The Alleged Russian Revival
That Does Not Exist
As discussed in our introduction,
today there are more than 20 different bodies, all of which somehow claim an
origin in the 'coup d'état' by Paul I that was never recognized by the Pope and
as will be detailed underneath, an alleged Russian revival that does not exist.
The legal aspect, which is not a matter of a dispute is that Paul I was
inherently incapable of being the superior of a religious order of the Catholic
Church, and his "election" in November 1798 was invalid
in itself. The legitimate head of the Order continued to be Hompesch. In February 1803, then Giovanni Battiste Tommasi
was elected the Grandmaster of the Order of Malta. Thus after the death of Paul
I as soon the Pope made Tommasi Grandmaster of the Order of Malta Marshal Soltykoff, on hearing the news, immediately handed over his
powers and sent from St Petersburg the magistral regalia which had been created
by Paul I (they are now in the Magistral Palace in Rome, forming a memento of a
bizarre interlude in the Order's past).
The 'coup d'état' by Paul I thus was never recognized by the Pope, yet
self-styled orders of St John or of Malta nevertheless take on the appellation
"of St.John",
claiming to be a continuation of Paul's Russian Orthodox priory, which, as we
will see, was ended in the early 1800s. First, its property, was seized by
Russian imperial ukase in 1810 and then in 1817 another decree proscribed the
wearing of the insignia of an order which since then never existed in Russia or
abroad.
The French Revolution and
Napoleon
When the French Revolution broke out in July 1789, it was immediately
apparent that the Order of Malta would be one of its victims. In August the
National Assembly abolished the tithes and feudal rights that formed a major
part of the Order's income. In June 1791 Louis XVI attempted (with the aid of a
large loan made to him by the Order's Receiver in Paris) to escape from France.
When this resulted in his capture at Varennes and return to Paris in the hands
of a revolutionary mob, it was the end of effective monarchism in France; and
the sixty-six-year-old Grand Master Rohan, on hearing the news, suffered a
stroke that left him an invalid for the rest of his life. In October 1792 the
government of France, by now declared a republic, confiscated the Order's
entire property in the country. As the revolutionary armies swept over Europe,
the same confiscation was imposed in the Austrian Netherlands, in Germany west
of the Rhine, and in northern and central Italy.
By late 1796 these seizures had deprived Malta of something like half
the income it drew from its European properties, and the knights in the lands
affected were left penniless. But suddenly a savior appeared in an unexpected
quarter: on the death of Catherine the Great, the Russian throne was inherited
by Paul I, a ruler whose strange enthusiasms included a passionate admiration
for the Order of Malta. He summoned to his side the dashing Giulio Litta, who
had so distinguished himself in the Russian Navy six years before and began to
show lavish tokens of his favor. The recently founded Grand Priory of Poland
had passed under Russian sovereignty with the Second Partition of Poland, and
Paul proceeded to pay off its large arrears at a stroke and to increase its
responsions to 53,000 florins, thus making it a sizable contributor to the
Order's desperately reduced revenues.
The losses inflicted by the French, besides striking a worse material
blow at the Order than it had suffered even at the Reformation, limited the
candidates for the succession to the Grand Magistry,
which was obviously imminent. It would have been difficult to elect a head from
the parts of Europe where the Order's institutional existence had been
destroyed. Moreover, it was essential that the new ruler should bring some
political protection against the ever-widening conquests of revolutionary
France. The Order could hardly elect a Grand Master from Spain, whose king had
gone into alliance with the nation that had murdered the head of his family.
The choices of patron were in fact narrowed down to Naples and the German
Empire, and the protection of Naples was more to be feared than welcomed. That
is why by 1797 it was considered certain that Rohan would be succeeded by a
German Grand Master.
This implied a very limited choice indeed. Owing partly to the small
size of the Langue, no German had ever been elected Grand Master of the Order.
