An Armchair Traveller's History of Apulia (6 page)

The only other traveller known to have come here is the young Charles Macfarlane during the 1820s, as a guest of Don Francesco Pinto y Mendoza, Prince of Ischitella. He says the town was on “the edge of a forest, which for extent and wilderness, and the sublime height of its trees, I have never seen surpassed.” Although the prince had begun his career fighting for Napoleon, he later became a Borbone general and King Ferdinand II’s minister of war. At that time, however, he was distrusted by the court and spent his time improving his estates, building roads and digging much needed wells. He showed his guest another of his great houses, the “half-ruined baronial castle” at Peschici, where Macfarlane met a pardoned brigand in the prince’s service, who told him nightmarish stories of bandit life in Borbone Apulia.

The son of a poor chemist, Pietro Giannone was born in Ischitella in 1676, just before Pacichelli’s visit. At sixteen he went to Naples to read law at the university, but kept his links with his birthplace, dedicating a book to the then Prince of Ischitella. In 1723, after twenty years research, he published his sensational “Storia Civile del Regno di Napoli”, portraying Neapolitan history as a struggle down the centuries between the civil authorities and the Catholic Church, attacking the Inquisition and the ecclesiastical courts, together with the clergy’s corruption and greed. He claimed that the Roman Church had destroyed the kingdom’s freedom.

The Church reacted furiously, placing the “Storia Civile” on the Index of Forbidden Books. The author was excommunicated by the Archbishop of Naples, hooted in the streets and nearly lynched. Since the Austrians, who then ruled Southern Italy, were far from displeased, he took refuge in Vienna where he was given a pension; here he wrote “Il Triregno”, attacking the Papacy even more fiercely. When the Austrians were driven out of Naples and the Borbone monarchy was established in 1734, he lost his pension and moved to Venice, but was expelled within a year. He wandered through Northern Italy under an assumed name, eventually settling in Calvinist Geneva. However, crossing the border into Piedmont in 1736 to visit friends, he was arrested.

Giannone spent the rest of his life in Piedmontese prisons, dying in the citadel at Turin. Although his gaolers allowed him books, pens and paper, even letting him write an autobiography, they forced him to sign a recantation of everything in his books critical of the Catholic Church – he seems to have been threatened with torture.

Europe’s intellectuals understandably hailed Giannone as a martyr. His “Storia Civile” was translated into English, French and German, consulted by Edward Gibbon when writing “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, and read by travellers who wanted to find out what had happened in Southern Italy after the barbarian invasion. Nowadays his criticisms of the Church have lost their relevance, but his history remains gripping stuff, especially its lurid accounts of the
Mezzogiorno
in medieval times – of the murder of Queen Giovanna I, of the private lives of King Ladislao and Giovanna II (“two monsters of lust and filthiness”), and of King Ferrante’s dreadful banquet for his rebellious barons. The book helps to explain a good deal about Apulia during the earlier centuries.

Life imprisonment, with no hope of release, must have been particularly miserable for a man with so active a mind and such racy humour. He says in his autobiography that he is writing “to assuage in some degree the boredom and tedium.” On his deathbed at Turin in 1748, poor Giannone must surely have remembered the orange and lemon groves above the blue Adriatic at Ischitella in the Gargano.

Part II

8

There has risen from the sea a beast full of blasphemy, that, formed with

the feet of a bear, the mouth of a raging lion and, as it were, a panther in

its other limbs, opens its mouth in blasphemies against God’s name...

this beast is Frederick, the so-called Emperor.

Pope Gregory IX

GOING DOWN FROM THE GARGANO into the Southern Capitanata and the flat Tavoliere that stretches as far as Foggia, you enter the region most closely associated with the Hohenstaufen Emperor Frederick II (1194–1250).

He captured the imagination of the thirteenth century English chronicler Matthew Paris, who called him “Frederick, greatest of earthly princes, the wonder of the world”, and he continues to fascinate. Not even Adolf Hitler was immune to his spell. Among the travellers, he appealed to Norman Douglas in particular, as a “colossal shade”. For Apulians, “Our Emperor, Federico di Svevia” is beyond question a Pugliese, by choice if not birth, and there is nobody they admire more. They remember Hannibal from his elephants and Bohemond from his tomb at Canosa, but Frederick made his home among them.

