We are now at Barium, Bari, the original Bari of the West, as
distinguished from the Bari, _Bar_, _Antibaris_, _Antivari_, which
repeats its name on the opposite coast. There we can now again, as we
could have done seventy years back at Cattaro, land at a Montenegrin
haven. The distinction between the two bearers of the name of Bari
implies an association which is not out of place. The historic interest
of Bari gathers wholly round its connexion with the lands on the
other side of Hadria. In earlier days the place has really no history
whatever. Its most memorable day was when the powers of the Eastern
and Western Empires--powers which perhaps never again worked in such
harmony--were needed to dislodge a Saracen Sultan from its walls.
"Emir," some one will say, not "Sultan," and certainly we are more
used in Europe to Sultans of much later date than the days of Lewis
the Second and Basil the First, Sultans coming from quite other lands
than any that can have sent forth the Mussulman prince of Bari. But
he is called Sultan as well as Emir by his one biographer, the Emperor
Constantine, and we cannot appeal from those august pages which still
form the best guide-book to the eastern shores of the Hadriatic.
Anyhow, the Sultan of Bari was a philosopher; he never laughed, except
once when he saw a wheel go round; for that reminded him of the ups and
downs of his own fortunes. Then Bari passes to the rule of the Eastern
Empire; instead of a Sultan it has a Katapan, representative of the
Eastern Augustus in that Italian dominion which had become so small
at the beginning of the ninth century, and which was so great again at
its end. Threatened again at the beginning of the eleventh century by
new Saracen invaders, it is guarded by the fleets of Venice, still the
faithful vassal of Constantinople against a common enemy. Seventy years
later the arms of Robert Wiscard added the capital of Byzantine Italy
to his Norman dominion, and before the century was out, Pope Urban, the
great stirrer of the West against the Mussulman East, chose Bari as the
scene of the Council called to denounce at once the practical abuses of
the Christian West and the dogmatic errors of the Christian East. Once
more, in the next age, we find Bari looking across the sea to its old
lord, and chastised by the Sicilian king for its disloyalty. Add that
Bari, before all saints, still honours St. Nicolas of the Lykian Myra,
and keeps his relics sacred, we are told, from Turkish desecration
by the craft of merchants of her own city. Altogether Bari seems, at
least in its history, as much Greek as Italian or Norman. It would seem
neither unnatural nor unpleasant if Greek were still the tongue of the
seafaring folk of Bari, much as a Norman in his own land often carries
an air about him which would make Danish seem a much more natural
speech for him than French.
But the great buildings of Bari belong to that mixed Norman and
Italian style of which we have already seen something at Bitonto. The
architectural attractions of the city are chiefly to be found in two
great churches and one smaller one. The castle, standing by the sea,
should have its landward side walked round, and the walk will reveal
much of picturesque outline and a little of good detail. But it is
the churches, above all the great abbey of St. Nicolas, which are the
glory of Bari. They all lie in the old town by the sea, the old town
of narrow and crooked streets, in which it does not much matter which
way you go; you are sure to come either to the castle or to one of the
churches before very long. Very different are things in the new town,
which we may rejoice in as we look at it as a sign of Bari's abiding
or renewed prosperity, but which can raise no feelings of pleasure on
any other ground. Its streets, crossing each other at right angles, are
indeed carefully dedicated to the worthies of Bari; but, unless we can
always remember which of several perhaps not very familiar worthies
watches over each of several angles which are exactly alike, it is
easy to take a wrong turn and to put oneself under the care of Andrew
of Bari when we ought rather to be commending ourselves to Robert.
