ABSTRACT
The writings of perceptive contemporary observers are relevant to the reconstruction of the past as they provide source material and, more often than not, determine the pattern that later researchers adopt. 1 such literature has exercised an enormous influence and continues to echo through the writings of present-day historians. This paper focuses on two such eyewitnesses who lived through the trauma of the agonizing last years of the Order of st John on Malta and whose correspondence constitutes a firsthand account of contemporary developments as they evolved or as they were seen to evolve. Both observers were high-ranking Venetian members of the Order. One is Antonio Miari, from Belluno, de Rohan’s secretary for italian affairs and, since 1 February 1793, Resident Minister for the Venetian Republic at the magistral court in Valletta. His attainments are not sufficiently or adequately documented. He has been called an accomplished scholar, but what his true intellectual pursuits were remains obscure. It has been claimed that he was a ‘distinguished diplomat’, 2 but all that can be established is that, after the fall of Hospitaller Malta to the French, he acted as the Order’s envoy at Vienna in 1815 and at Aix-la-Chapelle in 1818, where his performance does not appear to have been very impressive: indeed, his achievements there have been described 166as almost negligible. 3 His ministerial mission on Malta was to look after Venice’s interests in the central Mediterranean in general and in the Hospitaller principality in particular. After the rapprochement of the 1760s, 4 political relations between the two states grew steadily more cordial. 5 Venice’s major concerns included her declining commerce, the security of navigation, and the safety of her merchants and sailors. Through his regular letters from Malta, Miari would keep the doge and the esteemed Cinque Savii alla Mercanzia well informed about the prevailing conditions in the area, about developments in current issues and if and when they were resolved, and about problems that might yet emerge. 6 This task he appears to have accomplished admirably, and it is probably because of his correspondence that we are more familiar with this aspect of his career than with any other. Above all, he would write with fervour on the harmful impact that the Revolution in France was having on his Order, a passionate manifestation of where his true loyalties lay. Within the limitations of our factual knowledge of the man, the surviving collection of his original letters to Venice provides valuable insights into his thought and personality.
