An Armchair Traveller's History of Apulia

by Seward, Desmond

  The rain had stopped, so after arriving at the sister’s house, they went out onto the balcony to admire the view of the harbour. Going back into the room, Juliette Figuier found their hostess raiding their trunk. “The old woman had a hard, glaring stare, pale lips and a false, cruel face.” She ran up to Mme Figuier, raised her veil and cried with a hideous laugh, “What no earrings, no necklace, no jewels? My sister must be mad. Here’s a guest who’s not worth strangling, not even worth the price of the cord.”

  Juliette was so frightened that she ran out into the street, to see dark blotches on the paving stones which she fancied were blood-stains. Telling the cabmen to retrieve their trunk, she and M. Figuier just managed to catch the 3.00 pm train back to Foggia, the last that day. On the journey they tried to eat the chicken, unsuccessfully, deciding that when a fowl was killed in Apulia it was always the oldest member of the flock.

  Twenty years later, no one tried to strangle the formidable Janet Ross when she arrived with her timid protégé, the painter Carlo Orsi. She was amused by the ill-feeling between Trani and Andria. “At Trani they told us that the people of Andria were all thieves and assassins, uncivil to strangers, and perfect savages; while at Andria we were informed that Trani was a nest of robbers, and its inhabitants ‘maleducati e gente di nessuna fede’ (ill-bred and untrustworthy)”. There were certainly some unusual members of the medical profession in Trani. In a dirty back street Janet Ross found an advertisement posted up outside the house of a Professor Rica:

  The said Professor Rica will buy, for making his salves, live snakes and big serpents, wolves, bears, monkeys, marmots, weasels, and may other kinds of wild animal, alive and in good condition.

  But Mrs. Ross met only politeness in the town, even if the people were amazed by her courage in walking about alone. They were equally astonished at her wearing a hat instead of a shawl over her head. “‘Are you a man that you wear a hat?’ asked a small boy. Some nice-looking young men at once reproved him and asked me to excuse the bad manners of an ignorante [uneducated]. They then offered to show us the way to the cathedral and made way for us through the crowd.” To be fair to the little boy, there was clearly something unmistakably masculine about Janet Ross, judging from photographs.

  The cathedral, with its tall campanile and its magic setting by the sea, was largely built between 1159 and 1186 although only completed in the thirteenth century. A recent restoration has re-moved the Baroque ornament disliked by Swinburne, revamping the interior in twilight twentieth century style. The effect is unspeakably bleak, that of a soulless barn, even the local clergy comparing the bishop’s new throne to a dentist’s chair.

  On the evening of Holy Saturday, Mrs. Ross returned to the cathedral, to find out just what was meant by the abbavescio di Cristo:

  As the clock struck eleven a great curtain which hid the high altar fell, and the noise which followed was frightful. The whole congregation shouted, knocked their sticks on the pavement and dashed chairs against the walls, while the bells rang all over the town. This was the abbavescio which I discovered meant the resurrection of Christ... The noise outside was even worse. Crackers, paper bombs and rockets were exploding all over the place, and on the pavement in front of every house were lines of little brown-paper parcels full of gunpowder, which went off with a deafening effect. This was the batteria di Gesù (the battery of Jesus), a demonstration of joy at His rising from the tomb.

  What she did not appreciate was that the abbavescio was a survival from Byzantine Apulia, from the Greek Orthodox celebration of Easter.

  She thought the public gardens “wildly picturesque”, and her description shows that they still remain much as they were a century ago. They are next to the seawall, adjoining the little semi-circular harbour, which reminded her of Venice.

  Part V

  Bari

  19

  The Catapans

  It was at Bari that the Byzantine troops made their last stand; it was

  Bari that remained capital of the Theme of Italy until the very end.

