Cagliostro and Malta : Fact and Fiction and the Greatest Impostor of the Eighteenth-Century 9990984042

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CAGLIOSTRO AND MALTA FACT AND FICTION and THE GREATEST IMPOSTOR OF THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY

Thomas Freller

Colour Image Malta 1997

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, re-hired, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior written consent in any from of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent publisher.

© Thomas Freller, 1997

Printed & Published by Colour Image, Mgarr - Malta Cover Design & Image Reproduction by Visual Grafix Studio

ISBN 99909-84-04-2

Besides the essential help of Mr Louis J. Scerri, MA the author would like to acknowledge the help of Mr Joe Saliba Ms Sharlene Caehia

Dott. Gerard Bugeja

Mr Ralph Schaub

Mr Stephen Degiorgio &

Freimaurer Bibliothek, Bayreuth (Bavaria) Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale Vittorio Emanuele II, Rome österreichische Staatsbibliothek, Vienna Bibliothèque Nationale et Universitaire, Strasbourg

Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich

Staatsbibliothek Bamberg (Bavaria)

Stadt- und Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt a. M. Universitätsbibliothek Basel

Hessische Landesbibliothek Wiesbaden (Germany) Cathedral Museum and Archives, Mdina, (Malta)

National Library of Malta.

ABBREVIATIONS AOM BNVER CAM FBB MH MST NLM

Archives of the Order of St John, National Library of Malta, Valletta (Malta) Biblioteca Nazionale Vittorio Emanuele, Rome Cathedral Archives Mdina (Malta) Freimaurerbibliothek Bayreuth (Bavaria) Melita Histórica Munich State Archives National Library of Malta, Valletta (Malta)

Contents Introduction 1

a) b)

1

The Crisis of the Ancien Régime and Hospitaller Malta Enlightenment, Freemasonry, and Conservatism

5

19

Interpretation and Legends The Famous Malta Connection: A Claim and its Rebuttal

24

The Investigation

29

The Son of Grand Master Pinto and Friend of Althotas? Cagliostro’s Supposed Maltese Sojourns: Fact or Seeking after Effect

29

Cagliostro’s Later Career Friend and Companion of the Greatsof Europe?

40

c)

Alchemy, Sorcery, and Superstition

48

d)

Freemasonry

53

All Roads Lead to Rome Cagliostro on Trial

60

Résumé

72

3

4 a)

b)

6

The Selling The Spirit of the Time (Zeitgeist)

The Malta Connection - A Fantastic Tale in the Style of the Arabian Nights

2

5

ix

Chronology

74

List of Illustrations

79

Endnotes

31

Bibliography a) Sources b) Literature

108 108 111

INTRODUCTION

In the late 1780s an etching was published which depicted a fairly common belief: the mysterious ‘Conte Cagliostro’ - dressed in Oriental robes-accompanied by his retinue departing from Rhodes to go to Malta, his supposed place of birth.1 Following his emergence into the limelight of European interest, many and varied were the speculations about Cagliostro’s birth, life, and activities. That Malta and the colourful life and fate of Cagliostro were actually closely linked will be demonstrated later on in more detail. Indeed many of his contemporaries believed that he was born in Malta, some even alleging he was the illegitimate son of the Grand Master of the Order of St John, the Portuguese Manoel Pinto de Fonseca (1681-1773).

Illustration I Caiflivstro leaving Rhodes on his irar to Malta

Up to now, both in Malta and abroad, the discussion about Cagliostro’s links with Malta and the Order of St John has never been settled. Although this book will not put any such discussion beyond debate, it will present a collection of facts and documents, some of them hitherto unknown, and draw some conclusions from them. ‘Conte Alessandro Cagliostro’ is the pseudonym of the Palermitan charlatan and impostor Giuseppe Balsamo. In this book the name ‘Cagliostro’ will be used to avoid confusion, as is also done in the case of his wife, Lorenza Balsamo, who called herself Serafina Feliciani. Balsamo might have assumed his name from his great-uncle from Messina who was named Cagliostro. Although more than 200 years have passed since the activities and adventures of Cagliostro, he remains right in the centre of European, not to say world-wide, interest. In 1995-96, on the occasion of the bicentenary of his death, a great number of festivities, exhibitions, and congresses were held and this colourful figure was again the subject of many articles and essays.2 Discussing the life of il divino Cagliostro is, on the one hand, attractive and tempting, but most difficult on the other. Only a few other characters have given rise to so many speculations and rumours. Where does legend end and truth starts? Although his identity and his descendance arc still covered in mystery, the identity of the figures of Giuseppe Balsamo and of ‘Conte Alessandro Cagliostro’ is generally accepted. In the 1770s and 1780s Cagliostro was among the most famous and celebrated personalities of the time, enjoying great popularity from Lisbon to Moscow and from Copenhagen to Malta. He was the friend of dukes, cardinals, men of letters, scientists, and authors, while his thrilling adven­ tures and activities lit the imagination of the most famous members of the intelligentsia. Many contemporary drawings and engravings show him practising his seances which included a mixture of hypnosis, cabbala, and Freemasonry. Cagliostro’s life and activities inspired Germany’s most renowned writer, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, to write Groftkophta (1791), a comedy (sic) about a Cagliostro-like figure and his revival of Egyptian cabbala, alchemy, and Freemasonry. Goethe’s deep interest in Cagliostro started in 1785 when he learned about the famous affair of Queen Marie Antoinette’s diamond necklace. This affair ridiculed Cardinal Louis de Rohan - a nephew of the ruling Grand Master Emanuel de Rohan - and involved some of the most renowned habitues of the Paris salons, including the notorious Comtesse Jeanne de ia Motte, Mlle d’Oliva, Retaux de Vilette, and ‘Comte Cagliostro’ himself, and even led to the latter’s imprisonment in the Bastille in 1785-86. Goethe was himself a Freemason

and for a while kept close contacts with the Freemason and Illuminist J. Johann Christoph Bode,3 who later published some pamphlets about Cagliostro’s life and activities. Cagliostro inspired the other German ‘classic’ author, Friedrich Schiller, to write his novel Der Geisterseher (1791-92) and a ironic critical essay ‘Calliostro (sic) - viel Lärmens um nichts’ (‘Calliostro - much ado about nothing’ J.“1 A few years earlier, another famous German author of the Sturm und Drang movement, Maximilian Klinger - who had lived for a long time in Italy and in 1781-82 might have even visited Malta - wrote Derwisch, a work clearly influenced by the startling rumours and gossip whirling around Cagliostro. Another lesser-known fact is that erudite Czarina Catherine II (the Great), who look a keen interest in literature, depicted Cagliostro in her comedies (sic) Der Betrüger (‘The Impostor’) and Der Verblendete (‘The Blinded’) published in Russian and in German versions in Riga 1787 and in Berlin in 1788.5 Using the stories around Cagliostro as inspiration for comedies seemed to have been fashionable. In 1791 Natale Roviglio wrote II Cagliostro, commedia di cinque atti in prosa,6 while in France the stories around Cagliostro inspired a comic opera Cagliostro ou les Illumines (Paris, 1810) by Reveroni de St. Cyr and E. Dupaty which was later taken up by the renowned Alexandre Dumas the older for his Memoires d’un medicin, Joseph Balsamo (Paris, 1846^48). Some years earlier, the German Roman­ tic author Ludwig Ticck had used this subject in his novel Die Wundersüchtigen (‘The wonder addicts’). In his heydays in the 1780s, Cagliostro was the centre of great European interest. An account of contemporary European authors who commented on this colourful character would fill a book on its own. When Goethe was in Sicily on the occasion of his Italian journey - when he also intended to visit Malta7 - one of his first thoughts was to meet the family of this Cagliostro or Balsamo. In his Italian Journey, Goethe wrote more than nine pages about his meeting with Balsamo’s sister and some other of his relatives on 13 April 1787.8 By comparison, his encounter with the viceroy of Sicily during which occasion he had a short chat with Conte Statella, a knight of Malta5 who only shortly afterwards travelled to Weimar and visitedGoethe’sfriends,10 takes up just one page! To avoid rumours and trouble, Goethe disguised himself as a Mr Wilton, an English gentleman with a message from ‘Cagliostro’ when he met the Balsamo family in Palermo. Even after Cagliostro’s trial and imprisonment in 1790 and his death in August 1795, interest in him never ceased. Many books and essays about

Ml life and activities, plans, scandals, and forgeries kept being published, although there remain many unanswered questions about him. This book, however, will concentrate on his involvement with the mighty and influen­ tial movement of eighteenth-century Freemasonry, his contacts with the members of the Order of St John, and his claims of having been born in Malta of noble ancestors. One of the principal questions should be how it was possible for the inventor of a form of Freemasonry according to the ‘Egyptian rite’ and the self-proclaimed master of cabbala, alchemy, and hypnosis to link his destiny and person so closely with a very strict Catholic Order composed of members from the highest European aristocracy. Another, maybe even more interesting, question is why did so many people believe his tales? To answer these questions and to understand the background and the lines of communication between Malta and Europe better, one has first to take a closer look at Malta and the Order of St John at the end of the eighteenth century and at some of the contemporary spiritual and philosophical concerns.

\ii

Chapter 1

The Setting

a) The spirit of the time (Zeitgeist) ‘Concerning the secret art of Cagliostro, I am very suspicious of these stories. I have hints and news of a large number of lies, lingering in the dark .... Believe me, our world of morality and policy is undermined by subterranean streets, cellars, and cloaks.’ Only a few other comments possess more significance for the period as these lines written in 1787 by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to the Swiss naturalist and author, Lavater.' Generally speaking, eighteenth-century Europe has been charac­ terized as the period of the Enlightenment and Illuminismo, the time distinguished by the development of a solid approach to nature and science, and a crucial phase on the way to empiric science. How­ ever, this century was also marked by a complex stream of old and new schools of thought, of inter-relationships between freethinkers and conservatives and circles of clerics and Freemasons. The contemporary existed concurrently with the ‘non-contemporary’, and this is best reflected in the events and aftermath of the French Revolution in the 1780s and 1790s, when the French ideas of Jacobinism, Gallicanism, and strong anticlericalism spread through­ out Europe. Spain and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, on the other hand, were still deeply marked by clerical and feudal structures and influences. That royalism and conservatism were far from dead was shown a few years later when, after the breakdown of Napoleon’s Empire, European society underwent a restoration. Meanwhile, the European communita letteraria in the second half of the eighteenth century paid its respect to the ‘goddess of reason’ in whose shade superstition and apprehension still lingered. Perhaps nothing reflects this fragile situation better than the famous

drawing El sueno de lo razon produce monstruos (‘The sleep of reason produces monsters’) by Francisco Goya, an eyewitness to the highest aspirations and most bitter setbacks of the time. The vacuum created by the anticlerical movement and the struggle against Catholic ‘superstition’ was very often filled with a bizarre medley of ‘new’ pseudo-cults, occultism, and spiritualism pregnant with artificial rites. New phenomena, such as Mesmerism and Freemasonry, very often developed into movements with strange and aesthetically-oriented habits and celebrations and into quasi-religipus cults. Indicative of the double-sidedness of the time, the centres of these new superstitions and cults, which were mostly practised in secret, were those same places where the movements of rationalism and empiric science reached its peak. Franz Mesmer (1734-1815), the ‘father’ of Mesmerism, a method to cure people by hypnosis and electrical fluid, experienced his most successful years in pre-revolutionary Paris. Mesmer also organized secret societies of Magnetism which had similar aims to the ‘cosmetic’ aspects of Freemasonry and of which, in the late 1780s, there were 30 centres in France and Germany. Mesmer also had a considerable impact in Malta when one of his pupils, D’Amy, started to offer cures to knights, Maltese nobles, priests, and common people in Valletta in the early 1780s.2 The impact of Mesmer and his ‘art’ is even recorded in contemporary documents in the archives of the Order of St John? In 1783 Grand Master Rohan commissioned a group of knights and doctors to conclude a detailed report on D’Amy’s work. Although they were not favourably impressed, the donat of the Order Ovide Doublet in 1784 still saw the Frenchman enjoying a lot of popularity? Another most famous contemporary healer and hypnotizer was the Marquis de Puysegur. A good example of the quick-and-ready acceptance of the most avantgarde inventions and thoughts of all kinds in Malta is provided by Count Johann Michael of Borch. Late in December 1776, Borch frequented some Maltese palaces and meeting places of the Maltese intelligentsia. He wrote to his friend: ‘Today I attended a display of an experiment with the astringent water of the Abbe Grimaldi. I will tell you about the result of this experiment. You 2

know that the ancients had a very good remedy against inner haemorrhage and to close open wounds. However, the knowledge of this medicine, as the knowledge about so many other useful things, got lost later. . . . Now the Abbe Grimaldi has maintained to be in possession of this secretagain. Now the Prince de Rohan, who is a nephew of the Grand Master, intends to be the Maecenas of the Abbe and told the latter to fix a day to demonstrate the efficiency of this medical mixture. I was allowed to be present al this experiment.’5

Illustration 2

Francisco Goya, El sueno de lo razon produce monstruos

3

Vienna in the 1780s under Emperor Joseph II, who was perhaps the strictest adherent of rationalism and secular thinking who ruled a country in the eighteenth century, was one of Europe’s foremost centres of the new cult of Freemasonry. In the artistic field, this is possibly best reflected in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s operas Don Giovanni (1787) and Die Zauberflote (‘The magic flute’) (1791) which both abound with references to Freemasonry and their rites.6 The self-styled Count Alessandro Cagliostro concerned himself with nearly all of the above-mentioned fashions of hypnosis, spiritu alisrfl, occultism, alchemy, and, of course, Freemasonry 7 He furthermore used to his personal advantage humanity’s millennial desire to prolong life and to see beyond death.

