We don't hear much about Malta these days.
When was the last time you read a news dispatch from Valleta, the capital?
I asked four handy people what they knew about it and three mentioned the
Bogart movie "The Maltese Falcon." The other was a coin collector.
This is a tiny country. The main island has
only 95 square miles, the other big island, Gozo, has 26, and the rest
of the territory consists of a handful of uninhabited rocks. Nearby
Sicily, with almost 10,000 square miles, could hold close to 100 Maltas.
But throughout recorded history this has been a crucial spot in the world,
and as recently as WWII people were anxiously listening to the radio for
the news that Fortress Malta had withstood the barbarians yet another day.
The Maltese story is a long one, mostly of military
movements, and includes the high romance of the eponymous knights who used
the island as their base for a quarter millennium. And I have been
interestingly surprised to find, over the decades, that numismatic relics
circulate in the collector's market in numbers far in excess of what one
would naturally expect. Let's take a closer look.
PREHISTORY
A land bridge connected Malta with Sicily some 100,000+
years ago, but there are no signs that people were there to use it.
Evidence of human habitation begins about 7000 years ago. The settlers
would seem to have sailed from southwestern Asia, which is to say the Holy
Land. This was before the emergence of the Egyptian and Semitic civilizations
in the Middle East. These people were neolithic farmers. They
grew wheat and lentils, raised cattle and sheep, and made glazed pottery.
By the 4th millennium BCE, evidently several centuries in advance anywhere
else in the world, they were starting to build in stone.
There was an early connection with Sicily, seen
in the succession of pottery styles in the archeological record,
A sizable migration from the neighboring island took place around 4000
BCE, the one of many such movements. The newcomers seemed to get
along with the old folks, and their cultures, as far as the evidence shows,
converged.
Monumental architecture in stone was well established
by 3500 BCE or so, seemingly earlier than anyplace else in the world.
The most impressive remains are of temples dedicated to the Neolithic mother
goddess. They consist of enormous dressed stone blocks, well fitted
to form handsome compounds and rooms. There are also tombs elaborately
cut in rock, the later ones adorned with lintels and columns. The
building of these monuments occupied relatively large numbers of people
for extended periods of time, implying a higher degree of social organization
and stability that extended over a period of at least five hundred years.
There is no evidence of any military activity during this period.
Maltese peace was shattered around 2500 BCE with
the arrival of invaders from the Greek islands. The newcomers seem
to have had a lower level of social organization, but they were warlike,
and they had bronze. The old civilization collapsed soon after their
arrival, the temples falling into ruin in the wake of a massive decline
in population. Details of the calamity are unknown; war, disease,
and climate change are all possible contributing causes.
For a couple of centuries the invaders eked out
their squalid existence, making crude pottery and bronze, but no fancy
stone buildings like their predecessors. Then, around 1000 BCE, a
small migration from Sicily brought iron working to the island.
THE PHOENICIANS
History proper began about a century later when
a Phoenician ship, it's skipper using the new technique of celestial navigation,
sailed west over the horizon and made landfall on Malta. The utility
of the island; its convenient location close to both Sicily and Africa,
and its fine harbors, was immediately apparent to this sailor, and it quickly
became a major port of call on the western routes. Phoenicians came
to trade, then more and more of them came to stay, to the point that they
came to constitute the majority of the population. Malta became an
outpost of Phoenician culture, and today the native Maltese are considered
the purest example of the survival of the ancient Phoenician type.
The modern Maltese language retains significant Phoenician elements, and
even some cultural remnants are to be seen, such as the burning of an effigy
of a child on St. John's Day, a disquieting reminder of the child sacrifice
of which the ancient Phoenicians were so fond.
Politically bound to nearby Carthage near modern
Tunis, Malta served as a staging point for the Punic operations in Sicily.
It was during that struggle that Carthage decided that coinage was a good
idea, at least for trade with the coin using Greeks.
A few coppers were struck on Malta during the late
3rd century BCE with Punic legends. The subjects were religious,
including references to the Egyptian cult of the dead god Osiris.
These coins have received low prices in the major catalogs, but that is
no indication of their availability. They are actually quite rare.
