Chapter IX: Part 9

So short an occupation cannot be expected to have left any marked impress on the cities which Venice thus held for a few years at a late time as isolated outposts. These Apulian towns are not Venetian in the same sense in which the Istrian and Dalmatian towns are. In those regions, even the cities which were merely neighbours and not subjects of Venice may be called Venetian in an artistic sense; they were in some sort members of a body of which Venice was the chief. Here we see next to nothing which recalls Venice in any way. The difference is most likely owing, not so much in the late date at which these towns became Venetian possessions, as to the shortness of time by which they were held, and to the precarious tenure by which the Republic held them. As far as mere dates go, Cattaro and Trani were won by Venice within the same century. But, as we have seen, the architectural features which give the Dalmatian towns their Venetian character belong to the most part to times even later than the occupation of Trani. Men must have gone on building at Cattaro in the Venetian fashion for fully a century and a half after Trani was again lost by Venice. There are few Venetian memorials to be seen in these towns; and if the winged lion ever appeared over their gates, he has been carefully thrust aside by kings and emperors. More truly perhaps, kings and emperors rebuilt the walls of these towns after the Venetian power had passed away. Still the occupation of these towns forms part of Venetian history, and they may be visited so as to bring them within the range of Venetian geography. Brindisi is the natural starting point for Corfu and the Albanian coast, and Brindisi is one of the towns which Venice thus held for a season. The two opposite coasts are thus brought into direct connexion. The lands which owned, first the Norman and the Angevin, and then the Venetian, as their masters, may thus naturally become part of a single journey. We may have passed through the hilly lands, we may have seen the hill-cities, of central Italy; we may have gone through lands too far from the sea to suggest any memories of Venice, but which are full of the memories of the Norman and the Swabian. We find ourselves in the great Apulian plain, the great sheep-feeding plain so memorable in the wars of Anjou and Aragon, and we tarry to visit some of the cities of the Apulian coast. The contrast indeed is great between the land in which we are and either the land from which we have come, or the land whither we are going. Bari, Trani, and their fellows, planted on the low coast where the great plain joins the sea, are indeed unlike, either the Latin and Volscian towns on their hill-tops, or the Dalmatian towns nestling between the sea and the mountains. The greatest of these towns, the greatest at least in its present state, never came under Venetian rule. Bari, the city which it needed the strength of both Empires to win from the Saracen, is said to have been defended by a Venetian fleet early in the eleventh century, when Venetian fleets still sailed at the bidding of the Eastern Emperor. Further than this, we can find few or no points of connexion between Venice and these cities, till their first occupation at the end of the fifteenth century. But that short occupation brings them within our range. We are passing, it may be, from Benevento to fishy Bari, as two stages of the "iter ad Brundisium." Thence we may go on, in the wake of so many travellers and conquerors, to those lands beyond the sea where the Lords of one-fourth and one-eighth of the Empire of Romania, and the Norman lords of Apulia and Sicily, the conquerors of Corfu and Albania, were alike at home. Between Benevento and Bari the eye is caught by the great tower of Trani. Such a city cannot be passed by; or, if we are driven to pass it by, we must go back to get something more than a glimpse of it. And Trani is one of the towns pledged to Venice by Ferdinand of Naples. In the midst of cities whose chief memories later than old Imperial times carry us back to the Norman and Swabian days of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, we find ourselves suddenly plunged into the Venetian history of the end of the fifteenth.

