Bidspirit auction | [HISTORY] - [Pontalier Tallamey Michele

[HISTORY] - [Pontalier Tallamey Michele de, attributed] - Between Malta And Biserta: A Wounded Commander’s Account Of The Naval Battle Off Syracuse, 26 June 1625 - Autograph or contemporary manuscript relation in Italian describing the naval engagement fought on 26 June 1625 between five galleys of the Order of Malta and six galleys and galiots of Biserta, near Muso di Porco, off Syracuse. Manuscript on paper, 4 pages (paginated 213–214), written in a fluent seventeenth-century cursive hand, evidently once forming part of a larger collected volume or dossier. Some browning, folds, and light marginal wear, but in all an appealing and entirely legible survival. A rare and powerfully immediate first-person relation of one of the many violent encounters that opposed the fleet of the Order of Saint John of Malta to the corsair forces of the Barbary coast in the early seventeenth century. The text records the action of 26 June 1625 off the Sicilian coast, near Syracuse, and unfolds as a direct narrative of combat: the sighting of the enemy squadron, the tactical decisions taken at sea, the exchange of artillery, the disorder of close engagement, the attempted boardings, and the mounting toll in dead and wounded. The account is of particular interest for its attribution to Michele de Pontalier Tallamey (or Tallamé), identified as the general of the five Maltese galleys. Far from being a dry administrative report, the manuscript is animated throughout by the voice of a man writing from within the event itself. The commander presents his own decisions, observes the conduct of the action in detail, and dwells on the severe wounds he sustained, giving the narrative an urgency and authenticity rarely encountered in naval documents of the period. What survives here is therefore more than a record of a single Mediterranean skirmish. It is a document poised between official military relation and personal testimony, preserving not only the fact of the engagement but also the psychology of command, the rhetoric of honour, and the brutal material reality of galley warfare. The text vividly evokes the world of the seventeenth-century Mediterranean, where Malta, Sicily, and the North African regencies were bound together by a continual cycle of raid, reprisal, and open battle. Manuscripts of this kind are intrinsically scarce, and especially desirable when they unite a precise historical event, a named commander, and so strong an eyewitness character. In the present case, the appeal is heightened by the dramatic tone of the narrative and by the author’s insistence on his own bloodshed and endurance, lending the piece an almost memoir-like intensity. A striking and evocative naval manuscript, of clear historical and literary force: a surviving eyewitness account of the battle off Syracuse in 1625, in which the armed confrontation between Malta and Biserta is seen through the eyes of the wounded commander who led it.” • > This lot is located in and ships from the UK. An export license is required, and we will request it on the buyer's behalf. Import duties and taxes in the destination country are the buyer's responsibility.