Religious Life under Hospitaller Rule in Rhodes and Malta

Hospitaller rule joined a Catholic military order to communities with their own religious lives. Rhodes, governed by the Order from 1310 to 1522, included Greek Orthodox and Latin Christians as well as Jews. Malta, under Hospitaller rule from 1530 to 1798, had Catholic parishes in which residents funded services, joined confraternities and contested how ceremonies were run. The Order, bishop, parish priests and papal inquisitor held different kinds of authority; local worship cannot be reduced to any one of them.

On this page5 sections

Greek and Latin Christians on Rhodes

The Hospitallers were a Latin Catholic religious order, while much of Rhodes’s population was Greek and Orthodox. A description of mid-fourteenth-century Rhodes distinguishes the collachium, the walled quarter where the knights lived, from the borgo, or town beyond it. The town’s Latin quarter included churchmen, clerks, soldiers, merchants and visitors; Greeks and Jews lived in another part of the town.

The two Christian communities shared an island under Hospitaller government, but they belonged to different church traditions. One account describes relations between the Greek population and the knights as good, and says Greeks regarded the Hospitallers as protectors. The account expresses a contemporary view of the knights’ protection, within an island where Latin and Orthodox institutions remained distinct.

Malta’s Catholic setting and languages

In Malta, parish churches served the ordinary cycles of worship, instruction, marriage and burial. Maltese was the language of most residents, while Italian and Latin had important written and institutional uses. A parish priest could explain a confraternity’s statutes to its members in Maltese, showing how the local language entered the practical religious life of an institution whose rules were kept in Italian.

Hospitaller churches and hospitals expressed the Order’s own religious obligations. They existed alongside diocesan parishes rather than replacing them. Residents contributed money and labour to parish buildings and services, while clergy and lay groups negotiated how those resources were used.

Religious oversight and the Inquisition

Religious authority in Malta involved the Order, the bishop and representatives of the papacy. In 1574, Pope Gregory XIII sent Pietro Dusina to mediate between the Grand Master and the bishop; Dusina became the first inquisitor on the islands. The Roman Inquisition replaced an older inquisition associated with the bishop. Its establishment reflected overlapping claims to authority, including disputes concerning heresy.

The inquisitor took up residence in Birgu in a former courthouse, which became both his official home and the seat of the tribunal and its prisons. The tribunal heard allegations concerning belief and religious conduct. The building also contained a small room used by Jews for prayer.

Parishes, confraternities and public worship

Confraternities were lay religious brotherhoods with their own members, funds, altars or oratories and devotions. In eighteenth-century Malta they helped pay for services, processions and feast days. Parishioners could regard a church as theirs because they had financed and maintained it. This gave local residents a practical role in worship rather than leaving every decision to the ruling Order or the priest.

At St George’s parish in Qormi, a dispute with the parish priest concerned who should pay visiting confessors on the main feast days, where relics should be kept, and when the litany should be sung in relation to a procession. The brotherhood also controlled a fund that provided dowries for two poor girls. Such records show religious observance as a sequence of organised actions, expenses and local decisions, and link parish life to family welfare.

Church authorities sought oversight. A Maltese diocesan synod in 1703 required parish priests to direct confraternities spiritually, examine their accounts and take part in elections of officers. The rules did not eliminate disagreement, because brotherhoods defended rights they believed belonged to their members.

Who controlled local religious life

Parish practice could produce conflicts between residents and clergy. In Luqa in 1770, members of the Rosary confraternity objected when a church court chose an officer whom they believed they had the right to elect; the court assessor supported the brotherhood. In Cospicua in 1783, members of the Holy Crucifix confraternity tried to exclude the parish priest from their meetings, but a decree from Grand Master Emmanuel de Rohan pressed them to admit him. These cases show that the Order could intervene in a dispute without being the sole source of parish authority.

The Inquisition, episcopal supervision and local confraternities occupied different places in Malta’s religious life. On Rhodes, the major distinction was instead between the Latin order and long-established Greek Orthodox communities. Keeping these arrangements separate explains how people worshipped and organised religious activity under the same Hospitaller name in two very different settings.