4

b) The crisis of the Anden Regime and Hospitaller Malta Enlightenment, Freemasonry, and Conservatism A biographer of Cagliostro very recently wrote: ‘Concedendogli i fondi necessari, affido a Giuseppe la missione di mostrarsi al mondo come vivente risultato dell’attivita dei cavalieri di Malta. Vero é che in quel periodo il gran maestro aveva bisogno di ció che noi non esiteremmo a definiré “propagandista”, perché 1’ordine di Malta, che militarmente non aveva piü ragione d’essere, era all’inizio di un’inarrestabile decadenza ed era necessario dargli un nuovo motivo per esistere, altrimenti sarebbe stato ben presto predadelle grandi potenze che guardavano con cupidigia al “piü terribile fortezza del mondo nel cuore del Mediterráneo”.’1

That such a notorious character as Cagliostro - so obviously contrary to the very concepts and standards of Catholicism in his spirit and behaviour - could trick most of Europe into believing he was a distinguished person closely connected with the oldest Order of Catholic Christendom, is in itself a significant sign of the times. For Europeans to believe that Pinto’s Malta could be scene of Cagliostro’s obscure and occult activities, their perception of the Hospitaller State must have undergone a massive change. In fact, quite surprisingly and contrary to Malta’s actual polilical and ideological relevance, there was a great revival of interest among French, German, and English intellectuals, poets, and writers in this remote island. Certainly this was helped by a kind of counter­ movement in the last decades of the century against the theories of strict rationality and materialism of writers such as Baron d’Holbach Jean le Rond d’Alembert or the other encyclopaedists. In the context of the pre-Romantic Gothic literature such as Horace Walpole’s influential The Castle of Otranto or Ann Radcliffe’s Mystery of Udolpho and such fantastic knight tales as Christian August Vulpius’ best-sellers DerMaltheser and Rinaldo Rinaldini and Van der Velde’s Der Maltheser, southern Italy, Sicily, and Malta had become places of the ‘sublime’ and the bizarre and symbols of feudal ‘anachronism’. European audiences were further influenced by those semi-fictitious travelogues and adventure 5

stories set in Hospitaller Malta, such as Carasi’s L’Ordre de Malte dévoilé (Lyon, 1790) and the anonymous Reisen eines Weltmann (Breslau, 1790), which encouraged the belief that the anachronistic ‘Gothic’ regime of the Hospitallers was one of the places where the most bizarre and strange events could happen. This change in the European perception of Malta of the Knights, formerly admired as the geographically-remote frontier of Chris­ tian fighting spirit, faith, and harmony, and the efficient training ground for French, Italian, and Spanish naval officers, was by no means caused only by the new spirit in French, English, and German philosophy and literature. Nor was it entirely connected with the change of the political and economic climates in central Europe towards a bourgeois society which was heading for its industrial revolution, a development which would give the last blow to the anti-mercantile or old-mercantile patterns of the Ancien Régime. It was the Order’s State itself which, during the long reign of the old Portuguese Grand Master Manuel Pinto, had missed reading the signs of the times2 and therefore fell an easy victim to all the ‘diseases’ of European modernity. These various influences and pressures on the weakened Order led to a climate which made the Abbé Boyer write in his diary in August 1775:‘The spirit of intrigue has as much influence here as pretty women once had in the affairs of France under Louis XV.” Consciously or subconsciously, nearly every educated visitor to Malta in the late eighteenth century felt that the time of the Order as a sovereign state with its old traditions would soon come to an end. The case of Cagliostro was just one of the most interesting indicators of this development. Hospitaller Malta appeared as rather bizarre, ambivalent, and multi-faceted to the educated and sophisticated ‘authentic’ travel­ lers at the time of Cagliostro. It still exerted its own fascination, as can be proven from the considerable number of visitors who travelled further to tiny Malta from Naples on their Grand Tour. On the other hand, there was a lot of disillusioned criticism, which gradually found its way into many travelogues and books. In April 1767 Baron Riedesel pointed out the ill-treatment of the Maltese nobility by the knights,4 which was also confirmed in June 1778 by 6

the Dutch traveller Carel Dierkens.5 In Palermo in the summer of 1782, an anonymous Russian nobleman, who in his travels in Germany and Italy had heard the latest stories about Cagliostro, witnessed the arrival of some galleys of the Order of St John. The Russian was curious to examine these famous ships and to get to know better these knights and officers so renowned for their bravery and skill. However, he soon realized that these knights had no real idea of seafaring,6 and was disgusted with the bad treatment of the galley slaves. He pointed out that the knights seemed to have been more interested and experienced in participating in the various feasts at Palermo. That many of the knights in Malta did not respect their vow of chastity is stated in various sixteenth- and seventeenth-century accounts and diaries.7 However, such reports were then either not published or were ‘corrected’ and tampered with/ Now, the com­ ments about the matter by authors such as Patrick Brydone, Roland de la Platibre, and Francois Gabriel de Bray became more and more ironic and harsh.9 It comes, therefore, as no surprise that there were rumours accusing Cagliostro and his wife Serafina of engaging in prostitu­ tion during their alleged stay in Malta.10 That such a possibility was not at all unlikely - if Cagliostro and his wife visited the island at all-may be supported by many contemporary eye-witness accounts of Italy and Malta which maintain that Rome and Malta were the places with the most flourishing business in prostitution. Indeed, when in Malta in the summer of 1782, the above-mentioned noble Russian traveller disembarked at the Grand Harbour, the first thing he was told by the captain of the port - a certain ‘Pusiello’ - was to beware of the temptations of the numerous prostitutes of Valletta and the harbour area.11 That there had been a lot of tension between the Maltese popu­ lation and clergy and the Order since the very beginning of the Order’s stay was also an open secret,12 although rarely mentioned by visitors. In the late eighteenth century such tension started being openly mentioned in travelogues and descriptions. What was really a new development was the increasing loss of the knights’ fighting spirit and their laxity in carrying out their statutory 7

Caravans. Such behaviour was just the exterior manifestation of the deeper crisis within the Order. The warning to the Order had been loud and clear and could hardly have been mistaken: ‘Réformez-vous; sinon, nous vous réformerons ‘ (‘Reform yourself; otherwise we will reform you’ ).13 These were the words said by Count Kaunitz, chancellor of the Holy German Empress Maria Theresa, to Bailliff Colloredo, ambassador of the Order at the court of Vienna. Obviously the era for agreement and understanding between the centuries-old chivalric Order of St John and the States of Europe of the Ancien Régime was approaching its end. Still the Order was officially looked upon as an admirable and highly*-reputed institution with an honourable ideology. However, as already indicated, behind the façade, the situation and the attitude towards the institution were gradually changing. As a result of intensified economic links - especially by France - with Turkey and the Barbary States and treaties between the European States and the Sublime Porte, the Order had lost its main enemy. The Maltese corso and privateering were, therefore, re­ stricted heavily. The Order’s main raison d’ être, fighting the infidels, had more or less disappeared in the changing political climate and only the vow and mission of charity remained.14 The Ottoman threat had ceased to exist and the Order’s desperate attempt to hold on to its anachronistic role as the policeman of the Mediterranean was being reduced to a mere farce, as will be shown later on. Maybe even more threatening than these political and economic omens were the ‘spiritual’ dangers approaching from France, England, and Germany. Eighteenth-century Malta, with its anach­ ronistic existence, conservative ideology, and climate of intoler­ ance was not only attacked heavily by the European ‘avantgarde’, circles of freethinkers, and bourgeois intellectuals but, in the last decades of the century, also received considerable criticism from moderate circles. The nascent Classical movement and its emphasis on republican and bourgeois values, helped to change the percep­ tion of the Order’s State from one of pure admiration to one of very mixed feelings. In April 1767 the German aristocrat, antiquarian, and diplomat Johann Hermann von Riedesel - perhaps the first real 8

classical traveller to visit Malta - after leaving the island, felt free again: ‘I was so seized with fear and sadness... when walking round the walls, and I saw myself shut in on all sides, that I was very anxious to depart again. How great a happiness is the liberty of mankind! How is it possible that so many do not know it, or undervalue it, or even voluntarily resign it?"5

The former knight of the Order and natural scientist Deodat de Dolomieu commented even more drastically: ‘To hold despotism fully in honor... one must have seen it exercised in a place as small as Malta.’16 Obviously the spirit of travellers to Malta had changed. With a new more morally-orientated approach, the decline of austerity and chastity in Malta could no longer be overseen and left uncom­ mented. In 1715 the renowned French antiquarian and author AnneClaude-Philippe de Thubieres, Comte de Caylus, although other­ wise in favour of the ideas of chivalry and valour, had already felt a small ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’17 in a lively pleasure garden when visiting Malta. The government of the knights, especially that of the anachronistic Pinto, was not only ridiculed and criticized by many of the visiting members of the European intelligentsia, such as the Dutch ‘Grand Tourist’ Carel Dierkens, the German Baron Johann Hermann of Riedesel,18 the naturalist C.S. Sonnini,19 Abbé Delille,20 the economist Roland de la Platière,21 and the Oriental traveller and scientist Carsten Niebuhr,22 but also by many knights itself. The knight de la Tramblaye, who was in Malta in 1761 on the occasion of the threat of a Turkish attack as a revenge for the capture of La Corona Ottomana,23 published an anonymous travelogue in 1788 where he frankly admitted it cost him a big effort to leave his maîtresse behind in Paris. Furthermore, according to de laTramblaye, who was obviously a careful reader of Rousseau and Montesquieu, the sexual libertinage of the knights could be explained by Malta’s furious hot climate. Although the French knight makes a plea for the survival of the sovereign Order’s State, statutes which go against human nature, such as the vow of chastity and the monkish habit, should be abolished immediately.24

9

In fact, various knights had contacts with French freethinkers, encyclopaedists, and Freemasons,25 and even frequented most of the avantgarde salons of Paris. For example, it was common belief that Bailliff Louis-Gabriel de Tessé de Froulay had close contacts with both Voltaire and Rousseau. Rousseau’s impact on members of the Order is referred to in the joint work by a group of knights and Freemasons from Lyon entitled L’Ordre de Malte devoilé. The pseudonymous author, ‘Carasi’, writes: ‘ThemorelreadRousseau’s Emile, the more I wanted to read.’26 Another well-known member of those literacy circles, the author and poet Abbé Delille, actually came to Malta in 1776 accompanying the French antiquarian and connoisseur Comte Choiseul-Gouffier on his voyage to Greece. Although the visitors were well received by Grand Master Rohan and lodged in the Grand Master’s palace in Valletta, Delille later wrote anonymous spicy letters and articles against the Order,27 which offended some knights and occasioned several vehement replies. Although Delille retracted his statement,28 hostile spirits that would soon be clamouring for seizure of the Order’s estates in France took careful note. The changed spirit of the time emerges also from the writings of the Comte Choiseul-Gouffier himself. It was not the military heritage of the Order but its hospitalité that he singled out.29 There is, therefore, no need to rely on those propagandistic antifeudal and anticlerical works, such as L’Ordre de Malte devoile® which was written only to discredit the Order’s State and the authenticity of whose description of Malta is surely questionable. In fact the authors behind ‘Carasi’ were a group of knights and chaplains of the Order belonging to the Masonic lodge ‘St. Jean de Jérusalem d’ Ecosse’ of Lyon,31 masterminded by the knight Louis Gaspard Esprit Tulle de Villefranche (1746-1823). Other members were the knights Joseph de Gain de Linars and Jean Baptiste du Bouchet and the conventual chaplains Pemon, Boucher, andMuquet. This Lyon lodge had also been known as ‘Loge de Malte’ for a time.32 What makes this episode so especially interesting in the present context is that some of its members also attended Cagliostro’s seances during his sojourn in Lyon in 1784.33 The criticism of the Order was not connected solely with the 10

infiltration of immorality, libertinage, and corruption but espe­ cially with its very relevance which was being more and more questioned, the loss of its raison d’être as a result of the decline of Turkish threat, and its anachronistic organization. The Order’s guerre de course was regarded as one of the major causes for disturbing the economic exchanges between the Levant, North Africa, and Europe. Therefore more strong criticism came from rational, pragmatic, and technocratic points of view. For example, although the famous German scientist and oriental traveller Carsten Niebuhr had visited Malta in June 1761, his description of his sojourn and activities only forms a short paragraph in his trav­ elogue.34 More interestingly he used his observations of Malta aud the Levant to write a detailed essay about the anachronistic role of the Order in the Mediterranean. In this essay, which was printed in a 1787 edition of the magazine Deutsches Museum, he not only recorded comments about the Order by Oriental merchants he had met in Cairo in the summer of 1761,35 but he also criticized the damage which the Order’s squadrons and privateers did to Mediter­ ranean shipping. With the open involvement of Turkey and the Barbary States in the European economy, the Order had lost one of the main columns of its raison d'être. In France several persons had already called envious attention to the Order’s commerce and riches. The Turkish threat was long over and, ironically, France and England were secretly discussing how to protect the Turks from the greedy hugs of the Russian bear. Such sceptical writings were not entirely based on political and spiritual changes in central Europe but also on the perception of the thoroughly-rotten state of the government of the Order, reflected even in the authentic writings of competent knights themselves. In 1784 the erudite and promising young Chevalier Francois Gabriel de Bray ( 1765-1832) took part with the Order’s fleet in a joint naval expedition with the Spanish and Venetian navies to attack Algiers. De Bray, who was certainly no Republican and Jacobin supporter and who later wrote bitterly against L ’ Ordre de Malte dévoilé?*' had to-admit to a complete disaster: the ships of the Order - in previous centuries the epitome of Christian bravery - tried their utmost to avoid contact with the enemy. De Bray was so disgusted 11

with the situation that he soon left Malta. Used to the sophisticated European salons and the new concept of the Enlightenment, he drew a rather negative sketch of contemporary Maltese ‘high society' in his diary: ‘The company on here is disgusting. Loose women, nowhere education and grace, raw and bad habits, an appearance of self-styled proudness and vanity, injustice, bad manners, and nothing from religion.. . . Persons who are captured and blinded by their bad habits might find a certain commody and well-being on here. Their laziness will be never disturbed. One wakes up late, takes his breakfast, makes a walk through the city, eats well, and starts gambling. After the game, those people take a sleep. Then there will be the suppef, another round of gambling. Finally one goes to sleep. For the people on here that is the most desirable life they can think about.... No one dares to complain about this useless living as most of the inhabitants are the same lazy.’37

Obviously a man like de Bray, brought up and educated in close contact with the concepts of bienveillance, utility, and reserve of the French Enlightenment could not agree with the things he saw in Malta which, like Sicily and Spain, held on to its baroque aristocrat! sm. As with his compatriots de laTramblaye and Delille, it was the lack of bienveillance which annoyed de Bray most: Tn France, they would not accept the existence of a man who only exists for himself. In France, there does not exist the disgusting freedom to be useless and to show its weak existence publicly. Those people are driven to activity only when it is for their own vanity. There is no other country so fruitful and rich at intrigues, fraud, bribery, and private and public enmity. They attack each other, treat each other without any scruple and further thinking. However, even here not all good sentiments are gone. There are a few who try to live a honourable life. They are as much distinguished as the morality of the rest is miserable and disgusting.’38

De Bray’s close friend, Grand Master Rohan, was well aware what was going on and at certain moments did fear with good reason that the Order would soon fold up like the Templars had done in the early fourteenth century.39 But Rohan was too tied up with tradition to undertake a real modernization of the institution. In some cases. 12

however, he was prepared to abandon old patterns and rules. While de Bray was still a knight, Rohan had written to him:

‘Should you have the occasion to find a suitable woman to marry and should it be possible for you then to settle in Germany, we should consider it the best for you to do. If this should happen, we give you our guarantee that you will be allowed to keep the cross and the uniform of our Order. . . J40

