An Armchair Traveller's History Of Apulia Part 10

Leonidas, "Epigrams"

VERY FEW GREEK TARANTINES are remembered as recognisable historical personalities, as people in their own right. There are two exceptions, however. These are a brilliant scholar-statesman, Archytas, and a minor poet, Leonidas.

It was under Archytas, who was born about 400 BC, that Taras became the head of a formidable confederation of the Greek city-states of Magna Graecia. He was arguably the greatest Apulian in history, not excepting the Emperor Frederick II. Not a lot is known about him, and what we do know coming mainly from a few pages in an ancient Greek collection of lives of the philosophers. Chosen seven times by the Tarantines to be their leader, Archytas's head remained unturned despite winning many victories over the Messapians and the Lucanians, and never once losing a battle. Because of his gifts as a statesman, as well as a military commander, the Tarantines reached the summit of their prosperity and the Tarantine fleet ruled the waves in the Ionian and Adriatic seas. Thanks to his alliance with Dionysius, tyrant of Sicily, several cities of Magna Graecia that had been conquered by Dionysius's father recovered their freedom. Dionysius felt such respect for him that in his honour he sent a gigantic bronze candelabrum to light the Tarantine senate-house, with a burner for every day in the year.

Archytas wrote on astronomy, music, geography and politics, but only a few fragments of his books survive. A pioneer of mathematical mechanics, he developed new methods of weight-lifting with pulleys, constructed a wooden dove that flew, and solved the problem of duplicating the cube by building a scale model. His discoveries were so important that they influenced Plato and Euclid, possibly even Aristotle.

After the death of his mentor, Socrates, Plato took refuge with Archytas and his Pythagorean circle at Taras. When Plato went on to Syracuse and infuriated Dionysius, Archytas saved his life by writing an eloquent letter of intercession and then sending a galley to take him away quickly. A man who looked after his slaves as well as he did his family, he was probably a model for the philosopher king in Plato's "Republic".

He was drowned in a s.h.i.+pwreck off the coast of the Gargano. Three centuries later, Horace wrote a wistful ode to his memory, "Te maris et terrae", in which he lamented how the superb genius, who had known how to measure the earth and the ocean, even all the grains of sand, was now himself "a little mound of earth near the Matine coast."

The Tarantine poet Leonidas, who appears to have escaped from the city when it fell to the Romans in 272 BC, was neither a genius nor a very important poet. He seems to have been poor and obscure even before the fall of his beloved native city, knowing little of Tarantine luxury, a friend of peasants, fishermen and artisans, and writing how he found love in hovels. Yet, for all his terseness, or perhaps because of it, his poems have a gentle charm which inspired at least one really great poet, Andre Chenier.

He used a humble verse form, the epigram, which never consisted of more than a few lines. He wrote some lines in praise of Pyrrhus's victory at the River Sinni in 274, when the king was trying to save Taras from the Romans, that give us the only clue to when he lived. He is most likeable, however, in his country mode, as in the four lines of Greek which form "The Farmer's Rest" (translated by E.F. Lucas): Spare to this humble hillock, this stone that stands so lowly, Where poor Alcimenes slumbers, one word in pa.s.sing, friend, Though beneath briar and bramble it now lies hidden wholly These same old foes that, living, I fought with to the end.

Leonidas's descriptions of nature can still move. In one epigram, "The Goatherd's Thank-offering", he describes a very old lion, "time-worn in every limb", who is so grateful at finding shelter from a snowstorm in a goatherd's fold that he does not harm any of its terrified goats. In another, "The Cricket's Grave", he writes of "the wild thistle-climber... the corn-stalk scaler".

In yet another epigram (translated by Kenneth Rexroth), his husband from Magna Graecia sounds just like a certain sort of Apulian farmer who even today is not yet quite extinct: Here is Klito's little shack.

Here is his little corn patch.

Here is his tiny vineyard.

Here is his little wood-lot.

Here Klito spent eighty years.

