The Normans In The South

by John Julius Norwich

  It was not long before Monte Sant'Angelo became one of the great pilgrim shrines of Europe. It was visited by saints, like St Gregory the Great at the end of the sixth century, or like St Francis in the middle of the thirteenth, who set a poor example to the faithful by carving an initial on the altar just inside the entrance; by emperors, like the Saxon Otto II, who came with his lovely young Byzantine wife, Theophano, in 981, or their mystic, megalomaniac son Otto III who, in an excess of zeal, walked all the way barefoot from Rome; and also perhaps, on a somewhat humbler level in the year 1016, by a band of Norman pilgrims whose conversation with a curiously-dressed stranger in that very cave changed the course of history and led to the foundation of one of the most powerful and magnificent kingdoms of the Middle Ages.

  By the beginning of the eleventh century the Normans had virtually completed the process by which, in barely a hundred years, they had transformed themselves from a collection of almost illiterate heathen barbarians into a civilised, if unscrupulous, semi-independent Christian state. It was, even for so energetic and gifted a race, a stupendous achievement. Men were still alive whose fathers could have remembered Rollo, the fair-haired viking who led his longboats up the Seine and was enfeoffed with most of the eastern half of modern Normandy by the French king Charles the Simple in 911. To be sure, Rollo was not the earliest of the Norman invaders; the first wave had descended from the forests and the fjords over half a century before, and since then the migration had persisted at a fairly steady rate. But it was he who focused the energies and aspirations of his countrymen and set them on the path of amalgamation and identification with their new homeland. Already in 912 a considerable number of them, led by Rollo himself, received Christian baptism. Some indeed, according to Gibbon, received it 'ten or twelve times, for the sake of the white garment usually given at this ceremony', while the fact that 'at the funeral of Rollo, the gifts to monasteries for the repose of his soul were accompanied by a sacrifice of one hundred captives' suggests that in these early years political expediency may have been no less strong a motive for conversion than was spiritual enlightenment, and that Thor and Odin did not give way without a struggle before the feathery onslaught of the Holy Ghost. But within a generation or two, as Gibbon himself admits, 'the national change was pure and general'. The same was true of language. By 940 the old Norse tongue, while still spoken at Bayeux and on the coast (where the newer immigrants presumably kept it alive), was already forgotten at Rouen; before the end of the century it had died out altogether, leaving hardly a trace behind. One last great institution remained for the Normans to adopt before they could become Frenchmen—an institution that in the years to come was to exert a perennial fascination over them and their descendants and was soon to form the cornerstone of two of the most efficiently run states the world has ever seen. This was the rapidly rising edifice of French law; and they adopted it with open arms.

  A pre-occupation with law was a hallmark of most mediaeval societies of the West; but it remains one of the paradoxes of Norman history that it should have persisted so strongly among a race notorious for its lawlessness throughout Europe. Piracy, perjury, robbery, rape, blackmail, murder—such crimes as these were being committed, cheerfully and continually, on every level from the personal to the national, by Norman kings, dukes and barons, long before the Crusades came still further to debase the moral standards of the civilised world. The explanation is that the Normans were above all pragmatists. They saw the law, quite simply, as a magnificent and firmly rooted structure on which a state could be built, and which could be used as a bulwark to strengthen their position in any enterprise they might undertake. As such, it was not their master but their slave, and they sought to uphold it merely because a strong slave is more useful than a weak one. This attitude prevailed among all the Norman rulers, whether in the north or the south. It explains why even the most unscrupulous among them nearly always managed to produce some ingenious legal justification for everything they did; and why the greatest Norman architects of statehood, King Henry II of England and King Roger of Sicily, were to concentrate above all on building up a massive legal system throughout their realms. None of them ever looked upon the law that they created as an abstract ideal; still less did they make the mistake of confusing it with justice.

