Melfi historical timeline

Melfi mattered enormously for about two centuries and then stopped, which is why it holds monuments out of all proportion to its size.

The Norman capital

The Normans took Melfi in the mid-eleventh century and made it the seat of their power in the south before Palermo existed as a capital for them. In 1059 a council here saw Pope Nicholas II invest Robert Guiscard as Duke of Apulia and Calabria — the deal that legitimised Norman rule in southern Italy. Five church councils were held at Melfi in all; at one of them Urban II is said to have begun preparing the First Crusade.

The Constitutions

Under Frederick II the castle became a favoured residence and a hunting base. In 1231 he promulgated here the Liber Augustalis, the Constitutions of Melfi: a systematic code asserting royal justice over feudal and ecclesiastical privilege, drafted with Pier delle Vigne. It is regarded as one of the earliest attempts at a centralised, secular legal order in medieval Europe.

Decline

Angevin and then Aragonese rule reduced Melfi to a provincial town, and the earthquakes did the rest. The 1851 quake killed around a thousand people and levelled much of the centre.

The brigands

After unification in 1861 the Vulture became the centre of the southern brigand war. Carmine Crocco, from Rionero just down the road, led the largest band in the south and took Melfi itself in 1861. The revolt was partly banditry and partly a peasant rising against a new state that had changed nothing about who owned the land, and it was put down with considerable force.

Modern

Brigandage was endemic here after Italian unification, and emigration emptied the countryside. In the 1990s a large car plant opened at San Nicola di Melfi, which remains the biggest employer in Basilicata and changed the town more than anything since the Normans.