Mainland South Italy after the Byzantines

Byzantine culture persisted in southern Italy long after the Norman conquest of ca. 1071, especially in Calabria and the Salento, the toe and heel of the Italian boot. This paper focuses on the latter, where a regional dialect of Greek, Griko, is still spoken in a few places even today. A notable number of grammars and schedographies reveal that education in Greek remained important, with the curriculum and methods imitating those of Constantinople into the sixteenth century. Texts written by ancient and medieval Greek authors were copied extensively, especially in the decades around 1300; the latest Byzantine text was Nikephoros Blemmydes’s Epitome physica of ca. 1237, copied in 1471/72 (Vatican City, Barb. gr. 226). A few of these were illustrated, including an Iliad around 1270 (Wrocław, Biblioteka Uniwersytecka, Rehdigeranus 26). In Salento, unlike Calabria, the copyists were priests, clerics, and laymen, not monks. The region’s last dated manuscript in Greek is a typikon produced in Soleto in 1583 (Vatican City, Barb. gr. 383). The Orthodox faith persisted in some towns until the 17th century, despite the successive replacement of Orthodox bishops by Latin ones and the gradual adoption of Roman-rite practices, but only exceptionally was a non-Byzantine saint commemorated in the Orthodox liturgy (an office of Saint Francis was composed in 15th-century Galatone). Greek-rite churches continued to be built, rebuilt, and ornamented with frescoes, and Byzantine-era chapels and images were sometimes preserved in new or updated Roman-rite buildings and in Baroque altars. Post-Byzantine visual and material remains include mural paintings, tombstones, manuscripts, and icons, often “Byzantinizing” in style, iconography, or both. Local images of the “Madonna di Costantinopoli” evoked both the subject and the fate of the famous Hodegetria icon destroyed by the Turks in 1453 by including a depiction of the cathedral of Otranto being attacked by Turks in 1480.