Article of the Month - August 2022
“A Habsburg Thalassocracy: Habsburgs and Hospitallers
in the Early Modern Mediterranean, c.1690-1750,”
(Emanuel Buttigieg: History, University of Malta)
Emanuel Buttigieg, “A Habsburg Thalassocracy: Habsburgs and Hospitallers in the early modern Mediterranean, c.1690-1750,”
The Habsburg Mediterranean, 1500-1800, Dorothea McEwan and Stefan Hanß [Eds.],
(Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences, 2021), 99–118.
Keywords: Central Mediterranean • central Europe • Habsburgs • Hospitallers • Malta • Charles VI • commanderies • material culture • eighteenth century • contact / frontier zones • thalassocracy • empire • notarial acts • Greek Ottoman subjects • Maria Theresa • centre and periphery
Nomination Statement:
Dr. Buttigieg's reframes the Habsburg dynasty as a maritime power in the Mediterranean in the late seventeenth and eighteenth century by focusing on its overlooked connections with the Order of Malta before and after the War of Spanish Succession. Buttigieg rightly demonstrates the strong connections between the maritime ambitions of the Hospitallers in their order-island state of Malta and the reemergence of Habsburg ambitions in the central Mediterranean through its military actions in the Adriatic and early eighteenth-century control over the Kingdom of Sicily and Naples. While scholars have focused on the increase of French and British influence, the Habsburgs, with their long-standing relationship with the Hospitallers, maintained a position as a maritime power through trade and naval activity. The Order of Malta controlled several properties in the empire, and a small but powerful contingent of Knights from the empire filled its rank. These connections facilitated Habsburg trade and military connections with Malta, Sicily, and the Maritime ports in the Adriatic. By demonstrating the important diplomatic, trade, and military connections between the Habsburgs and the Hospitallers, Buttigieg provides a strong argument against emphasizing the landlocked character of the Habsburgs, while tempering his judgement that Habsburgs were not a full-fledged maritime power. In this view the Order of Malta can be seen as an extension of Habsburg maritime interests, while maintaining the Hospitallers' longstanding independence as a military religious order. The frequent movement of peoples, goods, and ideas from Central Europe to the Central Mediterranean and vice-versa reinforced and expanded nodes of influence and integrated this small Mediterranean island into a wider nexus of geopolitical relations fostered by the Order of Malta, while they maintained the Habsburgs as a maritime power.
Authors’ Comment:
When I am asked to define what kind of history I ‘do’, I reply that I study the military-religious Order of the Hospitaller Knights of Malta in the early modern period. Beneath that broad – and I dare say, to many people, unfamiliar set of words – lies a wide-ranging world of human interactions across diverse places and different periods. The article featured here represents one line of inquiry within my broad area of Hospitaller-Maltese studies. It sprang from a study I had published earlier on dealing with early modern slavery. Here, I was interested in drawing attention to such aspects as the body, emotions and material culture of slaves in the Mediterranean.[1] Through this publication I became familiar with the work of Stefan Hanß on hair, emotions and slavery in the Early Modern Habsburg Mediterranean,[2] and from there followed an invitation to participate in a symposium on the Habsburg Mediterranean which was held at the Austrian Hospice in Jerusalem in September 2018. My research interests, together with the theme and location of this conference convinced me to look at how issues related to centre and periphery can be understood when looked at from the overlapping contact / frontier zones of the Mediterranean lands and seas.
Two seemingly distinct and separate places – the central-European possessions of the Habsburgs and the central-Mediterranean location of Hospitaller Malta – turned out to be points of contact and circulation of people, goods and ideas. I was able to examine this reality through documentation held in the central archive of the Order of Malta (located at the National Library of Malta, Valletta) and through a series of notarial acts from the notarial archive in Valletta.[3] The latter was where I had started my academic career using such documents to write my undergraduate dissertation. Now, I turned again – hopefully with a more mature eye – to these rich tomes. Together these afforded the possibility to enter a world of Mediterranean contacts that extended beyond its littoral and took a variety of forms, from high politics to the very personal.
At present I am engaged in writing a book on the naval-military endevours of the Hospitallers in the 17th-century Mediterranean. As I do so, I am reminded of the need to think of the Mediterranean beyond the binary of the battlefield and the bazaar, and more as a fluid space that people were constantly trying to negotiate their way through.
[1] Emanuel Buttigeg, ‘Corpi e anime in schiavitù: schiavi musulmani nella Malta dei Cavalieri di San Giovanni (1530-1798)’, Schiavitù del corpo e schiavitù dell’anima. Chiesa, potere politico e schiavitù tra Atlantico e Mediterraneo (sec.XVI-XVIII), Emanuele Colombo, Marina Massimi, Alberto Rocca and Carlos Zeron [Eds.], (Milan: Biblioteca Ambrosiana / ITL Editore, 2018), 287-310. [can be accessed at https://malta.academia.edu/EmanuelButtigieg or here https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar//handle/123456789/38844 ]
[2] http://www.mediterraneanseminar.org/2022-june-article-of-the-month
[3] cf. Emanuel Buttigieg and Joan Abela, ‘NAV: A survey of the past, present and future of the Notarial Archives of Valletta, Malta’, Nuovi Annali della Scuola Speciale per Archivisti e Bibliotecari, XXXIV, (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2020), 5-26. [can be accessed at https://malta.academia.edu/EmanuelButtigieg or here https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/66525 ]
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