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The most powerful Prince of Tàranto, Gianantonio del Balzo Orsini...
could ride on his own land from Salerno to Tàranto.
Benedetto Croce, “Storia del Regno di Napoli”
GUIDEBOOKS GIVE THE IMPRESSION that nothing happened at Tàranto from the Classical era until modern times. Yet it was in turn a bastion of Byzantine Italy, a Saracen pirates’ nest, a Byzantine city again and then the capital of a great feudal principality. Few Anglo-Saxon historians have written about the fifteenth century Mezzogiorno when the Prince of Tàranto decided who should wear the crown at Naples, Gianantonio del Balzo Orsini being a southern Italian version of Warwick the Kingmaker. His name, with that of his father Raimondello, crops up all over Apulia.
During the Barbarian invasions and the Byzantine reconquest, Taranto suffered severely. It was occupied by the Saracens from 842–80 under Sahib al-Ustul, Abu Ga’far, and finally Uthman, who used it as a base for raiding instead of making it into an emirate like Sawdan’s Bari. Regained by the Byzantines, it was sacked by the Saracens, then rebuilt by Nicephorus Phocas and re-colonised from Greece. One should always remember that all the Greek survivals encountered in Apulia are not so much the last traces of Magna Graecia as relics of the Byzantine Empire. If he was an educated man, the Strategos of Taranto may perhaps have seen himself as heir to the Nomarchs of ancient Taras, but he must have known very well that what he ruled was a Latin and Lombard port – only in the eleventh century did sufficient colonists arrive from Byzantium to make it once more a truly Greek city.
It fell to the Normans in 1063. Bohemond of Hauteville became its first prince in 1085 and, although he left it to go on Crusade, this was the start of its history as the most important feudal fief in Apulia. Significantly, before becoming king Manfred was Prince of Tàranto.
Charles II created his younger son, Philip, Prince of Tàranto and Despot of ‘Romania’ – the Latin name for Byzantine Greece. If Philip made little impact on Greece, when he died in 1331 he left his titles there to his eldest son Robert, who through his mother was Latin Emperor of Constantinople. Philip’s second son Louis inherited Tàranto. At Louis’s death in 1362, Tàranto passed to another Philip, to whom Robert bequeathed the titular Empire. Philip died childless in 1374. Behind these Imperial pretensions lay Apulia’s eternal tie with the Levant.
In 1346, Louis of Tàranto married his beautiful, doomed cousin, the twenty-year-old Giovanna I. Her first husband, Andreas of Hungary, had been strangled and castrated, so his father invaded the Regno at the head of a Hungarian army, under a banner that bore a murdered king and the word vendetta. For a time the young couple were forced to go into exile. After Louis’s death, Giovanna married two more husbands, until in 1382 she was deposed by her cousin, Charles of Durazzo, who had her smothered with a bolster.
Among the new King Charles’s opponents was a Raimondello del Balzo Orsini, who from his boyhood had “loved to tempt fate” as an adventurous knight errant, and whose life was a long series of battles and chivalrous duels. A great Roman family, the Orsini and their Colonna rivals dominated Rome during the century when the Popes lived at Avignon. They also acquired lands in Southern Italy, Raimondello being a younger son of Niccolò Orsini, Count of Nola near Naples. Born about 1350, he was bequeathed the county of Soleto by his grandmother’s brother, Raimondo del Balzo. Niccolò, however, insisted that his eldest son should inherit the county. Raimondello went off to the Crusades, but on his return he took Soleto by force, putting ‘del Balzo’ before his name. In 1384 he married Maria d’Enghien, Countess of Lecce in her own right and a famous beauty.
During the war that followed Giovanna’s death, he led a company of seventy knights who had sworn to avenge the murdered queen, supporting her heir, Louis of Anjou, against Charles of Durazzo. Among Charles’s commanders was the Englishcondottiere(mercenary warlord) Sir John Hawkwood, and there was some fierce fighting; after being badly wounded in the thigh Raimondello always wore one leg of his hose white and the other red. Charles became King of Hungary as well as Naples in 1386, but was murdered. When the Angevin party collapsed, Raimondello went over to Charles’s son Ladislao, his reward being the principality of Tàranto.
A megalomaniac, Ladislao planned to become King of Hungary and all Italy, occupying Rome on two occasions. As lustful as he was ambitious, he employed pimps to kidnap pretty girls, whom he kept in a secret harem at Naples. He was also violent-tempered and murderous.
