Page:A History of the Knights of Malta, or the Order of St. John of Jerusalem.djvu/577

Rh No sentence of death was recognized in the code, but if a knight were guilty of a crime so heinous as to require such a penalty he was stripped of his habit as a preliminary measure, and then being no longer a member of the Order, he was handed over to the civil power, and treated like an ordinary criminal. The records of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries mention several instances of capital punishment which had been inflicted in this manner on quondam members of the fraternity. The method most usually adopted for carrying out the last sentence of the law was l.orrowed from the Turks, and consisted in fastening tip the condemned criminal in a sack, and throwing him alive into the Marsa Muscetto. The application of torture was not expressly authorized by the statutes, but, at the same time, it was nowhere forbidden, and the criminal records show that it was resorted to very frequently for the purpose of extorting confessions from suspected persons. No rank was so elevated as to save a prisoner from this cruel test. It will be remembered that during the second siege of Rhodes the chancellor D’Amaral was subjected to the question in order to elicit a confession of traitorous correspondence on his part, and that this was by no means a solitary instance may be seen by a study of the criminal documents now in the Record Office at Malta.

The eighteenth division of the statutes is devoted to an enumeration of the various acts forbidden to the brotherhood, and the punishments which were to follow their perpetration. No member was to make a testamentary disposition of more than the one-fifth part of his property, the remainder reverting to the public treasury. lie was never to become a partisan in the quarrels of secular persons, whether princes or private individuals. He was not to interfere in the administration of justice by interceding for an offending brother, lie was not to wander from his commandery, or priory, so as, in the words of the statute, “to make a vagabond of himself.” This regulation prevented members from leaving the precincts of their own commanderies or priories, except on good cause shewn, and then only with the written permission of the commander in the case of a simple knight, of the grand-prior in the case of a commander, and of the Grand-Master himself in the case of a grand-prior. Any person connected with the Order