ROME
Malta was incorporated into the developing Roman
world in 218 BC. The administrators did not do much to cultivate
the local economy and culture, devoting themselves to the control of the
harbors and the taxation of the inhabitants. Tomb inscriptions and
other evidence reveal that Punic remained the language of the people throughout
the Roman period and even later.
A few coppers, with Greek legends, were struck during
the early years of Roman rule, and these, like their Punic predecessors,
are very hard to find. For the rest of the Roman period there are
no coins.
From the modern point of view the key event of the
Roman occupation was the forced landing of the shipwrecked St. Paul in
60 CE. On his way to Rome for the trial that would result in his
execution, Paul was stuck on Malta for several months. He evidently
got on well with the locals, a substantial number of whom converted.
There is not much in the way of evidence for the
events of the late Roman and early post-Roman period. The islands
were almost certainly raided, and perhaps briefly occupied by the Vandals
during their sweep through Spain and into Africa, and formal control devolved
to the Byzantines after the fall of the Western Empire.
ISLAM
By the 9th century CE the armies of Islam had occupied
North Africa, Spain, and Sicily, and in 870 they occupied Malta.
The inhabitants did not disdain their new masters. A majority converted
to Islam, and they aided them in defending the islands from an attempt
by the Byzantines to recover their lost territory. Malta became a
haven for corsairs preying on Christian shipping.
Muslim rule endured for some four centuries, and
has left as its chief inheritance the modern Maltese language, which, though
it is written in the Latin alphabet, is substantially Arabic in structure
and vocabulary. As far as I know there are no coins of the Islamic
period.
NORMANS
The Muslim rulers fell to quarreling among themselves.
Administration deteriorated and dissatisfaction grew among the populace.
The Norman ruler of Sicily, Roger I, moved on Malta in 1090, and took it
essentially without conflict. The Maltese were tired of the incompetent
Muslims, and welcomed him. The island now became a bulwark of Christianity,
a forward base for raids on North Africa. Indeed, it was the possession
of those strategically located islands that made possible the Crusades.
There are no Norman coins struck specifically for
Malta.
In the succeeding century control of Malta passed
by dynastic inheritance to the Hohenstaufens, then to Charles of Anjou,
who lost it in the "Sicilian Vespers" rebellion of 1282. The rebels
were suppressed by the armies of Aragon, who remained in occupation until
1410, when it passed to Castile. During all this time there were
no coins.
A ROMANTIC DIGRESSION
We must now take a break in the narrow geographic
and chronological approach we have been using, and turn our attention to
another land and an earlier time. Christians in Europe had been wanting
to make pilgrimages to the Holy Land since Roman times, but the general
poverty of the so-called "Dark Ages" had prevented more than the merest
trickle of travellers. In the 11th century things changed.
There was more money, and the trickle became a stream.
Around 1048 a group of merchants from the Italian
town of Amalfi applied to the Muslim Caliph Al-Qa'im for permission to
establish a hospital in Jerusalem for the care of sick pilgrims.
The staff was drawn from the local Benedictine monastery. Permission
was granted, and the enterprise thrived.
The local authorities in the Holy Land were Muslims,
bound by their faith to tolerate and respect Christians, and there had
been no serious problems in the past. But now there were a lot more
Christian pilgrims, and their attitude had changed. They had become
bumptious and uppity. They were starting to talk about taking back
Jerusalem for Christ, and other nasty seditions. Things became tense.
The tension increased with the arrival of a new
set of rulers in the Holy Land, the Seljuk Turks. There had been
some degree of laissez-faire in the former administration of the Holy Land,
but the new guys wanted to get things under control, and they started to
license and regulate, especially the pilgrims.
This attempt at administration was interpreted in
Europe as repression, and the situation was blown out of proportion by
demagogues who ranted about the desecration of the holy sites by "the Infidels."
The Europeans whipped themselves into a rage, which was channelled into
the First Crusade.
When Jerusalem was captured in 1099 by Godfrey of
Bouillon he found the head of the Amalfi Hospitallers, Gerard Tunc, in
jail, where he had been placed for safe keeping during the hostilities.
