Troia

Troia is so called because a Byzantine gave it the name of another city. Before that it was Aecae, which the Greeks called Aika, founded before the Punic wars and grown under the empire, when the via Traiana crossed it between Aequum Tuticum and Herdonia; it was then that the diocese of Eca was set up by three bishops, Marco, Eleuterio and Secondino, and two of them are patrons of the city still. The barbarian invasions destroyed it, and the place was reborn only in 1019 at the will of Basil Boioannes, Byzantine catapan of Italy, who renamed it Troia in memory of the ancient Anatolian city; a document in Greek of that same year says the new town was founded by people who came from the county of Ariano. Made a stronghold, it was besieged more than once — by the emperor Henry II in 1022, by Frederick II in 1229 — because it stood on the via Francigena. And four popes held a council here: Urban II in 1093, Paschal II in 1115, Callixtus II in 1120, Honorius II in 1127.

In 1583 Giovanni di Capua sold the city to Ferrante Lombardo, count of Gambatesa: a man born in Troia, among the richest in the kingdom, the very type of the new class that lived on banking, the grain trade and livestock. The people of Troia would not have him. They obtained release from his control and a return to the royal demesne on 15 October 1585, redeeming themselves with a sum equal to the one Lombardo had paid out: nearly sixty thousand ducats. In the seventeenth century the city was granted in fief again all the same, to the d'Avalos, and in 1649 Francesco d'Avalos obtained from Philip IV the title of prince of Troia, which lasted until feudalism was abolished. Meanwhile the cathedral, founded in 1093, had taken on its rose window of eleven rays, which everyone in Italy has held in their hands: it was printed on the back of the five thousand lire notes issued between 1979 and 1983. And the treasury museum keeps three of the 28 Exsultet rolls left in the world.