37
...a land
Where laws are trampled on and lawless men
Walk in the sun...
Samuel Rogers, Italian Journal
APULIA SUFFERED FROM BRIGANDS until almost a century ago, as it had always done, even under Charles of Anjou. They multiplied during the unhappy reign of his great-granddaughter Giovanna I. In the fifteenth century Antonio Becadelli claimed, in his life of Alfonso the Magnanimous, how that unusually effective king had rid the realm of brigands, “something never known before.” They soon came back, however, large armies of them fighting pitched battles with the Spanish viceroys’ troops. The scourge was tamed by later viceroys and largely, if not entirely, eradicated under the Borboni, but revived in the early nineteenth century during the French occupation.
The caves in Apulia’s ravines made good hideouts, and the olive groves that stretched for mile upon mile provided an escape from pursuing cavalry. A hollow tree trunk quickly hid someone on foot while, after putting fifty yards of trees behind him, even a horseman vanished. The woodland, formerly a feature of the Murgia dei Trulli, suited robbers particularly well, and the area around Alberobello, Noci and Martina Franca was infested with them. For centuries the valley of Ponte di Bovino, a long, narrow pass through which ran the only road from Naples into Apulia, was notorious for hold-ups. Crouched on a hill that dominated the pass, the town of Bovino was the birth-place of several famous brigands. They often ambushed the royal mail coach, although it was always heavily escorted; on one occasion a comitiva (band) found that the coach was carrying the robes of a newly appointed judge, so they amused themselves by dressing their leader in the robes and “trying” a captive traveller – who was sentenced to death and “executed”.
Many of the brigands came from the Abruzzi, leaving its barren mountains for richer pickings; men such as Marco Sciarra in the sixteenth century, who led a comitiva a thousand strong, well armed and paid regularly, marching in three companies behind the banners of three lieutenants. For seven years they terrorised the Papal States and the Regno, including Apulia. Sometimes they stormed entire cities, such as Gioia del Colle, looting the houses of rich citizens. Marco always took care to hand out money and food to the poor. He genuinely believed in redistributing wealth, calling himself “a minister sent by God against usurers and drones.” As the historian Rosario Villari explains, brigands like Marco were “shaped by a sense of justice and also by the standards and customs of a peasant world to which wild and primitive ferocity was far from alien.”
He fought several pitched battles with government troops. Often he showed considerable chivalry, ordering his musketeers not to shoot at the enemy commander. When a traveller whose party he had ambushed strode up and announced “I am Torquato Tasso”, he knelt down to kiss his hand, beseeching the great poet to remount and go on his way. For, Marco saw himself as more than a mere captain of banditi; in his own eyes, he was a patriot fighting Spanish invaders. Tasso understood this, commenting: “He waged a war like that of Spartacus.”
In 1592, after defeating 4,000 troops sent against him by the Viceroy, Marco invaded the Capitanata. Here he captured Lucera, whose unlucky bishop, Don Scipione Bozzuto, was shot by a marksman when he peered down from the church tower where he had taken refuge. During the same year, however, Adriano Acquaviva, Count of Conversano, drove Marco out of both Apulia and his lair in the Abruzzi. Hired by Venice to fight Dalmatian pirates, Marco and his men refused to fight in Crete, so the Venetians slaughtered them. He escaped, trying to reach the Regno, but was murdered by one of his lieutenants for the money on his head and a free pardon.
In 1594, the traveller Fynes Moryson had been told of the hunted, wolfish existence led by such men all over Southern Italy. He was aware that many brigands had killed comrades for the sake of head-money and a pardon: “they are so jelous one of another, and so affrighted with the horror of their owne Consciences, as they both eat and sleep armed, and uppon the least noyse or shaking of a leafe, have their hands uppon their Armes, ready to defend themselves.”
Other brigand comitive (groups) were active in Apulia at the turn of the sixteenth century, especially in the Terra d’Òtranto, if not so well organised as Marco’s. The peasants often helped them, regarding the Spanish soldiers as robbers and murderers – with good reason. The Benedictine monks of a priory near Troia not only gave shelter to brigands but helped to dispose of their plunder.
The most dangerous comitive, usually about thirty strong, were those around Cisternino and Martina Franca: those in the Lecce area led by the Lubelli brothers, and those near Ceglie Messapico under Cataldo and Nunzio, whose other hunting ground was the Monopoli district. For many years Antonio Rovito of Ugento was popularly known as “King of the Brigands” in his neighbourhood, while in 1608, Stefano Calò was wanted in Ostuni for more than twenty murders. Two years later the authorities congratulated themselves on having rid Apulia of banditi, which was clearly wishful thinking.
