3. Giovambattista De Arcentino: Go East young man!
The Argentinas before Francavilla
Naples in the 14th century. Attributed to Francesco Rosselli - Public Domain
GIOVAMBATTISTA De ARCENTINO: GO EAST YOUNG MAN
The traces connecting the Argentina family between Naples in 1301 and Francavilla Fontana in the 1400s have been severed and are unlikely to ever be attached again, but be that as it may, by the mid-1400s a Giovambattista De Arcentino, a captain for the crown of Aragon’s army, after spending some years in Brindisi and marrying there, arrived in Francavilla’s neighboring town of Oria. His son, Roberto DeArgentino bought land between those two towns in 1480 or 1486 – a difference of some importance to be discussed later – and the family never left, as demonstrated by the seventeen generations that link me and that Roberto De Argentino, all of which after a couple of generations in Oria, lived in Francavilla, and mostly within the same few blocks.
And so it was that Giovambattista arrived in the region, but why? What brought him there from Naples? His ancestor, it is written in historian Nicola Argentina’s archival notes, entered the southern part of the Italian peninsula with the armies of Charles I of Anjou, who came down all the way from beyond the Alps, vanquished the Swabian king Manfredi at the Battle of Benevento in 1266, and set himself up in Naples, the kingdom’s capital, becoming the ruler of the southern part of the Italian peninsula and Sicily. The island was soon lost in 1282 in the aftermath of the Sicilian Vespers revolt, an event that historian Benedetto Croce defined as an amputation of the kingdom; during those disorders the parliament in Palermo had invited Peter III of Aragon, who needed little invitation as he was in a phase of expansion in the Mediterranean anyway, to come in and govern the island. The loss of Sicily stunned the kingdom for a couple of centuries and was a factor in the downfall of the Anjou dynasty. But while under the Anjou, in the 14th century, Naples became a resplendent capital, more sophisticated than Rome, Paris, or London. Its university, one of the first in Europe, attracted luminaries like Petrarca, who had two stints at court in the early 1340s, and other seminal pre Renaissance writers and artists like Boccaccio and Giotto.
Sometimes in the first couple of decades of the 20th century, historian Nicola Argentina found Angevin records in the National Archives of Naples that documented the employment of a Robertus De Argentina as a military police officer in service of the crown of Anjou in 1301[1]: ‘Robertus de Argentina, qui olim fuit Deputatus in custodia captivorum in criptis prope Castrum Novum de Neapoli’. It is from those searches that it resulted that this ‘De Argentina’ family arrived in Naples with the army of Charles I of Anjou and settled there. As I try to create mental tableaus of what life in the city must have been like, I also like to imagine my ancestor, Robertus’ son, tipping his hat to Petrarca or Boccaccio or Giotto as they walked past each other in the narrow streets of Naples in the pre plague years of the early 1340s.
I wish I could look into those Anjou documents about Robertus mentioned above, but they no longer exist. I lamented that the family’s traces to the Naples of the 1300s have been severed; that severance happened in1943, when the German army burned libraries and archives on the way out of town. Some were bombed by allies. This presence of our family in Naples is known to us because historian Feliciano Argentina, my uncle, wrote about it in 1978; his sources were the notes that Nicola wrote after his visit to the National Archives. I regret to report that I have not found those notes yet, so this whole thing with Naples and 1301 and Charles I of Anjou and all that, rests on my trust in my uncle and great grandfather’s integrity in their work, which I have no reason to doubt, but…I would have preferred to write of these events with evidence observed with my own eyes. Now, having cleared all of that out for full disclosure, let me continue forward as I retrace Giovambattista possible steps to Francavilla.
The rule of the Angevin dynasty lasted less than a couple of centuries, and I assume must have been the time when Giovambattista’s ancestor began to accumulate the wealth he brought to Brindisi with which his son would buy land near Francavilla in 1480. The town was at the center of a region that since the 6th Century had not known political organization, but rather existed as individual population settlements just trying to survive the series of invasions that came after Rome collapsed, and which the Byzantines, inheritors of the Empire, could not prevent. The political and administrative structures the Norman rulers put in place after their takeover of the region in 1071, were continued by the Germanic Swabians they married into, and after their defeat in 1266, were maintained by the Angevins bringing a centuries long level of stability and organization to the region that could truthfully be called a kingdom. Though based on the feudal model common in northern Europe, it evolved into its own peculiar system in the kingdom of Naples, and some of the administrative innovations created by the Angevins remained in place until Napoleon replaced them.
