The Medieval Salento. Linda Safran

Sicily during the Vespers of 1282,⁵⁰ the Angevins were constantly at war with the Aragonese, which caused sustained economic crisis in the Salento. Bubonic plague and Hungarian invasions in the mid-fourteenth century exacerbated the crisis, and over the next century and a half many of the area’s rural habitats were abandoned.⁵¹

      The Angevins were major supporters of the Franciscans, counting one of the latter—Saint Louis of Toulouse—as family. The spread of the mendicant orders had important repercussions for religious and social life in southern Italy, particularly for the Jews, against whom they preached aggressively. In 1276 the largest Jewish communities were in Brindisi, Nardò, and Taranto, cities that saw occasional outbursts of violence by the Christian citizens against their Jewish neighbors.⁵² The Jews of the kingdom of Naples were servi camerae regiae, important contributors to the royal treasury under the direct control of the ruler. Charles I generally supported the Jewish minorities in his realm against local abuses, but his son and successor, Charles II, was the first ruler to expel them, in the 1290s. He was under pressure from the Dominicans, who used the Inquisition meant to uncover Christian heretics as a means of encouraging conversion of the Jews.⁵³ New Jewish converts received fiscal exemptions in return for professing Christianity, but many fled to northern Italy rather than convert. Others remained, and the Angevin king Robert the Wise (r. 1309–43) invited more Jews into the kingdom, asserting that nowhere else in the world could they find treatment as favorable as in the kingdom of Naples.⁵⁴ Privileges were extended by Robert’s successors to most of the Jewish communities until these were all rescinded in 1427.⁵⁵

      By the late fourteenth century, the different branches of Angevins in Provence and Durazzo were at war with each other and the only beneficiaries were Venetian traders and Florentine bankers; the Salentine population was in dire straits. Local control was exercised by the descendants of the Brienne family who had married into the powerful Enghien clan and controlled a vast feudal state that included the principate of Taranto, county of Lecce, and county of Soleto.⁵⁶ In 1384 Maria d’Enghien became Countess of Lecce; the next year she married Raimondello del Balzo Orsini, prince of Taranto and Count of Soleto and Nola. Thus, at the end of the fourteenth century, most of the Terra d’Otranto—with the exception of Nardò in the south and with the addition of Matera in the northwest—was in the hands of one powerful feudal leader, and the minor nobility was kept in check.⁵⁷ There were major changes in settlement patterns: about a third of the existing villages were abandoned, many transformed into masserie (large farms), suggesting different modes of agricultural organization.⁵⁸ It was at this time, too, that Italian definitively began to replace Greek and Latin, as Maria d’Enghien, sole ruler after the death of her husband in 1406, authorized the use of volgare for letters and local statutes.⁵⁹

      The Angevins also were responsible for striking changes in the region’s architecture and art. “Gothic” features were introduced by the early fourteenth century, especially via extensive patronage of the basilica of Santa Maria del Casale, outside Brindisi [28]. Royal patronage of the Franciscan order later stimulated such imposing structures as Santa Caterina at Galatina, and a wave of church and monastery building in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, not necessarily connected with the rulers, fundamentally altered the urban fabric of many cities.⁶⁰ Tuscan-style paintings were introduced in the second half of the fourteenth century, a half century behind their initial appearance in the Angevins’ Neapolitan court milieu. With the Torre di Belloluogo [59] and Santi Niccolò e Cataldo in Lecce [58], Santo Stefano in Soleto [113], and Santa Caterina in Galatina [47] all painted in the late fourteenth to early fifteenth century, the late Gothic courtly style—substantial figures in increasingly convincing pictorial space, discursive narrative cycles—began to take hold and significantly altered the generally “Byzantine” flavor of the region’s painting. These are the principal artistic reasons for ending the current study soon after 1400.