From 1791, when Rohan suffered his stroke, an observer in Malta would have seen
a choice of just two German Grand Crosses resident on the island:
Franz von Schönau, who was the Pilier of the Langue, and Ferdinand von Hompesch,
the imperial ambassador. Then, seven months before Rohan's death, Schönau left for his own country and Hompesch
succeeded him as Pilier, becoming the only candidate
available. This was a fatal predicament. Hompesch was
simply a minor diplomat, weak in character, and a man whose career had shown a
consistent subservience to his sovereign in detriment to the interests of the
Order. When Rohan died in July 1797, the Order thus found its choice restricted
to the worst superior it could possibly have elected.
The conquests of the French revolutionaries made their annexationist
aims very obvious. Just before the election of Hompesch, France had conquered the Republic of Venice and
its possessions of the Ionian Islands, thus placing itself within striking
distance of Malta. Yet in the eleven months of his reign, Hompesch
devoted himself to cultivating his popularity at home without making any
attempt to prepare his island against attack. Schönau,
who was representative of the Order at the Congress of Rastadt
in 1798, warned him unequivocally that the French intended to seize Malta and
urged him to take precautions, but the Grand Master preferred to pay no heed.
This inactivity, coming after the six years of enfeebled government during
Rohan's illness, was fatal to the morale of the island. General Bonaparte had
been commissioned by the Directory to lead an expedition to Egypt and to seize
Malta on the way so as to give France a naval base in
the central Mediterranean. Nelson was cruising off Toulon to stop any such departure,
but Bonaparte gave him the slip, and on 6 June 1798 he appeared off Malta with
a fleet of between 500 and 600 vessels carrying an army of 29,000 men. When he
demanded the right to enter the Grand Harbour to take
on water, the Order's Council decided to apply the long-standing rule, designed
to protect Malta's neutrality, that only four ships should be admitted at a
time. Bonaparte rejected the condition and began his attack on 10 June.
The fall of Malta
Two often-repeated mistakes about the fall of Malta should be corrected.
The first is that the knights were unable to resist the French because their
vocation forbade war against Christian nations. In fact, that plea was only
advanced by the French knight Bosredon-Ransijat, who
was openly a partisan of the republican regime, and he was promptly clapped in
prison for it. Apart from the consideration that the Republic's anti-religious
frenzy put it in a different category even from the Protestant countries, whom
the Order had always respected, the duty of neutrality towards Christians had
never been thought to exclude the right of self-defense.
The second mistake is that the defense of Malta was undermined by the
secret leaning of the French knights to their own country. Again, this
explanation is given color only by the defection of Bosredon.
In the previous months an agent of the Republic, Etienne Poussielgue,
had been busy in Malta, and he arrived at a very exact estimate of the number
of French knights who had any sympathy with the Revolution: fifteen, of whom
only three had what he called the energy to work actively for France. His
estimate was confirmed when Bonaparte, after conquering Malta, ordered all the
knights out of the island, including his compatriots, exempting only three on
the grounds of their assistance to the French cause. The remainder of the 200
French knights who had taken refuge in Malta were identified by Poussielgue as irreconcilable royalists, and as the most
resolute element in the defense. His judgment, which is obvious enough, is
confirmed by the details of the siege when nearly all the chief commands were
held by French knights, the only exception being the future Grand Master
Tommasi. The accusation against the French has obscured the real complicity of
the Spanish in the defeat of Malta. Their country was in alliance with France,
and the Spanish knights were ordered by their ambassador to remain in their
Auberges and take no part in the fighting. Nevertheless, as there were only
twenty-five Spanish knights in Malta, this abstention had little influence on
the outcome.
The loss of Malta was one of the most ignominious military surrenders in
history, and one of the most unnecessary. It required no heroic feat of arms in
1798 to defend Malta against the French; the most cautious and defensive
strategy would have done it. Against such an overwhelming enemy, it was
hopeless to resist a general landing; yet Valletta itself was impregnable. The
French would have been faced with a siege of many months, and such a course was
not open to them. Nelson alerted to Bonaparte's escape from Toulon, was in hot
pursuit and arrived off Syracuse on 22 June, only twelve days after the attack
on Malta began. The general, in fact, had orders to abandon Malta if its
resistance threatened the Egyptian expedition. But a strategy of sitting tight
behind the walls of Valletta required a minimum of military sense and steady
nerves, and Hompesch possessed neither and the fall
of Malta became history.