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Trani then will be our introduction to the group of towns with which we are at present concerned. At the present moment, it is undoubtedly the foremost among them; but it is hard to call up any distinct memory of its history till we reach the times which made it for a moment a Venetian possession. Trani, like other places, doubtless has its history known to local inquirers; but the more general inquirer will very seldom light upon its name. It is hard to find any sure sign of its being in Roman times, but it must be the "Tirhennium quæ et Trana" of the geographer Guido. Let us take such a common-place test as looking through the indices to several volumes of Muratori and Pertz till the task becomes wearisome. Such a task will show us the name of Trani here and there, but only here and there. We do by searching find it mentioned in the days of King Roger and in the days of the Emperor Lothar, but it is only by searching that we find it. The name of Trani does not stand out without searching, like so many of the cities even of southern Italy. Yet Trani is no inconsiderable place; it is an archæpiscopal see with a noble metropolitan church; and in our own day, though much smaller than its neighbour Bari, it seems to share in the present prosperity of which the signs at Bari are unmistakeable. The visitor to Trani will find much to see there, but he will not find the stamp of Venice on the city. Trani, like its fellows, had received its distinctive character long before it had to do with Venice, and that character was not one that was at all marked by Venetian influences. The city is not without Venetian monuments; the memory of its Venetian days is not forgotten even in its modern street nomenclature. There is a _Piazza Gradenigo_, and an inscription near one of the later churches records the name of Giuliano Gradenigo as the Venetian governor of Trani in 1503, and as having had a hand in its building. The castle might be suspected of containing work of the days of the Republic; but a threatening man of the sword forbids any study of its walls even with a distant spy-glass; not however till the chief inscription has been read, and has been found to belong to days later than those of Venetian rule. There is no knowing what may not happen to places when they have once fallen into the hands of soldiers; to the civilian mind it might seem that, when a king writes up an inscription to record his buildings, he wishes that inscription to be read of all men for all time. It is hard too to see how an antiquary's spy-glass can do anything to help prisoners confined within massive walls to break forth, as Italian--at least Sicilian--prisoners sometimes know how to break forth. The metropolitan church of Trani is happily not in military hands; neither are the streets and lanes of the city, the houses, the smaller churches, the arcades by the haven, the buildings of the town in general. All these may therefore be studied without let or hindrance; civil officials, even cloistered nuns, see no danger to Church or State if the stranger draws the outside of a window or copies an inscription on an outer wall. But though we may find at Trani bits of work which might have stood in Venice, it is only as they might have stood in any other city of Italy. There is nothing in Trani, besides the memorial of Gradenigo, which brings the Serene Republic specially before the mind. The great church, the glory of Trani, bears the impress of that mixed style of art which is characteristic of Norman rule in Apulia, but which is quite different from anything to be found in Norman Sicily. It has some points in common with its neighbours at Bitonto and Bari, and some points very distinctive of itself. It is undoubtedly one of the noblest churches of its own class. If we were to call it one of the noblest churches of Christendom, the phrase would be misleading, because, to an English ear at least, it would suggest the thought of something on a much greater scale, something more nearly approaching the boundless length of an English minster or the boundless height of a French one. In southern Italy bishops and archbishops were so thick upon the ground that even a metropolitan church was not likely to reach, in point of mere size, to the measure of a second-class cathedral or conventual church in England or even in Normandy. But mere size is not everything, and, as an example of a particular form of Romanesque, as an example of difficulties ably grappled with and thoroughly overcome, the church of Trani might almost claim to rank beside the church of Pisa and the church of Durham. And higher praise than that no building can have.

Fully to take in the effect of this grand church, it will be well not to hurry towards it on reaching the city. Go straight from the railway-station towards another bell-tower, not to that of the _duomo_. That course will lead to the so-called _villa_ or public garden. The suppressed Dominican convent close by its gate has no attractive feature except its tower, one of the usual Italian type, only with pointed arches. But the grounds of the _villa_, raised on the ancient walls of the monastic precinct, look down at once on the waves of Hadria. In the northern view we look out on lands and hills beyond the water; but no man must dream that the eastern peninsula of Europe is to be seen from Trani. We look out only over the gulf of Manfredonia--the name of the Hohenstaufen king is as it were stamped upon the waters--to the Italian peninsula of Mount Garganus. Hence, on our way to the metropolitan church, we pass by the basin which forms the haven of Trani, a basin which reminds us of the _cala_ which is all that is left of the many waters of Palermo. The distant view clearly brings out its main outline; above all, it brings out those arrangements of the eastern end which form the most characteristic feature. We see the tall tower at the south-west corner; we see the line of the clerestory with its small round-headed windows; above all, we see--so unlike anything in Northern architecture--the tall transept seeming to soar far above the rest of the church, with the three apses, strangely narrow and lofty, treated simply, as it would seem, as appendages to the transept itself. Those who have not seen Bitonto and Bari will not guess how great a danger these soaring apses have escaped. The Norman of Apulia did not, like the native Italian, deal in detached bell-towers; he clave to the use of his native land which made the tower or towers an integral part of the church. But he seems to have specially chosen a place for them which is German rather than Norman, and then to have treated them in a way which is neither German, Norman, nor Italian. At Bitonto and in the two great churches of Bari, a pair of towers flanks the east end. In Italy it might be safer to say the apse end; but we think that in all these cases the apse end is the east end or nearly so. Such pairs of eastern towers are common in Germany; but there the great apse projects between them. At Bari and Bitonto the whole apsidal arrangement is masked by a flat wall. The towers rise above the side apses; the great central apse is hidden by the wall carried in front of it. We thus get at the east end a flat front, like a west front; we lose the curves of the apses, and with them the arcades and grouped windows which form so marked a feature in the ordinary Romanesque of Germany and Italy. A single window, of larger size than Romanesque taste commonly allows, marks the place of the high altar. And this window is adorned with shafts and mouldings of special richness, and with animal figures above and below the shafts. Now here at Trani, though all the apses stand out, yet a like arrangement is followed. The central apse has only a single window of the same enriched type; the side apses have also only a single window each, but of a much plainer kind. Thus much, without taking in every detail, we can mark in our distant view; we can mark too somewhat of the unusually rich and heavy cornice of the transept, and the upper part of the transept front, the wheel window and the two rich coupled windows beneath it. We can mark too the arrangements of the great square tower, crowned with its small octagonal finish; and even here we can see that, with all its majesty of outline, it is far from ranking in the first class of Italian bell-towers. Its composition lacks boldness and simplicity, while it has nothing remarkable in the way of ornament. Saint Zeno among the simpler towers, Spalato among the more elaborate, stand indeed unrivalled. But the cathedral tower of Trani, when closely examined, is less satisfactory than its own majestic neighbour at Bari. It is not merely that the pointed arch, always out of place in an Italian bell-tower, is used in the upper stages. The pointed arch is used with better effect, both far away in the noble tower of Velletri, and close by at Trani itself, in the far humbler tower of the Dominican church. The fault lies in this, that the windows, instead of being spread over the whole face of each stage, are gathered together in the centre of each, while two of them have rather awkward pointed canopies over the groups of windows. Still, seen from far or near, it is a grand and majestic tower, though its faults, which catch the eye at a distance, become more distinct as we draw nearer.

