An Armchair Traveller's History of Apulia (12 page)

Molfetta, on the other hand, in the eyes of the travellers, lacked charm although impressive from a distance. Count de Salis visited it with Archbishop Capecelatro of Tàranto. While admiring its past glories as one of the most important trading ports in Apulia, he found it “filthy, ugly and badly built.” It is full of unhappy memories; in 1902, for example, thousands of starving men and women besieged the municipality and the
carabinieri
’s (national military police) barracks, then looted the flour mills. To some ex-tent the city is redeemed by the
duomo vecchio
, the former cathedral, begun in 1150 and as much Byzantine as Romanesque, whose twin white towers dominate the harbour.

In the eighteenth century travel by land between these cities was not always easy. According to de Salis, the road between Molfetta and Giovinazzo, the next port, was “the worst I have every traversed in my whole life, so cluttered up with stones, that the mules were obliged to leap like goats, from one heap to the next; so that at a certain point we were obliged to leave the carriage and make our way on foot.”

At Giovinazzo, once known as Iuvenis Netium by the Romans, a forgotten mosaic floor from the early Middle Ages slowly emerged before the cathedral’s high altar during a recent restoration. “The view of the sea and the symmetry of its architecture, including that of its suburbs, make it delicious” was Pacichelli’s flattering opinion of Giovinazzo, whose enthusiasm may have been prompted by admiration for its feudal lord, the Duke Giudice, “noble from the dignity of the purple and splendour of the toga, and from sagacity.”

Keppel Craven ate an excellent dinner at Giovinazzo, washed down with a good local red wine. Afterwards he took a stroll, before retiring to a bed at the inn spread with clean linen, entering “possession of it with the prospect of a comfortable night’s rest. But in this I greatly erred; for the bed and all its alluring appendages contained ‘that within which passeth outward show’, a most numerous and lively population.” At the end of the nineteenth century, however, Janet Ross did not need to worry so much about bed bugs, although at least one Apulian inn-keeper mistook her travelling bath for “some novel musical instrument.”

17

Whether it was his blood or the plots formed against his life by the

barons which embittered and darkened his nature, it is certain that he

was equalled in ferocity by none among the princes of his time.

Jacob Burckhkardt, “The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy”

AS WELL AS the Emperor Frederick and King Manfred another royal ghost haunts this landscape, even if no Pugliese would ever wish to call King Ferrante an Apulian. “Besides hunting,” says Burckhardt, “his pleasures were of two kinds: he liked to have his opponents near him, either alive in well-guarded prisons, or dead and embalmed, dressed in the costume they wore in their lifetime. He would chuckle in talking of the captives with his friends, and made no secret whatever of the museum of mummies.” He is also credited with feeding prisoners to a pet crocodile, which he kept in a dungeon.

Ferrante’s coronation as King of mainland ‘Sicily’ (Naples) took place in the cathedral at Barletta on 4 February, 1459. In the know-ledge that everyone present was aware of his illegitimacy and being challenged for the crown by a rival, he made heralds throw silver coins into the crowd with an inscription stating that his cause was just; they had been minted out of reliquaries stolen from Monte Sant’ Angelo. A coronation banquet followed, in the hall of the great Hohenstaufen castle by the sea.

Meanwhile the Neapolitan Wars of the Roses dragged on. Ferrante’s father Alfonso of Aragon had routed his rival, Réné of Anjou – but Réné’s son, the Duke of Calabria, and the Angevin party remained extremely dangerous. In the circumstances Barletta was a good place for a coronation since it was near the Tavoliere, enabling Ferrante to get his hands on the revenue from the grazing tolls. He needed money desperately. John of Calabria had the support of France, and the French occupied Genoa, controlling its formidable fleet. He knew that the
Regno
’s haughty barons despised Ferrante as a young Catalan bastard who was widely rumoured to be the son of a Moorish slave. He also knew that the king’s brother-in-law, the Prince of Rossano, hated him for having committed incest with his sister. Even Ferrante’s uncle by marriage, the Prince of Tàranto, the greatest magnate in Apulia, was in close touch with the Angevins.