Sometimes the comitive were led by local noblemen, like Giovan Vincenzo Dominiroberto, Baron of Palascianello, who once escaped from prison in the basket in which his food had been delivered. In 1631 the baron was finally run to ground in a church at Serracapriola, dragged out from sanctuary and beheaded, despite the local bishop’s protests; presumably his head was sent off to obtain the head-money, while his four quarters were hung from roadside trees.
In the 1630s magnates began recruiting small armies of banditi, to enforce their dominion over the peasants and cow the commons in the towns. “Never before had Southern Italian brigandage... been so closely linked with the barons’ activities and interests”, comments Villari. The wool merchants grew frightened of doing business in the dogana at Foggia where the magnates’ new henchmen bullied them into paying robbers’ prices. Feudal privilege enabled barons to give their brigands virtual impunity, although many were hunted down by revengeful peasants during the revolt of 1647.
Later in the century the authorities almost eradicated brigandage, but it revived during the 1760s. The comitiva of Nicola Spinosa, or ‘Scanna Cornacchia’ (‘Carrion Crow’) as he was popularly known, a murderer and escaped convict from Castellana, became a useful political tool for Count Giulio Antonio IV of Conversano, who protected its members in return for favourable results in the elections to his city’s commune. He regularly received the ‘Carrion Crow’ after dark at his hunting-lodge of Marchione outside Conversano, turning a very blind eye to murder, robbery, rape and extortion.
Giulio Antonio was also Count of Castellana, where ‘Scanna Cornacchia’ was no less active. In 1782 its people petitioned King Ferdinand, imploring him to save them from the ‘Carrion Crow’, and explaining that the comitiva was under their feudal lord’s protection. In response, the count was ordered to hand the comitiva over to justice within a month; otherwise, His Majesty would put in train “certain steps of an economic nature.” Giulio Antonio thereupon bribed Gregorio Matarrese, whom he knew was in their confidence, to murder them and gave him guns. The comitiva was planning to rob the King’s Messenger near Tàranto so Matarrese laid a lethal ambush. Most of its members were killed or captured, but the ‘Carrion Crow’ escaped into the woods. He went to ground with his mistress, Domenica Pugliese – ‘La Falcona di Putignano’ in a masseria near Putignano, where the couple were at last tracked down by a company of Swiss soldiers. Realising he had no hope of escape, the ‘Carrion Crow’ ordered his mistress to kill him, the ‘Falcon’ shooting him in the neck. Stuck on a lance, his head was paraded through Castellana.
“Many abandon their wretched way of life and turn to robbery”, Galanti wrote of the Regno’s peasants in the 1790s, yet when de Salis visited the Terra d’Òtranto at this time he noticed that guards were not needed – although their presence was a help in dealing with extortionate innkeepers. By then the authorities seldom executed brigands since they were useful as convict labour.
However, in 1806, Joseph Bonaparte became king, succeeded by Marshal Murat two years later, and brigandage broke out all over Southern Italy. ‘Il Pennacchio’ (‘the Plumed One’) stormed through the Gargano, claiming he was under orders from the exiled King Ferdinand, killing French supporters and plundering their property. In 1808, Major Courier reported that the area around Foggia was a land of thieves: “They hold up travellers and have their way with the girls. They rob, rape and murder.”
During Joseph’s reign they terrorised the Bovino valley, along which ran the main road from Naples. Charles Macfarlane writes, “rarely could a company of travellers pass without being stopped; a Government officer, a Government mail, or the revenue from the province, never without a little army for an escort. And all these troops were at times unable to afford protection, but were themselves beaten off, or slaughtered by the brigands.” They even dreamt of capturing Joseph and taking him prisoner to King Ferdinand in Sicily. However, Murat eventually brought the situation under control.
The most notorious comitiva was led by Gaetano Vardarelli and his brothers. After deserting from Murat’s army in 1809, Gaetano harried northern Apulia with 300 horsemen, one of his bases being the Bovino valley. He and his band encouraged the country people not to pay taxes, burning conscription lists. Since salt was a government monopoly, they broke into state warehouses and handed out the salt. They lived off the land, raiding masserie; if resisted, they set fire to the buildings and the crops, driving off the livestock. When the hunt finally grew too hot, many of the comitiva fled to Sicily, including Gaetano, who became a sergeant in King Ferdinand’s guards. But Apulia had not heard the last of Don Gaetano Vardarelli.