Hompesch, seeking the protection of
his Emperor, landed on 25 July at Trieste, where he set up the Order's Convent
with the seventeen professed brethren who remained faithful to him. But among
the knights as a whole, the news of his incredible
betrayal was greeted with fury. One should bear in mind that the statutes of
the Order decreed the automatic loss of the habit for any knight who
surrendered a stronghold to the enemy.
The Russian coup d'état
On 26 August (Russian calendar) 6 September (Westen calendar) the
members of the Grand Priory of Russia published a manifesto declaring that they
regarded Hompesch as deposed, and invoking the
protection of the Czar Paul I
proclaimed that he took the Order under his "supreme direction", and
the Grand Priory of Germany adhered to these decisions; Hompesch's
own compatriots wanted to lose no time in disavowing him.
These moves were the product of the eccentric zeal of Czar Paul,
exploited by the Order's envoy. Giulio Litta, after his naval service in the
Russo-Swedish War, had returned to Russia in 1794 and acquired a favorite's
status with the new ruler. The transformation of the Priory of Poland into the
richly endowed Russian Priory had been his doing. When in recognition Hompesch declared the Czar Protector of the Order in August
1797, Litta was appointed ambassador extraordinary to
invest him with the title. It was obvious policy to make the most of this
welcome accession to the Order's support, and the character of the new Grand
Master showed how much the Order needed a strong prop in Europe, but Litta was
using personal ambition to take his favor in a dangerous direction. In November
1797 he made a speech declaring that the Order of Malta wished the Czar to put
himself at its head. In the months before the fall of Malta, he was assiduously
pressing Hompesch to send the Emperor
the most precious relics and to invest the largest possible number of Russian
noblemen with the cross of the Order. He encouraged Paul in his plan to
supplement the enlarged Russian Priory with a new one designed to receive the
Orthodox nobility of the empire, a body difficult to include in a religious
order of the Catholic Church. The nominal re-admission a generation earlier of
the Grand Bailiwick of Brandenburg provided a precedent for this oddity. Hompesch gave his approval for the foundation on the very
eve of Bonaparte's appearance off Malta, although the French attack prevented
the bull from being despatched to Russia.
In these irregularities, Giulio Litta was being seconded by his own
brother, Archbishop Lorenzo Litta, who was in Russia as papal nuncio. In that
capacity, Monsignor Litta represented a power that was as much in jeopardy from
the Revolution as the Order of Malta. The French armies had entered Rome, and
by 1798 the aged Pius VI was an exile, first at the Charterhouse of Florence
and then in France, where he died. The nuncio, looking at potential saviors
with not too critical an eye, gave his full support to the abuses that
followed.
The finishing touch to the Czar's assumption of power was given when on
27 October (Russia) 7 November (Western), he arranged what he called his
election as Grand Master. This was, in fact, an acclamation made in St
Petersburg by a small number of knights (thought to have been between seventeen
and twenty-six), most of whom were Russian subjects, with the inclusion of
Giulio Litta and two French emigres. There is no need to labor the illegality
of the act. A single Grand Priory, even with three supernumeraries from
outside, had no power to elect a Grand Master, and, as all writers have pointed
out, the Czar was triply disqualified from the office, as being not professed,
not celibate and not a Catholic. But on 29 November / 10 December, he was
enthroned as Grand Master by none other than the papal nuncio himself. Giulio
Litta, renouncing his vows with indecent haste, had already been rewarded with
the hand of a rich Russian princess, a niece of Potemkin, and he was appointed
Lieutenant of the Order, while his brother was made Grand Almoner.