The road by which we approach the _duomo_ will give us no view of it from the west, and, till we come quite near to the church, we shall hardly see how closely it overhangs the sea. We take our course by the harbour, for part of the way is under heavy and dark arcades which remind us of Genoa. Presently, before we reach the great church, we come across the east end of a smaller one, with which we shall afterwards become better acquainted from its western side. At this end it seems to be called _Purgatorio_; at the other end we shall find that its true name is _Ogni Santi_--All Hallows. Here there is no transept; still the three apses may pass for a miniature of those in the metropolitan church; there is the same single large and elaborate window in the mid apse, the same smaller single windows in the side apses. We go landwards for a short way, and we presently find ourselves on a terrace overlooking the sea, close under the east end of the _duomo_. We now better take in both the grandeur and the singularity of the building whose general effect we have studied from a distance. We take in some fresh features, as the tall blank arcades along the walls, a feature shared by Trani with Bari, and we guess that the extraordinary height of the apses must be owing to the presence of a lofty under-church. We see signs too at the east end which seem to show that at some time or other there was a design for some other form of east end, inconsistent with the present design. The visitor will now perhaps be tempted to go at once within, though he ought in strictness to pass under the tower in order to finish his outside survey at the west end. It is curious to see how the same feeling which prevails in the east end prevails in the west front also. Here we have no continuous arcades like Pisa, Lucca, and Zara--happily we have no sham gables like the great one at Lucca; we have again the single great window with the small ones on each side. Only here the mid window has over it a rich wheel, the favourite form of the country, a form which the apsidal east end would not allow. And it is treated in exactly the same way, with the same kind of surrounding ornaments, as the single-light windows.

This west front, as it now stands, has a rather bare look; the windows have too much the air of being cut through the wall without any artistic design, and there is too great a gap between the windows and the west doorway with its flanking arcades below. But this last fault at least is not to be charged on the original design, which clearly took in a projecting portico. We may doubt however whether the portico could have been high enough to have much dignity, and we shall find this feature far more skilfully treated in the other smaller church of which we have already spoken. And here we must confess that it is possible to make two visits to Trani, and each time to make a somewhat careful examination of its great church, and yet to miss--not at all to forget to look for, but to fail to find--the bronze doors which form one of the wonders of Trani. This may seem incredible at a distance; it will be found on the spot not to be wonderful. We will not describe the doors at second-hand; we will rather hasten within to gaze on the surpassing grandeur of an interior, which, as an example of architectural design, may, as we have already hinted, rank beside the church by the Arno and the church by the Wear, beside the Conqueror's abbey at Caen and King Roger's chapel at Palermo.

