The Medieval Salento. Linda Safran
forebears, also conveyed status among Jews. For Christians, the equivalent may have been life as a cleric or monk, but postmedieval proverbs indicate that these latter activities were not always held in high esteem.43
Learned and well-to-do Jewish families whose daughters were betrothed to men of a lower intellectual or social level were keenly aware of the fact. Unequal matches were made rarely, and only under extenuating circumstances, for they violated the norms of social hierarchy and social mobility.44 A comprehensive wish list of attributes for a Jewish son-in-law is provided by a ninth-century mother, an ancestor of Ahima‘az, who wants the best for her daughter and balks at an engagement below her station:
I will not give her out. [Only] if he will be like her father, [learned] in Torah, in Mishnah, in Scripture, in Law and Logic, in Sifri and Sifra, in Midrash and in Gemarah, in meticulous observance of minor and major commandments, in intelligence and wisdom, in astuteness and cunning, in wealth and grandeur, in courage and exercise of authority regarding the observance and precepts and commandments, in fearfulness and humbleness, and that he have every [other] virtue.45
Despite her mother’s wishes, Cassia is married off to an unworthy relative once her father, the sage Shephatiah, perceives how nubile she has become. It is unlikely that the range and depth of textual knowledge expected by the girl’s mother could have been matched by any but the highest levels of local Jewish intellectuals. Of all the material evidence, only a late Hebrew tombstone from Trani commemorates a “very learned” individual [150]. The degree to which a comparable “package” of excellence and stature was desired by the region’s Christian mothers is unknown.
One very public method of advertising family status was to construct or renovate a church or chapel that would then serve as a repository of family memory, with privileged tombs, texts, or images on the exterior or inside. Such Eigenkirchen were very common in the Orthodox world; they became less common in Europe after the twelfth-century Gregorian reformers’ efforts to centralize religious control.46 When John of Ugento constructed a “basilica” at Acquarica del Capo [1.A], he may have been “motivated by the remission of his sins and benefit of his soul and those of his parents,” but at the same time he was providing a place of worship for a larger group, the inhabitants of the village where he may have been only an occasional visitor. This is the only regional text that announces a whole basilica rather than a chapel [cf. 35, 47.A]. Jewish patrons, too, could publicize family and status by renovating parts of their local synagogues; several such efforts were recorded in inscriptions to be read to and by the whole community [9, 50]. While there must have been many small family churches, used especially for burials, even family-funded synagogues always served a larger community because a quorum of ten men (a minyan) was required for many religious services. A minyan is explicitly identified as patrons of a synagogue at Trani [147].
By the later Middle Ages, aristocrats and religious elites often had their own spaces for worship, either in separate buildings or in elaborate chapels within existing structures. At Santa Maria del Casale, the early fourteenth-century vita cycles of Saint Catherine on the south presbytery wall are usually associated with Catherine of Valois, Courtenay, and Constantinople, the second wife of Philip of Anjou, Prince of Taranto [28.N].47 There are later textual references to an Angevin dynastic chapel, but this was probably in the north transept, which contains a large fictive textile with the Angevin arms. It is also possible that, despite their placement high up on the nave walls, the repeated depictions of large shields and of small family groups being presented to the Virgin and Child served as focuses of family devotion within the large basilica, even if these ostensible family spaces were not delimited architecturally.
In 1383, Bishop Donadeus of Castro built a chapel in the local cathedral with money from the property of his deceased parents, endowing it with those funds [35]. This literal family chapel was visible to anyone attending services in the cathedral. The early fifteenth-century castle chapel at Copertino [42], the “Cappella Maremonti” in the parish church at Campi Salentina,48 and the “Cappella Orsini” at Santa Caterina in Galatina are all examples of late medieval aristocrats’ family spaces inside larger churches. The latter occupied part of the south aisle of the Galatina basilica; a projecting apse in the south wall boasts its own altar and a surrounding decorative program with scenes of the life of the Virgin.49 How the family used this special space within the five-aisle basilica built by Raimondello del Balzo Orsini is not known, as the cenotaph of the founder and later his son were located in the sanctuary, not here [47.C]. I wonder whether this Orsini chapel is equivalent to the “chapel of Saint Catherine” announced in Greek over the doorway into this part of the church [47.A].
Postmortem Status
From the moment a person died, his or her status was manifested in the location and form of the tomb and the extent and kinds of activities at the funeral and afterward. In addition, the quality and range of objects found in graves reveals something about the occupants’ lives and communal standing. By the later Middle Ages the dead in Salentine villages were interred within their communities; this may not have been the case earlier, when burials seem to have been outside of the settlements, in and around funerary churches.50 Most inhumations took place in simple rectangular or ovoid tombs cut into the natural bedrock and oriented east to west [102–103]. Several of these cemeteries are quite extensive and most have a church as their nucleus. Some of the graves are lined with stone slabs, but in the majority of cases the covering slabs required to seal in the odor of decomposition are missing. Within the grave the tomb could be flat or curved and with or without a stone “cushion” or terra-cotta tile to keep the head of the deceased lifted up and facing east toward the eventual Second Coming.51 By the eleventh century, most bodies were interred with heads to the west and feet to the east.52 In most of the excavated village sites, tombs were reused for subsequent burials, presumably for family members; in these cases most of the earlier, disarticulated bones were removed to an adjacent ossuary or charnel pit, pushed to the foot of the tomb, or left underneath the new corpse.53 One grave at Quattro Macine (XXIII) contained the remains of seven individuals [103].54 Individual burials were also possible, however, including several fourteenth-century examples inside the church of Santa Maria della Strada at Taurisano.55
At the village of Quattro Macine, the graves closest to the north wall of the twelfth-century church were for infants, including one newborn [103], and this concentration also occurred at Apigliano. It has been suggested that rain dripping from the church roof would convey a special blessing to these privileged children,56 but since not all children were interred in this way the location was also likely to have been based on economic factors linked to status.57 One fetus was interred in an amphora far from the cemeteries around both the Byzantine and Norman-era churches at Quattro Macine; stillborn and probably unbaptized, it may well have been buried at home.58 I have suggested elsewhere that the container on the ground in front of the praying Daniel at Masseria Lo Noce [54.A] may represent a child’s amphora burial, although the form of that amphora is not the same as contemporary local production.59 Daniel and his putative dead child are painted on the intrados of an arcosolium, so even if my amphora suggestion cannot be proved, the arcosolium form underscores the likelihood of a privileged burial there.
The most privileged medieval dead were buried inside a church in an arcosolium, a floor tomb, or a freestanding sarcophagus. The much-loved Stratigoules was interred under an arcosolium in the north wall at the west end of the rock-cut church at Carpignano [32.J]. Other arcosolia, such as the pair in the lower church of Santa Lucia at Brindisi, probably served a comparable function. There were several floor tombs for children inside Santa Maria della Strada at Taurisano.60 In the two-story crypt church of Saint Bartholomew at Casalrotto, near Mottola, the subfloor tombs in the lower church presumably were reserved for important monks.61
Stone sarcophagi were used on occasion to hold one or more special bodies. The example of uncertain date inside San Cesario di Lecce may have held the church’s founder, a priest, sometime after 1329,