An Armchair Traveller's History of Apulia

by Seward, Desmond

  As the Emperor drew older, during his unending battle with the Papacy, he became bitter and cruel. Most reports of his savagery date from this period. His enemies claimed that he crucified prisoners of war. They also spread a story that he gave two men under sentence of death a heavy meal, and then sent one out hunting and the other to bed; after several hours both were disembowelled to see who had digested his food better.

  Gradually the smear campaign took effect, and Frederick found himself surrounded by friends who had turned into secret enemies. His physician gave him a cup of poison, which Frederick pretended to drink, spilling it down his chest. The dregs were given to a condemned criminal, who promptly died in agony – as did the doctor shortly afterwards.

  The Friar Salimbene says of Emperor Frederick: “Of faith in God he had none. He was cunning, deceitful, avaricious, lustful, malicious, hot-tempered, and yet sometimes he could be a most agreeable man, when he would be kind and courteous, full of amusement, cheerful, loving life, with all sorts of imaginative ideas. He knew how to read, write and sing, how to make songs and music. He was handsome and well built, if only of medium height. I have seen him myself, and once I loved him... he could speak many different languages, and, in short, had he been a good Catholic and loved God and his Church, few Emperors could have matched him.”

  Frederick dazzled and terrified his contemporaries, who credited him with possessing sinister, magic powers. It was not only the Popes who were genuinely convinced that there was something Satanic about the Emperor. Throughout Italy, including Apulia, the Franciscan ‘Spirituals’, the wandering heretic friars trying to live what they thought was the original Franciscan life, identified him with the Antichrist of the prophecy of Abbot Joachim of Fiore, the fiendish monarch who was going to destroy the Church in its present, corrupt form in 1260. Unfortunately Frederick destroyed the prophecy, by dying ten years too soon. When he died, a monk dreamt that he saw him riding down to Hell with his knights through the flaming lava of Mount Etna.

  On the other hand, there is plenty of plausible evidence that the Emperor died a good Christian, while his surviving supporters, who included a fair number of orthodox clerics, were clearly devoted to him. There were even men who believed he would one day return, like King Arthur, and usher in a new golden age.

  Frederick of Hohenstaufen was a fascinating enigma during his lifetime, and he has remained one ever since.

  Certainly no ruler made a more powerful or more enduring im-pact on Apulian folk memory. The massive strongholds that he built all over Apulia, and that serve as his monuments, are often said to conceal hoards of gold guarded by his ghost. In Pugliese legend Frederick is still Stupor Mundi, “the wonder of the world.”

  9

  Castel del Monte

  ...on clear days one can see Castel del Monte,

  the Hohenstaufen eyrie, shining yonder...

  Norman Douglas, “Old Calabria”

  AMONG THE MANY HUNTING-BOXES built by Frederick II, the last was Castel del Monte. You come closest to him here. It is the most beautiful and mysterious of all his strongholds.

  The Emperor stamped his complex personality and his extra-ordinarily wide interests on this little castle. His fondness for mathematics could be seen in the plan, his love of nature in the decoration, and his vision of himself as the heir of the Caesars in the classical statues that adorned the rooms. He had a stone head brought from an ancient temple near Andria, with a bronze band fastened around its brow which bore the Greek inscription “on the calends of May at sunrise I shall have a head of gold.” He had it placed above the great entrance door that faces east. On the first day of May, the rays of the rising sun gilded this Imperial diadem, in the same way that the heads of Roman emperors had been wreathed in sun-rays on their gold coins.

  There are innumerable theories about the design of Castel del Monte, many of them wildly fanciful – even one that it was based on the pyramid of Cheops – but there is general agreement that it was Frederick’s own creation. Begun about 1240, after his return from the Holy Land, its octagonal plan is not unlike the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. Here, however, the octagon is carried to extremes, each point having an octagonal tower and the central courtyard eight sides. On both floors there are eight rooms (although only five of the towers have rooms, the others containing spiral-staircases) while in the courtyard there was an enormous octagonal bath, cut from a single block of white marble.

