Welcome back. I hope you enjoyed the ‘Otranto’ essay.
Today I am adding photos, sources, and additional commentary on the essay, and I hope this additional content will enrich the experience.
Let’s begin with photos:
In a side chapel of the cathedral of Otranto, behind the altar presided by Mary, a wall of skulls and bones look down on all who visit.
Oldest part of the church goes back to Norman times and was first built in 1068 atop remains of an old Messapian village, itself built on the remains of a Roman temple.
The family chapel at the town cemetery was spacious when first built…
Remains of old bones are put in smaller boxes and lowered in a crypt twenty feet or so below the chapel.
…it required the help of my two cousins to lift the heavy marble covering that keeps those spirits at peace in the dark.
I stared at my own name engrave in marble; it’s my grandfather…
…a XV century balcony that is a historical landmark has a sign on it named Balcone Argentina.
I walked by houses where beloved relatives lived; centenarian stone paved streets indelibly etched in my subconscious by juvenile footspteps.
Where are we?
This region is called ‘Il Salento’. Some will say that the axis between Brindisi and Taranto, with Francavilla in the middle is its northern border. Others will contend it goes further up north, while others will not permit it to go much beyond Lecce. It’s a cultural border and not a demarcated or administrative border, so… it’s fun to listen to the arguments, but as we will look into later, the Brindisi - Taranto axis was at one time a cultural line between Byzantine Greek religious rites to the south of it, and Roman Latin ones to the north, though it was for long a liminal and fluid space. The language of administrative documents in the Middle Ages reflects that congruence of cultures.
The Mediterranean in the year 1400. Notice what little remains of the Byzantine Empire; it will be gone in 1453.
Map available on wikipedia commons
Expansion of the Ottoman Empire
From Encyclopaedia Britannica
RANDOM NOTES on THE HISTORIOGRAPHY of the OTRANTO 1480 EVENT.
None of these sources are quoted directly in the essay, but collectively helped me get a better understanding of what happened in Otranto. It must be remembered, as Tommasino writes, that not many people made it out of Otranto alive in August 1480 to talk about what happened, and the few stories quickly became legend and multiplied. The Otranto event was immediately used as a propaganda piece by Sixtus IV and the papacy to encourage a new crusade to retake Constantinople, and further on, Jerusalem. Not many took him up on it, but the siege of Otranto became an iconic event used for centuries, at first to ‘other’ Ottomans and Muslims, and later as a source of pride and resistance as the Italian nation state was being cobbled together with a common identity and destiny. As late as the last decade, as Tommasino writes, Italian politicians have compared the Otranto event with ISIS decapitations of Christians in their ‘Caliphate’.
In reality, the Ottoman world and Latin Europe were not divided by a wall and separated by each other. As we will explore later, there was much fluidity in culture, populations, and trade in the Adriatic and Eastern Mediterranean.
The 800 victims did not rest in peace, as their bones attest, and they continued to return to the front of Catholic consciousness. In 1771, they were proclaimed ‘Servants of God’. In July 2007, Pope Benedict XVI formally acknowledged them as having being killed for their faith, ‘Occisi propter fidelitatem ad Christum’, and in 2013, Pope Francis canonized the 800 victims as saints.
Whereas ample sources attest that Mehmet II’s intentions had been to reach Rome and become the head of a united empire and reunite the two Christian churches under his kingdom, Eroglu writes that there are few contemporary Ottoman sources that comment on the Otranto invasion.
Some of the SOURCES consulted:
Eroglu, Haldun. “Mehmet II’s Campaign to Italy (1480-1481).” Mediterranean Journal of Humanities 2011, no. 1/2 (n.d.): 127–34. Link to article
Fleet, Kate. “Italian Perceptions of the Turks in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries.” Journal of Mediterranean Studies, University of Malta 5, no. 2 (1995): 159–72. Link to article
Ricci, Giovanni. “I Superstiti Di Otranto e l’ombra Dell’Islam.” Franciscan Studies 71, no. 1 (2013): 183–96. Link to article
Rohlfs, Gerhard. “Greek Remnants in Southern Italy.” The Classical Journal 62, no. 4 (January 1967): 164–69. Link to article
Safran, Linda. The Medieval Salento. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014.
Tommasino, Pier Mattia. “Otranto and the Self.” I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, Villa I Tatti: The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, 18, no. 1 (2015). Link to article
A song suggestion just for fun - this is one of the prettiest songs I’ve heard in years. the music is beautiful and the lyrics move me. It’s called ‘The Soldier and the Oak’ by Elliott Park.
NEXT ESSAY POST - SEPTEMBER 1 - A FIVE HUNDRED YEAR OLD ARCHIVE
If you know someone who might appreciate this sort of thing, please share this project with them, it would make me happy to bring it to a larger audience.
Wow great work and research! And personally well-timed for me as we are in the throes of planning a trip to nearby Bari! I feel we may be expanding that itinerary to head a bit further south 😉 I look forward to reading more!