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CHAPTER 4

Status

“Status” refers to an individual’s position in relation to others, especially his or her social standing within and between groups, and relative status is a major factor in interpersonal behavior. Like other aspects of identity, one’s status is imputed by others and interpreted according to subjective cultural categories. It generates expectations that can range from respect and admiration to contempt. A higher position in the social hierarchy, manifested in manifold ways within different social frameworks, is sought not just by humans but also by many kinds of animals (not only primates), which suggests that the pursuit of status may be intrinsic to communal life.¹ Material culture, clothing, funerals, architecture—everything associated with enduring or ephemeral visual experiences—both reflect and constitute the social realities associated with status.²

As a postmedieval Salentine proverb sums it up, “Vesti muntone [or zzurrune], ca pare bbarune” (Clothing of fur, or colored blue, makes a man appear to be a baron).³ The semblance of nobility is vested in clothing associated with and appropriate to that social group—an issue of economic rather than cultural capital.⁴ Appearance often constitutes the most immediately perceptible index of social status, and the preceding chapter, particularly the concluding section on the legislation of appearance, would have been appropriate here as well. However, I focus in this chapter on nonsartorial features that also constructed and restricted an individual’s place in medieval Salentine society. I discussed surnames in Chapter 1; when these were still rarities, as was the case until the thirteenth century, they stood out from the norm and distinguished their bearers. Supplementing surnames as indicators of special standing are the titles and professions cited in inscriptions or indicated by painted clothing or accoutrements; in addition, certain occupations can be extrapolated from archaeological data. In the later Middle Ages, heraldry became an important signifier of status. The construction and contents of tombs announced family wealth, not only at the moment of burial but also thereafter. Age, gender, and marital status had clear and not-so-clear implications for social standing as well. Finally, it is possible to discern some facts about the relative status of churches, monasteries, and even communities from the visual and archaeological record. All of this information about status provides a richer context for the individuals depicted or recorded in medieval Salentine art.

Titles and Professions

The most impressive title in or on a Salentine monument belongs to the Byzantine emperor Nikephoros II Phokas: the rebuilt walls of Taranto themselves credit this “pious and all-powerful autokrator” with commissioning new city ramparts in the 960s [139]. Other imperial or royal titles included in Salento inscriptions are used mainly as indicators of date and tell us little about the individual commemorated or credited in the inscription.⁵ A series of titles occurs only in Latin texts, most ostentatiously at Santa Maria del Casale in 1335 when Nicholas de Marra is identified as royal knight, royal lord of two villages, councillor, familiar, captain general, and justiciar [28.W].⁶ Of civic titles, most occur only once in the corpus of painted or carved texts: chamberlain [48], nobleman (nobilis vir) [141], royal baron [144], leader (praeses) [78.C], preceptor [28.T], village captain (kephalikos) [30], spatharios (a minor title originally applied to a bodyguard) [32.J], soldier (stratiotes) [43.A]. One Hebrew gravestone in Bari bears the title strategos even though the Justinianic law code barred Jews from the army and the title of “general” was patently impossible [10.B].⁷ The only civic titles used more than once are “count” [48, 58.A–B] and “judge” (iudex, iustitiarius) [28.W, 79.A]. The more generically respectful “lord” (dominus, kyrievontos) is employed several times [1.A, 28.T, W, 38, 48, 86.E, 144] and “lady” (domina) twice [1.A, 81.B], once for a Jewish woman. A rabbi who was also the son of a rabbi boasts this largely honorific title [18] and another has a double titulature, “rabbi” and “master” [149].⁸ This last is a vague title, but it recurs in Hebrew [150] and magister/μαΐστωρ precedes names in Latin and Greek [31, 51.A, 109.A]. One of these may contain the further specification magister muratoribus [39],⁹ and another two men are identified as sons of a magister [36, 87.A]. It is difficult to know whether and to what degree a particular title or profession conveyed status in the Middle Ages, but I have assumed that if it was worth recording in an inscription it probably was noteworthy in the broader social context.

A wide range of medieval occupations is attested in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin written documents, far more than are attested in public texts and images.¹⁰ Excavations provide further evidence for occupations not recorded in texts (the faith of these workers is unknown): Supersano had linen workers, Otranto had vintners, Apigliano and Quattro Macine had metalsmiths, and several communities produced ceramics used in the region and beyond.¹¹ If it actually had four mills, as its name implies, Quattro Macine must have had quite a few inhabitants involved in grain production. Yet none of these professionals left a secure visual or verbal record of their presence.

