Initial plans merely dictated the general boundaries within which each of us was to work which, by and large, have been respected in what is being presented. But certain leads to hitherto unexplored material, especially at the Vatican Secret Archives, led the first author to unearth a number of documents which were of obvious relevance to the matter in hand, even after a cursory perusal under the very restrictive conditions obtaining at the archives, but whose crucial importance emerged only after a full transcription of the cryptic texts from xeroxed copies received later in the post. As fully discussed in the sequel, the picture that emerges fully confirms our earlier educated, although somewhat hazarded, conjectures namely that the roots of the First Order Franciscans in both these islands, for both Conventuals and Observants, do not antedate the very last decade of the fifteenth century and that earlier activity was restricted to that by Franciscan Tertiaries working at the old Ospedale di San Francesco at Rabat, Malta. That these Tertiaries were regular rather than lay was in no way suspected when the idea was first mooted. This development, in fact, fits very well the general settlement pattern of the other religious orders in these islands that is becoming increasingly evident as being very much a fifteenth-century phenomenon.
Maltese historians are aware of the difficulties involved in writing our medieval history.
In recent years we have witnessed the contributions of a few scholars in this field of research. This period of history, however, is still in need of further research in order to be placed in a balanced framework of general Maltese history. The research covering a satisfactory and complete history of religious orders present in Malta before the arrival of the Knights of St. John is still exiguous, and much of the material which has been published is in need of thorough revision. The discovery of these documents has proved to be an extremely exciting and rewarding experience for both of us and was, perhaps, what one may term the strike of a lifetime'. This short study is a contribution to a more credible history of the origin of one of these religious orders, namely the Franciscan Order, in late medieval Malta.