The Medieval Salento. Linda Safran

Of some 360 medieval villages identified in the province of Lecce alone, at least 43 are hagiotoponyms named for saints, the Virgin, or Christ.¹¹³ Yet it is difficult to compile a comprehensive list of regional hagiotoponyms because it is rarely clear whether a textual source refers to a village, a neighborhood, a beach, a tower, or a cult site around which villages might develop. In the following list, I attempt to include only towns and villages (casalia). From the fourteenth century onward, the successively smaller administrative subdivisions (pictagia, neighborhoods, contained vicinia) of cities like Lecce and Nardò were uniformly hagiotoponyms named after neighborhood churches.¹¹⁴ Including such cult sites yields a much higher percentage of saints’ names than in earlier periods. Nevertheless, at the end of the Middle Ages communal identity was connected inextricably with the name of a saint (or other holy person) regardless of whether one had the same personal name.

      Extant hagiotoponyms cannot communicate the rich array of earlier village dedications because so many sites were abandoned in the late medieval period or agglomerated into modern towns and cities.¹¹⁵ I have compiled a list of over forty medieval Salentine hagiotoponyms,¹¹⁶ which are Anglicized or Latinized as follows (number of sites follows if greater than one): Andrew, Anne, Barbara, Bartholomew, Benedict, Blasius, Cassian, Cataldus, Caesarius, Cosmas, Costantina (?), Danactus, Demetrius, Donatus, Elijah (2), Elizabeth, Emilianus, Euphemia, George (4), Helena, James (3), John (5), Laurence, Lucy, Mark (2), Martin, Marzanus, Michael, including Angelus (4), Nicholas (5), Pancratius, Paul, Peter (6?), Phocas, Potitus, Praexedonia (?), Simon, Stephen, Susanna, Theodore, Three Hebrews (“Trium Puerorum”), Victor, and Vitus (2).

      Throughout Italy, hagiotoponyms recall saints of the early church; rarely are places named for Saint Francis or Saint Dominic, even as those personal names grew in popularity.¹¹⁷ Mario Villani asserted that southern Italian place names replicated toponomastic preferences elsewhere in Italy but in a different order of frequency. The ten most common hagiotoponyms in Italy are Peter (643), Martin (160), John (128), Michael (or Angelus, 120), Laurence (79), George (68), Andrew (65), Stephen (61), Nicholas (50), and Vito (49),¹¹⁸ but only Peter, John, Nicholas, George, Michael, James, Mark, Vitus, and Elijah (Elias) are used more than once as place names in the Salento. Nicholas and to a lesser degree Elijah are thus over-represented locally, while Martin is scarcely present as a toponym even though there were many churches dedicated to him.¹¹⁹ This toponymic disparity parallels the one between the local name stock and that in Italy more generally.

      Salento hagiotoponyms evidence a special devotion to Saint Peter: San Pietro in Lama and San Pietro Vernotico, both thriving small towns today; San Pietro in Galatina, now simply Galatina; and the extinct casalia of San Pietro de Hispanis,¹²⁰ San Pietro de lacu Iohannis,¹²¹ and probably San Pietro in Bevagna, whose homonymous church still stands. The popularity of Petrine place names is due in part to local legends about the apostle’s sojourn in Apulia en route to Rome,¹²² even though most of the sites with his name date only to the Middle Ages. In any case, Peter is, after the Virgin, the most widely diffused hagiotoponym throughout Italy,¹²³ so his prominence cannot be attributed merely to local factors.

      Most hagiotoponyms commemorate universal saints, but a number of less familiar and even unknown saints’ names are also attested locally. A rare Old Testament hagiotoponym (in addition to Elijah) is Casale Trium Puerorum, now San Crispieri, a reference to the Three Hebrew Children placed into the fiery furnace in the book of Daniel.¹²⁴ Caesarius probably is not the sixth-century bishop of Arles, but a deacon from Terracina (Sicily) who was sewn into a sack and cast into the sea;¹²⁵ Danactus (Dana) was a martyr from Illyricum who met the same fate after first being chopped into pieces.¹²⁶ Emilianus—unknown in modern Italy, but attested near Otranto—could be one of a number of saints with that name; Potitus was an early martyr executed in northwestern Apulia.¹²⁷ There is no record of a saint named Praexedonia, a hagiotoponym attested near Aurio, although Santa Praxedis exists as a Roman cult, and Rome may also be behind a Santa Co(n)stantina. It is unlikely that these uncommon toponyms represent the collective choice of a community. More likely they reflect individual preferences as the titular saints of privately owned churches around which hamlets or villages later developed.

