IX. Bari.
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?
The journey is done—
"Brundisium longæ finis cartæque viæque."
Otranto lies yet further; but Otranto, yet more notably than Bari, comes within the Venetian Notitia. So does Brundisium, city of the stag's horn, of the haven so aptly called, if we only knew in what tongue it is that Brentesium has that meaning. But we are tempted to regret that Brindisi and not Otranto is the point for which Hadria has to be crossed. Brindisi has no moral claim. We cannot look thence, as we can from Otranto, upon the mountains of still enslaved Epeiros; no one is tempted even to dream that he looks on free Corfu or on the lesser satellite that stands in front as its outpost.