The Normans and Their World

by Jack Lindsay

  Rodulf had given a clear political basis for the Norman irruption by making his agreement with the pope; Rainulf showed the way in which an astute, unscrupulous and daring Norman could reach baronial status. Normans flocked to Aversa, and the sons of Tancred of Hauteville began to ride southward. About 1035 William, Drogo (Dreux) and Humphrey, sons of Tancred’s first wife, Muriella, set out. (Muriella bore two more sons; the second wife, Fressenda, bore seven.) In 1038 the Normans had their attention drawn to Sicily. The Byzantines took advantage of the civil war there among the emirs to send an expedition led by the giant general George Maniakes; in the ships were Varangians under Harold Hardrada. Some three hundred of the wilder Normans joined in, with Italians and Lombards; among them were the three Hautevilles. Norsemen who had come along the east routes were in the same host as Northmanni from the west. Maniakes took Syracuse. William de Hauteville saw the city’s emir ride out on sortie; he charged and unhorsed him, leaving him dead on the ground and earning the name of Bras de Fer. But Maniakes was recalled. The Normans, anyhow, seem already to have gone off after a dispute about Syracusan loot; Maniakes probably repressed their exuberant rapine in a liberated Greek city.

  Meles’ son, Argyrus, in 1040 raised another revolt in Apulia. He offered the Normans Melfi, a hill town on the Byzantine borders, as their headquarters while they drove out the Greeks and shared the land. Amatus cites him as saying: ‘You still occupy the land given to you, you live in it like mice in skirting.’ From Melfi the Normans went out raiding, killing, raping, devastating. Twice the Byzantines were beaten. At the second battle Bras de Fer led them. In a state of high fever he meant to watch from a hill, but was so stirred by the sight of fighting that he jumped from his litter, charged down the slopes, and led his men to victory. In September 1041 the Normans captured the new catapan. The Apulian princes were jealous, and the Normans were themselves torn by rivalries — the older men, settled some twenty years before at Troia, refused to take orders from the reckless upstarts of Melfi. Then Maniakes came back in favour with the Byzantines; in the summer of 1042 he marched through the land, burning and slaughtering even children, monks and nuns. But again he found himself the victim of palace intrigues, revolted, and fell as he defeated an imperial army in Bulgaria. The Normans had meanwhile invested Trani, a town loyal to the Byzantines; but Argyrus betrayed them. He seems belatedly to have realized that they were a far worse danger to his people than the Byzantines.

  The Normans decided to set up their own chief and selected Bras de Fer as count in September 1042. Needing an overlord, he turned to Gaimar of Salerno, whom the Normans acclaimed as duke of Apulia and Calabria. Gaimar gave William his niece in marriage and divided the land won from the Greeks or yet to be won among twelve leading Normans. The Lombard movement was at an end. More and more Normans came riding in. They went on fighting the Byzantines while robbing and wrecking peasants or anyone else who might provide loot. In June 1045 Rannulf died and Gaimar invested Drogo as count of Apulia, giving him his daughter as wife. At the moment there were three popes competing for Rome, one in St Peter’s, one in the Lateran, one at S. Maria Maggiore. The Emperor Henry III, drawn into Italy, held a synod at which all three popes were deposed and Henry nominated a friend, the bishop of Bamberg, who, as Clement I, crowned the emperor and his wife. For a while Henry repressed the anarchy in Italy and invested Drogo as Duke and Magister of Italy and Count of the Normans of All Apulia and Calabria.

  Round this time, perhaps in 1047, there came to Italy Robert de Hauteville, soon to be called the Guiscard, the Crafty. He was a man of fine stature who rode a horse ‘so small that his feet nearly touched the ground’. Anna Comnena, princess of Byzantion, described Robert with a frank admiration tempered by scorn for an upstart:

  This Robert was Norman by descent, of insignificant origin, in temper tyrannical, in mind most cunning, brave in action, very clever in attacking the wealth and substance of magnates, most obstinate in achievement, for he did not allow any obstacle to prevent his executing his desire. His stature was so lofty that he surpassed even the tallest, his complexion was ruddy, his hair flaxen, his shoulders were broad, his eyes all but emitted sparks of fire, and in frame he was well-built where nature required breadth, and was neatly and gracefully formed where less width was necessary. So from tip to toe this man was well-proportioned, as I have repeatedly heard many say. Now Homer says of Achilles that when he shouted his voice gave his hearers the impression of a multitude in an uproar, but this man’s cry is said to have put thousands to flight. Thus equipped by fortune, physique, and character, he was naturally indomitable and subordinate to nobody in the world. Powerful characters are ever like this, people say, even though they be of somewhat obscure descent.[163]

