Patronage in the re-Christianized Landscape of Angevin Apulia: The Rebuilding of Luceria sarracenorum into Civitas Sanctae Mariae

This dissertation examines the early fourteenth-century architecture, art, and urbanism of Lucera in Apulia, a city that for most of the thirteenth century served as the only Muslim settlement on the Italian peninsula until its violent purge and destruction by the king of Naples on August 15, 1300. As a city that was suppressed, repopulated, and rebuilt within the span of two decades, Lucera is unique and facilitates a case study that bridges scholarship on the art and architecture in southern Italy, urbanism, multiculturalism, and the emergence of states. This interdisciplinary work argues that Lucera's destruction and reconstruction were due to the rise of an Angevin state and investigates how the repopulated city's art and architecture were affected by the priorities of consolidation and centralization. This dissertation emphasizes the growth of Angevin cities as social and historical phenomena within an analysis of their built environments and the art forms that inhabited them. The most fundamental question raised is how did the emergence of the centralized Angevin crown, the same force that willed the end of Muslim Lucera and its subsequent reconstruction, affect architectural production as well as the dissemination of artistic styles throughout the kingdom? In addition, what was the relationship between arts on a smaller scale, many examples of which were "imported" from regional artistic centers, and buildings, which largely were vernacular constructions? This dissertation argues that the links between political centralization, building production, and artistic circulation within the Angevin South were inextricable. It reaches three fundamental conclusions: the development of an Angevin state meant that a large population of visible religious and ethnic minorities at Lucera was seen as detrimental to political, social, and cultural consolidation, necessitating a purge; the group of outsiders was located within an economically important region of the kingdom, prompting an immediate reconstruction to complete a network of urban centers that had begun three decades earlier; and the same commercial and diplomatic networks of which rebuilt Lucera formed one of the final pieces facilitated the circulation of materials, individual expertise, and art work employed to build, govern, and furnish the reconstructed city. In essence, this dissertation provides a history of the Angevin state through a detailed examination of Lucera's art and architecture rather than providing purely monographic histories of each object.

Department dc:contributor.department

History of Art

Year dc:date.issued

2014

Author dc:creator

• Harper, Alexander

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Jill, Caskey

• Angevin
• Colonialism
• Islam
• Italy
• Naples

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1807/68438

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:utoronto.scholaris.ca:1807/68438