The Italian astrophysicist who solved the mystery of the martyrs of Otranto — Part 2
Second in a series about a scientist whose passion for correcting the historical record inspired him to decode hundreds of 15th century diplomatic letters
By Janna Brancolini
Pope Francis’s first proclamation of sainthood was also his most controversial.
Exactly one month into his papacy, on May 12, 2013, he canonized the infamous martyrs of Otranto, a group of 800 men who were reportedly massacred for refusing to convert to Islam during the Ottoman Invasion of Southern Italy in 1480.
Newspapers at the time described Francis’s task as “delicate and arguably unwelcome,” inherited from his predecessor and generating controversy because many viewed the move as stoking tensions between Catholicism and Islam.
But another controversy — one that the reporters largely ignored — was also brewing: the fundamental question of whether the story was even true.
While the Catholic and secular press both seemed to take the account’s veracity for granted, a scientist in Calimera, a small town near the fortified coastal city of Otranto, had been working for years to determine what really happened to the martyrs.
Driven by a love of solving puzzles and a desire to provide a fuller historical account of his beloved Salento region — a land of sun, sea and olive groves nestled in the heel of the boot of Italy — Daniele Palma had decoded hundreds of diplomatic letters exchanged during the wars of the 1480s.
In these letters Palma uncovered the truth about the martyrs of Otranto, which led him to tackle yet another historical mystery — this one about the infamous Lucrezia Borgia.
In 1480, the Ottoman Turks landed on the Italian peninsula and laid siege to its easternmost city, Otranto, which was part of the Kingdom of Naples at the time. During the 15-day siege, 12,000 people were killed and 5,000 enslaved, according to some reports.
Legend has it that 800 men were also taken prisoner during the siege and ordered to convert to Islam or be sentenced to death. They chose death and were decapitated one by one on a hill outside the city. The bones of the “martyrs of Otranto,” as they came to be known, are displayed to this day in the Cathedral of Otranto.
In September 1481, the King of Naples’ troops succeeding in expelling the Ottoman forces, marking the last time a Muslim force occupied any part of the Italian peninsula.
For centuries the story was rife with propaganda value, which in modern times has also made it rife with controversy.
During the Italian unification period in the 1860s — when the various neighboring kingdoms became a single state called Italy — historians recalled the martyrs of Otranto as representing the strength and fortitude of a collective Italian people, essentially presenting them as civic heroes.
Meanwhile the Catholic Church had long considered them religious heroes. They were beatified in the 1770s, meaning they were declared holy, and in 1980 Pope John Paul II visited Otranto to mark the 500th anniversary of the massacre.
The controversy heated up, however, in 2007, when Pope Benedict issued a decree saying the martyrs had been killed “out of hatred for their faith.” He later authorized the Congregation for the Causes of Saints to issue a decree attributing a miracle to the martyrs — a crucial step on the path to sainthood.
For the miracle in question, the first martyr supposedly stood back up after losing his head and remained standing until all 800 had been killed.
Benedict then took the extraordinary step of announcing in February 2013 that he was stepping down from the papacy. In the very same meeting with cardinals that he announced his resignation, he also set a date for the future pope to canonize the martyrs of Otranto.
It was a highly unusual move that showed just how committed Benedict was to the martyrs’ cause.
But many questioned whether pushing through the sainthood was unnecessarily antagonistic toward Muslims. Two months later, Pope Francis declared the martyrs as saints — and studiously avoided any mention of Islam during his canonization remarks.
That didn’t stop some members of the Italian press — including the editors of former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s Il Giornale — from announcing that the “victims of Islam” had been granted sainthood.
To Daniele Palma, a trained astrophysicist who went on to pursue a career in machine logic and computer programming, the story of the martyrs of Otranto defied common sense. For years, Palma had been conducting research on local history, with a particular interest in the war with the Turks.
“Turkey dominated half of Europe leaving everyone to their own religion,” he explained, in Italian, over coffee in his home in Calimera last month.
Ottoman leaders, moreover, were not prone to ceremoniously killing captives; selling them into slavery was much more lucrative. This begged the question: what really happened to the martyrs of Otranto?
Palma found the answers in a trove of coded diplomatic letters held in the state archive of Modena, a city located 900 kilometers from Otranto in north-central Italy. During the 1480s, the Duke of Ferrara was married to the daughter of the King of Naples. This gave the Duke’s diplomats unique access to the action on the ground, Palma said.
One letter in particular contained the best explanation for the massacre uncovered to date: a failed ransom bid.
Palma found that the Turks had a practice of taking captives from the Salento coast and agreeing to return them to their families in exchange for 300 ducati. The sum represented about 3 years’ worth of earnings for a normal family, so only the wealthiest residents would have had the money on hand to save their relatives.
The diplomatic letters that Palma decoded described bank transfers and payment negotiations for freeing various captives in the months following the siege of Otranto.
In all likelihood, the men who were killed were the ones whose families were too poor to secure their release. That would make the massacre a diplomatic failure, not an act of religious martyrdom.
Palma also disputes the number of people reportedly killed and imprisoned during the invasion — 12,000 and 5,000, respectively. According to census records from the time, taxes were only being collected for about 200 to 300 families. Even if each family had 20 members, the city would have only been home to about 6,000 residents.
Palma published his findings in a massive volume, The Authentic History of Otranto in the War Against the Turks, right around the time of the canonization of the martyrs, in the spring of 2013. Even before that some scholars doubted the killings were religiously motivated, but they had previously failed to supply compelling counter-narratives.
Palma declined to speculate why the sainthood was pushed through so forcefully despite the questions surrounding the event. He said he simply wanted to know: “Is it right to consider them saints and heroes, or should we consider them poor people?”
