Acknowledgements
One of the most rewarding aspects of working alone on a long-term project is the realization that there is in fact very little that is actually solitary about the process. Sure, we type away in a room, or read and translate in a library, on our own. But, the support, the conversations, the suggestions, the amendments, the listening, the compassion, the cups of coffee and arms around the shoulder, these are all evidence of the collaborative input that underpins this book. I take great delight in thanking all those who were part of that ‘team’. Gifted and patient colleagues, friends, and mentors pointed me towards improvements and sources, and steered me away from errors and misunderstandings (any that remain are solely down to me!). Family provided joy, restoration and perspective. Having written this book through a global pandemic, at a time of devastating distress and isolation, the support and connection from this ‘team’ made this book possible.
I am so thankful, therefore, to so many colleagues and friends, including Rosanna Alaggio, Edoardo D’Angelo, Joanna Drell, Georg Christ, Charles Insley, Adam Kosto, Markus Krumm, Stephen Mossman, Ian Moxon, Ingrid Rembold, Chris Wickham, and Marino Zabbia. The origins of my own interest in southern Italy can be traced to Graham A. Loud, who never fails to support and inspire me. The origins of my particular interest in Puglia can be traced to Jean-Marie Martin, who sadly passed away during the writing of this book: his magisterial study on the region is awe-inspiring, and his encouragement of my endeavours always meant so much to me.
I am extremely grateful for the funding provided by the Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship which allowed me to spend twelve months researching and writing-up this monograph. I also
want to thank the staff at the Biblioteca Statale di Montevergine, who enabled me to view original documents from the Archivio di Montevergine. I am, as ever, thankful to the Department of History at the University of Manchester for providing me with a semester’s research leave which provided the time and space for me to establish the foundations of this research project. The entire editorial team at Oxford University Press have been amazing, and I am particularly grateful for the guidance provided by Stephanie Ireland, Cathryn Steele, and the valuable input from the peer reviewers. A thankyou also to Cath D’Alton for producing the excellent map of Puglia and being so helpful in response to my queries.
Finally, to Kate, Finlay, and Sebastian: I hope you all know what you mean to me, and what you have done for me. You have filled my world with compassion, brilliance, and wonder. This is a book about memories, and you have all gifted me so many to cherish. But this book is also about the value of the past for thinking in the present and for forging ahead; and the greatest gift you give me is a share in your now and in your future.
ListofTables
Abbreviations
MapofMedievalPuglia
Introduction
Narratives of the Past: Historical Writing and Its Disappearance
The Monarchy and Archival Searches
IuratusetInterrogatus: Inquest and History
The Papacy: Privilege and Dispute Resolution
Intempore: Interwoven Periodizations
Conclusions
Bibliography Index
1. 2.
List of Tables
Documents recalled in 1232 Inquests in Puglia (post-1220)
Abbreviations
Chronicon ignoti civis Barensis sive Lupe Protospatae chronicon ab anonymo auctore Barensi, ed. C. Pellegrino, in L. A. Muratori (ed.), RIS V (Milan, 1724), 145–56.
Alexandri Telesini abbatis Ystoria Rogerii regis Sicilie, Calabrie atque Apulie, ed. and trans. L. de Nava, commentary by D. R. Clementi, FSI 112 (Rome, 1991).
LupiProtospatariiannales, ed. G. H. Pertz, MGH SS V (Hannover, 1844), 52–63.
Archivio storicopugliese
Annales Barenses, ed. G. H. Pertz, MGH SS V (Hannover, 1844), 51–6.
Bullettino dell’Istituto storico italianoper ilMedio Evo
Le carte che si conservano nello Archivio dello Capitolo metropolitano della città di Trani(dalIXsecolo fino all’anno 1266), ed. A. Prologo (Barletta, 1877).
Codice diplomatico barlettano, vol. 1, ed. S. Santeramo (Barletta, 1924).
Codice diplomatico brindisino. Volume Primo (492–1299), ed. A. De Leo and G. M. Monti (Trani, 1940).
Le pergamene del Duomo di Bari(952–1264), ed. G. B. Nitto de Rossi and F. Nitti di Vito, Codice diplomatico barese I (Bari, 1897).
Le pergamene del Duomo di Bari (1266–1309) [includes in appendix: Le pergamene di Giovinazzo, Canosa e Putignano sino al 1266], ed. G. B. Nitto de Rossi and F. Nitti di Vito, Codice diplomatico barese II (Bari, 1899).
Le pergamene della Cattedrale di Terlizzi (971–1300), ed. F. Carabellese, Codice diplomatico barese III (Bari, 1899).
Le pergamene di S. Nicola di Bari. Periodo normanno (1075–1194), ed. F. Nitti di Vito, Codice diplomatico barese V (Bari, 1902).
Le pergamene di S. Nicola di Bari. Periodo svevo (1195–1266), ed. F. Nitti di Vito, Codice diplomatico barese VI (Bari, 1906).