It remained to secure European recognition. Louis XVIII of France (he
had assumed the title on the death of the child Louis XVII in the Temple) was
an exile in Russia, and in January 1799 he authorized the French knights to
recognize Paul. The Prince de Conde, head of a cadet line of the Bourbons, was commander of the French emigre army, which was
now in the Russian service; he had been made Grand Prior of the Russian
Catholic Priory in November 1797 and was in no position to oppose his patron.
Louis' nephew, the Due d' Angouleme, who as a boy had held the Grand Priory of
France, tried to evade the question when it was put to him, and replied that
his forthcoming marriage excluded him from the Order, but he did not avoid
enraging the Czar, who had to be appeased by the Bourbon king with the grant of
the Saint-Esprit.
The Elector Charles Theodore of Bavaria, whose Priory was his own
foundation, was reluctant to recognize Paul, but he died in February 1799, and
Bavaria was inherited by a distant line of the family hostile to every aspect
of his rule. The new Elector determined to abolish the Bavarian Priory, but a
threat of Russian military invasion called him to heel. The Kings of Naples and
Portugal also gave their consent. The German Emperor, as the ally of Russia,
had little option but to follow suit, and put pressure on Hompesch
to abdicate from the shadowy rule he maintained in Trieste. The great exception
was Spain, which was still in alliance with France, but here the question was
whether the Priories were to remain attached to the Order at all. After the
fall of Malta, King Charles IV had wasted little time in beginning the process
of assimilating the Order of Malta to those of Spain, as a national order under
royal rule. On 4 September 1798, he published a decree forbidding his subjects
to have dealings with the exiled Convent in Trieste, and there was no chance of
his recognizing the self-appointed one in Russia. The Spanish ambassador
absented himself from Czar Paul's coronation as Grand Master - and was promptly
ordered out of the country.
The ruler whose view was of most legal relevance was the Pope. Despite
the dire captivity to which he was reduced, Pius VI could not bring himself to
recognize a schismatic as head of a Catholic religious order. He temporized,
and when he finally wrote to Monsignor Litta on 11 March 1799 disapproving of
the election, he authorized him to delay communicating the decision to the
Czar. But an indiscretion brought the letter to Paul's
ears, and his response was immediate. The Bali Litta was dismissed as Lieutenant
(his place in the imperial favor had already raised against him a cabal of
Russian magnates, led by Count Fedor Rostopchin) and
his brother the nuncio was told to leave St Petersburg.
By this time the Czar had founded the projected Orthodox Priory of
Russia, with ninety-eight commanderies and a revenue of 216,000 roubles, and with his eldest son, the Czarevich
Alexander, as its Grand Prior. Paul entrusted special squadrons of the Baltic
and the Black Sea fleets to the Knights of Malta. He also added ten
commanderies to the Catholic Priory, which by 1799 included a hundred French
emigres among its knights.
Next to Litta, the guiding hand in these developments was Joseph de
Maisonneuve, an ambitious knight who had been active since the 1780s in the
plans for the Grand Priory of Poland. Appointed the Order's Master of
Ceremonies in Russia, he quickly published an outspoken account of the recent
events, reflecting the bitter anger of the French knights at the way the
Order's honor had been betrayed by Hompesch, and
their hopes of vindication under the Czar.1
Outside Russia, a leading figure in the Order's affairs was Johann
Baptist von Flachslanden.2 Originally a member of the Priory of Germany, he had
played an important role in the foundation of the Bavarian Priory and the
Anglo-Bavarian Langue, to which he transferred his membership, and he was
rewarded with the Bailiwick of Neuburg and the office of Turcopolier. As an
Alsatian, and therefore a French subject, he was elected to the Estates General
(a general assembly representing the French estates of the realm) of 1789. In
July 1799 he represented the usurping Grand Master in the agreement made with
the Elector Maximilian Joseph of Bavaria, and in November he headed a Bavarian
deputation to Russia which presented the homage of its Grand Priory. As
Turcopolier in 1799, he was one of the only two legitimate Piliers
of the Order who remained in office under Paul I. The other was the Bailli de
Ferrette (Baron von Pfordt-Blumberg), who was also
Alsatian. He had succeeded Hompesch in 1797 as Pilier of the German Langue, and
was to be important in the Order's affairs as a diplomat until his death in
1831. He continued under Paull as Grand Bailiff, while all the other great
offices were assigned to Russian subjects appointed by Paul. However, by 1801
both Flachslanden and Ferrette had been dropped, and
the Russian governing council did not contain a single professed Knight of
Malta.
