Antoine de Paule

Fra' Antoine de Paule (c. 1551 – 9 June 1636) was elected the 56th Grand Master of the Knights Hospitaller (the Order of Malta) on 10 March 1623.

He died on Malta thirteen years later, on 9 June 1636, after a long illness and at the age of 85.

However, de Paule was not without his enemies, some of whom presented a memorial to Pope Urban VIII describing him as "a man of loose life and conversation", "guilty of simony", who had "bought his dignity with money".

[1] As Grandmaster, de Paule acted as a judge when a once-captured ship was re-captured and the original owner claimed the ship, decided whether to release a galley rower of a captured privateering vessel who was himself earlier captured by the privateers and forced to row, and appointed abbots and priors to various positions, amongst other responsibilities.

[2] The town of Paola, Malta, was named after the Grandmaster, who laid its foundation stone in 1626.