The
coast-lands were never in their possession; they only harried the
natives. The system of the Saracens on the mainland, though it seldom
attained the form of a provincial or even military government, was
different. They had the animus manendi. Where they dined, they slept.
In point of destructiveness, I should think there was little to choose
between them. One thinks of the hundreds of villages the corsairs
devastated; the convents and precious archives they destroyed,
[Footnote: In this particular branch, again, the Christians surpassed
the unbeliever. More archives were destroyed in the so-called "Age of
Lead" - the closing period of Bour-bonism - than under Saracens and
Corsairs combined. It was quite the regular thing to sell them as
waste-paper to the shopkeepers. Some of them escaped this fate by the
veriest miracle - so those of the celebrated Certoza of San Lorenzo in
Padula. The historian Marincola, walking in the market of Salerno,
noticed a piece of cheese wrapped up in an old parchment. He elicited
the fact that it came from this Certosa, intercepted the records on
their way for sale in Salerno, and contrived by a small present to the
driver that next night two cartloads of parchments were deposited in the
library of La Cava.] the thousands of captives they carried
off - sometimes in such numbers that the ships threatened to sink till
the more unsaleable portion of the human freight had been cast
overboard. And it went on for centuries. Pirates and slave-hunters they
were; but not a whit more so than their Christian adversaries, on whose
national rivalries they thrived. African slaves, when not chained to the
galleys, were utilized on land; so the traveller Moore records that the
palace of Caserta was built by gangs of slaves, half of them Italian,
half Turkish. We have not much testimony as to whether these Arab slaves
enjoyed their lot in European countries; but many of the Christians in
Algiers certainly enjoyed theirs. A considerable number of them refused
to profit by Lord Exmouth's arrangement for their ransom. I myself knew
the descendant of a man who had been thus sent back to his relations
from captivity, and who soon enough returned to Africa, declaring that
the climate and religion of Europe were alike insupportable.
In Saracen times the Venetians actually sold Christian slaves to the
Turks. Parrino cites the severe enactments which were issued in the
sixteenth century against Christian sailors who decoyed children on
board their boats and sold them as slaves to the Moslem. I question
whether the Turks were ever guilty of a corresponding infamy.
This Parrino, by the way, is useful as showing the trouble to which the
Spanish viceroys were put by the perpetual inroads of these Oriental
pests. Local militia were organized, heavy contributions levied, towers
of refuge sprang up all along the coast - every respectable house had its
private tower as well (for the dates, see G. del Giudice, Del Grande
Archivio di Napoli, 1871, p. 108). The daring of the pirates knew no
bounds; they actually landed a fleet at Naples itself, and carried off a
number of prisoners. The entire kingdom, save the inland parts, was
terrorized by their lightning-like descents.
A particular literature grew up about this time - those "Lamenti" in
rime, which set forth the distress of the various places they afflicted.
The saints had work to do. Each divine protector fought for his own town
or village, and sometimes we see the pleasing spectacle of two patrons
of different localities joining their forces to ward off a piratical
attack upon some threatened district by means of fiery hail, tempests,
apparitions and other celestial devices. A bellicose type of Madonna
emerges, such as S. M. della Libera and S. M. di Constantinopoli, who
distinguishes herself by a fierce martial courage in the face of the
enemy. There is no doubt that these inroads acted as a stimulus to the
Christian faith; that they helped to seat the numberless patron saints
of south Italy more firmly on their thrones. The Saracens as
saint-makers. . . .
But despite occasional successes, the marine population suffered
increasingly. Historians like Summonte have left us descriptions of the
prodigious exodus of the country people from Calabria and elsewhere into
the safer capital, and how the polished citizens detested these new
arrivals.
The ominous name "Torre di Guardia" (tower of outlook) - a cliff whence
the sea was scanned for the appearance of Turkish vessels - survives all
over the south. Barbarossa, too, has left his mark; many a hill,
fountain or castle has been named after him. In the two Barbarossas were
summed up the highest qualities of the pirates, and it is curious to
think that the names of those scourges of Christendom, Uruj and
Kheir-eddin, should have been contracted into the classical forms of
Horace and Ariadne. The picturesque Uruj was painted by Velasquez; the
other entertained a polite epistolatory correspondence with Aretino, and
died, to his regret, "like a coward" in bed. I never visit
Constantinople without paying my respects to that calm tomb at
Beshiktah, where, after life's fitful fever, sleeps the Chief of the Sea.
And so things went on till recently. K. Ph. Moritz writes that King
Ferdinand of Naples, during his sporting excursions to the islands of
his dominions, was always accompanied by two cruisers, to forestall the
chance of his being carried off by these Turchi. But his loyal
subjects had no cruisers at their disposal; they lived Turcarum
praedonibus semper obnoxii. Who shall calculate the effects of this
long reign of terror on the national mind?
For a thousand years - from 830 to 1830 - from the days when the
Amalfitans won the proud title of "Defenders of the Faith" up to those
of the sentimental poet Waiblinger (1826), these shores were infested by
Oriental ruffians, whose activities were an unmitigated evil.
