The Normans in European history

by Charles Homer Haskins

In the eleventh century, as in the early nineteenth, Italy was merely a geographical expression. The unity of law and government which it had enjoyed under the Romans had been long since broken by the Lombard invasion and the Frankish conquest, which drew the centre and north of the peninsula into the currents of western politics, while the south continued to look upon Constantinople as its capital and Sicily passed under the dominion of the Prophet and the Fatimite caliphs of Cairo. Separated from the rest of Italy by the lofty barrier of the Abruzzi and the wedge of territory which the Papacy had driven through the lines of communication to the west, the southern half followed a different course of historical development from the days of the Lombards to those of Garibaldi. Nature had thrust it into the central place in the Mediterranean world, to which the gulfs and bays of its long coast-line opened the rich hinterland of Campania and Apulia and the natural highways beyond. Here had sprung up those cities of Magna Graæcia which were the cradle of Italian civilization; here the Romans had their chief harbors at Pozzuoli and Brindisi and their great naval base at Cape Miseno; here the ports of Gaeta, Naples, Amalfi, and Bari kept intercourse with the East open during the Middle Ages. And if the genius of Hamilcar and Hannibal had once sought to tear the south and its islands from Italy to unite them with a Carthaginian empire, their close relations with Africa had again been asserted by the raids and conquests of the Saracens, while their connection with the East made them the last stronghold of Byzantine power beyond the Adriatic. In the long run, however, it has been pointed out that, if the culture of this region came from the south, its masters have come from the north;[62] and its new masters of the eleventh century were to unify and consolidate it at the very time when the rest of the peninsula was breaking up into warring communes and principalities. In the year 1000 the unity of the south was largely formal. The Eastern Empire still claimed authority, but the northern region was entirely independent under the Lombard princes of Capua, Benevento, and Salerno, while the maritime republics of Naples, Gaeta, and Amalfi owed at best only a nominal subjection. The effective power of Byzantium was limited to the extreme south, where its governors and tax-collectors ruled in both Apulia and Calabria. Of the two districts Calabria, now the toe of the boot, was the more Greek, in religion and language as well as in political allegiance, but its scattered cities were unable to defend themselves against a vigorous attack. The large Lombard population of Apulia retained its speech and its law and showed no attachment to its Greek rulers, whose exactions in taxes and military service brought neither peace and security within nor protection from the raids of the Saracens. There was abundant material for a revolt, and the Normans furnished the occasion.

The first definite trace of the Normans in Italy appears in or about the year 1016, when a band returning from Jerusalem is found at Monte Gargano on the eastern coast. There was here an ancient shrine of St. Michael, older even than the famous monastery of St. Michael of the Peril on the confines of Normandy with which it had shared the red cloak of its patron, and a natural object of veneration on the part of Norman pilgrims, who well understood the militant virtues of the archangel of the flaming sword. Here the Normans fell into conversation with a Lombard named Meles, who had recently led an unsuccessful revolt in Apulia and who told them that with a few soldiers like themselves he could easily overcome the Greeks, whereupon they promised to return with their countrymen and assist him. Another story of the same year tells of a body of forty valiant Normans, also on their way home from the Holy Sepulchre, who found a Saracen army besieging Salerno and, securing arms and horses from the natives, defeated and drove off the infidel host. Besought by the inhabitants to stay, they replied that they had acted only for the love of God, but consented to carry home lemons, almonds, rich vestments, and other products of the south as a means of attracting other Normans to make their homes in this land of milk and honey. Legend doubtless has its part in these tales,—the good Orderic makes the twenty thousand Saracens in front of Salerno flee before a hundred Normans!—but the general account of the occasion of the Norman expeditions seems correct. Possibly a Lombard emissary accompanied the pilgrims home to help in the recruiting; certainly in 1017 the Normans are back in force and ready for business. There was, however, nothing sensational or decisive in the early exploits of the Normans on Italian soil. The results of the first campaigns with Meles in northern Apulia were lost in a serious defeat at Canne, and for many years the Normans, few in number but brave and skilful, sought their individual advantage in the service of the various parties in the game of Italian politics, passing from one prince to another as advantage seemed to offer, and careful not to give to any so decisive a preponderance that he might dispense with them. The first Norman principality was established about 1030 at Aversa, just north of Naples, where the money of Rouen continued to circulate more than a century afterward; but such definite points of crystallization make their appearance but slowly, and the body of the Normans, constantly recruited from home, lived as mercenaries on pay and pillage. Their reputation was, however, established, and when the prince of Salerno was asked by the Pope to disband his Norman troop, he replied that it had cost him much time and money to collect this precious treasure, for whom the soldiers of the enemy were “as meat before the devouring lions.”[63]

