Part V
19
It was at Bari that the Byzantine troops made their last stand; it was
Bari that remained capital of the Theme of Italy until the very end.
Jules Gay, “L’Italie méridionale et l’empire byzantine”
IN 1071 The LAST CATAPAN, Stephen Pateranos, was freed by the Normans and allowed to sail home to Constantinople. He had been taken prisoner when Bari fell to Robert Guiscard after a siege of nearly three years. Besides trying to assassinate Guiscard (with a poisoned javelin as he sat at dinner in his tent), the Byzantines had made desperate attempts to relieve the doomed city – only that winter Stephen had slipped in through the Norman blockade on his return from the Imperial capital, where he had gone to make a frantic appeal for more troops. In April, however, weakened by treachery, the garrison surrendered. Stephen’s departure meant the end of Byzantine Italy.
Originally Bari was Peucetian, then Greek and then Roman. However the city was unimportant in ancient times. Horace enjoyed the fish here, seemingly the sole distinction to be recorded in classical literature.
Bari’s Byzantine period began in the mid-sixth century, when it was one of the first places recaptured from the Goths for Justinian. Shortly after the Emperor’s death it was occupied by Lombards and, together with most of Apulia, governed by the Lombard Dukes of Benevento under Byzantine suzerainty. What was left of Imperial Apulia, the Salento, was administered by a Strategos (general) at Òtranto, who took his orders from the Emperor’s viceroy in Italy, the exarch of Ravenna further up the Adriatic coast. They kept in touch by sea, until Ravenna fell to the Lombards in 752, after which the Strategos received his instructions direct from Constantinople.
Despite the Lombard occupation, one can safely assume that Bari kept its links with Byzantium, the greatest trading centre in the world, the last bastion of classical civilization and the only source of luxuries.
During the early ninth century Italy began to be attacked by Saracens, Berber Aghlabids from North Africa, who sacked Rome and conquered Sicily. In 847 Bari was captured by Khalfun, once a mercenary in the service of the Lombard prince Radelchis. He evicted its Lombard governor Siconolfo and established the first and only fully-fledged Moslem state in mainland Italy. By 860, Khalfun and his successors – Mufarrag ibn-Sallam and Sawdan – had added Orta and Matera to their territory, using them as for-ward bases from which to plunder far and wide, and sending count-less Apulian men, women and children to the African slave markets.
According to Bernard the Monk their city was defended by a double wall, while they gave it mosques and minarets. Despite being a great sacker of monasteries, Sawdan, the third emir, was no mere pirate but a scholar who obtained formal recognition of his emirate from the Caliph of Baghdad. Up to a point, he even tolerated Christians. In 867, on his pilgrimage to Jerusalem, Bernard had no difficulty in obtaining a passport at Bari and finding a pas-sage to Egypt – although he saw shiploads of Christian slaves bound for Africa. However, in 871 the Western Emperor Louis II retook the city, capturing Sawdan.
After Louis’ death in 875 the Carolingians were too busy with troubles in France and Germany to intervene in Italy, and three years later the Strategos Gregorios marched up from Òtranto to reoccupy Bari in the Eastern Emperor’s name. It should be realised, however, that outside the Salentine peninsula which was governed from Òtranto, held by Constantinople since the sixth century, there was no continuous Byzantine presence. Even after Greek settlers began arriving at the end of the ninth century, most Byzantines in Apulia were soldiers or officials – apart from a handful of monks, who had first arrived a hundred years before, fleeing from iconoclastic persecution.
In 975 the Byzantines commenced a long campaign of reconquest. Bari replaced Òtranto as their Italian capital while the Stratagos was given the new title of Catapan, which meant becoming a viceroy with full military and civil powers over the ‘Theme of Lombardy’. In 1011 the Catapan Basil Mesonardonites built a kastron (town) here. After Basil Boiannes – ablest of the catapans – had established Imperial rule over all Apulia, Greek settlers poured into Apulia, most of whose rock-churches date from this time. Had another brilliant Emperor followed Basil II (the ‘Bulgar Slayer’), who died in 1025, the Byzantines might have succeeded in re-creating Magna Graecia.
“Among the many perverse notions of which we are now rid-ding ourselves is this – that Byzantinism in south Italy was a period of decay and torpid dreamings”, wrote Norman Douglas with considerable justice in 1915. “There was no lethargy in their social and political ambitions, in their military achievements, which held the land against overwhelming numbers of Saracens, Lombards and other intruders.”
Yet only in the Salento were Apulia’s Greeks in a majority and only there was Greek universally spoken. North of Brindisi, the population in most coastal cities as well as inland was dominated by ‘Lombards’. Latin speaking by now despite their Germanic names, intermarriage had turned them into a caste rather than a race, a caste which differed from its neighbours merely in laws and customs. Chronically short of men and money yet having to extract taxes and raise troops, the catapans handled the Lombards with Byzantine subtlety, carefully respecting their customs and allowing them to live under their own laws with their own magistrates.
Nonetheless, the Byzantine Emperors set the utmost value on Bari. Ever since the Moslem period the city on the promontory had been so well fortified that its possession was vital for control of the southern Adriatic. As in other Apulian ports, its inhabitants were an exotic mixture of Lombards, Latins, Greeks, Armenians, Jews and Moslems, governed by Byzantine officials. The city grew rich from importing the gold, spices, silks and luxury goods that could only be obtained at Constantinople, in return exporting oil, almonds, wine, salted fish and slaves. Prosperous citizens enjoyed luxuries unknown in most of Western Europe, Lombard nobles dressing like Byzantines in silk robes and fantastic head-dresses.
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.