Caravaggio arrived in Malta as a fugitive. In 1606, after what most accounts describe as a quarrel escalating from a disputed game of court tennis, he wounded the young Ranuccio Tomassoni in the thigh with his sword; Tomassoni died of the wound, and Caravaggio was condemned to death for murder and forced to flee Rome^[5]. Some later-discovered documents suggest Tomassoni may have been the one who first challenged Caravaggio rather than the reverse, but the outcome for the painter was the same: exile, and a search for a powerful protector who could help secure a pardon from the Pope^[5]. Malta and the Order of the Knights of St John offered exactly that kind of protection, a hierarchical, semi-independent state with its own legal standing, willing to shelter a famous painter in exchange for major commissions.

Caravaggio spent roughly a year in Malta and was accepted into the Order of the Knights of Malta, an honour that normally required a substantial cash payment, which Caravaggio is understood to have paid instead in paintings^[3]. For a few months he lived as a nobleman within the Order's strict hierarchy, gaining exactly the elevated status his crime in Rome had stripped from him. That status collapsed quickly: he fought with a fellow knight, a serious offence within Malta's rigid social code, and was imprisoned^[3]. The Order's own records describe his eventual expulsion in blunt terms, as the cutting away of a foul and diseased limb, and a formal tribunal stripped him of his knighthood in a session held in front of the very painting that had helped secure it^[1].

Caravaggio's decision to sign only this one painting, and to do so by writing his name into the blood pouring from the Baptist's severed neck, has drawn more interpretation than almost any other detail in his work. The signature originally read Fra Michelangelo, using Fra to assert his new status as a knight of the Order, though the writing has since worn so that only part of it, F Michel A, remains legible today^[1]. Some readings take the blood-drawn signature as an expression of guilt for the killing that had brought him to Malta in the first place, or as a symptom of a violent, unstable personality; others read it more as a declaration of achieved status and reputation, since his Maltese paintings were very well received at the time^[2]. The two readings are not mutually exclusive: a signature that asserts hard-won rank and one that carries an undertow of guilt can sit in the same brushstrokes.