The initial successes of the Anjou dynasty were shaken by that loss of Sicily to the house of Aragon after the Vespers revolt, by the Black Death epidemics of 1347 and 1350 which had devastating effects on the population and the economy, and by succession problems. The power of the Anjou crown had also always been at times in balance, and at others in contrast, to that of the regional fief holding barons throughout the kingdom, nobles without whom the rulers in Naples would not have been able to control so vast a territory. These barons and landlords were rarely loyal to the crown by virtue of honor and moral obligation as was more common in Northern European feudal arrangements, but rather operated through transactional relationships that ebbed and flowed depending on changing interests, goals, and alliances. The outcome was that the crown in Naples was marginally relevant to the everyday lives of common people throughout the kingdom, especially the very distant Salento separated by the difficult obstacle of the Apennine mountains, and the local feudal lords enjoyed administrative, fiscal, and judicial authority over those who lived on their lands; it was the barons who applied laws and policies as they saw fit, with little chance for anyone to appeal to the distant crown in Naples.
The Anjou dynasty came to a dead end in 1442, as an aggressive House of Aragon, now well established in Sicily and soon to be allied to the house of Castile with the marriage of Isabel and Ferdinand, took advantage of a weak Renato I of Naples who had no direct descendants. Alfonso V of Aragon plotted for decades, and after setbacks, alliances, and secret treaties, eventually took over the kingdom and became Alfonso I of Naples in 1442. It was during Alfonso’s reign that Constantinople was lost to the Ottomans in 1453 as that empire was asserting itself in the Mediterranean and the Balkans and would eventually assault Otranto in 1480. Alfonso was succeeded by his illegitimate son, Ferdinand I of Naples, known as Re Ferrante to his subjects, and it was at some point during Re Ferrante’s rule that Giovambattista Argentina, as an officer of the Aragon army, found his way down to Brindisi. There is little information about him, including any descriptions of what he may have looked like. In his book, Feliciano Argentina makes this statement about the first Argentina in the Salento region: ‘A Giovambattista Argentina arrived in Brindisi with the rank of captain with the army of the crown of Aragon, and lived there a few years, where he married a noblewoman from nearby Mesagne’. Giovambattista must have had some rank and respect, or money, as matrimonies in noble families were arranged between equals at the least. Her family must have seen an opportune alliance, or if he was not quiet the catch, was trying to get rid of her. Love was seldom a factor in these marriages. The couple later moved to Oria, an older medieval town near Francavilla. Where Feliciano sourced this information that he published, I do not know. A careful historian who methodically listed his sources, he did not cite where these facts came from, so I can only go with what he wrote. Giovambattista would have arrived in Brindisi in the 1440s, his son Roberto would likely have been born in the 1450s, and he bought the land in Francavilla in 1480.
But back to the main question: what brought Giovambattista to what was for all purposes a frontier region of the kingdom, and abandon Naples, the only city in the kingdom with culture and a court, the magnificent city in which he was likely born, was living, and working? Travel across the kingdom has been reported by some as secure during this period, and writers of history Benedetto Croce and William Manchester separately use the following quote, harvested by a survey of Italy’s medieval period written in the late 1700s:
“All over Italy people said that such were the tranquility and security of the kingdom that ‘throughout Apulia (what the whole south was called then, R.A.), the Terra di Lavoro, Calabria, and Abbruzzo the citizens neither knew the use of arms nor bore them, except that they carried a wooden club in their hands to defend themselves against dogs’”.[2]
After that encouraging travel advisory, what follows now is a handful of possible scenarios that might have caused Giovambattista to leave Naples for a new life in Salento. None can be proven, but nevertheless, I found constructing them a worthwhile exercise.