We say King Roger's chapel advisedly; for the palace chapel of Palermo, were every scrap of its gorgeous mosaics whitewashed over, would still rank, simply as an architectural design, among the most successful in the world. And the chapel of Palermo has points which at once suggest comparison and contrast with the great church of Trani. We see the traces of the Saracen in both; but at Palermo the building itself is thoroughly Saracenic, at Trani the Saracen contributes only one element among others. In Sicily, where the Saracen was thoroughly at home, the Norman kings simply built their churches and palaces in the received style of the island, a style of which the pointed arch was a main feature. In southern Italy, where the Saracen was only an occasional visitor, a style arose in which elements from Normandy itself--elements, that is, perhaps brought first of all from northern Italy--are mixed with other elements to be found on the spot, Italian, Saracenic, and Byzantine. The churches of Bari, Bitonto, and Trani, all show this mixture in different shapes. One feature of it is to take the detached Italian bell-tower, and to make it, Norman fashion, part of the church itself. In such cases the general character of the tower is kept, but Norman touches are often brought into the details; for instance, the common Norman coupled window, such as we are used to in Normandy and England, often displaces the oecumenical _mid-wall_ shaft which the older England shared with Italy. Thus here at Trani, the tower joins the church, though it is not made so completely part of its substance as it is at Bari and Bitonto. The inside of the church shows us another form of the same tendency. The Norman in Apulia could hardly fail to adopt the columnar forms of the land in which he was settled; but he could not bring himself to give up the threefold division of height and the bold triforium of his own land. An upper floor was not unknown in Italy, as we see in more than one of the Roman churches, as in Saint Agnes, Saint Laurence, and the church known as _Quattro Coronati_, to say nothing of Modena and Pisa, and _Sta. Maria della Pieve_ at Arezzo. But in some of these cases the arrangement is widely different from the genuine Norman triforium, and the threefold division certainly cannot be called characteristically Italian, any more than characteristically Greek. But it is characteristically Norman; and when we find it systematically appearing in churches built under Norman rule, we must set it down as a result of special Norman taste. At Trani each of the seven arches of the nave has a triplet of round arches over it, and a single clerestory window above that. The Norman in his own land would have made more of the clerestory; he would have drawn a string underneath it to part it off from the triforium; he would have carried up shafts to the roof to mark the division into bays. But the triforium itself, as it stands at Trani, might have been set up at Caen or Bayeux, with only the smallest changes in detail. But where in Normandy, where in England, where, we may add, in Sicily, is there anything at all like the arcades which in the church of Trani support this all but thoroughly Norman triforium? These have no fellow at Bitonto; they have hardly a fellow at Bari. In those cities the Norman adopted the columnar arcades of the basilica, while in Sicily the Saracen still at his bidding placed the pointed arch on the Roman column. At Trani too we see the work, or at least the influence, of the Saracen; but it takes quite another form. The pointed arch would have been out of place; in Normandy and England it is ever a mark of the coming Gothic, and there is certainly no sign of coming Gothic at Trani. But the coupling of two columns with their capitals under a single abacus--sometimes rather a bit of entablature--to form the support of an arch, is a well-known Saracenic feature. Not that it was any Saracen invention. In architecture, as in everything else, the Saracen was, as regards the main forms, only a pupil of Rome, Old and New; but, exactly like the Norman, he knew how to develope and to throw a new character into the forms which he borrowed. The coupled columns may truly be called a Saracenic feature, though the Saracen must have learned it in the first instance from such buildings as the sepulchral church known as Saint Constantia at Rome. We may fairly see a Saracenic influence in a crowd of Christian examples where this form is used in cloisters and other smaller buildings where the arches and columns are of no great size. It is even not uncommon in strictly Norman buildings in positions where the shafts are merely part of the decorative construction, and do not actually support the weight of the building. It was a bolder risk to take a pair of such columns, and bid them bear up the real weight of the three stages of what we may fairly call a Norman minster.

But the daring attempt is thoroughly successful; there is not, what we might well have looked for, any feeling of weakness; the twin columns yoked together to bear all that would have been laid on the massive round piers of England or their square fellows of Germany, seem fully equal to their work. It may be that the appearance of strength is partly owing to the use of real half-columns, and not mere slender vaulting-shafts, to support the roofs of the aisles. But the slender shaft comes in with good effect to support both the arch between the nave and the transept, and the arch between the transept and the great apse. The lofty transept is wholly an Italian idea; but the general idea of these two tall arches is thoroughly Norman.

In looking at such a church as this, so widely different from any of the many forms with which we are already familiar, there is always a certain doubt as to our own feelings. We admire; as to that there is no doubt. But how far is that admiration the result of mere wonder at something which in any case is strange and striking? how far is it a really intelligent approval of beauty or artistic skill? Both feelings, we may be pretty sure, come in; but it is not easy to say which is the leading one, till we are better acquainted with the building than we are likely to become in an ordinary journey. It is familiarity which is the real test. It is the building which we admire as much the thousandth time as the first which really approves itself to our critical judgement. We have not seen Trani for the thousandth time; but we did what we could; we were so struck with a first visit to Trani that, at the cost of some disturbance of travelling arrangements, we went there again, and we certainly did not admire it less the second time than the first. And, whatever may be the exact relation of the two feelings of mere wonder and of strictly critical approval, it is certain that a third feeling comes in by no means small a measure. This is a kind of feeling of historic fitness. The church of Trani is the kind of church which ought to have been built by Normans building on Apulian ground, with Greek and Saracen skill at their disposal.

But at Trani, as commonly in these Apulian churches, it is not enough to look at the building from above ground. The great height of the apses will have already suggested that there is a lower building of no small size; and so we find it, conspicuously tall and stately, even in this land of tall and stately under-churches--crypt is a word hardly worthy of them. The under-church at Trani shows us a forest of tall columns, some of them fluted, with a vast variety of capitals of foliage. A few only can be called classical; some have the punched ornament characteristic of Ravenna. A good many of the bases have leaves at the corners, a fashion which in England is commonly a mark of the thirteenth century, but which in Sicily and Dalmatia goes on at least till the seventeenth.