      We can now summarize the chronological and geographical parameters of this study. Byzantine hegemony, a probable influx of Greek speakers, and new ecclesiastical organization point to the ninth century as a time of major change in southern Apulia. An agrarian crisis after the Black Death and the resulting abandonment of many settlements; an explosion of mendicant preaching bringing new animosity toward local Jews; a shift toward Italian as a written language; changing artistic preferences around the turn of the fifteenth century; and, eventually, the establishment of the new Aragonese dynasty in Naples (1442) mark the end of this study—and the gradual change from late medieval to early modern.⁶¹

      While the definition and contours of the Salento were mutable, and even now the term is used inconsistently, it was certainly an administrative entity in the Middle Ages when the Normans called it the “Terra d’Otranto,” a synonym still in use today. The region extends some two hundred kilometers north from Leuca along both the Ionian and Adriatic coasts.⁶² It incorporates the whole of the modern province of Lecce in the south and, in the north, most of the provinces of Brindisi and Taranto, including the southern part of the diocese of Ostuni, all of the dioceses of Oria and Taranto, and most of the diocese of Castellaneta (see map, pp. 240–41). I do not include in this study data from the microregions northwest of Taranto (Laterza, Castellaneta, and Ginosa) or north of San Vito dei Normanni and Ceglie Messapica, which are not traditionally considered part of the Salento.⁶³

       Demographics

      In the Byzantine era (ca. 870–1071) and later, the Salento was very densely settled, with villages averaging only eight kilometers apart.⁶⁴ It remains today the Italian province with the greatest number of settlements although it lacks, and always lacked, correspondingly high population numbers. While reliable demographic figures are not available for the early periods, the Terra d’Otranto appears in several Angevin and Aragonese tax registers. In 1278 the province contained 212 terre (habitats), more than any other region in the kingdom of Naples; in 1378 there were 225 terre, but in 1447 the number had declined to between 155 and 162, a loss of some 70 habitats (31 percent) in only seventy years.⁶⁵

      For the period 1284–1343, the population was approximately 270,000 persons. This estimate is based on the number of fuochi (hearths), equivalent to households, and assumes six persons per household.⁶⁶ In 1378 there were approximately 72,000 inhabitants (using the coefficient of five persons per household), while an Aragonese census of the “Terra Idronti” in 1447 counted between 51,000 and 60,000 persons.⁶⁷ By that time there were only four important cities (Nardò, Lecce, Taranto, and Brindisi), of which only two had more than five hundred fuochi, Nardò (540) and Lecce (1,323),⁶⁸ compared with 114 habitats of between one and fifty households.⁶⁹ While the Terra d’Otranto had over 10 percent of the settlements in the kingdom of Naples, the population comprised only 6 percent of the kingdom’s households.⁷⁰ Thus, in contrast with other regions of Italy, the population was still dispersed in many small centers and over 70 percent of its inhabitants were villagers.

      Documentation for most Salentine dioceses has been lost, but we do have population figures for the diocese of Nardò in 1412. This list, reported to the Holy See by the incoming archbishop in the year that Nardò was elevated to a bishopric, contains the approximate number of inhabitants—one village having as few as one hundred—and their religious affiliation. The towns and villages are called either “Greek” (Orthodox) or “Latin” (Roman-rite Christians); only Nardò itself, with a population of 15,000, is listed as hosting adherents of both rites with an archpriest for each.⁷¹

      Around 1165, Benjamin of Tudela counted five hundred Jewish fuochi at Otranto, three hundred at Taranto, and just ten at Brindisi. Few other firm figures are available. In 1294, some 1,300 Jews allegedly converted to Christianity, including 172 at Taranto and 310 at Trani.⁷² By the later fifteenth century there were some 50,000 Jews in the kingdom of Naples responsible for paying taxes; many Ashkenazim had come from northern Italy and Provence, others from Catalonia. Nevertheless, at the beginning of the fifteenth century the Jews of the Salento were predominantly Romaniote, their numbers swelled by Balkan immigrants escaping the Ottoman conquests to the east.⁷³ Only at the end of the century did the composition of the community change