But while Tsar Paul I’s appointment was to be contested by Pope Pius VII
and numerous Priories of the Order, as has been seen, recognition or
non-recognition of the Czar was a decision of the various rulers; most of the
knights could do little but obey their sovereigns' wishes. In Italy, the Bali
Trotti refused to accept Paul l and was immediately deprived of his commandery
3, but there were not many who saw their duty so clearly. If we ask why
professed Knights of St John should have been prepared to accept Czar Paul as
their head, we should seek the reason in the prompt remedy it offered for the
loss of Malta. Within seven weeks of the island's surrender, Nelson had
destroyed Bonaparte's Egyptian expedition at the Battle of the Nile. In
September the Maltese rose against the French occupying forces, whom they held
besieged for two years in Valletta, with rather feeble support from the British
Navy, until their final capitulation in September 1800. The official British
policy during this period was to give back Malta to the Czar, as Grand Master
of the Order. Such an outcome offered a means - and the only means - whereby
the Order could have quickly wiped out the stain of Hompesch's
surrender, and it is understandable if the knights thought that accepting a
schismatic as Grand Master was not too high a price to pay for it. That must
have been the feeling of the many French knights who placed themselves under
the rule of Paul I. In December 1798 the Czar ordered a Russian fleet through
the Dardanelles, and during the next twenty months it would have been possible
for this force to sail to Malta, clinch the siege and claim the island for the
Czar. It is one of the oddities of Paul's policy that it never did so. The
fleet's first objective, sensibly enough, was the Ionian Islands, which were
recaptured from the French. By September 1799 the fleet had arrived in Sicily,
and Nelson even offered to transport its sailors and marines to Malta, after
its ships were pronounced unseaworthy for the journey. The Neapolitan government,
however, contrived to keep it in Palermo. In January 1800 it returned to Corfu,
as the Czar's policy changed towards a rapprochement with republican France,
and it withdrew from the Mediterranean later in the year.
For several months after the Russian coup d'etat, the Grand Master Hompesch refused to accept his demotion. He had formally reconstituted the Convent in Trieste on 27
September 1798, and he appointed a Sacred Council, which issued instructions to
the few who were willing to receive them. However, with his own sovereign
supporting the usurpation, his position became untenable. At the Emperor's
insistence, he signed an act of abdication on 6 July 1799; a few days later he
left Trieste, abandoned by all, and took up residence in the chateau of Portschach in Carniola, a property of the Bishop of
Laibach. The Convent of the The Knights of Malta
Order was dissolved, not to be reconstituted till four years later in Messina.
To be canonically valid, the Grand Master's abdication needed papal acceptance,
but Pius VI, in captivity in France, died the following month, and the papacy
remained vacant until the election of Pius VII in March 1800. Thus even the knights of the Grand Priory of Rome, with no
direction of their own ruler to guide them, had no government to look to but
that of Paul I.
During all this time, the long siege of the French garrison in Valletta
was continuing.
Many of the Maltese would have welcomed the return of Hompesch, whose popularity in the island was the only
achievement of his Grand Magistry. If he had had a
spark of enterprise, he might have trumped Paul I's card at any time from
September 1798 by returning to Malta and putting himself at the head of the
national revolt, with as many of the knights as were prepared to support him.
But he proved himself as spineless in recovering his throne as he had in
preserving it. He sent an emissary to Malta in June 1799, not to range himself
with the resistance but to parley for retrocession with the French garrison,
whose position by then was doomed. When Valletta finally fell in September
1800, the Czar claimed Malta from the British; but his flirtation with Bonaparte,
who had seized power in France as First Consul, was beginning to sow seeds of
suspicion in the mind of the government of London, and it made no reply. Paul
responded by forming the League of Armed Neutrality and planning to recover
Malta through alliance with the French.