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But the metropolitan church is not all that Trani has to show. In some of the buildings which we pass by in its narrow streets, we see some good windows of the style which it is most easy to call Venetian, though it might be rash hastily to refer them to the days of Venetian occupation. And there are other windows seemingly of earlier date, certainly of earlier character, which bear about them signs of the genuine Norman impress. But the strength of Trani, even setting aside the great church, lies in its ecclesiastical buildings; the best pieces even of domestic work are found in one of the monasteries. Two smaller churches deserve notice; one of them deserves special notice. This is the church of All Saints, of which we saw the east end on our way to the great minster, and on whose west end we shall most likely light as we come away from it. That west end is covered by a portico, or rather something more than a portico, as it contains a double row of arches. The front to the street forms part of a long and picturesque range of building, of which the actual arcade consists of four arches. One only of these is pointed, and that is the only one which rests on a column, the others being supported by square piers. But beyond this outer range, the vaulted approach to the church displays a grand series of columns and half-columns, with capitals of various forms. One is of extraordinary grandeur, with the volutes formed of crowned angels; the forms of the man and the eagle, either of them good for a volute, are here pressed into partnership. Within, the church is a small but graceful basilica, which, notwithstanding some disfigurements in 1853 which are boastfully recorded, pretty well keeps its ancient character, its columns with their capitals of foliage. He who visits Trani will doubtless also visit Bari, and such an one will do well both to compare the great church of Trani with the two great churches of Bari, and to compare and contrast this smaller building with the smaller church at Bari, that of Saint Gregory. Besides this little basilica, Trani possesses, not in one of its narrow streets, but in its widest _piazza_, a church, now of Saint Francis, but which, among many disfigurements, still keeps the form of the Greek cross within, and some Romanesque fragments without. Here, as also at Bari and at Bitonto, oriental influences--something we mean more oriental than Greeks or even than Sicilian Saracens--may be seen in the pierced tracery with which some of the windows are filled. In these cases this kind of work suggests a mosque; with other details, it might have carried our thoughts far away, to the great towers of the West of England.

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Among the other members of this group of cities we might have expected to find Brindisi, so famous as a haven of the voyager in Roman days, and no less famous in our own, fill a high, if not the highest, place among its fellows. And Brindisi has its points of interest also, one of them of an almost unique interest. Over the haven rises a commemorative column--its fellow has left only its pedestal--which records, not the dominion of Saint Mark, but the restoration of the city by the Protospatharius Lupus. Is this he whose name has been rightly or wrongly added to certain annals of Bari? Anyhow there the column stands, one of the few direct memorials of Byzantine rule in Italy. There is the round church also, the mosaic in the otherwise worthless cathedral, and one or two fragments of domestic work. The lie of the city and its haven is truly a sight to be studied; we see that in whatever language it is that _Brentesion_ means a stag's horn, the name was not unfittingly given to the antler-like fiords of this little inland sea. We trace out too the walls of Charles the Fifth, and we see how Brindisi has shrunk up since his day. But we are perhaps tempted to do injustice to Brindisi, to hurry over its monuments, when we are driven to choose between Brindisi and the greater attractions of the furthest city of our group, in some sort the furthest city of Europe. We pass by Lecce, which lies outside our group, as between Trani and Brindisi we have been driven to pass Monopoli, the spot which saw the first beginnings of the short Venetian rule in these parts. Everything cannot be seen, and we shall hardly regret sacrificing something to hasten to a spot which may well call itself the end of the world, and which forms the most fitting link between the central and the eastern peninsulas of Europe.

OTRANTO.

1881.

Hydrous, Hydruntum, Otranto, has as good a claim as a city can well have to be looked on as the end of the world. It is very nearly the physical end of the world in that part of the world with which it has most concern. When we have reached Otranto, we can go no further by any common means of going. It may pass for the south-eastern point of the peninsula of Italy: it is the point where that central peninsula comes nearest to the peninsula which lies beyond it. It is the point where Western and Eastern Europe are parted by the smallest amount of sea. It has therefore been in all times one of the main points of communication between Eastern and Western Europe. The old Hydrous appears as a Greek colony, placed, as one of the old geographers happily puts it, on the mouth either of the Hadriatic or of the Ionian sea. Hydruntum appears in Roman days as a rival route to Brundisium for those who wish to pass from Italy into Greece. A city so placed naturally plays its part in the wars of Belisarius and in the wars of Roger. Held by the Eastern Emperors as long as they held anything west of the Hadriatic, it passed, when the Norman came, into the hands of Apulian Dukes and Sicilian Kings, and it remained part of the continental Sicilian kingdom, save for the two moments in its history which bring it within our immediate range. Otranto is the one city of Western Europe in which the Turk has really reigned, though happily for a moment only. It is one of the cities in this corner of Italy which formed, for a somewhat longer time, outlying posts of Venetian dominion; and it is a spot where the memory of the Turk and the memory of the Venetian are mingled together in a strange, an unusual, and a shameful way. In most of the other spots which have seen the presence of the Turk and the Venetian, the commonwealth which was the temple-keeper of the Evangelist shows itself only in its nobler calling, as "Europe's bulwark 'gainst the Ottomite." At Otranto, Venice appears in a character which is more commonly taken by the Most Christian King. Before Francis and Lewis had conspired with the barbarian against their Christian rivals, the Serene Republic had already stirred him up to make havoc of a Christian city.