The answer, according to his meticulous research, is poor people — in every sense of the word. It seems the martyrs of Otranto were both unfortunate and lacking in funds.
That December of 2013, Palma’s work on the Invasion of Otranto led to another, unexpected mystery that had also persisted for about 500 years.
The week before Christmas, he was watching a documentary on RAI, the Italian public broadcaster, commemorating 500 years since Niccolò Machiavelli published The Prince. At one point the vice director of the State Archive of Modena showed a letter and noted that the contents remained a mystery.
“I literally jumped out of my seat when I saw this letter,” Palma said.
Although he could only see a corner of the letter, Palma recognized that one of the symbols was similar to the secret alphabet he had decoded when researching the war with Otranto.
He was sure that if he could get a copy of the mysterious letter, he could break the secret code — even though other scholars had for centuries failed in the attempt. He wrote the director of the archive and soon received a copy of the letter, which consisted of 480 characters represented by 40 different symbols and arranged in 15 uninterrupted lines.
Together with his son, a biophysics researcher, and daughter, a graduate student, Palma created a mathematical program to analyze and crack the code. Within two weeks they were able to create a table with all the deciphered symbols.
It turned out the letter was sent by none other than Lucrezia Borgia, the infamous daughter of Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia.
Lucrezia is best known for her many lovers — and for baseless accusations of incest that arose during contentious annulment proceedings surrounding her first marriage — but she was also a skilled stateswoman and accomplished Renaissance patron.
In 1502, she married Alfonso I d’Este, the Duke of Ferrara. Alfonso d’Este’s father was Ercole d’Este, whose diplomatic letters from the 1480s had led Palma to his findings about the martyrs of Otranto.
As a result, the code that Lucrezia used to communicate with her husband in the early 1500s was similar to the code that her father-in-law had used to communicate with his ambassadors 30 years earlier.
Palma was able to use clues from the earlier code to crack the later one. He determined that a few of the symbols were used to represent the same letter of the alphabet, while in other cases the same symbol was used but to represent a different letter.
No letter was ever repeated; double letters such as “rr” had their own unique symbol. And some symbols had no meaning whatsoever; they were used simply to throw would-be decoders off track.
The letter was written mostly in Italian but with certain phrases — dates, places and other important details — in Latin.
At the bottom the letter was signed “Duchess Lucrezia,” with the date 1510 in Roman numerals. Its contents described a fortress in the province of Ferrara called the Rocca Possente di Stellata — literally the “Mighty fortress of Stellata” — that was under attack from the Venetians.
“The fortress is lost,” Lucrezia wrote.
Venetian forces aligned with the Duke’s enemy, Pope Julius II, had claimed the stronghold and were advancing on the Castello Estense in Ferrara.
Palma was struck by the humanity of the circumstances described in the letter. Popular historical representations have portrayed Lucrezia as a fair-haired femme fatale, but the letter shows she enjoyed enormous responsibility while her husband was away on the front lines.
“Here is a woman, 30 years old, alone in Ferrara with two small children. Her husband is away and, together with a small group of advisors, she sends this letter urging him to hurry, hurry, hurry because they are surrounded on three sides,” he said.
Lucrezia Borgia was the illegitimate daughter of Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia, who in 1492 became Pope Alexander VI. Despite being born to his mistress, the Cardinal acknowledged her as his offspring almost immediately.
She was pursued as a teenager by hordes of suitors and was married three times. The first ended in annulment, with her husband desperate to stop the annulment and accusing her of incest with her father and brother. The second ended when her husband — whom by all accounts she adored — was strangled in his bed. Many suspected her own family was behind the killing due to recent political re-alignments.
She was accused of poisoning her enemies and participating in orgies while her father was away on business. In reality, observers were indignant that an illegitimate daughter was allowed into St. Peter’s Basilica, and that the Pope left his daughter — a woman — in charge of official business while he was away. Rumors persisted of an illegitimate child, and the conflicting evidence intrigues scholars to this day.
But once Lucrezia escaped the machinations of her family in Rome, things seemed to settle down. She was married for a third time in 1501 to the Duke of Ferrara, offering the Borgias a key alliance in Northern Italy.
“Later in her life, at the court of Ferrara, Lucrezia was regarded as the model of good breeding,” Josep Palau i Orta wrote in the January issue of National Geographic History magazine. “It was only later that she took a role in the increasingly fantastical set of myths about the Borgias, many centering on her use of poison and other fanciful execution methods to murder her husbands and other rivals.”
Ferrara was a cultural hub during the Renaissance, and Lucrezia was regarded as a wise businesswoman and patron of the arts.
Palma was struck by the vitriol Lucrezia endured.
“She wasn’t conceived during the papacy,” he said. “Her father was a cardinal at the time. Other cardinals had children too. I thought, perhaps she wasn’t so evil.”
Lucrezia’s story had everything that intrigued Palma about Otranto’s war with the Ottoman Turks: a puzzle to solve that cut straight to the heart of a story accepted by history, but not supported by the facts.
Today Palma is committed to preserving history in addition to uncovering it. His latest project is a dictionary of words in Griko, a dialect of Greek that was widely spoken in the Otranto region until it was suppressed in the 1700s.
His work is profound both for his process of discovery and for the revelation that has emerged from that process: the idea that the truth is no less dramatic than the legend.
A failed ransom bid by an invading empire seeking to overthrow Rome. A brilliant young woman navigating a political-military crisis alone in a Renaissance castle.
These stories have everything a reader could want in a narrative — conflict, injustice, drama, passion. They are distant and intriguing, the people involved real but long dead.
Still, thanks to Palma and his work, we can immerse ourselves in the stories while still honoring the dignity of the deceased. At the very least, we can recognize what really happened to them.
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