Le carte diMolfetta(1076–1309), ed. F. Carabellese, Codice diplomatico barese VII (Bari, 1912).
Le pergamene di Barletta. Archivio capitolare (897–1285), ed. F. Nitti di Vito, Codice diplomatico barese VIII (Bari, 1914).
Pergamene di Barletta del R. Archivio di Napoli (1075–1309), ed. R. Filangieri di Candida, Codice diplomatico barese X (Bari, 1927).
Le Pergamene di Conversano. Seguito al Chartularium Cupersanense del Morea, ed. D. Morea and F. Muciaccia, Codice diplomatico barese XVII (Trani, 1942).
Le pergamene di Conversano, I (901–1265), ed. G. Coniglio, Codice diplomatico pugliese XX (Bari, 1975).
Les Chartes de Troia. Edition et étude critique des plus anciens documents conservés à l’Archivio Capitolare, I (1024–1266), ed. J.-M. Martin, Codice diplomatico pugliese XXI (Bari, 1976).
Le Cartulaire de S. Matteo di Sculgola en Capitanate. Registro d’istrumenti di S. Maria del Gualdo (1177–1239), 2 vols, ed. J.-M. Martin, Codice diplomatico pugliese XXX (Bari, 1987).
Le carte del monastero di S. Leonardo della Matina in Siponto (1090–1771), ed. J. Mazzoleni, Codice diplomatico pugliese XXXI (Bari, 1991).
Les Actes de l’Abbaye de Cava concernant le Gargano (1086–1370), ed. J.-M. Martin, Codice diplomatico pugliese XXXII (Bari, 1994).
Le pergamene di Ascoli Satriano conservate nella Biblioteca di Montevergine (994–1354), ed. T. Colamarco, Codice diplomatico pugliese XXXVI (Bari, 2012).
Le pergamene dell’Archivio diocesano di Gravina (secc. XI–XIV), ed. C. Drago Tedeschini, Codice diplomatico pugliese XXXVII (Bari, 2013).
Le pergamene dell’Archivio arcivescovile di Taranto (1193–1373), ed. V. Campanella, Codice diplomatico pugliese XXXIX (Bari, 2018).
De rebus circa regni Siciliae curiam gestis: Epistola ad Petrum de desolatione
Siciliae, Pseudo Ugo Falcando, ed. and Italian trans. E. D’Angelo, FSIM/RIS (3rd series) 11 (Rome, 2014).
Documenti tratti dai regestri vaticani: (da Innocenzo III a Nicola IV)[1198–1292], vol. 1, ed. D. Vendola (Trani, 1940).
EnglishHistoricalReview
Falcone di Benevento, Chronicon Beneventanum, ed. and Italian trans. E. D’Angelo (Florence, 1998).
Fonti per la storia d’Italia
Fonti per la storia d’Italia medievale
Girgensohn, D., and Kamp, N., ‘Urkunden und Inquisitionen der Stauferzeit aus Tarent’, QFIAB41 (1961), 137–234.
History of the Tyrants of Sicily by ‘Hugo Falcandus’, 1154–1169, trans. G. A. Loud and T. Wiedemann (Manchester, 1998).
JournalofMedievalHistory
Mélanges de l’Ecole française de Rome. Moyen Âge
Monumenta Germaniae Historica Scriptores
Papers ofthe BritishSchoolat Rome
Le pergamene dell’Archivio arcivescovile di Taranto (1083–1258), vol. 1, ed. F. Magistrale (Galatina, 1999).
I più antichi documenti del libro dei privilegi dell’universita di Putignano (1107–1434), ed. A. D’Itollo (Bari, 1989).
Foggia e la Capitanata nelQuaternus Excandenciarum de Federico II di Svevia, ed. and Italian trans. G. de Troia (Fasano, 1994).
Quellen undForschungen aus italienischen Archiven undBibliotheken
Ryccardi de Sancto Germano Notarii Chronica, ed. C. A. Garufi, RIS 8, part 2 (Bologna, 1937).
Rerum italicarum scriptores
Roger II and the Creation of the Kingdom of Sicily, trans. G. A. Loud (Manchester, 2012).
Medieval Puglia
Introduction
The creation of the kingdom of Sicily in 1130 generated profound political, social, and cultural transformation across southern Italy and the island of Sicily. Diverse regions were gradually subsumed under the centralizing umbrella of a new monarchy. In several of these regions, royal-centred historical writing seemingly displaced the textual recording of local historical memory. This, along with the marked presence of royal officials and directives in surviving documentation, suggests the extended reach of royal power and the emergence of recorded discourses about the past and present, which became dominated primarily by the monarchy and its agendas. Indeed, there exists a body of excellent research on the major works of historical writing in the kingdom—chronicles and narratives that were produced either by those near to the monarchy, or via a royal optic, or by major monastic houses.1 However, the creation and control of historical memory was complex and certainly not shaped solely by unilateral top-down dynamics. How and why the past was ‘officially’ documented and by whom reveals much about agency, both of central authorities and of communities, and of the interrelationships between them. Yet, we are still awaiting a study on how history and memories were recorded in the constituent parts of the kingdom of Sicily, a realm which developed into one of the most powerful and bureaucratic in medieval Europe. This is the case for Puglia, undoubtedly one of the most important regions in this new monarchy (and note that this study uses the term Puglia throughout rather than the anglicized Apulia).