The professions of some individuals can nevertheless be deduced from a variety of nontextual evidence. We can extrapolate that professional stonecarvers were available from the high quality of some of the incised tombstones in all three languages. The example from Oria manifests the comfort of the carver with Hebrew and his relative unfamiliarity with Latin [81]. Many Latin funerary and dedicatory texts, such as those at San Paolo in Brindisi [26.C] and Santa Maria del Galeso [144], betray all the hallmarks of professional carving, with ruled guidelines, word divisions, regular lettering, and careful inlay. The first carver of the Andrano hospital dedication shows a distinctively angular style and a profusion of Greek ligatures [4.A]; he was more of a professional than the second carver [4.B].¹² That professional carvers were not always employed even for highly visible projects seems clear in the case of Taphouros, the ciborium carver at Cerrate; André Jacob argues that he barely knew his Greek [114.C–D].¹³

A partial roster of occupations is visible in the Last Judgment at Santo Stefano in Soleto (ca. 1440) [113.B]. While the artist has essentially followed Byzantine artistic conventions and much of the scene is formulaic (if no less affecting for that), these particular professions would have been rendered in the Greek of the models, not the local volgare, if they were irrelevant to fifteenth-century life in the region.¹⁴ Hence we find, among the damned, a builder (with ax) and woodworker, a butcher, tailor (with scissors), innkeeper (with jug), and shoemaker (with oversized tool), all of whom share space with the more obviously moralizing usurer, thief, rich man, and greedy man. Several of the labels that accompany the sinners have clearly been repainted and it is not certain that these were the original occupations, but the roster of professional malfeasance deserves to be included even if it takes us slightly beyond my chronological boundaries. The two other Last Judgment scenes in the Salento, at Santa Maria del Casale near Brindisi [28.A] and San Giovanni Evangelista at San Cesario di Lecce [108.sc], are within our time frame but much less informative: there are the usual clergy, monks, and nuns, but only the innkeeper at Brindisi is labeled and has two jugs around her(?) neck.¹⁵

In surviving works there is a preponderance of religious titles. One of several possible words used for “priest” is by far the most common title employed in Salentine inscriptions: there is one πρωτόπαπας [46] and one κληρικός [33.G], but a dozen men are titled either ἱερεύς, παπᾶς, or πρεσβυτέρος and two the more poetic θύτης [49] and θυηπόλος [114.B]. Roman-rite priests similarly outnumber all other professionals: one archpriest, one chlericus, five sacerdos or sacerdotis, and nine extant presbyters. Higher and lower clergy are also represented in public texts: seven bishops or archbishops and four deacons, including one arch- and one subdeacon.

Four men are termed monks in Greek, including one hieromonk [114.A], and a group of monks from Otranto added a collective graffito to a dedicatory text at Vaste [154.B]. We do not find in the Salento the written record of nuns characteristic of church dedications in such areas as southern Greece, and few if any nuns are depicted.¹⁶ I do not assume that such adjectives as “humble,” ταπεινός, necessarily identify a monk [143.A]; others with that adjective are priests. Monastic profession was no obstacle to textual recording, as Roman-rite abbots, a prior [22.F], and Orthodox abbots are all associated with inscriptions. One of the Orthodox abbots [109.A] and one bishop [49] have the additional designation “lord” (κύρ), thus supplementing their religious titulature with a secular one. Finally, there is an ὀβφέρτος (oblate) of Saint Stephen at Vaste, either the tonsured, kneeling priest George or his father [157.G]. Because all of these texts were visible to others, albeit in varying degrees, the titles used should be accurate; it is doubtful that anyone could style himself iudex or even σπαθάριος in public unless he had been awarded such a title or had that profession, although it is possible that the more vague magister/μαΐστωρ or even dominus/domina/κύρ were used without much standardization.¹⁷

Even when an individual patron or supplicant is untitled, his status could be communicated by proximity to those who are. Thus when George Longo invites four bishops to attend the consecration of his new hospital at Andrano, their presence announces George’s social standing at that moment; only one of the bishops, Donadeus of Castro, was required for the consecration [4.B]. Whether the coterie of regional bishops might have visited George on other occasions cannot be determined, but on this socially significant occasion they were all there, their presence recorded proudly and in perpetuity. George lacks a title, but status accrues to him through the ranks of his guests.

