Byzantine Culture

History · Article

Byzantine Southern Italy

Byzantium ruled parts of southern Italy from the sixth century to 1071. The catepanate of Italy, the Greek monasteries, the surviving Griko dialect and the churches still standing.

Byzantium ruled parts of southern Italy for longer than it ruled Egypt, Syria or North Africa — from Justinian’s reconquest in the 530s to the fall of Bari in 1071, more than five centuries with interruptions. Calabria, Apulia, Lucania and Sicily were Greek-speaking and Orthodox in their populations for much of that period, and the traces are still on the ground and in the language.

It is the part of the Byzantine world that is easiest for a western European to visit and the hardest to see, because it has been overlaid by Norman, Angevin, Aragonese and Italian building for a thousand years.

The Territory

Justinian’s general Belisarius took Sicily in 535 and the Gothic War that followed brought the whole peninsula under imperial control by 554 — at the cost of devastating it. The Lombard invasion of 568 took most of the north within a generation, leaving Byzantium with the extremities: Ravenna and its exarchate in the north-east until 751, Rome’s duchy until the papacy turned to the Franks, Naples, Calabria, parts of Apulia, and Sicily.

Sicily was lost to the Aghlabids of Tunisia between 827 and 902 — a slow, grinding conquest in which Syracuse held until 878 and Taormina until 902.

The mainland was then reorganised. From 965 the catepanate of Italy, governed from Bari, held Apulia, Calabria and Lucania, and it was a functioning Byzantine province with themes, officials, tax registers and a Greek-speaking administration. It survived Ottonian invasions, Arab raids and local revolts.

It fell to the Normans. Robert Guiscard took Bari in April 1071, after a three-year siege, four months before Manzikert — a year in which the empire lost its western and eastern extremities within a season of each other.

The Greek Population

Southern Italy had been Greek since the colonies of Magna Graecia in the eighth century BC, and Greek speech never entirely disappeared from Calabria and the Salento.

Byzantine rule reinforced it substantially. Refugees from the Arab conquest of Sicily settled in Calabria in large numbers in the ninth and tenth centuries, bringing monks, books and the Greek liturgy. Imperial policy in the ninth century deliberately transferred the southern Italian dioceses from Roman to Constantinopolitan jurisdiction, and Greek bishops replaced Latin ones.

The result was a region where Greek was the language of church, administration and daily life across large areas, inside Italy, for centuries.

The Monasteries

Italo-Greek monasticism is the richest part of the inheritance. Basilian monks — following the rule of Basil the Great — established hundreds of foundations in Calabria, Lucania and the Salento from the eighth century onward.

Their most distinguished figure is Nilus the Younger (c. 910–1005), a Calabrian who founded the monastery of Grottaferrata in the Alban Hills outside Rome in 1004. Grottaferrata is still there and still celebrates the Byzantine rite — an Italo-Albanian Catholic monastery, in communion with Rome, using the Greek liturgy continuously for over a thousand years. It is the oldest continuously functioning institution of Byzantine rite in western Europe.

The southern monasteries were also copying centres, and a significant number of Greek manuscripts in European libraries were produced in Calabria and the Salento — a contribution to the transmission of classical learning that ran independently of the eastern route and that supplied some of the earliest western students of Greek.

The Buildings

What survives is small-scale and worth seeking out.

The Cattolica di Stilo in Calabria, a tenth- or eleventh-century brick church about eight metres square with five domes on a cross-in-square plan — a perfect miniature of middle Byzantine architecture standing on a hillside in southern Italy.

San Marco at Rossano in Calabria, another five-domed church of similar date.

Santa Maria del Patir near Rossano, an eleventh-century Basilian foundation with a superb mosaic floor.

The rock churches of Matera and the Salento, cut into the tufa with Byzantine fresco cycles, comparable in kind to Cappadocia.

Santa Maria dell’Ammiraglio (the Martorana) in Palermo, built in 1143 by George of Antioch, the Greek admiral of the Norman king Roger II, with mosaics by Constantinopolitan craftsmen. The Norman rulers of Sicily employed Byzantine mosaicists extensively — the cathedrals of Cefalù and Monreale and the Cappella Palatina are the results, and they are among the finest surviving Byzantine-tradition mosaics anywhere.

The Codex Purpureus Rossanensis, a sixth-century purple-parchment gospel book with illuminations, is kept at Rossano and is one of the oldest illustrated New Testament manuscripts in existence.

Griko

Two pockets of Greek-derived dialect survive: Griko in nine villages of the Grecìa Salentina in Apulia, and Greko in a handful of Calabrian villages in the Aspromonte.

Whether these descend directly from the Greek of Magna Graecia, or from the Byzantine-era Greek, or from both, has been argued since the nineteenth century. The current view generally allows for continuity from antiquity reinforced heavily by the Byzantine period.

Both are severely endangered. Griko has a few thousand speakers, most of them elderly; Greko has very few. Revival efforts exist, and there is a body of Griko song that has attracted attention, but the linguistic prognosis is poor.

The Schism on the Ground

Southern Italy is where the eastern and western churches actually met, and the friction there contributed materially to the schism of 1054.