What did he look like, this great Apulian, who terrified both friends and enemies? All Western chroniclers, even the most hos-tile, agree that Frederick was handsome and impressive. The face on his gold coins shows a fine profile. Yet an Arab who saw him says he was covered with red hair, bald and myopic, and would have fetched a poor price in a slave market.

His father, Emperor Henry VI, became King of Sicily and ruler of Apulia by right of his wife, Constance of Hauteville, burning his opponents alive on the day after his coronation, blinding and castrating a seven year old rival for the throne. At Henry’s death in 1197 the child Frederick was crowned king. His mother died shortly after, placing her son under the Pope’s protection, and he grew up in Palermo, so neglected that he begged for food in the streets. He made Arab friends there, from whom he learned Arabic and an interest in science, while from his Greek subjects he discovered how the Byzantines saw their own emperor as God’s representative on earth. His first wife, the Count of Provence’s sister, taught him the polished manners of the Provençal court, so that he became famous for his charm.

The ‘
Puer Apuliae
’ (Boy from Apulia) as he was nicknamed, spent his early manhood in Germany, winning all hearts and vanquishing a competitor for the German throne. When crowned King of the Romans at Aix-la-Chapelle he proclaimed a Crusade – something he would live to regret – before returning to Italy in 1220. As he expressed it, “We have chosen our kingdom of Sicily for our very own from among all our other lands, and taken the whole realm for our residence, and although radiant with the glorious title of Caesar, we feel there is nothing ignoble in being called ‘a man from Apulia’.” He always came back to the plains and marshes of the Tavoliere, the uplands of the Murge and the forests of Monte Vulture.

The chronicler Villani, writing half a century later, tells us Frederick “built strong, rich fortresses in all the chief cities of Sicily and Apulia that still remain; and he made a park for sport in the marsh at Foggia in Apulia, and hunting parks near Gravina and near Melfi in the mountains. In winter he lived at Foggia, in summer in the mountains, to enjoy the sport.” One of the reasons the Emperor loved Apulia was the opportunity it gave for hunting and hawking. In those days much of the landscape was covered by dense wood-land, containing wolves, wild boar, deer and game birds – he him-self introduced pheasants – whilst the marshes were full of wild fowl.

Years after, one of Frederick’s sons, King Enzo of Sardinia, by then a prisoner in a cage at Bologna, sang in his
canzonetta
(a popular secular song): “
e vanne in Puglia piana – la magna Capitanata/la dov’è lo mio core notte e dia” (“go to flat Apulia, to the great Capitanata, where my heart is, night and day
”). Enzo was remembering days spent hunting with his father.

As the Emperor drew older, during his unending battle with the Papacy, he became bitter and cruel. Most reports of his savagery date from this period. His enemies claimed that he crucified prisoners of war. They also spread a story that he gave two men under sentence of death a heavy meal, and then sent one out hunting and the other to bed; after several hours both were disembowelled to see who had digested his food better.

Gradually the smear campaign took effect, and Frederick found himself surrounded by friends who had turned into secret enemies. His physician gave him a cup of poison, which Frederick pretended to drink, spilling it down his chest. The dregs were given to a condemned criminal, who promptly died in agony – as did the doctor shortly afterwards.

The Friar Salimbene says of Emperor Frederick: “Of faith in God he had none. He was cunning, deceitful, avaricious, lustful, malicious, hot-tempered, and yet sometimes he could be a most agreeable man, when he would be kind and courteous, full of amusement, cheerful, loving life, with all sorts of imaginative ideas. He knew how to read, write and sing, how to make songs and music. He was handsome and well built, if only of medium height. I have seen him myself, and once I loved him... he could speak many different languages, and, in short, had he been a good Catholic and loved God and his Church, few Emperors could have matched him.”

Frederick dazzled and terrified his contemporaries, who credited him with possessing sinister, magic powers. It was not only the Popes who were genuinely convinced that there was something Satanic about the Emperor. Throughout Italy, including Apulia, the Franciscan ‘Spirituals’, the wandering heretic friars trying to live what they thought was the original Franciscan life, identified him with the Antichrist of the prophecy of Abbot Joachim of Fiore, the fiendish monarch who was going to destroy the Church in its present, corrupt form in 1260. Unfortunately Frederick destroyed the prophecy, by dying ten years too soon. When he died, a monk dreamt that he saw him riding down to Hell with his knights through the flaming lava of Mount Etna.

