13
We are on a hill – a mere wave of ground; a kind of spur, rather, rising
up from the south – quite an absurd little hill, but sufficiently high to
dominate the wide Apulian plain.
Norman Douglas, “Old Calabria”
THE WESTERN SIDE of the Tavoliere is bounded by the foothills of the Appenines, on one side of which stands Lucera. A reasonably important city in ancient times, supposedly founded by the Homeric hero, Diomedes of the Great War Cry, there was a temple of Athene Ilias here, guarded by dogs, who, it was claimed, barked at the barbarous Daunians but fawned on Greeks. The Romans founded a colony of 20,000 veterans, giving the city a fine amphitheatre.
Lucera’s golden days, however, were in the thirteenth century under the Hohenstaufen, when Frederick II built the biggest and most luxurious of his fortress-palaces in the city, its curtain-walls large enough for a sizeable town, with twenty-four towers. “All round the outside of those turreted walls (they are nearly a mile in circumference; the enclosure, they say, held sixty thousand people) there runs a level space”, wrote Norman Douglas. “This is my promenade at all hours of the day. Falcons are fluttering with wild cries overhead; down below, a long, unimpeded vista of velvety green, flecked by a few trees and sullen streamlets and white farm-houses –the whole vision framed in a distant ring of Appenines.”
The Emperor installed a colony of 16,000 Saracens from Sicily in the enclosure and in the ruins of the old Roman town, and they created a new, Muslim, Lucera with a mosque and a souk. “No monarch has ever had more grateful or more loyal subjects than Frederick’s Saracens at Lucera”, comments the Prussian Gregorovius. “They formed his Praetorian Guard, his Zouaves, his Turcos, light cavalry with javelins and poisoned arrows, a crack corps.” The Emperor’s personal bodyguard was exclusively recruited from these Saracens so that enemies nicknamed him ‘The Sultan of Lucera’. His Muslim colonists included not only warriors but potters, forgers of Damascus steel, makers of war machines, Greek fire and poisoned arrows – some of their women made carpets, cushions and harnesses, while others were courtesans.
The custodian suspected Norman Douglas of being a treasure-hunter, probably because the Emperor was known to have kept his money at Lucera: “After a shower of compliments and apologies, he gave me to understand that it was his duty, among other things, to see that no one should endeavour to raise the treasure which was hidden under these ruins; several people, he explained, had already made the attempt by night.”
It was essential for King Manfred to gain the support of the Lucera garrison when his brother, Emperor Conrad, died in 1254. As soon as he arrived at the city the Saracens cheered him from the battlements, but their commander, John the Moor, “whose heart was as black as his face”, had gone off to pay homage to the Pope, leaving orders that the gates must be opened to no one. His lieutenant, Marchisio, refused to admit Manfred. The king was about to crawl through a culvert beneath the walls when the entire garrison except for Marchisio rushed to the main gate, threw it open, placed Manfred on a horse and led him into Lucera in triumph.
When the castle surrendered in 1269 to Manfred’s supplanter, Charles of Anjou, he left the Saracens in peace. However, in 1300 his son Charles II made them choose between death and conversion to Christianity. Some think that a secret, clannish people who lived at Troia until quite recently, the Terrazani (the Earthy Ones), are descended from the Lucera Saracens.
Much of Frederick’s palace survived until the eighteenth century, including a great octagonal tower, but then the stones were used to build new law courts at Lucera. When Janet Ross came and admired the castle’s “beautiful warm yellow-ochre colour” in the 1880s, she found an old woman, who had come from the Abruzzi for the winter with her family and 800 sheep. They lived in a crude shelter they had made inside the walls, a few planks covered with felt, sleeping on a pile of sheepskins.
