The Normans and Their World

by Jack Lindsay

  The year 1062 started well, but failed to live up to its promise. Roger, married, had in correct Norman style to enfeoff his wife and family in a way befitting their station; and Robert still shrank from fulfilling his promise to share conquests. Now, irritated with Roger’s demands, he beseiged him in Mileto. Malaterra tells a tale that brings out the odd combination of reckless behaviour with shrewd calculation in these men, the mixture of the chivalric with their too often cold and ruthless violences. One night Roger slipped out to seek aid from near Gerace. Robert hotly pursued, but had the gates slammed in his face. So he hid under a cowl, got inside the town, and made his way to a friend, Basil, who with his wife Melita asked him to stay and dine. A servant, recognizing him, gave the alarm; the house was surrounded by a raging crowd. Basil was struck down before he could reach the nearest church; Melita was impaled on a stake. Robert shouted for silence and gave a speech. For their own sakes let his enemies not lose their heads at finding the duke of Apulia in their power or they might see a reversal of fortune; he had come with no hostile aim; they had sworn him fealty and he had never played them false; it would be shameful if a whole city, forgetting its oath, hurled itself on a single unarmed man; let them remember that his death would bring down the lasting hostility of the Normans and would be mercilessly avenged. The crowd was calmed. Robert was taken to a place of safety. His followers outside the town heard what had happened and rushed to ask aid of Roger who was encamped a few miles away. He rode to Gerace in full state, called the elders into the open space before the gates, and angrily asked why they had not at once handed Robert over to him; he, not they, had suffered from Robert’s duplicity; if they didn’t hand him over, the town’s farms and vineyards would be razed before morning. Robert was delivered up. Roger dropped his show of anger and the brothers embraced with tears of joy. Robert granted Roger all he asked, and they rode off together to Mileto. But, once secure, Robert regretted his concession. There was more fighting before Roger got what he wanted.

  So Roger didn’t return to Sicily until high summer of 1062, taking Judith with him. He garrisoned Troina and left her there. Meanwhile the local Greeks, finding the Normans worse oppressors than the Saracens, rose and tried to get Judith as a hostage; all day there was fighting in the streets. Roger left Nicosia which he was investing, and hurried back, to find the Saracens had joined the Greeks. He ordered a retreat to the area round the citadel and barricaded the approaches. For four months the siege went on; winter arrived early; Norman supplies were low. Troina, 4000 feet above the sea, was chilly, and there was little fuel. Judith and Roger had a single woollen cloak, worn by day and used as blanket by night. But one day early in 1063 Robert learned that the Moslems were drunk with the region’s red wine. The Normans attacked in the windy night, moving on deep soundless snow, and took the beseiging lines. Harsh reprisals and a great feast followed.

  Roger’s main problem was manpower for extended campaigns. The Saracens were beginning to unite and the Normans in Apulia were too entangled with endless small wars to spare many reinforcements. Roger had to return to the mainland for more horses. Judith, in command of Troina, made regular day and night rounds. But Roger soon returned and with his nephew Serlo went on harassing the Saracens. In the summer he had to turn to the east and meet the main enemy force, swollen by new recruits from Africa, under the Prophet’s green banner. The Normans were vastly outnumbered and for three days at Cerami the two armies watched one another. Then, says Malaterra, ‘our men, unable any longer to bear seeing the enemy so near without attacking them, confessed themselves with the utmost piety, made their penances and then, trusting in God’s mercy and sure of his aid, rode off into battle’. After a daylong fight they routed the Saracens and looted their camp.

  They seized their camels and all else they found there. Next day they left to seek out all those 20,000 footsoldiers who had run off into the mountains for refuge. Many of these they killed. The rest they took captive and sold as slaves, getting a great price for each man. But after a short while the contagion that rose from the corpses rotting on the battlefield drove them away and they went back to Troina.[167]

  Now they held securely the whole area from Troina to Messina. Malaterra tells of St George coming in person to join the Normans as they rode into battle. A section of the splendid booty, including four camels, was sent to Pope Alexander II.