Indeed, the monarchs who ruled the kingdom after 1130 carried the title Rex SiciliaePrincipatusCapuae et DucatusApuliae (King of Sicily, ofthePrincipalityofCapuaandoftheDuchyofPuglia). Puglia
was central to the ideological identity of the monarchy. It was also a major administrative province in the kingdom, a vital commercial zone, a productive agricultural territory, a prominent international transit hub via its ports, and an area of political sensitivities, given both its proximity to the Byzantine empire—which had, until the lateeleventh century, governed this part of southern Italy since the lateninth century and the claims made on the mainland by the German emperors and popes. At the core of these attributes, meanings, and representations then was a region integral to the new monarchy. For this reason, Puglia serves as an excellent case study for a geographically focused analysis of documents and the production of historical memory in the kingdom. But other factors also contribute to its suitability. One is the survival of a significant body of documentation (see pp. 10–12). The other, evidence for the existence (see Chapter 1) of distinctive earlier local traditions of annalistic and chronicle writing, which seemed to disappear after the creation of the monarchy. I deliberately use the word ‘seemed’, because this schematic framework is not entirely accurate as we shall see, but nonetheless it raises intriguing questions around how interaction with, and representations of, the past might have changed in the region over time.
This study, then, offers the first extended analysis of the production and function of historical memory within Puglia after 1130. It emphasizes the importance of documentation in the formation of memory and historical identity, and of the agency of Pugliese communities within all of this. In so doing, it proposes a new model for how subordinate memories and identities could function when in creative dialogue with a more dominant set of (in this case, royal/imperial and papal) institutional imperatives. It does so through an extensive examination of charters and correspondence, an evidence-type yet to be fully utilized for this purpose in the study of medieval Puglia.2 Closely analysing the corpus of extant Pugliese charters and correspondence for the period of Norman–Staufen rule (1130–1266) in the kingdom reveals the existence of embedded ‘histories’. Furthermore, not all of this
historical reflection was mediated and directed by central institutions (the monarchy and the papacy), and thus we can identify the vibrant, continuing production of local historical narratives and memories claimed by monastic, episcopal, professional, urban, and familial communities.
The study will ask the following key questions:
What sort of historical memories were preserved in documents within Puglia?
In what ways did documents become integral receptacles for historical memory within the new monarchy?
What was the role of Pugliese individuals and communities, and ‘central agents’ (papacy, monarchy), in producing local historical memory?
What does this process of documenting the past in Puglia reveal about centre–periphery interrelationships within medieval polities?
It is important to note here that this study is not making claims for, nor attempting to reveal, a distinct collective or unified Pugliese identity or approach to the past. Rather, it aims to uncover the presence of multiple historical memories and interactions with the past, produced within one region by different individuals and communities.3 Moreover, tracking any regional-level, collective Pugliese identity would also be complicated by the thorny question of boundaries. The full extent of the territories encompassed in medieval Puglia (or any other region in the kingdom) is far from clear. If the region had linear boundaries in the kingdom in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, their precise whereabouts remain unknown to modern historians and they were unlikely to be static. Before the monarchy, the Byzantine catepanateof Italia, centred on Bari, seemed to broadly converge with the modern-day boundaries of Puglia, though it may have incorporated parts of the Basilicata, and Melfi and Venosa (both in modern-day Basilicata) were important sites of power and commemoration for the Norman dukes
of Puglia.4 To some contemporary observers in the Middle Ages, the entire mainland region of the kingdom, or even the entire kingdom itself, was often simply identified under the label of Puglia. It was in its widest meaning, as Fulvio Delle Donne has shown, that Frederick II was ascribed the nickname Puer Apuliae by his contemporaries (primarily those outside the kingdom) in the thirteenth century.5 Puglia’s name also evoked different mythic qualities—an ‘Other’, bountiful land to be recovered by its rightful claimants—and as a result was often used as a setting in Romance literature.6 We can be sure that Puglia functioned as a named administrative province within the kingdom. However, under the Norman and Staufen monarchies the administrative jurisdiction encompassed by Puglia fluctuated and was often connected to the Terra di Lavoro (which increasingly represented the former principality of Capua). Numerous high-ranking royal officials (variously termed Master Captains/Chamberlains/Constables/Justiciars) usually combined in their title jurisdiction over Puglia with that of the Terra di Lavoro.7 Whatever administrative unit Puglia formed, we do know that at times it was split into sub-regions or jurisdictions—the Terra d’Otranto (southern Puglia), the Terra di Bari (central Puglia), the Capitanata and/or the Honour of Monte S. Angelo (northern Puglia, including the Gargano peninsula)—and might have incorporated parts of modern-day Abruzzo, the Basilicata, and Molise.8 The histories of Matera, Melfi, and Venosa (all modern-day Basilicata), for example, were often closely entwined with developments in medieval Puglia, and at times may have been considered within the region.9 Termoli (modern-day Molise) likewise appears in a thirteenth-century inventory of the Capitanata in northern Puglia.10
But, in their basic outlines, the sub-regions (the Terra d’Otranto, the Terra di Bari, the Capitanata/Honour of Monte S. Angelo) remain at the core of present-day Puglia, and the current study, therefore, focuses on communities and settlements based within the boundaries of modern-day Puglia. For the most part, these were also clearly part of a ‘medieval’ Puglia too, but we must recognize the fluidity at its edges. Nor is this study suggesting that the sorts of
interactions with historical memory preserved in Pugliese documents post-1130 were absent earlier; some of them were indeed present before 1130. But the temporal focus of this study has been specifically selected in order to explore how local narratives of remembrance within documentation interacted within a superstructure with increased capability to intervene: this type of superstructure was provided by the new kingdom of Sicily and, markedly from the later-twelfth century, the papacy.
