Captivity, slavery and ransom in Hospitaller Malta, 1530–1798

After losing Rhodes to the Ottomans in 1522, the Knights Hospitaller established their base in Malta in 1530. They ruled Malta and Gozo until the French invasion of 1798, and held Tripoli in North Africa from 1530 until its capture by the Ottomans in 1551. In these territories, warfare and corsairing brought captives into a system of forced labour and sale, but capture did not give everyone the same status or fate. Some people were enslaved and assigned to work; others, particularly people whose families or governments could pay, were ransomed or released through exchange. The Order and private owners also held enslaved people in households and on land. These arrangements existed alongside the use of convicts and other coerced workers, who were not legally slaves.

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From capture to enslavement

Many enslaved people in Hospitaller Malta were taken during attacks on enemy ships and coastal settlements. The Order sent out its own fleet, while licensed private vessels also operated under its authority. A letter of marque permitted a private ship to sail under the Order’s flag and seize enemy vessels. The captures could include ships’ cargoes and people aboard them, who might then be enslaved. Capturing people and property provided income as well as labour for the Order and its supporters.

The process depended in part on who had made the capture. If an Order vessel seized people, the Order decided whether they would serve on its galleys, work on land, enter domestic service, be given away or be sold. A licensed privateer had to pay the Order a share before disposing of the rest of the capture. The distinction could become contentious. After the Hospitallers helped the Venetians take Coron in the Peloponnese in 1685, official figures recorded 1,336 Turkish and Jewish inhabitants taken into slavery and divided among the Christian coalition; the Hospitallers were allotted 223. Some members of the Order’s forces secretly took additional captives. The total carried away by them is reported as more than 500, while Order records show 284 people assigned to its Treasury. The episode shows that military capture, private appropriation and the Order’s claims over captives could overlap.

People arriving by sea were first held in quarantine, either aboard ship or at the Lazzaretto, a quarantine station on Manoel Island. They were then assessed by sex, age and physical condition. These assessments helped determine the work they might be made to do and their value to buyers. People already enslaved before their capture could also be seized from a captured ship and transferred to a new owner.

The enslaved population of Malta varied over time, from a few hundred to a few thousand. Estimates suggest that Muslims and Jews made up about four-fifths of it, with Christians forming the remainder. Many Muslim captives were Turks, North Africans or people captured while serving as corsairs; enslaved Jewish people came from places including the Levant and Aegean islands. Christian captives included people from Greece, the Middle East and central Europe. Christian identity did not necessarily mean freedom: Greeks could be held on the grounds that they were religious schismatics or were trading with the Ottomans. Nor did conversion to Catholicism automatically end enslavement.

Galley service and the need for rowers

The Order’s reliance on oared galleys created a continuing demand for rowers. After captives arrived, men judged physically fit were often selected for this service. The proportion of enslaved people among the rowers increased over time: they made up about 30 percent in 1548 and 71 percent in 1669. At the fleet’s mid-seventeenth-century height, the Order needed about 1,500 galley slaves and another 500 enslaved people for its other ships.

Not everyone who rowed for the Order was enslaved. Some rowers were convicts; others were buonavoglia, men who entered contracts with the Order’s Treasury in return for payment and became bound by debt. Free Maltese rowers also served, especially when the Order lacked manpower. In 1579, the Order’s three galleys were collectively crewed by 277 buonavoglia, 216 convicts and 200 enslaved rowers. These distinct categories matter: the work could be physically coercive without making every galley worker a slave.

Conditions for galley slaves were harsh, and deaths at sea were a continuing risk. The Order appointed managers to oversee their clothing and food, which included daily soup and biscuits and bread and meat twice a week. Such provision did not make the work safe. Hundreds of galley slaves drowned when four of the Order’s galleys sank in a tornado in the 1550s.

Work on land and in households

Enslaved people who were not assigned to galleys worked in a range of land-based occupations. Women and men deemed unfit for rowing could be put to domestic, agricultural or construction work. The Order also temporarily assigned galley slaves to land labour when large projects required more hands. During fortification work, enslaved labourers commonly removed and carried rubble, while skilled construction was generally done by workers employed by contractors.

Records connect enslaved workers to specific projects. In January 1547, they were ordered to carry out repairs at Fort St Angelo. After the Great Siege of Malta in 1565, several hundred Muslim captives took part in excavating the ditch for the new city of Valletta. Enslaved labour was also used in building the Wignacourt Aqueduct in the early seventeenth century. Other work included making and maintaining weapons, shipbuilding, producing sailcloth and loading and unloading ships. In 1635, as many as 600 enslaved people were working as artisans or labourers in Valletta and Senglea.

Domestic service was another common form of enslavement, in towns and in the countryside. Enslaved women in rural households might cook, clean and serve; men were also employed in households and could work in agriculture. The Order’s palaces used both enslaved people and free employees. From 1555, Grand Masters were entitled to have 30 enslaved people in personal service. The number permitted rose to more than 50 in 1568; Grand Master Hugues Loubenx de Verdalle had 230 in his service when he died in 1595.

Enslaved people did not all belong to the Order. Knights and Maltese residents could buy people at auction, and publicly owned slaves could be rented to knights. Owners included members of the nobility and people in professions such as medicine, law, trade and the clergy. Enslaved people could also be permitted to earn small sums through activities such as barbering or selling goods, though the Order restricted such work and trade.

