Acta Archaeologica vol. 82, 2011, pp 291-306Printed in Denmark • All rights reserved

Copyright 2011ACTA ARCHAEOLOGICA

ISSN 0065-101X (print)ISSN 1600-0390 (online)

INTRODUCTIONOn the 10 October 881 San Vincenzo a Volturno, the Ben-edictine monastery in north-west Molise, was attacked and sacked by a Saracen war-band, an event which is described in unusual detail in the 12th-century Chroni-con Vulturnense (CV 1: 362-68. See Hodges 1997a: 144-53; 1997b) (Fig. 1).1 Even today, farmers tending the fi elds in the vicinity describe the traumatic events of that day as though they had occurred only recently. Central to the catastrophe is the binary contrast between the monastic community that in the 9th-century had enjoyed a European status and the brutality of the Arabs whose nefarious action led to the eclipse of San Vincenzo al Volturno as a major monastery in Italy. During extensive excavations by a Brit-ish School at Rome/University of East Anglia/University of Sheffi eld team between 1980 and 1998, the burnt and ransacked remains of the attack, containing numerous ar-rowheads of a distinctive bi-pyramidal type, were discov-ered (cf. Hodges, 149, 1997a: fi g. 7.2; Hodges 1997b, 132-3, fi g.3; Hodges, Leppard and Mitchell 2011: 234-7, cats. 2.41-58, fi g. 7.25). New excavations since 1999 by the Uni-versità degli Studi Suor Orsola Benincasa, Naples (Marazzi

1 Acknowledgements. Our thanks to the AHRC 418 for supporting the publication of San Vincenzo Maggiore and the Collective Workshops, and to Marios Costambeys and Inge Lyse Hansen for commenting upon our fi rst draft.

et al. 2002; Marazzi 2008), have shed light on other parts of the 9th-century monastery, making it possible to reinterpret the topographic history of San Vincenzo and incidentally providing new information about the cataclysm of 881 (cf. Hodges, Leppard and Mitchell 2011: 411-36). Meriting comparison in its layout with the schematic ninth-century plan of St. Gall (c. 830) (Horn and Born 1979; Jacobsen 1992), San Vincenzo al Volturno is now the most extensive-ly excavated monastic site of the period in Western Europe. In this short paper, we wish to develop an earlier assessment of the sack of San Vincenzo al Volturno (Hodges 1997a: 144-53; 1997b) and consider the implications of why cer-tain buildings were targeted on that day, while others were not. We will argue that this provides a telling illustration of the changing political circumstances of the monastery in the last quarter of the 9th century.

A NEW TOPOGRAPHIC HISTORY OF SAN VINCENZO AL VOLTURNOSan Vincenzo al Volturno was founded in AD 703 by three Beneventan monks. The excavations show that the earli-est monastery occupied much of an earlier, late antique estate centre, and was modest in scale (Hodges 1997a: 49-58). By the later 8th century the monastery, benefi ting

THE SACK OF SAN VINCENZO AL VOLTURNO

10 OCTOBER 881 RECONSIDERED BY ARCHAEOLOGY

Richard Hodges, Sarah Leppard & John Mitchell

…subito ex adverso super sacrum monasterium irruerunt, eumque circumdantes ignibus combuserunt … [They … suddenly attacked the sacred monastery from the other side, and surrounding it on all sides they set it on fi re (CV I: 364)]

THE SACK OF SAN VINCENZO AL VOLTURNO