Sketches from the Subject and Neighbour Lands of Venice Part 7

It will be remembered that, early in the war, the insurgents were attacking the town of Trebinje, and, among later rumours, were tales of renewed attacks in that quarter. But at the time of our travellers'

journey the road was perfectly open, and no actual fighting was going on in the neighbourhood. Trebinje however was on the watch: the plain before the town was full of tents, and, long before the town or the tents were within sight, the sight of actual campaigners gave a keen feeling of what was going on. Flour is to be had in the stony land only by seeking it within the Austrian frontier, and to the Austrian frontier accordingly the packhorses go, with a strong convoy of Turkish soldiers to guard them. Twice therefore in the course of their journey, going and coming back, did our travellers fall in with the Turkish troops on their way to and from the land of food. For men who had never before seen anything of actual warfare there was something striking in the first sight of soldiers, not neat and trim as for some day of parade, but ragged, dirty, and weather-stained with the actual work of war. And there was something more striking still in the thought that these were the old enemies of Europe and of Christendom, the representatives of the men who stormed the gates of the New Rome and who overthrew the chivalry of Burgundy and Poland at Nikopolis and at Varna. But the Turk in a half-European uniform has lost both his picturesqueness and his terrors, and the best troops in Europe would be seen to no great advantage on such a day and on such a march. And perhaps Turkish soldiers, like all other men and things, look differently according to the eyes with which they are looked at. Some eyes noticed them as being, under all their disadvantages, well-made and powerful-looking men. Other eyes looked with less pleasure on the countenances of the barbarians who were brought to spread havoc over Christian lands. All however agreed that, as the armed votaries of the Prophet pa.s.sed before them, the unmistakeable features of the aethiop were not lacking among the many varieties of countenance which they displayed. But the Paynim force, though it did no actual deed of arms before the eyes of our party, did something more than simply march along the road. The realities of warfare came out more vividly when, at every fitting point, skirmishers were thrown off to occupy each of the peaked hills and other prominent points which line the road like so many watchtowers.

The armed force went and came back that day without any need for actually using their arms. Insurgent attacks on the convoys are a marked feature of the present war; but our travellers had not the opportunity of seeing such a skirmish. Still before long they did see one most speaking sign of war and its horrors. By the banks of the Trebenitza a burned village first came in sight. The sight gives a kind of turn to the whole man; still a burned village is not quite so ugly in reality as it sounds in name. The stone walls of the houses are standing; it is only the roofs that are burned off. But who burned the village, and why? He would be a very rash man who should venture to say, without the personal witness of those who burned it, or saw it burned. Was it a Christian village burned by Turks? Was it a Turkish village burned by Christians? Was it a Christian village burned by the insurgents because its inhabitants refused to join in the insurrection? Was it a Christian village burned by its own inhabitants rather than leave anything to fall into the hands of the Turks? If rumour is to be trusted, cases of all these four kinds have happened in the course of the war. All that can be said is that the village has a church and shows no signs of a mosque, and that, while the houses were burned, the church was not. The burned village lay near a point of the river which it is usually possible to ford in a carriage. This time however, the Trebenitza--a river which, like so many Greek rivers, loses itself in a _katabothra_--was far too full to be crossed in this way, and our travellers had to leave their carriage and horses and get to Trebinje as they could. After some scrambling over stones, a boat was found, which strongly suggested those legends of Charon which are far from having died out of the memory of the Christians of the East. A primitive punt it was, with much water in it, which Charon slowly ladled out with a weapon which suggested the notion of a gigantic spoon. Charon himself was a ragged object enough, but, as became his craft, he seemed master of many tongues. We may guess that his native speech would be Slave, but one of the company recognized some of his talk for Turkish, and the demand for the two oboli of old was translated into the strange phrase of "dieci groschen." To our travellers the words suggested was the expiring coinage of the German Empire; they did not then take it how widely the _groat_ had spread its name in the south-eastern lands. At first hearing, the name sounded strange on the banks of the Trebenitza; but in the absence of literal _groats_ or _groschen_, the currency of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy was found in practice to do just as well. Then our four pilgrims crossed and crossed again, the second time with much gladness of heart, as for a while things looked as if no means of getting back again were forthcoming, and it was not every one of the party that had a heart stout enough even to think of trying to swim or wade. Charon's second appearance was therefore hailed with special pleasure.

