Castle of Barletta

About

The castle of Barletta is the architectural result of various stratifications due to the succession of different ruling dynasties from the 11th century to the 18th century. Once a fortress for defensive purposes, surrounded by the sea that occupied the moat all around the castle and insulated it from potential enemy attacks, it constitutes a strategic point in city life as well as an important urban core. It is home to the Municipal Library, the Civic Museum and a conference and exhibition hall. Among the works preserved, in addition to an alleged limestone bust of Frederick II of Swabia, dating back to the 13th century, the Sarcophagus of the Apostles, the first stone high relief to bear witness to Christianity in Barletta, dating from the period between the 3rd and 4th centuries, is located here.

Hypotheses on the origin of the first nucleus of the present castle attest to its origins between 1046 and 1050 by the Normans and are based on the custom, typical of this people, of fortifying the lands close to those to be conquered by providing them with towers, in view of the subsequent occupation of the neighboring territory. For this reason Count Peter the Norman in view of a later attack on the city of Trani, held strenuously until 1054, under Byzantine rule, took possession of the undefended lands of Barletta, erecting a fortress for defensive purposes in the southeastern area of the present building. In those same years he had the first town wall built, within which the settlement was divided into the two nuclei of Santa Maria, near the castle and the ancient mother church, and San Giacomo, to the west around the church of the same name.

The handover between the Norman count and his son Peter II, which took place in 1067, and the ensuing wars of succession to power involving the Hauteville family of Sicily, made Apulia an open field of war, and brought the territory of Barletta under the power of William I of Sicily, who succeeded his father in 1154, his elder brothers having died. Following the destruction of Bari, William, between 1156 and 1162, enlarged the castle's edifice, building two more towers, connected by a simple wall, to which a fourth was later added on the southwestern side, thus constituting a pseudo-trapezoidal layout fortress. In 1172 William II, son of William I, on his return from Taranto and on his way on pilgrimage to the sanctuary of Monte Sant'Angelo, stayed in the castle of Barletta, making substantial donations in favor of the Barletta clergy.

Of the Norman period, which ended with the death of Tancred, cousin of William II, in 1194, only the southeast tower of the castle remained, severed in height and incorporated during the 16th-century interventions in the southern curtain of the Spanish structure. The profound restoration of the castle that took place in the 1980s, given the direct inaccessibility of the tower, allowed its internal visibility through the recovery of a hole on the ground floor protected by a metal grating.

In 1194 Frederick of Swabia, son of the King of Sicily and Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI and Constance of Hauteville, was born. After Henry's death in 1197, and Constance's in 1198, Frederick was brought under the guardianship of Pope Innocent III. This event led to extensive involvement of the church in royal affairs and makes it possible to trace the first historical record in which explicit reference is made to the castle of Barletta, in some letters of Innocent III in 1202.

In 1202 the dispute for dominion over the Kingdom of Sicily flared up, pitting the Germans led by Markward von Annweiler and Dipold of Acerra against the French of Walter III of Brienne. Dipold and Markward demanded guardianship over the infant Frederick II, entrusted instead by his mother Constance to Pope Innocent III; the pontiff then appointed Walter III Prince of Taranto, Duke of Apulia and Count of Lecce and chose him as his own champion to restore control over the Kingdom of Sicily. Letters from the pontiff, sent to Walter between July 21 and September 24, 1202, testify for the first time to the neuralgic role assumed by the castle in those years along the Adriatic coast. On October 6 of the same year, near Cannae, Walter had to repel first an assault by Dipold's troops and later, after occupying Barletta and its castle, the siege of William of Palearia's troops. During the following year, after the groundless news of Innocent III's death had spread, the people of Barletta tried to take advantage of the event by besieging and driving out the pro-papal castellan who had occupied the fortress on behalf of Jacopo of the Counts of Segni in the hope of regaining the structure, though causing damage to the wall structure.

Frederick's growth continued in parallel with that of the Barletta castle, in which the emperor resided on several occasions beginning in 1228. After being crowned in 1215 king of the Romans and Germany in Mainz and in 1220 consecrated emperor by Pope Honorius III, Frederick II banished the Sixth Crusade from Barletta in 1228 and in the following year, on his return from the Holy Land, stayed in the city for two months. Before 1224, the year in which the construction of the Frederician wing of the castle was promoted, the only historical document in which Barletta appears again dates from 1205 and in it the sovereign authorized the church of St. James to build a mill, a tavern and an oven. In that year, the castle complex was irregular and asymmetrical, far from the usual construction of Frederick's forts. For this reason, between 1224 and 1228, the sovereign intervened by demolishing the eastern area that had belonged to the Normans and building there the Frederician domus, accentuating the decorative and architectural aspects of the castle and transforming what had previously been a fortress for defensive purposes into a palace for his court. In 1228 Frederick visited Barletta and from there, after assembling the parliament of barons in the castle, announced his departure for the Sixth Crusade during a diet held in the domus itself.