An act of the Latin archbishop of Taranto in 1028 was signed in Latin by ten priests, two deacons, and one subdeacon and in Greek by one protospatharios, one spatharocandidate, and two tourmarchs.¹⁸ Public texts never include so many names and titles, and neither do they address a comparably wide range of topics. Yet even the more limited public titulature confirms the overwhelming presence of Christian priests and other religious titleholders in the local built environment and in the verbal communication of local status. As discussed in Chapter 2, the fact or appearance of literacy was a source of social and cultural power.

One of the most interesting professions, because it is so rarely attested elsewhere, is surely that of painter or other artist. While none are portrayed, at least not recognizably, and no artists’ paraphernalia has been identified archaeologically, a surprising number are attested epigraphically. This is done in Greek with the phrase διὰ χειρός, by the hand of the (named) artisan. This differs from such other Italian regions as Campania, where the craftsman’s role is never acknowledged textually, and is more akin to the situation in Byzantine provinces.¹⁹ The centuries of Byzantine rule, the enduring form of most devotional inscriptions, and the persistence of epigraphic communities who could read them probably explains why there are many Greek painters’ names in the Salento.

Some of the oldest dated works in the Database, at the Santa Cristina crypt church at Carpignano, are signed in Greek by painters who work at the behest of someone else: Theophylact in 959 [32.A], Eustathios in 1020 [32.D], and Constantine in 1054/55 [32.I]. In architecture, Michael Korkouas of Corone built an unknown church at or near Vaste at the behest of a patron [154.A]. Master Daniel and Mar[tin?] had a hand in the construction or decoration of the San Biagio monastery church at San Vito dei Normanni in 1196; they share credit with the abbot and a financial supporter [109.A]. John, son of master Pellegrinus, in 1309/10 built with his own hand (χειρὶ) a church of the Theotokos at Cavallino, but the efforts of the patron are cited first [36]. The ciborium of the Orthodox monastery at Santa Maria di Cerrate gives credit to the abbot for its expense, but the priest Taphouros, further identified as the engraver (ξέστης) of the dodecasyllabic inscription, “constructed” (κατεσκεύαζε) it [114.C]. At San Nicola at Acquarica del Capo in 1282/83, painters named N—Melitinos and Nicholas co-signed in Greek a long dedicatory text that they executed in Latin [1.A]. A few years later, the rock-cut church at Li Monaci was painted by the hands, ἐζωγραφήθη δὲ χειρὶ, of a father-and-son team, Nicholas and Demetrius of Soleto [43.A]. Uniquely, at Santa Chiara alle Petrose in Taranto the undated “humble painter John” explicitly seeks remission of his sins [143.A].

As it states more than once, the famous mosaic pavement of the cathedral at Otranto was the work of the “right hand” (per dexteram, per manus) of the priest Pantaleon, in conjunction with its patron, Archbishop Jonathan [86.C–G]. When the so-called “Madonna della Sanità” in the Benedictine monastery at Nardò was repainted in 1255 it was made by “the skilled hand of Bailardus” (doctaque manu Baylardi); two others are said to have “made” it, which generally has a financial implication [78.C]. A bronze bell originally in the church of Sant’Anna in Brindisi has on its rim an inscription crediting a prior named Matthew with (initiating?) the work and the hand of a priest named Bartholomew with finishing it and a companion bell [22.F]. It is unlikely that Bishop Bailardus actually built the cathedral at Brindisi with his own hands (the verb used is composuit) but Peter, son of Gui—, may well have been the architect because his name appears modestly at the base of the apse exterior, even though no verb is preserved [21.A, C]. Only in the case of the rebuilt walls of Taranto is a recognized professional architect described as being eminent, renowned, and greatly valued. His social status is apparent from the adjectives, and in fact Jacob has shown that he is identical with the magistros and strategos Nikephoros Hexakionites known from other sources [139].

More craftsmen sign their work in Greek than in other languages; presumably their patrons permitted or encouraged them to do so. Studies of late Byzantine dedicatory inscriptions indicate that painters’ names were included only when they shared the social rank and cultural background of the patron and that this only occurred in monuments outside the major cities.²⁰ Because the Salentine craftsmen are associated most often with priests or monks, neither of whom enjoyed a particularly high status, a comparable standing likely accrued to the artists as well. We might think of them as locally distinguished (perhaps more for their apparent literacy than for artistic skill) but not among the wealthy elite.

