An Armchair Traveller's History of Apulia

by Seward, Desmond

  Douglas’s pilgrims sound little different from those seen by Mrs Ross: “travel-stained old women, understudies for the witch of Endor; dishevelled, anaemic and dazed-looking girls; boys too weak to handle a spade at home, pathetically uncouth, with mouths agape and eyes expressing every grade of uncontrolled emotion – from wildest joy to downright idiocy... And here they kneel, candle in hand, on the wet flags of this foetid and malodorous cave, gazing in rapture upon the blandly beaming idol, their sensibilities tickled by resplendent priests reciting full-mouthed Latin phrases, while the organ overhead plays wheezy extracts from ‘La Forza del Destino’.”

  “The way down the great flight of steps was... lined with the lame, the maimed, and the afflicted, all of whom exhibited their wounds with a dreadful and almost brutal insistence which was more than one could bear”, shuddered Edward Hutton in the early 1900s. “But the scene in the church beggars description. The mere noise was incredible. Mass was being sung at the high altar, but all around us other devotions were in progress, litanies and prayers were being chanted, and moans and groans rising on all sides. It was impossible to remain for long. Our curiosity seemed more shameful than any superstition.”

  None of the travellers really understood why the pilgrims had come. “Their existence is almost bestial in its blankness”, was Norman Douglas’s opinion. “For four months in the year they are cooped up in damp dens, not to be called chambers, where an Englishman would deem it infamous to keep a dog – cooped up amid squalor that must to be seen to be believed; for the rest of the time they struggle, in the sweat of their brow, to wrest a few blades of corn from the ungrateful limestone. Their visits to the archangel – these vernal and autumnal picnics – are their sole form of amusement.” But this does not tell us what brought them to the shrine.

  The pilgrims saw him as intercessor and defender. At his feast-days on 8 May and 29 September the choir sang “Holy archangel Michael, be our shield in battle; so we shall not be lost at the dread Day of Judgement.” First among the archangels, he was greater than the saints; after God and the Holy Virgin, they were accustomed to confessing their sins to him when seeking absolution. Night and day he defended them against the onslaught of the Devil and his demons, giving patience to bear trials and sorrows. They also firmly believed that St Michael could save them from natural disasters – from droughts, crop-failures, cattle-murrains and earthquakes, from famine and pestilence. He would protect them too against wicked landlords and their cruel stewards, against brigands and house-breakers; they hung a picture of this ultimate guardian angel in their homes to ward off burglars – many of them still do. And, understandably, in that eerie, awe-inspiring cave they felt closest to him.

  During his visit to Monte Sant’ Angelo, Norman Douglas dis-covered the potent local red wine that, two centuries earlier, Pacichelli had called “vino esquisito” (exquisite wine), Douglas and his hired coachman getting very drunk indeed. “Gloriously indif-ferent to our fates, we glided down in vertiginous but masterly vol-plane from the somewhat objectionable mountain town.” But, whatever Douglas may have thought, it is a most attractive place and must always have been one, even when it was just a mere cluster of shacks or cave dwellings during the Dark Ages. There are some lovely old houses here, especially in the Junno quarter.

  From the ramparts of the Tower of Giants on the summit, built by the Norman Robert Guiscard, you have a wonderful view over the Gulf of Manfredonia, or inland, as Norman Douglas says, “of Lesina with its lakes, and Selva Umbra, whose very name is suggestive of dewy glades.” During the thirteenth century the Emperor Frederick II enlarged the castle, giving its castellan authority over all others in the area. Frederick bequeathed it to his son Manfred who, until he became king, called himself “Prince of Tàranto and Count of the Honour of Monte Sant’ Angelo”. The paranoiac King Ferrante added three bastions as a defence against gunfire and a gateway bearing his initials with the date 1493. Sadly, in the early nineteenth century the Prince of Sant’ Antimo used it as a quarry, reducing it to Douglas’s “proud aerial ruin”.

  However, Monte Sant’ Angelo remains the shrine of the Captain of the Hosts of Heaven, who will one day slay the Antichrist on the Mount of Olives, whose voice will summon the dead to arise. This is the heart of the Gargano, the pilgrims still making their way here in May and September.