Rather paradoxically, de Bray later served as the official repre­ sentative of the Order at the congresses of Amiens and Rastadt.41 Throughout his life de Bray remained a staunch defender of the rights and the political sovereignty of the Order, writing several treatises about the subject.49 Those non-official sources about such a renowned and respected institution may sound strange and exaggerated, but sometimes the facts were even worse. In 1782 Baron Ferdinand of Waldstèin, a knight of the Teutonic Order and a member of one of the leading families of Bohemia, came to Malta to complete his military expe­ rience. He joined the Order’s navy only to discover that the guerre de course was a mere farce. To avoid danger and not to interrupt commercial relations, the knights even communicated the destina­ tions of their warships before their departure to the Barbary States.43 Ovide Doublet, from 1787 onwards Grand Master Rohan’s secre­ tary, wrote in similar terms: T have heard captains of galleys boast that they did not want to attack Barbary Corsairs... in order to spare themselves the expenses and inconvenience of quarantine.’44 After suffering cuts in their income, some knights even engaged in robberies in the Basilicata and Calabria.45 Such revealing informa­ tion does not come from authors who were naturally and ideologi­ cally opposed to the Order but from eyewitnesses, such as the Danish scholar Friedrich Miinter, Barou Ferdinand of Waldstein, Chevalier de Bray, and C. S. Sonnini, who have to be treated as most trustwor­ thy sources. It was the change in the European mentality which the Order could not escape and which took a grip on Malta as well. All this helps us to visualize a society and a Christian military Order which had drifted far from its former austerity and loyalty and

13

did not exclude at all the infiltration of charlatans, adventurers, and criminals. Perhaps it was Freemasonry which led to the deepest corrosion within the Order and in the context of which Cagliostro comes directly into the game. Both Clement XII, by means of the Papal Bull In Eminenti (1738), and Benedict XIV, in his Bull Providas Romanorum Pontificum (1751), had forbidden Masonic activity. In 1740, on the insistence of Ludovico Gualtieri, then inquisitor in Malta, the text of In Eminenti had also been published in Malta. In 1789 Cardinal GiuseppeFirrao had prohibited Catholics from belonging to Masonic societies under pain of death without absolution and the confisca­ tion of their property, while a landlord who allowed a Masonic gathering in his house was liable to have it demolished. In accord­ ance with In Eminenti, Pinto had expelled six knights from Malta in 1741 for allegedly practising Masonic rites.46 Ultimately, how­ ever, all the steps of the Inquisition and the Order against the spread of Freemasonry in its various manifestations had no real effect. Without further research, one cannot say that Malta fell to the French in June 1798 because of the infiltration of Freemasons and their conspiracy with post-revolutionary France, the Directory, and Napoleon.47 Still many European conservatives and some knights liked to believe so. The French contemporary historian and anti­ Jacobin, AbbS Barruel - who before 1789 had been a Freemasom himself and had access to many now lost papers - attributed the defeat of the Order to the undermining activities of the ‘sect with Dolomieu.. ., with Bosredon and the pusillanimous Hompesch’48 and the Austrian knight Charles Joseph Mayer de Knonau,49 and the anonymous author of an account of the fall of Malta (Denkwürdigkeiten)^ speak of a planned ‘revolution’ in June 1798. From the 1760s onwards Freemasonry played a major part in the island’s society and politics. The Processo Lante of April 1776 maybe the last real effort to fight Freemasonry - was a farce.51 Inquisitors Scotti and Caipegna never had a real chance to control this spreading movement, especially since the highest dignitaries of the Order were involved in it. Although they were accused of active participation m Freemasonry, various knights and also members of the Maltese nobility, such as Agostino Formosade Fremeux, Giovanni 14

Francesco Dorell, and the Marchese Diego Muscati, found no opposition on Rohan’s part.52 Officially the first Masonic lodge ‘St Jean du Secret et de L’Harmonie’ in Malta was installed on 30 June 1788 with the patent, which had been acquired from the Grand Lodge ‘of London’ .60 The patent was dated 30 March 1789. Perhaps the most important driving force behind the new lodge was the Grand Prior of Bohemia, Count Heinrich of Kolowrat,54 who wrote several letters to the London Grand Lodge to hasten acknowledgement and facilitate other admin­ istrative aspects. Count Kolowrat was a special protégé of the freethinking enlightened Emperor Joseph II who never acknowl­ edged the papal condemnation of Freemasonry in his territories. A very clear indication of the organization of this lodge is given in a letter sent to the Austrian Lodge ‘Zu den symbolischen Bergen’ (Innsbruck, Austria) dated 2 July 1788. It introduces the new Maltese lodge and is signed by the bailliff and grand cross of the Order Giovanni Battista Tommasi, who was later to become grand master (1803-05) when the Order had its headquarters in exile in Messina,5S as master of the lodge; Bailliff Charles Abel de Loras (deputy master); and the knights Count Litta (first supervisor); de Royer (second supervisor); and Ventimiglia (master of ceremonies).56 Therefore it is no surprise that a man like Cagliostro, a good friend of Bailiff de Loras’s,57 could manage to convince diplomats, members of the intelligentsia, and the circles of the salons, that he had very close ties with the Order. The structure of the Lodge ‘St Jean du Secret et de l’Harmonie’ originally reflected the structure and hierarchy of the Order. At first only members of the Order were allowed to become members. In 1789 it had ‘only’ about 40 knights as members,58 including Doublet, Rohan’s secretary. That the Grand Master was not in­ formed about such developments is very unlikely. One of the most common meeting places of this lodge was the palace of the knight de Sesmaisons. The Order itself had sowed the seed which later brought several of its members to discredit. Besides the role played by Kolowrat, Lincel, and Tommasi, a crucial boost to Freemasonry in Malta was given in the early 1780s by the installation of the new AngloBavarian langue.59 Many of the Bavarian knights were Freemasons 15

zind Illuminists, some of them being named in the ‘list of traitors’ which the knight Mayer de Knonau compiled in October 1798 while in exile with Grand Master Hompesch.60 For the final negotiations for the installation of the new langue in the spring of 1782, a delegation which included Count Manucci as the plenipotentiary of the Archduke, the Baron of Vieregg, and the staunch Freemason Baillif Flachslanden, arrived in Malta on 14 March.01 The master­ mind of the delegation was the close consultant of Archduke Karl Theodor, the Freemason and prelate (sic) Haffelin,62 while Baillif de Almeyda supported the delegation in Malta.63 Most of the negotia­ tions with Grand Master Rohan were carried out secretly behind the back of the Ordinary Council.64 Abb£ Haffelin would later play a decisive role in uniting the Anglo-Bavarian knights to vote for Hompesch as the new grand master. Both Baillif Jean Baptiste-Antoine de Flachslanden,65 who came from an old Alsatian family, and this somewhat mysterious character Haffelin had contacts with various European Freemasons, spiritists, and Illuminists. The Order of the Illuminists had been founded in 1776 in Bavaria by Adam Weishaupt (1748-82). Soon afterwards some Bavarian knights came in contact with the Illuminists.66 Haffelin visited Malta in March 1782 and was made a member of both the Anglo-Bavarian and the German langues of the Order.67 In the spring of 1796 when it was obvious that Rohan - who had suffered from a stroke since 1791 - would not live for a long time, ‘Commandeur Hoeffelin’68 was set for another visit to Malta,69 presumably to promote the claims of a suitable German successor. However, this was not the actual beginning of Freemasonry in Malta, which was certainly practised some decades before the installation of the ‘St Jean du Secret et de L’Harmonie’ lodge in 1788. A previous - later dissolved - lodge (‘Parfait harmonie’) seems to have been established on 13 February 1765. According to the files of the ProcessoLante, in the year ‘G.L. 5766’ (AD 1765) the knight of Malta T.C.F. de Lincel was entitled to erect a lodge in Malta by means of a decree issued by a certain ‘Master’ Beufier de la Lourie of Toulon. Although most of its members were knights, some others belonged to the Maltese nobility and even the clergy. Their meeting places were villas and houses belonging to their 16

members in Msida, Paola, Valletta, and Zejtun.70 There were even hints of an earlier lodge erected by some knights of Malta and some Maltese nobles, namely Agostino Formosa de Fremeux, Diego Muscali, Gaspare Maurin, Monsu de Bufferant, and Giovanni Francesco Dorell. This lodge did not seem to have had any direct Connection with the French masterlodge.

17

Illustration 4 Serafina Feliciani

However, it was not just Freemasonry which caused havoc with the old statutes and the monastic spirit of the knights as Mayer de Knonau liked to believe. Nearly all of the new streams of European ideas found their way to cosmopolitan Hospitaller Malta. Despite all this, the Order as an institution composed of members of old leading aristocractic families still attracted international interest in the Europe of the Ancien Régime. All this explains why there was nothing sensational in the close contacts and relations which a man like Cagliostro had with mem­ bers of the Order. The development of these contacts will be discussed later on.

18

Chapter 2

The Malta connection - A fantastic tale in the style of the Arabian Nights?

In the eighteenth-century, London and Paris were the most advanced centres of European avantgarde culture and spirit. The two cities were also the stage for the century’s most famous and notorious quack and charlatan, the Sicilian Giuseppe Balsamo or Conte Alessandro Cagliostro, as he styled himself. The circle of il divino Cagliostro included important personalities while the members of the Masonic lodges of the ‘Egyptian Rite’, which Cagliostro founded all over Europe, included scholars, noblemen, merchants, politi­ cians, clerics, and even members of the Order of St John, then still famous throughout Europe for its anachronistic role as the ‘police­ man of the Mediterranean’ and as a fierce defender of the Catholic Faith. Typical of the age’s spiritual climate, Cagliostro’s claim that he could be a son of the former Grand Master Pinto (1741-73) and the Princess of Trabezunt did not cause any scandal. Most probably, Cagliostro’s statement was only intended to give himself a sense of importance and mystery and to make himself ‘untouchable’. On several occasions, Cagliostro claimed to have visited Malta twice and to have received his final ‘European’ education there. This claim appeared both in the exhaustive (although incomplete) manuscript source of the Cagliostro trial at Rome - the ‘Raccolta di scritture legali riguardanti il processo di Giuseppe Balsamo detto Alessandro Conte di Cagliostro e di P. Francesco Giuseppe da S. Maurizio Capuccino, innanzi al Tribunaledel S. Uffizio di Roma’1 - and in the widely-read contemporary publication Compendiodellavita, edelle gestadi Giuseppe Balsamo denominate il Conte Cagliostro (Rome, 1791). The latter was an excerpt of the minutes of Cagliostro’s trial published by the priest Marcello. Unfortunately, by decrees of 4 May and 8 June 1791 given at the Minerva in Rome, most of the

manuscripts and papers belonging to Cagliostro’s circles and lodge were burnt.2 References to Cagliostro’s stay in Malta are given in numerous contemporary books and pamphlets, such as the popular Mémoire pour le Comte de Cagliostro .. . and the Réponse pour la Comtesse de Valois la Motte, au mémoire du Comte de Cagliostro, both published 1786 in Paris on the occasion of the diamond necklace affair,3 and the rare publication Confessions du Comte de C*** avec l’histoire de ses voyages en Russie, Turquie, Italie, et dans les pyramides (Paris, 1787). In the 1780s and early 1790s dozens of treatises, essays, and pamphlets circulated about the life or activities of Cagliostro. Many of them, such as Ma correspondence avec le Comte de Cagliostro (Paris, 1786) and the Echten Nachrichten von dem Grafen Cagliostro, aus der Handschrift seines entflohenen Kamrnerdieners (‘True information about Count Cagliostro, from the manuscript of his escaped servant’) (Berlin, 1786), claim to be first-hand sources. Since they do not differ much concerning the ‘Maltese episode’, they are therefore not all utilized here. Amongst the more reliable and well-researched publications there is Clementi no Vannetti’s Liher Memorialis de Caleostro (sic) (Mori, 1789). The scholar Vannetti who was secretary of the Accademia degli Agiati of Rovereto met Cagliostro at the end of September 1788 in the Italian city. The fragmentary information which Cagliostro gave about his birth and youth is as mysterious as it is vague. The version he gave and which was ornamented by his followers suggests that he grew up in Medina, the holy city of the Arabs, although he never got to know exact details of his parentage. When he tried to ask his servants about this matter, they gavehim to understand that this was a forbidden subject for discussion although he obviously had noble parents and distinguished forebears. It was later indicated to him that he was the son of Grand Master Pinto and a princess of Trabezunt who had been captured by the galleys of the Order and brought to Malta. Later the Grand Master set the Princess and her three-month-old child free and her parents then handed over the child to the Mufti of Medina for a proper education. It was certain - as Cagliostro later said - that his parents were Christians not 20

Muslims.4 In his Memoire (Paris, 1786) and his apologias against the accusations which followed the necklace affair and which were mostly drafted by his friend, Jean-Charles Thilorier, Cagliostro names four persons who looked after him in the palace of the Mufti Salahaym in Medina: his mentor, Althotas, then a man in his fifties and two black and one white servant. The name under which lie was brought up was Acharat. Cagliostro’s versions of his birth and youth vary slightly. When he was being interrogated on 30 January 1786 in the course of the necklace affair, thequestion of his place of birth cameup. Cagliostro answered:

T cannot say for sure if I was bom in Malta or Medina. I was always accompanied by my mentor and chamberlain, who told me that I come from noble descendance. According to the others, I lost my parents when I was three months old.’5 Although the Mufti tried his utmost to bring up his distinguished ward in an Oriental environment, the young man’s desire to see foreign countries was too strong. With his mysterious elderly friend and mentor Althotas, he travelled to some Oriental and Mediterra­ nean countries. It was this Althotas who taught the young Cagliostro the Oriental languages and all the mysteries of alchemy, the cabbala, and other arcane knowledge. After the group left Rhodes (the medieval residence of the ^nights of St John) for Cairo, strong winds caused them to drift to Malta. Other contemporary sources indicate that Cagliostro’s group embarked on aFrench ship which was bound for Malta? This supposedly took place in 1762 although Thilorier and other sources suggest 1766,7 which contradicts Cagliostro’s claim to have visited Malta at the age of eighteen. Although for ships calling from Oriental countries which were always suspected of harbouring the plague and other epidemics a 40-day quarantine was generally imposed, Cagliostro’s group were allowed to land after only two days. Cagliostro and Althotas were received with all honours by Grand Master Pinto and accommodated in his palace. To his great surprise, Cagliostro even saw Althotas wearing the cross of the Order over the 21

habit of the Brotherhood. Pinto ordered a knight, the Cavaliere d* Aquino of the distinguished house of Caramanico, to show the guests around. Together with d’ Aquino, Cagliostro was received by all the dignitaries of the island and the grand crosses of the Order. Pinto also gave them all the facilities to work in his laboratory. However, in the course of one of the experiments, there was an explosion which killed his beloved adviser. Cagliostro recounts the last words of Althotas: ‘My son! obey the Almighty and love your brethren. Soon the truth about all the knowledge which I taught you will prove right.”’ All the efforts and promises of Pinto - who seems to have known about his special ‘relation’ with the young visitor - to convince Cagliostro to stay, including posible promotion to the high ranks of the Order, proved fruitless. After three months Cagliostro com­ municated to Pinto his decision to proceed to Italy, Pinto directed d’Aquino to accompany Cagliostro to whom he also gave a con­ siderable sum of money and made him promise to visit the island again. Cagliostro and d’Arpino sailed to Sicily from where they crossed over to the Greek archipelago before returning to Italy. In Naples Cagliostro lived for a while in d’Aquino’s palace. Before bidding him farewell, d’Aquino gave Cagliostro letters of credit for the banker Bellone in Rome. In Rome Cagliostro soon became familiar with the Orders’ ambassador de Breteuil. Cagliostro’s further activities and adventures are not of great interest in the present circumstances. What is interesting is that Cagliostro claimed to have returned to Malta in 1766 and was again entertained by Pinto. This time he received invitations from and had dinner with most of the high dignitaries of the Order, including the future grand master, Emanuel de Rohan. Cagliostro’s story - all of it, actually - sounds very much like literary fiction. There are elements of biographies; fictitious and non-fictitious contemporary travelogues; cabbalistic and spiritistic literature; and contemporary fiction. Cagliostro was a great story­ teller but what did he know about Malta’s culture and history, beside its being the residence of the Order of St John? Remember­ ing his early education in a monk’s school, his story has some tempting ingredients. In fact his first travels and Maltese sojourn is reminiscent of StPaul’s visit as recounted in the Acts ofthe Apostles 22

(Chaps. 27 & 28). It was unfortunate winds which took Cagliostro to the shores of Malta, on a journey which also started on a Greek island. Cagliostro’s stay, like St Paul’s, lasted three months before he proceeded to Sicily and Naples.

