Households, Women and Property in Hospitaller Malta

The Knights Hospitaller governed Malta from 1530 to 1798, but families managed homes, work and property through arrangements that were not simply those of the ruling Order. Marriage contracts and dowries affected a woman’s resources and the establishment of a household. Free women could own property and conduct business, while enslaved women and men lived under coercive ownership and worked in elite and ordinary households. Those differences in legal status shaped daily choices more directly than membership in the Order, which was a separate religious institution.

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Marriage, dowries and free women’s property

Marriage involved families, clergy and often a notary. Contracts set out dowries and the property brought to a new household. A study of the mid-sixteenth-century alla Maltese marriage regime shows that spouses’ property rights were defined with attention to what would happen on death, annulment or separation. A dowry was therefore not merely a wedding gift: it formed part of the family’s legal and material settlement.

The resources involved could vary greatly. In Valletta’s Porto Salvo parish, a study of marriages found an average age of about 23 for men and 17 or 18 for women, with some girls marrying younger. Families sometimes drew on relatives or charitable help to assemble a dowry. The widow Petrissa Famigliomeno sold an enslaved woman, Margerita, in order to trade soap and raise money for her daughter Angela’s dowry. The episode connects one free family’s planning with the severe lack of freedom imposed on someone else.

Free women were not absent from property and commerce. Records identify Caterina Vitale as a chemist and benefactor and Cosmana Navarra as a noble property owner; both also owned enslaved people. Their wealth distinguished them from families struggling to assemble a dowry, while both women’s estates relied partly on enslaved labour.

Domestic service and household labor in Malta

Slavery was practiced in Malta throughout the Order’s rule, from 1530 to 1798. Most enslaved people arrived after capture at sea or in raids. Captives were quarantined and then assessed by sex, age and physical condition. The Order assigned people it owned to different kinds of work; captains of licensed private vessels could dispose of their share of captives after paying the Order what it was owed. Some people were sold at auction to private owners, including Maltese residents, while others served the Order.

Domestic slavery formed part of life in both towns and the countryside. Enslaved women in rural households commonly cooked, cleaned and served; women and men both performed household work in towns. Enslaved people also worked in agriculture, construction and manufacturing, so domestic service was one part of a wider system of coerced labor. In the Order’s palaces, enslaved people worked alongside free employees.

Numbers recorded for the Grand Masters’ personal service illustrate the scale of elite households, not the ordinary household. Grand Masters were permitted 30 enslaved people for personal service from 1555; the number rose to more than 50 in 1568. Grand Master Hugues Loubenx de Verdalle had 230 people in his service at his death in 1595. Private slave ownership was not confined to men or to members of the Order.

Women, children and marriage

Enslaved women’s lives depended on owners’ decisions about work, sale, marriage and movement. Captured women and children could be sold after raids; children born to enslaved women were often baptized. These were forms of coerced domestic labour within the same society in which free families used contracts to secure their property.

Parish registers record marriages between enslaved people and Maltese residents from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. Some people gained freedom through marriage, but the possibility was uncertain and did not make enslaved spouses equal to free ones. Baptism records for children of enslaved women often name a mother and owner but no father. Historians have discussed sexual exploitation in this setting, although an unnamed father cannot be identified from such a record alone.

Property, restrictions and paths to freedom

Hospitaller law treated enslaved people as property. The Order’s 1724 penal code referred to them as merchandise, and they could be bought and sold. Yet their legal position did not mean they had no economic activity of their own: enslaved people could own and sell property, subject to the Order’s control. Restrictions limited how far they could earn or keep money. Rules introduced from 1602 curtailed paid work and trading, allowing only small sums under supervision, and prohibited slaves from renting lodgings.

These controls made it difficult for an enslaved person to save enough to purchase freedom. Near the end of the sixteenth century, the average redemption price was 120 to 180 scudi, depending on the individual. Some people obtained freedom by paying their owners; others were ransomed by relatives or through diplomatic arrangements. Some were freed through marriage, and owners sometimes freed elderly or unfit enslaved people in their wills. A will could therefore change an enslaved person’s status, though the possibility of release remained dependent on an owner’s decision.

When French forces took Malta in 1798, a decree abolished slavery. The change did not immediately end every dependent household relationship: some people continued to serve their former owners after legal emancipation. The Maltese authorities upheld abolition in 1800, after the Order’s rule had ended.