An Armchair Traveller's History of Apulia (14 page)

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

...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.

From 1500–24 Bari was ruled by the Duchess Isabella Sforza, who was the daughter of Alfonso II of Naples and the widow of Gian Galeazzo II of Milan. She hated the French for chasing the Sforza out of Milan and for taking her young son by Galeazzo a prisoner to France, where they forced him into becoming a monk. She never saw him again, signing herself “Isabella, unique in misfortune.” A poetess and an accomplished musician, she lived in splendour at the castle, devoting herself to her daughter Bona. But in 1517, in a dress of blue studded with golden bees, Bona was married by proxy to King Sigismund of Poland.

After Isabella’s death, Bona governed Bari from Poland. When Sigismund died in 1548, she took a lover, her luxurious court at Cracow corrupting even the clergy. She was on bad terms with her son, Sigismund II, hating her daughters-in-law; the first died in childbirth, the second within days of being crowned, and it was widely believed that Bona had poisoned them. After a final quarrel with her son, in 1555 she returned to Bari, taking so much treasure with her that, at their coronation, future Kings of Poland had to swear to recover it. She died two years later.

Bona may have brought one or two Protestants with her from tolerant Poland, for during the latter half of the sixteenth century, “a foreigner from a distant land” appeared in Bari, teaching philosophy. When it was discovered that he was “a perfidious Calvinist”, who cast doubt on the doctrine of Transubstantiation, Archbishop Puteo ordered his arrest. He fled to Trani, but was caught and sent to Rome, where he was burned at the stake.

Since the Turkish conquest of the Balkans, the city had been increasingly threatened by Muslim pirates, Baresi notables being captured and held to ransom on their way to greet Bona at Venice when she was returning from Poland. The situation became so serious that the
duomo
’s bell-tower was used as a look-out post, a permanent watch being kept for the sails of Turkish or North African raiders. Inland, brigands frequently intercepted wagon-loads of food en route to Bari.

In 1579 Camillo Porzio wrote of the Terra di Bari, “this province is famous for corn, oil, cotton, wine, saffron and... whole woods of almond trees.” Rich Baresi often owned a
masseria
in the country or a share in one, where olives were pressed, but many of the city’s
palazzi
contained presses that could handle several hundred-weight. Grapes were pressed in the country, the must brought in to the
palazzi
to ferment. A
palazzo
generally had two storeys and a roof-terrace, the owner’s apartments being on the first floor, store-rooms and cisterns on the ground floor; if more storage space was needed the courtyard would be covered with sail-cloth. Five hundred Venetian merchants came regularly to buy wine and wheat.

As elsewhere, savage taxation caused a popular rising in 1647. Plague broke out in 1656, killing 12,000 Baresi out of 15,000. Brigandage grew even worse, pirates more active, so that the walls had to be rebuilt at great expense. With not enough labour to work them, the price of arable land, olive groves and vineyards slumped; by the 1670s they were almost unsaleable. There was famine in 1672, another outbreak of plague in 1690–92.

Yet the Abate Pacichelli, visiting Bari in the 1680s, calls it the “Crown of the Province and Jewel of Cities”. He liked the people, whom he says are good looking, fine men of business, honest, hardworking and kind-hearted, and make good soldiers –
Arditi nelle Guerre
.

As a result of the War of the Spanish Succession, Austrian rule replaced Spanish from 1707 to 1738. In his journal George Berkeley describes Bari at this time. It “hath inhabitants 18,000; moles old and new, port shallow, not admitting ships of any burden.” He says of two friaries outside the walls, “pleasantly situated, cool cloisters, orange and lemon groves in them, fine views, delicious living.” He adds that the outskirts abound in cornfields, vineyards and orchards, and admires the extremely delightful small white houses. But he also tells us, “The gentry of Bari dare not lie during summer in their villas for fear of the Turk.”

In 1738 the kingdom of the Two Sicilies became independent once more under Charles VII of Bourbon, the first of the Borbone dynasty, who revived Southern Italy’s prosperity, building count-less roads. In 1740 he spent three days at Bari to thank St Nicholas for the birth of a son and heir, presenting the basilica with a silver
baldacchino
(canopy of state).

The composer Nicolo Piccini was born here in 1728. His first success was at Naples; the opera “
La Cecchina: la Buona figliuola
”, with a plot inspired by Richardson’s novel “Pamela” about the trials of a virtuous servant girl. Piccini later went to Paris, to become the unwilling rival of Gluck. When he died in 1800, he had written more than 150 long forgotten operas. “
La Cecchina
” was revived some years ago, at the Val d’ Itria festival.

Henry Swinburne visited Bari at the end of the 1770s, finding its streets “narrow, crooked and dirty”, but enjoyed the prospect from the harbour wall – “at every turn you catch a different view of the sea and the coast, stretching from the mountains of Garganus to the hills of Ostuni.” His reaction to the shrine of St Nicholas was typical of his period: “a dirty, dark, subterranean chapel... Underneath its altar is a hole through which devout and curious persons thrust their heads, to behold a bone or two swimming below in water; this liquid is drawn up by the priests in a silver bucket, and distributed under the name of Manna, as an infallible cure for sore eyes and disordered stomachs.”

In 1798 Ferdinand IV gave the city’s
borghesi
equality with its nobles. By then everyone agreed that Bari should be expanded. Huddling behind crumbling walls, it still covered no more ground than in medieval times, with too many ruinous houses and horribly inadequate sewage. Already, in 1790 two engineers, Viti and Palenzia, had produced a plan for a new city. But the plan had to be postponed, although King Ferdinand had approved it.

At the beginning of 1799 the French invaded Southern Italy, chasing out King Ferdinand and inviting their sympathisers to set up the “Parthenopean (Neapolitan) Republic”. In February the Baresi joined it, planting a Tree of Liberty in their city with great ceremony. Early in the summer, however, Bari was reoccupied by Borbone troops. Later, the
Risorgimento
would canonise the Southern Revolutionaries as “Patriots of ’99”, although their regime was incapable of surviving without foreign bayonets. It was not a good moment to begin rebuilding.