  Once again there was trouble at Rome. Alexander had been chosen by Hildebrand and the cardinals; Honorius II was set up by the Empress-regent Agnes and supported by the Lombard bishops. Agnes was soon deposed but her pope held out till 1064. Alexander was in bad need of allies. Once again the papacy reform group had to lean on Norman aid. Alexander sent Roger a papal banner and proclaimed absolution for all who joined him in the holy work of freeing Sicily from the heathen. Now the invasion was a crusade in the eyes of Europe — a point that Duke William did not forget when soon afterwards he wanted all possible sanctification for his attack on another island, England.

  In August 1063 the people of Pisa sent a fleet to help capture Palermo; but Roger, while keen for controllable reinforcements, had no wish for allies who would claim an important share of his gains. He refused the aid and the Pisans failed. In early 1064 Robert, with five hundred knights and some thousand footmen, came down into Calabria, and Roger met him in Cosenza. They planned their own assault on Palermo. But when Robert reached the city’s outskirts by land, he encamped on a hill swarming with tarantulas. Malaterra says their bites caused ‘a most poisonous wind’ with thunderous farts; unless hot compresses or the like were applied to the bites, ‘it is said that their very lives were in peril’. Robert hastily moved camp, but the nerves of the Normans had been shaken. After three months’ seige nothing was achieved. The Norman forces were insufficient for anything like a quick victory. Roger moved his headquarters on to Petralia, taken in 1062, a rocky site from which he could swoop down on the region round Palermo and keep the Saracens on the defensive. Once more the latter began to succumb to internal dissensions. But for a few years there was a stalemate. Robert could do little to help his brother; in 1064 he had to meet a serious revolt of his Apulian vassals, which the Byzantines aided. Then the threat of the Seljuk Turks in the east of the Byzantine empire eased things for the Normans. In Byzantion a Cappadocian, Romanos Diogenes, was acclaimed emperor on the first day of 1068; he concentrated all his forces against the Turks. Robert’s rebellious vassals lost heart. Robert suborned an officer of the sole remaining rebel, Geoffrey of Conversano, and took his town; the traitor was given the fief.

  All these events in Italy and Sicily were closely followed in Normandy. During the years when William was struggling for survival, Richard of Capua and Robert Guiscard had become important men in an area more spectacular than north-west France. They had been honoured by pope and emperor, and in the 1060s they began the conquest of Sicily with all its riches. William of Normandy was deeply stirred by these achievements of men who at home had only been members of lesser baronial families; the thought of what they had done nerved him for his attack on England and he drew on their experience for dealing with the technical problems of invasion. Only by becoming king of England could he equal, let alone surpass, these men who had begun as mere knights. Further, he was ensured of papal backing because of the dependence of the reform-popes on the Normans of the South — because of the lucky chance that had turned them from moral pariahs into the supporters of Hildebrand. The same decade saw the invasions of Sicily and of England; in each case the invasion was turned by papal blessing into a sort of crusade.

  Between 1059 and 1085 the papacy, confident in a new political and theological militancy, was eager to draw the western nobles into wars which it saw as furthering the Christian cause. It promised beatitude for death in battle and provided consecrated banners. Earlier, such a banner could be taken to signify a papal investiture and St Peter’s Soldiers were papal vassals rather than fighters for the faith. But with the Hildebrandine reforms the Holy War becam
e a definite and effective means of strengthening the papacy and drawing together the west under its leadership. Christ’s Soldiers were no longer monks or hermits; now the term ‘had come to denote the armed might of the west mobilized for war under papal leadership’ (Douglas). Here we touch on one of the reasons for the rapid decline of the monks from their central position in the Christian scheme of the west after 1100. Christ’s Soldier was now not so much fighting an inner battle in solitude against the devils of the spirit; he was an armed knight fighting an actual infidel or heretic. What he gained was now not so much treasure in heaven as loot and land on earth, of which a due share must be handed over to mother church.

