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The title of Count was recognised to the Bahria estates owned by the grantee. These estates, purchased by Navarra family from the Calava family in 1599, were raised to the dignity of a feudal tenure. The title is inheritable by any stranger in blood who may come into ownership of the Bahria estates.
The first grantee was Ignazio Moscati-Falsoni-Navarra by the Grand Master Pinto de Fonseca on the 16th May 1743. The next holder was Iganzio’s eldest daughter, Maria Teresa, who married Antonio Stagno, 3rd Count of Casandola (Sicilian Title). The Count of Bahria who emigrated to Sicily was in possession of various entials he was very short of money. Because of his near bankrupt state, his emigration could hardly have caused any economic problems on the island.
Elopement sometimes occurred when the parents refuse to give their daughter permission to marry. The circumstances were however different in the case of Maria Teresa, daughter of the Count of Bahria. Her lover, the Contventual Chaplain Fra. Samuele, the head of the Grand Master Pinto's pages, had used his friendship with the Count as a means of obtaining ebtry to the Palazzo in Gudja. In October, 1754, the couple elpoed taking with them valuables estimated to be worth 30,000 scudi and embarked on a French privateer destined for the Levant. There, they settled in the house of the French consul in Corfu. Through an intermediary, the Count of Bahria informed the Governor of Corfu of the robbery, and the couple were subsequently arrested and imprisoned. As Corfu came under Venetian jurusdiction, the couple were sent to Venice for trial. Here the 'long-haired Samuele' is said to have died. Maria Teresa was placed in a convent but eventually succeeded in making her way to Syracuse where she is said to have married a certain Stagno to whom she bore a son, Giuseppe. This however, was more likely a polite fiction and the child was really the son of Fra.Samuele. The Count of Bahria, her father, subsequently settled down in Messinam, where his descendants perished in an earthquake about one hundred and fifty years later.
The patent of Bahria differed from all previous diplomas of nobility because it empowered the title holder to nominate as his successors either a relative, or even a stranger in blood (etiam extraneos).
The House of Stagno-Navarra carried two titles to 1908, where the 5th Count of Bahria and his family perished in the Messina earthquake of 1908.
The title was succeeded by the 5th Count sister’s son, Raimondo Palermo-Navarra. This too went out of the Palermo family to the Consoli family in 1962, though the Title of Casandola went into abeyance.
The present holder Salvatore Consoli-Palermo-Navarra is the 9th Count of Bahria and lives in Sicily.
This Research was researched by
(Text originally based on that of a website by Charles Said Vassallo, by permission.)