My Internship at the Courts and Tribunals Archive

Claire Bugeja

My internship at the Banca Giuratale, offered by the Friends of the National Archives and sponsored by the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library Malta Study Centre, involves the cataloguing of the Consolato del Mare fond. The Consolato del Mare was a maritime tribunal established in Malta in 1697 by Grandmaster Ramon Rabasa de Perellós y Rocafull (1697-1720). With the coming of the French Napoleonic Empire in 1798, and the ousting of the knights from Malta, the Consolato was halted for a two-year period. The Consolato was reinstated when the British forces came to Malta and drove out the French occupation, and it continued running up until 1814, when it was suppressed and the Commercial Code replaced it.

During 2022, the majority of the many series within this fond were successfully catalogued. In the first half of the year, the first series of the Acta Originalia was concluded, covering the years 1697 to 1798, and the second Acta Originalia series, covering the years 1800 to 1814, was started and finished. In the latter half of the year, the four Testimoniali series, the Registri delle Sentenze, Registri delle Manifesti, and the Registri delle Depositi were also fully catalogued, totalling to around 267 boxes of loose bundles and 60 volumes this year.

The cataloguing is done on Google Sheets and follows the DACS (Describing Archives: A Content Standard) international standard, in accordance to the rest of the vHMML online repository. Examples of fields included in this catalogue are the binding dimensions of the volume or bundle, the languages found in the items, the typology of the documents, the features that might be present within the item, and also the item condition. It is interesting to note the political shifts that can be seen throughout the years simply from the items themselves, especially the rise of the French Republic, which can be seen in the later bundles of the many series through the sudden appearance of the slogan ‘Egalité, Fraternité.’ With regards to the languages found, one can note the internationality found on the Maltese Islands during the period of time the tribunal was active, with a wide variety of European languages like Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, English, French, Russian, Armenian and Greek, as well as languages from beyond the European border, like Arabic, Ottoman Turk, and Hebrew. These are seen alongside the ever-present Italian and Latin, which were the languages of the Maltese court.