From the crossing-place to Trebinje itself our travellers had to trudge as they could along a fearfully rough Turkish path--not rougher though than some Dalmatian and Montenegrin paths--till they reached the town itself, which this delay gave them but little time to examine. The suburbs stretched along the hillside; below, the tents of the Turkish troops were pitched on one side; the Mahometan burial-ground lay on the other. After so much time and pains had been spent in getting to Trebinje, a glimpse of Trebinje itself was all that was to be had. But even a glimpse of Eastern life was something, particularly a glimpse of Eastern life where Eastern life should not be, in a land which once was European. It is the rule of the Turk, it is the effect of his four hundred years of oppression, which makes Trebinje to differ alike from Tzetinje and from Cattaro. The dark, dingy, narrow, streets, the dim arches and vaults, the bazaar, with the Turk--more truly the renegade Slave--squatting in his shop, the gate with its Arabic inscription, the mosques with their minarets contrasting with the church with its disused campanile, all come home to us with a feeling not only of mere strangeness, but of something which is where it ought not to be. It is with a feeling of relief that, after our second trudge, our second voyage, our second meeting with the convoy, we reach the heights, we pa.s.s the guard-houses, and find ourselves again in Christendom. Presently Ragusa comes within sight; we are in no mood to discuss the respective merits of the fallen aristocratic commonwealths and of the rule of the Apostolic King. King or Doge or Rector, we may be thankful for the rule of any of them, so as it be not the rule of the Sultan. The difference between four hundred years of civilized government and four hundred years of barbarian tyranny has made the difference between Ragusa and Trebinje.

CATTARO.

1875.

[I have left this paper, with a few needful corrections, as it was published in March 1876. Since then, it must be remembered, much has changed, especially in the way of boundaries--to say nothing of a carriage-way to Tzetinje.

Neither Cattaro nor Budua is any longer either the end of Christendom or the end of the Dalmatian kingdom of the Austrian. That kingdom has been enlarged by the harbour of Spizza, won from the Turk by Montenegrin valour and won from the Montenegrin by Austrian diplomacy. But Christendom must now be looked on as enlarged by the whole Montenegrin sea-coast, a form of words which I could not have used either in 1875 or in 1877. Of this sea-coast I shall have something to say in another paper.]

The end of a purely Dalmatian pilgrimage will be Cattaro. He who goes further along the coast will pa.s.s into lands that have a history, past and present, which is wholly distinct from that of the coast which he has. .h.i.therto traced from Zara--we might say from Capo d'Istria--onwards.

We have not reached the end of the old Venetian dominion--for that we must carry on our voyage to Crete and Cyprus. But we have reached the end of the nearly continuous Venetian dominion--the end of the coast which, save at two small points, was either Venetian or Ragusan--the end of that territory of the two maritime commonwealths which they kept down to their fall in modern times, and in which they have been succeeded by the modern Dalmatian kingdom. After Cattaro and the small district of Budua beyond it, the Venetian territory did indeed once go on continuously as far as Epid.a.m.nos, Dyrrhachion, or Durazzo, while, down to the fall of the Republic, it went on, in the form of scattered outposts, much farther. But, for a long time past, Venice had held beyond Budua only islands and outlying points; and most of these, except the seven so-called Ionian Islands and a few memorable points on the neighbouring mainland, had pa.s.sed away from her before her fall. Cattaro is the last city of the present Austrian dominion; it is, till we reach the frontier of the modern Greek kingdom, the last city of Christendom. The next point at which the steamer stops will land the traveller on what is now Turkish ground. But the distinction is older than that; he will now change from a Slavonic mainland with a half-Italian fringe on its coast to an Albanian, that is an Old-Illyrian, land, with a few points here and there which once came under Italian influences. It is not at an arbitrary point that the dominion in which the Apostolic King has succeeded the Serene Republic comes to an end. With Cattaro then the Dalmatian journey and the series of Dalmatian cities will naturally end.

Cattaro is commonly said to have been the Ascrivium or Askrourion of Pliny and Ptolemy, one of the Roman towns which Pliny places after Epidauros--that Epidauros which was the parent of Ragusa--towards the south-east. And, as it is placed between Rhizinion and Butua, which must be Risano and Budua, one can hardly doubt that the identification is right. But though Ascrivium is described as a town of Roman citizens, it has not, like some of its neighbours, any history in purely Roman times. It first comes into notice in the pages of Constantine Porphyrogenitus, and it will therefore give us for the last time the privilege of studying topography in company with an Emperor. In his pages the city bears a name which is evidently the same as the name which it bears still, but which the august geographer seizes on as the subject of one of his wonderful bits of etymology.

