By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

The Sovereign Order Of Malta Settles In Rome

After having temporarily resided in Messina, Catania, and Ferrara, the seat of the order was moved to Ferrara in 1826 and to Rome in 1834.

Seen earlier, Paul I, wanted to become a Grand Master to secure a base in the Mediterranean (at the expense of the French and British), and whatever agreements he had with Grand Master Hompesch were null and void. When Hompesch died, he was replaced by Lt. GM Tommasi, where the legitimacy continued. A Grand Master cannot nominate his successor. Only the Pope can suppress a religious order, which has never happened in the case of the Knights of Malta.

From a census drawn up by Commander Amabile Vella early in 1826, 121 professed knights still lived, most possessing commanderies. And whereby the census ignored the French, who were then reckoned to have some forty professed knights: the members of the separated Spanish Priories were also excluded. In addition, 268 Knights of Justice had not taken vows but remained celibate; the Order's custom was to class them as novices, even if they had completed their year's novitiate. These figures show a numerical advance of the professed proportionally from the time just before the French Revolution.

The Papacy called the remnants of the Order to settle in Rome in the 1830s to begin the process of re-organizing, and following the here presented details, it has become clear that the original Order indeed continued unabated. The Order's continuing sovereign status was not forfeited through the loss of Malta.

Amabile Vella

 

The Appointment Of A New Grand Master

Pope Leo XII admitted he was a member of the Order of St. John. When he was still nuncio, Cardinal della Genga, the future Pope, wrote in 1814 to Lieutenant Di Giovanni, "I have the honor to belong to the Order".1 Reference here is to the Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of Saint John of Jerusalem of Rhodes and of Malta (Italian: Sovrano Militare Ordine Ospedaliero di San Giovanni di Gerusalemme di Rodi e di Malta) in short referred to as the Sovereign Military Order of Malta (SMOM).

Also, the next Pope, Pius  VIII, acknowledged that the Order still existed. After the latter's death, Gregory XVI granted a brief, empowering Lieutenant Antonio Busca to govern the Order alone and issue all necessary decrees on his authority, and this became the legal basis of the Order's government for the next fourteen years.2 In his eagerness to help the knights, Gregory XVI also proposed at this time to restore the Grand  Mastership; but the Lieutenant refused the offer with derision. Such a head, he wrote, could be no more than a playing-card king.3

As soon as he heard of Busca's death in Milan, Gregory XVI issued a brief, dated 23 May 1834, appointing the Neapolitan knight Carlo Candida Lieutenant of the Order and, at the same time, raising him to the rank of Bailiff. The Pope's action was so prompt that Candida's first knowledge of the Lieutenant's death was from the brief calling him to fill the vacancy.

Candida had been living in Rome since 1819 as the Receiver of the Grand Priory and had taken up rooms in the Order's old embassy in the Via Condotti, known then as the Palazzo di Malta, whose administration he handled. He was well known to the Pope and many members of the Roman Curia, including the Secretary of State.

Born in 1762, Candida had become a knight at the age of twenty -five and had commanded the Capitana galley in the Order's last years in Malta. If he had been elected Lieutenant in 1814, the Order's history in the next twenty years would have been very different; but he was then living in Naples, cut off from the Convent since the Napoleonic conquest. When Gregory XVI called him to the head of the Order, he was aged seventy-two and had two episodes of severe ill health behind him.

Within four days of his appointment, Candida decided that the Convent of the Order would be reassembled in the Order's palace in Rome. The clerical employees still working in Ferrara (where the previous convent was in operation till the end of 1831), including some old Maltese dependants, were summoned to come, with all the Order's effects. The closure of the Convent had made little difference in Ferrara except that the knights no longer had a residence in common.

 

Opening Of The Hospital In Rome

Candida was concerned that the novitiate for Knights of Justice should be real; therefore, he asked the Pope for a hospital in Rome where the novices could carry out the traditional service to the sick. In 1835 Gregory granted him the old hospital of Cento Preti at the Ponte Sisto; and the adjoining church of St Francis of Assisi. The hospital was opened on Christmas Day, 1835.4

Of course, at that time, the Order was also still in the grip of competing political ambitions in Europe. For example, that same year (in 1835), the Prime Minister of France, the Duc de Broglie, proposed entrusting the Knights of Malta with the maritime patrols to suppress the Atlantic slave trade, but the scheme was blocked by British opposition. Later, Candida held negotiations to acquire the island of Ponza from the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, wanting to open a large marine hospital there for the benefit of all nations, but Britain opposed that too.

