35
Lambs at the sound of a church bell,
lions at the blast of a trumpet.
R. dall Pozzo, “Historia della Sacra Religione Militare di San Giovanni”
THE COAST NEAREST the Murgia dei Trulli was known as the Difesa di Malta (Challenge of Malta), because it was so well guarded by the Knights of Malta. These were the Knights Hospitallers, the warrior monks who had defended Crusader Jerusalem, still waging an unceasing war on the Infidel. In Italy they were popularly known as ‘Hierosolomitan’ or ‘Jerusalem’ Knights. Even after the decline of the Ottoman Empire ended the threat of invasion, Apulia suffered from raids by North African and Albanian pirates, and the brethren’s policing of the Adriatic and Ionian Seas was of vital importance, often saving the crews of Apulian merchantmen and fishing boats from enslavement. Locals saw the corn, wine and oil that went out to Malta by felucca as a very good investment indeed. By the mid-eighteenth century raids on the Apulian coast had ceased, but they began again after Napoleon evicted the Knights from Malta in 1798, continuing well into the 1830s. Apulia must have sighed for the galleys of Malta.
Apulian brethren also took part in wars on the mainland. During the 1670s Fra’ Giovanni Gadaleta from Trani fought as a captain of horse in the Spanish service against the French when they tried to relieve the rebellious citizens of Messina. Pacichelli heard about him when he visited Trani, “A true Hierosolomitan... who died soon after in the flower of his youth and his courage”, comments the Abate.
The Apulian Knights included the odd black sheep, however, such as “a tall, wild-looking man with red hair”, Fra’ Vincenzo della Marra, who belonged to a family from Sannicandro Garganico. Notorious for brawling and duelling, he “would have sold his Order for a crust of bread”, but his bravery was admired; when taken prisoner by the Turks during a battle at sea, his brethren ransomed him immediately. In 1633 – with some friends – he dragged an enemy from his coach in the streets of Naples, and smashed his skull with an iron-tipped stave. Outlawed, Fra’ Vincenzo fled to Malta and then became a colonel in the Papal army, only to be dismissed for insulting a cardinal. After joining the Venetian service, he was killed fighting the Turks in Greece.
Until confiscated by Murat in the early nineteenth century, the Order of Malta’s estates in Apulia stretched from Venosa to Trani, from the Gargano down to Lecce and Òtranto, in a network of commanderies under the Prior of Barletta. Ever mindful of status, Pacichelli lists members of the nobility in each city he visits, who have “taken the Hierosolomytan habit”. A successful Knight was rewarded with a commandery, retiring to administer it, sending the revenues to Malta, but keeping enough to support himself in the style of a nobleman. Rich old bachelors, the commanders entertained lavishly, occupying a prominent place in Apulian society.
The travellers’ normal itinerary, from Bari to Brìndisi, went along the coast of the Difesa di Malta, passing through Mola, Polignano, Monopoli and Egnatia. Bishop Berkeley describes the country along this coast as extremely well planted and fruitful, but almost entirely lacking in houses, due to “fear of the Turks, which obligeth families to live in towns.” He rode through great forests of olive trees interspersed with pears and almonds. At Mola, where the low, rocky coast was covered with figs, he found “no place in the town to dress or eat our victuals in; a merchant of the town gave us the use of an apartment to eat our meat in, as likewise a present of cherries.” The town owes its existence to a fortress built here by Charles of Anjou in 1278, as linchpin in a line of coastal towers down to Brìndisi, that were intended to be a protection against piracy. At that time the Knights were still in the Holy Land and not yet active in these waters.
Monopoli was an important port under the Byzantines. There are Byzantine grotto churches in the city and in the fields outside, hidden among olive groves. However, the cathedral, the best piece of late Baroque in Apulia, did not exist in Berkeley’s time, being begun only in 1742 on the site of a Romanesque predecessor. The Difesa di Malta was discreetly in evidence, the Knights’ tiny medieval hospice standing next to their small thirteenth century church. Both survive, identifiable by the eight-pointed cross on the church. In 1358 the Knights had established an important commandery in the former Benedictine abbey of Santo Stefano di Monopoli, three miles down the coast, but moved it to Fasano during the seventeenth century.