23

Chapter 3

Interpretation and Legends

The Malta Connection - A Claim and its Rebuttal In 1786, after studying Cagliostro’s report about his birth, youth, and career, the Comte de Mirabeau, wrote: ‘The confessions of the Count Cagliostro resemble a tale from the thousand and one nights.1' Nevertheless the Sicilian’s claim of having been bom in and also visited Malta was readily believed by many contemporary and modem authors. The following selection of modem authors shows how this subject was treated, sometimes seriously, sometimes in a colourful manner more fitting a novel: Carlo Liberto,2 Claire Eliane Engel,3 Sir Harry Luke,4 Enzo Petraccone.5 Frank King,6 Francois Ribadeau Dumas,7 Rudolf Harms,8 Friedrich zu OppelnBronikowski,9 W.H.R. Trowbridge,10 Elizabeth Wheeler Schermerhorn,11 Pericle Maruzzi,12 Heinrich Conrad,13 Constantin Photiades,14 Denyse Dalbian,15 Raymond Silva,16 and Roderick Cavaliero.17 Even more recent authors include Philippe Brunet,18 VirginiaM. Fellows,19 Marcello Vannucci,20 A.J. Agius,21 and many others. Most of these authors regard it as a fact that Cagliostro visited Malta and found a friend in Grand Master Pinto, this ‘admirer of alchemy’.22 For example, Carlo Liberto wrote: ‘But if it is wrong [to believe] that Cagliostro was born in Malta, however it is true that he sojourned and lived in the island for some months. It is ascertained that, following his travels and his first daring feats in Sicily (fraud, extortion, betrayal), Giuseppe Balsamo did come to Malta in the company of a certain Althotas, who tried to train Cagliostro in the mysterious labyrinths of the supernatural, and one has to admit that the student learned quickly and diligently. It is also ascertained that in Malta, in the company of this colourful Althotas, Cagliostro was received and welcomed by the then Grand Master Pinto de Fonseca. The two conjurors

could not find a more opportune time to appear, since among the many pastimes, sacred and profane, which Pinto practised, there were those of occultism and alchemy.'-3 Despite all these claims and interpretations, solid documents concerning Cagliostro’s stay were never presented,24 but we are often faced by strange and bizarre theories and arguments. Without investigating further, A.J. Agius copied Sir Hany Luke’s hint that the National Library of Malta is in possession of a document by the Maltese eighteenth-century diarist Ignazio Saverio Mifsud testify­ ing to Cagliostro’s sojourn at Malta and his activities in a laboratory at the grand master’s palace.25 Agius, like Luke, significantly does not give the exact bibliographical source nor the exact date but vaguely indicates ‘Ignatius Saverio Mifsud, Manuscript Diary’,26 The reason for all this soon becomes clear. The paragraph in question in the diary reads:

Illustration 5 Grand Master Pinto de Fonseca

25

•For some months there has been lodging in the Palace of His Most Serene Highness a man who claims to be a chemist. This man was received by the afore-mentioned Highness and admitted to his lull confidence, being lodged in his Palace and maintained at his own expense, occupying the rooms surrounding the loggia of the fountain made by His Highness in the Garden Court. And the reason of all this is that he has announced his intention to concoct a certain elixir of life designed to keep man sound in health and strength and mind.’27 On the right side of the page, a later hand wrote down ‘II Conte Cagliostro’. This manuscript further quotes - and that is left out both by Luke and by Agius - that Pinto himself later ordered this anonymous charlatan out of Malta, presumably because he was disappointed with the results of the charlatan’s experiments. In fact, Pinto’s quest for alchemy was well-known throughout Europe,28 but the reference Mifsud gives dates to February 1754, when Cagliostro, alias Giuseppe Balsamo, was only 11 years old!29 Whichever nine­ teenth- or early twentieth-century reader discovered this passage in Mifsud’s diary and added T1 Conte Cagliostro’ must have been driven by a rich and tempting imagination.

Illustration 6 Reproduction of a manuscript (Ignazio Saverio Mifsud's ’Stromata’, 1754) in the National Library ofMalta which allegedly presumes a stay by Cagliostro in Malta

26

The most glaring example of an uncritical approach regarding the Sicilian impostor and Malta is to be found in François Ribadeau Dumas’ modem biography of Cagliostro. Here Cagliostro’s sup­ posed Maltese sojourn is the time when Giuseppe Balsamo was made ‘Conte Cagliostro’ ; indeed his first visit to Malta is regarded as the decisive and real starting point of his illustrious career. Pinto is described as the man who ‘made’ Cagliostro. Cagliostro con­ sciously used the Order’s spirit and structure to determine his further life:

‘GrandMaster Pinto.. .this over-ambitious man, opened up the eyes of th# young Balsamo to the wonders of occultism. He showed him the meaningl and truth behind the visual reality, he showed him the right methods and the ways to find the tools to be master of the powers and to use them in handling people, he showed him the belief on material and spiritual joy. In brief, he introduced him to and implemented in him the wish to gain all the relevant 27

knowledge and the desire to gain power through the use of the supernatural and the occult. Simultaneously Pinto explained to him that this century would have tire strong tendency to philosophy, to rationalism, to the dynamism in development of science, and, consequently, it would cultivate a strong scepticism. But there would be also a strong counter-movement which favours theosophy, astrology, alchemy. All this would be for the profit of spiritism. Spiritism would be shown new ways and developments. This movement had a strong base in St John, the beloved apostle of Jesus and master of the esoterics. It was St John who had received the Holy Word and had discovered the secrets.... Don Manoel ‘made’ Balsamo to Cagliostro. In the coinmandery Balsamo received the spiritual baptism and his ‘initiation’. ‘You have to be reborn’ (John, 3,7).”° This desire for fabulation and tempting interpretations in modem authors and biographers did not stop here. Like others, including Friedrich von Oppeln-Bronikowski, Dumas also accepted Cagliostro’s claim of having revisited Malta a few years later. According to Oppeln-Bronikowski, Cagliostro stayed another three months on the island, busying himself concocting elixirs to prolong life and re-create youth.31 However, like all his followers in these fantastic interpretations, Oppeln-Bronikowski gives no serious source. Even the most recent authors and ambitious biographers of Cagliostro, such as Philippe Brunet, describe Pinto’s Malta as the place where Balsamo ‘became’ Count Cagliostro (‘it was at the age of 23, in the Church of St John, that Giovanni Balsamo became Count Cagliostro’),32 and refer to him as Tallievo' or 'il figlio spirituale' of Grand Master Pinto.33 Cagliostro’s alleged Malta visits are presented as facts.34 But what are the facts concerning Cagliostro and his relations with the Order of St John and Malta? Three main facts regarding Cagliostro’s activities and sources of possible links with Malta of the Knights need investigation: (a) whether he was Grand Master Pinto’s son, (b) whether he carried out alchemical activities in Malta, and (c) whether, as a leading figure in the circles of spiritism and Freemasonry, he had close contacts with many members of the Order of St John.

28

Chapter 4 The Investigation

a) The Son of Pinto and friend of Althotas? Cagliostro’s supposed Maltese sojourns fact or seeking after Effect? What are the facts which suggest that Cagliostro’s visits to Malta did, at least, did at least take place? Was Pinto really the ‘master of theatre, who guided Caglios tro ’,1 as modem biographers of Cagliostro attest? That Pinto might have had children from a number of women cannot be denied. Various contemporary sources point to the belief that the Grand Masterhadhad affairs.2 Doublet gossiped about Pinto in his Mémoires,

‘d’avoir donne jusqu’à la mort, qui le surprit eu flagrant délit a l’age de quatre-vingt-dix ans, l’exemple du libertinage le plus scandaleux avec des femmes sans pudeur, exemple qui nefut que trop imité par une quantité de membres de L’Ordre de tout grade, et qui fut porté a un tel exces que plusieurs honnêtes Maltaisfurent indignement exiles du pays, parce qu 'ils avaient eu le malheur d‘ epouser de jolies femmes convoit'es pour des chevaliers riches et déboutés. However, as already shown by Claire Éliane Engel, there is no

indication that any princess of Trabezunt was captured by the Order’s galleys or corsairs in the early 1740s.4 It is even more far­ fetched to consider Cagliostro as the fruit of an affair of the Grand Master with the wife of the Maltese judge Massimiliano Balzan, as suggested by the late Chevalier Joseph Galea.5 But what might have led to this theory of Cagliostro being Pinto’s son? A contemporary source, Ludwig Ems tBorowsky, who, through his academic correspondence and his numerous acquaintances in the highest circles, was one of the best-informed men about Cagliostro and his trial, gives some interesting indications. In the mid-1780s he

started collecting and analysing every piece of information about the mysterious ‘count’ he could lay his hands on. Soon he got also interested in the question of Cagliostro’s parentage and place of birth. Besides the version about the princess of Trabezunt and Pinto, he recounts another slightly different tale which circulated during Cagliostro’s imprisonment in the Bastille and which was already published in the 1786 and 1787 issues of the Courier de I ’Europe. It was not a princess of Trabezunt but the daughter of the pasha of Medina who was brought to Malta and who gave birth to Cagliostro. Later the pasha sent the young Cagliostro to Pinto to educate him according to the Christian rite (sic). Pinto is supposed to have transferred a yearly pension of 300,000 livres for his son to a bank in Venice. Cagliostro is said to have shown close friends his certificate of baptism which apparently indicated that he really was the son of the late Grand Master.6Thisrumour and Cagliostro’s own claims in his ‘memoirs’ published in 1786 in Paris soon reached Malta. TheFrench representatives concerned with the investigation into the diamond necklace affair in 1785-867 made inquiries in Malta, while the Order’s representatives, on their part, must have contacted the French side. The answer from Malta was somewhat mysterious. During the period indicated by Cagliostro for his first appearance in Malta, c. 1760, a young boy of 10 or 12 years of age, was actually brought to Malta by a certain Sicilian priest named Puzzo. When the Order’s representatives checked this priest’s papers it emerged that he had travelled to Oriental countries. This priest died in Malta but the boy, who was named Michael and to whom Pinto awarded the cross of the Order, was sent to Rome, accompanied by the knight d’Aquino who is mentioned several times by Cagliostro. The Maltese inves­ tigators got the impression that Cagliostro was this ‘Michael’,R especially since the description of this boy and Cagliostro’s own features were very similar. Not much should be read into Cagliostro’s account that he was released from quarantine by the Grand Master’s personal intervention after just two days and which was very much doubted by ‘authentic’ visitors to Malta. The Grand Master - as Borowsky says - did have the right to overrule the rules of quarantine in special circumstances. 30

The contemporary author ‘detective’ of Cagliostro’s life goes on to report that, although it was widely known that Pinto had quite a few illegitimate children, he was normally not very generous to them, although there could always be an exception on whom he could have bestowed special financial favours. After this stunning - unfortunately anonymous and therefore not reliable9 - informa­ tion from Malta, Borowsky came to the conclusion that Cagliostro, while he was still in Sicily, probably got to know about this mysterious ‘Michael’ whose later destiny is not known and used it for his own story. His features, dark complexion, and Sicilian origin all helped him to adapt to this new mysterious identity. The identification of the mysterious ‘Michael’ with Cagliostro was later taken up in Michael A. Kusmin’s semi-realistic biography Das wundersame Leben des Joseph Balsamo, Graf Cagliostro (‘The wondrous life of Joseph Balsamo, Count Cagliostro’).10 According to Kusmin, Cagliostro’s first voyage from Sicily to Malta was made in 1766 in the company of the priest Puzzo and Cavalière d’Aqnino. D’Aquino is referred to as an old friend of Puzzo’s.11 After a sojourn in Malta, d’Aquino and Cagliostro left Malta for Spain (sic)12 while Puzzo remained behind. A blow against the possibility of Cagliostro’s ‘Maltese’ roots was given when, after the publication of Cagliostro’s Mémoire Jean Pierre Louis de la Roche du Maine, Marquis de Luchet published his Mémoires authentiques pour servir à l’histoire du comte de Cagliostro. The Marquis reports how the Order’s am­ bassador in Paris protested that Cagliostro’s account of his first visit to Malta was nothing but a fairy tale. His description of his landing, the reception by the Order’s grand crosses, his residence in the palace, and, especially, the sudden ‘metamorphosis’ of his Oriental friend to a knight of Malta were nothing but a fiction.13 Also very sceptical was the author of the Réponse pour la Comtesse de Valois la Motte, au mémoire du Comte de Cagliostro (Paris, 1786) whose arguments against a Malta sojourn for the young ‘Acharat’ or Cagliostro and the mysterious Althotas sound quite convincing: ‘The claim of this sojourn in Malta is absurd. Just as absurd is the assertion of having lodged in the palace of Grand Master Pinto. This event would 31

have created strong interest in an island so small as Malta where everyone knows everyone else. No one in Malta saw the old Althotas nor the young Acharat. Furthermore no one else witnessed the quick ‘metamorphosis’ of this sixty-year-old (sic) man dressed in Oriental clothes into a person decorated with the cross of the Order of St John. To wear this cross needs proofs of a legitimate birth, nobility, and the profession of the Catholic religion.’14 Again research has brought us into vagueness and lack of certainty. Another aspect which has created even more questions is the attempt to reveal the identity of Cagliostro’s friend and mentor with the Greek-sounding name of Althotas. The Roman inquisition in 1790 seemingly could not uncover the truth behind this episode; neither could the early biographers of Cagliostro.15 EnzoPetraccone, who had a good knowledge of the Roman archives, could find no clue.16 Frank King, however, identified this man with Kblmer, a merchant from Jutland,17 who had lived for some time inEgypt. After his return to Europe he taught old Egyptian magic rites to many spiritists. It was also said that he had spent some time in Malta in the time of Pinto. Cagliostro could have had knowledge of Kolmer’s adventurous life and used it to ‘invent’ his ‘Althotas’. Still there are a number of differences. According to Cagliostro, this Althotas had revealed himself as a knight of Malta and had died while conducting alchemical experiments in Pinto’s laboratory during their 1762 visit to Malta. The present author could not trace the death certificates of either Kolmer or of the cryptic ‘Althotas’ while no knight of the Order with either of these names existed in the relevant period. The documents only indicate that Pinto did have a laboratory in his palace and that it was sometimes used by foreigners.18 What about the names of the knights whom Cagliostro en­ countered in Malta? In fact there was a knight of the Order with the illustrious name of d’Aquino: Fra Luigi d’Aquino di Caramanico (1739-83) who came from a famous and highly-reputed Neapolitan family. FraLuigi was the brother of D. Francesco d’ Aquino, Principe di Caramanico who later became viceroy of Sicily. Although no mention of a passage by Luigi d’Aquino to Naples in 1762 could be discovered, Baron de Breteuil was indeed the Order’s ambassador in