The only secular “profession” recorded pictorially is that of the military man. I disagree strongly with Maria Stella Calò Mariani that the male embracing a woman on the ceiling at Li Monaci is the soldier Souré of the dedicatory inscription [43.A, C].²¹ The only depicted figures who are inarguably knights are a single figure at Santa Caterina at Galatina and a series of supplicants on the upper walls at Santa Maria del Casale near Brindisi. Both are Roman-rite churches built and decorated with aristocratic support and painted in 1432 and the fourteenth century, respectively. “Franciscus of Arecio” at Galatina [47.D] has been identified as the artist rather than the subject image because of the Latin fecit, but “made” very likely meant “had this made” rather than “painted it with my own hands.” In any case this is a humble supplicant addressing a single saint, even if he is clad in chain mail. That fighting was a high-status occupation is much clearer from the scale of the paintings at Brindisi [28] with their subjects often identified by inscriptions and titles, and the fact that the knights are usually accompanied by grooms, horses, and repeated heraldic markers.

The grooms in the retinue of one of the soldiers at Santa Maria del Casale are certainly servants and may even be slaves [28.D]. There are numerous documentary references to slaves in the Salento—wealthy members of all three religious groups had them—but their representation is rare. Slaves are referred to in the eleventh-century Stratigoules epitaph [32.J], unless ψυχαρίων there refers more broadly to servants.²² In addition, a southern Italian Hebrew poem of the ninth or tenth century refers to handsome males and females being brought into an unnamed local port by ship and sold by the shipmaster for a quantity of straw (women) or a measure of gold and gems (men).²³

Salentine Jews were involved in a wide variety of professions, although these are unremarked on their tombstones (nebulous references to “rabbi” are unlikely to indicate a line of work). When Benjamin of Tudela visited in the twelfth century he noted that the Jews of Brindisi were all involved in dyeing.²⁴ More information comes from the Jewish communities displaced from southern Italy (including Apulia, Calabria, and Sicily) in the sixteenth century. In Corfu the newly arrived Jews were active in moneylending, dyeing, leatherworking, and commerce; in Thessalonike they were mariners, fishermen, bricklayers, and tavernkeepers, unlike the exiled Jews from Rome, who tended to be merchants, doctors, and lawyers.²⁵ This accords with scattered documentary information about what the Jews were doing in the medieval Salento.

Heraldry

Beginning in the mid-twelfth century, the ability to employ heraldic symbols systematically on one’s person, household, and possessions was one of the most obvious European indexes of status.²⁶ Heraldry was intimately connected to family identity, kinship, and lineage. Even some Jewish Italian families adopted heraldic symbols in the late Middle Ages in clear imitation of highly regarded contemporaries [149.B].²⁷

In 1483 the well-traveled Dominican Felix Fabri noted a wide range of ways that visitors to holy sites left a record of their presence: by painting their coats of arms or pasting paper copies to church walls; using chisels and mallets to carve them; or even hanging their shields. He goes on to criticize these visual intrusions into the sanctity of the sites (parietes deturpabant).²⁸ Notwithstanding such criticism, in the material culture of the Salento heraldry appears in the form of painting and carving. There are impressive compositions high on the walls of Santa Maria del Casale, where many of the panels are framed with a series of painted shields or other insignia, sometimes echoed in such compositional details as banners, horse blankets, and shields [28. I, N, Q, R, V]. In other panels, one or more painted shields testify to patronage at a high level [28.C, N; Plate 6]. At other sites, stemmata (coats of arms) are painted on roof beams.²⁹ Comparable to this ostentatious painted display is the carved shield on the relief slab of a judge (iudex) at Santa Maria dell’Alto [79.A] or the tomb of Nicholas Castaldo’s unnamed wife at San Paolo in Brindisi [26.C] and, in larger format, on a separate slab in the same church [26.D]. Whether painted or carved, these constitute formal, public statements of family status just as valid and even more legible than a verbal text. In the Middle Ages, the Anjou or Del Balzo coats of arms were immediately recognizable, and perhaps the Di Tocco and Di Marra were as well, at least to certain audiences. But like most names from the past, the insignia at Santa Maria del Casale and elsewhere have lost their visual impact and are seldom recognizable today.³⁰