After escaping from Taras, Leonidas roamed the sh.o.r.es of the Aegean, especially those of the island of Kos off Asia Minor, lamenting that he was going to die in exile after so many wanderings. Yet, like Archytas, he had shown the world that not all Tarantines were heartless voluptuaries. Sadly the countryside the poet loved, all around Taranto, is now covered with plastic tunnels for early vegetables.

40.

The Princes of Taranto

The most powerful Prince of Taranto, Gianantonio del Balzo Orsini...

could ride on his own land from Salerno to Taranto.

Benedetto Croce, "Storia del Regno di Napoli"

GUIDEBOOKS GIVE THE IMPRESSION that nothing happened at Taranto from the Cla.s.sical 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 princ.i.p.ality. Few Anglo-Saxon historians have written about the fifteenth century Mezzogiorno when the Prince of Taranto 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 84280 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 Taranto.

Charles II created his younger son, Philip, Prince of Taranto 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 t.i.tles there to his eldest son Robert, who through his mother was Latin Emperor of Constantinople. Philip's second son Louis inherited Taranto. At Louis's death in 1362, Taranto pa.s.sed to another Philip, to whom Robert bequeathed the t.i.tular Empire. Philip died childless in 1374. Behind these Imperial pretensions lay Apulia's eternal tie with the Levant.

In 1346, Louis of Taranto 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 Niccol Orsini, Count of Nola near Naples. Born about 1350, he was bequeathed the county of Soleto by his grandmother's brother, Raimondo del Balzo. Niccol, 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 English condottiere (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 princ.i.p.ality of Taranto.

A megalomaniac, Ladislao planned to become King of Hungary and all Italy, occupying Rome on two occasions. As l.u.s.tful 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 Taranto 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 Taranto 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 Taranto.

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 Taranto in 1431, but two years later he fell out with the queen. Led by Louis of Anjou, a group of courtiers besieged him at Taranto in 1434, hoping to seize his estates. Fortunately Louis suddenly died of a fever.

Queen Giovanna herself died in 1434, leaving her throne to Rene of Anjou, Louis's younger brother. During the same year, fighting for Alfonso, Gianantonio was captured by Rene's Genoese allies in a sea-battle off the isle of Ponza. When released, he went home to raise the Apulian barons against Rene in a long war that involved all the other states of Italy. Alfonso only survived because of the Prince of Taranto 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 a.s.signed 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 Taranto 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 n.o.ble 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 Taranto, 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.

41.

The Travellers' Taranto

...we glide into the suns.h.i.+ne of h.e.l.lenic days when the wise Archytas, sage and lawgiver, friend of Plato, ruled this ancient city of Tarentum.

Norman Douglas, "Old Calabria"

"TODAY IT IS MUCH REDUCED from its former expanse", Pacich.e.l.li wrote of Taranto after his visit here in 1687. He was impressed by St Cataldo's life-sized silver statue in the cathedral, noting that it contained the saint's skull, together with his tongue, "uncorrupted after a thousand years." He also tells us that at Pontifical Ma.s.ses in the cathedral the Epistle and Gospel were sung in Greek as well as in Latin, which suggests that at that date the Tarantines still remained partly Greek-speaking.

A century after Pacich.e.l.li, Swinburne commented: "The streets are remarkably dirty and narrow, especially the Marina, which runs along the Mare Piccolo, and is, without dispute, the most disgustful habitation of human beings in Europe, except, perhaps, the Jewish Ghetto in Rome." But Swinburne enjoyed the sea-food, when he was a guest at a convent: The prior received me with great politeness, and at supper treated me with the most varied service of sh.e.l.l-fish I ever sat down to. There were no less than fifteen sorts, all extremely fat and savoury, especially a small species of muscle (sic), the sh.e.l.l of which is covered with a velvet s.h.a.g, and both inside and outside is tinged with the richest violet colour. I tasted of all, and plentifully of several sorts, without experiencing the least difficulty in the digestion.