  It was ironic that the great strengthening of the Hildebrandine papacy and the creation of the concept of the Holy War should have been made possible by the support of the Normans who had been papally condemned as anti-Christian murderers and marauders. The anti-Christian robbers became the most Christian vassals and servants of the pope. Leo IX had made an attempt to build his own army, but the Normans frustrated it; after that Rome’s only hope lay in the Normans if it was to throw off the domination of the German emperor. In view of the important results of the revival of the idea of the Holy War we may glance at its past history. The roots go far back, reaching to the days when Constantine the Great was said to have had his victory at the Milvian Gate in 312 presaged by the sign of the cross in the sky: that is, the acceptance of war by Christians arose out of the crucial event which was soon to result in the incorporation of the church in the state structure. The acceptance of the church by the state was as much the acceptance of the state by the church. The Christian repudiation of war was finally corroded. Augustine provided the rationalizations, arguing that there might be occasions when war could be condoned if not sanctified. But through the troubled centuries ahead most prelates were all too aware of the dangers to the church of endemic warfare and tended to condemn it. In the east, where Byzantion continued as a bulwark against wave after wave of attacking non-Christians, the acceptance of war was inevitable and the relative subservience of church to state ensured that there were no dissentient voices. In the west the change began under Charlemagne. His power was at root secular, but he acted with the papacy as the militant representative of Christianity against the Moslems and the Saxon pagans. He saw himself as having a special duty to defend the church against its enemies. The Norse and Hungarian onslaughts strengthened the sense of a beleaguered Christendom waiting for the end of the world; and the idea of righteous war was furthered by the fact that victories often led to the conversion of pagans.

  But the eleventh century saw a new aspect of the situation, with a converted St Olaf forcing the Norwegians bloodily into the Christian fold, and St Stephen ruling in Hungary. The Christian west had made great economic and political advances; and despite the existing anarchy it was increasingly aware of an underlying unity, which found its ideological expression through the church — which in turn began to assert itself with a new confidence, both at the monastic and the papal level. Pilgrimages expressed both the restless spirit born of the breakdown of old limits, and the desire to learn more of the forces creating the new sense of unity. Men from diverse areas came together on pilgrimages and found a deep satisfaction in reaching the shrine of a saint who embodied the creed that was uniting them. The saints themselves changed in the new climate of unrest and aggression. St James of Compostella in Spain, whose tomb was one of the greatest pilgrim centres, had once been a figure of peace; by the eleventh century he had become Santiago Matamoros, Killer of the Moors. There was much enthusiasm for the warrior St Michael and for St Gabriel, Chief of the Angelic Guards. Sword-blessings were common; liturgical prayers for victory increased. Chansons de geste gave a vigorous expression to the idea of the Holy War, especially the Chanson de Roland, which depicts Charlemagne as the ideal king, tireless in waging the Holy War, a priestly warrior who uses the sign of the cross and can grant absolution. Roland, faithful vassal, is also the ideal Christian hero, wielding a sword studded with relics; and with him is the warrior-prelate Turpin who promises salvation to the comrades who die with him. St Peter Damiani (died 1072) saw Christ as a war-lord who in the heavenly city gave his faithful largesse in the way of the feudal lord: ‘Christ, palm of warriors, bring me into the city after my girdle of knighthood has been loosened; make me share the reward (donativum) of its blessed citizens.’

  In defeating Pope Leo IX in 1053 the Normans dealt a temporary blow to the idea of the Holy War; but by becoming the militant agents of the papacy some six years later they more than compensated for this damage. They lifted the idea on to a new comprehensive level, leading quickly to the invasions of Sicily and England, and soon afterwards to the launching of the crusades.[168] The Holy War ceased to be a general concept of Christian resistance to a non-Christian world; its aims were identified with the carrying out of papal policy. Thus anyone who defied that policy and its enunciations, whether he was Harold in 1066 or the later Albigensian heretics of southern France, was as culpable as were irreconcilable pagans.