But although Candida inherited a government that had been reduced to a virtual nullity, from the point of view of its resources, the Order of 1834, as we have seen, was far from extinct. This is also documented by a census drawn up by Commander Amabile Vella early in 1826, from which it appears there were 121 professed knights still living, most possessing commanderies.5 Being Vella's work, the census naturally ignored the French, who were then reckoned to have some forty professed knights: the members of the separated Spanish Priories were also excluded. In addition, 268 Knights of Justice had not taken vows but remained celibate; the Order's custom was to class them as novices, even if they had completed their year's novitiate. These figures show a numerical advance of the professed proportionally from just before the French Revolution when fewer than a quarter of the Knights of Justice were in vows - a natural development since hardly any young men or boys were left in the Order. Both professed and non-professed were, however, reckoned as religious, and the convention is a justified one; firstly, because novices are usually considered members of their religious order (although in strict canon law, they are not); more particularly, because a knight who had made his proofs of nobility and paid his entrance fee acquired a constitutional right in the Order of Malta such as only exceptionally arose in other religious orders; and lastly, one may add, because in practice the taking of vows made little or no difference to the duties of one who was already a Knight of Justice.

Allowing for a good number of deaths since 1826, we may reckon that there must have been 200 or 300 Knights of Justice living when Candida took charge in 1834, besides a few dozen professed chaplains. Strictly we ought to add the nuns of the surviving convents in Italy until their suppression along with the other religious orders by the Italian Kingdom later in the century. Still, in practice, the relations between the male branch of the Order and the female seem deplorable, to have been virtually non-existent at this period. To revive the Knights' corporate life, Candida held a Chapter of the Order in Rome in March 1838, the news of which reached the aged Count Litta in St Petersburg.6

One development of this time that Candida could do nothing about was the loss of the Portuguese Priory. The fortunes of that distant branch had been in decline for several Years. In 1821 the Cortes, following the same revolutionary trend as in contemporary Spain, confiscated the commanderies, but they were returned on the restoration of monarchical rule after 1823. However, Catania's lack of effective control produced a disintegration of discipline. By 1826 the Receiver was reporting that some commanders refused to pay their responsibilities (which were not paid to the Lieutenancy but appropriated to the royal treasury), and the Bailiff of Leca foresaw the imminent dissolution of the Priory.7 In 1831, Busca wrote of the Portuguese: "Our knights are in full dissension and at furious war with each other"; and "they have declared themselves against the Convent, to which they do not wish to be subject.8 Under the absolutist King Michael I (1827-34), a former Knight of Justice and Grand Prior of Crato, the Order enjoyed royal favor. Still, his reign was ended by revolution and civil war, in which the new Liberal regime expropriated the commanderies. Receptions to the Order ceased, and the Priory became extinct with the deaths of the last Knights of Justice in the 1860s.

In France, the state of paralysis that had existed for the past ten years was partially relieved. Busca had created very few Knights of Devotion there (at Ferrette's proposal) after 1824 and none at all in his last years; of Knights of Justice, there was no question. But Candida soon resumed grants, the earliest being in November 1835. The Council of the French Langues had had its existence shattered by the revolution of 1830, but attempts to revive it were begun with a meeting held in Paris on 25 July 1835. It was attended by thirty-eight noblemen, including four Knights of Justice who had relinquished their celibacy and several members with strong family links to the Order.9 The old professed knights - who according to an imposter by the name of Pierre-Hippolyte Laporterie who called himself "Marquis de Sainte-Croix de Molay" had been reduced by 1830 to only eleven 10 - were nearly all dead; the Bailli de Calonne d' Avesnes (1744­-1840) was still living, but in his nineties, and he was not represented. Sainte-Croix had turned his attention to recruiting aspiring knights in England by these years, and he no longer appears in the French proceedings. Authorities in Marseilles were later trying to prosecute him for fraud.11 The policy of the Ordinary Council, as revived in 1835, was to respect the decisions of Busca in 1824 and to recognize none of the Knighthoods of Justice that had been granted by the Commission or those of Devotion that Catania had not confirmed. At its first session, the Council elected as its Mandatary General Baron Jean-Baptiste de Nottret de Saint-Lys, who claimed to have been received as a Knight of Minority in 1789. The objectives were to revive the Order in France, recover its properties, and even recover the debt of Louis XVI, which had been recognized by Louis XVIII in 1814.