  4

  The Norman Conquest – of Apulia

  On one of these pious visits to the cavern of Mount Garganus in Apulia,

  which had been sanctified by the apparition of the archangel Michael,

  they were accosted by a stranger... a mortal foe of the Greek Empire.

  Edward Gibbon, “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”

  AS THE NORMANS venerated the archangel ‘to whom in peril we pray’ at his shrine of Mont St Michel in their homeland, they naturally made a point of visiting the cave on Monte Gargano whenever they went on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The Norman conquest of Apulia began here, a blood-stained epic during which their exploits became the stuff of legend. “Giants cloven to the saddles; armies routed by a single warrior; castles and bridges defended by one person alone; knights travelling over the world in search of kingdoms, princesses and adventures, are no more than the real events of the lives of William Fierabras, Robert Guiscard, Earl Roger, and their companions”, comments Henry Swinburne.

  At the start of the eleventh century, the northern frontier of Byzantine Italy (which was known as the ‘Theme of Italy’) ran from Termoli on the Adriatic to Terracina on the Tyrrhenian Sea. In practice, apart from acknowledging the suzerainty of the ‘Sacred Emperor’ at Constantinople, large areas of the south more or less ignored his viceroy, the catapan at Bari, so that Imperial rule was restricted to Calabria, Basilicata and Apulia. Even in Apulia only the Salento, together with the cities of the eastern coast up to Brìndisi and the area around Tàranto, was Greek. Elsewhere the population was predominantly Italian speaking and ruled by the Lombards, even if by now the originally Germanic Lombards had been completely Latinised except for their personal names and their laws.

  Although the catapan did his best to rule tactfully, leaving local government as far as possible to the haughty Lombard ruling class and respecting their cherished customs, the Lombards nonetheless developed a deep dislike for the Greeks, resenting the obligation to pay heavy taxes to the Emperor. Bari rebelled against Constantinople in 1009, joined by other cities, but the catapan (govenor) Basil Boiannes crushed the rising within a year, apparently without too many reprisals. Nevertheless, the Lombards remained bitterly resentful. In 1016 Melus, the Lombard who had led the rising, accosted a group of Norman pilgrims in the archangel’s cave and asked them to help him drive out the Byzantines. They accepted, but two years later they were annihilated by Boiannes at Cannae. Even so, other Normans began coming to Apulia in increasing numbers, as mercenaries.

  Despite their defeat by Basil Boiannes, these formidable cavalrymen with their chain-mail, conical helmets and kite-shaped shields, armed with lance and sword, could rout the toughest opposition if they had really good leaders. They found one in the terrible William ‘Iron-Arm’, eldest of the twelve sons of a small squire in the Cotentin called Tancred of Hauteville. In 1040 ‘Iron-Arm’ seized the castle at Melfi, from where he regularly rode out to raid and plunder. Intending to evict him, in March the following year a large Byzantine army (which included the axe-wielding Varangian Guard) intercepted his entire force near Venosa.

  Because he outnumbered the Normans, the then catapan, Doceanus, optimistically hoped to frighten them into surrendering and leaving Italy. Instead of attacking, he tried to negotiate. How-ever, to the Greeks’ horror, a huge Norman named Hugo Toutebonne rode up to the catapan’s herald and felled the man’s horse to the ground with a single blow of his fist on the animal’s head. Next day, he and his comrades cut the entire Byzantine army to pieces. In May Doceanus attacked for a second time, in the plain of Cannae, and once again he was totally defeated. In September the s
ame year the Normans overwhelmed a third Byzantine army no less completely, taking prisoner the new catapan, Eustathius.

  Within a year, save for Bari and Trani, all Apulia north of the Tàranto-Brìndisi road was in Norman hands. At Melfi in 1042, claiming that the land now belonged to them ‘by right of the sword’, they swiftly divided the area from Monte Gargano down to Monopoli into twelve counties, ‘Iron-Arm’ being elected Count of Apulia. Scores of lesser men acquired rich estates and castles, just as their brothers and cousins were going to do in England.

