The Medieval Salento. Linda Safran

inscription at Vaste [157.A], but there is disagreement about whether the new popularity of this name is connected with Antony of Padua, canonized in 1232, or the much older Antony Abbot.⁷⁸ In 1372/73 we find a bishop named Cyriakus [4], the Greek equivalent of Dominic, whose name began to penetrate the Salento along with its representatives in the Dominican order.⁷⁹ The female equivalents of these new names, Kyriake and Domenica, are lacking in the local visual sources but well attested in textual documentation.

      In the few female names known from the visual record, Maria was in use by the eleventh century, as it was in other Byzantine areas, although it would not become widespread in Europe until the thirteenth century.⁸⁰ For the twelfth century, Jacob found that Maria was matched by Anna as a common female name, but Anna does not survive at all in our late evidentiary corpus. Diminutives are popular among the Greek names (Doulitzia, Kalia, Eulalia).⁸¹ As with male names, Latinate female names are introduced by the twelfth century (Rogaie) and begin to dominate in the fourteenth (Margaret, Isabella, Donna). In the family dedication at Vaste, the father, Antony, and one of the daughters, Ioanna (or Jeanne), have names that could not predate the fourteenth century [157.A]. At the beginning of the fifteenth century there is still a great variety of personal names in the Salento for both men and women; the different strata of names (Lombard, Greek, Latin) were not amalgamated into a smaller, more uniform stock as was the case elsewhere in Europe by the thirteenth century.⁸²

      Even families that were open to innovative personal names did not necessarily adopt a surname.⁸³ Jacob found that approximately one-third of the twelfth- and early thirteenth-century names in his textual sources were supplemented by a last name, but the proportion is lower in the visual sources, under 25 percent for the whole period of the twelfth through fourteenth centuries. Three-quarters of these surnames are found in inscriptions or graffiti written in Latin; only a handful are in Greek. This significant disparity suggests that the authors of Greek public texts were less inclined to adopt last names even when their Latin-speaking neighbors did so and even though some upper-class Greek speakers had done so in preceding centuries.

      There are four distinct types of surnames: anthroponymic, in which a first name is used as a last name; nicknames, often a given name in origin; geographical; and names related to professions or crafts. Of some 1,800 surnames culled from thirteenth- and fourteenth-century documentary sources, Jean-Marie Martin found that over 50 percent were anthroponymic, 30 percent were nicknames, 15 percent were geographical, and only a small percentage were related to profession.⁸⁴ Of our nineteen male surnames, the geographical type is better represented than in Martin’s sample, with toponymic and anthroponymic surnames about equally present, but there are far fewer nicknames and professional attributes. Anthroponymic surnames include De Nestore [78.A], De Juliano [39], and probably Crispulus [76.A]. Local toponyms in our list include Leo of Nucilia (Nociglia) [66.F], Paul of Sogliano [30], and the archpriest of Latiano, George “de Horia,” presumably the nearby city of Oria [55]. More exotic in origin are Del Balzo (des Baux) [48], Moraville [82], De Marra [28.W],⁸⁵ and Melitinos [1]. The toponym “de Morciano” accompanies a supplicant at Santa Maria di Cerrate [114.F], possibly from northern Italy rather than the southern Salento.⁸⁶ Nicholas Palia identifies himself as coming from Giovinazzo, north of Bari [23.B], but his surname is unrelated to it. Longo seems to be the only local surname derived from a nickname [4], while Castaldo (from the Lombard gastaldus, representative of the king) [26.C] and Ferriaci (from the Latin for iron, a smith) [156.A] appear to be professional names. Markiantos [36] and Palia are both of unknown derivation.

      In the most recent study of contemporary Italian surnames, roughly the same categories appear: augurial names culled from medieval personal names in Italian; names based on historical and literary tradition that became popular in the fifteenth century; nicknames ultimately derived from Latin personal names but used in medieval Italian (volgare) as ironic comments on an individual’s character or physiognomy; anthroponymic surnames culled from the Latin, German, Greek, and Hebrew substrata; and epithetic surnames, including patronymics or matronymics, ethnic and toponymic names, and professional names.⁸⁷ In the medieval Terra d’Otranto the epithetic name was the most common; many of the names that we might consider anthroponyms are patronymic in origin, using a first name as a second name. In southern Italy in general, the epithetic surname is still the most common, especially the patronymic plural.⁸⁸ For example, De Giorgi or Giorgio, D’Andria, and De Luca are among the top ten surnames in the modern provinces of Lecce and Taranto, and Iacobini is still attested in Lecce and Taranto.⁸⁹ Among the twenty most common surnames in all of Italy, with particular frequency in the cities of Lecce, Brindisi, and Taranto, is the toponym “Greco,”⁹⁰ reflecting the Byzantine demographics of a millennium ago. Longo, the surname of a fourteenth-century hospital builder in Andrano [4], is still popular in both Lecce and Brindisi,⁹¹ and even the decreasingly popular personal name Leo is still present as a common surname, especially in Taranto.⁹² Even today, in comparison with the rest of Italy the province of Apulia is characterized by exceptional diversity and local specificity in its surnames.⁹³

      We have already noted a few disparities in onomastic preference based on the types of sources consulted, so it is worth considering whether different social levels appear in the epigraphic record versus the documentary records. If, as has been argued, the intellectual milieu—represented by commissioners and signers of books, acts, and charters—is not inclined toward innovation in the domain of names,⁹⁴ the same seems true for nonelites: with few opportunities to “make a name” for themselves and their relatives, they preferred to maintain tradition, perpetuating family identification by repeating names from previous generations. In his work on late thirteenth- to mid-fourteenth-century surnames in Bari, Martin identified laymen as most likely to adopt a surname, followed by clergy and then women⁹⁵ (female surnames are nonexistent in the Salento). I discuss in other chapters the ways in which women were present in the visual culture of the Salento, but names were not the primary vehicle.

      Kinship

      Kinship information is preserved in about half of the early visual sources (ninth to eleventh century) that contain fully or partly preserved names of Christians. Most common are references to a named man’s wife and child(ren), but in only three of those cases is the wife’s name given [32.A, 32.H, 146.A]. In an inscription from Brindisi, John and Thecla share equal billing as parents of their children [25]. In addition to children mentioned in connection with a wife, there are two references to children alone [32.I, 33.A], one “very dear child” [32.J], and a single child [159]; unlike contemporary Jewish epitaphs, no early medieval Christian text singles out a daughter. In one exceptional case, a named mother is associated with her unnamed child without any reference to a husband or father [32.B]. In this small sampling of ninth- to eleventh-century sources, which come from only a handful of sites, wives are recalled less often than children; twice as many wives as children are noted in the twelfth- to fourteenth-century texts. These numbers are probably too small to extrapolate larger social patterns.

      In a long eleventh-century epitaph at Carpignano, the father of the deceased gives the name of his “very dear” child, Stratigoules (a diminutive of profession), but omits the name of his wife while drawing attention to his own now-illegible name [32.J]. This is the only case in the Christian Salento in which an emotional relationship is made explicit: repeated expressions of love and grief supplement a list of all the relatives, friends, and slaves who will miss the dead boy. In other texts, relatively unemotional exhortations to God or the Virgin or a saint to remember the speaker or his or her loved one are supplemented by pleas to passersby to pray for the “speaker” or for the commemorated deceased [156.A].⁹⁶ All the attempts to solicit participation in the named individuals’ salvation come from the twelfth- to fourteenth-century visual evidence.

      A greater range of family relationships is documented in the later visual material.