Godfrey was impressed with the work of the Hospitallers, and granted them
cash and estates for their future income. Gerard thereafter established
his organization as the first of the fighting religious orders of Christendom,
charged with the protection and care of the pilgrims.
The Order became very popular back in Europe.
Enormous donations were made, and the Hospitallers of St. John (the Baptist)
of Jerusalem became very wealthy and powerful, but they could not hold
Jerusalem against the Ayyubid sultan Saladin, who evicted them in 1187.
The Knights retired to Acre, where they remained for about 100 years.
Finally driven from the Holy Land at the end of the 13th century, the knights
made their way to Cyprus, where they remained as guests of Henri de Lusignan
for almost two decades. The situation was unstable, however; there
were too many knights, and there was no interest in assimilation.
The Master of the time, Foulk de Villaret, resolved to take the island
of Rhodes, which, though nominally a Byzantine possession, had become the
lair of pirates. A fleet set out for the assault, which was crowned
with success in 1310.
The Knights embellished and fortified Rhodes, holding
it for 200 years as a bulwark against recurrent attacks by the Muslims.
Having become territorial sovereigns, they commenced immediately the striking
of coins; silver and gold along the lines of contemporary Italian types.
These coins of the Knights on Rhodes are very rare, especially the gold
ones.
THE KNIGHTS ON MALTA
Sulayman the Magnificent ascended to the throne
of the Ottoman Empire in 1520. His opening campaign slogan was "First
Belgrade, then Rhodes." The first objective obtained in 1521, he
immediately set sail for the the second. The Knights had just received
a new Grand Master, Philippe de l'Isle Adam, and under his direction the
island was masterfully though unsuccessfully defended. The Knights
departed Rhodes under duress in 1523, headed for they knew not where.
Eventually they made landfall on the Greek island
of Candia, where they were welcomed and invited to stay. Grand Master
de l'Isle Adam moved on to Italy, where he consulted with the pope.
With support from the Holy See an approach was made to Charles V, Holy
Roman emperor and king of Spain, for a grant of territory. Charles
had plenty of land to spare (he theoretically owned, by virtue of his new
American holdings, almost half the world), but wouldn't it be nice, he
thought, to have a crack military force like the Knights under his thumb.
So his starting position in the negotiations was the fealty of the Order,
which l'Isle Adam was unwilling to give. The pope was strongly with
the Order though, and after 7 years of palaver the Knights were finally
granted Malta, and for good measure, Tripoli in North Africa, free and
clear.
Loosely held and with a hostile hinterland, Tripoli
looked like like not so good a deal. But Malta looked tolerable.
Preparations for the move were begun at once, and the Knights arrived before
the year was out.
The traditional histories of the next 250 years
concern themselves with the doings of the Knights, who spent a lot of that
time harrassing the Muslims or defending against them. But it is
useful at this point to consider the point of view of the inhabitants,
who found themselves ruled by a monastic order with a mission of military
activity. They were thus subject not only to the usual taxes of any
common person of the time, but there was also the constant impingement
of the military imperative: the support of the Knights in offense, and
the certainty of the need for defense more often than would have been the
case had the Knights not had their peculiar vocation.
The Knights struck coins on Malta from the time
of l'Isle Adam. Not quite every Grand Master is represented from
1530 to the close of the 18th century. There is gold, silver, and
copper, most, but not all of which is rare.
The normal type of the early gold was an imitation
of the Venetian zecchino, which would be reasonable, since any use gold
might have would be in international trade, and the zecchini circulated
from England to India. Silver coins came in a range of denominations,
and served both locally and in foreign trade. Types included the
head of John the Baptist, the Baptist standing, and the Lamb of God.
Copper, for local use only, came in a range of sizes too. The coppers
were often used as fiat currency, valued above their intrinsic value, and
some of them bore the motto "NON AES SED FIDES" (Not money, rather, faith)
along with a pair of hands shaking. To the Knights this must have
seemed a declaration of their solicitous care for their subjects, but to
the modern mind there is more than a hint of irony. Coppers were
also countermarked at various times, an indication that fiscal games were
played with their values.
