Hughes de Loubens de Verdalle, 1531-1582-1595, Cardinal et Grand Maitre de l'Ordre de Malte (review)

Alain Blondy's scrupulously researched biography of Hughes de Loubens de Verdalle, a Cardinal Grand Master of the Knight Hospitallers, and an enlightened Renaissance Prince and patron of the arts, has the rare quality of being both scholarly and highly readable. This makes the book appealing to a wider public than the narrow specialist market. It tells the story of a remarkable man whose statesmanship and diplomatic skills steered the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem, or the 'Sacred Religion' (La Sacra Religione) as it liked to call itself, out of one of its darkest crises and gave it renewed vitality, a refound belief in the uniqueness of its mission, and a rekindled optimism in a glorious future. This was achieved through an exercise of precarious political brinkmanship between the Spanish and French factions within the Hospital, the implications of which on the European political scenario are one of the two major concerns of the book. The other is Grand Master Verdalle's contribution to the forging of a truly European identity for Malta and to giving the island, although still de jure an appendage of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, a de facto sovereign status that placed it on a par with Venice and the other republics and city states of mainland Italy. These developments brought unprecedented prestige to the Hospital. The Grand Master could now justifiably regard himself as a prince, and he sent a clear message of the new political reality across Europe when, in a deliberately calculated move, he introduced the ducal crown in the Grand Master's armorial shield.

Verdalle profoundly changed the nature of the Hospital from a medieval nursing and military religious order to a Counter-Reformation, haughtily aristocratic association modeled on Renaissance prototypes. Its conventual obligations and military and hospitaller commitments remained essential priorities, but there was a new emphasis on pomp and circumstance that blossomed, in the eighteenth century, in the enlightened Baroque triumphalism of the Portughese Grand Masters Anton Manoel de Vilhena and, more especially, Emanuel Pinto de Fonseca. The latter changed the ducal crown to the closed crown of monarchy. That Verdalle managed to achieve all this was in great measure due to papal support, but his perceptiveness and political acumen were also instrumental factors. The way in which he exploited the Ottoman menace, both real and imagined, to the advantage of the Hospital and Malta, is an important case in point.

The merit of the book lies in the insights that it affords into the motivations that shaped this important new chapter in Hospitaller and Maltese history, and in its analysis of them. Events, and the political and religious intrigues which they engendered, are seen and interpreted in the wider perspective of the political chess game of Counter-Reformation Europe in which France and Spain were major protagonists, and where shifts in the balance of power sometimes depended on the whims of a succession of able and energetic popes one of whom, Sixtus V (1585–1590), made Verdalle a cardinal. The papacy saw in the Hospitallers a shield against the Ottoman menace and found it politically expedient to sustain and protect them from internal dissent and outside interference. Elevating the Grand Master to a Prince of the Church was a clear message to Philip II of Spain to refrain from seeking to control the Hospital.

The book is the latest addition to the literature on the Knights of the Hospital of St. John whose crusading exploits and charitable initiatives had won them fame across Europe long before the time of Verdalle. The heroism displayed during two great sieges, that of Rhodes in 1480 and the more recent and better publicized one of Malta in 1565, together with a succession of almost larger than life Grand Masters foremost among them Pierre d'Aubusson (1476–1503), Philippe Villiers de l'Isle Adam (1551–1534...