Military assignment:
Alfonso V of Aragon, ruler of Sicily, who had long plotted for it, finally strongarmed his way into the Kingdom of Naples in 1442 and began his rule there as Alfonso I of Naples. Seen as a foreigner by many in Naples, he replaced the Anjou court and their customs with the Spanish language and manners. Resentful or not, many of the Neapolitan noble families would have cared only so much as long as they were left alone with their privileges, and the barons in the faraway provinces would have cared even less. As Alfonso took the throne, he absorbed and made his own the military and administrative structures already in place under the fading House of Anjou and made legitimacy of the Crown over the kingdom one of his priorities. It was during this period that barons in the eastern littoral part of the kingdom, on the lower Adriatic coast, had become increasingly concerned about Ottoman piracy on their port cities and immediate surrounding countryside, concerns that had received lip service from the monarchs in Naples but few resources in treasury or soldiers. The concerns would become much more existential when Constantinople fell in 1453, the Ottoman expansion reached the Balkans, and suddenly coastal cities like Bari, Brindisi, and Otranto were on the front lines of the battle between Islamic and Christian rulers on the Eastern Mediterranean. Alfonso did send some soldiery to Brindisi to appease his barons there, and Giovambattista may have been one of those, arriving there in the middle of the 1440s or right after the fall of Constantinople, and this hypothesis would work with the description Feliciano Argentina wrote about him, arriving in Brindisi as a captain with the crown of Aragon’s army.
No advancement possibilities at the new Court:
As a descendant of an Anjou family, he may not have had a clear path to advancement within the new Aragon administration, which favored those who came up from Sicily with Alfonso. This could also be the reason why he might have been posted to the faraway port of Brindisi to face potential Ottoman attacks. It could have been part of an administrative restructuring with the military that elevated newcomers from Sicily and relegated the established Anjou officers away from the capital. Just writing out loud here, I have no evidence for this, but am enjoying playing the game of possibilities.
Economic opportunity:
Going east may well have been a choice in search of opportunity in a promising region that was being developed, was much less expensive than Naples, and further away from government meddling. I will address what was going on around the Salento region during this period in the next essay – or maybe the one after that, as this project is suffering from major mission creep – but suffice it to know that the administrations in Naples were aware that the region that was called ‘Terra del Lavoro’ and is now called Puglia could become, as it once was with the Romans, the breadbasket of the kingdom. What was needed was safety, security, and the development of commercial centers around agriculturally developed lands. This process had been started in the previous century and it led to the founding of Francavilla in 1310, and for someone with resources there was still ample opportunity to grab some land and become part of the noble/entrepreneurial class that dominated the economic life of the region. Perhaps it was nothing more than a young man seeking his fortune that led Giovambattista down that way. Or maybe it was a combination of all three, but with what little I know, this is all I have to throw at the wall and see what sticks. By the way, a real Italian would lose all respect for you if that’s what you did to check on the doneness of pasta. Know this: if it sticks to the wall, it’s overcooked.
In November and December, we will take a backwards glance, move some rocks, and understand how Francavilla came to be and what was there before it was founded. With the new year we will continue the forward march from 1480, the year that Giovambattista’s son, Roberto de Argentino, established a presence in Francavilla, that same year that the inhabitants of Otranto were being massacred while in Florence Botticelli was putting the finishing touches to his ‘Birth of Venus’. The Renaissance on the Italian peninsula was a time a beauty and enterprise and a time of incredible violence. Then again, most human existence has been so.
[1] Ex Registri Caroli II Anno 1301-1302, and Famiglie Nobili del Regno di Napoli, Volume V, page 305.
[2] Fragmenta Historiae romanae in L.A. Muratori, Antiquitates italicae meddi aevi (Arezzo, 1773-80), VII, 555-57. As noted in Benedetto Croce’s History of the Kingdom of Naples, and William Manchester’s A World Lit Only by Fire.
In a week you will receive an addendum with maps, sources, and timeline of rulers in the region. If this time and place are not so familiar, these resources will help create a better geohistorical context and if interested, a place for further exploration.
Thank you for another great story!