Encounters with the ‘Other’: Hospitallers and Maltese before the Great Siege of 1565

The sources for this paper are notarial manuscripts from Malta, specifically the manuscripts of the sixteenth-century Maltese notary, Juliano Muscat. These are used to look at processes of state formation and economic issues, through which insights may be gained about how Hospitaller and Maltese viewed each ‘Other’ in the period 1530-65 (with a special focus on the 1540s). These themes are then discussed within the wider context of the land and the sea.