Understandably, young Duke Petracone grew very apprehensive. Keppel Craven tells us how he found out just what he would have to face:
A gentleman, who had been sometime, as was the custom in those days, a retainer in his family, left it abruptly one night, and sought the Count of Conversano’s castle, into which he gained admission by a recital of the injurious treatment and fictitious wrongs, heaped upon him by the tyrannical and arbitrary temper of the Prince of Francavilla. A complaint of this nature was always the passport to the Count’s favour and good graces, and he not only admitted this gentleman to the full enjoyment of his princely hospitality, but having found he was an experienced and dextrous swordsman, passed most of his time in practising with him that art.
A few days before the duel, the gentleman, who was a spy – one source says he had been both men’s fencing master – left Conversano and went to Martina Franca, where he reported to Duke Petracone:
the only chance of success which he could look to, was by keeping on the defensive during the early part of the combat; he was instructed that his antagonist, though avowedly the most able manager of the sword in the kingdom, was extremely violent, and that if he could parry the first thrusts made on the first attack, however formidable from superior skill and strength of wrist and arm, he might perhaps afterwards obtain success over an adversary, whose person, somewhat inclined to corpulency, would speedily become exhausted.
When Petracone reached the age of eighteen in 1665, a meeting was arranged at Ostuni, on 19 July. Before he rode to meet his doom, the Duke made his will and confessed his sins, saying goodbye to his mother, who went into her chapel to pray. ‘O Sfidante’ ate an unusually good breakfast and then, taking leave of his wife muttered carelessly, “Vado a far’ un capretto” – “I’m off to kill a kid.”
The combatants had arranged to fight their duel as publicly as possible, on the forecourt of the great Franciscan friary just outside the walls, one of the city’s most imposing buildings and only recently completed. Warned by the friars, however, the Bishop of Ostuni, in cope and mitre and bearing the Host, was waiting to stop them. Followed by an eager crowd, the two duellists looked for an alternative arena, settling on a little paved yard in front of the Capuchin church. Petracone’s second was his sixteen year old brother, Innico, Cosmo’s his eldest son, Girolamo – the same age as Petracone. Their weapons were rapiers with blades three foot long, balanced by daggers in their left hands.
When the combat started, according to a chronicler from Noci, Count Cosmo attacked Petracone so ferociously and skilfully that it seemed scarcely possible the young Duke could survive. Yet, somehow he warded off the Count’s thrusts, letting him tire himself out. Then, to the crowd’s astonishment, Petracone succeeded in wounding Cosmo. He asked if honour had been satisfied, but the enraged Count’s only answer was to rush at the Duke. Receiving a second thrust, Cosmo fell to the ground, streaming with blood, whereupon Petracone and Innico mounted their horses and hastily rode away.
A friar helped Count Cosmo rise to his feet. Clutching his right breast from which blood was still pouring, he staggered into the friary, demanding a confessor. He died a few hours later.
Everyone had expected the duel to end very differently. A band of assassins, brigands hired by the Prince of Francavilla, waited in vain for Count Cosmo on the road home to Conversano.
37
Brigands
...a land
Where laws are trampled on and lawless men
Walk in the sun...
Samuel Rogers, Italian Journal
APULIA SUFFERED FROM BRIGANDS until almost a century ago, as it had always done, even under Charles of Anjou. They multiplied during the unhappy reign of his great-granddaughter Giovanna I. In the fifteenth century Antonio Becadelli claimed, in his life of Alfonso the Magnanimous, how that unusually effective king had rid the realm of brigands, “something never known before.” They soon came back, however, large armies of them fighting pitched battles with the Spanish viceroys’ troops. The scourge was tamed by later viceroys and largely, if not entirely, eradicated under the Borboni, but revived in the early nineteenth century during the French occupation.