There has, of course, been a plethora of important works on medieval Puglia, its communities, and settlements.11 Many studies have also appeared in the Archivio Storico Pugliese series.12 JeanMarie Martin’s monumental study of Puglia, along with his countless other analyses of the region, stands at the very apex of this scholarship.13 These studies demonstrate in various ways how the region was integrated into the monarchy, and how its communities functioned thereafter. Drawing on these important foundations, the present study aims to move the discussion on the communities of medieval Puglia and their interrelationship with two powerful institutional superstructures—monarchy and papacy—onto another important pathway which has, however, received limited investigation: namely, an extensive analysis of the production, documentation, and function of historical memory in the region.
In doing so, this project then also builds upon ground-breaking work on medieval memory and charters, which has demonstrated the potent interrelationship between documentary records and historical memory, and identifies overlooked local historical narratives embedded within charters.14 It is grounded, too, in other important works on memory. These acknowledge memory’s constructed and malleable (particularly between individual and shared/community recollection) nature, and the important role played by contingent factors—the ‘law of supply and demand’, to apply James Fentress and Chris Wickham’s term—in its recovery or recreation.15 However, these approaches to documentation and remembrance have not yet been applied directly to one of medieval Europe’s most sophisticated monarchies, the kingdom of Sicily, nor
to its interrelationship with one of its most important regions, Puglia. Pugliese charters and correspondence have yet to be used, therefore, in ways that fully reflect one of their most important contemporary functions: articulating and preserving local historical memory within a wider ‘intertextual system’ that extends to Palermo (the royal centre) and Rome (the papal centre). The Pugliese case study demonstrates that historical memory was constructed through processes of top-down/bottom-up collaboration and consensus between centre and periphery, the carving out of ‘middle spaces’, and thus largely dependent on locally reconfigured interrelationships with vertical authority (papacy, monarchy). It will be possible, therefore, to evaluate how and why some Pugliese communities utilized the past in their interactions with monarchy and papacy, and to open up a new discussion on agency, identity, and centralization in the kingdom. This approach thus suggests the potential also to reconsider how constructing local historical memory in other polities —Capetian France, England, Byzantium, for instance—can reflect the reach or absence of central authority and its perceived legitimacy. It is also important to establish that similar patterns and modes of remembrance were undoubtedly occurring in other regions of the kingdom of Sicily itself (Abruzzi, Basilicata, Calabria, Campania, and Sicily), aided by sharing the common superstructures provided by monarchy and the nearby papacy. But equally, each region had its own contingent factors that generated and preserved historical memories specific to its individuals and communities. We must await similar studies of those regions before a broader comparative assessment of the entire kingdom can be made. This is just one building block, demonstrating via a focused study on one region, a model for achieving a larger synthesis.