Such was the recent lack of contact between the French and the Lieutenancy that Nottret did not attempt to write to Italy for two years. When he wrote his first letter on 20 April 1837, he addressed it to Busca in Ferrara, following it up with a letter to Vella.12 The correspondence found its way to Candida, and by December, Nottret could give the Lieutenant news of a surprising development. The French knights had gained the support of the bachelor Prince Honore V of Monaco, who was talking of becoming a Knight of Justice and leaving his principality to the Order.13 After a brief correspondence (which has been only partially preserved in the archives), Candida snubbed Nottret, and the French Council was never granted recognition; the death of Prince Honore in 1841 dispelled its hopes and virtually brought it to an end. On the other hand, the prestige of the Order in France was advanced at this time by the reception of prominent noblemen, including the Dukes Alfred-Charles and Stanis las de Blacas d'Aulps, Prince Jules-Antoine de Clermont-Tonnerre and Prince Ferdinand de Faucigny-Lucinge.

Within five years of Candida's appointment, the affairs of the Order presented a very different aspect from that of the previous decade. The spectacle of the Knights of Malta, now established with honor in Rome and doing what their vocation required of them, transformed the attitude towards the Order among the rulers of Italy. The oppressive policies of the past twenty years were everywhere reversed. In January 1839, after negotiations conducted by the Bali Ferretti in Vienna, Emperor Ferdinand I founded the combined Priory of Lombardy and Venice with the remnant of what its two predecessors had had; unsoftened by the imperial generosity, Candida stood out vigorously against the Priory's being placed at the mercy of Habsburg patronage. The Pope's nephew Giovanni Cappellari became Grand Prior and was installed in the old priory palace in Venice, where he retained his office until 1870. The restoration act was supported by the Dukes of Parma, Modena, and Lucca, who revived the commanderies in their respective states. In December 1839, King Ferdinand II of the Two Sicilies made amends for his father's persecution by refounding the Order in his kingdom, likewise grouped into one Grand Priory. Giovanni Borgia (not one of the two stalwarts of the Convent) was appointed its superior, and the old convent of Santi Bernardo e Margherita in the city of Naples became the seat.

One sign of regard that Candida did not achieve was the right of diplomatic representation. Although the Order maintained agents in Naples and the minor capitals of Italy until their fall in 1860, only the chargé d'affaires in the Duchies of Modena and Parma were accorded diplomatic privileges. Thus the Order's continuing sovereign status, not forfeited through the loss of Malta, essentially rested during the whole period from 1814 to 1918 on the recognition of two powers, the Austrian Empire and the Holy See. In the latter, the diplomatic representation was, however, in abeyance. Brigadier Bussi died in March 1834; Busca then asked Candida to take over his duties but refused to appoint him envoy. When the headquarters of the Order were moved to Rome, the post of the envoy was left vacant, through diplomatic recognition continued in principle, and the Palazzo Malta retained the status of an embassy.

The war in Syria from 1839 to 1841, resulting from the continuing disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, raised expectations for the founding of an independent Catholic principality there. Candida hoped to gain a foothold in Acre and revive the hospital the Order maintained there from 1191 to 1292.14. His hopes were not realized. Still, in 1841 he expanded the charitable work in Rome when the hospice of Cento Preti was turned into the Pontifical Military Hospital for old soldiers and sailors of the Papal States, and on 1 September, Gregory XVI came in person to open the new premises. In the three years of its existence, its number of inmates fluctuated between 184 and 325.15. In 1844, however, the hospital was destroyed in an act of arson committed by a medical assistant, and the Order's work of care for the sick was reduced to nothing. In April of that year, the Lieutenant suffered a severe illness, from which he had a difficult convalescence. In the late weeks of 1844, he could no longer attend to business, and on 20 December, the Pope appointed a council of three knights to administer the Order in his stead. After a partial recovery, he died on 10 July 1845, and at his funeral, his coffin was exposed on a catafalque denoting the rank of a cardinal.