A curious painted panel at Santa Maria del Casale [28.J, L] may postdate the badly abraded frescoes it covers (I was not able to examine the stratigraphy up close). It is certainly medieval. The left part of this “triptych” has a red helmet with white crest balanced on a white shield with diagonal red cross.³¹ The faint letters below, “IOHS.… / RODI,” refer to the order of Saint John of Jerusalem and Rhodes, to whom all the Templar possessions passed within a few years after the formal process against them took place in 1310, quite likely in Santa Maria del Casale itself.³² It is tempting to read in this panel a commemoration of the local event and a visual assertion of Hospitaller status vis-à-vis the Templars. The adjacent panel is more elaborate: a diagonally balanced shield at the base, decorated with three smaller shields, supports a red mantle, a helmet with visor, a crown with a golden Gothic m on top, and two large black-and-white crests. The right-hand panel has a black shield with gold cross supporting a more elaborate black helmet with a visor and what may be a griffon crest. To the right is yet another shield, this time gold with three rampant red lions, on which are balanced a vair-lined red mantle, two crests (unless these are elaborations of the cape), and a large golden n. The fur-lined mantles and the crowns are royal or princely emblems,³³ and the diagonal shield that supports additional insignia is the typical representation of the complete armorial image in medieval heraldic rolls. Similarly elaborate crests, one with an animal head, are worn by supplicants elsewhere on the same wall [28.D].

While I cannot fully unpack these impressive icons of power, I am confident that they were once readable by those visitors to Brindisi who possessed the heraldic code, including all of the high-ranking patrons of the church’s other painted images. Moreover, I would liken these heraldic images to painted or carved texts: their very presence was impressive even to those who could not “read” them, enhancing the status of the entire church. As Detlev Kraack has discussed, noblemen and members of chivalric or fraternal orders proudly demonstrated their presence at important sites—and even at less-important sites en route to those destinations—by means of permanent and ephemeral displays of insignia.³⁴ These “signs of honor” were important records of passage and of social relations. The insignia at Santa Maria del Casale record the presence of mutually supportive noblemen of equal rank.

A second corpus of heraldic material consists not of formally carved or painted shields but of more numerous small-scale examples, either quickly sketched onto or, far more often, incised into a plastered wall [e.g., 1.pg, 3.pg, 54.pg, 78.pg].³⁵ The evidence of subsequent incision provides a terminus ante quem for the frescoes, but it is not easy to assign dates because heraldry remained important long after the early fifteenth century. I think that all the small markers of status—or wannabe status—in the Database are from the late Middle Ages or early modern era.³⁶ In those cases where pictorial graffiti are in close proximity to verbal graffiti, the morphology of the latter can be compared with securely dated examples, such as the graffito of an archpriest at Nociglia of 1472 [80.B]). Such details as the preference for minuscule betrays a late date in Greek graffiti, while classicizing capitals, stylized script, and classical names indicate a postmedieval date for Latin graffiti. Assessing the age of undated graffiti, especially pictorial graffiti, is a risky question of connoisseurship.

A bigger question for the purposes of this chapter is whether all of these graffitists could actually have had a blazon indicating their family status. By the thirteenth century even those who were not of noble birth were permitted coats of arms, a usage formalized in northern Italy in the next century: according to Bartolo di Sassoferrato, so long as one did not falsely claim a title or damage the property or reputation of others, inventing a coat of arms was permissible.³⁷ Therefore, in some cases a painted or incised stemma indicated an aristocratic presence, however that “presence” is defined, while in other cases these might be harmless inventions. I suggest that isolated shield graffiti are expressions of desired rather than real status, whereas groupings of heraldic insignia are likely to be genuine symbolic communications of at least relative social status. This finds some confirmation in the isolated shield incised into a tombstone in Trani that presumably postdates the Hebrew inscription dated 1290/91 [149]. The “owner” of the shield could have been a descendant of the person named on the stone, or indeed any person with access to the tomb, although the fact that bones were found undisturbed may indicate that the graffitist was Jewish.³⁸

At Masseria Lo Noce, graffiti are clustered exclusively on the archangel Michael who guards an arcosolium tomb on the right wall [54.st; Plate 10]. A large, partly cross-hatched shield occupies the space below the angel’s left arm and his spear; at the lower-left corner, over and around his legs, are three more shields, all bearing different designs. Their presence on the crypt’s sole figure in military pose is clearly quite deliberate and it is tempting to see the careful distinctions among the shields as similarly meaningful. Their “realism” is reinforced by the incision of fictive loops for “hanging” the graffiti shields. But could the different decorations actually be products of creative invention rather than memory? Were the owners of these shields themselves present to insert their mark on Saint Michael, or were they done by members of the household or even by persons more removed from legitimate heraldry? At the moment these questions are unanswerable.