Documentation and literacy are central to this study. From the last decades of the twentieth century scholarship has increasingly reconsidered the extent and function of both of these within the medieval world. Conventionally, literacy was understood as a skill and activity restricted to a narrow, largely ecclesiastical elite, and which only spread more extensively across the laity in the later Middle Ages, particularly with the rise of vernacular literature. This understanding has, however, been significantly revised by various seminal works. Brian Stock’s model of ‘textual communities’ demonstrated how texts could be disseminated through communities, including lay groups, with limited literacy as defined by modern criteria.16 Other studies have identified an equally textured use of literacy in the medieval world, the many different registers through which it was applied, particularly in its ‘pragmatic’ and ‘performative’ forms.17 They have also established that aspects of this relationship with literacy, both with Latin and the vernacular written word, were already well-embedded in the early Middle Ages, before the apparent take-off of the twelfth and especially the thirteenth centuries.18
The present study draws on this understanding of a more dispersed and ingrained literacy in the Middle Ages to justify an analysis of documents and their use as tools for memory-making. Many individuals and communities encountered the written word, rarely in the form of high-status narrative texts, but more commonly in the shape of documents recording all manner of transactions, investigations, and judgements. In doing so they were utilized to preserve or create anew a plethora of histories meaningful to communities and individuals, and from which status, rights, and resources could be safeguarded in the future. Simply put, these documents were vital because, as Gadi Algazi notes, remembrances are ‘usually not about things past, but about the past in the present’.19 Aleida Assmann’s work on cultural memory also reminds us that ‘forgetting is the normality’, while ‘remembering is the exception’.20 The charters record a past of such importance to certain actors that it was deliberately remembered in opposition to a
norm for erasure. This, in Assmann’s terms, ‘actively circulated memory’ or the ‘canon’ runs alongside ‘passively stored memory’, termed ‘the archive’.21 We effectively encounter the former in our documents, but must remember the presence of the latter, alternative remembrances that underpin and/or contest. Here, also, we should keep in mind James C. Scott’s idea of two ‘transcripts’— the ‘public’ and ‘hidden’—in our understanding of the recording of pasts in our documentation. The ‘public transcript’ reflects a version shaped by the dynamics of power: information and actions provided by subordinates are either reframed and reinterpreted by those in authority, or the former (those who were subordinate) might purposefully provide information in ways that meet the latter’s (the powerful’s) expectations, all part of a ‘public performance’. The ‘hidden transcript’ reflects instead another competing ‘offstage’ iteration.22 The two are enmeshed for sure, and as Scott emphasizes, it would be reductive to consider the ‘public transcript’ as simply erroneous next to the ‘hidden’.23 In our documentation we overwhelmingly encounter the ‘canon’ and the ‘public transcript’, but must remain aware of the presence of the ‘archive’ or the ‘hidden transcript’ and its potential to occasionally, albeit silently, exert its influence. Moreover, as Fentress and Wickham outline, ‘once knowledge is textualized’ it has instantly stepped onto a new path of articulation.24 A new representation of knowledge and memory has been moulded.
There is now a far greater appreciation of the narrative function of charters, that they too represent versions of the past as important as chronicles and other traditional historical works.25 Charters might contain background to a dispute, detail of subsequent challenges, and an outcome: a historic and crafted narrative of origins, actions and endings. The issuing of privileges may be preceded by opening passages of narrative explaining the historic context behind the grant (loyalty, disruption, dispute) and a schematic overview of previous privileges. Significantly, documents were, for the most part, a more accessible and abundant resource for contemporaries to understand and search the past. Indeed, given this, it might even be
possible to posit a relationship between the material in such documents and the production of chronicles and annals. Enrico Faini has convincingly suggested that some thirteenth-century chroniclers of communal Italy probably drew on their experience of judicial procedures as notaries and judges. This, in turn, enabled them to gather information from testimonies about the past in written inquests and other legal cases, and this then likely supported the production of their historical narratives.26 While these authors could also draw on oral memory too, documents were undoubtedly among the raw materials, the building blocks, of historical knowledge.
This is certainly the case in Puglia in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, where documents which function as receptacles of one version/narrative of a past are common. Except here, as we shall see in Chapter 1, traditional historical narratives (chronicles and annals) produced in Puglia in the second half of the twelfth and the thirteenth century were scarce, and thus the potential connection between document and chronicle cannot be tested. Here, then, the documents, the raw materials for contemporaries to preserve and access their past, take on even greater significance. We might find, for example, a royal privilege granted in 1156 to the archbishop of Brindisi which was preceded by an opening narrative detailing a widespread rebellion in the kingdom and the punitive measures unleashed by the monarch; or a charter of 1184 detailing the progress of a long-standing dispute between a monastic house in Troia, the people of Ascoli Satriano, and another monastic house which had lordship over half of the latter settlement, and which culminated in a duel; or a record of a visitation in 1245 by the archbishop of Brindisi to receive the submission of a monastic house on an island in the city’s harbour, a record which recounted the ceremonial sailing of the archbishop to the island monastery, and the series of processions, ceremonies, songs, and sermons which followed.27 All of these encapsulate micro-histories which often overlap with macro-histories: the 1156 privilege intersects with wider political tension, rebellion, and external invasion; the 1184 dispute merges with the history of the rise of royal administration on the
mainland; the 1245 visitation with transformation in the reach of archiepiscopal authority. Institutions (lay and ecclesiastical) and individuals (lay and ecclesiastical) requested the production of documents which captured these moments/events/transactions and stored them for future use. They were imbued with importance as guarantees of rights, revenues, and an established version of the past—often authenticated by a monarch or pope—that could be presented should that version be challenged.
