A public lecture by Victor Mallia-Milanes, entitled, ‘Venice, Hospitaller Malta, and Fear of the Plague: Culturally Conflicting Views,’ is taking place as part of the 12th edition of Festival Mediterranea.

The lecture will look at the wide corsairing activity that marked the early modern Mediterranean, which was one major obstacle to the otherwise smooth running of legitimate trade.

There was another scourge, a more lethal force that militated against the peaceful and regular movement of merchants and merchandise between one port city and another in the Mediterranean.

This was the fear of an outbreak and spread of plague and other endemic diseases, not infrequent visitors to the Mediterranean. The plague ravaged towns and villages, threatened and indeed disrupted the ordinary everyday rhythm of normal life, and decimated populations.

The Grandmasters were fully aware that if plague spread out in Malta uncontrolled, the island would have become in no time one massive graveyard. The Republic of Venice was not always in complete agreement with the Order’s measures and traditional practices to prevent it.

Victor Mallia-Milanes is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Malta. Formerly Head of the History Department and Dean of the Faculty of Arts. He was also the founder and first Director of the University’s Institute for Maltese Studies.

He has published extensively on the history of Venice, the Order of the Hospital, and Malta in the early modern period. His book In the Service of the Venetian Republic: Massimiliano Buzzaccarini Gonzaga’s Letters from Malta to Venice’s Magistracy of Trade 1754-1776 was published in 2008. An Italian edition is being published later this year by the Libreria Editrice Vaticana.

He is currently completing a work on the state of the Order of the Hospital in the early half of the seventeenth century.

Entrance to the lecture is free of charge and it will take place at Il-Hagar | Heart of Gozo Museum, in St George’s Square, Victoria, on Saturday, the 2nd of November, starting at 9.30am.

The lecture will be delivered in English.

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