Castles and Coastal Towers of Calabria by La Dea Editori

The long land from the saracen charts A WIDE BUT FRAGILE AND DEFENCELESS FRONTIER OUTSTRETCHING TOWARDS THE MEDITERRANEAN From one shore to the other in the Great Inner Sea that does not divide but unites, «daring navigators depart, taking along with them the Gods from their original cities, in search of new lands, where to found new colonies from which temples will be raised». For Calabria these are invasions of different types of people, attracted by the great forests of pines, oaks, chestnuts all with high tree-trunks and Silan pitch that could be used for their ships. Armed to the teeth, the invaders devastate and brutally upset the newfound land, appropriating the Mediterranean trinity: the harvest of golden wheat and the millenarian cultivations of vines and olives. They absorb, assimilate and drive inland the populations which already submit to faraway kings; the bruzis are incapable of resisting the attacks which come from the sea, the crumbling of the fortiﬁcations, the ﬁres the massacres, the pillage of their villages. It is the contaminations of encounter/collision between East and West which marks the «Long land». in the Saracen charts, a wide but fragile and defenceless frontier outstretched on the Mediterranean. From then on, in the Bruzio territory «myths mingle and religion integrate into one single tissue, which is that of the history of the civilization of the region», and signs of different culture, alternate in revealing or concealing themselves in the different ways of life of the Calabrese, in the traits of their amazing faces: Greek, Saracen, but also Longobards, Normans or even Albanians. With the continuing changes in language and traditions, joined by a fervent religious feeling, the little towns and villages of Calabria, where feudalism has never completely disappeared, have so many events to recall noble origins on the complex successions of the scourges of the Muslim raids and the aggressions that came from East and West. From the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the Long land is overturned by a «succession of raids, invasions, external and internal wars, destined to shatter dominations, to overturn equilibriums, to overwhelm dynasties and

SCILLA RC Feudal castle of the Ruffo

NICOTERA VV

centres of power, in the search of a balanced order which seems however unreachable». It is a continuous suffering; for a very long time the Bruzio people searched for a stable government and for governors outside and above the grounds of external domination. «The great games of the present, have often been played, won or lost in the past and the armed presence on the Bruzio territory of Saracens, Eastern Imperial troops, Longobards, Normans, Angevins, Aragonese, Turks, invaders from Barbary coasts, Austrians and Spaniards is certainly responsible for one of the many negative conditionings of the history of the South». The origin of the distinguished historical development of Calabria from the rest of Italy is due to the continuous and paralysing pressures that it has been put through and that have contributed for thousands of years into turning the Bruzio lands into a frontier between East and

West; a frontline between Christianity and Islam, determining «the diversity of minute spaces, fragmented and never reassembled of the small nations» of a strongly cellular region. The Calabrias result into being made up of twelve sub regions and each of them in turn, differentiating in mountainous and coastal areas, that don’t have any physical and historical elements in common and thus preventing a harmonic synthesis for a possible economic and social development. These are lands that are «constant social/economic frontiers where often the daily battle for survival is fought and lost in favour of abandon». Each domination has left its own traces, not completely cancelling those before, and the events of the Iron Centuries reﬂect on these lands, uprooted ﬁnally by those two civilizations that determined its fractioning and its diversities. Europe and Italy on their part have almost totally ignored Calabria describing it since the beginning of the 19th Century with vague and generic information which sketch it, as the writer Carlo Carlino puts it: «an emphatic picture in a vision anchored to the past».

PALIZZI RC Feudal castle

Greek language And culture And latin soul After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the waters of the Mare Nostrum (our sea) as the ancient Romans used to call the Mediterranean sea are no longer presided, and so piracy restarts in full strength. The Byzantines, more than others give life to raids, assaulting in open seas the defenceless ships and on the coasts, the fishermen. In 534 A.D. the civil wars between the Goths, give an excuse to the emperor of the East, Giustinian I, to intervene in Italy so as to complete the reconquest of the western part of the empire. The Byzantines find in the Bruzio the cultural common roots of the Magna Grecae where the Latin soul and the Greek one cohabit even after the fall of the Roman empire. In 535 A.D. the Greek troops commanded by Belisario and Narsete move in arms, from Constantinople and after landing in Sicily, meeting no resistance and thus conquering Syracuse and Palermo, cross the Strait and reach Reggio. In the Long land every resistance is broken down harshly and the Eastern imperials pillage even the churches. In 554 A.D. the emperor Giustinian extends the Byzantine law to Italy and the extreme part of the peninsula becomes a colony to exploit in favour of the East. In 603 A.D. the Bruzio is under the complete control of the imperials who take men and women into slavery to relegate them in the Nuova Roma (New Rome) Constantinople, and then sell them off to the Arabs who take them away to their countries. In the 7th Century the great Arab nomads, who came from the deserts of the nearby East, united under one single flag, and go in search of means of subsistence outside their own territories. They render unstable the Byzantine defences, convinced of being the real representatives of the true faith and to be beholders of heavenly support in the search of their Mediterranean plan. The Byzantines were rather suspicious, also because, the Moslems were starting to display their fleet, built in the middle east dockyards which were supplied with crews of made up of Syrians, Palestinians and Lebanese. The Bruzio Long land, starts to prepare itself in welcoming waves of hermits