  Although the plan was eastern, the decoration was French in inspiration. The interior retains Gothic fauns and other sylvan deities on the keystones of its vaulted rooms and windows. It still has white marble columns streaked with lavender and rust, crowned by silver grey capitals carved with vines, ivy and agave. A grey marble frieze linking the tops of the windows and running above the huge fireplace is almost intact. The mosaic that covered the vaults has gone, but traces of the octagonal floor-tiles give some idea of what the decoration must have been like in Frederick’s day. The standard of comfort was far in advance of its time. There were flushing water-closets in the towers and even a bathroom where the Emperor took a daily bath, the water coming through lead pipes from a cistern on the roof. Not too big, the rooms would have been well-heated in winter, deliciously cool in summer.

  All Frederick’s palaces were sumptuously furnished, with a luxury almost undreamed of anywhere else in the Western Europe of his time. Silk hangings woven with gold thread, to clothe the walls and to curtain the windows, always travelled with him, servants going ahead to put them up. Huge cushions softened the stone benches around the walls, while the beds were made with silk or linen sheets. The marble table at which he dined after hunting was laid with a linen cloth and covered with gold and silver plate, and with Chinese porcelain which had been given to him by the Sultan of Cairo. Classical statues stood in niches in the walls; one of them was captured in his baggage at the siege of Parma, giving rise to a silly story that he worshipped idols. The tiled floors were carpeted by oriental rugs, light provided by candles in torcheres of rock crystal or enamelled bronze. There were lecterns for the books stored flat in cupboards along the walls.

  Among these books was the “Toledoth Yeshua”, a pseudo-biography of Christ written during the eighth century by an anonymous Jew, who claimed that Jesus was a bastard begotten by a Roman soldier on a perfumer’s wife, and had learned magic in Egypt before setting out to lead Israel astray; arrested as a sorcerer, he was stoned before being hanged on the Passover – and then went down to hell where he was tormented in boiling mud. Possession of this luridly blasphemous work might seem to confirm the suspicions of some contemporaries that their strange, slightly sinister emperor had ceased to be a Christian, although this was not necessarily the case.

  He displayed considerable learning in his own, less controversial book, the elegant “De Arte Venandi cum Avibus” (“The Art of Hunting with Birds”). Based partly on Arab treatises on falconry, but written largely from personal observation, this reveals the author’s deep love and understanding of hawks; significantly, the mews that housed them at Castel del Monte could only be reached through his bedroom. Sultans competed to present him with young Arabian birds of prey while he sent all the way to Iceland to buy his favourite gyrfalcons. He was the first European ruler to introduce a close season for game.

  Frederick liked to hunt in the woods around Castel del Monte, using hounds or even cheetahs for ground game, although he usually preferred to fly his falcons. He was accompanied by his bastard sons and by scions of royal or noble families from all over Europe and the Middle East. During the winter he did not return until dusk, not stopping to eat since he took only one meal a day. In the evenings, he and his courtiers discussed the nature of the soul and the universe, listened to readings from Aristotle, or sang poems to music of their own composition.

  After the death of the Emperor’s son, King Manfred, the rulers of the Regno seldom if ever came to Castel del Monte, although it was in working order as late as 1459. Then it was abandoned,
and the great bronze doors removed. For centuries farmers were allowed to stable their animals there, brigands hiding in the towers. At last the Italian government bought the castle from the Carafa family in 1876 and a trickle of tourists began to visit it, including Augustus Hare and Janet Ross.

  “It is a three hours drive (carriage with 3 horses, 20 francs) across the fruit-covered plain, sprinkled with small domed towers, upon which the figs are dried upon tiers of masonry round the domes”, reported Hare, who was staying at Trani. “From the point where the carriage-road comes to an end, it is an hour’s walk, over a wilderness covered with stones, where the sheep find scant subsistence in the short grass between the great tufts of lilies.” But for years few tourists came here.

  An old custodian, living in a hut nearby, told Mrs. Ross how delighted he was to see her, “and said his life was very lonely, and that if it were not for Vigilante (his dog) he should not be able to bear it.” He dismissed tales of the place being haunted at night by the great Emperor as “only fit for poor peasants.”

