A recently digitized collection of archival records from Malta is rewriting what historians thought they knew about the ...

A recently digitized collection of archival records from Malta is rewriting what historians thought they knew about the 16th-century Mediterranean. The project, led by the Malta Study Center at the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library alongside Maltese archives, documents centuries of Greek-Maltese relations, and the picture that emerges looks far less like a holy war than a functioning commercial network. The records include the story of Ioannis the Gascon, a Rhodes-born emigre who fled to Malta after the Ottomans took his island. He found work at a slaughterhouse in Birgu, organized small loans for Greek women in the community, and eventually got himself elected twice as a jurat, one of the most prestigious civic offices in the town. Then there is Antonio Camparini, a Greek merchant who in 1605 took a man named Horatio de Ferro to court after de Ferro assaulted him and seized his vessel. Camparini won, though by the time the judgment was delivered, his ship had already been dismantled and its timber reused elsewhere. He got financial compensation, but the lost business was gone. These are just two of hundreds of cases now surfacing from the archives. Malta's National Archivist Charles Farrugia and University of Malta lecturer Valeria Vanesio put it plainly: holy war did not eliminate trade. It created the institutional framework through which maritime commerce was regulated, contested, and ultimately exploited. When the Order of St. John left Rhodes for Malta in 1530 after the Ottoman conquest, it brought between 3,000 and 4,000 Rhodians with it, including sailors, shipbuilders, and prominent families. Some of those families, like the Marmara family, can be traced continuously in Maltese records from 1530 through the late 17th century. The findings will be presented at the fourth Linos Politis Research Workshop, organized by the Historical and Palaeographical Archive of the National Bank of Greece Cultural Foundation in cooperation with the University of West Attica. #GreekHistory #Malta #Mediterranean