Confrontation and Interchange Between Byzantines And

Chapter 5 Confrontation and Interchange between Byzantines and Normans in Southern Italy: the Cases of St Nicholas of Myra and St Nicholas the Pilgrim at the End of the 11th Century

Penelope Mougoyianni

1 Introduction1

The Norman conquest of southern Italy in 1071 was followed by a transitional period during which significant changes took place.2 Urban governments emerged in the cities of the region because the Norman rulers could not es- tablish full control over the former Byzantine territories.3 At the same time, the bishoprics were reorganized by the pope and the Normans in order to utterly pass into the jurisdiction of the Church of Rome.4 The construction or reconstruction of the cities’s cathedrals was connected with the (re)discovery and translation of the relics of patron saints. These saints were mainly of Latin origin and many of them stemmed from southern Italy’s Latin past before the

1 I am grateful to Professors Elena Boeck (DePaul University), Stefanos Efthymiadis (Open University of Cyprus), Marina Falla Castelfranchi (University of Lecce), and Dr Mercou- rios Georgiadis for their encouragement, their valuable comments, and every kind of help they offered me at different stages of writing this article, my supervisor Professor Sophia Kalopissi-Verti (University of Athens) for generously sharing her photographs, Dr Paul Old- field (Manchester Metropolitan University) for sending me his excellent study on St Nicholas the Pilgrim, and Professor Vasilios Koukousas (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki) for dis- patching to me inaccessible studies. Finally, I kindly thank the two editors of this volume, Dr Daniëlle Slootjes and Dr Mariëtte Verhoeven, who contributed to the improvement of this article with their insightful suggestions. 2 For the conquest of southern Italy by the Normans, see Huguette Taviani-Carozzi, La terreur du monde. Robert Guiscard et la conquête normande en Italie (Paris, 1996); G.A. Loud, The Age of Robert Guiscard: Southern Italy and the Norman Conquest (Harlow, 2000). 3 Paul Oldfield, “Urban Government in Southern Italy, c.1085–c.1127,” The English Historical Review 122/497 (June, 2007), 579–608. 4 Loud, The Age of Robert Guiscard, pp. 260–78. G.A. Loud, The Latin Church in Norman Italy (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 181–223.

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Byzantine domination (876–1071).5 However, two Apulian coastal cities, Bari, the former capital of the Byzantine theme of Longobardia, and Trani, Bari’s an- tagonist, turned to the Byzantine Empire to find their new patron saints. Bari chose one of the most prominent Byzantine bishops and miracle-workers, St Nicholas of Myra as its patron saint, while Trani sanctified an unknown young hermit from Byzantine Greece, St Nicholas the Pilgrim. This contribution ex- amines the catalytic role Byzantium continued to play in southern Italy during this transitional period and analyses the means by which the two cities chose these saints to promote different agendas, either to confront Byzantium, as in Bari’s case, or to make a statement of self-identity through the attachment to Byzantine culture, as in Trani’s case.

2 Changes in the Religious Landscape: St Nicholas of Myra as the Patron Saint of Bari

The translation of the relics of St Nicholas from his famous church in Myra to Bari on 9 May 1087 and the establishment of the saint’s new shrine in the Apulian city proved to be crucial turning points in the early history of Nor- man Bari. According to the two translationes sancti Nicolai,6 in April 1087 with over forty sailors and two priests on board, three ships7 departed from Bari with the purpose of selling wheat and other merchandise in Antioch. After the

5 Jean-Marie Martin, La Pouille du vie au xiie siècle (Rome, 1993), pp. 618–21; Paul Oldfield, Sanctity and Pilgrimage in Medieval Southern Italy, 1000–1200 (Cambridge, 2014), pp. 56–82, 104–05. 6 Members of the Barian clergy wrote the two translationes sancti Nicolai after the arrival of the relics in the city. The cleric Nikephoros wrote his translatio at the request of Bari’s mag- nates and church officials, while John, the archdeacon of the cathedral, wrote his text at the command of Archbishop Ursus. A critical edition of the translationes is not yet available. The two Latin texts with an Italian translation in Mons. Francesco Nitti di Vito, “La traslazione delle reliquie di san Nicola,” Japigia 8/3–4 (1937), pp. 336–56 (Nikephoros), 357–66 (John); Silvia Silvestro, Santi, reliquie e sacri furti. San Nicola di Bari fra Montecassino e Normanni (Napoli, 2013), pp. 92–102 (John), 113–24 (Nikephoros). For a discussion on the two translationes, see Charles W. Jones, Saint Nicholas of Myra, Bari and Manhattan. Biography of a Legend (Chicago, 1978), pp. 176–202; Agostino Pertusi, “Ai confini tra religione e politica. La contesa per le reliquie di S. Nicola tra Bari, Venezia e Genova,” Quaderni medievali 5 (June, 1978), pp. 19–26; Gerardo Cioffari, Storia della Basilica di S. Nicola di Bari. i. L’epoca normanno sveva (Bari, 1984), pp. 42–8; Pasquale Corsi, “La traslazione di san Nicola da Myra a Bari,” in San Nicola. Splendori d’arte d’Oriente e d’Occidente, Michele Bacci, ed. (Milan, 2006), pp. 89–96; Silvestro, Santi, pp. 54–5, 89–92, 137–58, who has very convincingly challenged the prevailing view that Nikephoros wrote his text before John. Silvestro dates John’s translatio to the end of the 11th century, while that of Nikephoros later, since the manuscripts containing his account cannot be dated before the 12th century. 7 The number of the ships is given only by John: Silvestro, Santi, p. 94.