PENTEDATTILO RC 5

escaping from all over the East invaded by the Arabs, and starts to become a real Byzantine outpost, reacquiring its own Mediterranean vocation. The mountains, unknown to the scarce population hidden in small villages, become refuge to the hermits, and according to Vera Von Falkenausen, a German researcher on the Byzantine domination of southern Italy, in Reggio the most populated city in Calabria and sentinel of the Strait, in 732- 733 A.D.,

the defence walls were rebuilt. From the 6th to the 11th Century, the region becomes a western ramiďŹ cation of the Eastern empire, giving new life to its ecclesiastic, cultural, political and economic Byzantinisation, due to the increasing presence of monks of oriental spirituality, who start building new monasteries and abbeys of Byzantine tradition and forming alliances with other town authorities, popularising in this way the Greek culture and language.

REGGIO CALABRIA

A sequence of wars destined to break up dominations and to overwhelm dynasties In the course of the ten iron centuries, as Emilio Barillaro defined them, one of the major experts in art, archaeology and culture of Calabria; slender galleys and Turkish and Berber vessels that at first hoisted the green flags of the Prophet and then the red flags with the half-moon, bring forth from the intense blue of the Mediterranean, mourning and ruins onto the coasts of the Christians infidels. From the 8th to the 14th Century, on the marvellous beaches, bays and high cliffs of the Bruzio, from the galleys over forty metres long and over six metres wide, with one or two masts bearing Latin sails,with 25 or 30 oars each side, banners in the wind Moslem troops and knights, land. Fernand Braduel, the great scholar who has revealed to the world the culture and connections of the Mediterranean countries, said «at the first slash of sabre by the Arabs, everything crashed down forever: Greek language and philosophy, western organisation, all was lost forever. It’s as if, one thousand years of history had not taken place». The Saracen raids are the «tragic calamity of the Byzantine domain and of the Basilian art in the Bruzio, (…) they compel the riverside population, thriving especially in the Magna Grecian period, to retreat from the coasts and take refuge in the most hidden recesses up on the mountains, on inaccessible slopes, and to set up fortifications, bastions, towers, any sort of stronghold in which to escape from the assaults of the ferocious Moslem hordes. (…) The golden ages of the italic civilization, that had flourished on the horizontal planes of the wonderful marine expanses, will find their complete metamorphose in the iron ages of the Turkish rule, founded on the vertical lines of the civilization of cliffs and towers». From 754 A.D. for the Byzantines and from 774 A.D. for the Longobards the bruzie lands are named Calabria, and become scene to many battles and the bulwark of Christian defence; here begins the long Mediterranean Moslem/Christian conflict, it’s «the never-ending night», and whosoever «had the strength and the means, started to build new villages down in the ravines, or on those mountains,or in those forests, that in mournful emer-

CORIGLIANO CS

Ducal castle (14th century)

SAN MARCO ARGENTANO CS Tower of Drogone the Norman (1055)

between the reconquest of the late 9th Century and mid 11th Century, and he tells us about the ﬁve urbes, (cities) twenty one castra (encampments), and some castellia, the fortresses of foundation o restructure, built by the men from the North who according to Emilia Zinzi, an art historian, go on to form «the installing net on which the productive and living organization is based on, during the one and half century of the Norman domination». The urbes mentioned by Malaterra are Regium and Sancta Severina, seats of metropolis, Geracium, Russa-

num, Cusentiae, for their fortiﬁed order and for the political, religious and administrative role. In the territories of the Pollino and in the valley of the river Crati the castra Orioli, Sancti Marci with Scribla, Tayside, Bisiniani and the urbs-castrum Cusentiae; on the mountainous spine of the range Catena Costiera Ayellum and Maruranum; on the high promontory on the Tyrrhenian sea which dominates the valley of Lao, Scalea; in the area between the plain of Sant’Eufemia and the Ionian sea, Neocastrum, Nicefola,Maja, Rocca (Falluca), Catanzarium, Sckillacium; in the south-west pre-Sila Rogel (Rogliano); in the eastern one Gerentia, with the urbes of Sancta Severina and Russanum; from the Turma delle Saline