Another assemblage of individualized shields, in this case more deliberately painted, is found in the second fresco layer on a pilaster at Alezio’s Santa Maria della Lizza [Plate 2]. Here an impression of hierarchy is palpable: two of the shields are significantly larger than the others, prominently “hanging” on painted hooks in the top row. These large shields, like several of the smaller ones, are rendered in more than one color, and both are further associated with a figural outline near the apex: a profiled male head for the left shield and a profiled bird for the right. These profiles are probably additional heraldic elements (crests?). The network of smaller shields at Alezio asserted to medieval viewers that the holders of the large shields had numerous followers or supporters. Unfortunately, I have not been able to identify any of these individuals.

The presence of white shields with black crosses on the ceiling of the Cripta del Crocefisso at Ugento [151.D] has spurred several studies arguing that they signify patronage by the Teutonic Order, which has ample attestation in the Salento.³⁹ On the other hand, there are also white shields with red crosses, suggesting to one scholar patronage by the Templars, who are entirely unattested in the region.⁴⁰ The latest scholar to weigh in on the matter, Hubert Houben, does think this was a Teutonic church, originally Santa Maria dei Teutonici, known from fifteenth-century texts; he considers the red-crossed shields either a matter of artistic license or an “homage” to the Templars on the part of the Teutonic Order.⁴¹ I am not convinced that this ceiling decoration is informative about individual or group patronage, just as I do not think the embracing couple at Li Monaci [43.C] represents people named in the dedicatory inscription. Ceilings, which could barely be seen in the dark and smoky interior of a crypt church, were not the place to make personal statements even though some large built churches discreetly, almost invisibly, included shields among the other decorative elements on their painted ceiling beams.

Nonheraldic pictorial graffiti—animals, buildings, faces—are difficult to connect with status in specific ways. They may have had such meaning to their creators, but what subsequent viewers would be impressed by them? Verbal graffiti that included the names of their inscribers might have had additional associations with status but they are more appropriately discussed in Chapter 6 as practices in places of worship.

Family Status

Both Christians and Jews were keenly aware of their family’s social standing. Individuals recorded in documents as owning property were certainly among the Salentine well-to-do, and these included the ancestors of Ahima‘az, who, in the ninth and tenth centuries, owned one or more vineyards, fields, orchards, and gardens.⁴² Participating in literary and cultural life, like Ahima‘az himself and his piyyutim-composing forebears, also conveyed status among Jews. For Christians, the equivalent may have been life as a cleric or monk, but postmedieval proverbs indicate that these latter activities were not always held in high esteem.⁴³

Learned and well-to-do Jewish families whose daughters were betrothed to men of a lower intellectual or social level were keenly aware of the fact. Unequal matches were made rarely, and only under extenuating circumstances, for they violated the norms of social hierarchy and social mobility.⁴⁴ A comprehensive wish list of attributes for a Jewish son-in-law is provided by a ninth-century mother, an ancestor of Ahima‘az, who wants the best for her daughter and balks at an engagement below her station:

I will not give her out. [Only] if he will be like her father, [learned] in Torah, in Mishnah, in Scripture, in Law and Logic, in Sifri and Sifra, in Midrash and in Gemarah, in meticulous observance of minor and major commandments, in intelligence and wisdom, in astuteness and cunning, in wealth and grandeur, in courage and exercise of authority regarding the observance and precepts and commandments, in fearfulness and humbleness, and that he have every [other] virtue.⁴⁵

Despite her mother’s wishes, Cassia is married off to an unworthy relative once her father, the sage Shephatiah, perceives how nubile she has become. It is unlikely that the range and depth of textual knowledge expected by the girl’s mother could have been matched by any but the highest levels of local Jewish intellectuals. Of all the material evidence, only a late Hebrew tombstone from Trani commemorates a “very learned” individual [150]. The degree to which a comparable “package” of excellence and stature was desired by the region’s Christian mothers is unknown.