Cattaro with him is Dekatera, and we read:

[Greek: hoti to kastron ton Dekateron hermeneuetai te Rhomaion dialekto estenomenon kai peplegmenon.]

We are again driven to ask, Which is the dialect of the Romans? What word either of Greek or of Latin can the Emperor have got hold of? At the same time he had got a fair notion of the general position of Cattaro, though he runs off into bits of exaggeration which remind us of Giraldus' description of Llanthony. The city stands at the end of an inlet of the sea fifteen or twenty miles long, and it has mountains around it so high that it is only in fair summer weather that the sun can be seen; in winter Dekatera never enjoys his presence. There certainly is no place where it is harder to believe that the smooth waters of the narrow, lake-like inlet, with mountains on each side which it seems as if one could put out one's hand and touch, are really part of the same sea which dashes against the rocks of Ragusa.

They end in a meadow-like coast which makes one think of Bourget or Trasimenus rather than of Hadria. The Dalmatian voyage is well ended by the sail along the _Bocche_, the loveliest piece of inland sea which can be conceived, and whose sh.o.r.es are as rich in curious bits of political history as they are in scenes of surpa.s.sing natural beauty. The general history of the district consists in the usual tossing to and fro between the various powers which have at different times been strong in the neighbourhood. Cattaro--[Greek: ta kato Dekatera]--was in the reign of Basil the Macedonian besieged and taken by Saracens, who presently went on unsuccessfully to besiege Ragusa.

And, as under Byzantine rule it was taken by Saracens, so under Venetian rule it was more than once besieged by Turks. In the intermediate stages we get the usual alternations of independence and of subjection to all the neighbouring powers in turn, till in 1419 Cattaro finally became Venetian. At the fall of the Republic it became part of the Austrian share of the spoil. When the spoilers quarrelled, it fell to France. When England, Russia, and Montenegro were allies, the city joined the land of which it naturally forms the head, and Cattaro became the Montenegrin haven and capital. When France was no longer dangerous, and the powers of Europe came together to part out other men's goods, Austria calmly asked for Cattaro back again, and easily got it. To this day the land keeps many signs of the endless changes which it has undergone. We enter the mouth of the gulf, where, eighty years ago, the land was Ragusan on the left hand and Venetian on the right. But Ragusa and Venice between them did not occupy the whole sh.o.r.e of the _Bocche_; neither at this day does the whole of it belong to that Dalmatian kingdom which has taken the place of both the old republics. We soon reach the further of the two points where Ragusan jealousy preferred an infidel to a Christian neighbour. At Sutorina the Turkish territory nominally comes down to the sea; nominally we say, for if the soil belongs to the Sultan, the road, the most important thing upon it, belongs to the Dalmatian King. And if the Turk comes down to the _Bocche_ at this end, at the other end the Montenegrin, if he does not come down to the water, at least looks down upon it. In this furthest corner of Dalmatia political elements, old and new, come in which do not show themselves at Zara and Spalato.

In short, on the _Bocche_ we have really got into another region, national and religious, from the nearer parts of the country. We have hitherto spoken of an Italian fringe on a Slavonic mainland; we might be tempted to speak of Italian cities with a surrounding Slavonic country. On the sh.o.r.es of the _Bocche_ we may drop those forms of speech. We can hardly say that here there is so much as an Italian fringe. We feel at last we have reached the land which is thoroughly Slavonic. The _Bocchesi_ at once proclaim themselves as the near kinsmen of the unconquered race above them, from whom indeed they differ only in the accidents of their political history. For all purposes but those of war and government, Cattaro is more truly the capital of Montenegro than Tzetinje. In one sense indeed Cattaro is more Italian than Ragusa. All Ragusa, though it has an Italian varnish, is Slavonic at heart. At Cattaro it would be truer to speak of a Slavonic majority and an Italian minority. And along these coasts, together with this distinct predominance of the Slavonic nationality, we come also, if not to the predominance, at all events to the greatly increased prominence, of that form of Christianity to which the Eastern Slave naturally tends. Elsewhere in Dalmatia, as we have on the Slavonic body a narrow fringe of Italian speech, art, and manners, so we have a narrow fringe of the religion of the Old Rome skirting a body belonging to the New. Here, along with the Slavonic nationality, the religion of Eastern Christendom makes itself distinctly seen. In the city of Cattaro the Orthodox Church is still in a minority, but it is a minority not far short of a majority.