(Plain of Gioia Tauro); towards the plateau of the Aspromonte, Oppidum and Mesanium; on the western slopes of the Serre that overlook the Ionian coast, Stilo and the urbs-castrum Geracii; on the Poro the castrum Melitense; on the Strait the urbs Reggina with its fortiﬁcations. To all these small towns, internal and hilly, except Reggio, we can add those of Cassanum on the southern bastion of the Pollino, of Nicotrum and Tropea on the Poro that overlook the Tyrrhenian, Insula on the extreme Ionian branch of the Marchesato, all sees and the great Byzantine town walls, interspaced with towers, of San Niceto on the Strait, to the tip of the Bruzia Long land. With the Altavillas, the Bruzio

ORIOLO CS

Feudal castle of norman origin (12th 13th century)

ALTOMONTE CS

Tower norman-swabian (1052-1206)

castles are transformed into fortified residences to give hospitality to the feudatories that came from Normandy. Under their drive, from 1054 A.D. onwards, together with their characteristic and unique ability to blend the cultural influences of the Latin West and the Arab and Byzantine East, works of defence are built in Calabria. Some of these castles are built by rearranging pre-existing Greek, Roman and Byzantines fortifications, on the top of the hills where Calabrese small towns are starting to expand. The historian Antonello Savaglio in his book Fortissima castrum, writes that «the Normans determined a change in the building of castles, which became stronger and more imposing, thanks to the use of bricks and stones, materials which were more resistant than wood, largely in use in the construction of the castrum in the Byzantine Age and were thus able to stop the missiles, hurled by the siege artillery, made up of ballista and trebuchets». These new fortresses, surrounded by moats and provided with drawbridges, parapets, jutting out defences and barbicans, are erected centre d off in respect to the houses, in order to better defend the territory and to «remove the likelihood of insults and the

MESA DI SANTA SEVERINA KR Norman castle (1076 - 13th 1496 - 17 th 18th century)

the ÂŤreferees in an immense cause, secular arm of a papacy intent on disrupting the traditional politic equilibriumsÂť. In the small towns of Calabria, Latin churches are added to the ones of Greek-Byzantine rites, and on the opposite side the Norman masts are raised: the new cathedrals and the castles are the tangible signs

of the dominating power, on the mese of Santa Severina and Gerace the two powers overlap, on one side the religious and Byzantine one of the splendid churches of Greek rite and on the other the civil and Latin one of the castles achieved by Roberto il Guiscardo. None of the two powers, civil and religious, Latin and Byzantine, gives in to the other. The adventure of the men from the North continues with the Calabro-Norman Ruggero II. The rex Siciliae, Calabriae, Apuliae, loves Calabria, column to his power; he is an obstinate and

determined politician, capable of speaking and making himself heard even from his avowed enemies: the pope and the Germanic and Byzantine emperors. Based on the oriental basileus model, as a true sovereign he organizes a new State, founded on a solid bureaucratic apparatus and imposes himself along the borders of three other worlds. He dominates his vassals, creates a centred government, proclaims new laws and leaves to his successors, a State which is almost an empire for the extension of the conquered lands.

The castles of Frederick II AUSTERE CHARACTER AND STRONG AND BARE SIMPLICITY Frederick II of Sweden (1194 A.D.-1250 A.D.), takes to the apogee the Norman project, which changes the history of the region «in terms of political/administrative, social, cultural and geographic unity». One hundred years ahead of his time, Frederick works in a passionate interlacing of elements in the western culture and in the eastern one, protecting in the same manner catholic and Moslem scholars, erudite Hebrews, and Provençal poets, with a personality which «dominates his contemporaries». «The creativity of his spirit» allows him to build in such a splendid manner, stone fortresses, and as heir to the Norman and Byzantine world, «sows the fertile seeds of new art era». According to Georgina Masson in her Frederick II of Sweden, the emperor brings «order wherever he goes, inspiring and imposing obedience», he cares about improving and enlarging the system of fortiﬁcations that was left to him from his Norman predecessors, and, to the pope’s great disappointment, he has no intention of separating the imperial crown from the realm of southern Italy. He works in such a way as to cancel the feudal oppositions, bringing down every lordly fortress in the realm and adopting a system of government which completes and rationalizes whatever innovation comes from the political experience of the Altavillas. «Whosever wasn’t endowed with such a strong character as Frederick would have given up the idea of restoring order in that rebel realm and would have renounced at the creation of stately strongholds all over the country to weaken the power of the feudal barons». With the Edict of Capua, Frederick imposes the restitution of the castles that were built arbitrarily by vassals o built on stately land after the death of William II (1189 A.D.), to dismantle or to turn them into strongholds for the crown, which had to maintain them with armed men and provisions. The improvements in the machines and in the besieging systems around 1200 A.D., decree the failure of the Norman structures, which are reinforced by the Swedish emperor, after