Gregory XVI appointed the senior Knight of Justice, Alessandro Borgia, Lieutenant ad interim. He directed an international election for the new superior, the first the knights had held since 1805. The background was tension within the Order, which had been developing for three or four years. The significant advances that Candida had achieved had the unfortunate effect of revealing that the only Order of Malta that Metternich was happy with was one subject to Austrian control. Let us remember that Gregory XVI's act in appointing Candida without consultation was itself something of a rebuff to the tutelage that Austria had exercised in the days of Bale Antonio Miari and Busca. The state of affairs is revealed by Robert Lucas Pearsall, a socially busy Englishman who was one of the would-be knights then organizing themselves in England and was privy to the indiscreet talk of the Austrian knights. In 1840 the Knight of Grace Theodor Neuhaus, who had been charge d'affaires in Vienna for many years, told him: "The Order has an existence, and an ostensible chief in its Lieutenant, but Metternich governs it."16 By May 1842, Pearsall was reporting that another professed knight, Kollowrath, stated at Court that Metternich had separated the Austrian branch of the Order from the Italian because the Pope or the Lieutenant had accepted knights who were unworthy and that knighthood was now being granted independence by the Austrian Crown. There was talk of amalgamating the Bohemian Priory with the Teutonic Order, which had recently been revived in the Austrian Empire.17

The causes for this rift seem insubstantial. Still, Candida had indeed been paying more attention to the financial resurgence of the Order than to its social exclusiveness, and some of the new family commanderies, such as Torlonia (a commandery founded in 1820 by admittedly Lieutenant Andrea Di Giovanni), opened the door to a very new nobility. An incident to be noted in this connexion is the Ball Scandal of 1839, which throws a light on the preoccupations of the Viennese Court. The trouble arose from the sartorial whim of a Dame of the Order, Countess von Goess, who wished to wear her decoration not hanging from a mesh on the left breast, as was prescriptive for the small cross, but in the manner of the Grand Cordon, on a black sash running across the body. This request, having passed through the diplomatic channel suitable to its importance, namely the nuncio in Vienna, Cardinal Prince Altieri, was granted by Lieutenant Candida. Still, he omitted to notify the Austrian Court or the Grand Priory of Bohemia. At a ball in January 1839, Countess von Goess, therefore, had to be told by the Bailli von Khevenhiiller that she was not wearing her cross in the approved manner; she immediately informed him of her permission and spent the rest of the ball boasting of the privilege she had received directly from the Lieutenant. The two ladies present who genuinely had the Grand Cross, Prince Metternich's wife, and sister, found the thing very odd. The Bailli von Khevenhiiller felt that he had been intolerably compromised; he wrote to Candida threatening his resignation unless the privilege was withdrawn and the ladies of the Order informed immediately, before the next Court ball, of how the cross ought to be worn.18 He would not have been so peremptory if there had not already been a background of dissatisfaction between the Austrian knights and the Lieutenancy. It does not seem, however, that the disagreements can have taken any more severe form, for constitutionally, the Order's records show uninterrupted unity with the Austrian brethren.