At Otranto then we finish our journey by land, and from Otranto, as Otranto is now, we have no means of continuing it by sea. We cannot sail straight, as men did in old times, either to Corfu or to Aulona. To make our way from the central to the south-eastern peninsula, we have to make the "iter ad Brundisium" back again from the other side. It is the natural consequence of being at the end of the world, that when we reach the point which holds that place, we have to go back again. And when we find ourselves at Otranto, the fact that we are at the end of the world, that we have reached the end, not only of our actual journey, but of any possible journey of the same kind, is forcibly set before us as a kind of symbol. We have come to an end, to a very marked end, of the great railway system of central Europe. From any place within that system we can find our way to Otranto by the power of steam. Beyond Otranto that power can take us no further; indeed we have so nearly reached the heel of the boot that there is not much further to go by the help of any other power. We are at the end of Italy, at the end, that is, of the central peninsula of Europe, in a sense in which we are not even at more distant Reggio. For Reggio is before all things the way to Sicily, and Sicily we must allow to be geographically an appendage to Italy, strongly as we must assert the right of that great island to be looked on historically in quite another light. And that at Otranto we have distinctly reached the end of something is clearly set forth by the arrangements of the railway station itself. The rails come to an end; the buildings of the station are placed, not at the side of the line, but straight across it, a speaking sign that we can go no further, and that the thought of taking us further has not entered the most speculative mind.

At Otranto then we have come to the end of one of the great divisions of the European world; it is therefore a fitting point to form a main point of connexion between that division and another. Otranto and its neighbourhood are the only points of the central peninsula from which we can, as a matter of ordinary course, look across into the eastern peninsula. We say as a matter of ordinary course. There are Albanian or Dalmatian heights from which it is said that, in unusually favourable weather, the Garganian peninsula may be descried; so it may be that the Garganian peninsula is favoured back again with occasional glimpses of south-eastern Europe. But a stay of even a few hours at Otranto shows that there south-eastern Europe comes within the gazer's ordinary ken. It is easy to see that it does not so much need good weather to show it as bad weather to hinder it from being shown. Before we reach Otranto, while we are still on the railway, the mountains of Albania rise clearly before our eyes; from the hill of Otranto itself they rise more clearly still. And even to those to whom those heights are no unfamiliar objects from nearer points of view, it is a thrilling and a saddening thought, when we look forth for the first time from a land of which every inch belongs to the free and Christian world, and gaze on the once kindred land that has passed away from freedom and from Christendom. From the soil of free Italy we look on shores which are still left under the barbarian yoke, shores where so many whose fathers were sharers in the European and Christian heritage have fallen away to the creed of the barbarian and to all that that creed brings with it. On the other hand, it is said that there are more favourable moments when it is possible to look from free Italy into free Greece. It is said that, sometimes perhaps Corfu itself, more certainly the smaller islands which lie off it to the west, may be seen from the hill of Otranto. If so, we look out from that one spot of the central peninsula, from that one spot of the general western world, where the Turk can be said to have really ruled, for however short a time, and not simply to have harried. And we look out on that one among the many islands which gird the eastern peninsula, which has gone through many changes and has bowed to many masters, but where alone the Turk has never ruled as a master, but has shown himself only as a momentary besieger.

The Turk then was never lord of Corfu; he was for a while, though only for a very little while, lord of Otranto. The winged lion floated over Corfu while the crescent floated for a season over Otranto. It was therefore perhaps not wholly unfitting that, for another somewhat longer season, the winged lion should float over Corfu and Otranto together. But it was not in his nobler character that the winged lion floated over Otranto. It would have been a worthy exploit indeed, if the arms of Venice, by that time a great Italian power, had driven out the Turk from his first lodgement on Italian soil. But instead of Venice driving the Turk out of Otranto, it was the common belief of the time that it was Venetian intrigue which had let him in. Nay more, if there was any truth in other suspicions of the time, the good old prayer of our forefathers, which prayed for deliverance from "Pope and Turk," might well have been put up by the people of Otranto and all Apulia in the year 1480. Not only the commonwealth of Venice, but the Holy Father himself, Pope Sixtus the Fourth, was believed to be an accomplice in the intrigues which enabled the infidel to establish himself on the shores of Italy. A time came, almost within our own day, when Pope and Turk were really leagued together, and when the Latin Bishop of the Old Rome owed his restoration to his seat to the joint help of the Mussulman Sultan of Constantinople and the Orthodox Tzar of Moscow. But in the fifteenth century we need hardly expect even such a Pope as Sixtus of deliberately bringing the Turk into Italy. His own interests both as priest and as prince were too directly threatened. But it is hard to acquit the Venetian commonwealth, under the dogeship of Giovanni Mocenigo, of risking the lasting interests of all Christendom, and of their own Eastern dominion as part of it, to serve the momentary calls of a petty Italian policy. We even read that Venetian envoys worked on the mind of the Sultan by the argument that it was the part of the new lord of Constantinople to assert his claim to all that the older lords of Constantinople had held east of the Hadriatic. No argument could be more self-destructive in Venetian mouths. If the Turk had inherited the rights of Eastern Cæsar in the Western lands, how cruelly was Venice defrauding him of a large part of the rights of the Eastern Cæsar in his own Eastern lands.

