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By Root 1286 0

of the eight Conventual Bailiffs – one for each Langue – and the Grand Priors. The Venerable Council framed the order’s statutes. Wignacourt was also in charge of the Criminal Council, which had the often demanding job of ensuring that those statutes were obeyed. As the leader of an all-male elite fighting unit, especially trained in privateering, pillage and kidnap, one of his main priorities was simply to preserve order. This was by no means easy, and a blind eye was diplomatically turned to certain habitual misdemeanours. Wignacourt made no attempt to close down Valletta’s many brothels: in 1581, when one of his predecessors had attempted to eliminate prostitution on Malta, the result had been a full-scale riot. But other offences were dealt with swiftly and ruthlessly, on a sliding scale of punishment.

The list of prohibitions and mandatory penalties is itself a testament to the difficulty of maintaining order among several hundred proud Knights of Malta. Punishment for the offence of being incorrectly dressed, without the eight-pointed cross of the order, was the ‘quarantaine’, which insisted that the miscreant be confined to his auberge for forty days, during which time he was to fast in penitence and submit to regular public floggings by the vice-prior in the conventual church. Repetition of the same offence brought a three-month prison sentence. The penalty for rowdy behaviour inside the auberges was deprivation of seniority within the hierarchy of the knights. Insults traded between brother knights in the Grand Master’s presence meant the loss of three years’ seniority. More serious crimes were punished by defrocking, the permanent deprivation of a knight’s habit. This was the penalty ordained for a variety of offences, including assault on a fellow knight, heresy, apostasy, theft, duelling and the abandonment of comrades in battle.55 If a knight killed in anger, he was sentenced to a traditional Maltese death. The procedure was described by George Sandys: ‘If one of them be convicted of a capitall crime, he is first publicly disgraced in the Church of Saint John where he received his Knight-hood, then strangled and thrown into the sea at night-time.’56

It would be harder to enter the brotherhood of Malta than Caravaggio had perhaps imagined. Knights of Justice were the elite of the order, from whose ranks the Grand Crosses who sat on the Venerable Council were drawn, but to be considered for such a knighthood the candidate had to be able to prove unbroken noble lineage of two hundred years. Below Knights of Justice came Knights of Grace, but they too had to prove a high degree of nobility. Considering his humble origins, Caravaggio could only aspire to the still lower Knighthood of Magistral Obedience, which was reserved for men of merit – valent’huomini, to use his own favoured terminology – and awarded at the discretion of the Grand Master. But just before Caravaggio’s arrival on the island, Wignacourt had introduced a statute putting an end to the conferment of such knighthoods. He had grown irritated by the number of applicants for them and felt they were cheapening the status of the brotherhood as a whole. Honorific knighthoods were viewed as being open to corruption, tradeable awards akin to a form of simony. On his travels in Palestine, Sandys was contemptuously amused by the sight of an apothecary from Aleppo being dubbed a knight in exchange for hard cash.

If Caravaggio were to become a Knight of Malta, special arrangements would have to be made by the Grand Master himself. Little is known about the artist’s activities during his first several months on the island. But on the evidence of three pictures that he painted during the second half of 1607, he was working hard to impress those in the upper echelons of the order. With each new commission, he moved closer to the centre of power.

SIGNED IN BLOOD

Soon after establishing a workshop on Malta, Caravaggio painted a sombre devotional picture for Ippolito Malaspina. St Jerome Writing had the same subject as the picture painted for the papal nephew,