32

Rome in the late 1760s. In 1786 and in 1790, when Cagliostro introduced them into the story, both Pinto and d’Aquino were dead and could not give their testimony. Pinto had died in 1773 and d’Aquino in 1783. Baron de Breteuil, whom Cagliostro claimed to have mèt in Rome, had himself died-in 1785. Nearly every other attempt to prove a real Malta sojourn for Cagliostro in 1762 and 1766 fails. The quarantine registers of the relevant years give no indication;19 neither do the Archives of the Inquisition at the Cathedral Museum, Mdina. That Cagliostro - as he alleged - was released from quarantine before respecting the due period is very unlikely: ‘No ship was allowed to disembark passengers, crew, or goods before she was granted pratique by the port sanitary authorities. Disregard of this rule involved the culprit in the death penalty if the ship came from an infected place... .No regard was paid to personal liberty, property, or international commerce... .’20

The strictness of Maltese quarantine was well-known, and no exceptions were made, not even in case of the most distinguished.21 Definitely invented was Cagliostro’s claim to have been invited by Bailliff Rohan on the occasion of his second Malta visit in 1766. Rohan was at that time a bailiff of the Order but he was not in Malta between 1763 and 1769 when he resided in France and Italy.22 In general these stories circulated orally or as quotations from the September and November 1786 issues of the Courier de l’Europe and other contemporary gazettes and pamphlets and stated that ‘a Maltese galley had captured a Turkish pleasure boat with several young ladies of distinction on board, one of whom - a princess of Trabizond - had exchanged hearts with Grand Master Pinto’ The whole story is reminiscent of a mixture of the then fashionable Oriental novels and the countless relationi and descriptions popular all over Europe which recounted heroic and adventurous exploits of the galleys of the Order. There might also be an echo of the popular mid-eighteenth-century novels featuring knights of St John by authors such as Abbé Prevost or the Comte de Caylus. The latter’s Contes des fées was indeed a very popular fictitious account of

33

gallant adventures and mysterious episodes. These tales were set in Oriental countries and exploited their exotic locations. Still audiences in Europe generally believed in Cagliostro’s Maltese connections.24 A typical example of this uncritical approach can be seen in the the anonymous pamphlet Les principaux evenemèns de. la vie merveilleurs desfameux Comte, de Cagliostro, published in 1786, where it is stated that: ‘We... believe... , that [Cagliostro] had been in Malta, exactly as he himself recounts.’25 This common belief that Cagliostro had at least visited Malta also featured inillustrations and engravings. Reference has already been made to the etching which was circulating in the late 1780s showing this voyageur'noble on his departure from Rhodes for Malta. Carlo Liberto in his collection of essays Siciliani illustri a Malta indicates that there was a print in France which shows Cagliostro in Pinto’s Malta,26 although the present author has been unable to trace it. In 1786 and 1787 other illustrations were published indicating Cagliostro’s supposed stay in the island. In most of them Cagliostro appears as a keen traveller.27 The caption of a copper engraving of 1787 says:

‘This man who looked so extraordinary and about whom much is spoken in various reports was educated in the city of Medina. Three servants and a mentor took care of him. The sciences in which he made the most notable progress were botany and medicine. His desire fortravelling finally led him to leave Arabia. After visiting Egypt, he turned to Malta where lie adapted the name “Count of Cagliostro”. He visited the Greek islands and from there he travelled to Naples and Rome. At the age of 22, he got married in Rome. He visited all kingdoms of Europe and, because he practised as doctor without charging any fees, he was received very well in every country.’38

In other contemporary illustrations, Cagliostro was even described as ‘Prince of Trabisonde’ .2Sl Modem investigations are complicated by the more than 200 years which have since passed and by the dearth of reliable docu­ ments. It is strange, however, that a contemporary critical essay seems to have been completely ignored by modem research. In 1791 François Emmanuel Guignard, Comte de St. Priest, a former knight of the Order who was in Malta in 1753 and 1754 to perform his 34

‘caravans’ and also visited the island several times again later, published an anonymous description of Malta known as Malthe. par un voyageurfrançaise. After St. Priest returned to France in 1754, he resigned from the Order and was absolved from his vows. In 1797 a slightly shortened and reworked version of St Priest’s book was published in Paris in the collection Malthe, Corse, Minorque et Gibraltar. At the end of his description of Malta, St Priest now added an essay based on his own research entitled ‘Cagliostro and Malta’ ,30 ‘This adventurer had played too great a role,... and that he came to Malta - as he claims in his mémoire is one of his lies.’31 Most of St. Priest’s information was obtained at first-hand although some of it was presumably taken from Cajetan Tschink’s critical review of Fr. Marcello’s excerpts of the minutes of the trial of Cagliostro in 1791 in Rome.32 Like Goethe, St. Priest also visited Palermo to find out the real family background of Cagliostro. What St. Priest learned should have finished all speculation concerning Cagliostro’s birth in Malta:

‘Cagliostro was not born in Malta: he never had relations with Malta. It is possible that he had visited the island, but his sojourn was not of any significance. He also did not keep any correspondence. Cagliostro was born in Palermo on 8 June 1743. His name is Joseph Balsamo. I have seen his mother, his sisters, and his relatives. His father was a merchant. After his death ... he was sent to the seminary of St Roch at Palermo.”3

St. Priest, like the Jesuit Father Marcello and the author of the Compendio, gives 8 June 1743 as the date of birth of Giuseppe Balsamo alias Cagliostro. However, baptismal records in Palermo give 2 June as Cagliostro’s birthday. The incongruity"is explained by the fact that both St. Priest and the author of the Compendio looked at the date of his baptism. As a novice in the convent of Caltagirone, Balsamo was employed in a pharmacy where he got his first contacts with alchemy and a knowledge of chemistry. After leaving the convent, he gave start to his illustrious, or better notorious, career by forging documents and stealing. According to St. Priest, it was in Messina and not in the Oriental countries that he met this mysterious figure Althotas,34 with

35

whom he started on his travels, in course of which they might have visited Malta. Of this, however, no proof exists. After the death of Althotas, about the causes of which St. Priest does not give any indication, Cagliostro went to Naples and to Rome, where he married the notorious Serafina Feliciani. St. Priest con­ firms that in the late 1760s the couple got involved in selling quack medicines, beauty waters, elixirs of life, and other dubious stuff (fl’eau des jeunesse’ and ‘vin égyptien")?* However, he does not state they sold these things during their second visit to Malta in 1766. According to the twentieth-century author Heinrich Conrad, who gives no sources, Cagliostro and his wife dealt not only in beauty waters, an acquit di gioventù,36 and elixirs to extend life but were also engaged in the business of prostitution in Malta in 1766.37 Another trustworthy contemporary critic of Cagliostro’s deeds was the anonymous author of the essay ‘Etwas über Cagliostro’ (‘Something about Cagliostro’), which was published at the time of the diamond necklace affair in the Viennese Journal for Free­ masons. In this essay Cagliostro’s connection with Malta was carefully scrutinized. The author proves to be very well informed about the situation in the island:

Illustration 8 Late eighteenth-century view of Valletta. 36

‘Cagliostro’s story resembles an unfinished novel. There are so many gaps which need to be filled to confirm the author’s claims. Many of the honourable persons whom he mentions in his story are dead. The present Grand Master of the Order of St John, the Prince de Rohan, did not live in Malta when Cagliostro maintained that he visited the island but was in Brittany. The knight of the Order d’Aquino, whom Cagliostro claimed to have visited at his death bed in Naples, did not die in Naples but in Malta.’3"

The author further refutes the plausibility of Cagliostro’s early release from Maltese quarantine: ‘ Quarantine obeys a strict law in Malta. No traveller whatsoever is exempt from it. Even the grand master has no right to interfere. In spite of all this, Cagliostro claims to have been released from quarantine after two days. ’39 After consulting a knight of Malta who was present at that time in Malta,40 the author questioned Pinto’s overwhelming hospitality to Cagliostro:

‘Rules of hospitality demand taking care of and supporting travellers. If Count Cagliostro had come to Malta, he would have been received like every other traveller. A reliable knight of Malta who was in Malta during Cagliostro’s supposed sojourn maintained that the whole tale was devoid of truth, but was all invented. Everyone who wanted to join the Order had to present legal and full proofs of nobility.’41

That there were investigations and inquiries about Cagliostro and his relation with the late Grand Master Pinto in France and in Malta was only to be expected. With the necklace affair, Cagliostro - although in this case he was more or less innocent - had found himself involved in bigpolitics. After Cagliostro had publicized his Maltese adventure in his Memoires and his Lettre . .. au Peuple anglais (1786-87), the ambassador of the Order in Paris immedi­ ately denied every element of truth in this tale with the French court.42 The ‘metamorphosis’ of Althotas to a knight of the Order was most strongly contradicted.

37

cniutatrc ti don£> on apart* Jb ¿i»er-rem&i£ r^ippartt, qu.'tl, a, itt ‘¿m cri-^ira^ta- dafw la. Vtlic' tiyi‘7. *r. urt, Got&&"riMi7 rjtn,pri^ UJttl*avb ¿¡rudspardculier dr-sorb ed>i.ea£ia>b. La,Botka.niqtL* «¿-la,-Midgtui&j'uj'-enl, lor Jci&tat+r atiii •■ulcwa, »«£,

¡¿.pl^t dt-surest son-poor, pou^-veyay er litifit, ymSif ¿t, ¿O/lAriur l*4rttb,i,

tXtsranr.lacAfaiter le^nr-dt

Illustration 9 Copper plate f1786) with portrait ofCagliostro and caption quoting a stay in Malta where he took the name ‘Comte de Cagliostro'

38

Illustration 10 Family tree of the Balsamo family (after a drawing by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)

That the French court started to inquire in other countries in the course of the necklace affair is also mentioned by Goethe. When the latter visited Palermo in April 1787, he had a long discussion with a local advocate, Antonio Vivona, who had been commissioned by the French to investigate Cagliostro’s family and descendance. This advocate showed him a detailed family tree of the Balsamo family based on careful research and the perusal of authentic papers and marriage records. Goethe immediately made a copy of this docu­ ment.43 Two years later, these minutes seemed to have been communicated to Rome to be used in Cagliostro’s trial.

39

b) Cagliostro’s Later Career Friend and companion of the greats of Europe ?

In Rome in the late 1760s Cagliostro met a ‘Prussian colonel’. This was none other than the impostor Agliata who had somehow man­ aged to get the ‘medal of honour of the State of Prussia’ which was to help him considerably in his future activities.1 Needless to say, even this medal was a fake. Early in the 1770s Giuseppe Balsamo changed his name to Count Alessandro Cagliostro. From then on he started insisting that this notorious charlatan Giuseppe Balsamo had nothing to do with the ‘noble Count Cagliostro’. This, however, is not the place to recount in detail the future life and activities of the famous and immortal ‘Conte Cagliostro’ ; the present publication is limited to Cagliostro’s activities in so far as they touch Malta and the Order of St John and its members. His activities as quack, charlatan, and grand master of various Masonic lodges of the Egyptian rite in the 1770s and 1780s took Cagliostro and his wife to Marseilles, London, Barcelona, Valencia, Cadiz, Lisbon, Strasbourg, Lyon,2 Berlin, Warsaw, Mitau in Kurland, St Petersburg, and several times to Paris. Other Maltese sojourns by Cagliostro and his wife are sometimes described both in contemporary sources as well as in modem accounts. In 1790 Ludwig Friedrich Borowsky - usually a reliable source - maintained that Cagliostro and Serafina Feliciani travelled to Malta in 1773 after Cagliostro had been sentenced for imposture in Naples. Giuseppe D’Amato mentions another visit to Malta in 17773 in the course of Cagliostro’s voyage to Cadiz and Lisbon: ‘in this year he travelled in a few months to Malta, Tunisia, Algeria, Tanger, Cadiz, Lisbon,.. .’.4 Such a voyage is neither confirmed in Cagliostro’s own writings nor in any other document. One of Cagliostro’s most remarkable successes occurred in the Alsatian metropolis of Strasbourg,5 where he contacted Cardinal Louis René Édouard, Prince de Rohan (1735-1803) soon after his arrival there. Doubtless these encounters with influential aristocrats and Freemasons, such as the Duke of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel6 40

and the Duke of Pietraperzia, helped him further to cultivate and implement his position in aristocratic and Masonic circles.

