The Normans and Their World

by Jack Lindsay

  After the fall of Bari in 1071 the Normans in south Italy set themselves to consolidate their position. Not that their troubles had ceased. The Lombard duchy of Naples was still hostile to Richard of Capua; and the Greeks still held enough cities to keep Count Roger at Mileto watchful. Though Robert held Bari, Brindisi and Otranto, he had yet to assert his authority over the coastal towns to the north. Full control of Apulia was slowly achieved in the years 1072-85.

  Further, the Normans were no longer in easy accord with the papacy; Hildebrand became pope as Gregory VII in 1073. Though the papacy had gained much from the aid of the Normans after 1059, their too successful expansion posed a threat, especially after Robert gained Amalfi and was looming up over the papal patrimony. Gregory therefore tried to set the Normans at one another’s throats. In 1072 he made an alliance with Richard of Capua and launched the first of his three excommunications of Robert Guiscard. His feelings are clearly revealed in a letter of 22 January 1075 to Hugh, abbot of Cluny: ‘There are no longer princes who set God’s honour above their own selfish ends...and those among whom I live, Romans, Lombards, and Normans, are, as I’ve often told them, worse than Jews or Pagans.’ He tried to build up an army; but the Pisans in it were outraged at finding among the ranks the pirate Gisulf of Salerno. The army broke up. The pope was dragged from the crypt where he was saying mass and imprisoned. Further, the emperor Henry IV was on the point of descending into Italy to depose him. The great investiture conflict had emerged fully into the open.

  Henry IV decided to take the Guiscard as ally, but the latter had his own ideas. He came to an agreement with Richard of Capua, and Gregory excommunicated Henry: the first time such an action had been taken by the head of the church since Theodosius seven centuries before. All the ruler’s subjects were in religious law exempted from allegiance. In October 1076 Robert, with Capua’s support, attacked Gisulf in Salerno with a sea and land blockade. The citizens suffered badly, and on the last day of 1076 they opened the gates to the Normans. The citadel fell in May 1077 and Gisulf went off to Rome. The last stronghold of Lombard power was in Norman hands. Furthermore, Salerno was an important mercantile centre. In 1078 Richard of Capua died and Robert was beyond question the strongest ruler in the south. Gregory gave in. In June 1080 he came to an agreement with Robert at Ceprano. The thrice excommunicated Norman was confirmed in his conquests of Amalfi, Salerno, and the march of Fermo. He had no secular overlord, though he repeated the oath of fealty to the papacy which he had taken in 1059.

  The conflict of German emperor and pope, which had come to its first head with the vindication of the imperial control of the see of Milan in 1046, now became fiercer and more far-reaching in its effects. Though Henry was backed by his own bishops, he had to deal with opposition at home: discontented Saxons and Thuringians who took up the papal cause for their own ends. Gregory’s sentence was more effective than he could have hoped; the German princes gave Henry a year in which to seek absolution. He had to cross the wintry Alps and wait three days at the fortress of Canossa as a penitent. Things were patched up between emperor and pope, but a second ban came in 1080. The pope’s release of Henry’s subjects from their allegiance and the encouragement given them to set up a rival king had played a crucial part in strengthening the divisions in Germany. After the formal deposition of 1080 there continued to exist an opposition, half dynastic, half clerical, till the religious half of the friction was alleviated by the Compromise of Worms in 1122, under which the emperor kept his control over elections in Germany, and received the right to invest by the sceptre, though he gave up the investiture by staff and ring. At the same time, however, he surrendered his hard fought claim to intervene directly in the elections of Italian bishops. The Italian bishoprics were in fact growing less important because of the rise of the communes and the acceptance by the bishops of Lombardy of the reforming decrees of the papacy. So, out of this first long phase of the investiture dispute the papacy emerged centralized and strengthened, with a clear policy, while the empire, though still powerful, was bleeding from an internal wound. As we have seen, the Normans played a crucial part in ensuring this outcome, at moments when the papacy was in dire difficulties.