  This pragmatic approach and preoccupation with outward form were also evident in the Norman attitude to religion. They seem to have been genuinely God-fearing—as everybody was in the Middle Ages—and like most people they clung to the simple, selfish mediaeval belief that the primary object of religion was to enable one, after death, to avoid the fires of hell and ascend to heaven as promptly and as painlessly as possible. The smoothness of this journey could, it was generally believed, best be assured by the straightforward means prescribed by the Church—regular attendance at Mass, the requisite amount of fasting, a little penance when necessary, an occasional pilgrimage and, if possible, generous endowments to religious foundations. So long as these formalities were observed, everyday life in the outside world was largely one's own affair and would not be too harshly judged. Similarly, there was no vital need to submit to the dictates of the Church in temporal matters. As we shall see, the genuine religious sentiments of a Guiscard or a Roger never stopped them fighting tooth and nail against what they considered unwarrantable encroachments by the Papacy, any more than those of Henry Plantagenet prevented his battle with Becket. Excommunication was indeed a severe penalty, not lightly to be incurred; yet incurred it was, often enough, and at least so far as the Normans were concerned it seems to have had little effect on their policy; they were usually able to get it lifted again before long.

  Materialistic, quick-witted, adaptable, eclectic, still blessed with the inexhaustible energy of their Viking forebears and a superb self-confidence that was all their own, the early Norman adventurers were admirably equipped for the role they were to play. To these qualities they added two others, not perhaps in themselves particularly praiseworthy, yet qualities without which their great kingdom of the south could never have been born. First or all they were enormously prolific, which meant a continually exploding population. It was this fact more than anything else that had brought the first immigrants from Scandinavia; and two hundred years later it was the same phenomenon that sent swarms of land-hungry younger sons still further south in their quest for Lebensraum. Secondly, they were natural wanderers—not just of necessity but by temperament as well. They showed, as an early chronicler noted, little loyalty to any of the countries which at various moments they called their own. The fastnesses of the north, the hills of Normandy, the broad meadows of England, the orange-groves of Sicily, the deserts of Syria, all were in turn forsaken by fearless, footloose young men looking for somewhere else, where the pickings would be better still.

  And what better excuse to leave for such a search, what better framework in which to conduct it, than a pilgrimage? It was not surprising, at the dawn of the second millennium, when the world had not after all come to an end as had been predicted, and a wave of relief and gratitude was still sweeping across Europe, that of the thousands who thronged the great pilgrim roads so large a proportion should have been Normans. Their destinations were various; four in particular, however, enjoyed such sanctity that visits to them were sufficient to earn pilgrims total absolution—Rome, Compostela, Monte Gargano and, above all the rest, the Holy Land. At that period the city of Jerusalem had been for some four hundred years under Muslim domination, but Christian pilgrims were welcomed—one of their hostels had been founded by Charlemagne himself—and the undertaking presented no insuperable obstacle to anyone with time and energy enough; least of all to young Normans, who looked upon the journey as an adventure and a challenge and doubtless enjoyed it for its own sake, quite apart from the lasting— indeed eternal—benefit which it conferred upon their souls. For them, too, it had a particular appeal; on their return from Palestine they could disembark at Brindisi or Bari and from there follow the coast up t
o the shrine of the Archangel, who was not only the guardian of all seafarers and thus in any case presumably due for some expression of gratitude, but who also occupied a special place in their affections in his capacity as patron of their own great abbey at Mont-Saint-Michel.

  Such appears to have been the course taken by the forty-odd Norman pilgrims who paid their fateful visit to Monte Sant'Angelo in 1016—according, at least, to the testimony of a certain William of Apulia who, at the request of Pope Urban II, produced his Historical Poem Concerning the Deeds of the Normans in Sicily, Apulia and Calabria just before the close of the eleventh century. William's account, in elegant Latin hexameters, begins with a description of how the pilgrims were approached in the cave by a strange figure dressed 'in the Grecian style’ in a long flowing robe and bonnet. They found him unprepossessing, and his clothes frankly effeminate; but they listened to his story. His name, it appeared, was Melus, and he was a noble Lombard from Bari now driven into exile after leading an unsuccessful insurrection against the Byzantine Empire, which at that time held most of South Italy in its power. His life was dedicated to the cause of Lombard independence—which, he maintained, could easily be achieved; all that was needed was the help of a few stalwart young Normans like themselves. Against a combined Lombard-Norman army the Greeks would stand no chance; and the Lombards would not forget their allies.

