Lucera

Lucera stands on a hill overlooking the Tavoliere of Capitanata, and was a bishop's seat as early as the fifth century. Frederick II settled the rebel Muslims of Sicily here from 1223, and the town became the Arab colony of Lūǧārah, with its mosque, Quranic school and archers for the Hohenstaufen army. Charles of Anjou starved it into surrender on 27 August 1269 and raised a great fortress beside the emperor's palace. In August 1300 Charles II of Anjou had the Saracens massacred, sold or forced to convert, razed the walls and the mosque, and repopulated the town with Christians as Civitas Sanctae Mariae; the cathedral of the Assumption was built for the new settlers.

In the fifteenth century the Aragonese briefly placed the royal customs house for the sheep of Apulia here, and from the end of the sixteenth century Lucera was the permanent seat of the Regia Udienza under a provincial governor, capital of Capitanata from 1584 until 1806. In 1642 the Spanish viceroy gave the city in fief to Count Mattia Galasso, abolishing the privileges granted by Charles II; the people resisted until 20 December 1691, when Lucera was declared a free city under the patronage of Saint Mary.