On a low hill between Lucera and Torremaggiore lie the scanty ruins of another of the Emperor’s fortresses, Castel Fiorentino. Riding to Lucera, he fell ill from dysentery and rested here when too weak to go further. Astrologers had warned him he would die “among flowers” near an iron door, and all his life he had avoided Florence. Learning that there was an iron door behind a curtain near his bed, the Emperor muttered, “This is where, long ago, they said I would die, and God’s will must be done.” He died on 13 December 1250. His supporters claimed he did so in a monk’s habit, his enemies that he expired grinding his teeth with rage and refusing the Sacraments.
“The road... to Troia (Inns, most miserable) passes through a most desolate country which till lately was completely in the hands of brigands”, Augustus Hare tells us. “The town is situated on a lofty windstricken eminence, and occupies the site of the ancient Accas or Acca”. Utterly destroyed during the barbarian invasions, Aecae lay in ruins till 1018 when Basil Boiannes, Catapan of Bari, built a heavily fortified new town, which he filled with Greek settlers but called ‘Troy’. Norman Douglas writes of “Troia, wrapped in Byzantine slumber”, yet while it is certainly sleepy no one else can see anything remotely Byzantine about it.
Hare thought the Romanesque cathedral, begun in 1093 on the site of a Byzantine church, “the noblest in Apulia”, admiring “a great rose-window of marvellous beauty”, but adds “The exquisitely beautiful interior has suffered terribly from a recent wholesale ‘restoration’ at the hands of its bishop, by whom it has been bedaubed with paint and gilding in the worst taste”.
However, the city’s commanding position over the plain ensured that the cathedral would be heavily bombed in 1943, after which it returned to something like its Norman appearance. Two wonderful green bronze doors with lions, lambs, dogs and dragons, were made in Benevento in 1119.
A few miles south of Troia is the little town of Orsara di Puglia. In the thirteenth century the huge castle was a commandery of the Knights of Calatrava, Spanish warrior monks, but it began as a Norman keep. Later it became a palazzo baronale (baronial estate). During an attempt to relieve the besieged fortress in 1462, King Ferrante unexpectedly defeated his Angevin rival, the Duke of Calabria – a decisive victory which saved his crown.
The battle that decided if France or Spain would rule Southern Italy was fought at Cerignola, south-east of Foggia, in April 1503. A French army under the fire-eating Duc de Nemours had been marching towards Troia in search of the Spanish, mistaking giant stalks of fennel for enemy lancers, many dying from thirst because, this being the beginning of the Apulian summer, there was no water in the few rivers or streams. At dusk the French finally located the Spaniards near Cerignola, camped behind a shallow ditch and a bank of earth on a small, vine-covered hillock; they included some of the new arquebusiers. Convinced that his men-at-arms and pikemen could easily storm such a feeble earthwork, Nemours insisted on an immediate assault, which he led in person. Almost at once, he was killed in the ditch by an arquebus bullet through the head, all his officers being shot down with him. Leaderless, the French troops fled across the flat plain, pursued by Spanish light horse, who killed large numbers of them. The military significance of this brief engagement lies in it having been the first really important battle to be decided by small-arms fire.
Under the long and repressive government by viceroys sent from Spain which now began, these three little towns on the Tavoliere became somnolent backwaters. It has been said that the only benefits the Spaniards brought to Apulia were tomatoes and wrought-iron balconies, yet at least they were accompanied by two hundred years of peace.
Although Cerignola is one of the oldest cities in Apulia, it was totally devastated in 1731 by the same earthquake that destroyed Foggia. “To look upon it today one might think it a creation of our own time, even the cathedral being an entirely modern building” is Edward Hutton’s ponderous verdict. Designed in a style the guide-book calls “goticheggiante” (“gothic”), the neo-gothic cathedral houses the sole survival from the medieval city, a thirteenth century painting of the Virgin, the “Madonna di Ripalta” who is the city’s protectress. “The place is scarcely worth a visit, but it bears witness to the transformation of all this country by modern methods of agriculture which are fast turning the better and higher part of this ancient pasture land into vineyards and olive plantations”, writes Hutton.
He seems to have had not the slightest inkling that for all too many Apulians the ‘transformation’ had made life on the Tavoliere very nearly as wretched, painful and lethal as a battlefield.