Studying historical landscapes: the cabreo and related archival sources from Italy and Malta (XVI-XIX Century)

The Order of St. John in Malta, from the XVI to XVIII Centuries, played an important institutional role in Europe's modernised social structure and political scenario. Its geographically-dispersed presence and prolonged history structured a Johanniter identity linking a political network of relationships based on the distribution of power. Across Europe and on the island-convent, the 'administrative nodes' of commanderies and agricultural estates, highlights the Order's attentive significance of possessing land as a crucial resource for economic benefit. This demand encouraged landscape recharacterisation and management systems - including administrative records, especially cabrei and legal documents - that ensured property value and economic sustainment. Although Italian and Maltese landed properties are of different geographic and juridical natures, their continued transformation throughout the Order's period and by subsequent rulers - the British in Malta and the Italian States in the XIX Century - created a sequence of interlinked elements and patterns that formed a landscape palimpsest. The Order's presence on the islands' and continent's regions, as occurred likewise with the British and Italian rulers, formed a social structure defined through political relations of the Order, sovereigns, ecclesiastics, and noble jurisdictions attributing in land holding a means for State control. Comprehending land and people, accentuates studies of archival histories in particular that of the Order of St. John highlighting therefore the need for in-depth and correct studies of records and institutions. Studying different, yet interrelated sources through a multidisciplinarian approach permits a deconstruction of a landscape using methods like the retrogressive approach to analyse aspects of continuity and transformation. In this methodological article we aim to demonstrate an introduction to landscape analysis achieved through studies of archival sources from XVI to XIX Centuries. Through comparative discussion of the Order's commanderies and Malta's agricultural estates, this approach intends to pin point methods towards multi-perspective pictures of past landscapes.