THE V\'ESTERN MEDITERR-\NEAN KINGDOMS 1200-1500LAND AND PEOPLE
The lands the Normans and their successors conquered
possessed neither geographical nor political unity. Long sea
coasts provided the best means for moving from region to
region. Large areas of southern Italy are mountainous and
there are no extensive internal plateaux. Inland there are
few important towns, though Melfi and Venosa were signific-
ant exceptions, as was the papal enclave of Benevento. The
coasts are where the centres of settlement have always lain:
the plain around Naples owes its fertility to the part benign,
part destructive lava flows of Vesuvius. By 1300 Naples was
one of the larger towns in Italy, much the most important
focus of population in southern Italy; Palermo too was a large
town by European standards, soaking up a significant part
of the food supply of Sicily. Both may have had populations
of very roughly 25,000; only a select few north Italian cities
- notably Florence, Genoa, Milan and Venice - can have
greatly exceeded this figure in the years around 1300. Down
the coast of the Tyrrhenian Sea ancient merchant settlements
at Gaeta, Amalfi, Salerno and other centres also contributed
to the importance of this relatively small region. But rocky
Calabria, the toe of Italy, was thinly settled and had no big
coastal towns to rival the bay of Naples. On the east coast
of southern Italy lay long, low plains, a source of wine, grain
and olive oil, stretching from the Apennine foothills down to
the sea; and along the sea existed a long line of towns, some
of them famous as centres of shipping, especially pilgrim traf-
fic: Bari, Barletta, Trani. Significant inland centres included
Frederick II's administrative headquarters at Foggia, and
the Muslim settlement at Lucera, itself a Byzantine founda-
tion; in the early thirteenth century the hinterland of this
region (known as the Capitanata) was emerging as a major
source of good quality grain for the export market. The
northernmost part of this coastline was, however, less well
populated and bordered on the wild Abruzzi and Molise
regions, the haunt of bears and wolves still. The thirteenth-
century new town of L'Aquila, meaning 'the eagle', expressed
the sensitive role of the region as a frontier defence zone.
The papal town of Rieti stood not far off, and the authority
of the bishops of Rieti actually straddled the frontier of the