On the other hand, there is plenty of plausible evidence that the Emperor died a good Christian, while his surviving supporters, who included a fair number of orthodox clerics, were clearly devoted to him. There were even men who believed he would one day return, like King Arthur, and usher in a new golden age.

Frederick of Hohenstaufen was a fascinating enigma during his lifetime, and he has remained one ever since.

Certainly no ruler made a more powerful or more enduring im-pact on Apulian folk memory. The massive strongholds that he built all over Apulia, and that serve as his monuments, are often said to conceal hoards of gold guarded by his ghost. In Pugliese legend Frederick is still
Stupor Mundi
, “the wonder of the world.”

9

...on clear days one can see Castel del Monte,

the Hohenstaufen eyrie, shining yonder...

Norman Douglas, “Old Calabria”

AMONG THE MANY HUNTING-BOXES built by Frederick II, the last was Castel del Monte. You come closest to him here. It is the most beautiful and mysterious of all his strongholds.

The Emperor stamped his complex personality and his extra-ordinarily wide interests on this little castle. His fondness for mathematics could be seen in the plan, his love of nature in the decoration, and his vision of himself as the heir of the Caesars in the classical statues that adorned the rooms. He had a stone head brought from an ancient temple near Andria, with a bronze band fastened around its brow which bore the Greek inscription “on the calends of May at sunrise I shall have a head of gold.” He had it placed above the great entrance door that faces east. On the first day of May, the rays of the rising sun gilded this Imperial diadem, in the same way that the heads of Roman emperors had been wreathed in sun-rays on their gold coins.

There are innumerable theories about the design of Castel del Monte, many of them wildly fanciful – even one that it was based on the pyramid of Cheops – but there is general agreement that it was Frederick’s own creation. Begun about 1240, after his return from the Holy Land, its octagonal plan is not unlike the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. Here, however, the octagon is carried to extremes, each point having an octagonal tower and the central courtyard eight sides. On both floors there are eight rooms (although only five of the towers have rooms, the others containing spiral-staircases) while in the courtyard there was an enormous octagonal bath, cut from a single block of white marble.

Although the plan was eastern, the decoration was French in inspiration. The interior retains Gothic fauns and other sylvan deities on the keystones of its vaulted rooms and windows. It still has white marble columns streaked with lavender and rust, crowned by silver grey capitals carved with vines, ivy and agave. A grey marble frieze linking the tops of the windows and running above the huge fireplace is almost intact. The mosaic that covered the vaults has gone, but traces of the octagonal floor-tiles give some idea of what the decoration must have been like in Frederick’s day. The standard of comfort was far in advance of its time. There were flushing water-closets in the towers and even a bathroom where the Emperor took a daily bath, the water coming through lead pipes from a cistern on the roof. Not too big, the rooms would have been well-heated in winter, deliciously cool in summer.

All Frederick’s palaces were sumptuously furnished, with a luxury almost undreamed of anywhere else in the Western Europe of his time. Silk hangings woven with gold thread, to clothe the walls and to curtain the windows, always travelled with him, servants going ahead to put them up. Huge cushions softened the stone benches around the walls, while the beds were made with silk or linen sheets. The marble table at which he dined after hunting was laid with a linen cloth and covered with gold and silver plate, and with Chinese porcelain which had been given to him by the Sultan of Cairo. Classical statues stood in niches in the walls; one of them was captured in his baggage at the siege of Parma, giving rise to a silly story that he worshipped idols. The tiled floors were carpeted by oriental rugs, light provided by candles in torcheres of rock crystal or enamelled bronze. There were lecterns for the books stored flat in cupboards along the walls.

Among these books was the “Toledoth Yeshua”, a pseudo-biography of Christ written during the eighth century by an anonymous Jew, who claimed that Jesus was a bastard begotten by a Roman soldier on a perfumer’s wife, and had learned magic in Egypt before setting out to lead Israel astray; arrested as a sorcerer, he was stoned before being hanged on the Passover – and then went down to hell where he was tormented in boiling mud. Possession of this luridly blasphemous work might seem to confirm the suspicions of some contemporaries that their strange, slightly sinister emperor had ceased to be a Christian, although this was not necessarily the case.