The Medieval Salento. Linda Safran

including an eighth-century ode by Cosmas the Melodist that also references the Logos, as on the Gospel book held by John.⁸⁷ Farther to the right is the apse Crucifixion with its exceptional titulus referring explicitly to Christ’s victory over death rather than to the usual “Jesus of Nazareth King of the Jews” [43.A]. Such an explicitly salvific title reinforces the message of the Jonah image and strongly suggests a funerary function for the church. The presence of the Virgin and John flanking the cross brings the image in line with the deesis imagery more typical of apses in the Salento. At Li Monaci, then, the languages serve to introduce the complexity of the cultural space.

      Literacy

      The preceding discussion of bilingualism raises the question of literacy, a term that is notoriously difficult to define. Does it imply reading complex texts, or only recognizing one’s name? Does it require the ability to write or only to read? How many spelling or grammatical errors are permitted before one’s supplication is considered illiterate? However it is defined, there are no studies of medieval literacy that focus on public texts in the Terra d’Otranto. Among private texts, historians who have studied notarial documents identify as illiterates those parties or witnesses who cannot sign their names and instead make the sign of the cross.⁸⁸ In Taranto, the notarial acts in Greek from the tenth to thirteenth centuries reveal approximately 70 percent literacy, 27 percent semiliteracy, and only 3 percent illiteracy.⁸⁹ At the same time, some of the monks at the important Orthodox monastery of Saint Nicholas at Casole could not read Greek.⁹⁰ A study of Latin usage in medieval Bari found a high level of literacy among upper- and middle-class laymen and a lower level among ecclesiastics, two-thirds of whom did not surpass the elementary level.⁹¹ While functional literacy seems to have been more prized in Byzantium than in Europe, this was no longer true, at least in Italy, by the thirteenth century.⁹²

      Jack Goody wrote, “Where writing is, class cannot be far away.”⁹³ Literacy was a source of social power, and the very fact of an inscription connoted status; this was true in antiquity and it remained true in the Middle Ages and beyond.⁹⁴ The literate, or those who could afford to fabricate evidence of it by commissioning texts, dominated the illiterate majority through the power of the word. “Monumental texts may exercise power through their location in space and the way they look,”⁹⁵ and many of the local dedicatory inscriptions—solid, framed blocks of words—were inscribed permanently, or at least durably, in prominent interior and exterior spaces. Most are in a church apse or over a doorway, obvious focuses of viewer attention. In this way messages and status were broadcast widely. The multiplication of monumental texts, such as the repeated strips of information in the Otranto mosaic pavement [86.C–G], make grand statements that attract the eye, as do texts supplemented by figural imagery. Devotional and funerary texts are rarely as long, as prominent, or as sizable as dedicatory inscriptions, but when they are disproportionately large or noticeable they command proportionally greater attention. Anyone entering the Carpignano crypt would be drawn to Stratigoules’s burial site, which has the longest funerary text in the Salento in any language and a unique arcosolium setting [32.J]. With its composition underscored by color, its intimate physical connection with sacred figures on the intrados who shelter the tomb, and its literary pretensions (regardless of its dodecasyllabic defects),⁹⁶ this text for a dead boy mostly helped his father stake his place in the local community, despite his modest title of σπαθάριος.