  It is hard to believe that piety was the dominant emotion in the hearts of the pilgrims, as they stepped out into the sunlight and gazed at the wide plain of Apulia lying beckoning at their feet. They cannot at this stage have foreseen how magnificent an epic lay ahead, nor how far-reaching would be its effects; but they cannot either have failed to realise the huge possibilities inherent in the words of Melus. Here was the chance they had been waiting for—a rich fertile land which they were being invited, implored almost, to enter, which offered them boundless opportunities for proving their worth and for making their fortune. Moreover, an operation of the kind proposed could be amply justified on both legal and religious grounds, aiming as it did at the liberation of a subject people from foreign oppression, and at the restoration of the Roman Church throughout South Italy in place of the despised mumbo-jumbo of Constantinople. It would be some years yet before these vague vistas of glory were focused into a clear ambition for conquest, and longer still before this ambition was so dazzlingly fulfilled; meanwhile the important thing was to hack out a firm foothold in the country, and for this the battle-cry of Lombard independence would do as well as any other.

  So they told Melus that they would willingly give him the help he needed. At present their numbers were inadequate; in any case they had come to Apulia as pilgrims and were hardly equipped to embark immediately on a campaign. They must therefore return to Normandy, but only for so long as was necessary to make the proper preparations and to recruit companions-in-arms. In the following year they would be back to join their new Lombard friends, and the great enterprise would begin.

  The patriotism of Melus was the more understandable since already by this time the Lombards could boast a long and distinguished history in Italy. Starting as just another bunch of semi-barbarian invaders from North Germany, they had settled around the middle of the sixth century in the territory that still bears their name, and had founded there a prosperous kingdom with its capital at Pavia. Meanwhile others of their compatriots had pressed farther south and had set up semi-independent dukedoms at Spoleto and Benevento. For two hundred years all had gone well; but in 774 Charlemagne swept down into Italy and captured Pavia, and the kingdom was at an end. The focus of Lombard civilisation now shifted to the dukedoms, especially to that of Benevento, which soon promoted itself to a principality and—although it was technically under papal suzerainty by virtue of a deed of gift from Charlemagne —continued to maintain the old Lombard traditions untarnished. There, where Trajan's magnificent triumphal arch still stands to mark the junction of the two principal Roman roads of the South, the Via Appia and the Via Trajana, the Lombard aristocracy grew steadily in influence and wealth, and by A.D. 1000 the three great princes of Benevento, Capua and Salerno were among the most powerful rulers in the peninsula, surrounded by courts ablaze with Byzantinesque splendour and endlessly conspiring to achieve their perennial dream—a united and independent Lombard state that would embrace the whole of southern Italy. With this object in view they deliberately did their utmost to obscure their own feudal position, acknowledging the suzerainty now of the Latin Empire of the West, now of the Byzantine Empire of the East (Benevento occasionally also paying lip-service to the claims of the Pope), for ever playing one off against the other. And naturally they never lost an opportunity of encouraging the various groups of Lombard separatists in the territories of their Byzantine neighbour.

  The Byzantine Empire, for its part, had had a sad record in Italy. Hardly had the armies of Justinian and his successor driven the Ostrogoths from the peninsula in the sixth century when they found it occupied by their erstwhile Lombard allies. Quick action might yet have saved the situation, but at that moment Constantinople was paralysed by palace intrigues and nothing was done. Meanwhile the Lombards dug themselves in. In 751 they were strong enough to expel the Byzantine Exarch of Ravenna, after which Greek influence was limited to Calabria, the heel of Italy around Otranto, and a few isolated merchant cities on the west coast, of which Naples, Gaeta and Amalfi were the most important. At first these cities were little more than prosperous colonics of the Empire, but as time went on they evolved into hereditary dukedoms, still fundamentally Greek in language and culture, acknowledging Byzantine suzerainty and bound to Constantinople by close ties of friendship and commerce, but for all practical purposes independent.

