The island of Malta was the scene of one of the storms which broke upon the Society in this half-century. The fathers had established a college at Lavaletta in 1592, and prospered there until 1632, when a sudden and mysterious tempest swept them, for a time, out of the island. The Jesuit version of the adventure is that the Grand Master Lascaris had attempted to curb the well-known licence of the knights and had, at their protest, thrown the responsibility of the reform on the Jesuits. When the carnival arrived, and the knights were hampered in their amusements, some of them took the revenge of masquerading as Jesuits in the gay throng; and when the Master imprisoned them, at the entreaty of the Jesuits, they forced the doors of the jail and compelled Lascaris to exile the Jesuits. This story is not implausable, but we are equally bound to notice the different version put forward by their opponents. They say that the Jesuits had incurred general contempt by hiding great stores of food in their house during a famine (as we have seen them do in Paris) and by their indulgence in vice. One is disposed to think that the former charge cannot be entirely devoid of foundation. It is singular that, when the French king, at the request of the French Jesuits, forced the knights to readmit the fathers, the two leading Jesuits were not suffered to return to the island. The most serious event of the half-century was, however, the bankruptcy of one of the Jesuit houses at Seville, and in this case we have serious independent evidence. The condition of the Spanish province evidently remained unchanged in spite of "visitations" from Rome and decrees of the Congregation. Their generous patron Philip III., whose dominion they had so materially helped to enlarge, died in 1621, but his successor Philip IV. was even more generous to them. They prospered, and continued to deteriorate. We may not be disposed to admit implicitly all the sordid stories about them which we find in the _Teatro Jesuitico_, one of the fiercest anti-Jesuit works of the period,[18] but we have independent evidence of such episodes as the murder of a Spanish Jesuit by an injured husband. Instead, however, of wasting time on these isolated disorders, it will be enough to examine the story of the famous bankruptcy.