entry
July 2013
additions in March 2023
The Lombards,
Monte Sant'Angelo & the Sanctuary
of St. Michael
DISCLAIMER
I don't know if
pilgrimages are idolatrous or have to do with "graven
images", all expressly forbidden by our Three Great
Monotheistic Faiths. Maybe you're just curious—"Ah,
so this is where it all started. Interesting." However,
even though you know that God is everywhere, if you then
start talking to and touching walls and rocks and cave
surfaces, some of which are pretty graven, maybe you're
trying to tap into or bargain for some special energy,
something electric and tangible to help get you through
life —well, then, maybe... but, thankfully, these are
Thomistic distinctions that I can happily leave to Thom.
And that is all I shall have to say on "...why
folk long to go on pilgrimage."
INTRODUCTION
watercolor by W. & J. Blaeu
from 1645
If
you leave from Naples and head east for the Gargano promontory, the "spur"
that juts out into the Adriatic on the other side of
Italy, you pass through Avellino and have the feeling that
you can coast the 125 km down the other side of the
Apennines to Foggia. You can't. Foggia, one of the
provincial capitals in the region of Puglia, is at an
altitude of 76 meters on the "Tavoliere," the fertile and
well-cultivated Apulian plain, called the granary of
Italy, the "breadbasket," a 4,800 km²/1800 mi² table-land.
Strangely, at the wrong time of the year, before the
bountiful potential lurking in those fields starts to
spill out, the area is orderly, yes, but unpleasantly
empty and yellow, even arid. You stick to the ring-road
around Foggia, get off and head NE and then start to see
the Gargano ridge rising undramatically from the left of
your field of vision. No real mountains, as such—just a
promontory, the highest point of which is just over 1,000
meters. It's 35 km from Foggia in a straight line down to
Manfredonia, the harbor town on the south, right in the
crook, where the spur rejoins the north-south line of the
coast.
From there you
wind back up to 800 meters along a mountain road,
switching back again and again up the chalky white south
face of the Gargano. It's a karst mountain with
plenty of caves from sea-level up to the top, but the
geology doesn't display any of the spectacular
mini-Dolomite formations that you find in other karst
areas in the south— the Cilento,
for example. You are now in Monte Sant'Angelo (photo,
right), one the seven places in Italy that make up
UNESCO's recent conglomerate World Heritage Site, The
Lombards in Italy, the Places of Power (568-774 AD).
Monte Sant'Angelo is a town of about 15,000; it holds a
special place in the religious history of Italy—indeed, of
Europe.
THE LOMBARDS
This
UNESCO graphic (below, right) shows the piecemeal
nature of the Lombard Kingdom of Italy.The upper
group of duchies are separated from the lower ones
by a broad swath of property that belonged to the
western church (the duchy of Rome) and what was left
of Byzantine presence in northern Italy, the Greek
Exarchate (vice-realm), extending down from Ravenna.
The Exarchate was conquered by the Lombards in 753
and then restored by Pepin, King of the Franks
(Charlemagne's father), and given NOT back to the
Greeks but rather to the duchy of Rome. This fusion
was the basis of the Vatican
States that would last until 1861.
The
Lombards (also Longobards) came into Italy from
the north in the mid-500s AD, apparently pushed south by
a rather aggressive and expansive nomadic people called
the Avars, about whom little is known. The Lombards met
almost no resistance. Italy was exhausted after the
so-called Gothic Wars,
a twenty-year period of devastating struggle between the
Ostrogoths (who had brought about the fall of the
Western Roman Empire in the first place) and the
invading Byzantine forces of Justinian, bent on
reconstituting the Empire. Justinian won but his own
forces were so depleted by then that they were no match
for fresh invaders. The Greeks withdrew to enclaves and
left the rest to the Lombards, who by the late 570s had
set up a kingdom, later named Regnum Italicum
("Kingdom of Italy"), which reached its height in the
mid-700s. It was more of a confederation of duchies than
a unified kingdom; indeed, one speaks of the Lombard
duchies separately —the Duchy of Benevento, of Friuli,
of Spoleto, etc., with the whole period commonly called
"the rule of dukes" since there was no unifying
monarchy. (In 774 the northern Lombard holdings would be
taken by Charlemagne, and the southern part by the Normans in the 11th
century.) The Lombards still live on in the memory of
the modern Italian nation in the name of the Region of
Lombardia and in towns such as Lombardi and even
Longobardi.
