other kinds of cyclical reckoning, with different starting dates, used irregularly by the papacy, notaries, and others. This method of dating was falling rapidly out of fashion in Europe by the fourteenth century, but it endured much later in the Salento with its strong Byzantine ties [79.A].53
Patrons inscribed dedications in Latin for many reasons. They rarely cite as motives the remission of their sins [1.A] or eternal life [58.A]; more often the dedication is simply to honor Christ, the Virgin, and various saints [1, 38, 57, 67.B, 78.C, 144]. The phrase ad (or in) honore Dei [144] is an echo of the liturgy.54 Sometimes no reason is given; perhaps generic piety was motive enough. On the column base at Brindisi, the dedication seems to be in honor of the “magnificent and benign emperors”; unfortunately, the text is incomplete [20]. Pious donations of goods (bonorum, donis) and serfs (colonis) were publicly recorded at Castro [35] and Lecce [58.A]. Of the Latin dedicatory texts that preserve information about their patrons, a clear majority were high-ranking ecclesiastics or priests, alone or in combination with lay donors, followed by feudal lords, then architects or artists.55 Two of these texts were in Leonine hexameters, the metrical form underscoring the episcopal patronage [57, 78.C].
In contrast with the dedications, devotional and hortatory texts in Latin rarely preserve a date of any kind. An exception is at Statte in 1416, where Nicholas Bertini, a traveler from northern Italy, left his name and the date of his visit to nearby Taranto [117.B].56 This kind of specificity fits the late date of this graffito, incised at a time when ideas about individualism were taking hold in northern Italy. In the Salento, too, dates are included in many postmedieval graffiti not included in my Database. Medieval visitors, by contrast, wanted to transcend the specifics of their recorded presence and solicit eternal favor or remembrance.
With the notable exception of incised graffiti, devotional invocations almost invariably begin with an abbreviation of the vocative Memento Domine, “Remember, Lord.” This is followed by “your servant,” either famuli tui, the correct genitive case, or the dative famulo tuo, which by the Middle Ages is a much rarer form. The dative is used disproportionately in Salentine Latin texts, however, either because of a contamination from the Greek or an attraction to the case of the patron’s name in the vernacular. In any case, the meaning of the inscription would have been, and remains, clear. The priest Sarulus who dedicated images of Saint Nicholas and Saint Margaret in two different crypt churches at Mottola must have been unperturbed when artists wrote famulo in one and famuli in the other [75.A, 76.C].
Latin devotional graffiti occur in large numbers at only two sites, San Marco in Massafra and Santa Lucia in Palagianello [66, 94]. These differ from more formal texts in several ways: they are incised irregularly, rather than painted or carefully carved; they are often much shorter and may be superimposed; some are in minuscule, or in a combination of capital, uncial, and minuscule letters; and they very rarely use the formal Memento Domine formula. Instead, most Latin graffiti begin with Ego, “I am,” followed by a name or names. These two sites, along with a third [116.A] that is also in the province of Taranto, contain the only Latin hortatory injunctions in the Salento. The overt request that readers of these texts pray for the person named therein was directed to Latin readers such as the monks, priests, and other clergy who identify themselves by profession in didactic Latin graffiti at the same sites.
In Santa Lucia (the former Trinità) at Brindisi, a painted text combines a devotional introduction, Memento Domine, with “rest in peace,” ending with “Amen” [27.A]. Given its location low on the left wall of the church, there is little doubt that the inscription marked a family burial place. At San Paolo, in the same city, a painted “Here lies” (hic iacet) records the tomb of an elite named man originally from Florence [26.A], while a carved marble plaque marks the burial of an elite unnamed woman [26.C]. The metrical inscription of the latter adds that an altar and a joint tomb have been prepared nearby by her devoted husband, Nicholas Castaldo. A now-lost sarcophagus lid for a magister states “Here lies the body” (hic jacet corpus) and warns of excommunication by the archbishop for anyone disturbing the tomb [31]. Like the Brindisi epitaph the lid gave a specific date, and this seems typical of elite commissions.
If we consider not only epitaphs and dedicatory and devotional inscriptions but also the didactic explanatory labels that accompany wall paintings, we find some evidence for the Latin literacy of a few painters. At Acquarica del Capo [1.A], where a long dedicatory inscription in Latin is signed by two artists in Greek, the caption for Saint Hippolytus on horseback is labeled both in Greek, “Ο ΑΓ(ΙΟC) ΙΠΠΟΑΥΤ(OC),” and in Latin, “S(AN)C(TV)S VPOLIT[VS].” The initial U (as V) in the Latin legend betrays the hand of the Greek painters.57 In the Saint Catherine cycle in the vault at Casaranello, which is entirely Latin in its captioning, the evil emperor is mislabeled once “MANSENCIUS” (for Maxentius), and “AGVSSTA” (Augusta) is also misspelled.58 This is sloppy Latin and hardly indicative of the artist’s better Greek if he was trained in France, as scholarly consensus has it.59 Vernacular pronunciation probably influenced the spellings of “CATERINA” (T for TH), “MASENCIUS” (S for X), “PORFILIUS” (L for R), and “IMPERATRICS” (CS for X).60 Similarly, at the Candelora crypt in Massafra, Saint Stephen is identified as “STEFANUS” (F for PH) and Nicholas the Pilgrim as “PELLEGRINUS” (LL for R) [63.B].61
Greek
The impressive quantity of Greek texts produced in the medieval Salento gives the lie to Nikephoros Gregoras’s lament that by his time, the first half of the fourteenth century, nothing remained of Greek poetry or spoken language in the ancient Magna Graecia: καὶ οὐδὲν ἔτι ἴχνος ἐλλέλειπται μὴ ὅτι γε μούσης