  The advent of Charlemagne and his Franks, though disastrous to the Lombards, brought no corresponding advantages to the Greeks, serving only to introduce a rival claimant to the overlordship of southern Italy; and it was not until the ninth century, when the great dynasty of the Macedonians assumed power in Constantinople, that Basil I and his successor Leo VI the Wise were able to halt the decline and partially to restore Byzantine fortunes. As a result of their efforts the Theme of Langobardia—or, as it was usually called, the Capitanata—consisting of Apulia, Calabria and the Otranto region, was by the year 1000 a powerful and profitable province of the Empire, which in its turn had once again become the greatest single force in the peninsula. Meanwhile it continued to claim suzerainty over all the land south of a line drawn from Terracina in the west to Termoli on the Adriatic, and thus consistently refused to recognise the independence either of the Greek city-states or of the Lombard principalities.

  Government of the Capitanata was beset with problems. First of all the whole territory lay wide open to the ravages of Saracen pirates from North Africa, who now dominated the entire western Mediterranean. Already in 846 they had raided Rome and pillaged St Peter's, and little more than twenty years later an uneasy and mutually painful alliance between the Eastern and Western Emperors had been necessary before they could be dislodged from Bari. A monk named Bernard, on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 870, wrote of how he had seen thousands of Christian captives being herded on to galleys at Taranto for shipment to Africa as slaves. Thirty years later—by which time, having gained effective control of Sicily, they had vastly improved their own strategic position—the Saracens annihilated Reggio and soon afterwards became so serious a menace that the Byzantine Emperor agreed to pay them an annual sum in protection money. In 953, however, this payment was stopped and the raids became worse than ever. In the last quarter of the tenth century, hardly a year went by without at least one major outrage.

  Then there was the Western Empire to be watched. The general relapse that followed the extinction of Charlemagne's family with the death in 888 of Charles the Fat had afforded a welcome respite from its south Italian claims; but with the appearance of Otto the Great in 951 the dispute had flared up again more violently than ever. Otto had devoted his immense energies to the task of d
elivering Italy from the contagion of Greeks and Saracens alike, and for nearly twenty years the land had been torn by heavy and entirely inconclusive fighting. Peace seemed to have come in 970, when friendship between the two Empires was theoretically cemented by the marriage of Otto's son—later Otto II—to the Greek princess Theophano; but this only gave young Otto the opportunity, on his accession, of formally claiming the 'restitution' of all Byzantine possessions in Italy as part of his wife's dowry. His demands were naturally refused, and the war began again. Then, in 981, Otto descended into Apulia, his wrath on this occasion principally directed against the Saracens. In Constantinople the Emperor Basil saw his chance: of the two evils, Otto represented by far the greater long-term danger. Messengers sped to the Saracen leader and a temporary alliance was hastily arranged, as a result of which, after certain initial successes, Otto was soundly defeated near Stilo in Calabria; only an ignominious flight in disguise saved him from capture. He never recovered from the humiliation and died in Rome the following year, aged twenty-eight.1 He was succeeded by a child of three and since then, not surprisingly, the Western Empire had given little trouble; but vigilance could never be relaxed for long.

  Internally too there were grave difficulties. In Calabria and the heel, government was straightforward enough, since these regions had suffered relatively little penetration by the Lombards. On the other hand they had provided a refuge for large numbers of Greek monks, fleeing in the eighth century from Iconoclast excesses of Constantinople and in the tenth from the depredations of the Sicilian Saracens; and the resulting Greek influence, political, religious and cultural, was still everywhere supreme. Calabria in particular was to remain, throughout the Renaissance, one of the principal centres of Greek learning. But in Apulia the situation was more delicate.