The Normans In The South
John Julius Norwich
London : Penguin, 1992. (1992)
Tags: Non Fiction
Non Fictionttt
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SUMMARY:
In 1016, a rebel Lombard lord appealed to a group of pilgrims for help -- and unwittingly set in motion "the other Norman Conquest". The Normans in the South is the epic story of the House of Hauteville: of Robert Guiscard, perhaps the most extraordinary European adventurer between Caesar and Napoleon; his brother Roger, who helped him win Sicily from the Saracens; and his nephew Roger II, crowned at Palermo in 1130. The Kingdom in the Sun vividly evokes this "sad, superb, half-forgotten kingdom, cultivated, cosmopolitan, and tolerant", which lasted a mere 64 years. It concludes with the poignant defeat of the bastard King Tancred in 1194, bringing to a close this extraordinary chapter in Italian history. With a comprehensive listing of all of Sicily's surviving Norman monuments, the result is a superb traveler's companion and a masterpiece of the historian's art.
THE NORMANS IN THE SOUTH
THE NORMANS IN THE SOUTH 1016-1130
JOHN JULIUS NORWICH
Faber and faber
This edition first published in 2010 by Faber and Faber Ltd Bloomsbury House, 74-77 Great
Russell Street London
All rights reserved ©John Julius Norwich, 1967
The right of John Julius Norwich to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not. by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
A CIP record for this book is available from the British library
ISBN 978-0-571-15964-1)
For Anne
CONTENTS
Introduction
A cknowledgements
PART ONE: THE CONQUEST
Beginnings
Arrival
Establishment
Sicily
Insurrection
The Newcomers
Civitate
Schism
Consolidation
Reconciliation
Invasion
Conquest
Palermo
PART TWO: THE BUILDING OF THE KINGDOM
Polarisation
Excommunications and Investitures
Against Byzantium
From Rome to Venosa
Victors and Vanquished
The Great Count
Adelaide
The Fledgling Years
Reunification
Coronation
Bibliography
Index
No chapter of history more resembles a romance than that which records the sudden rise and brief splendour of the house of Hauteville. In one generation the sons of Tancred passed from the condition of squires in the Norman vale of Cotentin, to kinghood in the richest island of the southern sea. The Norse adventurers became Sultans of an Oriental capital. The sea-robbers assumed together with the sceptre the culture of an Arabian court. The marauders whose armies burned Rome received at papal hands the mitre and dalmatic as symbols of ecclesiastical jurisdiction.
JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS,
Sketches in Italy and Greece
INTRODUCTION
In October 1961 my wife and I went on a holiday to Sicily. I think I was vaguely aware that the Normans had ruled there some time in the Middle Ages, but I certainly knew very little else. At any rate I was totally unprepared for what I found. Here were cathedrals, churches and palaces which seemed to combine, without effort or strain, all that was loveliest in the art and architecture of the three leading civilisations of the time—the North European, the Byzantine and the Saracen. Here, in the dead centre of the Mediterranean, was the bridge between North and South, East and West, Latin and Teuton, Christian and Muslim; superb, unanswerable testimony to an age of tolerance and enlightenment on a scale unknown anywhere else in mediaeval Europe and, even in succeeding centuries, seldom equalled. I became very over-excited and longed to know more. The holidays over, I took the only sensible course and made straight for the London Library.
I was in for a sad surprise. A few works, mostly in French or German, of formidable nineteenth-century scholarship and paralysing dullness, lurked on an upper shelf; but for the ordinary English reader, seeking merely a general account of Norman Sicily, there was practically nothing. For a moment I almost wondered whether that most invaluable and trustworthy of all English institutions had let me down at last; at the same time, I knew perfectly well that it hadn't. If the London Library did not possess the sort of book I wanted, it could only be because no such book was in existence. And so it was that I first came face to face with a question which, after five years, still has me baffled: why is it that one of the most extraordinary and fascinating epics of European history between the ages of Julius Caesar and Napoleon should be so little known to the world at large ? Even in France any reference to the subject is apt to be greeted by a blank expression and a faintly embarrassed silence; while in England, which after all suffered a similar—though far less exciting—Norman conquest of its own at almost exactly the same time and was later to provide Sicily with several statesmen and even a queen, the general bewilderment seems to be yet greater. M. Ferdinand Chalandon, author of the still definitive work on the period, included in his monumental bibliography of well over six hundred items only one English author, Gibbon; and though in the sixty intervening years this country has produced a number of scholars, magnificently led by Miss Evelyn Jamison, who have hacked out many a clearing and planted their flags in the darker corners of the forest, to this day I know of only two non-specialist works in English which tell even part of the story in any detail: E. Curds's Roger of Sicily, written with a conscientious if somewhat heavy hand shortly before the First World War, and The Greatest Norman Conquest—there's a give-away title if you like—by Mr J. Van Wyck Osborne, whose thoughtful scholarship is endlessly sabotaged by the exuberance of his imagination. Both these books, incidentally, were published in New York; both are long out of print; and neither covers the whole period.
