entry
May 2003
Saracen Towers
As
you approach the Sorrentine coast from the sea,
they look like mere specks, indistinct bits of stone
along the shoreline below the town and high on the
slopes of Montechiaro to the north-east. These are the
"Saracen Towers," a reminder of a time when the
citizens of Sorrento had more serious things on their
mind than how to carve those inlaid wooden souvenirs
called intarsio. Other examples of these
towers can be seen scattered all along the coasts of
Southern Italy —indeed, from Gaeta to Amalfi, alone, there are more
than 350 of them.
Some may have been restored and partially
incorporated into more modern buildings such that it
is difficult to make out what they originally were.
But as you sail south from Amalfi down the coast of
the Campania region, past the many small modern
harbors such as San Marco, Pisciotta, Marina di
Camerotta, etc. and around Cape Infreschi just before
Scario, you come to a stretch of cliff faces and
mountains along the coast that still have no roads and
are still isolated. Once the backdrop of modern
buildings disappears, the towers start to stand out
—distinct, visible and lonely. They are posted, in
some cases, just a few hundred yards apart, ringing
all of southern Italy. The Norman
founders of the Kingdom of Sicily started
building them in the 11th century and the Spanish
viceroys of the same kingdom were still building them
500 years later. They all served the single purpose of
watching for an enemy more feared than even the Goths
and Huns who had destroyed the Roman Empire —the
Saracens.
"Saracen"
is a vague word; the
meaning has shifted over time. Ptolemy's Geography
from the second century mentions Sarakene as
a region in the northern Sinai peninsula and mentions
a people called the Sarakenoi. What it meant
to Italians in the Middle Ages, however, was 'Muslim
Invader', whether the Arabs who rode the initial wave
of Islamic expansion into Spain and Sicily in the 8th
and 9th centuries, or the Ottoman Turks who took
Constantinople in the 15th century. Indeed, after that
traumatic event for Christianity, the front in the war
between the two faiths moved decisively to the West,
and though Muslim thrusts into Europe by the 16th
century were largely just harassment, people here
still remembered that the Saracens in the past had
more than once attacked even Rome, itself. The word
"Saracen!" was enough to set the population trembling,
for it was very often the towns along the Sorrentine
and Amalfi coasts that bore the brunt of raids by the
likes of Khayr Ad-Din, the feared pirate known as
"Barbarossa"—Red Beard.
to history portal
to top of this page
© 2002 - 2023