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The conquest of Otranto was the last of the conquests of him who rightly stands out in Ottoman history as pre-eminently the Conqueror. The second Mahomet, he who completed the conquest of Christian Asia by the taking of Trebizond, who crowned the work of Ottoman conquest in Europe by the taking of Constantinople, who by the taking of Euboia dealt the heaviest blow to the Venetian power in the Ægæan, who brought under his power, as a gleaning after the vintage, the Frank lordship of Attica and the Greek lordship of Peloponnêsos, in his last days stretched forth his hand to vex Western Europe as he had so long vexed Eastern Europe and what was left of Christian Asia. He was in truth attacking both at the same time; he won Otranto almost at the moment when he was beaten back from Rhodes. Each scene of his warfare illustrates the nature of the Ottoman power at that moment, how it was by the hands of her own apostate sons that Christendom was brought into bondage. Against Rhodes the infidel host was led by a Greek, against Otranto by an Albanian, both renegades or sons of renegades. And under the first Ferdinand of Aragon such was the state of things in the land which had once been ruled by good King William that soldiers of the Neapolitan King were willing to pass into the service of the Turk. Nay, the inhabitants in general seemed ready to believe the Turk's promises and to accept his dominion as likely to be milder than that of their own stranger king. The invader was his own worst enemy. A contemporary writer witnesses that the prisoners taken by Achmet _Break-Tooth_--such is said to be the meaning of his surname _Giédek_--pointed out to him that by his cruelties at Otranto he was losing for his master a province which otherwise might have been won with little effort.

But happily things took another turn. Otranto was in the Western world what Kallipolis--the Kallipolis of the Thracian Chersonêsos--had been in the Eastern. It was the first foothold of the barbarian, the gate by which he seemed likely to open his way to the possession of the central peninsula of Europe, as he had by the gate of Kallipolis opened his way to the possession of the eastern peninsula. Otranto was the last of the conquests of the great Conqueror; what if he had been longer-lived? what if the second Bajazet had deserved the name of Thunderbolt like the first? Would the threat of the first Sultan have been carried out, and would the Turk have fed his horse on the high altar of Saint Peter's? The eastern peninsula fell by internal division, and the central peninsula, as his very entrance into it shows, was fully as divided as the eastern. The French conquests presently showed how little prepared Italy was to withstand a vigorous attack, and Mahomet the Conqueror would have been another kind of enemy from Charles the Eighth. But all such dangers were warded off. The Turk still showed himself once and again in northern Italy, but only as a momentary plunderer. Otranto remained his only conquest on Italian ground, and that a conquest held for thirteen months only. Alfonso, who bears so unfavourable a character from other sides, must be at least allowed the merit of winning back the lost city for his father's realm. Otranto, and Otranto alone of Italian cities, belongs to, and heads, the list on which we inscribe the names of Buda and Belgrade and Athens and Sofia, on which it may now inscribe the names of Arta and Larissa, but from which hapless Jôannina and twice-forsaken Parga are still for a while shut out.

It was not therefore till the Turk had been driven out, not until southern Italy had been more thoroughly but not much more lastingly overrun by the armies of France, that Otranto passed for a while under the rule of Venice. The Serene Republic hardly deserved to rule in a city which she had so lately betrayed; the place seems never to have recovered from the frightful blow of the Turkish capture. The town now shows no sign either of the short Venetian occupation or of the shorter Turkish occupation. From the side of military history, this last fact is to be regretted. We must remember that in that day the Ottomans, pressing and hiring into their service the best skill of Europe, were in advance of all other people in all warlike arts. So Guiccardini remarks that the Turks, during their short occupation of Otranto, strengthened the city with works of a kind hitherto unknown in Italy, and which, as he seems to hint, Italian engineers would have done well to copy, but did not. The present fortifications date from the time of Charles the Fifth. Their extent shows at once how far the Otranto of his day had shrunk up within the bounds of the ancient city, and how far again modern Otranto has shrunk up within the walls of the Emperor. It is said that, before the Turkish capture, Otranto numbered twenty-two thousand inhabitants; it has now hardly above a tenth part of that number. As the military importance of the place has passed away, military precautions seemed to have passed away with it; the castle stands free and open; no sentinel hinders the traveller from wandering as he will within its walls. But the traveller will gain little by such wanderings except the look-out over land and sea. The town stands close upon the sea, on a small height with a valley between it and the railway station. It is entered by a gateway of late date, but of some dignity; but it is not much that the frowning entrance leads to. The visitor soon finds that Otranto, which gave its name of old to the surrounding land, which still ranks as a metropolitan city, has sunk to little more than a village. It seems to have had no share in the revived prosperity of the other towns along this coast. Its one object of any importance is the metropolitan church, and this is at once the only monument of the ancient greatness of the place, and also in a strange way the chief memorial of its momentary bondage to the barbarian.

