Debunking Gio Nicolò

Noel Grima Recently, Gio Nicolò Muscat has been raised to the highest place in Maltese history. Apart from publishing a well-received biography recently, Frans Ciappara wrote a groundbreaking essay in 1993 that placed Muscat as a leading jurist at the forefront of political rebellion, emancipation and reform. After him, Mark Montebello enshrined Muscat as a dynamic philosopher and the daring intellect of the century. And only recently, Evarist Bartolo sang the praises of this “enlightened reformer” whose vision, enterprise and courage history was now finding so remarkable.

But in a recent article in Melita Historica, Judge Giovanni Bonello concludes that on the contrary, and in the light of his further research, the picture of Muscat changes quite drastically. “Besides being an undoubtedly acute jurist au courant with contemporary liberal and enlightened thinking, Muscat was also a relentless political opportunist, a fawning boot-licker when his personal interests were threatened and, like many of the Grand Master’s uditori, possibly not averse to some massive corruption too – the model primordial switcher.

In his recent writings, Judge Bonello has written how the claims to national recognition of some celebrated heroes, firmly embedded in patriotic folklore, like Bishop Francesco Saverio Caruana, Censu Barbara and Don Gaetano Mannarino have been based on fraud, on wilful laundering of evidence, on rhetorical and wholly unsupported fantasy and myth-building.

He had come across him several times in his archival research: he had written about his defence of the miserable widow of the bronze founder Louis Bouchut, desperately trying to get paid for the splendid monument of Grand Master Vilhena, which a show-off knight had ordered from her husband to lever himself into the good graces of the head of the Order, but had then never come round to paying (that monument is partly unpaid for to this day, which may account for its agitated restlessness: it has changed place four times so far).

Gio Nicolò Muscat was not born to a traditional bourgeois family from which members of the professional classes – lawyers, doctors, notaries, periti – usually emerged. He came from deprived and straitened origins. Only his intelligence, his perseverance and ambition enabled him to pursue his dream of becoming a lawyer, and a successful one at that.

He was born on March 8, 1735, and was raised by his aunt who could ill afford to give him an advanced education. To compound matters, he married Maria Salamone, an impecunious widow much older than him, already with three children from her first marriage. The kindly old uditore Dr Gabriele Belli, realizing the young man was broke but showed promise, took him under his wing and advanced his career – lawyer, uditore, judge.

Newly discovered documents - wills, codicils and inventories - enable us to fill in the last major biographical lacunæ. So far Muscat’s life trailed off to 1800, and no hard evidence of when and where he died had yet been discovered, His online biography states that he disappeared from Malta and probably died sometime later in Sardinia. He did not, Judge Bonello says. He died in Malta on March 2, 1803. He lived and passed away next to the ta’ Giezu church in St John’s Street, Valletta where he asked to be buried; he was on very amicable terms with the Franciscan Friars Minor who ran that church.

Besides his three stepchildren from his wife’s first marriage, one Dr Egidio Salamone, and another Francesca, he had two children from her second marriage: Paula, still single at the time of his death, and Dr Pietro Paolo from whom, to all appearances, he was estranged. Dr Salamone took his professional oath on September 9, 1769 and married Vincenza Naudi in 1772 and Maria Debono in 1791; Dr Pietro Paolo graduated in law in 1787, but became an impresario of the Manoel Theatre just before and during the French occupation.

Pietro Paolo had left Malta, owing his father Gio Nicolò substantial sums of money, some borrowed from him and some paid by his father to silence his son’s creditors. All he got from his father’s inheritance was a remission of his debts, a mezzanine, but only if he had returned to Malta at the time of his death, and his father’s walking stick. It had a gold knob.

Gio Nicolò’s widow, Maria, though much older than him, survived him. He instituted Paula heir, but not unconditionally: should his daughter “contract a marriage that dishonours the memory and the name of the testator her father”, then all she inherited would pass to his sister Anna Muscat. He also left his bed and bedding to his daughter “provided she marries a man worthy of such a bed”. He did not specify how that worthiness was to be determined.

The first disquieting question mark in the narrative: however successful, lawyers in Malta never became inordinately rich. They could live in comfort, even some affluence, but not in grandiose wealth. When Dr Muscat passed away, he was an enviably rich man, much richer than his career in the law would seem to justify.

The Grand Masters had two roles, separate and very different. They were heads of the Order of St John, and the internal government of the Order was one prerogative of the knights in which the Maltese had little or no say at all. But then the Grand Master also ruled as the prince of Malta, and, in the civil government of the island (as distinct from the government of the Order), the Grand Master relied very heavily on Maltese assistants - his uditori.