Rules, confinement and daily life

Hospitaller authorities regulated slavery through a series of ordinances issued between 1530 and 1602. Rules addressed matters such as food, clothing, movement and work. The 1724 legal code referred to enslaved people as merchandise, reflecting their status as property that could be bought and sold. At the same time, regulation did not prevent coercion or severe punishment. Enslaved people could be flogged publicly, and accounts describe punishments involving branding.

Publicly owned slaves, particularly Muslim men, faced close surveillance. Some were locked up at night in slave prisons known as bagnios. There were prisons in Valletta, Birgu and Senglea; the Valletta prison held galley slaves, Muslims and convicts, while Jewish slaves were held in Birgu. A section of the prison was set aside for Muslim worship. People held by private owners could instead live and work in their owners’ households.

The Order also provided medical care to publicly owned male slaves who were ill or injured, and they were not required to work while sick. From 1573, an older infirmary in Birgu was used as a hospital for enslaved people. Later, galley slaves received care at the Order’s main hospital in Valletta. Such treatment existed within a system that regarded people as valuable property as well as workers.

Enslaved people sometimes formed social ties, met in taverns or earned money under restrictions. Some owned and sold property with the Order’s oversight. These limited opportunities did not remove their dependence on owners or authorities. The Order’s concerns about security were especially visible in the response to the planned revolt of 1749, in which enslaved Muslims intended to kill Grand Master Manuel Pinto da Fonseca and free other slaves. After the plot was discovered, many suspects were tortured; 35 were executed, three died in custody and 72 were sentenced to the galleys.

Ransom, exchange and routes to freedom

Enslavement and ransom were connected but distinct outcomes of capture. Some captives remained enslaved and were sold or assigned to work. Others were released when an owner accepted payment, when relatives arranged a ransom, or when political authorities negotiated an exchange. A ransom could be much higher than the market price of an enslaved person in good health, putting release beyond the reach of many families. High-ranking Ottoman captives might be ransomed by the sultanate, while other captives’ families could send money through intermediaries who negotiated between Malta and Muslim territories.

Records provide examples of individual ransoms. Macuncuzade Mustafa Efendi, an Ottoman judge, was captured in 1597 and ransomed in 1600. Muhammad el-Attaz, a Moroccan prince, was enslaved in 1651 and ransomed in 1656; after converting to Christianity, he became known as Baldassare Diego Loyola. Both men later wrote accounts of their experiences. Their positions and access to supporters helped make these ransoms possible.

Freedom could also come through self-purchase, an owner’s decision to release someone, marriage or a provision in an owner’s will. At the end of the sixteenth century, the average price for buying freedom is reported as 120 to 180 scudi, depending on the person. After release, a person who wished to leave for a Muslim territory also needed to pay 10 scudi for a safe-conduct document. From 1686 to 1706, the Order issued 757 such permits, 627 to men and 130 to women. Older enslaved people who could no longer work were sometimes freed or sold for a nominal sum; some remained in Malta if they had lost contact with their homeland.

Ransom efforts also worked in the other direction, for Maltese people held in Muslim territories. In 1607, Grand Master Alof de Wignacourt established the Monte della Redenzione degli Schiavi, a charity that raised funds to redeem Maltese captives. In 1733, corsairs from Sfax captured a family of eight at Ramla Bay on Gozo. Funds were raised for their ransom, and they returned two years later. These cases show how private and charitable fundraising could turn a period of captivity into a negotiated release.

Diplomatic agreements could secure releases on a larger scale. In 1769, the Moroccan sultan released 37 Tuscan captives and sent them to Malta; Grand Master Manuel Pinto da Fonseca released 40 Muslim captives to Morocco in return. In 1789, a much larger negotiation resulted in the release of the Order’s Muslim slaves for a total of 548,680 scudi. People who had converted to Christianity were not included in that ransom. The agreement did not end capture: between 1790 and 1798, vessels of the Order captured 440 Muslim and Jewish people, while corsairs captured another 1,023. Records also report 994 releases during those years.

Maltese people captured abroad

The threat of enslavement also faced Malta’s inhabitants. During a major Ottoman attack on Gozo in July 1551, an estimated 5,000 to 7,000 people were enslaved. Many were taken to North Africa, and some were later transported to Constantinople. In the same year, the Ottomans captured Tripoli from the Hospitallers. The Maltese and Rhodian soldiers and Calabrian mercenaries in the city were taken captive and remained enslaved in North Africa.

Such events make clear that captivity in the region was not confined to people brought to Malta by Hospitaller ships. Maltese people could be seized in raids or captured aboard ships, and they too might depend on ransom, exchange, escape or eventual release. For example, records describe Dionysius Fiteni, freed in 1732 after 20 years of enslavement when the galley on which he worked was captured by a Hospitaller vessel.

Abolition in 1798

The French occupation brought legal slavery in Malta to an end. On 16 June 1798, a few days after French forces invaded, Napoleon issued a decree abolishing slavery and freeing people held by both the Order and private owners. The decree also treated enslaved Ottoman subjects as prisoners of war, with their return linked to the release of French or Maltese captives held elsewhere. Maltese rebel authorities upheld the freedom of former slaves in 1800, and a proclamation by Civil Commissioner Alexander Ball confirmed it.

Legal abolition did not immediately end every form of dependence. A notarial deed dated 1814 still referred to two people as the slaves of their former owner. Nevertheless, the Hospitaller system of slave ownership had ended with the Order’s rule in Malta and the abolition decree of 1798.