Illustration 11 Cardinal Louis de Rohan

A few words have to be said about Cagliostro’s familiarity with Cardinal Louis de Rohan. That Cagliostro knew about the Cardi­ nal’s lust for life and good-living is very likely. Some believed that the connection started because of the Cardinal’s passion for Cagliostro’s wife, Serafina. Indeed some contemporaries regarded Serafina as Rohan’s mistress, a fact which might explain the long sojourn of Cagliostro and his wife in Strasbourg.7 That Cagliostro used his young wife to establish contacts with distinguished, influential, and rich personalities was rumoured by various sources and is also repeated by his modem biographers. A similar case seemed to have happened in the late 1760s in Rome when an influential member of the Order of St John was the ‘victim’. During this period Cagliostro and his wife entered the circle of Fra Laurent 1e Tonnellier Baron de Breteuil, then ambas­ 41

sador of the Order in Rome.8 These contacts only became better known in the course of Cagliostro’s trial in Rome in 1790. When this trial started Breteuil had already died. A passage in the records’ seems to indicate that Cagliostro’s wife had been Breteuil’s maitresse for some time.10 According to the‘RitrattazionediSerafinaCagliostro fatta a Brienne’, in July 1787 Cagliostro’s wife was paid a pension by Breteuil for some time.11 Similar rumours were later spread about a relationship between Cagliostro’s wife and Bailiff Loras.12 According to Trowbridge, it must have been Breteuil himself who, in 1768, introduced Cagliostro to Cardinals York and Orsini.13 In Strasbourg in the summer of 1781 Cagliostro met again his old friend, the knight of Malta Luigi d’ Aquino. According to Cagliostro, d’Aquino had expressly travelled to Strasbourg because of him.14 D’Aquino informed all the dignitaries of the city how Cagliostro had been so warmly welcomed in Malta especially by Pinto himself.15 Contemporary sources confirm d’ Aquino’s presence in Strasbourg in 1781. This close friendship between Cagliostro and d’Aquino seems to have lasted for some time: when in the summer of 1783 Cagliostro was in Strasbourg and he got to know by a letter that d’ Aquino was seriously sick in Naples, he did not hesitate to go to his side and just made it to his friend’s death-bed.16 What are the facts behind this story ? Luigi d ’ Aquino di Caramanico did die in 1783, as Cagliostro indicated, but in Malta and not in Naples.17 The Caramanico family had doubts about the relationship between their dead relative and Cagliostro.18 Most of Cagliostro’s comments about his encounters and contacts in Strasbourg and Naples can neither be proved nor disproved completely . Cagliostro’s departure from Strasbourg was probably connected with one of his worst setbacks. When the famous Swedish professor of Oriental languages at theUniversity of Upsala and traveller Matthias Norberg (1747-1826) stopped in the city on his return from his Eastern journey he was brought in contact with Cagliostro, Cagliostro, who claimed to have lived so many years in his youth in Mecca and Medina, could not even understand nor speak one word of Arabic.19 In course of these travels Cagliostro sometimes used other aliases, such as ‘Marquis Pellegrini’, ‘Marquis de St Anne’, ‘Marquis Balsam’, or ‘Comte Phenix’, although that of ‘Conte Alessandro 42

Cagliostro’ seems to have been his favourite. When, during his interrogation in the necklace affair in 1785-86 he was asked for the reason of his change of names and identities, Cagliostro explained that it was all due to his wish to travel more comfortably incognito. The necklace affair itself finally did not actually harm Cagliostro much. He was summoned before Parliament on 30 May 1786 where he repeated his stories about his mysterious descendance and childhood.20 The protagonists of the trial were the notorious Jeanne de la Motte-Valois, who was the mastermind of the affair, Mlle, d’Oliva, Retauxde Vilette, and their ‘victim’, Cardinal Rohan. That knights of Malta belonged to Madame la Motte’s circle was an open secret.21 Cagliostro himself was unanimously acquitted and re­ leased from the Bastille on 1 June 1786. His innocence was admitted by nearly all persons involved in the trial. However, Cagliostro and his wife were ordered to leave Paris within a week and France within three. He could still keep his elegant but vague reputation of a noble voyageur, the role in which he wanted to be seen by European society. One can only guess when Cagliostro started to launch his claim to be of ‘Maltese’ descendance. The contemporary investigator of Cagliostro’s life, the Count of St. Priest, provides no date when he recounts how Cagliostro started to style himself as being immortal, as having been bom in Malta to a princess of Trabezunt and Grand Master Pinto, and as having travelled all the Oriental countries.22 This episode was certainly well-known in Europe when the necklace affair brought Cagliostro back into the limelight in 1785-86. Espe­ cially during his nine-month-long rather ‘mild’ imprisonment in the Bastille, then the prison of the noble, rich, and famous, wild specu­ lations were spread about his origin and previous life. In his essay Der enilarvie Scharlaian (‘The charlatan revealed’) which was published in 1787 in Frankfurt a. M., an anonymous priest main­ tained that Cagliostro was bom in Portugal. Even the notorious Countess la Motte in her Memoire at times declared him a Portu­ guese Jew, at times a Greek, and at times an Egyptian. The December 1784 issue ofthe gazette Berlinische Monatsschrift23 and the Venetian Nuovo Postiglione were also on the same track: ‘People who met him frequently agreed that Cagliostro must be a Portuguese Jew. His 43

incorrect use of the French and Italian languages and many other things lead to this conclusion.’24 According to the contemporary research of the German Prof. Eggers, which was published on 9 March 1787, an uncle of Cagliostro’s had testified that the count was nobody but the son of the Palermitan Pietro Balsamo and his wife Felicia Bracconieri.25 The father died soon after the child’s birth, while his mother and a sister were still alive. Rumours about this ordinary origin had already started the previous year. When the editor of the gazette Courier de I ’ Europe which was read ‘in every comer of Europe’ ,2ft Theveneau deMorande (1748-1803) who was paid by the French court to agitate against Cagliostro, accused him to be nothing but of ordinary Sicilian origin,27 Cagliostro did not hesitate to publish an open letter which was dated 6 September 1786. Not being too conversant with writing in French and Italian, Cagliostro obtained theassistance of the French author Jean-Charles Thilorier. Cagliostro wrote:

‘Imyselfhavenoideawherelwasborn. ... I speak the lingua franca28 and Italian only very incompletely. Mr Morande maintains that I am a Sicilian. That is wrong. He also maintains I was born in Naples. I only stayed for two months in this city in 1783.1 was a friend of the knight of St John Aquino, who died when I visited this city.... What does it concern the audience whether I was bom in Malta, Medina, or Trabezunt, whether I am a S icilian, a Calabrian, or, a Neapolitan?... ¡admit thatlamnotacountnoramarquis nor a captain. Maybe one day the people will get to know whether my status is above or beneath [whether I have the right to] the claimed titles. But the people cannot blame me for acting so, since I, like all travellers, tried to keep myself incognito.’29 On another occasion, he answered the accusations in this manner:

‘AU over Europe I called myself Cagliostro. Concerning this noble title, one should judge according my education and consider the honours which I received from persons so distinguished as the Mufti Salahaym, the Sherif of Mecca, Grand Master Pinto, Pope Rezzonico [Clement XIII], and other European greats. Isn’t therefore my title rather an underestimation than an exaggeration?'30

44

A few months earlier Cagliostro had been much clearer. In his Mémoire pour le Comte de Cagliostro (Paris, 1786), Cagliostro proposed a version which was very similar in structure to the one he was to present four years later during his trial at Rome. The 1786 version, however, lacks many of the later spicy details and impli­ cations, when he said that he had proceeded from Egypt to Europe, stopping in Rhodes and in Malta on the way. Apparently bom in mysterious circumstances in the Muslim holy city of Medina, it was in Malta - a place which he felt somehow familiar - that he first witnessed European habits and traditions. Although Pinto prom­ ised him a knighthood and promotion to the high ranks of the Order, he insisted on moving on, especially since his faithful and intimate friend and mentor Althotas had died in Malta. Already here Cagliostro presents this mysterious Althotas as a knight of Malta and a master of alchemy.31 In the September, October, and Novem­ ber 1786 issues of the Courier de l’Europe there are attacks on Cagliostro and on his claims to noble descent. Theveneau- de Morande’s accusations were repeated by the Dutch Gazette de Leyden (25 September 1786). This controversy between Cagliostro and Theveneau de Morande and the debate about Cagliostro’s childhood and his supposed sojourns in Malta in 1787 finally became the subject of the ironic pamphlet, Procès comique & instructifpendant entre lefameux Cagliostro & le Sr. de Morandes. 32 However, the belief that Cagliostro had been bom in Malta was older and must have already been in circulation before the necklace affair and the 1786 publications. As in so many cases, the track leads to Lyon, then not only a ‘veritable stronghold of Freema­ sonry’33 but also the headquarters of the langue of Auvergne and the seat of a considerable contingent of young novices of the Order.34 It was in Lyon that the Loge de Malte, connue aujourd’hui sous le titre distinctif de Loge de St. Jean de Jérusalem (‘Lodge of Malta, known today under the special title of Lodge of St John of Jerusa­ lem’)35 was sited. It was its members, the knights Louis Gaspard de Tulle de Villefranche, Joseph de Gain de Linars, and Jean Baptiste Sabin Michel du Bouchet, together with the conventual chaplains Pemon, Bouchet, and Muguet, who wrote the joint work L’Ordre de Malte dévoilé. In Lyon Cagliostro established his first contacts 45

with the Freemason and baillif of the Order Charles Abel de Loras and other knights.36 Following Cagliostro’s 1784 visit to Lyon,37 the wealthy merchant and Freemason Jean Baptiste Willermoz (1730-1824) got to know about the famous visitor’s alleged Maltese origin. From the begin­ ning Willermoz was very suspicious of Cagliostro’s claims.38 After he got fresh information from Paris about the necklace affair, in November 1785 he wrote tofellow-Freemason Carl, the Landgrave of Hessen-Kassel (1743-1836):3’

‘Cagliostro has been imprisoned in the Bastille since August. One does not know anything about his descendance. Some believe that he is a Jew, that he is pretending to be of Maltese descent. One says that he cannot write nor read. No one who met him had seen him writing or reading. He dislikes every interrogation .. . and hides his descendance and his age....’40

Indeed Cagliostro had, on the occasion of his arrest and interroga­ tions in August 1785, insisted to be a ‘natif africain maltais’.i[ Unfortunately the direct answer of the Landgrave of Hessen Kassel to Willermoz’s letter has been apparently lost. That Landgrave Carl was informed about Cagliostro and his activities in detail is more than presumable. A few years before Landgrave Carl had hosted for many years another famous sorcerer and charlatan of the century, the mysterious Count de Saint Germain.42 This colourful figure was said to have presided over a secret society of alchemists and cabbalists together with Grand Master Pinto.43 Up to a few time ago no proof could be found that Cagliostro spoke about a supposed ‘Maltese’ descendance and connection before his appearance in Lyon in 1784. However, it seems that from the beginning of his career he promoted his ‘Arabic’ background. In 1781 the Hofrat Johann Joachim Christoph Bode, who his whole life long took an interest in illuminism, Freemasonry, and also the life of Cagliostro, wrote;‘He does not mind being held as an Arab or an Egyptian. Sometimes he indicates that he was bom at the Red Sea and describes the pyramids as the place where he acquired his knowledge.’44 So, right from the beginning of his career, Cagliostro claimed to have travelled in the Orient.

46

Moreover the ‘Maltese’ connections seemed to have formed an integral part of the life and personality of il divino Cagliostro from the beginning. Presumably leaked by Cagliostro himself, rumours about his connection with Malta and the Order had started circulating at least from his early days in Strasbourg and were soon twisted by some of his enemies. The very first written reference to Malta is found in an anonymous affiche that circulated in Strasbourg in August 1781. This short curriculum vitae reads: ‘Count Cagliostro is a merchant in drugs from Orvieto in Malta. He arrived in Malta in Turkish habit; he was a charlatan in Toulouse and Rennes, an impostor in Russia, a mentor and an adventurer in Strasbourg,.. .andSaveme... .’45By then, three main aspects of his career had already appeared: Malta is presented as the first stage of his illustrious and notorious career; he arrived on the island (from the Orient?) in Turkish habit; and he occupied himself in Malta making elixirs in a business somewhat connected to alchemy. About his claim to be Pinto’s son, nothing is heard as yet. Already in May of that same year, an experienced French traveller - one of the few who had really visited Sicily, up to the 1770s more or less off the beaten track of European travel - decribes Cagliostro as a Sicilian: ‘For all travellers who made the Giro through Italy, [Cagliostro] is apparently of Sicilian descendance.’46

Illustration 12 Giovanni Battista Lusieri, View of Palermo (c. 1782-99) 47

c) Alchemy, Sorcery, and Superstititon ‘No one should dare to practise any kind of sorcery, or be involved in it, or imitate any form of it; anyone found guilty of practising any of these sorceries, or commissioning such practices to others, will be condemned to row on the galleys for five years. The same punishment will be meted out to those goldsmiths and silversmiths who dare receive or work any kind of metal for alchemy, without earning any exemption of the penalty on the plea of ignorance.’1

This extract from statutes of the Order of St John indicates how strictly the practice of alchemy and sorcery was forbidden in Malta. Still this ‘business’ and belief in miraculous healing and sorcery must have been deeply ingrained in Maltese society, as can be seen in various examples. Most of the practising healers and sorcerers until the end of the eighteenth century on the island were Muslim slaves or Turks.2 That a man like Cagliostro would have found a ready market for ‘drugs from OrvietoinMalta’3or Teaudesjeunesse’ and ‘vinegyptièn’,4 as claimed by many contemporary sources, cannot be questioned. This belief in superstition and sorcery in Malta was not limited to the common people. The upper classes knew of the most recent theories and ideas in Rome or Paris. Many of the members of the higher circles of the Order in the eighteenth century had long lost their zeal for their statutes and their vows. Pinto himself seemed to have followed the habits of a long list of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century absolutist monarchs and more or less secretly promoted alchemists and sorcerers. Doublet, who as Grand Master Rohan’s secretary had good access to the archives and private documents, wrote: ‘Mais si dans ces divers occasions le grand maitre Pinto a mérité des éloges, cela ne saurait le faire absoudre de torts graves qu’ on a eu à lui reprocher:... 3. d’avoir dissipé des sommes immenses soità larecherche de la pierre philosophale... on assure qu’il a sacrificié plus d’un million d’écus pour courir inutilment près cette chimère. ’! Pinto’s interest in alchemy and spiritism is referred to in other more or less reliable contemporary writings.6 That Pinto still stuck

48

to the old alchemical search for the philosophers’ stone must, however, be questioned. Interestingly none of Cagliostro’s critics nor those who were sceptical of his claims of being Pinto’s son ever questioned the existence of a laboratory for alchemy in the palace in Valletta.7 Since the existence of this laboratory seems to have been quite well known in Europe, the recent publication by Virginia M. Fellows of excerpts from a deciphered manuscript which seem to reveal Pinto as the mastermind and leader of a circle of twentythree specially chosen young noblemen to learn ‘the secrets of the cabbala, the mysteries of divination, the science of alchemy, and other areas of arcane practice’ is somewhat surprising, to say the least.8 This claim was made by the Scottish nobleman and traveller William Baird who visited Malta in 1770 together with his friend Ian Douglas. These two claimed to have participated in the meet­ ings of this group which were always presided by the old Grand Master himself. Pinto’s instructions to his students and the subject of his lectures seem to confirm the claim that Cagliostro received his final education in alchemy and the cabbala in Malta. Fellows quotes the Grand Master as reported by Baird:

‘When you leave this isle, you will be skilled and skilful and very formidable practitioners of the hermetic arts. Nothing happens by accident, except disasters. If you are here tonight, it is because you were drawn by that great emanation of God that attracts all who desire wisdom. It is because of willingness to learn that you have been chosen to receive the teachings of the most benevolent wizards (magi) of yore. Over the next few years all of your questions will be answered.... When you leave Malta you will understand why events happen or not. You will be able to shape happenings toward the good of humanity.’’