The "muscle" sounds like a murex. Among the other sh.e.l.l-fish he ate would have been the sea-date, or dactylus, that according to Pliny s.h.i.+nes in the dark. "In the mouth, even, while they are being eaten, they give forth their light, and the same too when in the hands." Oysters, for which Taranto has always been famous, would not have been included, the oyster season here lasting only from 5 November to Easter Sunday.

When Count de Salis returned from the Salento, his interest in agriculture resulted in an invitation to stay at the house of Giuseppe Capecelatro, Archbishop of Taranto from 1778 to 1836. Sir William Hamilton was a fellow guest at the delightful Villa Santa Lucia on the sh.o.r.es of the Mare Piccolo, its gardens filled with pagan statuary and acacia, myrtle and every kind of rose; an inscription over the main gate read, "Si Adam hic pecca.s.set, Deus ignovisset" (If Adam had sinned here, G.o.d would have forgiven him). A worldly prelate, who criticised clerical celibacy, Jesuits and the enclosure of nuns, he told his seminarians to forget theology and teach modern farming. He was on friendly terms with King Gustavus III of Sweden and Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo of Tuscany, corresponding with Catherine the Great, to whom he sent a collection of Tarentine sh.e.l.ls. Another friend was Goethe. The Prussian scholar Herder wrote to his wife, "I have made the acquaintance of the Archbishop of Taranto, the most discerning, high-spirited, learned, intelligent and likeable ecclesiastic I have ever met."

In 1801 the Neapolitan government agreed to let the French garrison occupy certain ports, including Taranto. In 1803, it looked as if the English would invade the Two Sicilies, so a French artillery general was sent to organise its defences. He was Choderlos de Laclos, author of "Les Liaisons Dangereuses", 63 years old and in poor health, but forced by poverty to resume his military career. Exhausted by the journey, he was struck down by dysentery as soon as he arrived. From his sick bed Choderlos wrote, "Tarente est une a.s.sez vilaine ville dans un a.s.sez vilain pays" (Taranto is a nasty city in a nasty country), commenting that the inhabitants ate nothing but fish. Two months after, he died and was buried under the tower on the off-sh.o.r.e island of San Pietro in the Gulf of Taranto, his tomb being broken open and his bones scattered in 1815.

In the Old Town, in Via Paisiello, a plaque on a modest seven-teenth century house commemorates the birth here in 1741 of Giovanni Paisiello, "reformer of music, who discovered in his heart a fount of harmony and channelled it into songs of love and grief, honoured by Kings and Emperors." He composed many successful operas, such as "L'Idole Cinese", and spent eight years in St Peters-burg at Catherine the Great's court where he produced his master-piece, "Il Barbiere di Seviglia". In 1803 he went to Paris to work for Napoleon, having caught his attention with a march for General Hoche's funeral, but after only a year went back to Naples to serve Joseph Bonaparte and Murat, dying in 1815. Already his music had gone out of fas.h.i.+on, yet Beethoven admired the "Molinara". His "Inno Reale", a n.o.ble and melodious tune, remained the national anthem of the Two Sicilies until the end at church parades it was played at the elevation of the Host, soldiers singing it on bended knee.

When Ferdinand Gregorovius came here, Paisiello's house re-minded him of Mozart's birthplace at Salzburg. Despite writing that "cultural life is dead in Taranto", he had been impressed by a scholarly booklet on the ancient city by a certain Francesco Sferra. He tracked down the sage with difficulty, eventually directed by a priest to Via Paisiello. Here, in what he calls a "Temple of Aesculapius" (a pharmacy), he found a sickly looking young man with a dirty towel round his head making pills. The chemist's apprentice admitted that he was Sferra and immediately tried to sell Gregorovius another learned work.

