The Medieval Salento. Linda Safran

Salento helps us learn more about medieval people in general and, ultimately, more about identity formation and cultural interaction today.

      The Medieval Salento

      This study focuses on a particular region of southern Italy in the period between the ninth and the early fifteenth centuries. Both the geographical extent and the limited time frame require explanation, given the unfamiliarity of the term “Salento,” at least outside of Italy, and the absence of obvious temporal ruptures. A historical précis helps to clarify the geographical and chronological choices made here.

       Geography and Chronology

      At the tip of the heel of the Italian boot, the indigenous Messapian people resisted the founding of what would become flourishing Greek colonies in Magna Graecia between the eighth and fourth centuries BCE.²¹ By the third century BCE, all of them, even mighty Taranto, bowed to the superior might of the expanding Roman republic. Under Augustus in the first century BCE, the southern part of the new Second Region of Apulia, equivalent to ancient Messapia, began to be called Calabria; it sheltered tribes of Sallentines in the north and Calabrians in the south.²² Already in the third century BCE the Via Appia had been extended across the peninsula from Taranto to Oria and Brindisi (see map at beginning of the Database); directly across the Adriatic Sea, the Via Egnatia continued across the Balkans to Constantinople. Under the Romans in the second century CE, the Via Traiana was extended south from Brindisi and then farther south around the coast. The principal regional roads, and the Roman cadastral grids, were in place.²³ So were the Jewish communities at Taranto, Brindisi, and Otranto, populated by prisoners from Palaestina Secunda brought west, first by Pompey the Great (mid-first century BCE) and then by Titus after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE.²⁴

      Ancient Calabria, then, was essentially the area south of Taranto and Brindisi. The region has extensive limestone and calcareous sandstone outcrops in a slightly undulating terrain that never rises more than 195 meters above sea level.²⁵ Nevertheless, it is not easy to generalize about agriculture, climate, or topography because of significant small-scale variations. There is abundant evidence for a much greater degree of forestation than exists now, with extensive boschi near Taranto, Oria, Lecce, and Supersano.²⁶ In general, the settlement pattern appears to have been influenced mostly by the kind of soil available and the consequent ease, or difficulty, of obtaining water. Geological conditions likely underlie the presence of a majority of rural centers and may explain the surprisingly high number of settlements that still characterize the area.²⁷ In the Middle Ages the region produced wheat and winter barley, legumes, and grapes. Olive production increased slowly in importance, only dominating local agriculture beginning in the fifteenth century.²⁸ Other important economic activities included fishing, salt production, and textile dyeing and weaving.²⁹

      In the fifth and sixth century, some of the earliest monasteries on Italian soil (indeed, in the entire central Mediterranean) were founded in the hinterland of Otranto, including the “Centoporte” (Saints Cosmas and Damian) and perhaps San Nicola at Casole.³⁰ Following the Byzantine-Gothic wars of the sixth century and the Lombard conquests of the seventh, the name “Calabria” migrated across the Ionian Sea to the toe of the Italian boot, and the former Calabria became known as the Salento.³¹ “Sallentum,” the ancient Bruttium, originally had referred to the southernmost tip of ancient Calabria. Only Gallipoli and Otranto remained in imperial hands after the early medieval destructions;³² all the rest was integrated into the Lombard duchy of Beneventum. The wars had severe consequences for the urban infrastructure, which would be further weakened by Arab invasions in the ninth century. Half of the ancient cities and many smaller late-Roman sites disappeared, and rural fairs replaced urban markets.³³ In the early Middle Ages, the tall, freestanding menhirs once thought to be prehistoric monuments likely served as the most visible points of reference in the Christian religious landscape.³⁴

      Jean-Marie Martin has renewed earlier opinions that the Muslim invasions of Sicily spurred a new wave of Greek speakers immigrating into the toe and then the heel of the Italian boot.³⁵ These adherents of Orthodox Christianity sought, not always successfully, to establish and promote a new ecclesiastical organization, especially in the later ninth century with the Byzantine reconquest of Lombard territories in the former Calabria. Despite the successful reconquest, Byzantine sources continued to call the whole area—all of Apulia plus adjacent parts of Lucania/Basilicata—“Longobardia,” implicitly recognizing the dominance of Lombard law, Latin language, and Roman rite.³⁶ The entire province remained mostly Latin-speaking and faithful to Lombard law except for the southernmost extreme. South of the Via Appia, and especially south of Lecce, Greek speakers subject to Byzantine law and following Orthodox rites constituted a majority.