All this sounds quite similar to Althotas’s words spoken on his death bed. Baird’s account of his encounter with Pinto becomes even more more fascinating when it mentions that the Grand Master claimed to be ‘at the same level’ with one of the great figures of contemporary European alchemy, the ‘Great Count Saint Germain’ who had achieved considerable fame in the cabbalistic arts and had attracted a large number of followers towards the middle of the eighteenth century. 49

Illustration 13 The Count of Saint Germain

According to his contemporaries, Saint Germain spoke all the European languages together with Sanskrit and Arabic. His critics called him a Portuguese Jew who had made himself a master in the art of imposture. According to his many influential friends and followers, including Louis XV and his mistress Madame Pompa­ dour, he was more than 300 years old (sic) and could make artificial diamonds. In 1759 Saint Germain left France and retired to the court of the Landgrave of Hesse with whom he furthered his studies in the occult sciences. According to Baird, Pinto and Saint Germain together seemed to have set up a secret society with members from all over Europe which was later threatened by the founder of the Order of the Illuminists, Adam Weishaupt, ‘who attempted to infiltrate and dominate the ranks of Pinto’s and St Germain’s secret society for sinister political purposes’.10

50

All this seems to reflect the new Zeitgeist which was marked by heterogeneity and great uncertainty. The new phenomenon of secret societies intermingled desires for political reform, questions about society and social attitudes, a new approach to morality, and anti-clericalism. On the other hand, there was still the conflict with the archaic conservative and mystic form of alchemy. As for Cagliostro, it is quoted that Pinto had a very low opinion of Cagliostro and ‘considered him a fraud, and claimed that he had stolen alchemical secrets from his deceased friend [Althotas]’.11 The story told here about Cagliostro’s Malta visit is therefore different from the other versions. Cagliostro is said to have met Althotas, ‘a person of singular dress and countenance and accompanied by an Albanian greyhound’, while walking one day by the sea. Althotas invited him to his residence, a place furnished with everything necessary for the practice of alchemy. Finally Althotas invited Cagliostro to accompany him to Malta. In Malta, they were received by Pinto who was ‘avidly experimenting with alchemy’.13 After the death of Althotas, Cagliostro left for Europe to, as Pinto said, ‘defraud people with his false Egyptian Myster­ ies’ The Grand Master ‘promised that these would be exposed in time’, Fellows claims to be quoting from the deciphered version of Baird’s voluminous manuscript, which was later inherited by his relative John Baird, although there are some serious questions about its authenticity. In fact some statements are definitely false and even a eighteenth-century Scottish traveller, unfamiliar with the situation in Hospitaller Malta and its statutes, could hardly be so mistaken to describe a ‘Grand Duchess of Malta’ (sic) and ‘arbiter of local society’ who refused to receive Pinto because of his ‘reputation for fearful mystical powers’.14 Even more irritating ar* the stories which Baird reported about Pinto. That Pinto was boffld at Lamego on 24 May 1681 to Miguel Alvaro da Fonseca and Andi Teixeira Pinto and had died on 24 January 1773 in the palactu Valletta was then well known throughout Europe.15 AccordinnB Baird, however, there was a mystery about the Grand Master’ldH

51

‘Although his name was known throughout Europe, very little was known about the man himself. Pinto was a master alchemist on equal footing with the Count of SaintGermain. And, like the illustrious Count, Pinto’s pastand identity are points of much dispute. Some claim him to be the son of a wealthy Venetian merchant (sic) who learned the magical arts while travelling throughout Asia. Others were of the opinion that Pinto was the illegitimate son of a certain Spanish prince and had learned magic and mystery in Africa.’16

That such rumours, not recorded anywhere else, were spread about a grand master of the Order of St John and a descendant of a high aristocratic Portuguese family is most unlikely. Similarly unlikely and far-fetched is the report which Baird gave of Pinto’s death: ‘The most disquieting thing about the rumours of Pinto were those of his death. Some said he was executed (sic) for heresy while teaching in Spain. Others said he died of a strange fever in Egypt. Many of the natives considered Pinto to be a vampire who could not die.’17 This belief of Pinto as an immortal vampire seems to recall various Maltese folk tales which cropped up because of Pinto’s old age - he died at the age of 92 - and his ‘endless’ reign of almost 32 years (1741-73). In fact, as a result of a bizarre joke engineered by some knights against the unpopular Grand Master, a Parisian newspaper had announced Pinto’s death in 1758.18A11 in all, the excerpts of the manuscript published by Fellows have to be taken with the utmost care; indeed, contrary to what the editor claims, they do not seem at least entirely - to derive from an original contemporary source.

52

d) Freemasonry While the previous stories of sorcery and Cagliostro’s stay in Malta still remain somewhat vague and undocumented, his connections with Freemasonry are clearer and actually documented. Cagliostro ’ s contacts with the bailliffs of the Order Charles Abel de Loras, Camille de Rohan, and Jean Baptiste-Antoine Flachslanden; the knights Maisonneuve, Antinori, de Brat, Tulle de Villefranche, and de la Salle; and the chaplain of the Order Onorato Bres are incontrovertibly documented.1 Except for Bres, all the above-mentioned persons were Freemasons. Cagliostro’s involvement in the Euro­ pean Masonic circles has been investigated several times. Some of these studies, such as those by Gagnidre2 and D’Almeras,3 are of direct interest to this study. Such works, however, only touch obliquely Cagliostro’s connection with members of the Order. In the early 1770s Cagliostro started looking for closer contacts with the prosperous and ‘fashionable’ European Freemasonry. He mingled existing rites with the then extremely popular amalgam of Oriental mysticism, cabbalism, and the latest theories of hypnosis, psychology, and Mesmerism. His extraordinary success among the high nobility as well as the fame he achieved among the common people show that he managed to hit the nerve of the time. Although this is not the place for a detailed picture of late eighteenth-century Freemasonry, it is necessary to describe in brief how this movement infiltrated Malta and how it was used by Cagliostro. When Cagliostro entered the European scene, Freemasonry had changed. The first lodges erected in France, Spain, and Germany in the first half of the eighteenth century, although deriving many patterns from English ones,4 maintained an aristocratic and con­ servative character, while late eighteenth-century Freemasonry was more ‘bourgeois’, anticlerical, and politically liberal. This ‘bour­ geois’ class retained a strong affection for and fascination with noble and ancient rites. For most European nobles, however, Freemasonry was still a fashionable pursuit, a medium of ‘ secret communication ’, and ‘object of interest’. According to Alain Blondy in his study about the Order of St John in the late eighteenth century, Freemasonry than still held an attraction for European high society and, subsequently, 53

for the members of the Order. This fascination could express itself in the contemporary discussion of class, economies, and philosophy. ‘It was a fragile glue to disguise the diversity of situations and occupations.’5 To say that the Masonic lodges had great direct and immediate power on politics in France, Italy, and the German duchies as well as in Malta is to exaggerate the matter. It is more correct to speak of an indirect influence, although this can be even said with more justice of the ideas of freethinkers, anti-clerical writers, or the encyclopaedists. Once received in this ‘in-crowd’ of society and politics, persons like Cagliostro could find a ready audience for their projects. Therefore Cagliostro’s claim to be of noble origîh was a rather necessary aspect of self-styling to lend support to the air of mystery around him and bolster his untouchable position. It is interesting to note that rumours about his close - but at the same time vague and never exactly expressed - connections with Hospitaller Malta were intensified and gained common acceptance in the 1780s when Cagliostro was experiencing his biggest successes in France by erecting new Masonic lodges which adapted the socalled ‘Rituel de la Maçonnerie Égyptienne ' or ‘Egyptian rite’. That Cagliostro, as the ‘architect’ and later head or so-called grandmaster of these lodges of the ‘Egyptian Rite’, was conversant with at least the most important contemporary literature about Freemasonry and its history is more than a supposition. It may be at this time that he must have came across how the Order of St John had been instrumentalized in the fashioning and historical legitimization of Freemasonry. Perhaps the best-known publication about the subject is the Discours prononcée à la reception des franc-maçons by the Eng­ lish Freemason André Michael Ramsay. Ramsay had lived in France since 1710 and soon became a friend of Fénelon and Philippe of Orleans, the pretender to the French throne. By promot­ ing Philippe of Orleans, Ramsay became a member of the Order of St Lazarus and, for more or less opportunistic reasons, converted from Protestantism to Catholicism.6 Although the circulation and open reading of the Discours was soon forbidden by the powerful French minister Fleury, its spread could not be stopped. By 1740 it 54

had already been secretly published in Paris with the title Discours d’un Gr. maître dans la Gr.-Loge assemblée solemnement. Of great present interest are some passages about the origin and investiture of Freemasonry. In an attempt to combine historical tradition, legend, and certain aspects of conservatism and European identity, Ramsay wrote:

‘During the time of the first crusades to Palestine ... several princes, noblemen, and citizens assembled and vowed to restore all the Christian churches in the Holy Land. They promised to restore or re-erect these churches in the same manner as they had been built before. They agreed about several old symbols and signs which were taken from the religion. That was done to distinguish themselves from the infidels and Saracens. Only to those vowed not to reveal them were these words communicated. Therefore this holy promise was no bad or unworthy oath, but a most noble band or tie to unify the Christians of all nations in a kind of brotherhood. Some time later this our Order (sic) tied itself very closely with the Knights of St John. This unification happened according to the example of the Israelites, when they were building the second temple, when they held trowel and mortar in one hand and the sword and shield in the other.’7

It did not take long for this interpretation of history and the legends it created to find acceptance in other contemporary works dealing with Freemasonry. This historical connection with the knights of St John found its way into the procedure of acceptance in the French Lodges. A passage of the standard book of constitu­ tion of De la Tierce quotes the so-called 69th and 70th question of the ceremony: ‘Question: To whom your lodge was dedicated? Answer: To St John. Question: Why? Answer: Because in the time of the war in Palestine the Knight-masons (Chevaliers maçons) unified themselves with the Knights of St John of Jerusalem.’8

To imply even deeper connections with the Order of St John could therefore only be of considerable benefit for Cagliostro and must have fitted ideally in the picture of how he wanted to have his 55

legitimation and basis of power understood. Another reason for Cagliostro’s idea to style himself as being in close contact with the Order and Malta might be that, in fact, some very distant members of the Balsamo family of Palermo had been members of the Order of StJohn. Perhaps the best-known was Giovanni Salvatore Balsamo who in 1618 became grand prior of Messina? In general it was a fashion for Illuminists, spiritists, as well as Freemasons in the late eighteenth century to carry out pseudo­ scientific research on the past, especially on the medieval period and the history of the Christian military Orders and to draw parallels with modem times. It became essential to insert fragments of the ‘heroic’ chlvalric past and specimens of ancient prophecies and

sermons in the statutes and laws of the secret societies. Cagliostro did not hesitate to instrumentalize those episodes and prophecies for his own sake. During his trial he recalled one especially bizarre but significant episode which had happened to him. In 1780, while on his way from Poland to Strasbourg, he had stopped in Frankfurt where he met Anselm Robert and Friedrich Hermann, the heads of the local Illuminists who had showed him their secret archive in a cellar. Amongst other important items, the Germans presented him with a pledge written in human blood. Twelve grand masters of the Knight Templars had solemnly vowed to fight all despotic monarchs. The first attack was aimed at the house of Bourbon (sic), but Rome was also not to be left out.10 This experience of the use of mystery, the inflation of one’s importance, the occult, and personal cult were put to good use by Cagliostro when he founded ‘Sagesse triomphante’, the mother lodge of his ‘Egyptian rite’, on 26 December 1784 in Lyon.11 Cagliostro’s illustrious career met its sudden and dramatic end in Rome where some of his connections with the Order of St John became better known, although the full background and various details of his stay in Rome are still uncertain. Even the very motivation for his going to Rome on 30 May 178912 has remained a mystery up to now. It seems that after he had sullied some of his reputation in France and Germany, he played all his cards at once and tried to start a new beginning exactly where his most formid­ able enemy, the Roman inquisition, had its headquarters. He must 56

have been conscious of the dangers lying in wait for him there but he seems that he believed his connections and influence would save him from any trial and imprisonment. That his influential and highlyreputed Roman friends were many, cannot be doubted. When, in his trial, he was asked the motivation for his coming to Rome, he answered the Eternal City seemed most suitable for his plan to transform Egyptian Freemasonry to an institution similar to the Order of St John.13 This might have been just a convenient or evasive answer, but that Cagliostro tried to re-establish closer contacts with the Order cannot be denied. He had already contacts with the bailiffs Charles Abel de Loras; Camille de Rohan (1737-1816), nephew of the reigning grand master; de Brillane, formerly plenipotentiary extraordinary to the court of Portugal and grand prior of Aquitanie; and Laurent le Tonnellier, Baron de Breteuil, since his former stays in Rome, Lyon, Strasbourg, and Paris. Together with the former knight, the natural scientist Deodat de Dolomieu, Prince Camille de Rohan was a member of the Parisian ‘Loge des Neuf Soeurs’,14 which had been founded by Jerome de Lalande. Another member of the lodge was the famous painter and artist Jean Pierre Louis Laurent Houel(1735-1813),who had visited Malta in 1770 and 1776-77 and had been received by Grand Master Rohan during the latter occasion.15 Before Bailliff de Brillane was nominated ambassador of the Order to Rome, he had carried out the same duties in Paris.16Cagliostro had first met Brillane in Paris, while Brillane’s predecessor in Rome, Baron Breteuil, also knew the Sicilian.17 It was mostly in Paris, Lyon, and Strasbourg that Cagliostro came in contact with other knights who occupied themselves with Freemasonry and followed his activities with interest.IR Between 1780 and 1783, with some long interruptions, CagliosLro stayed mostly in Strasbourg where he got to know not only Cardinal Louis de Rohan, the grand nephew of the Grand Master, but also with the knights and Freemasons de la Salle1’ and Jean BaptisteAntoine Flachslanden. The knights Antinori, de Maisonneuve, and de Brat and the young Maltese scholar and conventual chaplain Ouorato Bres (1758-1818) were other members of the Order with whom Cagliostro became familiar in Paris and Rome. The extent of Cagliostro’s knowledge about the supposed sym­ pathy of Grand Master Rohan towards Freemasonry cannot be 57

:

Illustration 15 Grand Master Emanuel de Rohan (1775-97) 58

proved. Roderick Cavaliero believes that Rohan had been admitted to a lodge while he was living at the court of Parma i n the mid-1750s20 but he gives no sources. Gould’s History ofFreemasonry11 quotes an early nineteenth-century letter by the British Freemason Waller Rodwell Wright which maintains that Rohan was a Freemason ‘but policy and the prejudice of the people prevented him from making a profession of it’ ,22 Even in this case no definite sources are given. John Webb is even more courageous and maintains that Rohan became a member of a Masonic lodge in Parma in July 1756.23 That the court of Parma, under Prime Minister Guillaume du Tillot, Marchese di Felino, became one of the Italian centres for political and cultural tolerance and attracted various freethinkers is a well-known fact.24 Virieu de Beauvoir, a knight of the Order of St John and a close consultant of Du Tillot’s, was the driving force behind the setting up of a library in Parma which preserved one of the biggest collections of contemporary enlightened and anti­ clerical literature.25 Although Rohan kept close contacts with the court ofParma until his death,26 no document has yet been found which proves that Rohan was himself a Freemason.27 The connections between Cagliostro and the knights of St John should explain some of the events leading to the tragic end of il divino Cagliostro.