  Jules Gay, “L’Italie méridionale et l’empire byzantine”

  IN 1071 The LAST CATAPAN, Stephen Pateranos, was freed by the Normans and allowed to sail home to Constantinople. He had been taken prisoner when Bari fell to Robert Guiscard after a siege of nearly three years. Besides trying to assassinate Guiscard (with a poisoned javelin as he sat at dinner in his tent), the Byzantines had made desperate attempts to relieve the doomed city – only that winter Stephen had slipped in through the Norman blockade on his return from the Imperial capital, where he had gone to make a frantic appeal for more troops. In April, however, weakened by treachery, the garrison surrendered. Stephen’s departure meant the end of Byzantine Italy.

  Originally Bari was Peucetian, then Greek and then Roman. However the city was unimportant in ancient times. Horace enjoyed the fish here, seemingly the sole distinction to be recorded in classical literature.

  Bari’s Byzantine period began in the mid-sixth century, when it was one of the first places recaptured from the Goths for Justinian. Shortly after the Emperor’s death it was occupied by Lombards and, together with most of Apulia, governed by the Lombard Dukes of Benevento under Byzantine suzerainty. What was left of Imperial Apulia, the Salento, was administered by a Strategos (general) at Òtranto, who took his orders from the Emperor’s viceroy in Italy, the exarch of Ravenna further up the Adriatic coast. They kept in touch by sea, until Ravenna fell to the Lombards in 752, after which the Strategos received his instructions direct from Constantinople.

  Despite the Lombard occupation, one can safely assume that Bari kept its links with Byzantium, the greatest trading centre in the world, the last bastion of classical civilization and the only source of luxuries.

  During the early ninth century Italy began to be attacked by Saracens, Berber Aghlabids from North Africa, who sacked Rome and conquered Sicily. In 847 Bari was captured by Khalfun, once a mercenary in the service of the Lombard prince Radelchis. He evicted its Lombard governor Siconolfo and established the first and only fully-fledged Moslem state in mainland Italy. By 860, Khalfun and his successors – Mufarrag ibn-Sallam and Sawdan – had added Orta and Matera to their territory, using them as for-ward bases from which to plunder far and wide, and sending count-less Apulian men, women and children to the African slave markets.

  According to Bernard the Monk their city was defended by a double wall, while they gave it mosques and minarets. Despite being a great sacker of monasteries, Sawdan, the third emir, was no mere pirate but a scholar who obtained formal recognition of his emirate from the Caliph of Baghdad. Up to a point, he even tolerated Christians. In 867, on his pilgrimage to Jerusalem, Bernard had no difficulty in obtaining a passport at Bari and finding a pas-sage to Egypt – although he saw shiploads of Christian slaves bound for Africa. However, in 871 the Western Emperor Louis II retook the city, capturing Sawdan.

  After Louis’ death in 875 the Carolingians were too busy with troubles in France and Germany to intervene in Italy, and three years later the Strategos Gregorios marched up from Òtranto to reoccupy Bari in the Eastern Emperor’s name. It should be realised, however, that outside the Salentine peninsula which was governed from Òtranto, held by Constantinople since the sixth century, there was no continuous Byzantine presence. Even after Greek settlers began arriving at the end of the ninth century, most Byzantines in Apulia were soldiers or officials – apart from a handful of monks, who had first arrived a hundred years before, fleeing from iconoclastic persecution.

  In 975 the Byzantines commenced a long campaign of reconquest. Bari replaced Òtranto as their Italian capital while the Stratagos was given the new title of Catapan, which meant becoming a viceroy with full military and civil powers over the ‘Theme of Lombardy’. In 1011 the Catapan Basil Mesonardonites built a kastron (town) here. After Basil Boiannes – ablest of the catapans – had established Imperial rule over all Apulia, Greek settlers poured into Apulia, most of whose rock-churches date from t
his time. Had another brilliant Emperor followed Basil II (the ‘Bulgar Slayer’), who died in 1025, the Byzantines might have succeeded in re-creating Magna Graecia.