The tensions described illuminate two events, or non-events, of these years. In 1839 the King of Sardinia, who was no friend of Austria, had not joined his brother rulers in the refounding of the Order in northern Italy; in 1844, however, he created five commanderies with incomes from the royal revenues, and one might suspect that the action was by now an anti-Austrian gesture. The second phenomenon was the continuing failure to restore the Grand Mastership. As we have seen, Gregory XVI offered it at the beginning of his pontificate. By the 1840s, the recovery of the Order was sufficient to have made the measure an unmistakable mark of recognition. The difficulty with Austria held it up, but Metternich was moving towards a likely pleased solution for the Order. A grandson of Emperor Leopold II, Archduke Friedrich, born in 1821, was winning golden opinions in the Austrian Navy and fought gallantly in Syria. Preparations began in 1844 for his entry into the Order of Malta, with a view to his becoming Grand Master. In June of the following year, he took his vows as a Knight of Justice, being immediately raised to the rank of Bailiff. This was seen as a development of great significance. The Grand Prior of Bohemia described it as "an infinitely propitious event that has come to Our Holy Order," and Khevenhiiller told Candida: "I cannot but think that with this reception, a new era in the Order's existence has begun."19 The Irish knight John Taaffe has left an enticing account of Archduke Friedrich, whom he knew well: "He seemed created on purpose for the magisterial dignity ... and certainly Archduke Frederick cultivated the idea ...; it was his firm intention to procure the order's restoration and become its grand master."20

 

Savior Of The Order Of Malta In The Nineteenth Century

Candida died only a month after Archduke Friedrich's profession, and it would have been premature to make him head of the Order at once. On 15 September, a meeting was held in Rome, with representatives of each of the four Grand Priories then existing, to replace Alessandro Borgia with an elected superior and, at the same time, reconcile the national feud. Four members of the Bohemian Priory attended the assembly, joining ten Italians, and the influence of the Bali Ferretti was credited with the election of Filippo di Colloredo-Mels, from the province of Udine. Colloredo was well placed to carry out the task of reconciliation, not only because he was an Austrian subject. A branch of his family established in Austria had risen to princely status. As we have seen, Josef-Maria von Colloredo­Wallsee had been an important Grand Prior of Bohemia, and Filippo's uncle, Francesco Calloredo, although Italian, had also held a Bailiwick in the Priory, together with a high rank in the Austrian army. There were few names better calculated to win favor in Vienna. Born in 1779 at the family estate of Colloredo, Filippo had been received in Minority in 1783 and later went to school at the Theresianum in Vienna. The revolutionary period they prevented him from pursuing his career in the Order. Still, in 1839 he was one of the knights who was encouraged by Candida's measures to seek a profession, and he received one of the commanderies funded by the Common Treasury. Aged sixty-six in 1845, he might have seemed a bridge to the Order's pre-revolutionary past rather than the future. Still, as John Taaffe tells us, he accepted the Lieutenancy to hand over in due course to Archduke Friedrich. Gregory XVI confirmed the election and raised Colloredo to the rank of Bailiff, but the plans that had been laid were unexpectedly foiled. Archduke Friedrich died in 1847, aged only twenty-six, and the Order's wait for a Grand Master lasted thirty years longer.

When Colloredo became Lieutenant, he was still governing, as Candida had, with the extraordinary powers granted by Gregory XVI to Busca in 1831. But in the first months of his rule, he began to create the Ordinary Council, which remained the deliberative body of the Order for the next hundred years, with a representative of each of the four Grand Priories. At first, these were appointed by the Lieutenant from knights resident in Rome, and only later did they become elected delegates of their Priories.

Within a year of Colloredo's elevation came the death of Pope Gregory XVI, who deserves to be recognized as the savior of the Order of Malta in the nineteenth century. His appointment of Carlo Candida as Lieutenant would alone entitle him to that name, but he gave countless other signs of his favor. We have seen that from the election of Lieutenant Di Giovanni in 1814, the Order's government had been caught in a trap from which nothing but papal intervention could extricate it, and that intervention did not come for seventeen years, firstly because of the indifference of Pius VII and Consalvi and then because Busca failed to ask for it. If the Order's debt is, in fact, to Gregory XVI, it is worth recognizing that Leo XII and Pius VII might well have been equally helpful if Busca had ever gone to Rome to speak to them. Gregory XVI's goodwill was enough to overcome even that negligence, and one should bear in mind that any other pope might have dissolved the Order, as was being proposed when the Convent was closed in 1831. Gregory's appointment of Candida in 1834, though at first sight an overruling of the Order's autonomy, was, in fact, a lifeline for a body that had by then been reduced to complete helplessness. In the next twelve years, the Order responded amply to the faith Gregory had placed in it, but that merit of its own should not obscure the gratitude that it owes to him, perhaps more than to any pope in history.

