The Normans in European history

by Charles Homer Haskins

And one sharp tree—’tis a cypress—stands.

No land of the western Mediterranean has burnt itself so deeply into the imagination and sentiment of the English-speaking peoples. Twice has this vivid land of the south played a leading part in the world’s life and thought, once under the Greeks, of “wind-swift thought and city-founding mind,” as we may read in the marbles of Pæstum and Selinus and in the deathless pages of Thucydides; and a second time under the Norman princes and their Hohenstaufen successors, creators of an extraordinarily vigorous and precocious state and a brilliant cosmopolitan culture. If our interest in this brief period of Sicilian greatness be not Norman, it is at least human, as in one of the culminating points of Mediterranean civilization.

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It must be emphasized at the outset that the history of this Norman kingdom was brief. It had two rulers of genius, Roger II, 1130–54, and his grandson Frederick II, 1198–1250, separated by the reigns of William the Bad and William the Good,—contemporaries of Henry II of England, and neither so bad nor so good as their names might lead us to suppose,—Tancred of Lecce and his son William III, and Constance, Roger’s daughter and Frederick’s mother, wife of the Hohenstaufen Emperor Henry VI. It is usual to consider the Norman period as closing with the deposition of William III in 1194 and to class Constance and Frederick II with the Hohenstaufen. In the case of Constance there seems to be no possible reason for this, for she was as Norman as any of her predecessors and issued documents in her own name throughout the remaining three years of her husband’s life and during the few months of 1197–98 by which she survived him. With their son Frederick II, half Norman and half Hohenstaufen, the question is perhaps even, and the science of genetics has not yet advanced far enough to enable us to classify and trace to their source the dominant and the recessive elements in his inheritance. No one, however, can study him at close range without discovering marked affinities with his Norman predecessors, notably the second Roger, and the whole trend of recent investigation goes to show that, in the field of government as in that of culture, his policy is a continuation of the work of the Norman kings, from whom much of his legislation is directly derived. Half Norman by birth, Frederick was preponderantly Norman in his political heritage. It was in Sicily that he grew up and began to rule, and in Sicily that he did his really constructive work. To judge him as a Hohenstaufen is only less misleading than to judge him as a German king, for the centre and aim of his policy lay in the Mediterranean. In Frederick’s sons, legitimate and illegitimate, the Norman strain is still further attenuated, and as they had no real opportunity to continue their father’s work, it matters little whether we call them Normans or Hohenstaufen. The coming of Charles of Anjou ends this epoch, and his victory at Tagliacozzo in 1268 seals the fate of the dynasty. We may, if we choose, carry the Norman period to this point; for all real purposes it ends with the death of Frederick in 1250. The preceding one hundred and twenty years embrace the real life-history of the Norman kingdom. Brief as this is, it is too long for a single lecture, and we must limit ourselves to Roger and the two Williams, touching on the developments of the thirteenth century only in the most incidental fashion.

Throughout this period the territorial extent of the realm remained practically unchanged, comprising Sicily, with Malta, and the southern half of the Italian peninsula as far as Terracina on the western coast and the river Tronto on the eastern. There were of course times when the royal authority was disputed within and attacked from without,—feudal revolts, raids by the Pisans, expeditions of the German emperor, diplomatic contests with the Pope,—but it was not permanently limited or shorn of its territories. There were, on the other hand, moments of expansion, particularly by sea, for Sicily was of necessity a naval power and early saw the importance of creating a navy commensurate with its maritime position. The occupation of Tripoli and Tunis by Roger II seized the Mediterranean by the throat; the possession of Corfu threatened the freedom of the Adriatic; but neither conquest was permanent, and in the main the Greek empire and the powers of northern Africa succeeded in keeping the Sicilian kings within their natural boundaries.

In area about four-fifths the size of England, the southern kingdom showed far greater diversity, both in the land and in its inhabitants. Stretching from the sub-tropical gardens of Sicily into the heart of the highest Apennines, it was divided by mountain and sea into distinct natural regions between which communication continues difficult even to-day—the isolated valleys of the Abruzzi, the great plain of Apulia, the ‘granite citadel’ of Calabria, the rich fields of Campania, the commercial cities of the Bay of Naples and Gulf of Salerno, the contrasted mountains and shore-lands of Sicily itself. The difficulties of geography were increased by differences of race, religion, and political traditions. The mass of the continental population was, of course, of Italian origin, going back in part to the Samnite shepherds of primitive Italy, and while it had been modified in many places by the Lombard conquest, it retained its Latin speech and was subject to the authority of the Latin church. Calabria, however, was now Greek, in religion as in language, and the Greek element was considerable in the cities of Apulia and flowed over into Sicily, where the chief foreign constituent was African and Mohammedan. Politically, there was a mixed inheritance of Lombard and Roman law, of Greek and Saracen bureaucracy, of municipal independence, and of Norman feudalism, entrenched in the mountain-fortresses of upper Apulia and the Abruzzi; while the diverse origins of the composite state were expressed in the sovereign’s official title, “king of Sicily, of the duchy of Apulia, and of the principality of Capua.” The union of these conflicting elements into a single strong state was the test and the triumph of Norman statesmanship.