How were these documents preserved? Archives existed, of course, but they took many different forms. As Warren C. Brown has described, archives could range from ‘large and systematically organized repositories of records’ to ‘a small bundle of documents’, perhaps stored in a layperson’s house.28 Even here, though, we should exercise caution in assuming that monasteries, cathedrals and state chancelleries were necessarily more comprehensive or methodical in their archival practices. While they might boast their own professional scrinariior notaries, even by the thirteenth century these institutional archives were often full of lacunae, loss, and damaged documents. Indeed, Antonio Sennis has noted that while many monasteries self-represented as ‘guardians of memory’ they simultaneously displayed a ‘striking inclination to co-exist with the loss of memory and to have somewhat feeble ties with their past’.29 Their archives clearly could not ameliorate this loss and monasteries sometimes turned to the memory of local communities for a solution.30 An archive may also encompass an ‘imaginary’ archive, what a community expected should be found within its records. It might thus contain ‘manufactured’ documents (or interpolated clauses in pre-existing scripts) that asserted rights which had long been in force but never formalized in script, or which had formerly existed in written form but had been lost, or which were invented to back-date, bolster, or create claims for which there was no other evidence. Searching an ‘archive’ could also indicate the repository of knowledge preserved orally and via social memory: practices, customs, and traditions never enshrined in script, and which only at
a later point were recorded, often in opaque ways, in documentary form.
This study, it is important to note, utilizes surviving fragments of these archives to examine how Pugliese individuals and communities played a role in selectively capturing, recovering, and recreating their pasts. It does not attempt, therefore, a reconstruction of these medieval archives in Puglia in toto. That would require a very different type of study, and for medieval Puglia this would be extremely challenging, even though we are fortunate that a sizeable body of charters still survives from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Jean-Marie Martin’s magnum opus makes clear how fragmented and dispersed are the archives of the religious houses, owing to a range of factors including natural disasters, deliberate destruction, and the post-medieval dismantling of some of these archives.31 Also, a number of documents only survive in much later early modern copies, with all the usual problems this brings with assessing reliability of transmission. Graham A. Loud has likewise shown how much this picture has been compounded by the loss (and forgery) of documents issued by the kings of Sicily.32 We know from surviving charters that contemporaries were equally aware and fearful of the loss of documentation. As we shall see in later chapters, Pugliese church officials beseeched the monarchy or papacy to re-issue copies of (allegedly) lost or defective documents, or to permit the production of a copy of an original (real or putative) so that the institution concerned would not have to risk damaging their scripts if they needed to be transported elsewhere.33
But so, too, were laypeople concerned for their own documentary record and its validation of the pasts they represented. As we shall see, the documentary recall enacted by Frederick II in 1231 provides ample evidence that laypeople held onto scripts that were decades old (see Chapter 2), and were determined to ensure their validity. This, in turn, is further proof of what scholars have demonstrated, that is, the careful storage of documents and, by extension of historical knowledge, by laypeople (and sometimes ecclesiastical institutions might even have stored them on their behalf).34 Among
the many consequences of the destruction of Bari in 1156 was documentary loss, particularly of matrimonial contracts, and the evidence again shows that lay ownership of documents was common.35 Documents were sometimes deemed important enough to take on journeys, and unfortunately sometimes lost. At Terlizzi in 1266, a sire Pirrus Caciaconte, a miles, confessed that he had lost the original document of morgincaph (a document recording a dowry) while ‘in partibus Romanie’ (that is, in the territories associated with the Byzantine empire).36 More frequently, and more mundanely, are the many examples of laypeople keeping or presenting their own copies of documents, or receiving copies made as a result of a transaction. Often these were documents concerning property ownership or were last testaments, and we note some individuals possessing multiple documents or copies. In 1151, Iohanoccarus nauclerius (sailor/skipper) handed over seven documents relating to a house in Bari which he had agreed to sell to Pulcarus, a master (magister) metalsmith: the record of this transaction also contained short summaries of each of the documents; in 1188, an Urso negotiator similarly handed over two documents related to another house sale in Bari.37 In 1214, the clergy of San Nicola of Bari requested the copying of the testament of a certain Bisantius son of Kiribarde who had bequeathed some olive trees to the former. However, Bisantius’s mother, Constantina, possessed the written testament. The clerics, a judge of Bari, and two notaries met with Constantina and obtained her permission to copy and publish only those parts of the document relevant to the clergy.38 Documents from Trani highlight the production of multiple copies of scripts: in 1131, Alexius the son of Grifo the imperial protonobilissimus arranged for ten copies to be made of his testament (one for all his heirs including family members, and the abbey of Montecassino); and, in 1138, four copies were made of John son of Disigius’s testament, to be distributed to his family, his legal representatives (epitropi), the archbishop of Trani, and certain priests.39