The Czar's eccentricities were raising alarm among his closest servants.
His infatuation with the Order of Malta led him to shower its cross on all who
took his fancy, including his mistress, Madame Lapoukhine.
When she fell from favour, the Czar used to call
nightly on her successor, Madame Chevalier, attired in the Grand Master's habit
which he had designed for himself. By the early months of 1801 Paul was leading
a life of fearful isolation in his moated palace of Mikhailow,
while his ministers plotted to assassinate him, in collusion, it was thought,
with the Czarevich himself.
His Prime Minister, Count Peter von der Pahlen, who
had been made Grand Chancellor of the Order of Malta, was at the head of the
conspirators. On 12 / 23 March 1801 the Czar was strangled by a group of his
courtiers, among whom were four of his own Knights of Malta.
The young Alexander I, as he took the throne in these macabre
circumstances, had no part in his father's mania for the Order of Malta, and he
resolved to divest himself of its government. The distinguished soldier Marshal
Soltykoff had been appointed Lieutenant by Paul on
the dismissal of Litta, and he was continued in office
for the moment, but the new Czar's policy was to restore the Order to its
constitutional norms. In its shattered state, it would be impossible to elect a
Grand Master in a statutory way; so Alexander
proposed, with notable disinterest, that the Pope should appoint one from
candidates nominated by the Priories of the Order that still
remained. This remedy, however, was delayed by the continuing war in
Europe and in particular by uncertainty over the fate
of Malta, now in British hands. In March 1802 peace was restored by the Treaty
of Amiens, which provided for the return of Malta to the Order of St. John. So as to avoid control by either of the main belligerents,
the treaty stipulated that French and British subjects should be excluded from
the Order. As a result, the Anglo-Bavarian Langue was renamed the
Bavaro-Russian, although in practice the only knights of British blood in the
Order were a few individuals who had joined the French Lanques.
The three French Langues were, to be deemed
abolished. As the Order of Malta was not a signatory to the Treaty of Amiens
(which in any case never took effect), it was not bound by a clause that
changed its constitution, and the exclusion of the French Langues
was to be recognised as obsolete even before the
Treaty of Paris in 1814, which superseded that of Amiens.
In any case, the provisions for the election of a Grand Master were
sabotaged by the two rulers with the most influence in the matter. In January
1802, even before the Treaty of Amiens was Signed, the King of Spain made
definitive the separation of his four Priories and declared them a national
Spanish order. Thus, with the exclusion of the French, only eleven Priories
were left to give their votes for a Grand Master: Venice, Rome, Capua,
Barletta, Messina, Germany, Bohemia, Bavaria, the two Russias,
and Portugal. Next, Bonaparte intervened in the choice: the Bailli Flachslanden, who had been nominated by Bavaria and the two
Russian Priories, was vetoed outright, as an active Royalist. Having described
the plans for Malta as "a romance that could not be executed",
Bonaparte urged Bavaria to a second attempt at abolishing its Grand Priory,
though Russian protection proved strong enough to save it for the moment. In
August Bonaparte sought to limit the Pope further by excluding a Neapolitan
subject and urging the choice of a Roman, a northern Italian or the innocuous
Bavarian knight Tauffkirchen.
In the meantime, Hompesch had been aroused
from the state of apathy into which he had fallen after his abdication. In late
1800 he moved from Austria to the Papal States, where he lived for the next
four years. The death of Paul I encouraged him to revive his claims; he
asserted that his abdication had been dictated to him by Austria and that it
had merely been a proposal of abdication. Britain, however, was not prepared to
give Malta back to the knights under Hompesch, and
Bonaparte also rejected him so as not to imperil the session.