All the travellers agree that the countryside around Monopoli was delightful. Today, fields of fruit trees and olives are still interspersed with pretty villages and handsome villas set on the slopes of the Murgia. But on reaching Egnazia, Horace’s Gnathia, Bishop Berkeley went inland, a footnote in his Journal explaining: “This left on our left for fear of the Turks.” Clearly, raiders were still slipping through the Order’s patrols.
Sitting on the edge of the escarpment above the coast road, Ostuni – the same place as Pliny’s Stulnium – was visible to every traveller on his way to Brìndisi. The Normans wrested it from Byzantium only as late as 1070. It has some fine churches, in particular its Gothic cathedral begun in 1435, and is certainly one of the most attractive of the Difesa di Malta’s whitewashed towns. The citizens owed a good deal to the Knights’ activities, even if some of the travellers were ungrateful.
On his way to Ostuni, Swinburne stopped for refreshment at what must have been part of the charming Masseria Difesa di Malta nearby, built amid the olive groves by the Knights during the 1770s:
We arrived at a small single house, consisting of a kitchen, loft and stable, lately erected for the convenience of travellers, by the agents of the Order of Malta, to which the land belongs. The kitchen was too hot for me to breathe in, and the other two apartments as full of fleas as Shakespeare’s inn at Rochester, so that my only refuge was the narrow shade of the house, which was contracted every minute more and more, as the sun advanced towards the meridian. Behind the house then I sat down, to dine upon the fare we had brought in our wallets. Unluckily I had not thought of wine or water, neither of which were now to be had tolerably drinkable; so that I was obliged to content myself with the water of a cistern full of tadpoles, and qualify it with a quantity of wine, that resembled treacle much more than the juice of the grape. While I held my pitcher to my lips, I formed a dam with my knife, to prevent the little frogs from slipping down my throat. Till that day I had had but an imperfect idea of thirst.
No doubt the water here was like that from all too many cisterns in waterless Apulia and the wine vile, but at least the Order was providing humble travellers with free food in the kitchen, free bedding in the loft and free stabling for their mules. This “small single house” was one of many maintained by the Knights in the Difesa di Malta.
Some idea of the Knights’ wealth and standing can be gained at Fasano and Putignano. At Fasano, the palace of the Bailiff (now the Municipio) dates from the sixteenth century, but, with the adjoining church, was rebuilt in the eighteenth by a Knight of the Falcone family; his coat-of-arms, a bird of prey, can be seen on both buildings together with the eight-pointed cross. The cross of Malta is on other buildings too, while the city’s main street is still Via del Balì. The Bailiff’s role in the life of Fasano resembled the Count’s at Conversano or the Duke’s at Martina Franca; he was its feudal lord, the Order holding it in fee from the Crown. He spent the summer months at a villa in Selva di Fasano, on the edge of the escarpment looking out to sea, where he escaped from the heat and mosquitoes.
Nowadays Putignano, to the west, is a busy commercial centre, but the old city survives behind its white walls, amazingly intact. Here too, in what has been renamed Piazza Plebiscito, there is a Baroque Palazzo del Balì. This stands next to the ancient chiesa madre of San Pietro, rebuilt by the Knights in the seventeenth century with an imposing campanile, a double-decker high altar and an exuberant painted ceiling. The Knights prayed here and at the little Rococo church of the Purgatorio nearby, which has Maltese crosses over the portico. Putignano, with its white-washed houses and wrought-iron balconies, is the Difesa di Malta at its most elegant.
The Order of Malta’s palazzi in Apulia have become offices or flats. Yet there are still one or two Apulian Knights, whose towers or masserie are decorated with the eight-pointed cross.