01/12/2025
Isaac de Razilly, Knight-Commander in the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, Rhodes and of Malta, King Louis XIII's Lieutenant-General of Nouvelle France, Governor of Acadie and Seigneur of Port Royal.
Razilly was admitted as a Knight of Malta in the priory of Aquitaine January 6, 1605 having submitted his proofs of nobility on June 3, 1604. His brother, Gabriel, born in 1579, was received in the Order in May 1591. Both were among the eight children of François de Razilly and his wife Catherine de Villiers who came from the same family as Philippe de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Grand Master from 1521 until his death in 1534. It was under his grand mastership that the Order acquired the Maltese archipelago from Emperor Charles V in 1530. A great many members of the Razilly family, from Touraine, were admitted into the Order throughout the centuries, including Isaac’s and Gabriel’s nephew, Amador-Jean-Baptiste de Razilly, son of their brother Claude de Razilly, in 1700.
In 1621 Isaac de Razilly was appointed commander of Isle-Bouchard in Touraine. That same year he commanded a squadron of 13 vessels during the siege of the Huguenot-held port of Saint-Martin, his force capturing some 30-enemy craft during the action. In the attack on the Huguenots at La Rochelle in 1625 he was seriously wounded and lost an eye.
Isaac de Razilly became famouse for hunting Moorish pirates who raided French shipping in the Mediterranean. He occupied Mogador (Essaouira) in Morocco in 1626 where he built a Mission and created a base against the Sultan of Marrakesh, and then asphyxiate the harbour of Safi.
On April 29, 1632 Razilly was appointed lieutenant general of New France by the Company of One Hundred Associates of which he was a shareholder. He was also given the title of Viceroy. The Company owned and administered the North American colony in the king’s name. Razilly’s first official task was to recover Acadia from Great Britain and then to colonize the country. The treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye had restored that colony to France. He left Auray on July 4, 1632 aboard the king’s ship, appropriately named L’Espérance-en-Dieu, along with 300 settlers. He arrived at La Hève, now LaHave in Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia, on September 8, 1632. A fort was promptly erected on the South side of the LaHave River to serve as the headquarters of the enterprise and named Fort Sainte-Marie-de-Grâce. The successful crossing and foundation did not go unreported in France where a dispatch from Fort Sainte-Marie-de-Grâce, dated November 24, 1632, was published in the celebrated Gazette de France in Paris, in 1633. Richelieu, who personally wrote dispatches for the weekly newspaper, used it as a political and promotional tool. This news item is in fact the birth notice of the revived colony of Acadia under the guidance of Commander de Razilly:
“The King’s three vessels that left Auray in Brittany last Summer, under the command of Commander de Razilly, arrived here [La Hève] on September 8 last, on the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, in whose honor the fort is named, in which we were no sooner established that, following the King’s orders and the commissions of the King of Great Britain, which commanded the Scots to leave Port Royal, we were asked to return them on board one of our ships, we held talks with them and sent them a vessel on which they will return and our people who will transport them will remain in their place at the said Port Royal .”
Razilly described La Hève as a “paradise on earth” and, in a letter to Cardinal de Richelieu, called Acadia “this blessed land”. In the primeval wilderness of what is now Nova Scotia, the famous eight pointed cross of the Order of Malta was a familiar sight during Razilly’s lifetime. We know from an inventory of Razilly’s personal possessions established after his death at La Hève that he lived in as grand a style in the Acadian forests as was possible. His neck cross is mentioned, as well as several cloaks bearing the cross of Malta, several silver buttons on his vests displaying the celebrated cross, and six cloaks bearing his coat of arms. The National Archives of Canada have a paper imprint of Razilly’s seal showing the shield surrounded by a rosary. It was applied to a passport delivered at La Hève (LaHave) in 1632 to one Philibert de Ramesay. It is the oldest surviving impression of a seal in Canada.
The Commander invested a great deal of his own money in the venture, as did also his brother Gabriel. Along with several like-minded gentlemen, they formed a private company, the Razilly-Condonnier Company, to help the fledgling colony develop. Cardinal de Richelieu himself became an important shareholder and founded a school out of his personal funds for the education of both the settlers’ children and the Mi'kmawey people.
Despite enormous efforts, the colony was struggling. Razilly thought he had a ready-made solution to his problem: give land and a suitable harbor to the Order of Malta which could then use its North American base as either a priory or a commandery but certainly as a naval training school. He made his offer in a letter to Fra’ Antoine de Paule —who was Grand Master from 1623 to 1636 — at the beginning of September 1635. The Grand Master declined the offer because the constant threat of Muslim invasion of Malta in the Mediterranean required immediate attention.
Governor Isaac de Razilly's administration at LaHave, Nova Scotia, prepared the ground for the arrival of the first recorded migrant families on board the ship Saint Jehan, which left La Rochelle on 1 April 1636. There were a number of sailings from the French Atlantic Coast to Acadia between 1632 and 1636, but this is the only one for which a detailed passenger list has survived. Nicolas Denys, who was stationed across the LaHave River at Port Rossingol (Liverpool Bay), acted as agent for the Saint Jehan. After a 35–day crossing of the Atlantic, the Saint Jehan arrived on 6 May 1636 at LaHave, Nova Scotia. There were seventy-eight passengers and eighteen crew members. With this ship, Acadia began a slow shift from being primarily a matter of explorers and traders, of men, to a colony of permanent settlers, including women and children. While the presence of European women is a signal that settlement was seriously contemplated, there were yet so few of them in this group of migrants that they did not immediately affect the status of Acadia as basically a colony of European transients. By the end of the year, the migrants were moved from LaHave and re-established at Port Royal. At Port Royal in 1636, Pierre Martin and Catherine Vigneau, who had arrived on the Saint Jehan, were the first European parents to have a child in Acadia. The first-born child was Mathieu Martin. In part because of this distinction, Mathieu Martin later became the Seigneury of Cobequid (1699). One of the founders of Port-Royal and the patriarch of a large clan abundantly represented today in Acadia, Jacob Bourgeois (ca 1619-1701), surgeon and colonizer, is said to have studied surgery at the Order’s Commandery of Couperans where the Knights of Malta operated a hospital.
De Razilly died suddenly at La Heve in December 1635. History tells us little of his death, other than he was active and well-motivated right up to the last. He was buried in La Hève and later exhumed and transported to Louisbourg in 1749. De Razilly, had but three years (1632-35) in the colony but left a legacy which changed the world forever.
The presence of the Order of Malta in Acadia did not end with the death of Commander de Razilly. Thirty-three years later, in July 1669, the Chevalier Hector d’Andigné de Grandfontaine (1627-1696) became Governor of Acadia. This former officer of the Carignan-Salières Regiment had served in New France between 1665 and 1668. It was he who accepted the return of Acadia to France following the Treaty of Breda (1667) and he remained to administer this colony until 1673.
Bulk of source: Sovereign Military Order of Malta - Grand Priory of Louisiana