Lenormant observed in 1880 that, because of the Tarantines' fish diet, they suffered from rickets and even elephantiasis. Augustus Hare found a "miserable, filthy, scrofulous population, which has been confined in the narrow s.p.a.ce occupied by the Acropolis of the Greek city since the eleventh century." Yet he could not forget the legend that Plato had landed at the ancient bridge, to be welcomed by the Tarantine philosophers. He was also intrigued by the muslin produced from a sh.e.l.l-fish, the lana-penna, from the rocks around Punta Penna, its long, silky, golden-brown filaments being dyed purple and woven into a filmy gauze. (The veils of the dancing girls in the murals at Herculaneum were made of this material.) "Taranto has been compared to a s.h.i.+p", observed Hare with his painter's eye, "the castle at its east end representing the stern, its great church the mast, the tower of Raimondo Orsini the bowsprit, and the bridge the cable."

Mrs. Ross believed the Tarantines "show their evident Greek descent by their shapely hands and ears and well-poised heads", although this was wishful thinking. She thought the Old Town's side alleys so narrow that they "seem built for shadows, not men", but in the upper town "Some of the palaces are handsome in a baroque, rococo style, with balconies which bear witness to the Spanish rule, and are suggestive of serenades." She says the fishermen dread moon-rays: "They carefully protect the fish from them when caught, and if they find a dead one on board after a night's fis.h.i.+ng, declare it is allunato, or moon-struck, and nothing will persuade them to eat it."

"Old Taranto glimmers in lordly fas.h.i.+on across the tranquil waters", observes Norman Douglas, "a sense of immemorial culture pervades this region of russet tilth, and olives, and golden corn." He considered the cathedral "a jovial nightmare in stone", but was fascinated by the fishermen's huts on the banks of the inland sea, built of branches and gra.s.s-ropes. "There is a smack of the stone ages, of primeval lake-dwellings, about these shelters." They must have been descendants of the fishermen's huts Leonidas knew. Even so, "h.e.l.lenic traits have disappeared from Taranto", Douglas comments: "It was completely Latinised under Augustus, and though Byzantines came... they have long ago become merged into the Italian temperament."

Edward Hutton agreed that everything from ancient Greece had vanished: Here in Taranto, the last city of Magna Graecia, let us confess the appalling change this whole country must have suffered from earthquake and neglect since cla.s.sic times", he wrote after his visit. "Everywhere it is a prey to malaria, because it has so long lacked a population which may pursue the art of agriculture in peace; everywhere, save for its n.o.ble outlines, its mountains and its sea, it is a bitter disappointment to those few fantastics who hold a memory of the ancient world dearer than any mechanic triumph of today. Magna Graecia is not here but in our hearts...

Visitors of a new and unpleasing sort came in November 1940 when Taranto was attacked by British biplanes. Their bombs sank the wars.h.i.+p "Conte de Cavour", together with two other battle-s.h.i.+ps and a cruiser, crippling the Italian Royal Navy. The damage was greater than that inflicted by the Grand Fleet at Jutland on the Germans in 1916, and far more decisive, changing the course of the war. But little damage was done to Taranto itself.

Even today, Taranto's fishermen rarely face the perils of the open sea, fish of every description flooding into the Mare Piccolo. Their old method of farming mussels is doc.u.mented as far back as the twelfth century, but probably dates from long before the founding of Taras. Row upon row of pales are stuck in the shallow water, with ropes slung between. From these ropes are suspended others in rings, to which the baby sh.e.l.lfish cling in colonies, reaching maturity within a few months.

The ropes have, however, been replaced by plastic netting. In the past, garlands of mussels were brought to the market, where a housewife could choose the ones she wanted, but nowadays, with the advent of plastic, it is easier to sell them strips of netting. From the housewife's point of view, this is cheating since she has to pay for many too small to eat; from the mussels' it is infanticide and possibly, in the long term, genocide.

42.

Brindisi

That Brentesion of the Greeks where Virgil died, that Brundisium of the medieval chronicles where Frederick II married the beautiful Yolande of Jerusalem.

Paul Bourget, "Sensations d'Italie"

IF BRNDISI CANNOT CLAIM so glittering a past as Taranto, it has had moments of glory. One of the few sheltered harbours on the Italian Adriatic, Brentesion, as the Greeks called it, has been an important port since at least the sixth century BC. The Messapians, who founded it, traded with their kinsmen in the Balkans. Later a dependency of Taras, it was conquered by Rome and became a Roman colony, remaining loyal despite Hannibal's seeming invincibility. As a reward, it was made a municipium. Its name comes from the Messapian word for a deer's head, brunda, so-called because of the shape of the harbour, and its coat-of-arms is still a stag's head.