On Frederick's death in 1250 he was succeeded by his son Conrad. On May 21, 1254, with the departure of Conrad, who died in Lavello of malaria, his son Conradin, only two years old, became heir to the kingdom, whose guardianship was assumed by Manfred of Sicily, natural son of Frederick II and half-brother of Conrad. Fourteen years later, following the battle of Tagliacozzo between the Angevin troops of Charles I and the Ghibelline supporters of Conradin of Swabia, the latter was first taken prisoner and then beheaded. Thus ended the Swabian dynasty in favor of the Angevin dynasty, with the figure of Charles I of Anjou simultaneously taking over possession of Barletta and its castle.

The importance of Barletta and its castle on the one hand, and the rancor that Charles I of Anjou felt for the Swabians on the other, induced him to intervene architecturally on the entire fortress, as well as on the urban enclosure, starting in 1268. In this regard, the considerable documentation found shows the gradual transition from the intention to proceed with ordinary maintenance to the substantial modifications of the masonry work, which included the construction of the Angevin palatium on the north side, which disappeared following the subsequent Spanish extension and whose foundations, following restoration in the 1980s, were used as a water cistern, the replacement of the collapsed Norman antique tower to the southeast with a circular tower, the excavation of a moat around the castle with the building of an outer defense wall to the west, also called talutum, the reinforcement of the existing curtain walls and the building of an additional gateway to the castle named Porta Trani, facing east toward the city of the same name.

The listed works, commissioned by Charles I of Anjou, as recorded in ancient Angevin records, were performed by Pierre d'Angicourt, superintendent of the Royal Curia. Charles I died in Foggia in 1285 and was succeeded first by Charles II and then by Robert of Anjou. The latter, from 1308 to 1312, carried out the order of Charles II's Vicar to capture the Knights Templar residing in the city, who were detained in the castle dungeons.

In 1343, Robert of Anjou died and was succeeded to the throne by his niece Joanna of Anjou, wife of Andrew of Hungary, younger brother of King Louis of Hungary and Poland, who reigned for forty years in a convulsive period, which opened with Andrew's assassination in 1345, veiled by the doubt that it was a conspiracy operated by Queen Joanna. The end of Joanna of Anjou's reign came in 1382, when Charles III of Naples, husband of her niece Margaret, having occupied Naples and imprisoned the rulers, ordered the queen to be strangled. The following year, during the war of succession that saw the victory of Charles of Durazzo over Louis I of Anjou, Joanna's nephew, the castle of Barletta was occupied by Raimondo Orsini Del Balzo, under the orders of Charles. The latter was succeeded in 1386 by his son Ladislaus, who reigned until his death in 1414, when his sister Joanna II took power. The latter, lacking heirs, designated her successor first Alfonso V of Aragon, and then Louis III of Anjou, provoking in 1424 a war of succession between the two that had its sequel in the clash between Alfonso and Louis' brother, René of Anjou, and ended in 1442 with the ascension of the Aragonese ruler to the Kingdom of Naples.

During the Aragonese rule, which was present in Barletta from 1442 to 1501, the defense structures of the castle and city walls were strengthened, particularly during the years 1458, 1461, and 1481. Upon Alfonso's death in 1458, he was succeeded by Ferdinand I of Naples, known as Ferrante of Aragon, who was crowned on February 4, 1459, in the church of Santa Maria in Barletta. The ruler was in Apulia two years later and, moving along the coast out of fear of enemy attacks from inland, he settled in the castle of Barletta, indulging in leisure and entertainment with the town's patricians, heedless of the approach of John of Anjou 's troops. The siege was foiled by the men led by Gjergj Kastrioti Scanderbeg, who had come to the aid of the Aragonese ruler, to whom the latter then entrusted the protection of the city of Barletta by returning to Campania. Inside the hall of the castle where the bust of Frederick II is kept, testifying to the arrival of Gjergj Kastrioti in the military structure, there is the Scanderbeg coat of arms and a commemorative slab. In those same years the ruler continued the excavation of the moat and enlarged the city port to bring it back to the commercial needs of the period.