In autumn 1459 the Duke of Calabria landed north of Naples and many barons rose in rebellion. Even so, within a year Ferrante had almost beaten off the challenge, but then his army was unexpectedly defeated at the mouth of the River Sarno near Naples, and he fled with only twenty men-at-arms. He continued the struggle from Apulia, where in 1461 he suffered a fresh disaster, when large numbers of his troops and horses perished from thirst during a dreadful, waterless march across the Gargano. He took refuge in Barletta. Save for Trani, the rest of Apulia belonged to his enemies.

Both sides employed mercenaries, Iacopo Piccinino fighting for the Angevins, Alessandro Sforza for the king. By mid-summer 1461 the Prince of Tàranto occupied Andria, Giovinazzo and even Trani, while the Duke of Calabria held the Gargano. The tide soon turned, however, when Ferrante’s ally, George Castriota Skanderbeg, brought 800 tough Albanian veterans from across the Adriatic. In August the king besieged the castle of Orsara di Puglia near Troia. Calabria tried to relieve it, a skirmish turned into a pitched battle and suddenly the Angevins were routed beyond hope of recovery. The barons, including Tàranto and Rossano, changed sides. The rebellion was over.

“No one could ever tell what King Ferrante was thinking”, re-cords the French statesman Commynes. “Smiling in a friendly way, he would seize and destroy men... His kinsmen and close acquaintances have told me he knew neither mercy nor compassion.” After a show of reconciliation he had the Prince of Tàranto strangled and flung the Prince of Rossano into a dungeon, to await a nightmare death for a quarter of a century. He lured another old enemy, Iacopo Piccinino, to Naples, welcomed him like a brother, wined and dined him for a month, and then had him murdered – thrown from a window.

“Where money was concerned, he never showed pity or compassion for his people,” writes Commynes. He bred horses and pigs on a huge scale, his subjects being made to pasture his horses, lend him stallions and fatten his pigs. In oil-producing areas like Apulia, he bought the oil cheap, then forced the price up and compelled the public to buy it. He used the same method with corn. Loans were ruthlessly extracted from every rich nobleman.

Ferrante’s private life was equally swinish, especially after the death of his beautiful, highly intelligent queen, Isabella Chiaramonte. According to Commynes, “ he raped several women savagely.”

A paranoiac, he became as frightened of Turkish invasion as he was of revolts by his barons, and he added cannon-proof bastions to every castle on the Apulian coast. From his friend Skanderbeg, he realised that what had happened to Serbia and Albania might all too easily happen to Southern Italy, especially after the Turkish occupation of Òtranto in 1480.

The barons were terrified of his heir, the future King Alfonso II, who was even crueller than Ferrante. In 1485 a plot, the famous
Congiura de’ Baroni
(conspiracy of the barons), attracted many of the kingdom’s great dignitaries; they wanted Ferrante to be succeeded by his second son, the gentle Federigo. There was sporadic fighting during 1485–86, some of it in Apulia, and then the king made a peace which the plotters foolishly took at face-value.

One of the plot’s leaders was an Apulian baron, Francesco Coppolo from Gallipoli, Ferrante’s financial adviser, whom he had made Count of Sarno. The king invited several people involved in the plot to the marriage at Naples of Sarno’s son Marco to his own granddaughter. During the celebrations in the Castel Nuovo, all of them were arrested and beheaded soon after. A few months later several other magnates were seized, none of whom was ever seen again; according to Giannone, “it was generally believed that they had been strangled, put in sacks and thrown into the sea.” Among the victims were Ferrante’s brother-in-law, the Prince of Rossano, who had spent twenty-three years in prison, and Pirro del Balzo, Prince of Altamura.

Surprisingly, King Ferrante died a natural death in his own bed in 1494, after a stroke. He did so knowing that the French were about to invade the
Regno
and that his dynasty was doomed. The Apulians do not care to remember him, even if he was crowned at Barletta.

18

...the whole town is so gracious in spite of modern improvements that

a whole day is not too much to give it, lingering in the old churches, or

about the harbour, or lounging in the pretty public gardens by the sea.