Outside its walls, the Orthodox outnumber the Catholics. In short, when we reach Cattaro, we have very little temptation to fancy ourselves in Italy or in any part of Western Christendom. We not only know, but feel, that we are on the Byzantine side of the Hadriatic; that we have, in fact, made our way into Eastern Europe.

And East and West, Slave and Italian, New Rome and Old, might well struggle for the possession of the land and of the water through which we pa.s.s from Ragusa to our final goal at Cattaro. The strait leads us into a gulf; another narrow strait leads us into an inner gulf; and on an inlet again branching out of that inner gulf lies the furthest of Dalmatian cities. The lower city, Cattaro itself, [Greek: ta kato Dekatera], seems to lie so quietly, so peacefully, as if in a world of its own from which nothing beyond the sh.o.r.es of its own _Bocche_ could enter, that we are tempted to forget, not only that the spot has been the scene of so many revolutions through so many ages, but that it is even now a border city, a city on the marchland of contending powers, creeds, and races. But, if we once look up to the mountains, we see signs both of the past and of the present, which may remind us of the true nature and history of the land in which we are. In some of the other smaller Dalmatian towns, and at other points along the coast, we see castles perched on mountain peaks or ledges at a height which seems almost frightful; but the castle of Cattaro and the walls leading up to it, walls which seem to leap from point to point of the almost perpendicular hill, form surely the most striking of all the mountain fortresses of the land. The castle is perhaps all the more striking, nestling as it does among the rocks, than if it actually stood, like some others, on a peak or crest of the mountain. One thinks of Alexander's Aornos, and indeed the name of Aornos might be given to any of these Dalmatian heights. The lack of birds, great and small, especially the lack of the eagles and vultures that one sees in other mountain lands, is a distinct feature in the aspect of the Dalmatian hills and of their immediate borders, Montenegrin and Turkish. But, while the castle stands as if no human power could reach it, much less fight against it, there are other signs of more modern date which remind us that there are points higher still where no one can complain that the art of fighting has been unknown in any age. Up the mountain, during part of its course skirting the castle walls, climbs the winding road--the staircase rather--which leads from Cattaro to Tzetinje. On it climbs, up and up, till it is lost in the higher peaks; long before the traveller reaches the frontier line which divides Dalmatia and Montenegro, long before he reaches the ridge to which he looks up from Cattaro and its gulf, he has begun to look down, not only on the gulf and the city, but on the mountain castle itself, as something lying far below his feet. From below, Cattaro seems like the end of the world. As we climb the mountain paths, we soon find that it is but a border post on the frontier of a vast world beyond it, a world in whose past history Cattaro has had some share, a world whose history is not yet over.

