St Agatha and the Attack of 1551

The earliest evidence of the church of St Agatha comes from the 10th of August 1414, when Federico de Bondino bequeathed 5 florins to the fabrication of this church. The church stood, as it still does today, in a prominent location of Mdina, just inside the city’s innermost and third gate. In fact, on several occasions, it has been used as a locality marker at a time when street names were practically non-existent. In a late 17th century report it is asserted that the church altarpiece had been made in 1553. 

Reference was possibly being made to a votive painting, now in the Cathedral Museum, commissioned by Don Giuseppe Manduca, portraying St Agatha sitting on a throne with Don Giuseppe, who may have been the rector of the church in that year, kneeling at her feet.

Don Giuseppe Manduca was a member of a Maltese noble family and a Canon of the Cathedral of Malta. In 1548, after returning from Rome, he was appointed parish priest of Zebbug. It is said that Canon Manduca commissioned the panel reputedly as an ex-voto for the deliverance of Mdina in the historical event when a sizeable armada under Sinan Pasha and Turgut Reis laid siege to the city before proceeding to depopulate Gozo in 1551. As related by Giacomo Bosio, historian for the Order of St John, St Agatha purportedly appeared to a cloistered nun, instructing her to persuade Don Giuseppe to carry the saint’s marble statue, now in the Rabat church of the saint, processionally to the walls of the city, after which the enemy unexplainably retreated. One may not believe in the saint’s miraculous intervention, but that the procession actually took place is documented. The statue itself was mounted on the fortifications of the city.

In 1551 Sinan Pasha and Turgut Reis landed with a large contingent of some 10,000 men, and having surveyed the new fortifications around Birgu and Mdina, proceeded to devastate the whole of Gozo. They carried away with them into slavery almost the entire population of some 5,000 men, women and children, although some 700 able-bodied men managed to sale down the walls of the Citadel to safety; 40 old men were also spared and a few of the better-off Gozitans succeeded in buying their own safety. This massive depopulation left a yawning vacuum in the smaller island, thirsting for hands to work the excellent arable land. This attracted both foreigners- mostly from Sicily- as well as Maltese who went with their families in their hundreds, especially from the areas around Zejtun, Zurrieq, Zebbug and Qormi. Migration also took place in the opposite direction as surviving Gozitans preferred the relative safety of the Maltese bastions. The net effect was that it took about a century for the Gozitan population to settle to the original 1551 profile.