta, published in 2002. He made a banquet of the subject and only left others what crumbs, if any, fell off his table.

How, on the human plane, private owners treated slaves depended on a wide variety of factors. Slaves were not persons but objects that could be owned,  exchanged, traded, pawned, auctioned to the highest bidder or given as presents, just like cows, armchairs or credits. 

Slavery fundamentally dehumanised, legally and morally, those who suffered it, made chattels less than human of its targets. Falling into slavery meant civil death, the loss of legal personality and of the protection of the law. 

Violence against slaves had no legal consequences except that, if injury was caused, their owner could claim compensation, just like the owner of a car damaged in a road accident. Commerce in slaves was as honourable as that in white goods or computers. Slaves primarily represented an economic asset, tools that provided labour for free and capital that would render good dividends if the wares were ransomed. Owners had every reason to keep slaves happy, healthy and strong as insurance against depreciation.

Many lived with the families of their proprietor and sometimes bonds of affection grew between the owner and the owned – they became loved parts of the household and assumed the surname of its head. 

Numerous cases are on record of family slaves being ‘manumitted’ – granted their freedom, by wills or other notarial deeds. Mattia Preti, to mention one, gave his slave, Giuseppe Cianferli his freedom and his invaluable accumulation of drawings, today worth millions. Many others showed gratitude for faithful service, though some took care to temper an irrational compassion with a rational business plan – freedom but in exchange for a sum of money.

At the other end of the spectrum are records of extreme cruelty suffered by slaves, seen as objects with few, if any, rights. The Mdina nobleman, Francesco Gatto kept a mistress who, by instalments, rewarded his lust with gifts of illegitimate children. One day in 1410, he discovered she was cheating on him with the help of a young slave. The indications are that Gatto was rather unamused: he assaulted her with his sword, sliced off her nose and carved out her vagina. He also beat the slave to death. The royal authorities pardoned his indiscretions and let the good man off.

And the philanthropist Catherina Vitale of saintly fame who left considerable wealth for the ransom of Christian slaves in Ottoman captivity was not at all averse to satisfying a sadist streak through the agency of her slaves. Evidence survives about the extreme callousness she lavished on her female slaves, possibly brightened by sexual gratification. She had them tied to the railings of her staircase and flogged with a whip fashioned out of bull’s hide soaked in water to make it heavier and more painful.

Vitale made sure not to run short of torments to inflict on her female slaves. She ordered her male slave to smear boiling fat on their bare backs. One 27-year-old hollered so loudly she had to be gagged, almost suffocated, a delicate concern not to wake the neighbours.

Those were slaves in private ownership. Many, however, belonged to the community. Did the state treat them well? Able-bodied males often ended as rowers on the galleys. They lived the duration of a sea journey chained to benches, not being released for any reason. They usually relieved themselves on their immediate workplace, in an ambiance of unbearable stench. An agozzino enforced discipline – no wonder to this day the Maltese word ‘argużin’ refers to a heartless person who can only dish out cruelty. Some slaves self-mutilated grievously, just to avoid galley service.

Grand masters enacted special legislation to discourage slaves voluntarily overdosing on opium to put an end to a lifetime’s miseries of captivity. The suicide of a slave rated as an economic mishap, an affront to the sacred right of private property. How dare a slave even contemplate defrauding his owner by taking his own life?

The agozzino claimed a prerogative of life and death over the rower-slaves under his care. When, during a sea skirmish in 1625, the agozzino believed that a rower was only pretending to row, barely dipping the tip of his oar in the sea, without much ado, he chopped off his malingering arm there and then. Everyone praised his dedication to duty.

The correspondence of the grand masters with the Islamic rulers of North Africa emphasises how humanely the Order treated its slaves and expected Christians fallen in captivity to be treated in return. In 1714, the grand master and the bey of Tripoli exchanged gifts. The grand master received an ostrich, a horse and some gazelles and paid back the compliment with four crates of confectioneries.

Rarely do the annals record instances of wanton ill-treatment of public slaves. Apart from deprivation of freedom of movement, they enjoyed their own markets and their four mosques – one each in Valletta, Marsa, Vittoriosa and Senglea. 

Most of the slaves who survived on their own, exercised menial trades, though exceptions are not unknown. When the construction of the great Wignacourt aqueduct ran into serious engineering problems and ground to a halt in 1612, it was a Turkish slave who saved the day. We know the name of the bungling engineer but no one bothered to record that of the redeemer, a mere slave.

This would all change abruptly if slaves misbehaved. Pitiless retribution followed. 

When Grand Master Pinto discovered the conspiracy of the slaves in 1749, he let a supremely creative sadism run riot. He ordered the execution of the principal conspirators, not before subjecting them to protracted and most excruciating torments which horrified contemporaries, including Michele Acciardi, who describes these atrocities in bloodcurdling detail. They make the Marquis de Sade look like Francis of Assisi.