The city of Cattaro itself is small, standing on a narrow ledge between the gulf and the base of the mountain. It carries the features of the Dalmatian cities to what any one who has not seen Trau will call their extreme point. But, though the streets of Cattaro are narrow, yet they are civilized and airy-looking compared with those of Trau, and the little paved squares, as so often along this coast, suggest the memory of the ruling city. The memory of Venice is again called up by the graceful little sc.r.a.ps of its characteristic architecture which catch the eye ever and anon among the houses of Cattaro. The landing-place, the _marina_, the s.p.a.ce between the coast and the Venetian wall, where we pa.s.s for the last time under the winged lion over the gate, has put on the air of a _boulevard_. But the forms and costume of _Bocchesi_ and Montenegrins, the men of the gulf, with their arms in their girdles, no less than the men of the Black Mountain, banish all thought that we are anywhere but where we really are, at one of the border points of Christian and civilized Europe. If in the sons of the mountains we see the men who have in all ages held out against the invading Turk, we see in their brethren of the coast the men who, but a few years back, brought Imperial, Royal, and Apostolic Majesty to its knees. The same thought is brought home to us in another form. The antiquities of Cattaro are mainly ecclesiastical, and among them the Orthodox church, standing well in one of the open places, claims a rank second only to the _duomo_. Here some may see for the first time the ecclesiastical arrangements of Eastern Christendom; and those who do not wish to see a church thrown wide open from end to end, those who would cleave alike to the rood-beam of Lubeck, the _jube_ of Albi, and the _cancelli_ of Saint Clement, to the old screen which once was at Wimborne and to the new screen which now is at Lichfield, may be startled at the first sight of the Eastern _eikonostasis_ blocking off apse and altar utterly from sight. The arrangements of the Eastern Church may indeed be seen in places much nearer than Cattaro, at Trieste, at Wiesbaden, in London itself; but in all these places the Eastern Church is an exotic, standing as a stranger on Western ground. At Cattaro the Orthodox Church is on its own ground, standing side by side on equal terms with its Latin rival, pointing to lands where the _Filioque_ is unknown and where the Bishop of the Old Rome has ever been deemed an intruder. The building itself is a small Byzantine church, less Byzantine in fact in its outline than the small churches of the Byzantine type at Zara, Spalato, and Trau. The single dome rises, not from the intersection of a Greek cross, but from the middle of a single body, and, resting as it does on pointed arches, it suggests the thought of Perigueux and Angouleme. But this arrangement, which is shared by a neighbouring Latin church, is well known throughout the East. The Latin _duomo_, which has been minutely described by Mr. Neale, is of quite another type, and is by no means Dalmatian in its general look. A modern west front with two western towers does not go for much; but it reminds us that a design of the same kind was begun at Trau in better times. The inside is quite unlike anything of later Italian work. It seems like a cross between a basilica and an Aquitanian church. It is small, but the inside is lofty and solemn. The body of the church, not counting the apses and the western portico, has seven narrow arches, the six eastern ones grouped in pairs forming, as in so many German examples, three bays only in the vaulting. The princ.i.p.al pillars are rectangular with flat pilasters; the intermediate piers are Corinthian columns with a heavy Lucchese abacus, enriched with more mouldings than is usual at Lucca. As there is no triforium, and only a blank clerestory, the whole effect comes from the tall columns and their narrow arches, the last offshoots of Spalato that we have to record. For the ecclesiologist proper there is a prodigious _baldacchino_, and a grand display of metal-work behind the high altar. A good deal too, as Mr.

Neale has shown, may be gleaned from the inscriptions and records. The traveller whose objects are of a more general kind turns away from this border church of Christendom as the last stage of a pilgrimage unsurpa.s.sed either for natural beauty or for historic interest. And, as he looks up at the mountain which rises almost close above the east end of the _duomo_ of Cattaro, and thinks of the land and the men to which the path over that mountain leads, he feels that, on this frontier at least, the spirit still lives which led English warriors to the side of Manuel Komnenos, and which steeled the heart of the last Constantine to die in the breach for the Roman name and the faith of Christendom.

VENICE IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF THE NORMANS.

TRANI.

1881.

The solemn yearly marriage between the Venetian commonwealth and the Hadriatic sea had much more effect on the eastern sh.o.r.e of that sea than on the western. On the eastern side of the long gulf there are few points which have not at some time or other "looked to the winged lion's marble piles," and for many ages a long and nearly continuous dominion looked steadily to that quarter. On the western sh.o.r.e Venice never established any lasting dominion very far from her own lagoons.

Ravenna was the furthest point on that side which she held for any considerable time, and at Ravenna we are hardly clear of the delta of the Po. In the northern region of Italy her power struck inland, till at last, defying the precepts of the wise Doge who could not keep even Treviso, she held an unbroken dominion from Bergamo to Cividale. That she kept that dominion down to her fall, that that dominion could live through the fearful trial of the League of Cambray, may perhaps show that Venice, after all, was not so unfitted to become a land-power as she seems at first sight, and as Andrew Contarini deemed her in the fourteenth century. Yet one might have thought that the occupation of this or that point along the long coast from Ravenna to the heel of the boot would have better suited her policy than the lordship over Bergamo and Brescia. And one might have thought too that, amid the endless changes that went on among the small commonwealths and tyrannies of that region, it would have been easier for the Republic to establish its dominion there than to establish it over great cities like Padua and Verona. Yet Venice did not establish even a temporary dominion along these coasts till she was already a great land power in Lombardy and Venetia. And then the few outlying points which she held for a while lay, not among the small towns of the marches, but within the solid kingdom which the Norman had made, and which had pa.s.sed from him to kings from Swabia, from Anjou, and from Aragon. It is this last thought which gives the short Venetian occupation of certain cities within what the Italians called _the Kingdom_ a higher interest in itself, and withal a certain connexion in idea with more lasting possessions of the commonwealth elsewhere. At Trani and at Otranto, no less than in Corfu and at Durazzo, the Venetian was treading in the footsteps of the Norman. Only, on the eastern side of Hadria the Republic won firm and long possession of places where the Norman had been seen only for a moment; on the western side, the Republic held only for a moment places which the Norman had firmly grasped, and which he handed on to his successors of other races. And, if we pa.s.s on from the Norman himself to those successors, we shall find the connexion between the Venetian dominion on the eastern and the western side of the gulf become yet stronger. The Venetian occupation of Neapolitan towns within the actual Neapolitan kingdom seems less strange, if we look on it as a continuation of the process by which many points on the eastern coast had pa.s.sed to and fro between the Republic and the Kings of Sicily and afterwards of Naples. The connexion between Sicily and southern Italy on the one hand and the coasts and islands of western Greece on the other, is as old as the days of the Greek colonies, perhaps as old as the days of Homer. The singer of the Odyssey seems to know of Sikels in Epeiros; but, if his Sikels were in Italy, we only get the same connexion in another shape.

