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The northern plains of Apulia are still, as in the time of
Strabo and Pliny, famous for the rearing of sheep...
Augustus Hare, “Cities of Southern Italy and Sicily”
WHEN HARE WROTE this in the early 1880s, sheep farming had been giving place to wheat on the Tavoliere for nearly twenty years. The traditional way of life had almost gone for ever, and he was lucky to see it.
Each autumn the ancient Samnites had brought their flocks down to the low ground of Apulia, returning to the Abruzzi for the summer grass. Ramage was told at Ascoli Satriano that “during the later ages of the Roman Empire a tax was levied on all sorts of cattle and sheep thus migrating.” The system was known to Frederick II, who ordered compensation for anyone whose trees or crops were damaged by the animals: his laws were not enforced, resulting in the loss of great tracts of Apulian woodland, since the trees’ self-seeding was annihilated by goats. In 1442, not only did King Alfonso make the shepherds pay tolls for grazing their sheep here, but also for selling their flocks and skins, wool or cheese, solely at Foggia. Taxes per hundred sheep had to be paid to the Foggia customs house, the Dogana delle Pecore, while the king guaranteed protection and drove-roads for the flocks. Over the centuries the drove-roads, the tratturi, came to form a bewilderingly complex network known as the Draio.
Wild animals were attracted by the grazing. When King Ferrante rode out from Barletta in 1462 to fight the Duke of Calabria, he saw a cloud of dust so big that he thought it was a huge enemy army and fled back to Barletta. Later he realised that it had only been a herd of deer.
Landowners were forced to give up land for several months a year, to provide the enormous tracts needed for grazing, expanded as the number of sheep increased. Pasturage eventually included not only the Tavoliere but the Murge, part of the Salento and the lower slopes of the Gargano, causing widespread destruction of arable and the disappearance of whole villages, unable to grow the vegetables that formed their diet. In the fifteenth century there were 600,000 sheep, by the seventeenth four and a half million. The Dogana delle Pecore at Foggia was such a source of wealth that, during the brief period when the French and Spanish divided Southern Italy between them, they agreed to share the Dogana’s extremely lucrative revenues from tolls and taxes.
Each flock of sheep was accompanied by a shepherd, a dairyman and a cheese-maker, all dressed in sheepskins, living on coarse bread, oil, salt, sheep’s milk and cheese, sleeping on sheepskins in a sheep-skin tent. Two white Abruzzesi dogs, with spiked collars for protection against wolves, guarded each flock, a mule carrying the tent and the cheese-making utensils. Every flock of three or four hundred was part of a large flock of ten thousand, known as the punta that was supervised by a head shepherd, an under-shepherd and a head dairyman. Sometimes the wives stayed in the mountains, spinning or looking after the crops, but very often they and their children came too, on horses and donkeys. François Lenormant compared this once familiar spectacle to a folk migration.
The unusually white-wooled sheep nearly always belonged to a breed known in Apulia as the pecora gentile. Some said that the breed had been introduced from Spain by King Alfonso, but more probably it was indigenous. (Tarantine sheep were famous in antiquity and wore coats to keep their white fleeces clean). Shorn twice a year, completely in the spring but only half in the summer, these sheep were particularly valued for their excellent cheese, which made up an important part of the Tavoliere’s diet and was worth more than the wool, earning the owners of the flocks a great deal of money.
There was a long-developed art in making the cheeses and an experienced shepherd could tell from their taste on what sort of grass and in which month the sheep had been feeding when milked – a skill that, even now, is not quite extinct at certain masserie on the Murge. In years of drought he would proudly prefer to let his flock die rather than feed it on wheat in place of grass.
The punte met annually at the Foggia sheep fair, their shepherds solemnly leading them in a ceremonial review before the chief tax-man, ‘Il Magnifico Doganiere’, who wore a special robe of office. This splendid dignitary ranked as a magistrate and had his own tribunal. The fair took place in May, when the pilgrims were re-turning through the city from the feast days of the Madonna, the Archangel Michael and St Nicholas that had replaced the old pagan spring festivals. “On this occasion Foggia becomes a place of great resort and gaiety, even for the Neapolitan nobility”, Henry Swinburne observed in 1780. “They come here to exercise their dexterity at play upon the less expert country gentlemen, whom they commonly send home stripped of the savings of a whole year.”
Some farmers began to lease more land than they needed for pasture, sowing corn from which they made a hefty profit because of the low price they paid for the lease. In consequence, during the early eighteenth century, a considerable amount of wheat was being grown on the Tavoliere. Such crops were of course technically illegal and in emergencies, Swinburne tells us, the authorities enforced the letter of the law ruthlessly. “In the famine of 1764, instead of encouraging the farmers of Puglia to throw a reasonable supply of corn into Naples by the offer of a good price and speedy payment, the ministry sent soldiers into the province to take it by force, and drive the owners before them, like beasts of burden, laden with their own property. Such as were unwilling to part with it, by compulsion and upon such hard terms, carried their corn up into the hills and buried it. If they were detected in these practises, they were hanged.”
This period saw the start of emigration to America, if on a comparatively small scale. Henry Swinburne tells us that Apulian labourers were crossing the Atlantic during the eighteenth century, returning home after a few years. Others found seasonal work in France, Germany and the Low Countries, including musicians, who when not playing their fiddles or bag-pipes, dug ditches. A fair number of these came from the Tavoliere.
Another eighteenth century development was the authorities’ concern about the enormous amount of Tavoliere land that belonged to the Church, two thirds of the total and increasing daily. One reason for this was the notorious ‘soul-will’ or ‘testamento dell’ anima’, the words “I bequeath my lands to the Church” muttered on a death-bed, that needed no written proof and merely the witness of the priest and his sacristan. Once it belonged to the clergy, land could neither be sold nor taxed. Despite tithes, the abbeys usually had a fairly good relationship with the peasants, and were often model farmers, but the system was costing the Crown large sums in lost revenue. During the 1760s the government made soul-wills illegal, abolished tithes and dissolved several monasteries.
As soon as the French occupation began in 1806, not only were many more monasteries dissolved, but the Dogana delle Pecore and the Apulian System were abolished, causing considerable hardship on the Tavoliere. The nomadic shepherds from the Abruzzi and Basilicata suffered most, since they had nowhere else to take their sheep in winter. Many became brigands. However, the Dogana delle Pecore and pasturage rights returned in 1817 after the restoration of the Borbone monarchy.
Terrible misery would ensue in the wake of the Risorgimento, when the new regime sold off the Regno’s crownlands and the lands of the Church, United Italy’s attitude being essentially that of an asset-stripper. The Apulian System came to an abrupt end in 1865, with the auction of vast areas of the Tavoliere. Since by now this included not just the Capitanata but parts of the Terra di Bari and the Terra d’Òtranto, the sales had a disastrous impact on the lives of countless Apulian labourers and their families.