      Popular personal names and hagiotoponyms in the Salento generally coincide, with one interesting exception. Leo, a name used by all three faiths in the medieval Salento and that remained popular throughout the Middle Ages, never appears as a hagiotoponym, possibly because the earliest sainted Leo dates only to the fifth century. The universally renowned John and Nicholas outpace all rivals as both personal names and toponyms. Yet while a male resident of the Salento had a very good chance of being named some variant of Nicholas (Nicola, Niccolò), an inhabitant of Trium Puerorum was highly unlikely to bear the name Shadrach, Meshach, or Abednego, just as residents of Naples were never named for their patron saint, Januarius.¹²⁸ Local cults had little influence on naming patterns except when the local titular saint was also a prominent universal saint.¹²⁹

      To a certain degree, medieval onomastics are indexical of piety. Every place named for a saint signifies devotion to that sacred figure at some past date; nevertheless, hagiotoponyms were and are only a small percentage of all Apulian place names.¹³⁰ Particular devotion might also inspire a parent to name a child after a saint, and while we might think this was desirable—an extra layer of infant protection—it was not done consistently. Chrysolea [32.A] and Aprilios [32.D, F] at Carpignano are two of the earliest medieval Greek names that demonstrate how parental preferences and other traditions might favor other types of names. Similarly, Jewish anthroponymy demonstrates a willingness by some to invent novel monikers even if most parents adhered to familiar scriptural names.

      Supernatural Names

      Among the distinctive features of male Jewish names in the Salento was their frequent ending in -el, a reference to God; local Christian equivalents included Theodosius, Theophylact, and Theodore. According to Sefer Yetzirah, on which Oria’s Shabbetai Donnolo wrote an important commentary, God created the world by manipulating the letters in his own divine name.¹³¹ In fact, the Lord was believed to have many names, including the Tetragrammaton—so awesome that it was never to be pronounced explicitly—and others composed of seventy-two or forty-two letters or syllables.¹³² All of these names were enormously powerful, capable of effecting miracles if properly invoked by knowledgeable practitioners.¹³³ Moses, Jesus, and Simon Magus knew the names, and they were available to later epigones in the corpora of esoteric texts that included the Jewish Hekhalot and Merkavah literature and the (probably) Christian Testament of Solomon.¹³⁴ The Chronicle of Ahima‘az identifies the Book of Righteousness (Sefer ha-Yashar), parts of which survive in the Cairo Genizah, as containing magical instructions for employing the divine name.¹³⁵

      Ahima‘az’s ancestor Hananel temporarily restored his brother Papoleon to life by inserting a parchment with the name of God under his tongue; “the Name resurrected him” until the parchment was removed.¹³⁶ God’s name also was required for successful exorcisms. When Shephatiah, another ancestor, cured the daughter of the Byzantine emperor Basil I in Constantinople, he adjured the demon who afflicted her “in the Name of ‘He who dwells high aloft,’ and in the Name of ‘He who created the earth with His wisdom,’ in the name of ‘He who created the mountains and the sea,’ and in the Name of ‘He who suspends earth upon emptiness’ … come out in the Name of God.”¹³⁷ The repetition of biblical phrases underscores how frequently the concept of the holy name appears in Scripture: the name of God is God.

      Christians used the name of God in countless liturgies, hymns, and rituals, and in the sixth century Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite produced an influential treatise on divine names.¹³⁸ Two local exorcisms that guard against devastating hail begin with “the great name of (all-powerful) God), and ¹³⁹

      In the late