Wed, 29/01/2025 - 12:04
Snippets from the history on legal aid in Malta during the early years of the Order of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, by Judge Giovanni Bonello from Notes for a history of the judiciary at the time of the Order, https://judiciary.mt/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/A-History-of-the-Judiciary-1.pdf.
1556
The next Cumbo jurist to find a mention in the records was Pietro, who the Order’s Council under Grand Master de la Sengle in 1556 appointed advocate for the poor. He too fell foul of the Inquisition under suspicion of Lutheranism – an admirer of the French priest Gesualdo who ended burnt at the stake.
1565
Judge Giovanni Vassallo, the one who had aided and abetted Judge Cumbo in the phoney frame-up of the Tripoli survivors, had been the subject of an assault when judge of the Castellania in 1547. The knight Fra Dominic de Sbach had stridently insulted him conviciis ac injuriis. The Council fired Vassallo from the judiciary in 1561 and de Valette ordered a commission to investigate his behaviour. Just after the Great Siege the Council somewhat rehabilitated him, appointing him to the position of advocate for the poor – actually procurator pauperum, viduarum et pupillorum – the indigent, widows and orphans.18 His namesake, Dr Giovanni Vassallo, was elected Judge of the Castellania, together with Dr Pietro Muscat, in 1595.
1573
Dr Melchiorre Cagliares (also Cagliarese – from Cagliari? - probably the father of the only Maltese bishop in the times of the Order, Baldassare, consecrated in 1614) carved out a good legal career in the island, starting as advocate for the poor, widows and orphans in 1573, progressing to rapporteur and to assessor judge in a particularly high-profile case in 1584, when the Council ordered the arrest of the knight Fra Francesco Sommaia on his return from a corsairing expedition in the Levant charged with a dozen crimes, including stealing the booty captured from the Turks, personally murdering a soldier on his galley, and, most unforgivable of all, serving the poorest of dinners to the knights on board – facendo loro una tavola sordidissima che era un’ indecenza da non tolerarsi. The Council ordered Cagliares to investigate and prosecute.
Cagliares, besides his legal career, cultivated engrossing hobbies too. Did not everyone know that he slept concurrently with Caterina, with her sister Marietta and with Marietta’s daughter too, a committed believer in keeping it all in the family? The state paid him for protecting widows and orphans after all, didn’t it? In a colourful conflict between bishop Gargallo and the Grand Master, Cagliares had called the bishop vigliacco to his face. For his outspokenness and his resourceful lust, Gargallo excommunicated him. On one occasion, Cagliares felt slighted by Don Antonio Inguanez, Rector of St Paul’s church in Valletta, who apparently cut him dead when they met in the street. Cagliares threatened him in Maltese ‘Le tibzax, hecde kif fixkilt lohrayn, infixkil lilik’.