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In order thoroughly to take in the position of the great church of Otranto in its second character, as a memorial of bondage and deliverance, it may be well to pass it by for a moment and to go first to the castle, and look out on one of the points of view which it commands. Any local guide will be able to show the traveller the Hill of the Martyrs. It stands at no great distance beyond the town, and is held to mark the site of a pagan temple. There the Turks, after their capture of the city, did as they have done in later times. Some eight or nine hundred of the people of Otranto were massacred. Their bodies lay unburied so long as the Turk kept possession; on the recovery of the city, the bodies of the martyrs, as they were now deemed, were gathered together, and a special chapel was added to the metropolitan church to receive them. There they may still be seen, piled together in cases, with inscriptions telling the story. There are skulls, legs, arms, bones of every part of the human body, some still showing the dents of barbarian weapons, some with barbarian weapons still cleaving to them. There we look on them, ghastly witnesses that, neither in their days nor in ours, is the Æthiopian at all disposed to change his skin or the leopard his spots. What the Turk did at Otranto he has done at Batak; he may, if the freak seizes him, do the like at Jôannina. Only the deeds of Otranto were at least done by the Turk as a mere outside barbarian; he was not licensed to do them by the united voice of Europe. It is only in these latest times that the Turk has been fully authorized, under all the sanctions of so-called international right, to renew at pleasure the deeds of Otranto and of Batak in lands to which Europe has twice promised freedom.

The martyrs of 1480, their sufferings, their honours, have made so deep an impression on the mind of Otranto that the metropolitan basilica has popularly lost its name of _Annunziata_, and is more commonly spoken of as the church of the martyrs. But the great church of Otranto, the church of the prelate whose style runs as "archiepiscopus Hydrutinus et primas Salentinorum," is a building of deep interest on other grounds. Like so many Italian churches, it is not very attractive without, nor is there anything specially to tarry over in its bell-tower. But even outside we may mark one or two signs of the restoration which the church underwent after its deliverance from the Turk. The west window is of that date, one of those rose-windows to which Italian, and still more Dalmatian, taste clave so long, even when all other mediæval fashions had vanished away. Of the same date is the north door, showing, like the great doors at Benevento, the Primate of the Salentines attended by the bishops and chief abbots of his province. As we go within, our first feeling is one of wonder that so much should have lived through the infidel storm and occupation. But, according to the usual practice of Mussulman conquerors, the head church of the city was turned into a mosque; there was therefore, after the first moment of havoc had passed by, no temptation on the part of the new occupants to damage the essential features of a building which had become a temple of their own worship. It is therefore not wonderful that the main features of the basilica are still there, either untouched or most skilfully restored. Seven arches rise from columns, perhaps of classical date, with capitals, mostly of different kinds of foliage, but one of which brings in human figures, after the type which was so well set in Caracalla's baths. But a more interesting study is supplied by the great crypt, or rather under-church. At Otranto, as in some of its neighbours, the craftsmen who worked below clearly allowed themselves a freer choice of forms in the carving of capitals than they ventured on above ground. The vault of the under-church rests on ranges of slender columns, with heavy abaci and with an amazing variety in the capitals. None perhaps can be called classical; but very few are simply grotesque. The few that are so are found--one does not quite see the reason of the distinction--among the half-columns against the walls. Most of them show various forms of foliage and animal figures; the old law that almost any kind of man, beast, or bird, can be pressed to serve as the volute at the corner of a capital is here most fully carried out. But the further law, that that duty is most worthily discharged by the imperial eagle, can be nowhere better studied than in the Hydrantine under-church. In some capitals again, especially in the columns of the apses, the bird of Cæsar is perched as it were on Byzantine basket-work, clearly showing which Augustus it was to whom the Salentine Primate bowed as his temporal lord. Other capitals again are much simpler, but also savouring of the East; the plain square block has mere carving on the surface. Then, of the columns themselves, some are plain, some are fluted, some are themselves carved out with various patterns. In short a rich and wonderful variety reigns in every feature of the under-church of Otranto.