At the end of 1405, when Ladislao had finally been evicted from Rome and the Angevin cause was reviving under a new pretender, Raimondello led another revolt, but died at Tàranto in February 1406 while the King was marching to besiege him. Knowing that an Angevin expedition was on its way, his widow concealed his death, evacuating useless mouths and revictualling the city by sea. The siege dragged on for so long that Ladislao nearly gave up. Eventually he offered to marry Maria, although she was twenty years older. Since there was no sign of the Angevins, she accepted, the ceremony taking place in the castle chapel at Tàranto in April 1407. The Angevin galleys arrived just too late and had to sail back empty-handed to Provence.
Ladislao died in 1414, killed by a mistress after his enemies had told her to anoint her private parts with poison, pretending that it was an aphrodisiac. His sister and successor Giovanna II imprisoned Maria, but she soon escaped with her children. Among them was Gianantonio del Balzo Orsini, born in 1385; the new Prince of Tàranto.
A childless widow of forty-five, Giovanna was only interested in handsome lovers, leaving affairs of state to her favourites. Civil war broke out from time to time, since Alfonso V, King of Aragon and Sicily, and Louis II, Duke of Anjou were busily competing for the succession. The regime tried to buy Gianantonio’s loyalty, making him Prince of Altamura as well as Tàranto in 1431, but two years later he fell out with the queen. Led by Louis of Anjou, a group of courtiers besieged him at Tàranto in 1434, hoping to seize his estates. Fortunately Louis suddenly died of a fever.
Queen Giovanna herself died in 1434, leaving her throne to Réné of Anjou, Louis’s younger brother. During the same year, fighting for Alfonso, Gianantonio was captured by Réné’s Genoese allies in a sea-battle off the isle of Ponza. When released, he went home to raise the Apulian barons against Réné in a long war that involved all the other states of Italy. Alfonso only survived because of the Prince of Tàranto and his Apulians.
Alfonso finally won in 1442, a parliament recognising him as the first King of the Two Sicilies; but Gianantonio refused to ride in his ‘Roman triumph’ into Naples, saying that the place assigned to him was too low for the man who had made it possible. Even so, he was appointed Grand Constable and given the Duchy of Bari. In 1444, the King married his son Ferrante to Gianantonio’s favourite niece, Isabella Chiaramonte, and although he rarely left his lands he attended the wedding. It was his last appearance at court.
Alfonso dared not antagonise Prince Gianantonio, however. He was too powerful, lord of seven cities with archbishops, of thirty cities with bishops and of more than 300 castles. Not only did he control the entire heel of Italy, but large areas of Basilicata and the Neapolitan Campagna.
Gianantonio respected the brave, chivalrous and learned King Alfonso, but resented the greedy Catalans who now ran the Regno. Nor did he care for the King’s false, cruel son, Ferrante. When Alfonso died in 1458, from malaria caught while hunting in Apulia, Gianantonio welcomed the Angevin pretender the Duke of Calabria, who came and defeated Ferrante at the River Sarno.
Luckily for Ferrante, his beautiful, high-spirited queen, Isabella Chiaramonte, raised money to equip another army for him, tramping the streets of Naples with a begging box. Disguised as a Franciscan friar, and accompanied only by her chaplain, she went to Tàranto and pleaded with her uncle, who, after the battle at the Sarno, had occupied the royal cities of Andria, Trani and Giovinazzo. She found a sympathetic listener, for by now Gianantonio had begun to dislike the arrogant Duke of Calabria. He sat on the fence, giving the duke deliberately bad advice, and refusing to lend him money or troops. When the king routed Calabria at Troia in 1462, Gianantonio openly joined Ferrante, dooming the Angevin cause.
He died in his castle at Altamura in November 1463, rumour claiming that King Ferrante had bribed the old prince’s servants to strangle him in his bed. Gianantonio was childless and, ignoring his will and his widow’s protests, the king seized everything he left. Besides vast estates and huge flocks, there were a million ducats in cash and warehouses filled with merchandise. Ferrante became the richest ruler in Christendom.
You can gain an idea of what Raimondello and Gianantonio del Balzo Orsini looked like from their effigies in the church of Santa Caterina at Galatina where both are buried. Kneeling in prayer, Raimondello wears the courtly clothes he wore during his life, red and white; another effigy below shows him in a Franciscan habit. Dressed as a friar, Gianantonio lies under a canopy in an octagonal chapel; below are painted the words, “From perfect and gentle deeds a noble spirit never recoils”, an ironic epitaph for so cynical a career. Beneath the friar’s hood his face, with its huge, hooked nose, appears surprisingly gentle.
Yet the castle of Tàranto, properly known as the Castel Sant’ Angelo, is the best monument to the del Balzo Orsini, even if Ferrante made great changes. The chapel can still be seen, where in 1407 Raimondello’s widow, the beleaguered Countess Maria, married the priapic King Ladislao.