  “Among the many perverse notions of which we are now rid-ding ourselves is this – that Byzantinism in south Italy was a period of decay and torpid dreamings”, wrote Norman Douglas with considerable justice in 1915. “There was no lethargy in their social and political ambitions, in their military achievements, which held the land against overwhelming numbers of Saracens, Lombards and other intruders.”

  Yet only in the Salento were Apulia’s Greeks in a majority and only there was Greek universally spoken. North of Brindisi, the population in most coastal cities as well as inland was dominated by ‘Lombards’. Latin speaking by now despite their Germanic names, intermarriage had turned them into a caste rather than a race, a caste which differed from its neighbours merely in laws and customs. Chronically short of men and money yet having to extract taxes and raise troops, the catapans handled the Lombards with Byzantine subtlety, carefully respecting their customs and allowing them to live under their own laws with their own magistrates.

  Nonetheless, the Byzantine Emperors set the utmost value on Bari. Ever since the Moslem period the city on the promontory had been so well fortified that its possession was vital for control of the southern Adriatic. As in other Apulian ports, its inhabitants were an exotic mixture of Lombards, Latins, Greeks, Armenians, Jews and Moslems, governed by Byzantine officials. The city grew rich from importing the gold, spices, silks and luxury goods that could only be obtained at Constantinople, in return exporting oil, almonds, wine, salted fish and slaves. Prosperous citizens enjoyed luxuries unknown in most of Western Europe, Lombard nobles dressing like Byzantines in silk robes and fantastic head-dresses.

  Even so, the Baresi resented having to pay taxes to Constantinople, and serve in the catapan’s levies. In consequence there were several rebellions such as that of Melus, the Normans’ first Apulian ally. Basil Boioannes had no difficulty in putting down opposition of this sort, but he was recalled to Constantinople in 1027 and the catapans who followed him were mediocrities.

  When the Catapan Eustathius was released from Norman captivity after the crushing defeat at Melfi, in true Byzantine style he took care to flatter the Lombard magistrate of Bari, Bisantius. He thanked him warmly for his steadfastness against the ‘Franks’ (Normans), and rewarded him with a large area of land, permission to bring in settlers and tax them. He also confirmed his powers to judge all crimes according to Lombard law – save for plots against the catapan or the ‘Sacred Emperor’.

  But flattery and bribery were no match for Normans at a time when an overstretched Imperial army was fighting Turkish invaders on the far side of the Empire. The situation deteriorated steadily. When Tàranto fell in 1063 the Lombards decided that the Normans were bound to win, and the surrender of Bari was due to a Lombard traitor, Argirizzo, who let them into a key bastion. What made the city’s loss final was a disastrous Byzantine defeat in Anatolia, only a few weeks later.

  The early Norman period was chaotic and during the first quarter of the next century the new regime almost fell apart. From 1123 Bari, with its large population, was autonomous under Prince Grimoald Alferanites, and for a short time it seemed as if the rich city might become a merchant republic like Venice, a ‘Republic of St Nicholas’. But Roger II stormed it in 1144, hanging Grimoald’s successor, Jaquintus.

  The Baresi had learned to regret the loss of the catapans, particularly resenting a new Norman castle that had been built to cow them. When they rebelled in 1155 they asked the Byzantines to return and an expedition arrived from Constantinople, demolishing the castle. However, King William I (‘William the Bad’) soon recaptured the city. He gave the Baresi only two days to leave before he destroyed every building in it – saying that since they had pulled his house down he was doing the same to them.

  20

  Old Bari

  ...a noble mart for all the Adriatic Sea...

  Paolo Giovio, “Vitae Illustrium Virorum”

  OLD BARI was not only the capital of the Terra di Bari, but a microcosm of Apulia. No doubt its inhabitants were distrusted by other Apulians because of a Greek subtlety and Levantine flair for business they did not share. Even so, the Old Baresi had more in common with the wildest woodman from the Gargano or shepherd from the Alta Murgia than with anyone from outside Apulia.

