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By Root 1482 0

a number of headless knights’ corpses and floated them into the harbour at Birgu. Bosio wrote that ‘after having had them lashed to various pieces of wood with their arms spread apart so as to form, similarly, the sign of the Cross, and bound in such a manner as to make one body tow the other in a long chain, they were then tossed into the sea. The water, it was thought, would carry them and this truly horrible spectacle over to our brethren at Birgu, and it in fact did so.’44 The intention was to strike terror into the last remnants of Malta’s Christian garrison. But the Grand Master of the Order of St John, a doughty Frenchman named Jean de la Valette, responded to the Turks’ flotilla of death with a fusillade of his own. He ordered his Turkish captives to be decapitated and had their heads fired from cannons at the Turkish soldiers occupying Fort St Elmo. In the end the knights held firm, despite their crippling losses, and the Turks were forced to withdraw. By the end of the siege just 50 Knights of St John survived. More than 7,000 defenders had lost their lives, but the last great effort of the Ottoman Turks to seize control of the western Mediterranean had been successfully repulsed.

Over the decades that followed there was a surge of new recruits to the Order of St John, lured to Malta by the dream of emulating the exploits of the heroes of 1565. Just six years after the siege, that other famous Christian victory, at the Battle of Lepanto, had fanned the flames of such enthusiasm yet further. Hundreds of young noblemen from the leading families of Europe travelled to Malta to seek knighthood, honour and glory. They wanted to fight, and if necessary die a martyr’s death, at the front line of conflict with the forces of Islam.

According to Bellori, Caravaggio too nurtured the dream of becoming a Knight of St John. He was ‘eager to receive the Cross of Malta’, in the words of the biographer.45 But why? His art had electrified Naples. According to sources in Rome, steady progress was being made in the negotiation of his pardon. It would seem like an odd moment to travel yet further south, to a barren and rocky island at the farthest frontier of Christendom. It is possible that the fantasy of becoming a knight had long been with him – after all, he was a keen and talented swordsman, who had been brought up in the immediate aftermath of the Battle of Lepanto. Or perhaps he still felt vulnerable to attack or apprehension by a bounty hunter, aware of the price on his head. By papal dispensation the Knights of St John were above the law, subject to their own unique legal code. In Malta, Caravaggio would be safe. Furthermore, if he could win a knighthood he would, de facto, have gained pardon for his crimes.

But there was probably more to it than that. Caravaggio had always been extremely touchy about status. At his trial for libel, he had contemptuously dismissed the rank and file of Rome’s artists by saying that hardly any of them deserved the title of valent’huomo, literally, a ‘worthy man’. Caravaggio took pride in his own worth. The poems attacking Giovanni Baglione, in which he certainly had had a hand, made much of the gold chain awarded to his rival. The perceived injustice of the honour clearly rankled with Caravaggio as much, if not more, than anything Baglione had actually said or done. But by the summer of 1607, nearly a year after the murder of Tomassoni, Baglione had just been knighted and his stock had risen yet further. Caravaggio, by contrast, was still a fugitive from justice. Even if he were pardoned and allowed to return, he would be going back to Rome as a man in disgrace. But to return, himself, with a knighthood – and not just an honorific papal knighthood but a knighthood in the Order of St John, proudly wearing the eight-pointed cross on his chest – that would be very different. If he could manage that, he could face his rivals down.

Joachim von Sandrart tells an undoubtedly apocryphal tale about the cause of Caravaggio’s decision to go to Malta, which, for all its evident fancifulness, may contain