The caves in Apulia’s ravines made good hideouts, and the olive groves that stretched for mile upon mile provided an escape from pursuing cavalry. A hollow tree trunk quickly hid someone on foot while, after putting fifty yards of trees behind him, even a horseman vanished. The woodland, formerly a feature of the Murgia dei Trulli, suited robbers particularly well, and the area around Alberobello, Noci and Martina Franca was infested with them. For centuries the valley of Ponte di Bovino, a long, narrow pass through which ran the only road from Naples into Apulia, was notorious for hold-ups. Crouched on a hill that dominated the pass, the town of Bovino was the birth-place of several famous brigands. They often ambushed the royal mail coach, although it was always heavily escorted; on one occasion a comitiva (band) found that the coach was carrying the robes of a newly appointed judge, so they amused themselves by dressing their leader in the robes and “trying” a captive traveller – who was sentenced to death and “executed”.
Many of the brigands came from the Abruzzi, leaving its barren mountains for richer pickings; men such as Marco Sciarra in the sixteenth century, who led a comitiva a thousand strong, well armed and paid regularly, marching in three companies behind the banners of three lieutenants. For seven years they terrorised the Papal States and the Regno, including Apulia. Sometimes they stormed entire cities, such as Gioia del Colle, looting the houses of rich citizens. Marco always took care to hand out money and food to the poor. He genuinely believed in redistributing wealth, calling himself “a minister sent by God against usurers and drones.” As the historian Rosario Villari explains, brigands like Marco were “shaped by a sense of justice and also by the standards and customs of a peasant world to which wild and primitive ferocity was far from alien.”
He fought several pitched battles with government troops. Often he showed considerable chivalry, ordering his musketeers not to shoot at the enemy commander. When a traveller whose party he had ambushed strode up and announced “I am Torquato Tasso”, he knelt down to kiss his hand, beseeching the great poet to remount and go on his way. For, Marco saw himself as more than a mere captain of banditi; in his own eyes, he was a patriot fighting Spanish invaders. Tasso understood this, commenting: “He waged a war like that of Spartacus.”
In 1592, after defeating 4,000 troops sent against him by the Viceroy, Marco invaded the Capitanata. Here he captured Lucera, whose unlucky bishop, Don Scipione Bozzuto, was shot by a marksman when he peered down from the church tower where he had taken refuge. During the same year, however, Adriano Acquaviva, Count of Conversano, drove Marco out of both Apulia and his lair in the Abruzzi. Hired by Venice to fight Dalmatian pirates, Marco and his men refused to fight in Crete, so the Venetians slaughtered them. He escaped, trying to reach the Regno, but was murdered by one of his lieutenants for the money on his head and a free pardon.
In 1594, the traveller Fynes Moryson had been told of the hunted, wolfish existence led by such men all over Southern Italy. He was aware that many brigands had killed comrades for the sake of head-money and a pardon: “they are so jelous one of another, and so affrighted with the horror of their owne Consciences, as they both eat and sleep armed, and uppon the least noyse or shaking of a leafe, have their hands uppon their Armes, ready to defend themselves.”
Other brigand comitive (groups) were active in Apulia at the turn of the sixteenth century, especially in the Terra d’Òtranto, if not so well organised as Marco’s. The peasants often helped them, regarding the Spanish soldiers as robbers and murderers – with good reason. The Benedictine monks of a priory near Troia not only gave shelter to brigands but helped to dispose of their plunder.
The most dangerous comitive, usually about thirty strong, were those around Cisternino and Martina Franca: those in the Lecce area led by the Lubelli brothers, and those near Ceglie Messapico und
er Cataldo and Nunzio, whose other hunting ground was the Monopoli district. For many years Antonio Rovito of Ugento was popularly known as “King of the Brigands” in his neighbourhood, while in 1608, Stefano Calò was wanted in Ostuni for more than twenty murders. Two years later the authorities congratulated themselves on having rid Apulia of banditi, which was clearly wishful thinking.
Sometimes the comitive were led by local noblemen, like Giovan Vincenzo Dominiroberto, Baron of Palascianello, who once escaped from prison in the basket in which his food had been delivered. In 1631 the baron was finally run to ground in a church at Serracapriola, dragged out from sanctuary and beheaded, despite the local bishop’s protests; presumably his head was sent off to obtain the head-money, while his four quarters were hung from roadside trees.