After 650 AD,
the Lombards from Benevento spread into the Gargano,
where the cult of the Archangel Michael had established
itself in the 400s. Note: below* The sanctuary of
the Lombards in Monte Sant'Angelo was the first church
of Saint Michael in the west and a model for many such
later places of worship in western Europe. If, indeed,
there really was a place of devotion to Michael in the
Gargano as early as the beginning of the 400s, that is
likely due to Byzantine influence. Earlier, in the 300s,
Constantine the Great (272-337) built the Michaelion,
one of the earliest and best-known of such churches. It
was just north of Constantinople at a site physically
similar to the Gargano and built over an ancient temple
previously associated with medicine and therapeutic
waters.
ARCHANGEL
MICHAEL
Archangel
Michael Casts the
Rebellious Angels into the Abyss
by Neapolitan artist, Luca
Giordano
Among
Jews, Muslims and Christians, Michael stands out in
their religious literature and commentaries, as filled as
they may be with other prominent figures. In various
sources, he is one of the four archangels who stand around
the throne of God; he was the angel who wrestled with
Jacob; the angel who handed down the Torah to Moses, etc.
Indeed, the Book of Daniel in the Jewish bible presents
Michael as the Defender of the Hebrews:
But at that time shall Michael rise
up, the great prince, who standeth for the children of
Thy people: and a time shall come such as never was
from the time that nations began...And at that time
shall Thy people be saved, everyone that shall be
found written in the book." (Daniel 12,1.)
For Muslims, Michael is the angel of mercy. He
rewards the righteous and is also the sender of rain,
thunder and lightning. In medieval Christian faith he is
the angel who rescues souls from Limbo and Hell, the
warrior who holds the scales that balance good deeds
against bad (as commonly depicted in western Christian
art). He was first seen as a healing angel, and then later
as a protector and the warrior angel and leader of the
army of God against the forces of evil, as in the Book of
Revelation, where he leads God's armies against the forces
of Satan, symbolized by the dragon and as told by Milton
in Paradise Lost:
...but the
sword
Of Michael from the Armorie of God
Was giv'n him temperd so, that neither keen
Nor solid might resist that edge: it met
The sword of Satan with steep force to smite...
That has given Christian art another common
depiction of Michael —slaying a serpent or dragon or a
fallen angel, one of the hosts of Satan. Devotion to
Michael was congenial to the Lombards, for he was like
their earlier Germanic deity, Woden, a healer yet the god
of war and protector of heroes and warriors. This, no
doubt, hastened the Christianization of the Lombards.
THE SANCTUARY
The Upper
Atrium, entrance to the Sanctuary of St Michael
The Gargano, itself,
had a long history of myth and ritual from before the
Christian era. The area is rugged and covered by forests
and ravines. Many of the myths and rites had to do with
curative waters and the practice called incubatio,
a rite whereby one slept by a sacred place in order to
have divine revelations the next morning. These earlier
rites then left their traces in the cult of St. Michael.
The man-made structures within the later sanctuary
reshaped what had originally been simply a natural cave.
The inscriptions within the site let us follow the
evolution of the grotto into a full-fledged place of
religious expression that welcomed pilgrims from distant
places and offered them hospitality.
Devotion to St. Michael produced a rich mix of
faith, art and culture between the 500s and 700s. With the
Lombards the sanctuary at Monte Sant'Angelo became one of
the most important places of worship in Christendom and a
destination for pilgrims, a stage on the road that led to
the Holy Land. That road was really the ancient via
Traiana (Trajan Way), the Roman road from Benevento
to Brindisi, at which point travelers embarked for
Jerusalem. Under the Lombards the route became known as
the via Sacra Langobardorum [Holy Road of
the Lombards] and may be seen as a precursor of the other
famous route of pilgrims, the via Francigena. Both
channeled pilgrims from as far away as Britain.
The Lombards were thus responsible for the
development and growth of devotion to the Archangel
Michael. The names of such Lombard nobility as Queen Ansa,
Romualdo II, and of Gisulfo II found on the walls of the
sanctuary attest to the relationship between the Lombards
and Saint Michael, as do the tales of apparitions of the
saint.