  Even so, “what recalled Frederick II vividly to my mind were the hawks, sailing about and shrieking sharply as they flew in and out of their nests in the walls of the castle”, wrote Janet. She admired the view from the roof, where she could see the entire coast from the Gargano down to Monopoli, with the white towns of Barletta, Trani and Bisceglie. Inland, she could see Andria, Corato and Ruvo: “We understood why the peasants call Castle del Monte ‘La Spia delle Puglie’ (the spy-hole of Puglia).”

  Although the Emperor had many other homes in Apulia, Castel del Monte best preserves his brooding, brilliant majesty.

  10

  The Emperor’s Faithful Andria

  ...her burghers are still proud of the preference shown by the

  great Emperor of the middle ages for his faithful town.

  Janet Ross, “The Land of Manfred”

  IN 1818 THE DISTANT OUTLINE of Andria’s three campanili appeared to Keppel Craven “like the minarets of a Turkish mosque”. After a pleasant visit to the city, he included it among the Apulian cities that were famous for “the hospitable, polished character of their inhabitants”. In Roman times it was a staging post on the Via Traiana. Since it was the nearest important city to Castel del Monte, only eight miles to the north, Frederick II appears to have spent a good deal of time at Andria.

  Janet Ross drove here from Trani and gives us a vivid idea of what the neighbouring landscape looked like during the 1880s:

  rich but dull country, teeming with corn, almond trees and olives, the large fields divided by rough stone walls. It is singular to see such vast stretches of country without any cottages or farm-houses. The ground was splendidly tilled, seemingly by invisible hands, for it was a holiday, so we saw no peasants about, and look in vain for their houses. Large cisterns for collecting rain-water were dotted about, and the only living creatures we saw were the men engaged in hauling water for their animals... On approaching Andria we crossed a “Tratturo”, one of the broad grass-grown highways which since time immemorial have served for the yearly emigration of the immense herds and flocks of Apulia to their summer pastures in the mountains of Calabria and Abruzzi.

  She goes on to account, accurately enough, for the strange lack of human habitation:

  In former times all this country was subject to perpetual inroads from the Turks, and the general insecurity was so great that the peasants were forced to live in large towns. This custom still prevails, and explains the size of Apulian towns...

  The Emperor Frederick was obviously very fond of the elegant little city, presumably because of its unswerving loyalty. When the Pope tried to turn Southern Italy against him in 1228, while he was on crusade in the Holy Land, unlike all too many Apulian cities it stayed faithful. According to tradition, Andria gave Frederick an emotional welcome at his triumphant return from Palestine, “five youths of noble family” chanting verses in his honour. He rewarded the city with valuable privileges.

  The Porta Sant’ Andrea, known in Frederick’s day as the Porta Imperatore, still bears the inscription that he ordered to be placed above it, beginning “ANDREA FELIX NOSTER”. The Teutonic Knights, no less loyal than the citizens to the Emperor, built a church near here, Sant’ Agostino, where the remains of beautiful thirteenth century frescoes have been uncovered from beneath the Baroque plasterwork.

  Somewhere in the crypt of the duomo (cathedral church) lie the coffins of two of Frederick’s empresses, Yolande of Jerusalem and Isabella of England. Heiress to the crusader kingdom of Jerusalem and a queen in her own right, Yolande is said to have been marvel-lously beautiful, but she died at only sixteen. Her successor, King John’s daughter and an old maid of twenty when the Emperor married her by proxy at the palace of Westminster in 1234, pleased him by her wit and her learning. She too died young, however, after a mere seven years of marriage. The lives of these two young ladies cannot have been particularly happy, since both of them must swiftly have disappeared into their husband’s harem, described by a contemporary chronicler in a chilling phrase as “the labyrinth of his Gomorrah”.