Julius Caesar fought Pompey here in 49 BC, blockading his rival's fleet in the port. He filled the narrow harbour entrance with huge rafts, building a causeway over them, but Pompey escaped. (Piles sunk into the sea bed during the operation led to the gradual silting up of the harbour.) Julius's nephew Octavius took the t.i.tle 'Caesar', when he and Mark Antony divided the Roman world between them at the Treaty of Brundisium. However, in 32 BC, Octavius Caesar, the future Emperor Augustus, a.s.sembled his fleet here for the campaign which would destroy Mark Antony and Cleopatra. Shakespeare makes Mark Antony say: Is't not strange, Canidius, That from Tarentum and Brundisium, He could so quickly cut the Ionian Sea...?

Virgil died here aged fifty-one, in 19 BC. After spending ten years writing the "Aeneid", on his deathbed he gave instructions that his work should be destroyed as unworthy, but the Emperor Augustus countermanded them. Augustus Hare was another admirer, suggesting that throughout Apulia: the traveller will be perpetually reminded of the Latin poets, especially of Virgil's "Georgics", which may well be taken as his companion. Fields are still covered with lupin the "tristis Lupinus", and the peasants still in cloudy weather, tell the hour by the position of the flower, which, like the sunflower, turns, as Pliny describes, with the sun. The wood of the plough is still elm... and the oxen still drag back the inverted plough... and the wild fig-tree still splits the rocks with its evil strength.

Despite the damage done by Julius Caesar, Brindisi remained a princ.i.p.al port for both Roman wars.h.i.+ps and merchantmen. A scene on Trajan's column at Rome shows him leaving from Brundisium to conquer the Dacians. He erected two lesser columns in the port to mark the end of the Via Traiana and the Via Appia. (One was moved to Lecce in the seventeenth century.) Every July, Brundisium was full of s.h.i.+ps being loaded with Apulian wool.

Sacked and razed to the ground by the Saracens, Brundisium was rebuilt by the Byzantine Lupos Protospata, who had his name carved on the great pillar marking the end of the Appian Way. The city surrendered to the Normans in 1071, and ten years later was used against its former masters, when Robert Guiscard tried to make himself Emperor of Byzantium, a.s.sembling a fleet here. In the twelfth century Anna Comnena spoke of Brundisium as "the sea-port with the finest harbour in the whole of Iapygia." It was still capable of taking s.h.i.+ps that could carry a thousand pilgrims.

Countless crusaders sailed from this secure harbour, then the main port for the Holy Land. Many Apulians were among them, not just potentates like Bohemond, who had made himself Prince of Taranto, but humble people who formed a large proportion of the settlers in the new Kingdom of Jerusalem. Knights Templar, Knights Hospitaller and Teutonic Knights were constantly travelling to and fro between Brindisi and Acre.

In 1225 Emperor Frederick II married the heiress to the throne of Jerusalem, the fourteen year old Queen Yolande. After a wedding by proxy at Acre, she sailed to Brindisi for a second ceremony in the cathedral. The Emperor ignored her on her wedding night, seducing her cousin with whom he fell pa.s.sionately in love. Immured in his harem, Yolande lasted long enough to give him an heir, Conrad, dying in childbirth. Frederick wrote the poem "Oi la.s.so non pensai" for her cousin whom he calls "The Flower of Syria".

Two years later, the n.o.bles of Germany and Italy rode down to Brindisi, summoned by the Emperor to join him on a Crusade. Soon there were too many in the camps outside the city, bad weather, poor hygiene and lack of food causing an epidemic which decimated them. Both the Emperor and his second-in-command, the Margrave of Thuringia, caught it, although their head-quarters were on the island of Sant' Andrea in the outer harbour. Frederick set sail, but the margrave was dying so he put in at Otranto. The Emperor abandoned the Crusade to recuperate, and was promptly excommunicated by Pope Gregory IX.