Cut-away painting of the
Sanctuary of St. Michael (artwork by Francesco
Corni)
There is some documentary reference to apparitions
in the 490s, but none earlier than that; then, there
follow 15 centuries of incremental sanctuary building
dedicated to Michael, the Sant'Angelo, the Angel Saint.
The main church is essentially an entrance to the Grotto
Basilica, popularly termed the Celestial Basilica. The
grotto below the main entrance is multi-level with
stairways (image, above) leading to various devotional
stopping points contained within the main "cave church,"
the grotto. The prominent tower (#1, above) next to the
surface-level entrance (#2, above) is from the 1200s and
is called the Angevin Tower; it is an Angevin expansion of
an earlier tower built by their Swabian predecessor,
emperor Frederick II.
It was meant to be a watch-tower similar to those in place
in Frederick's famous and very odd Castel del Monte not
far from here. The building at the main entrance of the
sanctuary, the first thing you see from the street, is
called the Upper Atrium. It was built in 1656 in honor of
all those who had died in the recent plague.
If there is a
centerpiece of the entire complex, it is the statue
of Saint Michael (detail, right), closed in a silver and
Bohemian glass urn. It is of Carrara marble, 1 meter 30 cm
tall and is the work of Andrea Contucci, also
known as Sansovino (1467-1529). It was placed in the
grotto in 1507. The statue is widely reproduced at sites
throughout Monte Sant'Angelo, such as on the facade of the
Upper Atrium, itself, or facades of other buildings, or in
squares, etc., as well as being the theme for countless
variations in the form of miniature souvenirs. Indeed,
there was a time in the 1400s when permission, by royal
decree, to render miniature reproductions of St. Michael
was limited to a special class of local sculptors called sammecalère.
They are responsible for the many variations on Contucci's
original, each slightly different from the next, that we
still see today.

The earliest traces left by pilgrims date to the
6th century. The pilgrims include high-ranking members of
the Church, members of royal families, noblemen and
representatives from the common people. One should note
the presence —unique in Italy— of at least five
inscriptions written in letters of the ancient Runic
alphabet (image above, the inscription of the monk,
Hereberecht); they were left by Anglo-Saxon pilgrims and
bear witness to the European dimension of this pilgrimage
in the early Middle Ages. There has been a devotional
museum on the premises since 1989; it holds gifts given to
the sanctuary over the centuries by pilgrims.
The castle of Monte Sant'Angelo
Monte Sant'Angelo,
itself, shows distinct features in how it is laid out as
well as in historical and artistic sights; it is one of
the most interesting examples in Apulia of a "hill town."
The buildings follow the natural level curves of the
mountain, and the town could be defended by a castle
(photo, right) set at the highest part of the settlement.
There was a primitive fortification from the 800s; then
came the first three dynasties of the kingdom of Sicily,
then Naples: the Normans, the Swabians (Hohenstaufen), and
the Angevins, each of which expanded the castle. The
second one is the most interesting to me since this is
where Bianca Lancia, Frederick II's wife, lived and where
she bore three children, Costanza, Violante, and Manfredi. It is, however,
the sanctuary of Archangel Michael that has always
determined the development of the historical center of
Monte Sant'Angelo. Most of the buildings within both the
first and the second circle of walls, i.e. those built
between the 11th and the 13th century, had to do with
religious activities and the need to care for pilgrims.
The world is still full of the faithful of many
spiritual and religious persuasions who go on pilgrimages,
and thus they still come to Monte Sant'Angelo.
Besides the original sanctuary of St. Michael, there are
now at least a dozen other houses of worship in the town.
Modern pilgrims can be accommodated in hotels as well as
in a modern 50-room Sanctuary Guest House. Or they can
find a cave. There are still plenty of those.
*Note —on the 400s. The 5th
century was a tough and ultimately fatal century for the
Western Roman Empire. The Goths invade right on time
in 401; emperor Honarius closes the Colosseum in 405 and
calls off all fun & games —austerity (and the
century is just getting started!); in 407 Rome
starts to call legions home from Britain to protect the
home front; in 408, the Goths besiege Rome; in 410, the
Huns invade; then there's a great earthquake and some
plague, etc. etc. It doesn't get much better. The glory
that was Rome ends officially in 476. Bad times, indeed,
but at least the Huns introduce trousers to replace
togas, and Augustine writes De Civitate Dei (The
City of God), so maybe the century isn't a total
loss. up^
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