The conclusion was inescapable: if I wanted a complete history of Norman Sicily in English for the average reader, 1 should have to write it myself. And that is how it comes about that I now put forward, gingerly and with much diffidence, the first of two volumes which will together carry the story through from the first day, in 1016, when a party of Norman pilgrims was accosted in the shrine of the Archangel Michael on Monte Gargano, to the last, a hundred and seventy-eight years later, when the brightest crown of the Mediterranean passed to one of the blackest of the German Emperors. The present volume covers the first hundred and fourteen of those years and closes on Christmas Day 1130, when Sicily at last became a kingdom, and Roger II her king. They are the epic years, the years of endeavour and conquest, dominated by the sons and grandsons of Tancred de Hauteville and, above all, by the lowering bulk of Robert Guiscard, one of history's few military adventurers of genius to have started from nothing and died undefeated. Thereafter the mood changes; northern harshness softens in the sun; and the clash of steel slowly dies away, giving place to the whisper of fountains in a shaded patio and the ripple of plucked strings. Thus the second volume will tell of the golden age of Norman Sicily, the age of Cefalu, of Monreale and the Palatine Chapel at Palermo; and then, sadly, of its decline and collapse. True, its spirit was to live
on for another half-century in Frederick II, Stupor Mundi, the greatest of Renaissance princes two hundred years before his time, and in his lovely son Manfred. But Frederick, though a Hauteville on his mother's side and by his upbringing, was also a Hohenstaufen and an Emperor. His is a glorious, tragic story; but it is not ours.
This book makes no claim to original scholarship. Apart from anything else, I am no scholar. Despite eight years of what is still optimistically known as a classical education and a recent agonising refresher course, my Latin remains poor and my Greek worse. Though I have all too often had to struggle through contemporary sources in the original, I have gratefully seized on translations wherever they have been available and duly noted them in the bibliography; and though I have tried to read as widely as possible around the subject so as to fit the story into the general European context, I do not pretend to have unearthed any new material or to have put forward any startlingly original conclusions. The same goes for fieldwork. I think I have visited every site of importance mentioned in this book (many of them in unspeakably adverse weather) but my researches in local libraries and archives have been brief and—except in the Vatican—largely unfruitful. No matter. My purpose was simply, as I have said, to provide ordinary readers with the sort of book I wished I had had on my first visit to Sicily—something that would explain how the Normans got there in the first place, what sort of a country they made of it, and how they managed to imbue it with a culture at once so beautiful and so unique. Pausing now for breath, I only wish that I could do them greater justice.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Among the many friends in Italy who have helped and advised me with this book, I should like in particular to thank Dr and Mrs Milton Gendel for all their hospitality as well as for much historical expertise; Miss Georgina Masson, whose deep knowledge of mediaeval Italy and many bibliographical suggestions were invaluable; the Duchessa Lante della Rovere for immensely useful research; Dom Angelo Mifsud, O.S.B., archivist of the Badia della Cava, Salerno; Conte Dr Sigmund Fago Golfarelli, head of the Press Department of the Ente Nazionaleltaliano per il Turismo; and the late Father Guy Ferrari, whose recent untimely death is a sad blow for the Vatican Library and for all who work there.
In England I am especially grateful to Dr Jonathan Riley-Smith, whose kindness and erudition have saved me from many a nasty slip. Sir Steven Runciman and Mr Sacheverell Sitwell and their publishers, the Clarendon Press and Messrs Gerald Duckworth & Co., Ltd, have kindly allowed me to quote from their work; and I am also indebted to Messrs Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd and to Messrs Thomas Nelson & Sons Ltd for their permission to reproduce material from Miss E. Dawes's translation of The Alexiad and Professor R. W. Southern's translation of Eadmer's Vita Anselmi. Professor Nancy Lambton of London University took endless trouble to track down the Iqbal poem which provides the epigraph for Chapter 13. The translation from the original Urdu was made specially for me by her late colleague, Mr G. D. Gaur—a spontaneous gesture to an unknown enquirer for which I fear I did not thank him adequately in his lifetime. My thanks are also due to Mr C. R. Ligota of the Warburg Institute and to several, alas anonymous, members of the staff of the Bibliothcque Nationale in Paris.
But my deepest gratitude goes to my cousin, Mr Rupert Hart-Davis. No one understands better than he how a book should be written: no one could have given more generously of his time, experience and wisdom. My debt to him is enormous—and is shared, more than they know, by my readers, for if this book is found to be at all readable, it is due in large measure to him. Here is a debt which can be acknowledged, but never repaid.
Virtually every word of what follows has been written in the Reading Room of the London Library; and it only remains for me to echo the words of so many thousand authors before me—that without the Library's inexhaustible resources, supplemented by the patience, sympathy and good humour of every member of its staff, I do not see how my work could ever, possibly, have been clone.