The new Pope, Pius VII, although he had been elected in Venice during
the French occupation of Rome, was now back in his capital and trying to reach
a modus vivendi with the post-revolutionary system of Europe. His choices with regard to the Order of Malta were limited. He could
have declared that Hompesch's abdication had never
been accepted and that he was therefore still Grand Master, but in the
circumstances, that option was not considered. The Pope tried to recover the
Order provisionally for Catholic control by naming a Lieutenant in the person
of the Bali Giuseppe Caracciolo, who by Paul I's appointment was serving as the
Order's ambassador to the Court of Naples; but as Soltykoff
refused to hand over authority to him the nomination remained without effect.
The Priory of Rome had so far abstained from electing a candidate for the Grand
Magistry so as to leave the
Pope's choice untrammeled. Finally, in August 1802, the Pope resolved to
appoint Prince Bartolomeo Ruspoli (1754-1836), a
member of a great Roman family, who for form's sake was declared the candidate
of his Priory. He was chosen as being likely to secure Bonaparte's approval,
which was duly given. Pius VII, therefore, offered him the Grand Magistry in a brief of 16 September, which by alluding to Hompesch's abdication constituted the first, though tacit,
papal recognition of that act.
Ruspoli was a devout and cultivated
but eccentric man, who indulged a taste for incessant travel, He was currently
thought to be in London, whither the papal offer was sent; in fact, he proved
to be making a tour of Scotland and was not to be found; in mid-November Ruspoli had still not returned to the capital. By early
December he was considering the proposal without enthusiasm. His response,
setting difficult conditions, may have been aimed at securing the explicit
support of the Spanish Crown. He demanded that British and Sicilian troops be
withdrawn from Malta before his arrival as Grand Master, that the Spanish
Priories be reunited to the Order, and that Spain should pay its arrears from
the four years of separation. By 28 December the British government had
rejected Ruspoli's conditions with
regard to Malta, and he sent a reply to the Pope with his refusal to
serve.
Not until February 1803 was the vacancy in the Grand Magistry
filled when the Bali Tommasi accepted the office from the Pope, and Marshal Soltykoff, on hearing the news, finally handed over his
powers. He sent from St Petersburg the magistral regalia which had been created
by Paul I (they are now in the Magistral Palace in Rome, forming a memento of a
bizarre interlude in the Order's past).
The close of the Russian interlude prompts an estimate of its
significance in the history of the Order of St John. One may begin with the
legal aspect, which is not a matter of dispute. Paul I was inherently incapable
of being the superior of a religious order of the Catholic Church, and his
"election" in November 1798 was invalid in itself.
The legitimate head of the Order continued to be Hompesch
until his abdication in July 1799, and theoretically until the implicit papal
acceptance of that act in September 1802. But in practice, there was no
legitimate government of the Order from July 1799 until February 1803, when
Tommasi took charge. There was also no legitimate Convent of the Order during
that period, for the officials appointed by Paul I were non-professed and
nearly all non-Catholics.
We ought, however, to consider what Paull's seizure of power meant in
practical terms, and from that point of view, we may judge that he saved the
Order in the hardest predicament of its history. One need only consider what
would have happened if Hompesch had continued as
Grand Master. The Order would probably have fallen apart, with many knights and
whole Priories calling for his deposition. Certainly, there would have been
little chance of the British government, or anyone else, wishing to see Malta
returned to the knights under Hompesch's rule.
Paull's de facto Grand Mastership restored political credit to the Order at a
time of unprecedented disgrace; it is unlikely that Britain would have agreed
to restore Malta to the knights in 1802 but for the fact that it had previously
been envisaging returning it to Paul I; and the Czar's rule, illegitimate
though it was, effectively marshalled the whole Order under one government,
with the single exception of Spain, so that when Tommasi became Grand Master in
1803 he took over a united Order, and not the chaos of conflicting factions
into which it would have descended if Hompesch had
not been promptly disposed of.
Nevertheless, after Paul I the position of the Order in Russia is worth
noting.
