Sometime in the spring of 1596, a man from the island of Santorini, Demetrio di Antonio, and three other Greeks set out in a small boat from the Ottoman island of Chios off the western coast of Anatolia, and headed for the Aegean Sea to trade for salt. Near the island of Mykonos in the eastern Cyclades, the boat was set upon by a larger felucca captained by Alessandro Beccaforte. Beccaforte was not a corsair, but rather one of the many opportunistic, occa-sional, small-time pirates who swarmed the eastern Mediterranean in the growing maritime anarchy that characterised the decades after the great naval battle of Lepanto in 1571. Three of the men on the small boat were promptly released, but Demetrio was retained by his captors, who believed that he was a renegade Christian convert to Islam whose name was Mustafa and that he was married to a Muslim woman. He was transported to the thriving slave emporium of Malta, where he was quickly sold to Fra Ippolito Malaspina, a hero of Lepanto, friend and patron of Caravaggio, and a highly influential member of the Knights Hospitaller order. With this Demetrio disappeared into the ranks of the nearly 3,000 enslaved men, women, and children who provided galley labour, domestic work, and other services on the island.

Several months after being incorporated into Malaspina's household, however, Demetrio's story took an unexpected turn, when he claimed that he was a Christian and that he ‘fasted on Wednesday in the Greek fashion’ and so no longer wanted ‘to eat the meat that [he] was given’ on that day. Other members of the household also began reporting that they had observed

Demetrio reciting his prayers in Greek and making the sign of the cross. These startling developments eventually led Malaspina to question whether his new slave was indeed Muslim, as Demetrio's captor had insisted during their negotiations, or whether the unfortunate man was in fact Christian, as he now claimed. To get to the bottom of this question, Malaspina determined to take the case to the Maltese Inquisition.

The issue of Demetrio's religious identity is what brought him before the inquisition: the challenge was to establish whether he was a renegade Christian convert to Islam, or a wronged Christian who had been fraudulently sold into slavery as a Muslim.