  Every spring the people of Old and New Bari commemorate the arrival of St Nicholas’s bones 900 years ago. The celebrations last for days, with processions and pageants. Pilgrims come from all over the world, especially from the Abruzzi, many walking for a week behind their parish banners. Some carry pilgrim-staffs decorated with pine cones, olive flowers or feathers, singing their ancient prayer to San Nicola in an archaic, hypnotic chant that haunts those who hear it long after. The culmination is when a life-size Baroque statue of the saint has been carried through the crowded streets to the harbour by fishermen and sailors. The Archbishop says Mass on the mole, finally throwing a flask of St Nicholas’s oil into the waves, and then, escorted by an armada of small craft, the statue is taken out to sea in a fishing boat. As it crosses the harbour, sirens shriek and rockets burst, while the Baresi consume the nuts, olives and dried beans without which no Apulian holiday is complete. When night falls and the statue goes home to its shrine, the sky is lit by fireworks.

  In 1087, sixty Baresi landed at Myra in Asia Minor, smashed open the tomb of St Nicholas and stole his bones. A fourth century bishop, his fame is due to the miracles listed in the pilgrim’s prayer: “The sick are healed by his oil, and those in danger of shipwreck are saved... he raised a dead man to life by the roadside, baptised a Jew after finding his money for him, recovered a vase from the bottom of the sea, and a lost child...” Listening to the pilgrims crying their thanks on the quay, you realise that he still works miracles. The original Santa Claus, his gifts to some young girls won them husbands when their fathers could not afford dowries. He became the patron of small boys after reassembling and bringing to life three who had been chopped and pickled “to make tunny-fish”. This idea is quite possible; as late as the seventeenth century a consignment of so-called ‘tunny’ from North Africa turned out to be human flesh from the corpses of the fallen in a local war. Like the three boys, it had been salted and put in barrels.

  A shrine was built, the first Apulian Romanesque basilica and the largest, completed in 1105. San Nicola stands where the Catapan’s palace stood, the tower known as the Torre del Catapano being almost certainly Byzantine, while the carvings – lions, elephants, eagles – are Lombard, Byzantine and Saracen. Nicholas is buried in the crypt, which was consecrated by Pope Urban II, preacher of the First Crusade. His bones exude the colourless “St Nicholas’s Oil”, bottled as a cure for many ailments.

  Frederick II rebuilt the Norman castle by the sea. In 1220 he gave an audience here to Francis of Assisi, and then put a beautiful whore in his bed, but Francis lay down on the fire and invited her to join him, to the consternation of the whore and also of the emperor – watching through a keyhole. Frederick did not trust the Baresi, ostentatiously erecting a personal gallows in the city. After they deserted him for the Pope but were brought to heel, he placed an inscription over a gate: “The faithless Baresi are full of promises but then break them. Cherish in your noble heart, I pray you, this warning: ‘Be on your guard against a Barese as you would against a drawn sword’, and if he cries ‘hail’, then beware of an enemy.”

  The grim Charles of Anjou was no less cynical, despite an enthusiastic welcome, but his son Charles II – Lo Zoppo (The Lame) – became a devotee of St Nicholas, lavishing treasure on the shrine, one gift being a tooth of Mary Magdalene. Meanwhile the city grew richer and richer. The Latin conquest of Constantinople in 1204 brought even more trade with the East, since Bari was a staging post on the route from Venice to the Golden Horn.

  However, due to wars between rival dynasties and as a consequence of
becoming a duchy, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were a wretched period for the Baresi. One fifteenth century duke was Gianantonio del Balzo Orsini, Prince of Tàranto, who had the lucrative right of exporting foodstuffs from his estates free of duty; his flocks amounted to 31,000 animals. When he died in 1463, probably murdered by King Ferrante’s agents, the duchy was given to the Sforza of Milan, Ferrante’s allies in the war against the Angevins.