The Medieval Salento. Linda Safran
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II of Aragon expelled the Jews from his Iberian kingdom in 1492. Around 1500, the number of Jews in southern Italy perhaps totaled about 150,000.74 In 1541, the 1,500-year-old Jewish communities in the Salento and elsewhere in the kingdom were completely eradicated when their expulsion was ordered by Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor (and grandson of Ferdinand II), who had become the king of Naples and Sicily.
The depleted Jewish population was partly offset by an influx of Albanians and other Slavic groups in the fifteenth century. Fleeing westward before the Ottomans, these refugees repopulated some abandoned villages and also settled in existing towns, including Lecce by 1452. Their numbers included potters who stimulated new kinds of ceramic production in Lecce, Cutrofiano, Manduria, and possibly Grottaglie.75 The increased presence of Slavs, coupled with diminishing numbers of Jews, dramatically altered some of the bases of local identity. In this way, the demographic evidence for population change helps support an end point for this book in the early fifteenth century.
Salentine Identity Today
The issue of Salentine identity is very much alive today. Beginning in the 1970s, local folk music—especially that of the Grecìa salentina, the group of villages in which Greek was still spoken—began to be performed outside the region.76 By the 1990s, many local groups began to play the music of the pizzica, a form of tarantella, as an expression of local culture that had its roots in the region in the late Middle Ages. Originally this lively form of musical therapy had helped its victims recover from putative tarantula bites. The musicians played for several days almost without stopping, while the afflicted person—often female, and perhaps suffering less from a tarantula bite than from individualized psychosocial trauma—danced literally until she dropped.77 Isolated cases of tarantism were documented through the twentieth century and studied in detail beginning in 1959.78 Now the pizzica has been revived, popularized at concerts and festivals by so-called neo- (or nuovi) tarantati. These performers use the dialect of Lecce and centuries-old pizzica rhythms to publicly, and in a sense ritually, foster a communal identity among the participants through music and dance.
Cultural anthropologists have suggested that tarantism’s contemporary manifestations constitute a key to Salentine culture.79 At least one of the motives for the revival of this medieval Salentine practice is “to emphasize the distinctiveness of Salento, its territory and its people”; additional objectives, not unrelated to group identity, are to inspire other artistic forms and increase tourist revenues.80 The self-representation of the neo-tarantati—those who play the “traditional” tunes and those who dance along—now attracts up to half a million tourists annually to the two-week-long “Notte della Taranta” (Night of the Tarantula) cultural festival.81 Culminating in a grand concert in the Grecìa salentina, the preceding nights feature smaller shows in over a dozen communities. In this way, folk music ostensibly rooted in a medieval medical ritual participates in a local revival that goes beyond music, as there has been a simultaneous promotion and resurgence of the local griko dialect.82 The “exoticism” of the region’s culture is being advertised both within Italy and to the rest of Europe, bringing in much-needed euros that also come with a cost.83
Jewish identity in the Salento also has a modern history. Numerous Jews passed through displaced-persons camps in the region in the 1940s; some stayed, and one produced evocative murals that recently have been restored.84 North of the Salento, one of the four medieval synagogues in Trani has been returned to the Jewish community [148] and a number of local Christians are rediscovering their Jewish roots. Monthly Sabbath services are held there, and major festivals are celebrated with the accompaniment of kosher foods that have not been seen in Apulia for half a millennium.85
Finally, a specifically Salentine identity has been reinforced on the administrative and fiscal level by a project called “Grande Salento,” initiated in January 2006 by the presidents of the three provinces that compose the region. The aim is to promote regional infrastructure, agriculture, tourism, and culture and to streamline financial coordination among the constituents. Under this initiative, the University of Lecce was rechristened University of Salento and the former Papola-Casale airport of Brindisi became the brand-new Aeroporto del Salento.86
I like to think that these new manifestations of a corporate Salentine identity are a result of a long-standing local sensibility, one that became an increasing reality in the course of the Middle Ages. At the same time, however, it is important to underscore that even a region with a relatively uniform material and visual culture was never isolated from its neighbors; there were no fixed cultural boundaries in a place that witnessed as much conquest and commerce as the Salento. The emic evidence for names, languages, appearance, and status clearly shows the effects of intercultural contacts, and these become even clearer when additional evidence is introduced to assess local ritual practices. On the whole, however, the evidence for medieval individuals is roughly consistent across the Salento. This is due mainly to the infusion of Greek language and Byzantine culture in the ninth century, which produced a distinctive and enduring cultural substratum for everything that followed. In uncovering the lives of “regular” individuals alongside the elites, we can hope to acquire a better sense not only of this region, but also of others like it—communities in which people recognized the social, cultural, and spiritual value of leaving their marks on the built and natural environment and were, in turn, changed by those visual markers.
Art and Identity: Some Methodological Considerations and Consequences
I believe that it is just as important to know about Donna, represented in word and image in a rock-cut (also called a “crypt”) church at Vaste [Plate 18], or a Jewish teen named Leah, movingly commemorated on a tombstone in Brindisi [16], as it is to learn about Bishop Donadeus, textually present in both a Latin inscription on the exterior of the Castro cathedral [35] and a Greek hospital dedication at Andrano [4]. These otherwise anonymous people are not “just names.” The names themselves have a larger context in a history of naming that is informative about kinship, innovation, and tradition. Moreover, the names rarely exist in isolation; they are usually embedded in shorter or longer devotional, dedicatory, funerary, didactic, or hortatory texts.87 The choice of language in which to present information to contemporaries and for posterity is meaningful, not least when two languages are combined in a single statement or monument. The combination of images and texts in all three of these examples—Donna dressed with a certain elegance, the menorah and shofars on Leah’s rubricated epitaph, the blessing Christ and coat of arms alongside Donadeus’s dedication at Castro—tells us even more about these individuals’ perceived place in their world and in the world to come. When these data are supplemented by material remains, such as excavated belt fittings, and when analogous instances of display and additional evidence for local rituals of life, death, and commemoration are also considered, a richly textured picture of local medieval life can emerge. A “real-life” regional microhistory extrapolated from visual and material sources is the subject and the object of this book.88 The analogies between this approach and those of the New Historicists and anthropologists’ “thick description” should be clear.89
To underscore the local and regional qualities of the people in my study, I have limited my inquiry to monuments and objects that are more or less fixed in time and space. I say “more or less” because Donadeus’s inscription was moved from inside the cathedral to the outside, but it is still in the same relative location; Leah’s tombstone is now in a museum, not in a cemetery, but there is no doubt that it was produced and displayed in Brindisi; and Donna’s tiny image and short accompanying text are still exactly where they were painted in a crypt church in the hinterlands of Vaste over six hundred years ago. Castro, Brindisi, and Vaste were in the Middle Ages a town, city, and village that had more in common with each other than with places of similar size located farther away.
The changes in context, function, and usage that have affected virtually all medieval monuments mean that historians have to work that much harder to gain insight into the past. Interdisciplinarity is essential. Within the Salento, it seems to me a mistake to consider Leah’s Hebrew tombstone in isolation from Stratigoules’s long epitaph in