Torture and Witchcraft in Medieval Times in Malta

Inquisition in Malta

The Inquisitor was an ecclesiastic nominated directly the by Pope to protect the Catholic faith and Christian morals of the people. He presided over a Tribunal, with the duty of observing the established rules of procedures.

The Inquisition in Malta forms part of the Roman Inquisition tribunal that started to function as a separate tribunal from the Bishop’s law courts in 1562. It was due to the advent of Mgr. Pietro Dusina, that the Roman Inquisition tribunal became distinctly cut off from the Bishop’s jurisdiction.



The Holy See found a favourable opportunity to establish the third Jurisdictional Institution that is the Inquisitor in Malta in the controversy which raged between G.M. Jean de la Cassiere and Bishop Royas. The appointment of Mgr. Pietro Dusina was made in person on December 1, 1574.

As an Inquisitor Mgr. Pietro Dusina was also given the responsibility of Apostolic Nunciature by Pope Gregory XIII (1572-85). He was empowered to represent the Holy See in Malta, to exercise judical authority in determined degrees of appeal and to handle political affairs.

The Inquisition, held in high esteem by the Holy See. Almost every Inquisitor was promoted to Bishop, Nuncios, Partiarchs after their commencement of their role in Malta. Out of 37 Inquisitors from 1634 to 1798, when Napoleon abolished the Inquisition in Malta, 26 Inquisitors received the Red Hat, whilst both Fabio Chigi, elected Pope Alexander VII in 1655, and Antonio Pignatelli, proclaimed Pope Innocent XII in 1692 reached the zenith of their glory and were crowned to the highest Eclestic rank in the Roman Christian hierarchy.

For both the Bishop and the Knights the presence and juridical powers of the Inquisitor was implantable. Bishop Royas protested because the role of the Inquisitor also curtailed Episcopal rights that were stripped off from his responsibilities. The Knights, also did not like the Inquisitor’s presence because the Inquisitor enjoyed the precedence over the Order and also interfered in their administration.

Once, the Inquisition was established, the question soon arose as to how the Inquisitor and his Officers were to be paid. The Holy See imposed a pension of 400 scudi on the Bishop’s mensa and it was then raised to 1240 scudi in 1678. Revenues coming from fines and confiscation of properties were used also to sustain the cost of operations of the Inquisitor and the Tribunal.

The Inquisition Tribunal operations was in Birgu (Vittoriosa) and this was made up of the Assessor, who collected, examined and presented evidence for the prosecution. The Promoter-Fiscal who represents the witnesses who did not appear in Court for fear of reprisals against them whilst the Consultants were theologians, canonists and jurists who provides their expert opinion on matters of faith, canon and civil laws.


Notaries, Interpreters, Accountant, Doctor, Censors of Books and Cathecist were members of the staff that were assigned with the day to day duties of the Tribunal.

The process before the Tribunal starts with the reading of the indictment. The charges could be heresy, superstition, evil-eye, witchcraft, polygamy, defections of ecclesiastic representatives and other civil or criminal offences.

The accused could be represented by an Advocate or the Procurator of the Poor who stands for the accused who could not afford to pay for advocate fees. The Curator represented those who were under age.

If the indicted person confessed his guilt or abjured his heresy, the tribunal will absolve the sentence of excommunication and submitted salutary penance proportionate to the guilt.

On its part the Inquisition had a policy of publicizing the punishments it inflicted. For this reason penitents were sometimes made to abjure in public during high mass and made to wear placards around their neck with the crime clearly inscribed. The message the Inquisition tribunal wished to convey on such occasions was obvious. It wanted to warn those present what could befall if they engage themselves in similar crimes and ensure that on lookers would in the future refrain from following in the footsteps of the humiliated penitent. Harsher penances were the payment of fines, confinement to one’s home, to a convent, confiscation of property as well as civil imprisonment.

In cases when the accused did not confess, the accused was imprisoned and given torture according to the gravity of the crime. The Capitaneus, or prison director was entrusted with the execution of every Court sentence and in some cases the accused was given the death sentence.

Reference to Inquisition legal proceedings are found in 400 manuscript volumes found in the Inquisitorial Archives. The first crimes of the Inquisition relates in their majority on the menace of Protestantism and heresy crimes.

