La Puglia nel Medioevo germanico. Da Apulia a Pülle/Púl by Lorenzo Lozzi Gallo (review)

This volume offers a detailed and richly documented study of the major sources, written in Latin as well as in Romance and Germanic vernaculars, that have contributed to varying degrees to the image of Apulia from classical and late antiquity to the time after the reign of Frederick II.

As the author explicitly points out in the preface, the analysis, which is concerned primarily with the Germanic Middle Ages, revolves around the German literature of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The inclusion of sources dating from the classical and late antiquity periods and from the time prior to the so-called Stauferzeit shows how knowledge about Apulia—and, as a consequence, its image—changed over time as well as according to the ideological point of view adopted to describe it (or to ignore it). The dynamics leading to such changes are examined by the author against the backdrop of the quite turbulent political events that characterized the history of this region from the time after the fall of the Western Roman Empire until the end of the thirteenth century. The survey of sources provided is such as to present readers with a broad palette of documents, ranging from historiographic and geographic treatises to compendia and various literary genres from Germanic and Romance vernacular traditions.

The subdivision of the book into five major parts follows a chronological principle: sources from the classical period to the Early Middle Ages (I), texts in Latin from the High Middle Ages (II), literature in Romance and Germanic vernaculars (III), literature from the reign of Frederick II (IV), and literature after Frederick II (V). Each section provides a historical and cultural background, which enables the reader to place the textual evidence culled by the author in the cultural context of its production.

The first section is devoted to sources in Latin from the classical period to the early Middle Ages. Given the broad chronology covered by this chapter, the analysis is limited to major observations on each single work. The stereotyped image of Apulia as a rural idyl (p. 15) that Roman classical poetry establishes is the starting point of the investigation. Among the authors of this period, particular attention is devoted to Virgil, Ovid, Horace, and Titus Livius, as well as to geographic erudition, represented most prominently by Pomponius Mela and Pliny the Elder. With regard to late antiquity, the author discusses the role of treatises in shaping geographic knowledge and examines a variety of other sources, focussing on the historiographic works by Eusebius of Caesarea (especially the Chronicon translated by St. Jerome), Orosius, and Jordanes.

The author observes that the transition to the early Middle Ages is marked by a lesser degree of accuracy in terms of how Apulia is described. This is most clearly shown by such learned sources as Isidor of Seville, whose work reveals a rather poor knowledge of the geography of the southeastern territories of Italy.

The analysis of textual evidence from the early Middle Ages is organized around the historical events involving Apulia mainly from the arrival of the Langobards to the time of the Ottonian dynasty. As the author observes, the fragile balance of power between the Langobards and the Byzantines is overturned by the rapid Arabic expansion in the south and by the Frankish occupation of Langobardian territories in the north. From the time of the reign of Charlemagne, southern Italy became one of the major targets for imperial expansion, albeit with varying intensity. Based on these premises, the analysis aims at illustrating how this targeting is reflected in various sources. In particular, Lozzi Gallo chooses to examine some major historiographic works that show how Apulia was treated in different ideological and political contexts. Hence, after discussing how learned literature contributed toward spreading knowledge about the territories of southern Italy, the reader’s attention is driven to papal (i.e., the Liber Pontificalis and its use in later works...