One very public method of advertising family status was to construct or renovate a church or chapel that would then serve as a repository of family memory, with privileged tombs, texts, or images on the exterior or inside. Such Eigenkirchen were very common in the Orthodox world; they became less common in Europe after the twelfth-century Gregorian reformers’ efforts to centralize religious control.⁴⁶ When John of Ugento constructed a “basilica” at Acquarica del Capo [1.A], he may have been “motivated by the remission of his sins and benefit of his soul and those of his parents,” but at the same time he was providing a place of worship for a larger group, the inhabitants of the village where he may have been only an occasional visitor. This is the only regional text that announces a whole basilica rather than a chapel [cf. 35, 47.A]. Jewish patrons, too, could publicize family and status by renovating parts of their local synagogues; several such efforts were recorded in inscriptions to be read to and by the whole community [9, 50]. While there must have been many small family churches, used especially for burials, even family-funded synagogues always served a larger community because a quorum of ten men (a minyan) was required for many religious services. A minyan is explicitly identified as patrons of a synagogue at Trani [147].

By the later Middle Ages, aristocrats and religious elites often had their own spaces for worship, either in separate buildings or in elaborate chapels within existing structures. At Santa Maria del Casale, the early fourteenth-century vita cycles of Saint Catherine on the south presbytery wall are usually associated with Catherine of Valois, Courtenay, and Constantinople, the second wife of Philip of Anjou, Prince of Taranto [28.N].⁴⁷ There are later textual references to an Angevin dynastic chapel, but this was probably in the north transept, which contains a large fictive textile with the Angevin arms. It is also possible that, despite their placement high up on the nave walls, the repeated depictions of large shields and of small family groups being presented to the Virgin and Child served as focuses of family devotion within the large basilica, even if these ostensible family spaces were not delimited architecturally.

In 1383, Bishop Donadeus of Castro built a chapel in the local cathedral with money from the property of his deceased parents, endowing it with those funds [35]. This literal family chapel was visible to anyone attending services in the cathedral. The early fifteenth-century castle chapel at Copertino [42], the “Cappella Maremonti” in the parish church at Campi Salentina,⁴⁸ and the “Cappella Orsini” at Santa Caterina in Galatina are all examples of late medieval aristocrats’ family spaces inside larger churches. The latter occupied part of the south aisle of the Galatina basilica; a projecting apse in the south wall boasts its own altar and a surrounding decorative program with scenes of the life of the Virgin.⁴⁹ How the family used this special space within the five-aisle basilica built by Raimondello del Balzo Orsini is not known, as the cenotaph of the founder and later his son were located in the sanctuary, not here [47.C]. I wonder whether this Orsini chapel is equivalent to the “chapel of Saint Catherine” announced in Greek over the doorway into this part of the church [47.A].

Postmortem Status

From the moment a person died, his or her status was manifested in the location and form of the tomb and the extent and kinds of activities at the funeral and afterward. In addition, the quality and range of objects found in graves reveals something about the occupants’ lives and communal standing. By the later Middle Ages the dead in Salentine villages were interred within their communities; this may not have been the case earlier, when burials seem to have been outside of the settlements, in and around funerary churches.⁵⁰ Most inhumations took place in simple rectangular or ovoid tombs cut into the natural bedrock and oriented east to west [102–103]. Several of these cemeteries are quite extensive and most have a church as their nucleus. Some of the graves are lined with stone slabs, but in the majority of cases the covering slabs required to seal in the odor of decomposition are missing. Within the grave the tomb could be flat or curved and with or without a stone “cushion” or terra-cotta tile to keep the head of the deceased lifted up and facing east toward the eventual Second Coming.⁵¹ By the eleventh century, most bodies were interred with heads to the west and feet to the east.⁵² In most of the excavated village sites, tombs were reused for subsequent burials, presumably for family members; in these cases most of the earlier, disarticulated bones were removed to an adjacent ossuary or charnel pit, pushed to the foot of the tomb, or left underneath the new corpse.⁵³ One grave at Quattro Macine (XXIII) contained the remains of seven individuals [103].⁵⁴ Individual burials were also possible, however, including several fourteenth-century examples inside the church of Santa Maria della Strada at Taurisano.⁵⁵