London, 1966 J. J. N.
Note: Translations, except where otherwise indicated, are my own.
PART ONE
THE CONQUEST
1
BEGINNINGS
His starrie Holme unbuckl'd shew'd him prime
In manhood where youth ended; by his side
As in a glistering Zodiac hung the Sword,
Satan's dire dread, and in his hand the Spear.
Paradise Lost, Book XI
To the traveller, heading eastwards from Foggia to the sea, the gaunt grey shadow of Monte Gargano looms over the plain like a thundercloud. It is a curious excrescence, this dark limestone mass rising so unexpectedly from the fields of Apulia and, heedless of the gentle sweep of the coastline, jutting forty miles or so into the Adriatic— curious and somehow awesome. For centuries it has been known as the 'spur' of Italy—not a very good name even from the pictorial point of view, since it is much too far up the boot and seems to have been fixed on backwards. It is more like a hard callus, accidental, unlooked-for and basically unwelcome. Even the landscape, with its thick beech-forests, more Germanic than Italian; even the climate, raw and torn by winds; even the population, sombre, black-swathed and old (in contradistinction to anywhere else in Apulia, where the average age of the urban population, to all appearances exclusively male, seems to be about seven), bespeak a strange foreignness. Monte Gargano, to visitors and natives alike, is different. It does not really belong.
This feeling has always existed among the Apulians, and they have always reacted to it in the same way. Since the days of remotest antiquity an aura of holiness has hung over the mountain. Already in classical times it possessed at least two important shrines, one to Podaleirius—an ancient warrior-hero of small achievement and less interest—and one to old Calchas, the soothsayer of the Iliad, where according to Strabo 'those who consult the oracle sacrifice to his shade a black ram and then sleep in the hide'. With the advent of Christianity these devotions continued, as frequently happened after the minimum of adjustment necessary to keep up with the limes; so that by the fifth century, with a thousand years or so of uninterrupted sanctity behind it, the mountain was fully ripe for the miracle which then occurred. On 5 May in the year 493 a local cattle-owner, looking for a fine bull which he had lost, eventually found the animal in a dark cave, deep in the mountain-side. Repeated attempts to entice it out having proved unsuccessful, he at last in despair shot an arrow in its direction. To his astonishment, the arrow halted in mid-course, turned sharply back and embedded itself in his own thigh, where it inflicted an unpleasant flesh-wound. Hastening homeward as best he could, he reported the incident to Laurentius, Bishop of nearby Siponto, who ordered a three-day fast throughout the diocese. On the third day Laurentius himself visited the scene of the miracle. Scarcely had he arrived before the Archangel Michael appeared in full armour, announcing that the cave was henceforth to be a shrine to himself and to all the angels. He then vanished, leaving behind as a sign his great iron spur. When Laurentius returned with a party of followers a few days later, he found that the angels had been busy in his absence; the grotto had been transformed into a chapel, its walls hung with purple; everything was bathed in a soft, warm light. Murmuring praises, the bishop commanded that a church be built upon the rock above the entrance; and four months later, on 29 September, he consecrated it to the Archangel.1
In the little town of Monte Sant'Angelo Laurentius's church has long since disappeared, but the Archangel Michael is not forgotten. The entrance to his cave is now proclaimed by an octagonal thirteenth-century bell-tower and a rather ponderous porch built a hundred years ago in the romanesque style. Within, flight after flight of steps lead down into the bowels of the rock. On each side the walls are festooned with votive offerings—crutches, trusses, artificial limbs; eyes, noses, legs, breasts, inexpertly stamped on sheets
1 The story is told in the Roman Breviary, Proper Office of the Saints for 8 May.
of tin; pictures, genuine peasant primitives, of highway collisions, runa
way horses, overturning saucepans and other unpleasant accidents in which the victim owed his salvation to the miraculous intervention of the Archangel; and, most touching of all, fancy dress costumes which have been worn by small children in his honour— once again in gratitude for services rendered—tiny wooden swords, tinfoil wings and biscuit-tin breastplates, accompanied as often as not by a photograph of the wearer, all now gradually decaying against the dark, damp stone. At the bottom, guarded by a magnificent pair of Byzantine bronze doors—gift of a rich Amalfitan in 1076—lies the cave itself, in essence much as Laurentius must have left it. The air within it is still loud with the muttered devotions and heavy with the incense of fifteen hundred years, just as it is damp with the moisture that drips remorselessly from the glistening roof of rock and is subsequently dispensed to the faithful in little plastic beakers. The principal altar, ablaze with light and crowned with a glutinously emasculate statue of the Archangel which could not possibly be by Sansovino, takes up one corner; the rest is given over to crumbling columns, to long-abandoned altars in deep recesses, to darkness and to time.
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