Castle of Melfi

Melfi's castle begins with the Norman companies that came south under William of Hauteville and his brothers, whose arrival in 1041 is the date given for the first works on the crown of the hill; other reckonings place the fabric still standing in the late 11th century. The first fortification followed the motte and bailey pattern the Normans brought with them, a raised mound carrying a timber structure with a palisaded courtyard beside it. On that provisional work Robert Guiscard raised the first building in stone, a ducal palace with four corner towers, three of them still legible inside the later central block. The hill commands the gateway between Campania and Apulia, and the site was chosen both to hold off attack from outside and to shelter Norman allies.

In the summer of 1059 Pope Nicholas II came to Melfi and lodged in the fortress. On 24 June he concluded a treaty with Count Robert Guiscard and Prince Richard I of Capua by which the Church formally recognised the houses of Hauteville and Drengot. From 3 to 25 August he celebrated the First Council of Melfi, at which Guiscard was named Duke of Apulia and Calabria, with Sicily added to the style in some tellings although the island was still to be taken; the Concordat of Melfi of 23 August set the decisions down in form, and the town was promoted to capital of the new duchy. Guiscard had put aside his first wife, Alberada of Buonalbergo, to marry the Lombard princess Sikelgaita of Salerno. The palace held prisoners as well as popes: the Roman general Exaugustus Boioannes, captured during the fighting for Apulia, and barons who rebelled against ducal authority, among them Richard of Capua and Peter of Trani.

Four further councils followed, and the years from 1067 to 1137 were the brightest of Norman Melfi. Alexander II presided from 1 August 1067 into the first days of September, receiving Gisulf II of Salerno along with Guiscard and his younger brother Roger, and pronouncing Guiscard's excommunication. Urban II held the third council from 10 to 17 September 1089, its business the legislation of the Church and its relations with the Greek Church, and by some accounts the proclamation of the First Crusade. Paschal II's council of August 1101 granted the bishop of Melfi the privilege of answering directly to Rome. The fifth and last, from 4 to 18 July 1137, was presided over by Innocent II with the Emperor Lothair present; it deposed the antipope Anacletus II and struck at the legitimacy of Roger II of Hauteville. Anacletus had himself convened a council at Melfi on 5 November 1130, never recognised by the Church, at which he crowned Roger king of Sicily.

The Hohenstaufen arrived in 1194, and under Frederick II the castle was enlarged and given a curtain wall standing clear of the central palace, closed at either end by two outer towers that served as prison and as keep. The eastern one was the Marcangione; the northern one, the Tower of the Seven Winds, was raised at Frederick's order and stands tallest of the ring. The passages linking the two underground held the cells and the execution chamber, and iron shackles and human bones were recovered from them in later excavations. Frederick also made the castle the seat of the Archive of the Kingdom, where jurists and notaries worked on studies and translations from the Arabic, Avicenna's De Animalibus among them, and the chief deposit for the taxes gathered in Basilicata. Its cells held the Saracen Uthman of Lucera, released only on payment of fifty ounces of gold to the justiciar of Capitanata.

In 1231 Frederick promulgated the Constitutions of Melfi at the castle, the Liber Augustalis, the law code of the Kingdom of Sicily, proclaimed in the room still called the hall of the bowl. He took a hand in the drafting himself, alongside curial lawyers including his notary Pietro della Vigna of Capua, whom Dante set in the thirteenth canto of the Inferno, and the philosopher and mathematician Michael Scot; the code gathered and extended the Roman, Byzantine and Arab law that had come down to him through the Norman state. In 1232 he received Margrave Boniface II of Montferrat and Bianca Lancia at Melfi; she bore him his son Manfred, and he married her shortly before her death. After Gregory IX excommunicated him, he had two cardinals and a number of French and German bishops shut up in the castle in 1241, men who were to have sat in a papal council called to depose him.

The fall of the Hohenstaufen brought the Angevins, and with them the enlargement that gave Melfi the outline it still keeps: the outer circuit and the moat completed, three pentagonal towers and three more rectangular ones added, and the great cistern of Charles I of Anjou finished, the whole laid out by the military architect Pierre d'Agincourt between 1277 and 1280 in volcanic stone quarried from the slope behind. Between 1278 and 1281 Charles II had the stables raised, with the yards of the lairage and of the Mortorio, and the Lion bulwark guarded what was then the main entrance on the west.

The king's own apartment was modest, set apart from the central palace and backed against the Tower of the Seven Winds and linked to the block of the cells; the passage into it commanded the castle's main entrance on the north side and was guarded by a trapdoor, in all likelihood a last defence of the sovereign's person. In 1284 Charles II made the castle the official residence of his wife, Mary of Hungary. Its administrative weight nonetheless drained away to Naples, which took the Archive of the Kingdom with it, while its military role grew against plots and threats from within, the town below included; the moat was widened to press that separation home.

The Aragonese joined the contest for the town and ended as its masters. The fief passed through the Acciaioli and the Marzano before reaching Sergianni Caracciolo, the lover of Queen Joanna of Anjou, who installed himself with the title of prince. Aragonese rule was far from quiet. In September 1486 the castle housed a run of meetings among the leading figures of the conspiracy of the barons, whose purpose was to overthrow King Ferrante of Aragon, and the town's own lords, the Caracciolo, weighed heavily in it.

In 1528 the walls carried the last defence of Prince Giovanni Caracciolo against the French army of Odet de Foix, at war with the Emperor Charles V, which had already opened a breach and cut down the townspeople. Taken prisoner, and with no ransom forthcoming, the prince swore fealty to the king of France; the defeat that followed at the siege of Naples drove him into exile.

In place of the traitor Caracciolo the fief went briefly to Philibert of Chalon and then, in 1531, to the Genoese admiral Andrea Doria, who had financed Charles V's war against the French and put his fleet at the emperor's disposal. Doria men held Melfi for more than four centuries, first as governors and afterwards as agents of the princes. The first of them, Marco Antonio del Carretto, opened an entrance on the town side and threw a bridge over the moat, in earlier times a drawbridge; the stone arch above it carries a dedication from the town to his daughter Zenobia del Carretto and her husband Gianandrea Doria, prefect of the fleets of Philip, Catholic King of Spain. Married to Zenobia since 1558, Gianandrea had inherited the princedom from his uncle the admiral.

The central palace became the family's apartments, filled with furniture and paintings of hunting scenes, later dispersed to various museums and now being recovered for the castle piece by piece. Through the 18th and 19th centuries the governors lodged foreign travellers following the fashion for the Grand Tour, among them the Frenchman Lenormant and the Englishman Edward Lear. One tower, its name lost, is thought to have come down in the earthquake of 1694; another keeps the name of Marcangione, a brigand held in it in the 17th century. When an earthquake levelled much of Melfi in August 1851 the castle came through with slight structural damage, and when a second earthquake struck in 1930 it again came through unharmed, though the neglect it had fallen into cost it the sail raised on the clock tower at the end of the 17th century, which had carried a bell since 1853. The Doria administration then put 916,558 lire into repair and strengthening, and the work was finished two years later.

The Doria gave the castle up in the early 1950s and it passed to the Italian State, which holds it still and supervises its consolidation through the Ministry of Culture; the National Archaeological Museum of the Melfese opened in its rooms in 1976. The earthquake of 1980 did further damage, answered with concrete in the basement floors to carry the structures above. Since 2002 a long programme of consolidation and restoration has opened much of the castle to visitors and brought up finds now shown in the museum, which counted some 33,600 visitors in 2022. The building is protected as Italian national heritage.