  Still, Bari and the Terra d’Òtranto remained loyal to Constan-tinople and the conquest would take many years to consolidate. There was no decisive victory comparable to Hastings, but instead countless small-scale campaigns and raids, with the odd siege or minor battle. Merciless robber-barons, the invaders killed and plundered in much the same way that their Viking ancestors had done. As Gibbon puts it, “Every object of desire, a horse, a woman, a garden, tempted and gratified the rapaciousness of the strangers.” In the end, like the Lombards before them, they were to intermarry and became indistinguishable from other southern Italians. How-ever, the transformation would not be apparent for well over a century.

  They acquired a handsome young giant as their new leader, Robert Guiscard, who replaced the Tower of the Giants on the summit of Monte Gargano (built two hundred years previously by a Lombard Duke of Benevento) with a grim new castle that still stands as a fitting monument to him. The seventh of Tancred of Hauteville’s sons, he had arrived in 1046 as a penniless adventurer, but he had become pre-eminent by 1157 and two years later Pope Nicolas II made him Duke of Apulia, Calabria and Sicily. In 1061 he beat off a final Byzantine counter-attack and in 1071 he cap-tured Bari, their capital and the catapan’s last bastion. His nick-name, ‘Guiscard’ means weasel or wily yet the epitaph on his tomb is “terror mundi” (terror of the world), for in 1082, he defeated the Emperor of the East and in 1084, the Emperor of the West.

  It was the youngest Hauteville brother, Count Roger, however, who conquered Moslem Sicily, besides inheriting everything that Guiscard had won in Southern Italy. In 1130 Roger’s son, Roger II, was crowned King of Sicily, Duke of Apulia and Prince of Capua. On both sides of the Straits of Messina, despite a French-speaking nobility the Hauteville realm was a staggeringly exotic blend of Latin, Greek and Arab civilization. Known as the Kingdom of Sicily (and later as the Two Sicilies), this new political entity would endure for more than seven centuries. Italians called it the Regno or Kingdom since it was the only one in Italy, although sometimes the term meant the mainland alone.

  All Apulians, not only the Lombards and the Greeks, had suffered wretchedly during the conquest. Even though commanded to write his chronicle by Count Roger, and allegedly a Norman him-self, Geoffrey Malterra says bluntly that “Normans are cunning and revengeful”, in his rhymed history of the Hautevilles dating from about the year 1100, in which he also refers to their greed, treachery and ferocity. Yet, he admired their toughness: “Weapons and horses, costly clothes, hunting and hawking, these are what Normans enjoy, but if necessary they show extraordinary stamina on campaign and endure the worst weather, hardships and privation.”

  As in England, these ruthless conquerors quickly created a completely new society by introducing the feudal system that they had known at home in Normandy, which meant holding their estates in return for military service and riding out to fight for their king or lord whenever they were summoned. The Lombards were ex-propriated without delay, losing their lands and being reduced to poverty – just like the Anglo-Saxon thanes in England. Too late, they realised that they had made a ghastly but irreparable mistake in calling in the terrible Normans to escape from the far milder government of the Byzantine Emperor.

  When the Norman pilgrims first saw the Lombard Melus at the archangel’s shrine on Monte Sant’ Angelo they had laughed at his turban and flowing Greek robes. No doubt Melus thought that the crop-headed Normans were barbarians. Yet few meetings can ever have had such fateful, long lasting consequences for Apulia as that chance encounter in the eerie grotto church.

  5

  San Giovanni di Rotondo and Padre Pio

  Do you want to see? Then you shall see.

  Padre Pio

  IN THE WESTERN and northern Gargano, at the foot of the great mountain where the landscape is less rugged, there are attractive little cities, some quite big. Among these cities, San Severo was once capital of the province of the Capitanata, the De Sangro Princes of San Severo ranking with the Regno’s greatest magnates. Its vineyards produce what are among Apulia’s best wines, red and white. At Serracapriola the lowering castle of the eponymous Dukes has an octagonal Norman tower. There is another impres-sive feudal stronghold at Sannicandro Garganico, built in the fifteenth century by the della Marra family.