 

1. Archives of the Order of Malta in the Magistral Palace in Rome(OM), GM 87, Della Genga to Di Giovanni, 10 September 1814. It is also mentioned in Francois Ducaud-Bourget, La Spiritualité de l'Ordre de Malte (1954), p. 215, and Desmond Seward, The Monks of War (London, 1995), p. 312.

2. Vatican: Box 588, Rubrica 273, Anno 1833 (sic), Brief of Gregory XVI to Cardinal Albano, 20 December 1831.

3. OM: GM 110, Busca to Ciccolini, 6 October 1831. There was later a suggestion that Cardinal Doria Pamphilj, the Grand Prior of Rome, should be appointed Grand Master: Vatican: Box 588, Rubrica 273, Anno 1833, document of 10 November 1833.

4. Rivista, October 1938, p. 5.

5. OM: GM 105, Vella to Bussi, 22January 1826, with enclosure; ct. GM 106, Busca to Bussi, 11 March 1826, correcting the number of Portuguese commanders to fifteen.

6. Robert Bigsby, Memoir of the Illustrious and Sovereign Order of St John of Jerusalem (1869), p. 68, quoting a letter of Litta to the English, 23 March 1838: " les Chevaliers en tres petit nombre, et devenus  maintenant  decrepits, assistent maintenant a Rome a un soi-disant Chapitre, aux  demiers moments  d'une  agonie  prolongee du dit Ordre",  Litta could be excused for not realising that things had changed since Candida's appointment.

7. OM: GM 105, Busca to Paes de Sa, 15 October 1826; GM 107, the same to the same, 20 March 1827.

8. OM: GM 110, Busca to Ciccolini, 28 July 1831; Vatican: Box 588, Rubrica 273, Anno 1831, the same to the same, 17 November 1831.#

9. OM: C 105, Nottret to Candida, 14 August 1838, enclosing an Acte of 30 June 1838.

10. Ibid., Sainte-Croix to Vella, 14 April 1830.

11. Ibid., Nottret to Busca, 20 April 1837.

12. OM: C 105, miscellaneous documents, Captain de Giorny to Candida, 7 April 1838.

13. Ibid., a summary of Nottret to Candida, 10 December 1837 (the original is absent), and Krethlow, p. 304. Desmond Seward in The Monks of War, pp. 344-5, writes: "In 1840-41, the 'marquis' [Sainte-Croix] tried to persuade the unsavory Honore V of Monaco to offer Monte Carlo to the Knights of Malta in return for the Grand Mastership." The project was the subject of open negotiations with the Lieutenant during 1837-38, and there is no mention of the involvement of Sainte-Croix, who was no longer connected with the French Council. See also St John's Gate, Minute Book of the English Priory, 1836 onward: report by Sir Warwick Tonkin, 10 November 1841. The English were being assured that Candida was willing to give way to Prince Honore as Grand Master (cf the same Museum's collection of bound letters with that of Sir William Hillary to Richard Broun, 15 December 1841: "Does the Prince de Candida continue his wish to resign his high dignity?"), but the Order's records show that this was an invention. The Monegasque plan is also mentioned in Sir Richard Broun Synaptical Sketch of the illustrious and sovereign order of Knights hospitallers of St. John of Jerusalem (1857), p. 30.

14. Krethlow, pp. 252 and 305-6.

15. Alfred Reumont, Die Letzten Zeiten des Johanniterordens (Leipzig, 1844), p. 138.

16. Bigsby, op. Cit. (see Note 9 above), p. 68.

17. St John's Gate, Minute Book as in Note 16, report of Pearsall, 20 May 1842, and his letter of 13 June 1846. The knight was presumably Franz von Kollowrath-Krakowsky (1803-74), who became Grand Prior of Bohemia in 1867.

18. Krethlow, p. 368.

19. Ibid., pp. 508 and 507.

20. John Taaffe, The History of the Holy Military Sovereign Order of St John of Jerusalem (1852), pp.277-8.

 

 

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