Among the Norman leaders the house of Hauteville stands out preëminently, both as the dominant force in this formative period and as the ancestor of the later princes of southern Italy and Sicily. The head of the family, Tancred, held the barony of Hauteville, in the neighborhood of Coutances, but his patrimony was quite insufficient to provide for his twelve sons, most of whom went to seek their fortune in the south, an elder group consisting of William of the Iron Arm, Drogo, and Humphrey, and a younger set of half-brothers, of whom the most important are Robert Guiscard and Roger. At the outset scarcely distinguishable from their fellow-warriors, li fortissime Normant of their historian Aimé, the exploits of these brothers are celebrated by the later chroniclers in a way which reminds us less of sober history than of the heroes of the sagas or the chansons de gestes. William of the Iron Arm and Drogo seem to have arrived in the south about 1036 and soon signalized themselves in the first invasion of Sicily and in the conquest of northern Apulia, where William was chosen leader, or count, by the other Normans and at his death in 1046 succeeded by Drogo, who was soon afterward invested with the county by the Emperor Henry III. It was apparently in this year that Robert Guiscard first came to Italy. Refused assistance by his brothers, he hired himself out to various barons until he was left by Drogo in charge of a small garrison in the mountains of Calabria. Here he lived like a brigand, carrying off the cattle and sheep of the inhabitants and holding the people themselves for ransom. On one occasion he laid an ambush for the Greek commandant of Bisignano whom he had invited to a conference, and compelled him to pay twenty thousand golden solidi for his freedom. Brigand as he was, Robert was more than a mere bandit. His shrewdness and resourcefulness early gained him the name of Guiscard, or the wary, and his Byzantine contemporary, the princess Anna Comnena, has left a portrait of him in which his towering stature, flashing eye, and bellowing strength are matched by his overleaping ambition and desire to dominate, his skill in organization, and his unconquerable will. Allied by marriage to a powerful baron of the south, he soon began to make headway in the conquest of Calabria, and while Drogo and his brother Humphrey were jealous of Robert’s advancement, at Humphrey’s death in 1057 he was chosen to succeed as count and leader of the Normans. Leaving to the youngest brother Roger, just arrived from Hauteville, the conquest of Calabria and the first attempts on Sicily, Guiscard gave his attention particularly to the affairs of Apulia, and after a series of campaigns and revolts completed the subjugation of the mainland by the capture of Bari in 1071. Five years after the battle of Hastings the whole of southern Italy had passed under Norman rule. The south had been conquered, but for whom? Robert was no king, and a mere count must have, for form’s sake at least, a feudal superior. And this part, strangely enough, was taken by the Pope.

The relations of the Normans with the Papacy form not the least remarkable chapter in the extraordinary history of their dominion in the south. This period of expansion coincided with the great movement of revival and reform in the church which was taken up with vigor by the German Popes of the middle of the century and culminated some years later in the great pontificate of Gregory VII. So far as the Italian policy of the Papacy was concerned, the movement seems to have had two aspects, an effort to put an end to the disorders produced by simony and by the marriage of the clergy, evils aggravated in the south by the conflicting authority of the Greek and Latin bishops, and a desire to extend the temporal power and influence of the Pope in the peninsula. In both of these directions the conquests of the Normans seemed to threaten the papal interests, and we are not surprised to find the first of this vigorous series of Popes, Leo IX, interfering actively in the ecclesiastical affairs of the region and acting as the defender of the native population, which appealed to him and, in the case of Benevento, formally placed itself under his protection. Finally, with a body of troops collected in Germany and in other parts of Italy, he met the Normans in battle at Civitate, in 1053, and suffered an overwhelming defeat which clearly established the Norman supremacy in Italy. The Normans could not, however, follow up their victory as if it had been won over an ordinary enemy; indeed they seem to have felt a certain embarrassment in the situation, and after humbling themselves before the Pope, they treated him with respect and deference which did not prevent their keeping him for some months in honorable detention at Benevento. Plainly the Normans were not to be subdued by force of arms, and it soon became evident to the reforming party that they would be useful allies against the Roman nobles and the unreformed clergy, as well as against the dangerous authority of the German emperor. Accordingly in 1059, the year in which the college of cardinals received its first definite constitution as the electors of the Pope, Nicholas II held a council at the Norman hill-fortress of Melfi, attended by the higher clergy of the south and also by the two chief Norman princes, Richard of Aversa and Robert Guiscard. In return for the Pope’s investiture of their lands, these princes took an oath of allegiance and fealty to the Holy See and agreed to pay an annual rent to the Pope for their domains; in Robert’s oath, which has been preserved, he styles himself “by the grace of God and St. Peter duke of Apulia and Calabria and, with their help, hereafter of Sicily.” As duke and vassal of the Pope, the cattle-thief of the Calabrian mountains had henceforth a recognized position in feudal society.