On many occasions we encounter concern, both lay and ecclesiastical, with the validation of documentation. Familiarity with what constituted an authentic script, along with an understanding of the importance of this, was also clearly boosted by knowledge of local city customs, which were often referenced as guiding correct documentary practice.40 Frederick II’s post-1220 programme to restore order (see Chapters 2 and 3) dovetailed with this established documentary culture to provide extensive guidance: his reforms provided new regulations on the practices of the notarial class, on valid types of script and documents, and, as said, recalled documents considered suspect. In so doing, this programme further raised the status of script and those officials who worked directly with it.41 Indeed, as Pasquale Cordasco has shown, notaries became an ever more laicized and distinct social group in the thirteenthcentury kingdom. In the 1230s, a change was also incorporated into the title of the notary who henceforth was designated a ‘puplicus notarius’, emphasizing public responsibility as a local proxy of the state.42
The drive to protect documents was linked to their function in future-proofing, preserving memory for forthcoming generations. Numerous charters note that the document provided security for the present participants in a transaction, and to serve as remembrance in the futures (‘Ad futororum ergo memoriam’; ‘Ad memoriam futuri temporis’), the term normally rendered in the plural (futura) as JeanClaude Schmitt noted.43 There were many other variations on this logic in Pugliese charters, that explain the need to produce the written record, for example: ‘so that all things, lest they might pass into oblivion over the course of time’ (‘que omnia, ne de cursu temporis oblivioni tradi possent’); ‘Because if those things which occur among people are rendered in script they shall resolutely endure’ (‘Quoniam ea que inter homines fiunt si redigantur in scriptis firma stabilitate preradiant’); ‘Because if those things, which have happened in the past, are not preserved in script with time they slip and are removed from memory’s recollection’ (‘Quoniam ea que geruntur in tempore si in scriptis non redigantur cum tempore
elabuntur et a memorie recordatione tolluntur’).44 By the same virtue, to omit information from script served as a powerful impetus for erasure. The 1127 city customs of Troia concluded with a statement about preserving all the good customs that could be remembered and forgetting those which were deemed bad (‘malę vero consuetudines nullo modo memorentur’).45 This a reminder that archives are formed both by omission and inclusion.
The utility and accessibility of documents was grounded in their multi-media form: the convergence of the textual, oral, and aural. Some notaries included their own personalized symbols on their documents (perhaps a particular shape or an animal), and this, combined with the distinctive practice of some Pugliese notaries who included poetical verse clauses in their signatures, indicates that they functioned as markers of professional identities.46 These practices suggest that it was anticipated that these scripts would be preserved, seen, and consulted. Similarly, charters detailing land boundaries would often contain in their margins a representation of the unit of measurement utilized, so that future interested parties could use the document as a key, a measuring device in itself.47 More common are the occasions on which scripts record that participants also confirmed the transactions by swearing an oath, often on the Gospels.48 The records of witness statements in inquest records (see Chapter 3) normally commenced with ‘dixit’ or ‘dixerunt’, included oath-taking on the Gospels, and an acknowledgement that an official had arranged for their verbal statement to be preserved in script (‘et eorum dicta in scriptura publica redigi faceremus’).49 Documents were a product of speaking, hearing, and writing. Indeed, we regularly find the act of seeing and reading the document, or hearing it being read out, produced as proof.50 This is a notable feature of the inquests (Chapters 3 and 5), and sometimes those who drew on such recollections were notaries or officials required to work with or produce written records. For example, in an inquest at Mesagne in 1245, an Andrew the notary confirmed that the Church of Brindisi collected tithes from the
imperial demesne and said that he knew this because he saw the information:
contained in privileges and in sacred reports of the statements of kings and of the emperor granted to the Mother Church of Brindisi and in letters of the officials of the court who were in the kingdom at that time.51
Andrew added that:
Likewise he knows that from the time of the lord Peter the current Archbishop of Brindisi, the said Church of Brindisi collected and was accustomed to collect and have in Mesagne in any year the entire tithe and re-tithe of all the revenues of the court, namely from corn, barley, beans, wine and oil, and from the money of the baiulatio and of the introitu [entrance fees?] of the Bucheria [butchery] 20 solidi per year, and this he knows because the witness himself as notary of the Church and from the mandate of the said lord archbishop made and makes now many receipts [apodixas] made to the same lord archbishop in every year up to now from the procurators of the court and the bailiffs who were at the time in Mesagne.52
In another inquest held in 1247 at Taranto, Judge Nicholas of Judge Stephen provided information about the Church of Taranto’s rights to the tinctoria (dye works) of Taranto. He recalled that he saw the information confirmed in privileges of Henry VI and Constance, and could remember that Henry’s carried a golden seal and that Constance’s was of red wax.53
Documents then provided immediate, accessible, and multifaceted records of the past. They were pragmatic resources for protecting, recovering, and recreating the past, and safeguarding for the future. In the performative elements underpinning them— speaking, hearing, swearing—they also served as evocative tools for remembrance. They were a ubiquitous form of historical representation, and one that, if lost, could be replaced or reinvented more easily than traditional forms of narrative history. While in numerous cases these documents were produced by, or for, a central authority, they are nonetheless excellent materials for examining how individuals and communities in medieval Puglia interacted with
and preserved their histories. Thus, while this study utilizes important chronicle and annalistic accounts, the main body of evidence is documents (charters of judgements, privileges, inquests, and also correspondence) produced either by or for Pugliese individuals and communities.
