Abbey of Santa Maria di Pulsano, Monte Sant’Angelo

Built in 591, on the remains of an ancient pagan oracular temple dedicated to Calchas, it was entrusted to the monks of the Order of Saint Equitius Abbot. The historical events are little known until the 12th century when, in 1129, the intervention of Saint John of Matera and his Pulsanense Congregation revived it from the severe state of abandonment in which it was, founding the autonomous monastic order of the poor Pulsan hermits.

 In 1177 the construction of the abbey church dedicated to the Holy Mother of God was completed, whose altar, beneath which were placed the remains of Saint John of Matera, abbot who died in 1139, was consecrated by Pope Alexander III during a pilgrimage to Gargano. At the end of the 14th century, during the pontificate of Pope Martin V, the Pulsanense Order became extinct and the survivors passed to the Benedictine Order, renouncing the rule of Saint John the Abbot.

 In the 15th century, it was the Celestines who took care of the Abbey, protecting it from the claims of local lords. The abbey was nevertheless entrusted to a cardinal commendatory who managed it from Rome.

In 1646 it was damaged by a violent earthquake that destroyed the archive and library. Later, the Celestines of Manfredonia managed Santa Maria di Pulsano until the enactment of the Napoleonic laws of 1806. Joseph Bonaparte definitively suppressed the presence of a monastic order and authorized the lessees of the assets to retain the payments in emphyteusis. In 1842 the mountain priest Nicola Bisceglia officially received the Pulsan protomonastery complex in emphyteusis from the State to “protect it from abandonment and the vandal acts of shepherds and herdsmen,” except for the church subject to the jurisdiction of the diocesan Order. In 1966 the valuable and venerated icon of the Mother of God of Pulsano, not yet recovered, was stolen, a work of that Byzantine-Italian school, called the “Latecomers,” which flourished in Apulia in the 12th and 13th centuries.”