An Armchair Traveller's History of Apulia (26 page)

Pyrrhus, who in Hannibal’s opinion was the finest general of his lifetime, possessed a great toe rumoured to have divine powers. When he landed at Taras, because of a storm he had only a handful of cavalry, 2,000 infantry and two elephants. Learning that the Tarantines expected him to do all the fighting, he at once conscripted the male population, banning drinking parties and banquets. He managed to beat the Romans twice, but his losses were so heavy that he evacuated his troops to Sicily. The second of these battles, Asculum, was the original ‘Pyrrhic’ victory; “One more victory over the Romans like that and we’re done for”, he told a soldier. When the Romans marched on Taras, he rushed back to relieve it but was defeated, and in 272 BC the city finally fell to the Romans.

Taras became Tarentum, a Roman garrison occupying the citadel. However, in 212 when some Tarantine hostages tried to escape from Rome and, after being caught, were flung to their deaths from the Tarpeian rock, there was widespread revulsion against Roman rule among the citizens. Two young cousins of the victims, Philomenus and Nicon, wrote to Hannibal, offering to hand over the city to him. His army was camped nearby and he had ingratiated himself by releasing all the Tarantine prisoners taken at Cannae – if he could capture the port of Taras, he would be able to get badly needed reinforcements and supplies from Carthage.

The Romans were accustomed to letting Philomenus in after dark because of his passion for hunting, and because he always gave them some of his game. One night, while the garrison were having a party, he came back with an enormous wild boar; when the sentry bent down to admire it, he stabbed him with his boar-spear and then opened the gate for the waiting Carthaginians. Nicon had already opened another gate for Hannibal with the main storming party, and together they quickly overran the city. However, the Romans held out in the citadel, protected by the sea on three sides, and guarded on the landward by a deep moat and a strong wall. It bottled up the Tarantine fleet, so Hannibal had the ships dragged across the isthmus on huge wagons. Then they blockaded the citadel, but it still refused to surrender.

Three years later, when the Carthaginians were busy elsewhere, a Roman army besieged Taras. A traitor opened the gates, and after half-heartedly throwing a few javelins at them, the panic-stricken Tarantines ran into their houses. The Romans enslaved 30,000 men, women and children, besides sending home an immense quantity of gold, silver and statuary. “I see the Romans have their own Hannibal” was Hannibal’s comment. “We’ve lost the city in the way we took it.”

This was the end of Taras as a great city-state, Brundisium swiftly replacing it as Southern Italy’s principal port. Yet Roman rule cannot have been all that harsh, since after two centuries Strabo reported how Tarentum still kept its Greek language and way of life. It charmed both Horace and Virgil, who, like most cultivated Romans, revered everything Greek. Horace swore that if the Fates did not allow him to live out his last days at Tivoli, then he would do so near Tarentum. He praised the wine, the
merum tarentinum
, claiming that it was far better than the bland vintages from the vineyards around Rome, while Virgil wrote lyrically of the Tarantine countryside.

About 95 AD, Marcus Cocceius Nerva, a kindly, dignified senator, was exiled here by the paranoiac Diocletian. Too gentle to fear as a murderer, the savage and tyrannical emperor may have been afraid of him as a potential replacement. When Diocletian was assassinated in 96, Nerva was summoned to the throne although in his sixties. He only lived for another two years but his reign was one of the most benevolent in Roman history. No doubt, he rewarded the pleasant place of his banishment.

Centuries later, the River Galaesus, so often mentioned by the two poets, attracted classically minded travellers to the city. But they could not credit that any of the wretched, swampy little streams flowing into the Mare Piccolo could possibly be the beautiful river of Horace and Virgil that had once “soaked the golden fields.”

39

I die far from the land of Italy and from Tàranto, my home,

and for me that is a harder fate than death.

Leonidas, “Epigrams”

VERY FEW GREEK TARANTINES are remembered as recognisable historical personalities, as people in their own right. There are two exceptions, however. These are a brilliant scholar-statesman, Archytas, and a minor poet, Leonidas.