Their were two facets of the situation which were of chief concern from the outset, the English Protestant reformers struck a heavy blow at the Order of Jerusalem. King Henry VIII in 1537 as well as Elizabeth I in 1557 of England suppressed the English Langue and the confiscation of its property, so much so that in Valletta the Knights did not built an Auberge for the English Langue when they moved their official operations to the new city.

From the inset, there were movements who preached Lutheranism and were therefore inflicted and accused of heresy. Between 1536-46 before the advent of the Inquisition, Bishop Cubelles had dealt with a number of heresy crimes amongst which relates to highly influential lecturers who imbued to their students heretical doctrines.

The French priest Don Gesualdo, who also ran another school in Rabat, was convicted of spreading errors and heresy. Because of his pertinacity in his errors he was sentenced to death and burnt alive in Birgu square.

Despite the Lutheran campaign and the gathering of heretics, by the end of the 16th century the struggle against Protestantism lost much of its dynamism, most probably because the Protestant heresies was largely managed and controlled.

After the devastating plague in the early 1590s the Inquisition began to turn its focus increasingly within its folds, and special emphasis was laid on the purity of the Christian faith amongst its believers.

By the time Protestantism was well entrenched and the two opposing camps become more firmly identified with their respective scopes. The last reference to heresy was inscribed in a document when Inquisitor Lazzaro Pallavicin (1718-19) put to the attention French and English merchant ships not to disseminate or distribute any heretical books and leaflets.

The Church felt duty bound to educate its believers, so much so that the Inquisition was given more power and was reorganized to deal with internal threats, in particular the corruption of the ‘true Christian faith’. The Sixtus V’s bull refers directly to the preoccupation of the Church in this area and hence to the Inquisition to switch its focus and energies from anti-Protestantism to cases related to superstition, evil-eye and witchcraft.

The reasons of how the latter crimes came to an increase and gained popularity, can only be explained through a proper understanding of the historical transformation that was then taking place in Malta.

Amongst theologians, and members of the cultural elite, women were always linked with marriage. This psychological perspective meant woman especially unmarried and those who lived independently without any male protection became the culprits of the situation. Women were thought to be slaves of their sexual urges. Inquisitors along with other judges, in particular, featured women with the framework or fundamental immorality. Seen in this context, women were portrayed as inferior to men and became prone to be the scapegoats of witchcraft accusation.

Gender inequality was a predominant factor that put women to the disadvantage of men and put women more subject to recall to magical assistance, evil-eye, curse and witchcraft rather than to recall to legacy procedures to acquire their rights and gain what they wanted.

Moreover, the majority of accused women were recent settlers in the Harbour cites and they ventured from their rural lifestyle to urbanized settlers in search for better living. The conditions in the Harbour cities were very different. The urban areas were more crowded and in the urban settings neighours were able to spy on one another through cracks in the wall.

Moreover, the presence of multitude of people having different cultural backgrounds could have induced the Harbour dwellers to develop and contain witchcraft practices that had their distinctively unique characteristics, especially during times when the influx of Muslim slaves outweighs the number of local mails who in their majority were on board ships as sailors and hence absent for long periods of time.

These states of affairs often led women to subject themselves and recall to witchcraft or found it most convenient to turn to some form of prostitution. This reflects in the high frequency of cases were women accusations was related to ‘whore and witch’.

Women were also more likely to engage in witchcraft because of their connections with many areas of life in which magic seem the only explanation of events. Even in the urban Harbour area where the presence of the Order’s hospital meant a concentration of professionally trained medicals, women were the front liners who nursed the sick of all ages, who could die without warning. They cared for children who were even more subject to disease and death than adults, at a time when hygienic conditions were poor and childhood diseases largely uncontrollable.

Women of the lower classes in the Harbour areas were directly associated to white magic for healing purposes and were some of the times even consulted by the higher levels of the Maltese society.

All the above factors had put women in bad light. These situations were variables of a complex equation that exposes the demographic difficulties to women vulnerability especially of unmarried and unprotected women who were in search for a better lifestyle in the urban areas.

In fact, the idea that women were more likely to engage in witchcraft thus appears to gain widespread notion and accepted at grassroots’ level by the community at large during the time of the Inquisition in Malta. The general trend taken by witch hunts, may thus be considered as essentially an attack on the defendless members of the society. This explains why large numbers of women, were accused ‘en masse’ of witchcraft and their engagement in prostitution activities.

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