COSENZA Norman-swabian castle

BAGNARA RC Tower of Capo Rocchi (14th century

the last ruin (…) of all the other poor Lands in our country». The great thaumaturgy saint who will join Louis XI in France, to try and save the Catholic Europe from the immense Moslem attack, concludes his writings saying that «(…) the ministers of the crown, not impiety, which they use continuously against poor persons, widows, wards, cripples and such wretched persons ,those who have reason to be exempted of every burden. Woe to those who rule and badly rule, to the ministers of Tyrants and Tyrannies, woe to those Ministers of Justice that have been ordered to do justice but do everything but»! The openings of the king of Naples, Ferrante d’Aragona, who dreams of a modern structure in his reign with the centralization of power, ﬁnd a great obstacle in the violent

opposition by the barons, which the king appeases in blood. A contest that has terrible repercussions on the population, forced to endure every kind of vexation and oppression. Meanwhile the Turks are successful in installing themselves ﬁrmly in the Balkans; they take over Constantinople and they submit all the Mediterranean Islam right up to Algiers. Due to the fall of the Western Empire, the threat arrives from the East, and the Ottoman raids in Calabria increase in number. In the Mare Nostrum as the Romans called the Mediterranean countless are the bloody encounters between Christians and Moslems. Enea Silvio Piccolomini (1405-1464), future pope Pius II (1458-1464), on the 25th September 1453 states that «rulers of the universe were the Italics, now begins the Turkish empire». For many years terror runs along the Calabrese Christian coasts and spreads even to the inland cities, with the various feudatories and the universities who restart to strengthen towers and castles. No

common construction rule, manages to get the upper hand for the castles built according to the standards considered to be the most suitable for the defence of the coasts. The towers in this period are of various forms, with a preponderance of the cylindrical ones and quite large when they are intended for defence or as a refuge in case of raids. The reputation of intense cruelty that follows pirates, terrorises the population, and the sighting of galley with black sails is cause of apprehension for one’s fate and in order to escape from the distressing state of becoming a slave, many families dig well -hidden burrows under their houses; these are mostly the women’s hiding place, who are appreciated preys to the Turks. The entire work of defence, coastal towers and castles, is partly well functioning, in limiting the extent of damage by the pirates’ raids, but is inadaptable in preventing the feared invasion, that the Moslem will eventually attempt. The Aragonese torn by intestine and dynastic wars, due to ruth-

less antagonisms and from gloomy conspiracies, are forced to create other structures for military use. By the end of 1400A.D., the progress of firearms determines the inefficiency of all the military outposts; the frustrating height and the excessive thinness of the walls built to practice defence from above, become an easy target for the mortar blows. The great sandstone cannon balls hurled from the bombards, as well as making a tremendous roar, crushed every barrier and for the assailants it is easy play to overpower the strongholds. The problem explodes violently, after the Ottoman conquest, on the 11th August 1480 when the king Ferdinand I of Aragon, realises that to preserve the dominion of his lands, from the enemies attacks, it is necessary to render modern the existing castles and to strengthen the fortifications of the cities in order to efficiently oppose the use of new artilleries. The centres in Calabria have a poor and desolated aspect and are easy prey to assailants; the castles, towers

and the very walls which encircled the cities «that in olden times had inspired fear, for the transformation of the art of permanent fortiﬁcations built to contrast the use of artillery, loose their warlike pride and start to fall apart in abandon». For Calabria with the privilege granted on the 12th November 1480, Ferdinand I of Aragon, orders that the terre forti and especially the ports and coastal towns, continuously under attack by the Ottoman ferocity, be reinforced. With his letter dated 12th November 1480, the sovereign states that for the safety of all the lands of Calabria in which Reggio is the metropolis, all the encircling walls of the city on the Strait be rebuilt and reinforced, surrounded by bastions, ditches and ramparts. He also orders that the works be done with the participation of the nearby inhabitants, that should contribute with chariots, oxen and should help with the cutting and transport of the timber, stones and all the necessary material, so that the construction be terminated as soon as possible. To in-