It was under Archytas, who was born about 400 BC, that Taras became the head of a formidable confederation of the Greek city-states of Magna Graecia. He was arguably the greatest Apulian in history, not excepting the Emperor Frederick II. Not a lot is known about him, and what we do know coming mainly from a few pages in an ancient Greek collection of lives of the philosophers. Chosen seven times by the Tarantines to be their leader, Archytas’s head remained unturned despite winning many victories over the Messapians and the Lucanians, and never once losing a battle. Because of his gifts as a statesman, as well as a military commander, the Tarantines reached the summit of their prosperity and the Tarantine fleet ruled the waves in the Ionian and Adriatic seas. Thanks to his alliance with Dionysius, tyrant of Sicily, several cities of Magna Graecia that had been conquered by Dionysius’s father recovered their freedom. Dionysius felt such respect for him that in his honour he sent a gigantic bronze candelabrum to light the Tarantine senate-house, with a burner for every day in the year.

Archytas wrote on astronomy, music, geography and politics, but only a few fragments of his books survive. A pioneer of mathematical mechanics, he developed new methods of weight-lifting with pulleys, constructed a wooden dove that flew, and solved the problem of duplicating the cube by building a scale model. His discoveries were so important that they influenced Plato and Euclid, possibly even Aristotle.

After the death of his mentor, Socrates, Plato took refuge with Archytas and his Pythagorean circle at Taras. When Plato went on to Syracuse and infuriated Dionysius, Archytas saved his life by writing an eloquent letter of intercession and then sending a galley to take him away quickly. A man who looked after his slaves as well as he did his family, he was probably a model for the philosopher king in Plato’s “Republic”.

He was drowned in a shipwreck off the coast of the Gargano. Three centuries later, Horace wrote a wistful ode to his memory, “Te maris et terrae”, in which he lamented how the superb genius, who had known how to measure the earth and the ocean, even all the grains of sand, was now himself “a little mound of earth near the Matine coast.”

The Tarantine poet Leonidas, who appears to have escaped from the city when it fell to the Romans in 272 BC, was neither a genius nor a very important poet. He seems to have been poor and obscure even before the fall of his beloved native city, knowing little of Tarantine luxury, a friend of peasants, fishermen and artisans, and writing how he found love in hovels. Yet, for all his terseness, or perhaps because of it, his poems have a gentle charm which inspired at least one really great poet, André Chenier.

He used a humble verse form, the epigram, which never consisted of more than a few lines. He wrote some lines in praise of Pyrrhus’s victory at the River Sinni in 274, when the king was trying to save Taras from the Romans, that give us the only clue to when he lived. He is most likeable, however, in his country mode, as in the four lines of Greek which form “The Farmer’s Rest” (translated by E.F. Lucas):

Spare to this humble hillock, this stone that stands so lowly,

Where poor Alcimenes slumbers, one word in passing, friend,

Though beneath briar and bramble it now lies hidden wholly

These same old foes that, living, I fought with to the end.

Leonidas’s descriptions of nature can still move. In one epigram, “The Goatherd’s Thank-offering”, he describes a very old lion, “time-worn in every limb”, who is so grateful at finding shelter from a snowstorm in a goatherd’s fold that he does not harm any of its terrified goats. In another, “The Cricket’s Grave”, he writes of “the wild thistle-climber... the corn-stalk scaler”.

In yet another epigram (translated by Kenneth Rexroth), his husband from Magna Graecia sounds just like a certain sort of Apulian farmer who even today is not yet quite extinct:

Here is Klito’s little shack.

Here is his little corn patch.

Here is his tiny vineyard.

Here is his little wood-lot.

Here Klito spent eighty years.

After escaping from Taras, Leonidas roamed the shores of the Aegean, especially those of the island of Kos off Asia Minor, lamenting that he was going to die in exile after so many wanderings. Yet, like Archytas, he had shown the world that not all Tarantines were heartless voluptuaries. Sadly the countryside the poet loved, all around Tàranto, is now covered with plastic tunnels for early vegetables.

40

The most powerful Prince of Tàranto, Gianantonio del Balzo Orsini...

could ride on his own land from Salerno to Tàranto.

Benedetto Croce, “Storia del Regno di Napoli”

GUIDEBOOKS GIVE THE IMPRESSION that nothing happened at Tàranto from the Classical era until modern times. Yet it was in turn a bastion of Byzantine Italy, a Saracen pirates’ nest, a Byzantine city again and then the capital of a great feudal principality. Few Anglo-Saxon historians have written about the fifteenth century
Mezzogiorno
when the Prince of Tàranto decided who should wear the crown at Naples, Gianantonio del Balzo Orsini being a southern Italian version of Warwick the Kingmaker. His name, with that of his father Raimondello, crops up all over Apulia.