Illustration 16 Ferdinand von Hompesch, the last grand master of tht Knights of St John in Malta 59

Chapter 5

All Roads lead to Rome Cagliostro in Rome 1789-90 Much more concrete than Rohan’s supposed links with Freemasonry and his knowledge of Cagliostro, but also far from exhaustive, are the sources dealing with Cagliostro’s activities in Rome in the summer and autumn of 1789. It did not take long for Cagliostro to become the centre of secret seafices held in Villa Malta on the Aventine.1 Bailliffs de Brillane, de Loras, and Antinori also attended the meetings of the Egyptian Lodge which Cagliostro had established secretly in Rome? According to this rite, emphasis was laid not only on the traditional feast-day of St John the Baptist, as in various rites of traditional Freemasonry, but also on the cult of St John the Evangelist. For a time it really seemed that Cagliostro was trying to adapt his lodges in Rome to a more or less orthodox Catholic religion with the rather utopian intention of getting them acknowledged as real religious Orders, like the Order of St John or the Teutonic Order.

Illustration 17 Jonathan Skelton, Veduta di Roma con il Tevere (c. 1750)

Although at first the Conte tried his utmost to work in secret, some of his prophecies and sermons during the Lodge’s seances and meetings were soon spread around. In fact, there is a remarkable difference between his former activities in France and Germany and his actions in Rome. In spite of suggestions by Loras andMaisotineuve, Cagliostro hesitated to associate the lodge more closely with the ‘Les Amis Sincerds’ Lodge, which included mostly French diplomats, students, and artists living in Rome. When Loras, who had arrived in Rome at the end of 178 8,3 invited him to attend the solemn gathering of the French lodge on the anniversary of the nativity of Saint John the Baptist, Cagliostro refused,4 for reasons one can only speculate about. Was he eager not to lose the reputation and exclusivity of his own lodge or was he simply afraid of the spies of the Holy Office and therefore tried not to get involved too much? However, he still attended seances and spiritistic meetings. In late eighteenth-century Rome, Cagliostro’s prophecies about the fall of the Bastille and about the pontificate of Pius VI being the last onecould not have been kept secret. Cagliostro was particulary considered suspicious and dangerous owing to his perceived involvement with the Illuminists and Freemasonry. As soon as the Inquisition in Rome got notice of his stay, it started to investigate. Cagliostro’s efforts to establish contacts with members of the Order seem to have found a ready response. An interesting and oftenquoted letter by Cagliostro’s friend Charles Abel de Loras to Grand Master Rohan, dated June 1789, indicates that Cagliostro really wanted to settle in Malta:

*. . . Count Cagliostro has been here for a couple of days. I have renewed my company with him and now 1 am so familiar with him that he will certainly share secrets with me he won’t definitely tell to anyone else. Besides his knowledge of chemistry which is the base of his learning, he is a Freemason of all grades and founder of a rite which unifies all secrets in itself. The mother lodge of this system is in Lyon. She seems very generous, dis­ tributing considerable resources to her daughter lodges, allowing every member only what he himself achieves, and providing them with a good pension. This extraordinary man, tired of a vagabond life and persuaded by my suggestion, would be quite ready to settle in Malta for the rest of his life, if Your Highness deigned to promise him free asylum and the protection of 61

Your government. No expense would be incurred on his behalf. This proposal seems to me honourable as well as useful. Therefore I did not hesitate to communicate this secret to you.’3 Grand Master Rohan must have certainly known about Cagliostro’s mysterious role in the famous affair of Marie Antoinette’s diamond necklace, particularly since his relative, Cardinal Louis de Rohan, had been a chief victim. Moreover the Grand Master was already in considerable embarrassment owing to his relationship with the Curia because of his ‘enlightened’ Awocato del Principato, Dr Gio. Niccolb Muscat,6 and knew very well the consequences of hosting such a persona non grata and demurred with an answer. It is questionable whether Cagliostro really in­ tended to settle in tiny M al ta, a place much too limited and restricted for Cagliostro’s 'business’, or did Loras exaggerate, gratified as he was by his friendship with such an ‘extraordinary man’? Or was Cagliostro just trying to keep several options open? At the same time as Loras was writing to Malta, Cagliostro’s secretary, the Capuchin François Joseph, drafted a Memoriale to Paris on behalf of his master: ‘With the admiration and love that he felt for the French nation and the respectforitslegislations and august representatives, Alexander de Cagliostro ventured to submit to the Assembly in Paris, which was striving to restore their liberty to the French people and its original splendour to the first kingdom in the world, that he desired to be allowed to return and pass the rest of his days in a country whose glory and welfare had always been dear to his heart.’7

Whatever Cagliostro’s real intentions, his close relationship with Bailliff Charles Abel de Loras - until 1787 Rohan’s secretary and still a very close advisor of the Grand Master - was becoming more and more unbearable. Cagliostro openly cultivated this friendship and, in his letters to European dignitaries, referred to the Baillif as his ‘figlio Loras' .8 In his role of‘Grand Kophta’ of his lodge and making full use of his contacts, Cagliostro went so far as to promote Loras as the next ambassador of the Order in Rome.’ The Order’s am­ bassador in Rome, Bailliff Brillane, also frequented Cagliostro’s 62

seances. That Brillane should be removed from his post because of the bad service he was giving was an open secret. Although Loras had a supporter in Cardinal de Bemis, the influential French ambas­ sador in Rome, Pope Pius VI opposed Loras’ appointment as the Order’s ambassador in Rome, according to what Cardinal de Bemis wrote to the French ministre des affaires étrangères Armand-Marc Comte de Montmorin-Saint-Heren (1750-92) in Paris. Pius VI favoured Prince Camille de Rohan as the Order’s new ambassador, even though it is likely that he knew that the Prince was also a Freemason. When Grand Master Rohan finally proposed. Prince Camille as ambassador to Rome, Cardinal Bemis wrote to the Comte de Montmorin in Paris: ‘Since it is so, it would be useless for M. de Loras to try and enlist the support of all the European governments in his favour. But he will remain, for a while, in Rome, to watch developments and try to get round Prince Camille.’10 It was only when he realized that he could not manage to change the situation by interceding with Grand Master Rohan, Pius VI, or de Bemis, that he consulted his friend Cagliostro. The latter still felt powerful enough to write to Grand Master Rohan’s nephew, the Cardinal Louis de Rohan in Strasbourg: ‘Be assured that the interest of your family and the happiness of Prince Camille himself are bound up with the execution of the explicit and formal order we are giving you to use all your power and influence in this cause. Compel Prince Camille therefore to do all that is necessary to secure the appointment of our son de Loras in his place.’11

This intrusion into the internal affairs of the Order not only brought antipathy against Cagliostro himself but weakened de Loras’s position. The events of the French Revolution in the summer of 1789 and the resultant social upheaval greatly alarmed the Curia and the Inquisition in Rome. A considerable number of French refugees, noblemen, and members of the bourgeoisie, some of them Free­ masons, also came to Rome. Many of them were of ‘suspicious’ political and religious character and the situation in Italy got more and more tense. Not a few of them later proceeded to Malta.

63

The Roman Inquisition soon turned on Freemasons, Illuminists, and freethinkers of all kinds. Even slight ‘connections’ and friend­ ships caused various intellectuals and dignitaries to be investigated. On 27 December 1789 the French Academy near Santà Trinité dei Monti was the object of a raid. For a long time the Inquisition had suspected the Academy as the centre of a lodge (‘Les Amis Sincèrés’ ) mostly frequented by French students. The head and mastermind of this lodge was the French painter Augustine Louis Belle. Upon interrogation, Belle reported that his lodge was in close contact with other lodges in Paris, Naples, and Malta. Indeed it was known in Rome that various members of this lodge were also members of the newly-erected ‘Secret et Harmonie’ Lodge in Malta, as can be confirmed by contemporary monographs on Cagliostro.12 Also known was the exchange of letters between Rome and Malta concerning matters relative to Freemasonry.13 Among the papers and documents found in Belle’s position there was a letter to the Malta lodge with the address ‘M. le bailli de Loras, maréchal de L’Ordre’.'4 The Curia ordered Monsignor Ranucci, the governor of Rome, to arrest Cagliostro. It is not known if it was Belle who indicated where Cagliostro could be found. Cagliostro was captured and arrested that same night,15 together with his personal secretary Father François Joseph, a Capuchin monk of the convent of the Marais in Paris and a native of Saint Maurice, Switzerland. Before he took holy orders, he had been known as Hyacinthe Antoine Roulier. Cagliostro and Father François Joseph were imprisoned in Castel Sant’Angelo. By order of the Pope, Cagliostro’s wife was confined to the monastery of Santa Appolonia. Serafina’s comments about her husband would subsequently figure very prominently in the accusations against Cagliostro. Letters implicating de Loras and other knights were not only found at Belle’s but also in the possession of Cagliostro and of his secretary. Cagliostro’s various letters to Cardinal Louis de Rohan, the correspondence with the lodge of Lyon, as well as two letters by Baillif Loras to Cardinal Bemis and by Cardinal Rohan to Cagliostro would all form part of the material used in the Cagliostro trial the following year.16 The news of the imprisonment of other persons and new and farreaching investigations brought quite a few knights of the Order 64

especially those 'partisans de Loras'l7-to discredit.18 The Cagliostro affair came like a bolt out of the blue and all of a sudden many of these ‘subterranean cellars and cloaks of culture and society’, as Goethe put it, were brought into the light. An eyewitness, the Frenchman de Pisancon, in a communcation to his friend Deodat Dolomieu, de­ scribed how this affair ‘drew the attention of the whole city of Rome’ from the very beginning.19 Even men of letters and intellectuals, like the poet and author Carlo Castone Tone de Rezzonico who only had loose connections with Cagliostro’s circles, ended up being prosecuted.20 Cagliostro and Rezzonico had first met in Trento in December 1788.21 Rezzonico was named by Cagliostro in his trial as one of his followers, a declaration which ultimately ruined Rezzonico’s career. Later, in an attempt to get away from Italy, Rezzonico, who had met Grand Master Rohan at the court of Parma in 1756, applied to become a member of the Order and travelled to Malta in 1793.22 On 30 December Cardinal Bemis informed the Comte de Montmorin: ‘Three days ago Count Cagliostro and his wife were arrested and taken, the one to the Château St. Ange and the other to a convent. The charlatan, who is more celebrated than he deserves to be, was permitted to enter Rome, last spring, at the keen solicitation of the Archbishop of Trente (sic). Little is being said about his activities here. But it is alleged that he has been holding secret Masonic meetings, which are proscribed by a bull of Benedict XIV, and that, at these meetings, he thought to introduce, by means of supersti­ tious ceremonies, the ideas of the German and Dutch sect of Illuminists.’23

Presumably asked by Loras to use his influence to help in this case,24 Cardinal Bemis concluded otherwise: ‘It would be very imprudent of me to interfere directly or indirectly in the affairs of Cagliostro and his confident, Father Joseph.’25 That this affair was watched carefully by European diplomats is not surprising. The position of Cagliostro’s intimate friend, the Baillif de Loras, by now must have appeared especially shaky. On 2 January 1790 Loras dispatched a letter of apology to Grand Master Rohan;26 However, the situation in Rome remained tense and un­ certain. In February 1790 Comte de Montmorin wrote io Cardinal 65

Bemis: ‘I will not be surprised if Baillif de Loras will be caught in the trap of the Cagliostro case.’27 Another man who watched the developments in Rome very carefully was the natural scientist, traveller, author, and former knight, Deodat de Dolomieu (1750-1801).28 Dolomieu had met Cagliostro personally in Rome in the autumn of 1789 and he was not fascinated by the man at all. The rational anti-mystical Dolomieu described Cagliostro as one of the most mediocre charlatans he ever had encountered: ‘A man without esprit, without culture and rhetorical abilities. It is unbelievable how a man like him could play such an important role and could have so many followers.’29 Although Loras and Dolomieu were both Freemasons, they had

been bitter enemies for many years. In fact, they broadly re­ presented the two parties of the new generation of knights. Loras still kept to the aristocratic and elitist way of thought, while Dolomieu’s political tendencies clearly favoured anti-clericalism, a constitutional monarchy, and theocracy. Their moral and political positions were profoundly contrasting. Even while still a knight of the Order in the 1770s and early 1780s, Dolomieu had been the decisive force in the Club de Feuillahts, a group which favoured a constitutional monarchy. Dolomieu left Malta and the Order after being accused of conspiring against the Order30 but retained an interest in the internal affairs of Hospitaller Malta. Only two days after Cagliostro’s imprisonment, Dolomieu delightedly wrote to the Sicilian scholar and antiquarian Cavaliere Gioeni: ‘Cagliostro has been imprisoned because he and his assist­ ant, a Capuchin, had tried to setup the sect of the Illuminists in Rome. It is said that they elected Baillif Loras as the head of the branch.’31 However, here Dolomieu is not correct. Like many others, Dolomieu jumped on the rumour that Cagliostro tried to install himself as the head of the Order of the Illuminists. Those rumours have been accepted uncritically by various modem writers: ‘It is quite certain that Cagliostro was connected with the Illumines and financed by them. The nature of the connection is not so clear.’32 Only a few months after Cagliostro’s imprisonment a real Illumi­ nist, the German J. Johann Christoph Bode (1730-93), refuted this theory in an anonymous treatise. 66

There is no documented proof of any deep involvement by Cagliostro and Bail 1 if Loras in the movement of the Illuminists.33 This subject had already been discussed in the Essai sur la secte des Illuminés (Paris, 1789) by the Marquis de Luchet. On 9 January 1790 Loras, in a letter to Cardinal Zelada, bitterly accused his ‘enemy’ Dolomieu of blackmailing him and of dragging him deeper into the affair.3