In the 1630s magnates began recruiting small armies of banditi, to enforce their dominion over the peasants and cow the commons in the towns. “Never before had Southern Italian brigandage... been so closely linked with the barons’ activities and interests”, comments Villari. The wool merchants grew frightened of doing business in the dogana at Foggia where the magnates’ new henchmen bullied them into paying robbers’ prices. Feudal privilege enabled barons to give their brigands virtual impunity, although many were hunted down by revengeful peasants during the revolt of 1647.
Later in the century the authorities almost eradicated brigandage, but it revived during the 1760s. The comitiva of Nicola Spinosa, or ‘Scanna Cornacchia’ (‘Carrion Crow’) as he was popularly known, a murderer and escaped convict from Castellana, became a useful political tool for Count Giulio Antonio IV of Conversano, who protected its members in return for favourable results in the elections to his city’s commune. He regularly received the ‘Carrion Crow’ after dark at his hunting-lodge of Marchione outside Conversano, turning a very blind eye to murder, robbery, rape and extortion.
Giulio Antonio was also Count of Castellana, where ‘Scanna Cornacchia’ was no less active. In 1782 its people petitioned King Ferdinand, imploring him to save them from the ‘Carrion Crow’, and explaining that the comitiva was under their feudal lord’s protection. In response, the count was ordered to hand the comitiva over to justice within a month; otherwise, His Majesty would put in train “certain steps of an economic nature.” Giulio Antonio thereupon bribed Gregorio Matarrese, whom he knew was in their confidence, to murder them and gave him guns. The comitiva was planning to rob the King’s Messenger near Tàranto so Matarrese laid a lethal ambush. Most of its members were killed or captured, but the ‘Carrion Crow’ escaped into the woods. He went to ground with his mistress, Domenica Pugliese – ‘La Falcona di Putignano’ in a masseria near Putignano, where the couple were at last tracked down by a company of Swiss soldiers. Realising he had no hope of escape, the ‘Carrion Crow’ ordered his mistress to kill him, the ‘Falcon’ shooting him in the neck. Stuck on a lance, his head was paraded through Castellana.
“Many abandon their wretched way of life and turn to robbery”, Galanti wrote of the Regno’s peasants in the 1790s, yet when de Salis visited the Terra d’Òtranto at this time he noticed that guards were not needed – although their presence was a help in dealing with extortionate innkeepers. By then the authorities seldom executed brigands since they were useful as convict labour.
However, in 1806, Joseph Bonaparte became king, succeeded by Marshal Murat two years later, and brigandage broke out all over Southern Italy. ‘Il Pennacchio’ (‘the Plumed One’) stormed through the Gargano, claiming he was under orders from the exiled King Ferdinand, killing French supporters and plundering their property. In 1808, Major Courier reported that the area around Foggia was a land of thieves: “They hold up travellers and have their way with the girls. They rob, rape and murder.”
During Joseph’s reign they terrorised the Bovino valley, along which ran the main road from Naples. Charles Macfarlane writes, “rarely could a company of travellers pass without being stopped; a Government officer, a Government mail, or the revenue from the province, never without a little army for an escort. And all these troops were at times unable to afford protection, but were themselves beaten off, or slaughtered by the brigands.” They even dreamt of capturing Joseph and taking him prisoner to King Ferdinand in Sicily. However, Murat eventually brought the situation under control.
The most notorious comitiva was led by Gaetano Vardarelli and his brothers. After deserting from Murat’s army in 1809, Gaetano harried northern Apulia with 300 horsemen, one of his bases being the Bovino valley. He and his band encouraged the country people not to pay taxes, burning conscription lists. Since salt was a government monopoly, they broke into state warehouses and handed out the salt. They lived off the land, raiding masserie; if resisted, they set fire to the buildings and the crops, driving off the livestock. When the hunt finally grew too hot, many of the comitiva fled to Sicily, including Gaetano, who became a sergeant in King Ferdinand’s guards. But Apulia had not heard the last of Don Gaetano Vardarelli.
