translated by Antony Shugaar
“What is the source of all this savagery?” wondered Amedeo Feniello on the night three young men were murdered by the Camorra, the Neapolitan Mafia, in front of the school where he worked as a teacher.
A few months later, Feniello quit his teaching job and began another career, as a medieval historian. Naples 1343: The Unexpected Origins of the Mafia, which is the first of Feniello’s books to be translated into English, goes back to that fateful night of January 31, 2005, and links it to another violent event that happened on another night in Naples more than six centuries earlier.
All that Feniello has to draw on for this earlier event are three differing accounts of what unfolded—all of them perfunctorily told and from wildly different eras. The gist of the story is that, in 1343, a Genoese galley transporting meat and other foodstuffs from Sicily was hijacked by a Neapolitan patrol and escorted back to Naples. That night, the captain of the galley, it seems, was beheaded, while his crew was allowed to live. One is invited to imagine that the food on board the boat was rapturously received by the inhabitants of Naples, who were then in the grip of a famine that had already lasted several years.
Feniello reconstructs the entire historical context around this hijacking with extraordinary skill and patience. But it is his abilities as a storyteller that really kick this history up a notch, notably the passage where he divines the character of the Neapolitan knight, or milites, who executed the Genoese captain. “How do we imagine him? Sneering and arrogant. Violent. Insolent. Sheathed in a diving bell made up of prejudices, rituals, and mental and psychological training that make him what he is: a prominent member of an elite that right here and right now confidently dictates terms throughout this city …”
Feniello contends that the roots of the modern-day Camorra, so vividly written about in the books of Roberto Saviano, can be found in the customs and traditions of these milites, who were members or leaders of family-based clans, each in control of his own zone of jurisdiction, or seggi, in what was then the Kingdom of Naples. He draws a chilling parallel between the impunity of these ancient knights and the death squad that carried out the murders of the three young men outside his school. Of the latter, he writes, “They enjoyed uncontested control of the territory, where they could move freely, practically undisturbed, whatever they might choose to do.”
Feniello traces the rise of these ancient clans, linked to each other on the basis of relations between heads of families, back to the 12th century and the power vacuum that arose in Naples when the ducal era of independence ended and the Norman era of foreign government began.
Neapolitan society at that time was based on the idea of military defense, so the men who carried the most weight were the milites. “Loyalty and honor were first suckled along with one’s mother’s milk,” Feniello writes, “with the very first rudiments taught while one was learning to handle arms and armor.... A pairing of qualities that constituted a sort of secular religion to be consulted from time to time, every day.”
Anyone who did not respect this “regime of conventions” was banished from the social sphere. “Such a person was—to use a term that is popular still today to indicate a traitor, a breaker of oaths, the pentito of the clan—the infame,” writes Feniello. Violence was the tool invariably employed to settle these and other disagreements. Feuds broke out between clans, vendettas were activated, and innocent bystanders, such as the Genoese captain, became collateral damage. Feniello notes that during the 13th century there were so many bodies being tossed down wells that many of the wells were boarded over.
Feniello’s historical research is all the more impressive because most of Naples’s important medieval documentation was lost with the destruction of the Angevin and Aragon archive in San Paolo Bel Sito during the Second World War. In its absence, he has trawled through numerous private family archives dating back centuries, which attest to the land ownership and economic power of the clans who constituted the seggi.
Still, there is something about the 1343 hijacking that continues to confound Feniello. “Considering the names of the protagonists, there’s one basic thing that eludes our understanding,” he writes. “They represent the crème de la crème of not merely Neapolitan society, but of the kingdom at large.”
It is the thought that these seeming men of honor, when faced with an opportunity for easy plunder, should behave like common criminals. Out of a historical footnote that most have forgotten, Feniello serves a salutary reminder of what chaos ensues when groups of men—the Camorra have never accepted women into their ranks—believe that they are above the law.
Tobias Grey is a Gloucestershire, U.K.–based writer and critic, focused on art, film, and books