And under either protection we yearn in the wide straight streets
for some physical shelter from the Apulian sun, and wonder why modern
Rome, modern Athens, and modern Bari should have so much less common
sense than Bologna, Padua, and Corfu had in days long past. Still,
amid this rectangular labyrinth the sea is a help on one side, while
on another the tall tower of the metropolitan church of St. Sabinus
beckons us into the older streets, whose narrowness and crookedness
at least supply shade. That tower, one of the tallest and stateliest
of Italy, we naturally assume to be a detached campanile, without a
fellow and standing apart from its confederate buildings, church and
baptistery. So it doubtless would be in a purely Italian city; but
here we are in the city where the Norman displaced the Greek. The
two great churches of Bari, like that of Bitonto, have their towers
wrought into the building in Norman fashion, and at the _duomo_ the
great round baptistery is also merged in the same mass with the church
and its towers. Both of the great churches of Bari have east ends
of the same kind as that at Bitonto; the apses are swallowed up; the
place where the great apse should be is marked by a single splendid
Romanesque window. The eastern towers of St. Nicolas have never been
carried up; at St. Sabinus the southern one has perished, but the
northern one still soars in all its majesty, thoroughly Italian in its
conception, but rather to be called Norman in its detail. St. Nicolas
has also another pair of unfinished towers at its west end, standing
at once beyond the aisles as at Wells and Rouen, and in front of them
as at Holyrood. They flank a grand Italian front which one would think
would be finer without them. These western towers are absent in the
metropolitan church; but that has a most perfect octagonal cupola
over the crossing, the grouping of which with the two lofty eastern
towers, if there was any point from which it could really be seen,
must have been wonderful. Thus, in both churches, something of a German
outline has either been consciously brought in or has been incidentally
stumbled on. The four towers of St. Nicolas, the octagon and eastern
tower of St. Sabinus, will easily find Rhenish fellows, though we
should perhaps have to go as far as Angoulême for a single tower of
equal majesty mourning over a vanished brother. In other points the
external arrangements of the two great churches of Bari have much
in common. The rose windows, the coupled windows, the blank arcades,
are much the same in both. So is the choice of animal forms for the
fanciful supports of columns. In most places the lion discharges that
function--in a building designed by lions we should doubtless see
something different. So we do here at Bari, where the solid forms of
the _pachydermata_ are, perhaps discreetly, preferred to the lighter
_carnivora_. The elephant, we think, is to be found in both churches,
and the huge earth-shaking beast is represented so as to remind us both
of Pyrrhos and of Hannibal; some have the smaller ear of India, some
the larger of Africa. The hippopotamus appears only in the west front
of St. Nicolas. Had the daring shipfolk who bore away the saint's bones
from Lykia made their way to the Nile also?
When we pass the threshold of the two buildings we see that their fate
in modern times has been very different. St. Sabinus has suffered much
as Bitonto has suffered. The upper part of the building is hidden
in just the same fashion, and ugly tricks have been played with the
columns and their capitals. St. Nicolas, on the other hand, has been
left comparatively alone. The chief changes which it has undergone
must have taken place not very long after the original building. The
original plan was much the same as that of Bitonto--three arches from
columns, a massive pier, then three more arches from columns. But this
arrangement was disturbed at an early time by throwing three spanning
arches across the nave. The effect is so striking that we can hardly
regret their presence; but it is perfectly easy to see that they are
insertions, and, though they are essentially of the same style, yet
they differ in their details from the original columns. These last all
approach more or less to the Corinthian type; in the under-church the
patterns are more varied. Here are still the wonder-working relics of
St. Nicolas, and the balsam or "manna" which flows from them may still
be drunk. In the _duomo_ the under-church has been restored out of all
ancient character, but it still keeps an ancient Byzantine picture.
As so often happens, the secondary church of Bari altogether surpassed
the mother church in historic fame and local honour. To ourselves the
fact in its history which comes home most nearly is that it was here
that Urban held his Council, here that Anselm, to the satisfaction
of all Western minds, refuted the creed of the East, here that he
interceded with the Pontiff and the assembled fathers on behalf of the
king who had wronged him. Here too it was that the keen eye of English
Eadmer spied out on the shoulders of the Archbishop of Beneventum the
splendid cope which is no longer to be seen at Beneventum. Such little
touches in those days often brought the ends of the world together
in a way to which, in our days of more general intercourse, nothing
answers. When French was the polite language alike at Dunfermline and
at Jerusalem, when the Latin-speaking clerk was at home in any corner
of the West, when the few men of the West who had learned Greek spoke
it so that a Greek could understand them, when men passed to and fro
between the civil services of England and Sicily, communication between
distant parts of Europe was in some ways easier than it is now. Bari,
one of the chief places for setting out on crusades, must for a long
time have been a thoroughly cosmopolitan city. We do feel that the ends
of the earth have combined to meet at Bari, when we find the place
of honour in the church of St. Nicolas at Bari held by a princess of
Bari, who became Queen of the greatest Slavonic kingdom. Emblematic
figures of Bari and Poland support the tomb of Queen Bona, and her
epitaph describes her husband Sigismund, the first of that name, as not
only the mighty King of Poland, but Grand-Duke of Lithuania, Russia,
Prussia, Mazovia, and Samogitia. Yet we might have lighted on Slavonic
associations earlier on the road. There is a strange record of a
Bulgarian settlement in the parts of Beneventum; but that would take us
yet further afield: it was before Bulgarians became Slavonic. But what
are we to say to the Samnite _Schiavia_ which sheltered Anselm?