Malta

Malta is both a real island in Casper Gutman’s history of the Knights of St. John and the hinge of his story about the jeweled falcon. Its grant by Charles V comes with conditions that make the island’s political status inseparable from the bird: Malta is given to the Order, but a falcon is owed to the Emperor each year, and the island is to revert to Spain if the Knights leave it. Gutman presents the arrangement as the origin of the priceless gift at the center of the novel’s larger pursuit, while his accumulation of archival references gives the tale the texture of documented history without removing its uncertainty.

Grant and Conditions

After Suleiman the Magnificent drove the Knights from Rhodes in 1523, Gutman says, they settled in Crete. They remained there for seven years. In 1530, they persuaded Charles V to grant them Malta, Gozo, and Tripoli. The grant was conditional rather than absolute: the Order was to pay an annual tribute of one falcon, acknowledging that Malta remained under Spain, and if the Knights ever left the island, it would revert to Spanish possession. They could neither give nor sell it to anyone else.

Those terms make Malta more than a setting in Gutman’s account. The annual bird is a token of political subordination, while the restrictions on leaving, transferring, or selling the island define the grant as a continuing obligation. Gutman turns that small, formal tribute into the point from which the extraordinary jeweled falcon story follows.

The Origin of the Jeweled Falcon

Gutman argues that the Knights’ wealth made an extravagant expression of gratitude plausible. He describes the Order as enriched by spoils taken in its wars against the Saracens: gems, precious metals, silks, and ivories, which he calls the cream of the East. In his telling, the Knights answered Charles’s modest annual demand not with a live falcon but with a golden bird covered from head to foot in jewels from their finest stores in Asia.

The contrast is central to the story’s appeal. The tribute required by the grant is a single bird each year; the first year’s payment, according to Gutman, becomes a lavish object made from the Order’s accumulated riches. The falcon thus carries two meanings at once: it is the formal token owed for Malta, and an exceptional work of wealth and gratitude that exceeds the political bargain that supposedly occasioned it.

Archives, Claims, and the Bird’s Route

Gutman insists that he is drawing on more than a popular legend. He points to the Order’s archives in Malta, which he says survive from the twelfth century onward, though not intact, and to three references that he believes can only concern the jeweled falcon. He names an oblique reference in J. Delaville Le Roulx’s Les Archives de l’Ordre de Saint-Jean and a clearer statement in the unfinished supplement to Paoli’s Dell’ origine ed instituto del sacro militar ordine. These citations serve as the documentary scaffolding for his account, but the varying degrees of certainty in them remain visible: one reference is indirect, another supposedly unmistakable.

In Gutman’s version, Grand Master Villiers de l’Isle d’Adam had a foot-high jeweled bird made by Turkish slaves in the castle of St. Angelo. It was sent to Charles in Spain aboard a galley commanded by a French knight of the Order, named Cormier or Corvere. The vessel never delivered it. Khair-ed-Din, whom Gutman identifies as the admiral known as Redbeard or Barbarossa, seized the galley and took the falcon to Algiers. Gutman cites a letter from the French historian Pierre Dan as support for the bird’s presence there for more than a century, before its reported removal by Sir Francis Verney, an English adventurer associated with the Algerian buccaneers.

Gutman’s account openly preserves gaps rather than concealing them. He acknowledges that Verney’s family memoirs say nothing about the bird and that Verney was apparently penniless when he died in a Messina hospital in 1615. He nevertheless maintains that the falcon went to Sicily, and says it later belonged to Victor Amadeus II after he became king in 1713. Gutman links it to a gift for the king’s wife after his abdication and marriage in Chambéry, invoking the historian Carutti’s Storia del Regno di Vittorio Amadeo II as his authority. The route from Malta to Sicily is therefore presented not as an uninterrupted chain of proof but as a series of claims whose uncertainties Gutman acknowledges while continuing to assert the bird’s passage.

Narrative Significance

Malta’s importance in Gutman’s narrative lies in how a binding political arrangement generates a story about a singular object. The island’s annual tribute supplies the falcon’s historical premise; the Order’s wealth explains, in Gutman’s account, why a routine payment could become an extravagant jeweled gift. From there, Malta becomes the starting point for a disputed history that stretches across Spain, Algiers, and Sicily.

The story also makes documentation part of the object’s allure. Gutman names archives, books, historians, rulers, and places, but repeatedly distinguishes what he treats as established from what he admits is uncertain. His Malta narrative therefore offers apparent historical solidity and visible evidentiary gaps at once. The island anchors the falcon’s origin, while the falcon’s uncertain journey turns that origin into a legend that can be argued over, pursued, and valued precisely because it has never become fully secure history.