The Grand Master’s uditori would have been the equivalent of today’s ministers – they ran the country. The Grand Master had the final say, but he almost exclusively depended on the advice of his uditori. They were unquestionably the most powerful men in Malta, part-ministers, part-judges. Transfers of landed property to and from the government, licences and permits, overruling of court judgements, contracts of supply, tenders, employment, pardons, public works and promotions all depended on them. They could make a man fabulously rich or bankrupt him, decide on his freedom or his servitude. Most of the Grand Master’s uditori were Maltese and lawyers.

When, in 1777 Grand Master de Rohan wanted to modernize the laws of Malta and to reform the court system (the uditori were part of it as they were the superjudges who could overturn any court judgement in the name of the Grand Master) he summoned an internationally-famed Italian jurist to carry out the job. Giandonato Rogadeo came over, brimming with enthusiasm and ideas and set to work, only to be stonewalled and sabotaged at every step by the Maltese legal profession.

Shortly later he left Malta in a major huff, bitterly disillusioned by all the rot he had found in the island. “When it comes to making a profit” he observed, “there is no justice, no humanity and no religion that will induce a Maltese to do what is right”. He distilled his anger in a searing indictment of the Maltese courts, the uditori and the legal professions. He had never, anywhere, come across a legal class so institutionally inept and corrupt as he had in Malta.

Rogadeo singled out the Grand Master’s Maltese ministers as the principal architects of massive corruption; they abused of their public functions to enrich themselves by widespread and shameless bribery, graft and kickbacks. The uditori were the most powerful, but also the most hated, men in the island. Some of them defiantly ostentated their wealth: the more lavish palazzi and country villas in the 18th century were mostly built by ... Maltese uditori, Maltese corsairs and wealthy knights.

Dr Gio Nicolò Muscat, favourite uditore of Grand Master de Rohan, also has an undisclosed and amazing story of rags to riches. His wills and inventories, recently discovered at the Notarial Archives, bear witness to a fast-track accumulation of wealth that is rather problematic to explain.

His moveable holdings included paintings by Rembrandt, Correggio, Antonio Tempesta and Mattia Preti, and these only account for part of an impressive collection. His land holdings comprised an undivided half of the huge Palazzo Britto in West Street, Valletta, later pulled down and turned into St Paul’s Buildings, houses and gardens in Lija near Palazzo Preziosi and fields in Mriehel, together with important gold, jewels and silver objects.

Giandonato Rogadeo did not identify by name the living uditori, the targets of his opprobrium, but Muscat must have instantly realized that the Italian’s diatribe was also, if not principally, aimed at him. Stung to the core, Muscat took up pen and paper to defend himself and counter-attack his nemesis.

Dr Bonello says that here another question arises: is there anything pioneering or revolu- tionary in Muscat’s thinking? Rogadeo advocated sweeping, more rational and modern reforms in the laws and in the systems of administration of justice – and Muscat vehemently opposed them.

Rogadeo was no Cesare Beccaria, the visionary and revolutionary apostle of legal and judicial reform, but he was imbued all the same with some of the more innovative impulses of the enlightenment. Muscat, in his ponderous rejoinder to Rogadeo, was mostly for defending the status quo.

Rogadeo took full and public responsibility for his scathing libel on Maltese legal institutions and his book flew off the shelves – two editions, one printed in Lucca and the other in Naples, sold out in a short while. Muscat answered, but cravenly hid his identity. Stamping your feet (anonymously) to maintain the status quo is hardly the stuff of heroics and revolutionary inspiration.

Muscat’s debut on the literary scene was nothing short of cringe-making. The uditore was a compulsive writer and publisher of sonetti, which he published at his expense at the government printing press, starting in 1758 and persisting at least up to 1780.

His sonetti, according to Judge Bonello, begin with an epic of fawning adulation addressed to the ecclesiastical hierarchy, written when he was 23 years old. Juvenilia, no doubt, but a foretaste of the lengths he was prepared to go to ingratiate himself with the powerful. The recipients of his incense, the vicar-general Canon Gio Maria Azzopardi Castelletti and the two assessors of the Bishop, the Reverend Adriano Montana and Giuseppe Agius, must have been more embar-

‘He lived and passed away next to the Ta’ Ġieżu Church in St John’s Street, Valletta where he asked to be buried; he was on very amicable terms with the Franciscan Friars Minor who ran that church’