Generally speaking, all Maltese coins of the 16-17th
centuries are rare, and you'd be most likely to run into a low grade copper
of the lowest denomination - the grano. But the situation changes
in the 18th. It is not uncommon to come across later silvers and
coppers here and there in the market. The romantic designs of the
early gold and silver coins gave way to more standard images of the Grand
Master, though the older types persisted in the copper. Silver crowns
came into common use, and larger gold denominations were stuck, mostly,
it seems, for show and presentation.
The most common coins of the Knights in Malta would
be the silver crowns of the long-reigning Emmanuel Pinto, 1741-73, and
of the penultimate Master on the island, Emmanuel de Rohan. When
I went to look for Maltese coins a few weeks ago I found one of Rohan's
silver scudi on my second phone call. It is to me rather astonishing
that the issues of this tiny island should be so available, but Order had
been the recipient of substantial and continuing donations for centuries.
The rule of the Knights came to an end in 1798.
Napoleon, leading an expedition to Egypt on behalf of the revolutionary
French government, passed by Malta and, noticing no trace of preparation,
picked a fight with the Grand Master, Ferdinand de Hompesch. Hompesch
had minimal leadership qualities. He dithered, and Napoleon landed
15,000 troops, who occupied the island in short order.
The Knights were scattered. Many of them went
to Russia, for the Tsar Paul I had developed an interest in the Order.
In gratitude for the refuge, the Tsar was named Grand Master, but he died
in 1801, and his successor, Alexander I, had no interest. The Order
effectively ceased to exist, but was reconstituted in 1879 by pope Leo
XIII, and it is this restored Order that we know today as the Sovereign
Military Order of Malta.
THE BRITISH
Over the centuries of their rule the Knights had
treated their native subjects not badly according to the mores of the time.
They did a lot of public building, and the populace supported them, by-and-large,
in their holy military endeavors. But the Order had become exceedingly
rich, and the Knights grew thoroughly accustomed to their lives of luxury.
By the time of Napoleon's appearance the ideas of the Enlightment had penetrated
the culture of both the Knights and the Natives. The result was demoralization
among the former and disaffection among the latter.
The French made themselves unpopular, however, by
exercising the various traditional vices of occupying armies, and the people
rose against them in 1800. The British came in to help, and stayed.
Malta became a British colony in 1814.
The British saw in Malta what everyone else saw:
a critical location for projection of naval power in the Mediterranean.
With Malta added to Gibraltar the British controlled the western half of
that sea, bottling up the French. They modernized the fortifications
and built up their presence.
Coinage of the period was British. They struck
those little 1/3 farthings to substitute for the old, small, 1 grano coppers,
and they were used nowhere else. It's not too hard to collect a nice
example of the British "grain." Pick your monarch.
That Britain held Malta through World War II is
one of the miracles of that war, and the island played a key role in the
Allied invasion of North Africa.
People had begun talking about independence back
in the 1920s, and a movement began to form. Independence activities
were put on hold during the War, but accelerated after, culminating in
formal independence in 1964.
INDEPENDENCE
The island became a republic in 1974, and the British
relinquished their military bases in 1979. The country has developed
some industry, promotes tourism, and seems to be getting along.
Modern Maltese coinage is struck both for use and
for collection. Designs include maritime themes, animals (including
insects), and a bunch of modern local heroes. Interestingly, it is
not particularly easy to collect all of these coins. Once you start
to look for them you pretty much find 1972s. You never see the Franklin
Mint sets, and the new design coins of the late '80s-90s are difficult.
Only a few of the silver collector coins are out there, and one hardly
ever runs into Maltese gold other than the 1972 and 1975 coins. I
believe this indicates some degree of home interest.
SOVEREIGN MILITARY ORDER
The reconstituted Order of 1879 had a charitable
mission, and established offices in several countries. The Italian
office is considered sovereign territory, and the Order maintains diplomatic
relations with a number of nations.
Starting in 1961 the Order struck proof coins for
presentation and fundraising purposes. The 1965 issue was heavily
promoted by Coin Invest Trust of Liechtenstein, and the coins of that year
were widely distributed. The Order continued issuing coins through
the 1990s, but sales became sluggish as the years passed. 1960s dates
are the most common. Formerly fairly common, these show pieces have
become hard to find.