ISOLA DI CAPO RIZZUTO KR Angevin tower of Capo Rizzuto (1380)

crease the works of fortiﬁcation, with the decree of the 14th December 1483 emanated at Foggia, the king restores old uses and asserts that the universities are required to repair old buildings of defence «…since the new ones are onus to the crown..» The initiative doesn’t endure for long and soon turns into a delusion for the population which, obliged to work gratuitously and obliged to pay a fee of three tarì for every fuoco, becomes co-responsible for the suspension of the works. The political events in the life of the reigning House, anguished by the barons’ conspiracy (14851487), by the expansionistic demands of Venice and by the contrasts with the pope, are motive for the cancelling of every work. On the 11th August 1486 the clashes stop and peace is made between pope Innocent VIII

CERCHIARA CS

Tower of Magazzeni (16th century), incorporated in the building of the Plain

Stories of pirates and corsairs COASTAL TOWERS A FORMIDABLE DEFENCE RANGE Ever since 1535 A.D. the name Saracen will also indicate Turks and Berbers who continue the undertakings of their predecessors. The continuous Turkish raids never encounter any obstacles on land or sea; the naval defensive presence on the Tyrrhenian and on the Ionian is unknown, the garrisons and the coastal fortifications are lacking in manpower and badly armed; they usually have access to only one cannon, but no gunpowder or cannon balls. As soon as the enemy was sighted, militiamen, tower men and horsemen, had the simple job of warning the population of the imminent danger, in order to allow them to leave their villages and take refuge on the mountains, leaving to the Turkish and Berber crews all that they could not take away with them. The defence of the rumi is disconnected and contradictory and the chronicle of the raids is enriched with stories of bloody battles, of legendary characters surrounded by myth; of stories of pirates and corsairs, of men so faraway and different, of adventures such as those of Kamal Rais, known as the Camalicchio, the nightmare of the Sicilian, Calabrese and Pugliesi population in the first years of the 16th Cent., of Khair ad-Dais, the most famous corsair in the Turkish empire. Others join the list, with uncertain personalities such as Torghoud raìs Dragut, the terror of the Tyrrhenian, a pirate so fierce that the mere pronouncing of his name made one’s blood run cold, not only to Christian sailors. On the 11th March 1536 Juan Sarmiento inspects the coastal towers, the castles and other works of defence in the region and his report to the king Charles V, states that many fortifications are in a very bad shape, judging some of them such as those of Amantea, Cotrone, Oriolo and Tropea of no military importance and insufficient for defence and for Giuseppe Coniglio the royal report concludes with the hope of ulterior construction of fortified structures, suitable for defending the population living on the coast. In the periods of relative calm, from the growing peril that came from the sea, there are

SAN NICOLA ARCELLA CS Tower vice regnale of Porto San Nicola (16th century)

TORRE MELISSA KR

Feudal fortress (16th century)

alternative social form represented by the Ottomans. According to Vincenzo Mangini without the participation of the population, it is impossible to organize a very thorough defence and the ﬁght against the Turks gives an excuse to justify the dominant political arrangement. It becomes necessary to insinuate in the population’s state of mind, the Spanish vision of sense of duty, of respect and compliance to the interests of the Iberian

crown and this becomes a head to head contrast between two identities and two faiths. With the collaboration of the upper classes, the Iberian control, expands intensively on the bruzie communities, and against the Turkish land-raids all the population rises and the villagers become peasant-soldiers: «may all and each person of the Lands and locations of our State, and inhabitants of such places aged 15 onward and 60 downward, supplied with firearms, bullets, gunpowder and fuses, keep himself ready and waiting for defending the nation, and must at the first sound of alert or beat of the drum rush out armed». The imposition of the Spanish model and the rancour for the injustice suffered, produce feelings of defiance that result in seeing the Moslems not as

an enemy but as a possible ally. «If the Calabrese senses authority as an irrational and indisputable fact, he knows however that it is always an authority of men» and the defensive mission assigned to Calabria fails for the continuous desertions that tend to create connivance with the Turks. The cavallari (horse-keepers) of the coastal towers, do not alert the Spanish soldiers of the sighting of suspect ﬂeets, gripped in the vice of two contrasting schemes of the political and military power of the time, Catholic and Moslem, Spanish and Turk; the serfs revolt against the feudatories and join up with the Moslems, awaiting them on the seashores in order to embark on corsair ships, leaving for Tunis and once there to become janissaries.

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