Its status as Paul I had left it was undone by
Alexander I in 1810 when he confiscated the general possessions of the Catholic
and Orthodox Priories, but the Order continued after a fashion. It received a
further blow from the death in 1816 of Marshal Soltykoff,
who had been the only member of the Russian nobility who retained a real
interest in it. In 1817 Alexander decreed that the family commanderies should
become extinct on the deaths of their current holders, and
forbade the wearing of the Order's cross without imperial permission. Thus the Priory indeed may be said to have become extinct at
this time, or at least at the death of its surviving commanders.
Yet the Bali Litta continued to call himself President of the Catholic
Priory and remained a well-known figure at the Russian Court until his death in
1839. In 1820 he reported to the Bali Miari that commanders' revenues were
still being paid by the State, the Order's churches were maintained, and the
government held a capital of more than 2 million roubles,
which legally belonged to the Order. Even more interesting are the documents
which he sent to Miari in 1818 relating to the unrealized plans to restore the
former Grand Priory of Poland, a dossier which reveals the Czar's active
interest in preserving the Knights of St John in his dominions.4 These letters
show that Russia was one of the countries where the Order would have had a good
chance of restoration if its leaders had been able to raise it from impotence
and obscurity.
As for the various self-styled Orders that
claim a continuation of the creation by Paul I, fact is that a Public
Policy Statement from the Council of Ministers, affirmed by the Emperor and
dated January 20, 1817, clearly states that the Order of Malta “does not exist
in Russia” [PSZ, № 26626]." Something organizations like the OOSJ, or the
"Sovereign Order of St. John of Jerusalem, Knight's Hospitaller" in
Vancouver, want to ignore and apparently purposely misconstrue history.
As we have seen, starting with Paul I own son and heir to the throne, no
support has come for the spurious claims these self-invented Orders from the
imperial family of Russia, which always since then recognized the Sovereign
Order and no other. From the time of Alexander I, all the Czars except
Alexander III held the Grand Cross of Honor and Devotion of the Sovereign
Order. More recently this was also exemplified by Prince Nicholas Chalvovich Tchkotoua (Bailiff
Grand Cross of Honour and Devotion of the Order of
Malta). His successor as head of the imperial house Grand Duchess Maria Wladmirovna, issued on 30 April 2014 a full statement
repudiating the supposed Russian descendants and likewise asserting that her
house recognizes only the Sovereign Military Orders.
In the following historical investigation it
has become clear that the original SMOM Order indeed continued unabated and
that the Order's continuing sovereign status was not forfeited through the loss
of Malta. The appointment of a new Grand
Master.
Contested as some of the following developments initially where they
also contain some intrigue. The
foundations of the National Associations of the Order in England and Germany.
Following an earlier remark about Festing at
the end of the discussion here, there is
in fact a historical precedent in the form of an even more severe dispute that
more significantly gave rise to a vacancy in the Grand Mastership from 1951 to
1962 (which Roger Peyrefitte's famous novel
wrongfully attributed to a grain deal). Vatican's
opposition to the Order of Malta.
The above events are covered by Pierre don, Vol. 1 (1956) and Vol. 2
(1963); by Roderick Cavallero, The Last of the Crusaders (Malta, 1960); O. de
Sherbowitz-Wetzor and C. Toumanoff, The Order of
Malta and the Russian Empire (Rome, 1969) and H. J. A. Sire The
Knights of Malta (1996).
1. Joseph de
Maisonneuve, Annales Historiques de l'Ordre Souverain de Saint Jean de
Jerusalem (1799).
2. On Flachslanden see Thomas Freller, The
Anglo-Bavarian Langue of the Order of Malta (Malta, 2001). The author corrects Flachslanden's date of death, which was previously given
generally as 1822.
3. Archives of the Order of Malta in the Magistral Palace in Rome, GM
108, Trotti to Busca, 19 December 1829.
4. Archives of the Order of Malta, GM 92, Litta to Miari, 31 January
1820, and GM 93, dossier of 27 March 1818 etc., accompanying Litta's letter to
Miari, 7/19 May 1818.
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