The last decade of the 15th century was marked by strong political instability, dictated by a series of successions to the throne, which began with the death of Ferdinand I in 1494 and ended with Frederick I of Naples, with whom the rule of the Aragonese dynasty ended in 1501, to which no further merits can be assigned beyond those concerning the strengthening of existing structures.

The events that brought the Spanish dynasty to power and led to the Challenge of Barletta were part of the clashes between Ferdinand II of Aragon and the French of Louis XII, culminating in the victory of the Spaniards in the battles of Cerignola and Garigliano in 1503, thus succeeding in completing, by the end of the same year, the conquest of the entire Kingdom of Naples in favor of Spain.

With the arrival of the Spaniards, who occupied the Aragonese kingdom starting in 1504 as established by the Treaty of Lyon, work began first on the fortification of the walls, with the construction along the west coastline of the Paraticchio blockhouse, then between 1514 and 1519 the works for the construction of the fifth urban wall extended to the district of San Giacomo, with the building of Porta Nuova and Porta Reale. Consulting the Barletta Diplomatic Codex between 1514 and 1515, it is reported how the castle was in a precarious structural condition and how the structure was shown to be inadequate in the face of the advent of new artillery warfare techniques. The economic situation of the University of Barletta, on the other hand, was flourishing, being able to count on the presence of numerous merchants who came to the city from neighboring countries, as well as on the prestige offered by the presence of important bankers, coming from northern Italy and Greece.

In 1528 Barletta, torn by internal divisions and not yet completely surrounded by walls, so much so that the suburb of San Vitale and that of Sant'Antonio Abate to the east were still extra moenia, fell prey to a massive devastation at the hands of the French, suffering looting and fires that caused the destruction of numerous churches and convent buildings located beyond the walls. On that occasion, the castle was occupied by the French, who managed to gain access to it, aided by a faction of Barletta's people, through the walls to the east of the city, which were then undergoing strengthening works, but suffered no structural damage. With the Peace of Cambrai in 1529, the castle and the city of Barletta passed into the hands of Emperor Charles V of Habsburg, nephew of Ferdinand II of Aragon. The latter began work on adapting the castle to the building standards of the time starting in 1532. The work went on for over sixty years, with a further division into three phases: from 1532 to 1537; from 1555 to 1559; and from 1578 to 1598.

Under the leadership of the Habsburgs, the castle underwent a major transformation to prepare for possible enemy attacks no longer solely with cold weapons such as swords or spears but also with the use of gunpowder and cannons. Sixteenth-century construction methods involved castles that were no longer elevated in height, with watchtowers that were difficult to scale, but solid and particularly imposing structures, usually surrounded by large flat areas for more effective enemy control from the ground.

Buildings in the vicinity of the castle were demolished to allow its renovation and with them some churches such as that of Santa Maria delli Frati and Santa Caterina. Charles V thus put in place an intervention to thicken the walls to a section between seven and twelve meters in size and to incorporate the old structures: the Angevin ones were encased in the newly built ones while all those parts that did not comply with the idea of grandeur and symmetry were demolished. Work at the hands of Charles V, under the direction of the military architect Evangelista Menga, initially lasted from 1532 to 1537 and then was continued by his successors until 1598. The main theme of the works was the construction of the four corner bastions. Their traditional denomination, which coincides with that used by architect Grisotti during the restoration work in the 1980s, dates back to 1559 in which they appear mentioned in a document, named respectively, from the southwest clockwise, St. Mary's, St. Vincent's, St. Anthony's, and Annunziata. In the early nineteenth century the naming of the ramparts was completely twisted and in a plan by an anonymous French author, the bastion of St. Mary is called "of St. James," the one of St. Vincent is called "of the bell," the one of St. Anthony is named "of St. Mary," and finally the bastion of the Annunziata is remembered as "of St. Vincent."

It was then carried out with new Spanish-style walls the covering of all structures belonging to previous eras, such as the Angevin palatium, the foundations of which form the walls of a cistern for collecting rainwater placed in the middle of the inner courtyard of the castle, the Norman towers and all the masonry up to that time.

The castle of Barletta thus assumed its present morphological appearance: a quadrangular structure, with four pentagonal bastions at the corners, an endowment of cannons on all sides and a moat that allowed detachment from the mainland on three sides. On the other hand, the fourth side, to the north, faced the coast so as to ensure defense toward the sea. Access to the castle was mediated by a wooden drawbridge, built entirely during the 16th century. However, the castle, renovated and adapted as a fortress, was never used for military purposes, due to the shift of interests from the Mediterranean basin to North and South America.