  *

  The Guiscard’s ambitions now turned eastwards. The Byzantine empire had suffered a severe blow at Manzikert in 1071 at the hands of the Seljuk Turks. In 1074 Robert sent his daughter Helena to be betrothed to the son of the emperor Michael VII. He seems to have been scheming for a chance to grasp the eastern throne for himself. When Michael was deposed and killed, the contract for marriage with Helena was repudiated. Robert produced a bogus monk as the dead emperor and began refitting his fleet. Ever since his investment by the pope with the Calabrian duchy, Robert had been assuming the role of the eastern basileus or emperor, copying his insignia on seals and wearing imperial robes of state on formal occasions. At Crepano Pope Gregory had virtually recognized the bogus Michael as the true emperor; and now he sent his support, with a papal banner, to Robert for his invasion of the eastern empire. The fact that the Christian defenders of the east were hard pressed by the Turks made this a good moment to stab them in the back.

  On May 1081 Robert with his huge, barrel-chested son Bohemund sailed from Otranto, crossed the Adriatic, captured Corfu, and moved on to assault Durazzo. The investment began, but in October the Byzantine army came up. The imperial bodyguard largely consisted of Anglo-Saxon exiles who had been waiting fifteen years to get their own back on the Normans. They made a fierce attack with two-handed axes. The Apulian knights could not break their line; but Sichelgaita, Robert’s warlike wife, rode up to rally her side while Bohemund’s left wing wheeled in support. Crossbowmen shot down the Varangians. The last English took refuge in a chapel of the archangel Michael, which the Normans set on fire, burning the men inside. The Byzantines were defeated, and the Normans moved on east to Kastaria. But once again the vassals in Apulia and Calabria rose against their overlord, this time stirred up by Byzantine agents, and Henry IV was at the gates of Rome.

  We may pause to glance at the Anglo-Saxons who after 1066 had joined the Norsemen and Russians in the Varangian Guard at Byzantion. The Guard was given charge of the palace by Alexis Comnenos after he had suppressed the ancient corps of Excubitores. Alexis did his best to recruit western mercenaries, the chiefs of whom took a feudal oath to him, according to the customs of their own lands. Count Robert of Flanders in 1087, returning from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, promised to send five hundred knights, who took part in an expedition against the Pechenegs. A chrysobull of 1088 for Patmos distinguishes the Englishmen from the Varangians; but a tale told by a Canterbury monk who went as pilgrim to Palestine shows that towards 1090 the Anglo-Saxons belonged to the Varangian Guard. Alexis put some of them in the town that he founded to keep a watch on the Turkish emir of Nicomedia.

  Learning of the troubles in south Italy, the Guiscard left Bohemund in command, swearing by the soul of his father Tancred not to shave or wash till he returned. He found that Henry had gone off ravaging the lands of the papal ally, Matilda of Tuscany; so he turned to Apulia. Bohemund was beginning to threaten Byzantion itself, but in 1083 he was beaten at Larissa, and slowly all the Norman gains in the Balkans were lost. In Italy Henry, after a long siege of Rome, entered the city on 21 March 1084. Robert, having dealt with his Apulian rebels, moved north. Henry retreated, and when Robert reached Rome with a big body of Calabrian and Saracen mercenaries, he met little opposition. Forcing his way in through the Flaminian Gate, he hewed a passage through the burning streets to the Castello Sant’ Angelo where the pope was in refuge. Three days later some disturbances among the citizens provided the pretext for setting fire to the city again, and it was given up to rape, arson, murder, looting and destruction. Many of the leading citizens who survived were sent as slaves to Calabria. The devastation was enormous. No barbarian attack over the centuries had done anything like the damage. Churches and temples crashed down, the Capitol and the Palatine were burned out, hardly a
building was left between the Colosseum and the Lateran. Many people were burned alive, others were cut down as they ran about. The Normans had not only wrecked Rome, but had brought in Saracens to help in doing it.

  Pope Gregory did not care. He had beaten Henry and nothing else mattered. But now he was so detested by the people that he could not remain in Rome; he was doomed to go off with the Normans whom he had once so loudly denounced. In May 1085 he died at Salerno and was buried in the new cathedral, which was built, according to the inscription, by ‘Duke Robert Greatest of Conquerors with His Own Money’. To the end he was perfectly convinced of his own righteousness. ‘Therefore I die in exile.’