The immediate trigger for the confrontation between Cardinal Humbert and the patriarch Keroularios was a dispute about Latin practices in the Byzantine territories of southern Italy — specifically the use of unleavened bread — and about the jurisdiction of the Greek churches under Norman rule. The great argument between Rome and Constantinople began as a local quarrel in Apulia.

After the Norman conquest the Greek dioceses were gradually Latinised, the Basilian monasteries declined or converted, and by the fifteenth century the Byzantine rite survived in Italy mainly at Grottaferrata and among later Albanian immigrants.

The Arbëreshë

Those Albanians are the last chapter. From the fifteenth century, Albanian Orthodox Christians fleeing the Ottoman advance settled in Calabria, Sicily and elsewhere in southern Italy, retaining their language and the Byzantine rite.

Their descendants, the Arbëreshë, number perhaps 100,000 and constitute the Italo-Albanian Catholic Church — one of the Eastern Catholic churches described in the Byzantine rite today, with eparchies in Calabria and Sicily and its monastery at Grottaferrata.

So the Byzantine liturgy has been celebrated continuously in Italy for roughly fifteen hundred years: by Greeks under the empire, by Italo-Greek monks under the Normans, and by Albanians since the fifteenth century.

Grottaferrata

The one Italo-Greek institution that has functioned continuously for a thousand years deserves a full account.

St Nilus the Younger (c. 910–1005) was a Calabrian Greek from Rossano who became a monk after a worldly youth, led a community through several forced moves as Arab raiding pressed on Calabria, and finally, in extreme old age, was granted land in the Alban Hills south of Rome by the Count of Tusculum. He died before the buildings were begun; his disciple Bartholomew completed them.

The abbey church was consecrated in 1024. It survives, with a Romanesque campanile, a twelfth-century marble doorway, Byzantine mosaics over the inner door and in the triumphal arch, and a chapel frescoed by Domenichino in the seventeenth century — an accurate summary of the house’s hybrid position.

What makes it exceptional is continuity of rite. Grottaferrata has celebrated the Byzantine liturgy in Greek, without interruption, since 1004, while being in communion with Rome throughout. It is the last surviving house of the Italo-Greek monastic tradition that once numbered hundreds of foundations.

The library and scriptorium produced and preserved Greek manuscripts for centuries, and the abbey became a centre for the restoration of Greek and Latin manuscripts — a specialist conservation laboratory operated there from the nineteenth century.

The community is now very small, which raises an obvious question about the next thousand years.

The Norman Mosaics

The Byzantine artistic presence in Norman Sicily is the most spectacular part of the story and sits slightly outside the political narrative.

The Norman kings who took Sicily from the Arabs in the eleventh century inherited a population that was Muslim, Greek Orthodox and Latin, and they governed it with a deliberate eclecticism. Their buildings register it.

The Cappella Palatina in Palermo (1130s–1140s): a Latin-rite royal chapel with Byzantine mosaics by Constantinopolitan craftsmen, Greek and Latin inscriptions, and an Islamic muqarnas wooden ceiling painted with courtly scenes, hunting, drinking and dancing girls. Three civilisations in one room, commissioned by a Norman king.

The Martorana (Santa Maria dell’Ammiraglio), founded 1143 by George of Antioch, a Greek from Syria who served as Roger II’s emir of emirs. Its mosaics include Roger being crowned by Christ, in full Byzantine imperial costume, with the inscription in Greek — a Norman king depicting himself as a Byzantine emperor.

Cefalù (begun 1131) and Monreale (1170s–1180s): the latter with some 6,500 square metres of mosaic, the largest surviving programme in the Byzantine technique anywhere, executed by Greek craftsmen for a Latin king.

The craftsmen were Byzantine; the patrons were Norman; the programmes are Latin in their liturgical arrangement and Byzantine in their iconography. The comparison with the crusader material described in crusader art and Byzantium is exact.

Griko Today

The linguistic survival is the most fragile part of the inheritance and deserves specifics.

Griko is spoken in the Grecìa Salentina, a group of nine communes in the province of Lecce in Apulia — Calimera, Martano, Sternatia, Zollino, Corigliano, Martignano, Melpignano, Soleto and Castrignano dei Greci. Estimates of speakers range from a few thousand to under a thousand with full fluency, almost all elderly.

Greko or Grecanico is spoken in the Bovesia, a handful of villages in the Aspromonte mountains of Calabria. Speakers number in the low hundreds at most, and the situation is considerably worse than in Apulia.

Both are recognised as historical linguistic minorities under Italian law of 1999, which provides for teaching and signage.

The scholarly dispute about their origin — direct continuity from Magna Graecia, or introduction during the Byzantine period — was argued fiercely between Gerhard Rohlfs, who argued for ancient continuity, and Giuseppe Morosi, who argued for medieval origin. The current view generally allows both: an ancient Greek substrate reinforced heavily by Byzantine settlement, monasticism and administration.

There is a living song tradition, most famously the lament Klama and the widely performed Kali Nifta, and a revival movement with festivals, teaching and recordings. Whether that constitutes survival or a dignified commemoration is not yet clear.

Continue exploring