BISCEGLIE. – City in the province of Bari, with a small port on the Adriatic. In the Byzantine period, not before the seventh century, it was established as a diocese. According to Ughelli (VII, 584), a bishop of B. was present at the Council of Nicaea in 787. The bishops Mercurio (1059), Giovanni (1071), and Amando (1182) are also known from documents; during the time of Bishop Bisanzio (1220), St Francis of Assisi came to B., where he founded the convent known as della Nunziata, later destroyed. The diocese was suppressed by Pius VII by a bull dated 27 June 1818 and permanently united with the archdiocese of Trani.
A legend (BHL, 5792) states that the relics of the martyrs Mauro, Pantaleemone, and Sergio were discovered at B. in 1167. The Mauro listed by Ughelli (VII, 935) among the martyrs of the Trajanic age is pure legend; perhaps these are the relics of Mauro of Fondi or of the bishop of Parentium; Pantaleemone may be the venerated martyr of Nicomedia, commemorated on 27 July in the marble calendar of Naples (Martyr. Hieronymianum, p. 399); Sergio is perhaps the martyr of Syria of 7 October. B. was devastated by the Goths, the Lombards, and the Saracens; at the end of the eleventh century it was occupied by Robert Guiscard, who made it a county. Count Pietro II surrounded it with walls and towers, of which vestiges remain. The Swabians ceased there a castle enlarged by the Angevins. Robert of Anjou granted it as a lordship to Amelio del Balzo; in 1486, together with Corato, it became a duchy and was ceded to Alfonso d’Aragona, returning in 1513, upon his death, to the direct dependence of the kingdom.
In 1073 the Norman Count Pietro founded the Cathedral which, transformed in the Baroque style, preserves the carved main portal and a triple band of leafy tendrils, with a prothyrum supported by griffins on marble columns with capitals bearing acanthus leaves stirred by the wind.
The church of S. Margherita, founded in 1197 by Folco, an imperial judge, remained free of alterations. It has a Greek-cross plan with a central dome on pendentives and a semicircular apse. The dome, square on the exterior, is covered by a pyramidal roof. The smooth-faced gabled façade is decorated at the top with corbelled arches and a small rose window. The same motif is repeated on the other three sides. Against the left side are placed the tombs of the Falcone family, from the end of the 13th century, the work of Anserano da Trani, and of Pietro Facitolo da Bari. The church of S. Margherita preserves a 13th-century diptych with the saint and s. Niccolò, divided into compartments in the Byzantine manner, with scenes from the lives of the two saints, and an icon, likewise from the 13th century and Byzantine in inspiration, depicting the Madonna and Child.
A fifteenth-century Madonna crowned by Angels, painted on a gold-ground panel, is in the church of S. Matteo. In 1528 Palvisino da Putignano, a belated artist, painted for the church of S. Luigi the lunette-shaped panel with the Madonna enthroned with the Child between ss. Francesco and Antonio and the blessing Eternal. In S. Maria di Giano, in the territory of B., there is a fourteenth-century fresco depicting s. Giacomo amid scenes from his life, of Tuscan influence.
The Cathedral received from the sanctuary of S. Maria dei Miracoli at Andria, at the time of the suppression of the religious orders, a richly carved seventeenth-century choir. It preserves an illuminated evangeliary from the 11th century; three illuminated antiphonaries, a gift of the Angevins, are in S. Adono.