  In autumn 1084 Robert was back in Greece; but, as we saw, the tide had turned. This time the Normans had taken on an enemy too powerful for them, with far too many resources still despite setbacks and depletions. By the end of the year they held only a coastal strip. Robert tried to bring reinforcements across; but bad weather and the Venetians beat him, though at the close of his second defeat he rallied and drove his fleet into one more attack that capsized many of the heavier Venetian galleys. Anna Comnena tells of the mutilation he inflicted on his 2,500 prisoners. He took Corfu, but an epidemic, probably typhoid, broke out among his men and finally he himself was affected. On 17 July 1085 he died with Sichelgaita at his side.

  His tomb at Venosa called him with something like truth the Terror of the World. Various incidents of his Byzantine expedition got into the Chanson de Roland, as did incidents from the career of William the Conqueror; Charlemagne was described as having ‘conquered Pouille [Apulia] and the whole of Calabrie’ as well as having ‘crossed over the bitter sea to England’.[349] William and Robert had shared many qualities, but Robert operated in a wider field. In Apulia and Calabria he had to deal with territory broken up into many feudal units and comprising several advanced mercantile cities: something as unlike England as could be found in that age. But, though he tried imitating the Byzantines, he could not devise an administrative system to hold his conquests together. William, his admirer, died two years later; and with their two deaths the old Norman world disappeared. Something more sophisticated had to emerge.

  We noted that elements drawn from both William and Robert went into the Chanson de Roland, in which the concept of the holy war was maturing. To enter into the minds of the period we must understand how they could celebrate the violent and ruthless Robert as being under the special shield of the Virgin Mary, as being the Most Christian Duke guided by God and assured of his victory by the direct intervention of Jesus Christ. Amatus calls him and Richard of Capua (the Wolf of the Abruzzi) the Lord’s Anointed. A series of tales about visions and miracles supported these assertions. Robert, says Malaterra, preached a sort of sermon to his men before the invasion of Sicily in 1061 , bidding them seek remission of their sins before setting out on so holy an exploit. Roger, at Cerami in 1063, called on his men not to be daunted by the hosts facing them, since they were the sturdy soldiers of Christ’s army; and St George appeared on a white horse, with a shining banner, to lead the Normans to victory. Robert told his troops before Palermo that Christ was their leader, and the first Norman on the wall made the sign of the cross. Amatus tells us that, when Palermo was taken, the Normans cleansed the church of St Mary, which had been turned into a mosque, and celebrated mass there. During the ceremony angels descended from aloft and the whole church was filled with music and light. William of Poitiers stresses with strong conviction the view that William’s conquest of England was above all a Christian mission.[350] Eadmer thought that the victory at Hastings was ‘without doubt entirely due to a miracle of God’.

  To see in such actions and statements mere hypocritical sham would be as wrong as to take the expressions of piety at their face-value, nor can we rightly see in them a confessed mixture of hypocrisy and piety. We must realize how strong a magical element entered into the attitudes. Men did not feel drawn to compare the tales of miracles with such facts as that Robert had devastated Rome with the help of large numbers of Saracens. Since William won at Hastings, he must have had God on his side; and the protestations of men like Robert and Roger about their pure Christian mission had behind them a feeling that they were thus binding God and Christ to their cause. God ought to support his own cause; and the vehemence with which the fighters convinced themselves of the truth of their claim was felt as a force binding them to God and God to them; the emotion was the proof of the claim, which found its external vindication in success.

  *

  We cannot follow in detail the further story of the Normans in the south; but a few words are needed about the way in which Roger developed his state in Sicily, and about the Normans in the crusades.

  Robert was so taken up in his last ten years with the affairs of the papacy and his invasion of Greece that the struggle in Sicily was left more and more in Roger’s hands. Roger, however, still depended on his brother for reinforcements from Italy. At first he was concerned to strengthen the hold he already had, and probably built several more castles. In 1075 he came to an agreement with the sultan of Mehdia, under which the Moslem troops from Africa, particularly valiant fighters, were withdrawn. But he had a ten-year war with the emir of Syracuse, with moments of drastically changing fortunes; the emir in 1084 even ravaged Calabria and carried off the nuns of Reggio for his harem. But Roger built a new fleet, besieged Syracuse for some months and, at last, captured it. This was the decisive victory. In 1090 Roger took Malta and Gozo, and next year had made himself the secure lord of Sicily. By the time of his death, in 1101, he was dominating the whole political situation in south Italy. His position had thus already foreshadowed the emergence of a single Norman state in the south, with its capital at Palermo.