A crowd of rulers from one side and from the other have ruled on both sides of the lower waters of Hadria. Agathokles, Pyrrhos, Robert Wiscard, King Roger, William the Good, strove alike either to add Epeiros and Korkyra to a Sicilian dominion or to add Sicily to a dominion which already took in Epeiros and Korkyra. So did Manfred; so did Charles of Anjou. And after the division of the Sicilian kingdom, the kings of the continental realm held a considerable dominion on the Greek side of the sea. And that dominion largely consisted of places which had been Venetian and which were to become Venetian again. To go no further into detail, if we remember that Corfu and Durazzo were held by Norman Dukes and Kings of Apulia and Sicily--that they were afterwards possessions of Venice--that they were possessions of the Angevin kings at Naples, and then possessions of Venice again--it may perhaps seem less wonderful to find the Republic at a later time occupying outposts on the coasts of the Neapolitan kingdom itself.

It was not till the last years of the fifteenth century, when so many of her Greek and Albanian possessions had pa.s.sed away, that the Republic appeared as a ruler on the coasts of Apulia and of that land of Otranto, the heel of the boot, from which the name of Calabria had long before wandered to the toe. It was in 1495, when Charles of France went into southern Italy to receive for himself a kingdom and to return,--only to return without the kingdom,--that the Venetians, as allies of his rival Ferdinand, took the town of Monopoli by storm, and one or two smaller places by capitulation. What they took they kept, and in the next year their ally pledged to them other cities, among them Trani, Brindisi, Otranto, and Taranto, in return for help in men and money. These cities were thus won by Venice as the ally of the Aragonese King against the French. But at a later time, when France and Aragon were allied against Venice, the Aragonese King of the Sicilies, a more famous Ferdinand than the first, took them as his share in 1509. We cannot wonder at this; no king, or commonwealth either, can be pleased to see a string of precious coast towns in the hands of a foreign power. Again in 1528 Venice is allied with France against Aragon and Naples, and Aragon and Naples are now only two of the endless kingdoms of Charles of Austria. For a moment the lost cities are again Venetian. Two years later, as part of the great pageant of Bologna, they pa.s.sed back from the rule of Saint Mark to the last prince who ever wore the crown of Rome.

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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sing, 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 pa.s.sed by; or, if we are driven to pa.s.s 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.

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 quae 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 archaepiscopal see with a n.o.ble 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-gla.s.s; 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-gla.s.s can do anything to help prisoners confined within ma.s.sive 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 n.o.blest churches of its own cla.s.s. If we were to call it one of the n.o.blest 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-cla.s.s 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CATHEDRAL, TRANI.]

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 Garga.n.u.s. Hence, on our way to the metropolitan church, we pa.s.s 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 cla.s.s 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 n.o.ble 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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.s 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 surpa.s.sing 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 sc.r.a.p 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 oec.u.menical _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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CATHEDRAL, TRANI, INSIDE.]

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 ma.s.sive 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 cla.s.sical; 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.

But the metropolitan church is not all that Trani has to show. In some of the buildings which we pa.s.s 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.

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 pa.s.s by Lecce, which lies outside our group, as between Trani and Brindisi we have been driven to pa.s.s 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.