      Linguistic Identities

      La‘az is the generic term in Hebrew for a non-Hebrew language, including one that a Jew might speak.⁹⁷ In the Arukh, a Hebrew dictionary compiled in Rome circa 1100, la‘az is glossed with the vernacular barbaro—stranger, non-Jew, from the Greek term for “barbarian.” It is a cultural term as well as a linguistic one. Three centuries later, in an extensive glossary compiled by Judah Romano in Rome to clarify difficult terms in Maimonides’s Mishneh Torah, the meaning of la‘az is again limited to “foreign” language, probably synonymous with “vernacular.” Other terms are introduced here as well: Latino refers to someone who does not speak Hebrew, but likely refers to Romance rather than Latin.⁹⁸ In the Arukh and elsewhere, the expression lashon romi does not mean “speech/language of Rome,” which would be a literal translation referring to some form of Latin, but rather “a hybrid language, strongly graecicizing, perhaps that spoken in the central-southern regions of Italy under Byzantine influence.”⁹⁹ Rom in medieval Hebrew sources is Byzantium, the medieval Roman empire and not the ancient imperial city; Byzantine (and South Italian) Jews were Romaniotes. In general, the non-Hebrew lo‘azim, including Italian volgare, were derided by learned Jews as notzrì, Christian (from “Nazarene”), and this attitude meant that it was not used as a creative literary language by Jews before the sixteenth century. Nevertheless, short glosses in medieval texts indicate that the Italian Jews were developing their own written and spoken vernacular, which we now call “Judeo-Italian,” based on vulgar Latin.¹⁰⁰ Jewish women, and not a few men, would have profited from translations of the Scriptures and the prayer book written specifically for them in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.¹⁰¹

      Greek speakers are found in today’s Salento only in nine communities south of Lecce, but the medieval Hellenophonic zone was much larger.¹⁰² The language spoken in the Grecìa salentina is a particular dialect called by its users griko or grika: “milume grika” means “we speak grika.” This word is not Greek; it corresponds neither to Latin graecus nor ancient Greek γραικός. Gerhard Rohlfs suggested that it was the term that the ancient South Italians, speaking an Italic language related to Latin, called their Greek-speaking neighbors in Magna Graecia.¹⁰³ It remains unclear whether the dialect represents a survival of ancient Greek or a medieval phenomenon.¹⁰⁴ Regardless of its antiquity, the term and the dialect survived through and beyond the Byzantine period.¹⁰⁵ After unification in 1861, when Italian was imposed as the country’s official language, griko speakers in the Salento continued to use their traditional dialect among family and friends, while the Romance vernacular was used for everyday business and Italian only for official matters and largely unavailable higher education.¹⁰⁶

      Griko is illuminated by considering its use among Jews. After being expelled from Spain in 1492 and from the Salento by the Spanish rulers in 1541, the affected Jews went mostly to Thessalonike, part of the Ottoman Empire, or to Corfu, under Venetian rule. In both places they found Romaniote (formerly Byzantine) Jews, Italian Jews from Rome, Ashkenazim, and Sephardim practicing their distinctive liturgical rites. Visitors to early modern Corfu record that there were communities of Jews of diverse origin that included both gregi—Jews from the Salento who spoke griko—and others from Apulia who used pugghisu, “Puglian,” the Salentine Romance vernacular.¹⁰⁷ These communities had names derived from their languages: qehillah apulyanit (the Apulian community, using Romance) and qehillah griqa, or griga, using Salentine Greek.¹⁰⁸ The linguistic term was thus a cultural signifier for both Jews and Christians.

      The ancient Greeks labeled those who did not speak their language barbaroi, “barbarians,” and this term is also used to describe the Libyan heathens in the Byzantine dedication of the rebuilt walls of Taranto [139].¹⁰⁹ Today, ppoppiti, with the same kind of staccato syllables as barbaroi, is used to describe the inhabitants of the southern Salento by those who live along and beyond its northern limit and speak an Apulian rather than a Salentine dialect.¹¹⁰ Ppoppiti has also come to connote boorish, unlettered peasants, just as speaking a non-Greek tongue once implied other kinds of cultural and behavioral barbarisms. As usual, when the term is adopted by those who have been identified pejoratively—when it becomes an emic rather than an etic label—it loses much of its negative force.¹¹¹

      This chapter has demonstrated ways in which language is a linchpin of identity. Hebrew users were at least bilingual because they were always part of a larger community that did not share their language. Greek and Latin speakers, especially those who lived in a monolingual village, lacked such