  It is San Giovanni Rotondo, however, whose fame has exceeded all other towns in the region in recent times, now attracting more pilgrims than Monte Sant’ Angelo. It has been a place of veneration since time began. The baptistery or rotonda from which it takes its name, the Chiesetta di San Giovanni, stands on the site of a temple of Janus. Reputedly the oldest of Roman gods, double-headed Janus guarded doorways; his feast was in January, the month named after him, a day when devotees gave each other sweets and big copper coins with his two heads on one side and a ship on the other. In the thirteenth century Emperor Frederick II surrounded the city with high walls, and during times of trouble it sheltered pilgrims to St Michael’s shrine, fourteen miles further up the mountain. The amazingly energetic Abate Pacichelli, who came here too, wrongly thought the rotonda had been a temple of Apollo, but he was justified in saying it was set “in a pleasant plain amid lush meadows”. As usual, he was overawed by the local grandee, in this case, the Duke Cavaniglia. He may well have visited the Capuchin friary of Santa Maria delle Grazie, founded in 1540.

  Born into a family of poor peasants at Benevento in 1887, Padre Pio entered the Capuchins as a young man, joining the friary at San Giovanni Rotondo during the Great War and then became seriously ill with tuberculosis. In 1918 he collapsed in choir and was discovered to have the same stigmata as St Francis of Assisi – constantly bleeding wounds in the palms of his hands. He nonetheless managed to live a comparatively normal if invalid existence here for the next fifty years, wearing mittens to hide the wounds on his hands.

  ‘Normal’ is not quite the right word. His struggles with the Fiend recall St Anthony in the desert, and in his letters he tells of onslaughts by the Devil and demons from Hell, of a mind filled with hallucinations and despair, of being beaten. Often he thought he would die or go mad, sometimes he was bruised all over, spitting blood. The noise was so loud that it could be heard by other friars passing his cell.

  He is said to have told the then Archbishop of Cracow that he would be Pope. Carol Wojtyla had come to San Giovanni Rotondo dressed as a simple priest, but Padre Pio picked him out from among a huge crowd. (The Vatican refuses to confirm or deny the story.) He cured very many people, healing not only physical ailments such as blindness, but alcoholism and personality disorders. Tens of thousands of men and women visited him, while he received 600 letters a day. He had the gift of “bilocation”, the ability to be in two places at the same time; when bedridden at San Giovanni Rotondo, he was seen at Rome on five occasions, his explanation being that it was done by “a prolongation of personality.” He smelt of roses, violets or incense and, although he died forty years ago, people think he still visits them, recognising the scent. His relics continue to heal.

  His most spectacular miracle was for a pilot whose plane blew up at high altitude. The man woke up on a beach near Naples with an unopened parachute – at the time of the explosion his mother had a vision of a bearded friar telling her in dialect not to worry about her son. Usually, however, his interventions were less dramatic, advice full of earthy common sense. A widow asked him whether she should marry again. “So far, you’ve wept with one eye”, he told her. “If you remarry, you�
�ll cry with both.”

  He raised vast sums of money, sufficient to build not only a new basilica for the pilgrims, flanking the friary’s nice little Baroque church, but also a large hospital and a centre for handicapped children. Some people who remember him say he looked “like every-body’s favourite grandfather”, but others who claim to have seen his ghost in the friary church or the new basilica describe a man of about thirty-five. As a man devoted to poverty, he would have hated the gilded statue of himself that stands outside the basilica.

  The nails went through Christ’s wrists, not through the palms, and a friar who nursed Padre Pio on his deathbed once told us the wounds began to close within ten minutes of his dying. But this does not detract from his sanctity and it seems strange that it took so long to canonise him. Some have suggested that his “bilocation” encouraged the local witches, inspiring them to attempt similar feats. The real reason, however, is more prosaic: The Vatican needed time to read the letters he had sent to all the men and women who had written to him asking for advice. When his steel coffin was opened, his body was found to be uncorrupted. He was beatified in 1999, the first step towards being made a saint, then canonised in 2002. For several months in 2008, his body – still in a remarkable state of preservation, with a silicone mask round the face – was put on display for veneration in a glass casket at the fri-ary in San Giovanni Rotondo.