During the Barbarian invasions and the Byzantine reconquest, Taranto suffered severely. It was occupied by the Saracens from 842–80 under Sahib al-Ustul, Abu Ga’far, and finally Uthman, who used it as a base for raiding instead of making it into an emirate like Sawdan’s Bari. Regained by the Byzantines, it was sacked by the Saracens, then rebuilt by Nicephorus Phocas and re-colonised from Greece. One should always remember that all the Greek survivals encountered in Apulia are not so much the last traces of Magna Graecia as relics of the Byzantine Empire. If he was an educated man, the Strategos of Taranto may perhaps have seen himself as heir to the Nomarchs of ancient Taras, but he must have known very well that what he ruled was a Latin and Lombard port – only in the eleventh century did sufficient colonists arrive from Byzantium to make it once more a truly Greek city.

It fell to the Normans in 1063. Bohemond of Hauteville became its first prince in 1085 and, although he left it to go on Crusade, this was the start of its history as the most important feudal fief in Apulia. Significantly, before becoming king Manfred was Prince of Tàranto.

Charles II created his younger son, Philip, Prince of Tàranto and Despot of ‘Romania’ – the Latin name for Byzantine Greece. If Philip made little impact on Greece, when he died in 1331 he left his titles there to his eldest son Robert, who through his mother was Latin Emperor of Constantinople. Philip’s second son Louis inherited Tàranto. At Louis’s death in 1362, Tàranto passed to another Philip, to whom Robert bequeathed the titular Empire. Philip died childless in 1374. Behind these Imperial pretensions lay Apulia’s eternal tie with the Levant.

In 1346, Louis of Tàranto married his beautiful, doomed cousin, the twenty-year-old Giovanna I. Her first husband, Andreas of Hungary, had been strangled and castrated, so his father invaded the
Regno
at the head of a Hungarian army, under a banner that bore a murdered king and the word
vendetta
. For a time the young couple were forced to go into exile. After Louis’s death, Giovanna married two more husbands, until in 1382 she was deposed by her cousin, Charles of Durazzo, who had her smothered with a bolster.

Among the new King Charles’s opponents was a Raimondello del Balzo Orsini, who from his boyhood had “loved to tempt fate” as an adventurous knight errant, and whose life was a long series of battles and chivalrous duels. A great Roman family, the Orsini and their Colonna rivals dominated Rome during the century when the Popes lived at Avignon. They also acquired lands in Southern Italy, Raimondello being a younger son of Niccolò Orsini, Count of Nola near Naples. Born about 1350, he was bequeathed the county of Soleto by his grandmother’s brother, Raimondo del Balzo. Niccolò, however, insisted that his eldest son should inherit the county. Raimondello went off to the Crusades, but on his return he took Soleto by force, putting ‘del Balzo’ before his name. In 1384 he married Maria d’Enghien, Countess of Lecce in her own right and a famous beauty.

During the war that followed Giovanna’s death, he led a company of seventy knights who had sworn to avenge the murdered queen, supporting her heir, Louis of Anjou, against Charles of Durazzo. Among Charles’s commanders was the English
condottiere
(mercenary warlord) Sir John Hawkwood, and there was some fierce fighting; after being badly wounded in the thigh Raimondello always wore one leg of his hose white and the other red. Charles became King of Hungary as well as Naples in 1386, but was murdered. When the Angevin party collapsed, Raimondello went over to Charles’s son Ladislao, his reward being the principality of Tàranto.

A megalomaniac, Ladislao planned to become King of Hungary and all Italy, occupying Rome on two occasions. As lustful as he was ambitious, he employed pimps to kidnap pretty girls, whom he kept in a secret harem at Naples. He was also violent-tempered and murderous.

At the end of 1405, when Ladislao had finally been evicted from Rome and the Angevin cause was reviving under a new pretender, Raimondello led another revolt, but died at Tàranto in February 1406 while the King was marching to besiege him. Knowing that an Angevin expedition was on its way, his widow concealed his death, evacuating useless mouths and revictualling the city by sea. The siege dragged on for so long that Ladislao nearly gave up. Eventually he offered to marry Maria, although she was twenty years older. Since there was no sign of the Angevins, she accepted, the ceremony taking place in the castle chapel at Tàranto in April 1407. The Angevin galleys arrived just too late and had to sail back empty-handed to Provence.