      The medieval Orthodox liturgy in southern Italy remained close to that of Constantinople but with several variations, some of them culled from the old Palestinian (Jerusalem) Liturgy of Saint James.³⁷ The Roman liturgy was translated into Greek in the tenth century, with the resulting Liturgy of Saint Peter intended for use in mixed-language areas.³⁸ In the Jewish communities, Palestinian liturgy, exegesis, and customs were gradually replaced, beginning in the ninth century, with the Babylonian practices that would eventually become normative throughout medieval Europe.³⁹ The Salento Jews practiced the Romaniote (Byzantine) rite, only later coming under the influence of thinkers trained in the Rhineland and Spain.

      Two centuries of Byzantine rule brought important demographic changes and renewed relations with the Byzantine provinces to the east. Numerous “Greeks” were forcibly resettled in the Salento from their homes in Herakleia (Pontos) and the Peloponnese.⁴⁰ In the 960s, the former Longobardia became the Katepanate of Italy with its capital at Bari. A new network of regional habitats was established, probably a continuation of trends already occurring under Lombard rule. This network consisted of a few cities,⁴¹ fortified καστέλλια (kastellia; Latin, castra), and small hamlets or villages (χωρία, choria, casalia), the latter almost always unwalled and often with an originally isolated church serving as a nucleus. A chorion might also be an agglomeration of rural habitats and the surrounding hinterland.⁴² An ongoing survey by the University of Salento has identified approximately 360 medieval villages, with the greatest concentration in the southeastern part of the province of Lecce.⁴³ Most of the population was scattered in these very small habitats, which began to nucleate into choria around cult sites often erected on the ruins of earlier Roman villas.⁴⁴ The Byzantines promoted a network of bishoprics to serve the dispersed habitats.⁴⁵

      The Norman conquest of the eleventh century (Bari fell in 1071) instituted a feudal system of compact fiefdoms as well as larger counties and principalities.⁴⁶ By 1168, the Terra d’Otranto is cited as one of three discrete administrative units in Apulia (with Capitanata and the Terra di Bari), probably with its own judges and tax collectors (cf. a later Latin inscription in the Database, [28.W]), although the primary motive for its formation was surely defensive.⁴⁷ While the Norman kings ruled from Palermo, in Sicily, their relatives held important territory in the Terra d’Otranto. Tancred, the Count of Lecce—which became the Norman regional capital—became king of Sicily in the late twelfth century. The Normans founded numerous monasteries, both Orthodox and Roman rite, and promoted a kind of ecclesiastical feudalism by donating many casalia and other properties to the new foundations.⁴⁸ At the same time, sizable Jewish communities continued to flourish, particularly in the coastal cities; their numbers and leaders were recorded by the traveling merchant Benjamin of Tudela circa 1165. When the Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI invaded in 1194, with the excuse that he was married to the last of the Norman princesses, Tancred’s family fled to France. His daughter married Walter III, Count of Brienne, who assumed the title of Count of Lecce and returned to southern Italy with papal encouragement.

      The Normans were succeeded by the Swabian dynasty, including the puer Apuliae Frederick II, who built extensively, mostly north of the Terra d’Otranto, and promoted the region’s economic vitality.⁴⁹ After the fall of Frederick’s grandson Conradin to Charles I of Anjou, in 1268, the capital was moved from Palermo to Naples and large principalities