Frederick finally left for the Holy Land in 1228, from Barletta. After recovering Jerusalem, he was informed that hostile Papal troops had entered Apulia. He returned to Brindisi as fast as he could, driving out the invaders, and sacking towns such as Troia which had welcomed them.

During the late Middle Ages Brindisi entered a long decline. In the fourteenth century it was sacked by Hungarians while a hundred years later Gianantonio del Balzo Orsini jammed the harbour entrance by sinking boats in it. The city's misery was compounded by an earthquake in 1458. For three centuries the port remained blocked, from fear of the Turks.

Swinburne was amused by a privilege granted by Frederick that still existed at the time of his visit the cathedral canons could have "handmaids" free of tax, so long as they were old and ugly and no threat to celibacy. When he came, the city was ruinous and half empty, the only decent building being Frederick's castle next to the port, by now a malarial swamp. However, work had started in 1775 on a ca.n.a.l to reopen the outer harbour, and galley slaves were refacing the quays with stone from a medieval palace. He was more impressed by the hunting: "a few miles from the town, there is a good deal of woodland, where sportsmen find very good diversion. Gentlemen hunt hare, fox and sometimes wild boar, with hounds or lurchers, and sometimes with both. In autumn, fowlers use nets, springs or birdlime; in winter, guns. All the country is free to who-ever buys the King's licence, except some few enclosures where the Barons endeavour to preserve the game."

Keppel Craven had a bizarre experience here. Visiting the seven-teenth century church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, to his surprise he was invited into the convent. The nuns were convinced he was the Crown Prince of Bavaria, travelling incognito. Seated on a red and gold chair surmounted by a crown, he was plied with coffee, cakes and rosolio (rose petal liqueur), while the convent's most precious relics were shown to him. "Among the relics which were named to me, I remember some fragments of the veil and s.h.i.+ft of the Virgin Mary, a thumb of St Athanasius, a tooth of the prophet Jeremiah, and some of the coals which were used to roast St Lorenzo." The nuns filled his pockets with presents, oranges and lemons, "among which I afterwards discovered, to my great consternation, a pair of cotton stockings, and two of woollen gloves."

Like Swinburne, Craven admired the castle at Brindisi, considering it to be one of the most beautiful he had ever seen. By then it had become "a prison for malefactors: I heard one hundred and eighty of these wretches clanging their irons in time to the most discordant melodies that ever struck the human ear, the melancholy monotony of which was only broken by vehement appeals to the charity of the stranger."

After the opening of the Suez Ca.n.a.l in 1870, the port became a staging-post on the new, fast route to India, bringing many British. Even so, Janet Ross did not like it very much in the 1880s, although she had enjoyed Taranto. She could not find a cab at the station: "We were evidently not going to India; the mail steamer left two days ago. What could we want a cab for? Besides, it was raining; the harness would be spoiled, and the driver would get fever." The city could "vaunt an unenviable superiority over most places in the shape of dirt and bad smells", sniffs a ruffled Mrs. Ross, "It needed all the cla.s.sical reminiscences we could conjure up to make our two hours' pilgrimage bearable."

During the Second World War Brindisi had a brief moment of importance when for a few months it became the Italian capital. King Victor Emmanuel III and his government took refuge here in September 1943, before moving to Salerno the following February. After the War the port was kept busy by ferry services to Corfu and to mainland Greece, besides exporting farm produce from the Salento, which ensured a certain atmosphere of bustle. Some years ago, however, the port departed to a new location outside, a move that has been described as taking away the city's heart and soul.

Yet the port's departure was not such a bad thing for the nostal-gically minded tourist, for nothing can ever deprive Brindisi of its ancient memories of splendour. Regardless of decline, the Emperor Trajan's solitary column still broods at the top of a flight of majestic steps, looking out over the Adriatic Sea and you do not need too much imagination to marvel at what it must have seen.

Part X.