The Revolting Priests in Malta

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Priests, especially in the Christian tradition, are rarely militant or warmongering. Even in the days of the Crusades, priests were not at the front doing the fighting. So why did Roman Catholic priests revolt in Malta in the late eighteenth century?

In 1773 Malta was ruled by the Knights of St John. The island had seen 200 years of peace following the Great Siege of Malta, a rare extended period of calm in Maltese history which greatly improved life for the inhabitants. Having the Knights based there had a positive effect on the economy, culture and the arts. It is no exaggeration to say that life had never been better in Malta.

In that year, Grand Master Manuel Pinto de Fonseca died. He had been Grand Master for 30 years and had invested in the islands during his reign. The modern-day entertainment zone called the Valletta Waterfront at Pinto Wharf, bearing his name since he built this wharf and storage rooms to foster trade, is just one of Pinto’s many building projects.

All this investment came from the Knights’ treasury which meant that upon succeeding Pinto, the new Grand Master, Spaniard Francisco Ximenes de Texada y Eslava, found a huge amount of debt. He decided to impose austerity measures, not only reducing spending but also raising the price of corn to increase revenues.

As he continued in this vein he became more and more unpopular due to the hardship that the new measures imposed upon the population. The situation became tense and Don Gaetano Mannarino was one of the first priests to start plotting against the Grand Master. He gathered like-minded priests and they chose to attack the Knights on the 8th September when they knew that the Order’s ships would be at sea.

Twenty-eight priests and some locals should have turned up for the revolt however some backed out and only 18 priest showed up. Mannarino wasn’t going to let this setback discourage him, so the rebels attacked Valletta. Amazingly it only took 13 people to take over Fort St Elmo on the easternmost tip of Valletta. The others attacked St James Cavalier on the western walls of the capital city, lowering the flags of the Order of the Knights and raising the flags of St Paul instead.

The Knights wanted to negotiate however the revolutionaries threatened to blow up St Elmo’s gunpowder store, so the only option was military.

The whole revolution lasted a few hours.

It took two more years before trials started. The courts ordered three of the rebels to be executed by strangling while Mannarino received a sentence of life imprisonment. He served 20 years in prison before Napoleon freed him when he conquered the island. All the others were imprisoned, exiled or acquitted.

Antoine Borg

This article first appeared in: http://www.unexpectedtraveller.com/Blog/tag/valletta/