ISSUE 6·2007 Patrolling society's borders: slavery, apostasy and the Inquisition Carmel Cassar & Paul Sant Cassia Walter Benjamin once famously remarked that we write books we wish to read them. Not being able to read them, as they have never been written, we write them. In the case of history, we write books perhaps because we wish someone had then written an account of what we now wish to explore. Lacking that, we write such books for the people of, and from, the past At least we can give them a voice their contempordIies and time had denied them. Imagine that as historians we were to be offered an opportunity to b, presented with a mass of undreamt of data from, say the Malta National Archives. Let us take the period when the Order of St John ruled Malta between 1530 and 1798 as an example. We are sure that each one of us could imagine an ideal text, which would shed light on some particular aspect of their research. One could even imagine writing a history of unwritten histories. It is precisely when we begin to pose these types of questions that we realize only too uncomfortably that the mass of data that we possess deriving as they do from legal records, notarial archives, and other written sources, rich as they are, clearly deal with matters that concerned the economy, the elire, trade, booty, the church, family properties, and such like information. These are all very important, but let us imagine some hypothetical text that could have been useful to highlight the life and times of the mass of the population, or even of some particularly underprivileged group of Maltese society. One immediately thinks of slaves. They were clearly the most underprivileged group in Maltese society, they were on the margins, their lives were apparently 'nasty, bmtish and short'.l Yet they were central for the economy, both in their capture and in the labour they performed, and by the end afthe sixteenth 7'" century, a mere two generations after the knight)! set foot in Malta, they constituted some ten percent of the popUlation. §acra milttia A representation of a Moorish slave who served on galleys We know very well that, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, Malta was a slave-based society. We know that slaves were obtained from corsairing and coastal raids, and to a certain extent, where and how they were utilized. But the sources are silent on a huge number oftopics. For example, we do not know the precise number of slaves. Godfrey Wettinger, whose recent monograph devotes 600 pages of written text on the theme, provides some clues to their role within the economy, and also discusses how they were integrated and freed (baptism, manumission, and so on).' In a more recent publication, Wettinger has suggested that the numbers of slaves varied from five hundred in the early sixteenth century to perhaps over three thousand in the early decades of the eighteenth century - a not insubstantial proportion of the total population) Other areas have been touched but need to be looked into in more detail, like the role of slaves as an important source for magic, divination and other popular cures in which the masses of the population Cf. Thomas Hobbes in Leyiathan [first published 1651] {Harrnoudsworth. 1968 edition). 2 A detailed account ofslavery in Malta can be fQund in the monograph by G. Wettiuger. Slavery in the islands a/Malia and Oozo ca. (Malta, 2002). See also his more recent 'Btack African Slaves in Malta' > iu S. Mercieea (ed.), !",fedilerranean Seascapes (Mait.1, 2006) 3 Wettinger (2006), 65. 55