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Plainly the terms of this political problem were quite different from that set the Norman rulers of England. Whatever local divergences careful study of Anglo-Saxon England may still reveal, there were no differences of religion or of general political tradition, while the rapidity of the conquest at the hands of a single ruler made possible a uniform policy throughout the whole country. The convenient formula of forfeiture and regrant of all the land, for example, created at once uniformity of tenure and of social organization. Moreover, as we have already seen, back of the Norman conquest of England lay Normandy itself, firmly organized under a strong duke, who took with him across the Channel his household officers and his lay and spiritual counsellors to form the nucleus of his new central government, which was in many respects one with the central government of Normandy. In the south none of these favoring conditions prevailed. A country composed of many diverse elements was conquered by different leaders and at different times, so that there could be no question of uniformity of system. Indeed there could be no system at all, for the Normans came as individual adventurers, with no governmental organization behind them, and the instruments of government which they used had to be created as they went along. Whatever of Norman tradition reached the south could come only in the subdivided and attenuated form of individual influences. Furthermore, the Norman ingredient in the population continued relatively small. The scattered bands of early days were of course reënforced as time went on, but there was never any general migration or any movement that affected the mass of the population in town and country. If we had any statistics, we should doubtless find that some hundreds or at most a few thousands would cover the entire Norman population of Italy and Sicily. These brought with them their speech, their feudal tenures, probably some elements of Norman customary law; but, given their small numbers, they could not hope to Normanize a vast country, where their language soon disappeared and their identity was ultimately lost in the general mass. Under such conditions there could be no general transplantation of Norman institutions. The rulers were Norman, as were the holders of the great fiefs, but, to speak paradoxically, the most Norman thing about their government was its non-Norman character, that is to say, its quick assimilation of alien elements and its statesmanlike treatment of native customs and institutions. The Norman leaders were too wise to attempt an impossible Normanization.

The policy of toleration in political and religious matters had its beginnings in the early days of the Norman occupation, but it received a broad application only in the course of the conquest of Sicily by the Great Count, and was first fully and systematically carried out by his son Roger II. In religion this meant the fullest liberty for Greeks, Jews, and Mohammedans, and even the maintenance of the hierarchy of the Greek Church and the encouragement and enrichment of Basilian monasteries along with the Benedictine foundations which were marked objects of Norman generosity. In law it meant the preservation of local rights and customs and of the usages of the several distinct elements in the population, Latin and Greek, Hebrew and Saracen. In local administration it involved the retention of the local dignitaries of the cities and the Byzantine offices of the strategos and the catepan, as well as the fiscal arrangements established by the Saracens in Sicily. And finally in the central government itself, the need of dealing wisely and effectively with the various peoples of the kingdom necessitated the employment of men familiar with each of them, and the maintenance of a secretarial bureau which issued documents in Greek and Arabic as well as in Latin.

It was in the central administration that Roger II faced his freshest problem, which was nothing less than the creation of a strong central government for a kingdom which had never before been united under a single resident ruler. His method was frankly eclectic. We are told that he made a point of inquiring carefully into the practices of other kings and countries and adopting anything in them which seemed to him valuable, and that he drew to his court from every land, regardless of speech and faith, men who were wise in counsel or distinguished in war, among whom the brilliant admiral George of Antioch is a conspicuous example. Nevertheless we should err if we thought of him as making a mere artificial composite. The Calabria of his youth had preserved a stiff tradition of Byzantine administration, and the Mohammedans of Sicily had an even stronger bureaucracy at work. Roger’s capital was at Palermo, and it was natural that the Greek and Saracen institutions of Sicily and Calabria should prove the formative influences in his government as it was extended to the newly acquired and less centralized regions of the mainland. There was free adaptation and use of experience, but the loose feudal methods of the Normans were profoundly modified by the bureaucratic traditions of the East.