  Unlike Castel del Monte, Andria’s importance did not end with the Hohenstaufen. At the end of the fourteenth century it became a duchy, created for the del Balzo, who built a castle in the city centre to ensure obedience. During her visit here, Mrs. Ross met one of them when she inspected the church of San Domenico that they had built in 1398:

  “An old man who lived in the refectory of the deserted convent asked us whether we had seen the tomb of the Duke, and on our answering in the negative, led us into a chapel out of the picturesque cloister. With pride he pointed to a rudely painted board let into the wall, on which was inscribed ‘Hic jacet Corpus Serenissimi ducis Domini Francisci di Baucio fundatoris huius conventus 1482, aet 72’; and proceeded to unhook it. We then saw a long hole in the wall, in which was placed an open coffin with glass on the side facing us. In this lay a brown mummy, and a few white hairs still remaining on the head, and one leg slightly drawn up as though the Duke had died in great pain. To our horror, the old man laid hold of the mummy, and danced it up and down in the coffin; he was quite disappointed at my refusing to feel how light it was, and explained that this was one of the ‘divertimenti’ (amusements) that Andria could offer to strangers.” (The duke’s mummy is still there).

  Born in 1410, the Duke had fought for Aragon against Anjou in the struggle for the throne of the Two Sicilies. A family who claimed Visigoth royal blood, the del Balzo’s ancestral castle of Les Baux (or Balthasar) in Provence had belonged to them for so long that they were convinced they descended from one of the Three Kings and bore a Star in the East for their coat-of-arms. They first arrived in the Regno in 1264 as henchmen of Charles of Anjou.

  King Ferrante’s second son Federigo, who was to be the last Aragonese ruler of Naples from 1496–1504, originally bore the title of Duke of Andria, since the heir to the throne of the Regno was always the Duke of Calabria. The most likeable of his dynasty, Federigo’s reign ended in tragedy, his entire kingdom being taken from him by the King of Spain. Cesare Borgia was briefly Duke, but it seems very unlikely that he ever came here.

  Like most Apulian cities, Andria was ruled by feudal lords until the Napoleonic invasion, passing in 1525 to a branch of the Carafa family, who besides being Dukes of Andria were Dukes of Noja, Counts of Ruvo and Lords of Corato and Castel del Monte. They built a great palace on the site of the old Del Balzo fortress, which Pacichelli found most congenial; he writes of a luxuriant roof garden and “a noble and numerous ducal court”.

  In October 1590 Fabrizio Carafa, the handsome young Duke of Andria, was murdered in Venosa, just a day’s ride from Andria, in one of sixteenth century Italy’s most notorious crimes of passion. He was conducting an affair with the beautiful but neglected Donna Maria d’Avalos, wife of the homosexual Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa, famous for his eerie motets and madrigals. Re-turning to Venosa unexpectedly from a hunting trip, Gesualdo was infuriated by the fla
grant affront to his honour. He broke down the door of the bed-chamber and killed the pair as they lay in bed, shooting the duke with an arquebus, then finishing him off with a halberd, before stabbing Donna Maria repeatedly with a stiletto. Despite the Carafa family’s fury, he escaped scot-free – at this date a full scale military campaign would have been needed to bring an Apulian magnate to justice.

  Just outside Andria is the celebrated shrine of Santa Maria dei Miracoli. In 1576 a carpenter from the city, Giannantonio Tucchio, saw the Virgin in a dream, who told him to go to a cave in a ravine and light a candle before her image. An old man, he was nervous about visiting such a desolate place, but after she appeared twice more, went with a young friend, the lawyer Annibale Palombino. They found a picture on a wall and left a lamp burning before it. When they returned a week later, they found the lamp still burning, miraculously refilled with overflowing oil. Then Palombino’s mare went lame; every remedy failing, he tried the lamp oil and she was immediately healed. After this, humans began to be cured of diseases and pilgrims came flocking. In 1617 a magnificent Baroque church and a Benedictine monastery were built over the grotto by the great architect Cosimo Fanzago. A tablet records that in 1859 King Ferdinand II, very much at one with his subjects in matters of religion, came here and prayed for a cure. The shrine is now served by friars, crowds still descending the fifty-two steps into the grotto to pray before an ancient fresco on the wall of what was once a Byzantine cave chapel.