Edward Hutton, “Naples and Southern Italy”

MANY PEOPLE THINK TRANI is the most beautiful of all Apulian cities. It has a long history and its famous maritime code, the
Ordinamenta Maris
, dates from 1063 when it was part of the Byzantine Empire. Under the Normans countless Crusaders embarked for the Holy Land from Trani, after a night spent in vigil at the church of Ognissanti.

Facing the sea, its deep moat filled with seawater, Trani Castle is one of the few Hohenstaufen castles to retain its original geometric pattern. The Emperor Frederick, who built it, hanged Pietro Tiepolo, the Doge of Venice’s son, from its walls in full view of the Venetian fleet cruising outside, in revenge for Venetian raids on the Apulian coast. The Via Giudea commemorates the Jewish quarter at Trani, to whose community the Emperor gave a monopoly of the city’s silk trade, and the little thirteenth century churches of Scuolanuova and Sant’ Anna began as synagogues.

It is King Manfred, however, who has the most dramatic associations with Trani. In 1259 an anonymous Dominican chronicler, from the friary next to the harbour, watched the arrival of Manfred’s Byzantine queen, Helena Comnena:

On 2 June eight galleys brought to Apulia the bride of King Manfred, Helena, daughter of the Despot of Epirus, accompanied by many lords and ladies of our realm and from her father’s. She landed at the port of Trani where the King was waiting for her. When the lady landed from her galley, he warmly embraced and kissed her. After leading her all the way through the city to everybody’s applause, he took her to the castle where there was feasting and dancing, while during that evening there were so many illuminations, with beacons in every town in the land, that it seemed just like day-time.... the said queen is most agreeable, with a kindly manner, far more beautiful than the King’s first wife, and people say that she is only seventeen.

In 1496, King Ferrantino pawned Trani to the Venetians, who remained here for thirteen years. They occupied it again in 1529, but were driven out by the Spaniards. Some
palazzi
have a distinctly Venetian air. The city then declined steadily under Spanish rule, the harbour being deliberately left to silt up, to make it uncompetitive.

When the tireless Abate Pacichelli visited Trani at the end of the seventeenth century, he was distressed to find it so decayed. Many fine houses had been allowed to fall down while its spacious squares were deserted. This was partly due to the plague of 1656, in which “more than a hundred of the best families had been extinguished.” He noticed and, uncharacteristically, queried an inscription over a gate, claiming that the name Trani combined those of Diomedes’s son Tyrrhenius, who founded it, and of the Emperor Trajan who restored it.

Bishop Berkeley enjoyed the wine here in 1734. “N.B. The muscat of Trani excellent,” he recorded. As usual, his notes are as vivid as they are terse: “This city, as Barletta, paved and built almost entirely out of white marble; noble cathedral, Gothic, of white marble... port stopped and choked.” He adds “piracies of the Turks make it unsafe travelling by night.” By “Turks” he meant North Africans or Albanians, who generally arrived in fast boats, abducted a few women and animals, and then vanished as swiftly as they had come. The last raid of this sort on Apulia took place in 1836.

During the mid-eighteenth century Charles VII briefly made Trani the political and administrative centre of Apulia, siting all the law courts here. He dredged the harbour, enabling its merchants to export wool, grain and olive oil. However, it soon silted up again.

Swinburne had a low opinion of the wine, and of the cathedral too– “in very mean taste, the ornament preposterous.” The interior had suffered from Baroque “improvements”. Nor did this dour Northumbrian care much for the inhabitants:

Our evening was spent with the archbishop, a worthy conversable prelate. He told us he had taken great pains to introduce a taste for study and literature into his diocese, but hitherto without much success as the Tranians were a very merry race,
gente molto allegra
, but unfortunately born with an unconquerable antipathy to application. The collegians, though under his immediate inspection, were above his hand, and often, when he thought the whole seminary buried in silence, wrapped up in studious contemplation, or lucubrations, he had been surprised, on entering the quadrangle, to find all ring again, with gigs and tarantellas. We were satisfied that he spoke without exaggeration, for never did we hear such incessant chattering, and so stunning a din as was kept up the whole day under our windows. It is a rule established by the custom of time immemorial, that no work shall be done in Trani during dinner; the whole afternoon is to be spent in dozing, chattering or sauntering: we could not prevail upon the blacksmith to shoe one of our horses in the evening.