Guiscard, however, was not the man to rest content with the position he had won, or to interpret his obligation of vassalage as an obligation of obedience. He was soon in the field again, pushing up the west coast to Amalfi and up the east into the Abruzzi, taking no great pains as he went to distinguish the lands of St. Peter from the lands of others. The Pope began to ask himself what he had secured by the alliance, and a definite break was soon followed by the excommunication of the Norman leader. By this time the papal see was occupied by Gregory VII, who as Hildebrand had long been the power behind the throne under his predecessors, the greatest, the most intense, and the most uncompromising of the Popes of the eleventh century; yet even he failed to bend the Norman to his will. Fearing a combination with his bitterest enemy, the Emperor Henry IV, he finally made peace with Guiscard, and in the renewal of fealty and investiture which followed, the recent conquests of the Normans were expressly excepted. No great time elapsed before the Pope was forced to make a desperate appeal for Norman aid. After repeated attempts Henry IV got control of Rome, shut up Gregory in the Castle of Sant’ Angelo, and installed another Pope in his place, who crowned Henry emperor in St. Peter’s. Then, in May, 1084, Guiscard’s army came. The emperor made what might be called ‘a strategic retreat’ to the north, the siege of Sant’ Angelo was raised, and Rome was given over to butchery and pillage by the Normans and their Saracen troops. Fire followed the sword, till the greater part of the city had been burned. Ancient remains and Christian churches such as San Clemente were ruined by the flames, and quarters like the Cælian Hill have never recovered from the destruction. The monuments of ancient Rome suffered more from the Normans than from the Vandals. Unable to maintain himself in Rome without a protector, Gregory accompanied his Norman allies southward as far as Salerno, now a Norman city, where he died the following year, protesting to the last that he died in exile because he had “loved justice and hated iniquity.” The year 1085 also saw the end of Robert Guiscard. Sought as an ally alike by the emperors of the East and of the West, he had begun three years earlier a series of campaigns against the Greek empire, seizing the ports of Avlona and Durazzo which were then as now the keys to the Adriatic, and battling with the Venetians by sea and the Greeks by land until his troops penetrated as far as Thessaly. He finally succumbed to illness on the island of Cephalonia at the age of seventy, and was buried in his Apulian monastery of Venosa, where Norman monks sang the chants of Saint-Évroul over a tomb which commemorated him as “the terror of the world”:—

Hic terror mundi Guiscardus; hic expulit Urbe

Quem Ligures regem, Roma, Lemannus habent.

Parthus, Arabs, Macedumque phalanx non texit Alexin.

At fuga; sed Venetum nec fuga nec pelagus.[64]

With the passing of Robert Guiscard the half-century of Norman conquest is practically at an end, to be followed by another half-century of rivalry and consolidation, until Roger II united all the Norman conquests under a single ruler and took the title of king in 1130, just a hundred years after the foundation of the first Norman principality at Aversa. Guiscard’s lands and title of duke passed to his son Roger, generally called Roger Borsa to distinguish him from his uncle and cousin of the same name. The Norman possessions in Calabria and the recent acquisitions in Sicily remained in the hands of Guiscard’s brother Count Roger, nominally a vassal of the duke of Apulia, while the northern principality of Capua kept its independence, to be subsequently exchanged for feudal vassalage. Roger of Apulia, however, was a weak ruler, in spite of the good will of the church and his uncle’s support, and the revolt of his brother Bohemond and the Apulian barons threatened the land with feudal disintegration. Want of governance was likewise writ large over the reign of his son William, who succeeded as duke in 1111 and ruled till 1127. Guiscard’s real successor as a political and military leader was his brother Roger, conqueror and organizer of Sicily and founder of a state which his more famous son turned into a kingdom.