  *

  Ordericus Vitalis, writing in the first half of the twelth century, shows clearly how the exploits in the South passed into the whole Norman tradition. Born on the banks of the Severn to a French father and an English mother, he knew only English when at the age of seven he was sent to the reformed monastery of St Évroult in the forest of Ouche. He saw the Norman nobility as first of all the founders and benefactors of St Evroult, but also as the ‘mighty helpers of Robert Guiscard, Duke of Calabria, in Apulia and Sicily’. He depicts them travelling to southern Italy and back, then to England, Syria and Spain, establishing monasteries and lordships. He is delighted that the same chants are heard at Venosa and Sant’ Eufemia and Mileto as at Évroul. From the seven sons and four daughters of Giroy of Montreuil and Échaffour and his wife Gisela there came ‘a fighting clan of sons and grandsons, who struck terror into the barbarians of England and Apulia, Thrace and Syria’.[169] (For him peoples of a far higher culture than that of the Normans are mere ‘barbarians’.) Orderic feels the unity of the Norman world all the more because he sees the expansion as the work of his friends from the valley of the Risle. Robert de Grandmesnil, son of Hadwisa Giroy, turned from war to become abbot of St Évroult, which he had helped to refound; then he went off south through Rome to rule Sant’ Eufemia. This was the journey that Judith took to marry Roger de Hauteville. Another emigrant was her cousin, William of Montreuil, called in Apulia the Good Norman. He became duke of Gaeta; and at one time he commanded the army of Pope Alexander. What most interests Orderic are the gifts this William got ready to send from Italy to St Évroul if a trusty messenger came to fetch them. His own father, blind William Giroy, offered to go, and the abbot was ‘glad to see such devotion and sad to lose his company’. The old man crossed the Alps with twelve companions and stayed awhile with his son, pleased at meeting many friends and kinsmen in the south. But as he was returning with a huge sum of money, he fell ill at Gaeta and died. He was buried there in the cathedral that was being built.[170] Among the kinsmen he might have met was William of Eschaffour (de Escalfo), the son of his son Arnold, of whom Orderic tells us that after many wanderings he joined Robert of Loritello (nephew of the Guiscard), was given thirty castella, and married a Lombard wife, begetting a large family. For nearly forty years he lived among the Lombards, forgetting his own people. He turns up again in 1095 when at Chieti in the Abruzzi, as William of Scalfo, he witnessed a donation of Robert of Loritello to the bishop of Chieti. (Orderic’s tale of his great position is thus verified.) Some fifty years later in the same region a son or grandson still held many fiefs and served there as royal constable. Other persons of the house of Giroy, still bearing the name, are found in the records of the Terra di Bari.[171]

  The importance of the Italian conquests and the part played by the memory of them in Norman tradition in England is brought out by the speeches put in the mouths of generals long after 1066. Aelred of Rieva
ulx, telling of the Battle of the Standard in 1138 against the Scots, makes the veteran Walter Espec stir his men’s courage by conjuring up Norman glories. The very name of Gaul, he cries, has been wiped out from that part of the land taken by their ancestors. ‘It was our father who conquered this island and imposed our laws upon it...and who was it but your Normans who overran far kingdoms, Apulia, Calabria, Sicily?’ Henry of Huntingdon gives a similar speech to Ralph, bishop of the Orkneys: ‘Magnates of England, illustrious sons of Normandy, there is none who can resist you with impunity. Bold France made trial and was reduced to second place. Fierce England fell captive before you. Sumptuous Apulia in your hands flourished anew. Far-famed Jerusalem and noble Antioch both made surrender to you.’

  Interest in the different areas of Norman settlement and activity was kept alive by the many families which had members scattered about in those areas: Mowbray, Barneville, de Aquila (l’Aigle), de Say, Avenal, Taillebois, Cantelupe, Creun, d’Arques, Blosseville, and so on. Norman clerks, monks and bishops also moved continually from one Norman land to another.[172] The spoils of the south went on enriching Norman monasteries. The cathedral of Coutances was largely paid for by Robert Guiscard; that of Sées by other Apulian Normans or adventurers in the Byzantine service. Similarly, after the conquest of England, the treasures of the abbey of St Martin were swollen by spoils from the Anglo-Welsh borders and the abbeys of Caen rose fast because of the confiscations imposed on Waltham.[173]