In all, the authorities arrested and tortured 135 slaves and executed 38. The torments included the rack, the lash, flesh being torn away with red hot pincers, arms and legs shattered by repeated blows of a metal sledgehammer and, finally, drawing and quartering while still alive, by tying each extremity of the body to four vessels rowing in opposite direction. The area delle Forbici, near the Due Balli in Valletta, identifies, since at least the 1590s, the place where the flesh of delinquents was torn away with pincers or forceps, usually starting with the nipples.

So horrific were the torments inflicted on the slaves that the pregnant Teresa Aprile, one of the multitudes watching, fainted and suffered a miscarriage. Her recreational curiosity earned her the loss of her three-month-old creature.

As contemporary illustrations show, lavish use was also made of the torture bench, with a sharp V-shaped ridge running on top through its length. A pulley dropped suspects on it from a height with their legs apart; at times, heavy weights attached to the feet made the impact with the groin more unbearable still. One wretch with haemorrhoids turned the torture chamber into a lake of blood. Lighted torches held next to the slave’s chest and back ensured he would not writhe to relieve the pain. 

This ‘Spanish donkey’, known originally by its Italian name ‘cavalletto squarciapalle’, in Malta became ‘iż-żiemel ta’ Cumbo’ from the constant use made of it by the kindly Judge Giulio Cumbo (d. 1761) who kept a list and boasted of the 123 wretches he had condemned to death on the back of very voluntary confessions obtained through his eloquent contraption. Such was the fear inspired by the cavalletto that a slave who had been tortured on it and was to face a second session, tried to take his own life by drowning  but was saved in time. He then hanged himself in his cell. His corpse was exposed on a gibbet for public derision and was buried in the centre of a public road, to seal his complete humiliation in death as well as in life.

One of the slaves, who was awaiting interrogation and torture following the discovery of the conspiracy, cheated the tormentors, hanging himself by his trousers. Pinto, indignant at his unsporting dishonesty, ordered his body to be paraded on a cart round the streets of Valletta accompanied by a fanfare of trumpets, hung upside down by only one leg and then barbequed.

The horrified publicity stirred abroad by the savage Maltese orgy of inhumanity provoked revulsion against the Order throughout a not remarkably squeamish Europe. Pinto did not want the world to learn how far the charity of a good Christian prince could stretch. In an exercise of damage control, he persuaded Rome to place Acciardi’s publication on the Index of Prohibited Books and had his agents buy back every copy stocked by booksellers in Malta and abroad. He saw nothing wrong with his barbarities but drew the line at their disclosure.

One of the three judges, all Maltese, who orchestrated and fine-tuned the torments of the slaves, Pietro DeFranchis, then ended heartbroken when Gaetano, his 40-year-old personal slave, six years later died of an apoplectic fit. His tender heart could not bear the sorrows of bereavement. He went around telling anyone who cared to listen how unbearable life without his slave had become.

What about state-owned slaves suffering at the hands of private individuals? 

Two emblematic examples: Pietro Ghimes (related to the Inguanez nobility) came from a good family. In 1627, he killed a slave of the Order and was sued for reimbursement of damages. He claimed to have done so because of taunting and provocation by other slaves, one of whom then died of the injuries inflicted by Ghimes. The matter was settled by Ghimes who offered the Order another slave. The Treasury consented, provided the replacement slave had not reached his 30th year of age.

The galley slave Ram Hussein Ogli Aglali in 1701 was beaten so badly (mali trattamenti, bastonato [badly treated, flogged]) by one Enrico Grech that he succumbed to his injuries. The state did not prosecute Grech in the criminal courts but sued him for civil damages. The court valued the slave’s life at 400 piastre and condemned him to fork that sum out. Grech and his brother,  Alessandro, who had stood surety for him in the proceedings, then reached a settlement. Instead of paying damages, all would be overlooked if they provided the state with another two suitable slaves, acceptable to the agozzino Giovanni D’Andrea.

Slaves being things, not persons, the niceties of the rule of law applied very sparsely to them. The prince could and did order their execution without due process.  

Crimes of homosexual behaviour did not seem uncommon among slaves. In one instance, in 1744, the slave Delil Mehmet had superficially stabbed (senza però gran danno [without great harm]) a Maltese youth, Alessio Lauron, who had repulsed his gay advances. The enraged grand master intervened personally in the investigation, impatiently signalling the judges to stop wasting time. He ordered Mehmet’s public hanging the very day of the outrage. Homophobia rules, ok?

The mere suspicion of erotic attraction by slaves brought about the harshest punishments. A slave seen publicly and innocently talking to a boy was condemned to two years rowing in the galleys.

Another slave tried for gay offences was acquitted by the trial judge but the grand master all the same ignored the court’s findings and sent him to row on the galleys. Hanging awaited a Turkish slave who entered a women’s house to rape her.

The harshest retribution awaited slaves recaptured after escaping. Cutting off their nose and ears and branding their foreheads or cheeks with red-hot irons was the least they could expect. 

A finding of homicide for reasons of theft entailed the clawing of the flesh with pincers, the mutilation of the offending hands, before a merciful hanging hastened the ultimate release from pain.

Acknowledgements

My thanks for help received from Maroma Camilleri, Jeremy Debono, Theresa Vella and William Zammit.