Part IX
Tàranto and Brìndisi
38
Classical Tàranto
Taranto is in many ways the most remarkable city left to us in all
Magna Graecia... The ancient city spread itself out over the mainland
eastward, its acropolis alone occupying the peninsula, which is now
an island.
Edward Hutton, “Naples and Southern Italy”
THE TWO GREAT PORTS of southern Apulia are Tàranto and Brìndisi, on the Ionian Sea and the Adriatic. Since the third century BC they have been linked across the Heel of Italy by the Via Appia. Famous in Antiquity, they fascinated the travellers, who had read about them in Polybius or Livy. To understand how they saw these venerable cities and what they hoped to find there, you have to look at the history of Taras and Brentesion.
According to legend, Tàranto – in Greek, Taras – was founded by a divinity of that name, son of Poseidon, the god of the Mediterranean, and of the nymph Saturia, who was a daughter of Minos of Crete. She had set out for Italy from Crete with Iapyx (ancestor of the Messapians), but en route she had been raped by Poseidon. Taras arrived in Apulia on a dolphin, having ridden over the sea from Cape Matapan. He was worshipped as a demi-god by the Tarentines, who put him on their coins, and even today he appears on the city arms, riding on his dolphin.
The Cretan elements in the story, however fantastic, are probably significant. Minoan ships could well have visited the Gulf of Tàranto. Strabo says that the Cretans were here before the Spartans while Herodotus thinks that the Messapians came from Crete. (Although Herodotus admits that he is not infallible – “my job is to write down what has been said, but I don’t have to believe it.”) In reality, the Messapians came from the other side of the Adriatic; their pottery, unique in Italy, is relatively common in the Balkans. Yet there were undoubtedly Greek links from a very early date, with a small Mycenean trading colony on a site at Scoglio del Tonno – near today’s railway station – which flourished from about 1400–1200 BC. Even after the collapse of Mycenae, when most of the West lost contact, the Messapians kept in touch with Greece.
During the eighth century BC, a band of young Spartans left home because their countrymen refused to treat them as equals. They were bastards, born to women whose husbands had been away at war for nineteen years. The legend is that, led by Phalanthus – another dolphin rider – the youths sailed northwest into the Ionian Sea and founded Taras. What is certain is that Spartans established a colony here at about this time, administered by a ‘nomarch’. Trading with the Messapians, they were no doubt attracted by the marvellous harbour and beautiful coastline. “The landscape, vegetation and intensity of light all recalled Greece”, Francois Lenormant points out: “The first colonists from Hellas must have thought they were still in their own country... Here you enter a new land... which really does deserve the name ‘Greater Greece’.”
Predictably, there was unending war between colonists and natives. Yet there must also have been cultu
ral exchange since the Messapians adopted the newcomers’ alphabet. This was realised in 2003 when archaeologists unearthed a ‘map’ on a shard of black-glazed terracotta, which is the size of a large postage stamp and dates from about 500 BC. The oldest example of western cartography, it shows thirteen towns including Òtranto, Soleto, Ugento, Leuca (Santa Maria di Leuca) and Taras. Save for Taras their names are in Messapian, but written in ancient Greek script.
Until the fifth century Taras was governed by kings. Like all Greek colonies its citizens frequently faced extermination by the natives; as late as 474 BC they suffered a terrible defeat. However, they won a decisive victory in 460 at Carbina, when, as Hutton puts it, “the Messapian women were outraged upon the altars of their gods with such refinements of lust that one must suppose an extraordinary corruption of manners among the Tarantines.” Carbina is modern Carovigno.
During the fourth century BC, its most prosperous period, Taras had a population of 300,000 and covered much the same area as modern Tàranto. Its first citadel was an acropolis, on a rock on what was then an island, but is now the peninsula occupied by the Old Town, guarding the entrance to the Mare Piccolo. The chamber tombs were the most magnificent in Magna Graecia. Later, elegant suburbs with wide streets, theatres and baths were laid out on the site of today’s New Town.
An Armchair Traveller's History of Apulia Page 18