  Roger, who died aged seventy, had been the youngest de Hauteville; and three rulers — Philip of France, Conrad son of Henry IV, king of Italy, and Colman of Hungary — had sought to ally themselves with him in marriage. The dependence of the papacy on the Normans had not ceased. The pope Urban II, a Frenchman elected outside Italy, got into Rome through the Normans, in opposition to Clement III; he seems indeed to have had to spend nearly a year in the South under the aegis of the two sons of Robert Guiscard, the rival half-brothers Roger Borsa and Bohemund; not till the pair were reconciled could he go to Rome under Norman escort. Later in 1091 the supporters of Henry IV’s pope threw Urban out of Rome and again he had to seek Norman aid. Henry, having just beaten the forces of Matilda of Tuscany near Padua, was at the most succesful point of his career; but the Normans yet again won control of the situation and in 1093 Urban was back in Rome. Two years later Roger’s daughter Constance married Conrad, Henry’s rebellious son. Urban was becoming a powerful figure, with influence all over western Europe, and through him the first crusade was launched. We see that throughout the eleventh century the Normans in Italy played a decisive role in the relations of the papacy and the German empire, and thus in determining many of the main lines on which the medieval world was to evolve. If they had not played this role it is hard to see how the crusades could have come about as they did. The Easter synod of 1059, made possible by their support, was of key importance in the development of the whole reform movement. Part of that development was the creation of a coherent body of canon law in place of the vast compilations gathering conciliar acts and papal decrees (some of them forged, though uncritically accepted at this period).

  The English monk Eadmer gives us a picture of Roger of Sicily in 1097-8 when the exiled Anselm came to see him as he laid siege to rebellious Capua.

  Having heard the fame of Anselm, he sent messengers and asked him to come to him, wishing to see him and talk with him and be instructed by him in all that might conduce to his salvation. So the Father set out to go to him. But when we were yet a great way off, the duke himself, supported by a large company of soldiers, met him and ran to kiss him and thank him for coming. After that we spent many days at the siege living in tents some distance from the coming and go
ing and the turmoil and din of the camp.

  Pope Urban arrived, and he and Anselm were together ‘in such a way that they seemed to form one household’. William Rufus wrote letters and sent presents to turn Roger and the others against Anselm.

  The duke himself, to whom these messages were particularly directed, so far from paying any attention to them, tried by repeated requests to induce Anselm to do him the favour of staying on with him and accepting as a gift the best of his lands both in manors and in his cities, whether fortified or open.[351]

  In 1096 a high watermark of Norman unity was reached, in the union of Roger of Sicily, Roger of Apulia, and Bohemund of Taranto, against Amalfi. In the same year there came the first crusaders from the north, and Roger, as Duke of Apulia, received and entertained Robert, duke of Normandy, William’s son, treating him as his natural lord — as if the Normans everywhere recognized the duke of Normandy as their overlord.

  Roger’s third wife, Adelaide, a Ligurian, bore him two sons: Simon, who died in 1105, and Roger, who at the age of ten became ruler of Sicily under his mother’s regency. Roger I had still loved his mainland castle of Mileto; Roger II was brought up as a Sicilian, a man of the Mediterranean inheriting three great cultures. His mint, controlled by Greeks, was mainly staffed by Moslems; and about this time the Italian term for mint, zecca, was taken from the Arabic. In Palermo the governor, a Christian, was called emir, ammiratus: whence our admiral. In 1127 Roger II united the states of Apulia and Sicily, and outlawed all rights of feud. In 1130 he took the title of King of Sicily. He kept a harem in Moslem style, exercised the authority of a papal legate, and thus had more complete control of his church than had any other western ruler; he issued orders in Latin, Greek, and Arabic to officials variously called justiciars, constables, logothetes, catapans and emirs. No western kingdom of the twelfth century had so strong or so complex a constitution, a mixture of feudal customs and Roman-Byzantine-Moslem laws, and with the king’s will and the justice of his courts providing the basis of unification. Roger II’s policy aimed at developing the sea power which his Norman predecessors in the south had lacked, and at promoting trade and industry; he conquered the north African ports below Sicily and made his island the strongest sea power in Italy, so that in the end his rivals, Genoa, Pisa and Venice, had to combine to regain, later in the century, the mastery of the Italian seas.