At the village of Quattro Macine, the graves closest to the north wall of the twelfth-century church were for infants, including one newborn [103], and this concentration also occurred at Apigliano. It has been suggested that rain dripping from the church roof would convey a special blessing to these privileged children,⁵⁶ but since not all children were interred in this way the location was also likely to have been based on economic factors linked to status.⁵⁷ One fetus was interred in an amphora far from the cemeteries around both the Byzantine and Norman-era churches at Quattro Macine; stillborn and probably unbaptized, it may well have been buried at home.⁵⁸ I have suggested elsewhere that the container on the ground in front of the praying Daniel at Masseria Lo Noce [54.A] may represent a child’s amphora burial, although the form of that amphora is not the same as contemporary local production.⁵⁹ Daniel and his putative dead child are painted on the intrados of an arcosolium, so even if my amphora suggestion cannot be proved, the arcosolium form underscores the likelihood of a privileged burial there.

The most privileged medieval dead were buried inside a church in an arcosolium, a floor tomb, or a freestanding sarcophagus. The much-loved Stratigoules was interred under an arcosolium in the north wall at the west end of the rock-cut church at Carpignano [32.J]. Other arcosolia, such as the pair in the lower church of Santa Lucia at Brindisi, probably served a comparable function. There were several floor tombs for children inside Santa Maria della Strada at Taurisano.⁶⁰ In the two-story crypt church of Saint Bartholomew at Casalrotto, near Mottola, the subfloor tombs in the lower church presumably were reserved for important monks.⁶¹

Stone sarcophagi were used on occasion to hold one or more special bodies. The example of uncertain date inside San Cesario di Lecce may have held the church’s founder, a priest, sometime after 1329, but because another sarcophagus was also found under the church this is uncertain [108.pg].⁶² The figured sarcophagus now displayed in the crypt of the Taranto cathedral is a more status-conscious example, even if the original occupant’s name is now unknown [140.F], for it depicts in high relief a deceased man being lifted aloft by flanking angels. Either identifying information was painted alongside and is now lost or the sarcophagus was originally placed in a family chapel such that the occupant’s identification was apparent.

The carved multilevel cenotaph of Raimondello del Balzo Orsini (d. 1406) in the church he founded at Galatina is unique in this region and period [47.C]. Brightly painted and gilded, its form echoed that of such royal Neapolitan tombs as that of King Robert the Wise in Santa Chiara and it served as a model for the funerary monument of Raimondello’s son, Giovanni Antonio del Balzo Orsini, installed in the newly enlarged sanctuary at Galatina in the 1460s.⁶³ Such an elaborate tomb marker, complete with coat of arms, marks the honoree as one of the most exalted dead.

At Quattro Macine, the small Byzantine church of the tenth or eleventh century contained a single tomb before the altar, housing a male aged thirty to thirty-five [102].⁶⁴ While it seemed likely that this burial was the raison d’être for the church even though such a location for a tomb was unprecedented in Byzantine churches,⁶⁵ carbon-14 dating indicates that the man was actually interred during the thirteenth or fourteenth century.⁶⁶ Whatever the date, his was certainly a privileged burial. This was also the case for the seven graves inside the late medieval church (San Nicola?) at Apigliano, where infants’ tombs are arrayed nearest the altar and adults farther away. The centralized adult tomb (XXXVI), with three skeletons, is the only one anywhere at Apigliano constructed with squared limestone blocks, another indicator of the occupants’ social status.⁶⁷

Although the identity of a single person buried inside a church might not be forgotten quickly, the graves of individuals and families buried outdoors almost certainly required the presence of identifying markers. Carved tombstones, often with decoration on two or more sides, identify the deceased of all three religious and linguistic groups in the Salento. In every case, a formally carved stone must have been a veritable status billboard. Even with its Greek text written in hard-to-read minuscule, the stone that marked the grave of Nicholas, son of Vitalius Ferriaci, in 1330 would have been a credit to the family, attracting viewers’ eyes to both sides with their reliefs, compass-drawn rosettes, and alternating colors [156.A]. This marker contrasts significantly with a roughly contemporary gravestone from San Cataldo [107], which, while much larger, lacks relief or inlay and is carved on one side only with irregularly sized and poorly spaced letters. Nevertheless, the sheer size of this less-well-carved marker surely was meant to impress. The same must have been true for Jewish tombstones: some are extremely large [16, 135]; one has text emphasized in red [16] and with shofars and menorahs incised on sides and front; others have Latin and Hebrew texts on two sides and incised menorahs and shofars on the others.