Puglia: 1130–1266
A particular strength of documents as a corpus of sources lies in their quantity and the diachronic value this brings. They survive as a recurring presence which allows us to evaluate multiple moments across a transformative era in Puglia’s history; and the period from 1130 to 1266 was certainly transformative. At the start of the eleventh century, most of the region was governed from Constantinople.54 It may have seemed a frontier zone of the Byzantine empire, but as Jean-Marie Martin stated it ‘was an almost normal Byzantine province and more than a mere “threshold” to the empire’.55 Indeed, the construction of several fortified settlements in the tenth century and the first decades of the eleventh—the likes of Dragonara, Fiorentino, Montecorvino, and Troia—reflected an imperial attempt to consolidate the northern edges of Puglia and resulted in the creation of a new sub-region called the Capitanata, derived from the Byzantine administrative title, katepan.56 The historic link with Constantinople was replicated in cultural and religious convergence. Sizeable Greek Orthodox communities were found in southern Puglia, and especially on the Salento peninsula in the cities of Otranto and Taranto.57 By the end of the eleventh century, Puglia had, however, been wrested from imperial control by the expansion of Norman lords into the region. This had obvious political and ecclesiastical ramifications. Puglia’s religious institutions, most of which had at least theoretically been within the jurisdiction of the patriarchate of Constantinople, were transferred to that of the
papacy.58 Byzantium’s declining power in Puglia was, however, a gradual process which stretched across the eleventh century. At times it was slowed by important Byzantine victories (for example, at the battle of Canne in 1018), and accelerated by defeats to the Normans (for example, at the battle near the River Olivento in 1041).59 In addition, the combined resistance of a German imperial, Italian, and papal coalition failed to halt the Norman expansion when it suffered a significant defeat to a unified Norman force at the Battle of Civitate in 1053.60 The ascendant Norman, Robert Guiscard of the Hauteville dynasty, accumulated such status in the region that in 1059 he was formally invested by Pope Nicholas II with a new title: duke of Puglia and Calabria and (in the future) of Sicily.61 Guiscard often resided at Troia, in the Capitanata, and the city became something of a focal point of ducal activity.62 Guiscard’s position was further consolidated with the capture of Bari. The fall of the city, the administrative headquarters of Byzantine Italy, to Guiscard in 1071 followed a gruelling three-year siege.63 It was a pivotal moment which formally ended Byzantine rule on the peninsula. But Norman power was far from stable. While the new rulers often sought accommodation with the native communities, uprisings in the cities of Puglia were not uncommon, although sometimes they were connected to rivalries which had erupted between different Norman lords. Indeed, after the death of Guiscard in 1085, the power of the Hauteville dukes in Puglia receded, though this assessment has certainly been qualified in recent scholarship.64 Nonetheless, for a while Guiscard’s heir, Duke Roger Borsa, fought with his elder halfbrother Bohemond over their respective inheritances in Puglia. As a result, from c.1088 until his death in 1111, Bohemond exercised lordship over Bari and a significant part of central Puglia (albeit from 1096 this was often as an absentee ruler who would become prince of Antioch during the First Crusade). The Norman counts of Conversano—rulers of Brindisi, Monopoli, Conversano, and other settlements—similarly increased their status, and Graham A. Loud has demonstrated the considerable changes evident in the Norman nobility in the period 1085–1127, and especially that the coastal
region of Puglia was by ‘the 1120s radically different from that a generation earlier’.65 The papacy, driving its reform movement and filling the vacuum left by the receding authority of Byzantium, also intervened more frequently in southern Italy. It was in the city of Bari in 1098 where Urban II held his high-profile council aimed at reconciling the eastern and western Churches.66 Meanwhile, some cities extended their capacity to act autonomously and expressed this by recognizing the Byzantine emperor in their charters, though the latter was not able to intervene directly in Puglia at this point.67 From c.1119, Bari moved a step further when it developed into an independent principality governed by a Barese named Grimoald Alfaranites.
But the emergence of an assortment of political entities within the region was fundamentally challenged and, ultimately, halted by the rise of Roger II, count of Sicily. A member of the Hauteville kingroup, despite resistance he successfully claimed the succession to the Duchy of Puglia in 1127, following the death, without heir, of the last duke, William. Furthermore, in 1130, Roger II expanded his aspirations and established a new monarchy which would amalgamate mainland southern Italy and the island of Sicily.68 A near decade of tumultuous civil war followed. Repeated uprisings occurred across the mainland, especially in Campania and Puglia, and sometimes resulted in lengthy sieges and the destruction or depopulation of settlements by royal forces in response. Pugliese cities such as Ascoli Satriano and Troia were among those that did not escape such retribution.69 In 1139, Roger II was finally victorious. He had absorbed into his kingdom previously independent polities, such as the duchy of Naples and the principality of Capua, and received begrudging recognition of his new royal status from Pope Innocent II.70 Only the papal enclave of Benevento remained outside the new kingdom’s jurisdiction. The next fifty years saw the new monarchy generate a complex series of legislative and administrative reforms that created a governing superstructure which overlaid the kingdom.71 Throughout this process, the monarchy also had to manage the interrelationships and tensions