  Malaterra, who knew him better, added that ‘his gay and open manner was controlled by calculating prudence’, and that he set about trying with lavish gifts and favours ‘to collect a party of adherents who’d be devoted to furthering his fortunes’. No wonder that William of Normandy was fascinated by the tales that came back of Robert, and modelled himself on his bold and resolute character. William of Malmesbury says that he was in the habit of stimulating his own courage by reflecting on the Guiscard; for he thought it a dishonour ‘if he yielded in valour to a man whom he excelled in rank’, Robert being ‘born in Normandy of middling parentage’ and having gone off ‘with fifteen knights to Apulia to rectify their penury in the pay of spiritless people. Not many years went by before he had established his dominions throughout the land by the amazing favour of God, for where his forces were inadequate he made up the deficiency by his wits.’ Thus, by stimulating the ambitions of William and enlarging his whole horizon, men like Guiscard did much to bring about the invasion of England.[164]

  Perhaps Drogo didn’t like to enfeoff his brother Robert at once for fear of annoying fellow Normans who had served longer in the south. Robert went off on a career of endless skirmishes and small devastations, lurking in hill-caves and carrying on highway robbery until he joined Pandulf of Capua, but left him (says Amatus) when the promise of a castle and a daughter fell through. Pandulf, long a source of discord and trouble, died in February 1049. Robert returned to Drogo, who gave him command of a garrison in a hot malarial valley. But he soon moved on to healthier territory, becoming famed for his tricks. Once he got into an impregnable hilltop monastery by pretending to be dead in a coffin which his men brought up for a requiem mass. About this time he married Alberada, who seems to have been aunt of the Apulian baron of Buonalbergo.

  Richard, son of Ascletin, unable to get a free hand at Aversa from Rainulf II, also turned to brigandage and grew in power. Challenging Rainulf, he was beaten and imprisoned. But in 1048, when Rainulf died and his infant son needed a regent, Richard was finally chosen and freed; for a while he governed in the child’s name, then nothing more is heard of the child. Pope Clement lasted less than a year, the new pope whom Henry appointed lasted only twenty-three days. In December 1048 a council at Worms elected a tall red-haired Alsatian, Bruno, bishop of Toul, who had commanded an army at the time of Conrad I’s expedition into Italy; he became pope as Leo IX. The Church was in a bad way; its appointments were put up to auction; priests usually didn’t marry but had large families; tithes were unpaid; religious houses were lucky if they kept their treasures intact; monks and pilgrims to Monte Cassino were robbed by the Normans who systematically slashed vines and burned harvests. The people hated these brigands more than the Saracens and were provoked to reprisals. John, abbot of Fécamp, who had a narrow escape from death on a pilgrimage, wrote to the pope: ‘Italian hatred of the Normans has now become so great that it’s nearly impossible for a Norman, even if he’s a pilgrim, to travel through the cities of Italy without being set upon, abducted, stript of all he has, beaten and chained up: all this if he doesn’t give up the ghost in some fetid prison.’[165] (We can now see why, when the question of William of Normandy’s marriage with Matilda came up around this time, the papacy tried to foil him.) A
ll the while the Normans were extending their domains. Against them was the pro-Byzantine party led by Argyrus, the adherents of the pope, and the independents who saw the Normans as mere pests and wanted the old Italo-Lombard nobles back. Drogo, who had been one of the wilder leaders, was murdered on 10 August I 051 as he entered a chapel at Monte Ilaro. The pope went on raising an army; but Gaimar V said he would join the Normans if they were attacked. Then in June 1052 he was himself killed in Salerno by his four brothers-in-law. He was the last of the great Lombard princes of the south, a man of honour indeed compared with the Normans.

  The pope had decided that the Normans must be driven out; he was particularly worried by the threat to Benevento, which had recently become a papal town. Argyrus, as representative of the Byzantines, promised support. Leo proclaimed the anti-Norman cause a holy one, and collected a large body of Lombard and Italian troops, plus German mercenaries from Swabia. At last he moved south, meaning to join up with the Byzantines. In early June 1053 he reached Benevento, with almost all the non-Norman nobles joining him. But the Normans, their left wing under the Guiscard, caught up with him at Civitate, and they routed his army, while he watched from the town ramparts. Escorted back to Benevento, he was in fact their prisoner. For nine months negotiations dragged on. Leo held out, hoping somehow to see ‘this enemy nation expelled from the Church of Christ and Christianity avenged’. Then, worn out, he left in March 1054 and died on 18 April in the Lateran. Now the pope as well as the German emperor had to ratify the Norman gains.

  This was the crucial moment of change in Norman fortunes. In the years 1054-7 those in Aversa moved northwards for Gaeta and Aquino; in June 1058 Richard captured Capua and overthrew the Lombard dynasty. To the south the Guiscard was steadily extending his conquests in Calabria; after the death of his brother Humphrey he commanded the Norman advance into Apulia. In 1058 Gisulf II of Salerno, his main obstacle to the west, agreed to treat with him. He gave his sister Sigelgaita to Robert, who repudiated his Norman wife. Sigelgaita was a big, stentorian-voiced woman, whose prowess on the battlefield became legendary. She was to bear Robert a son; but it was the son Mark by the first wife who inherited his energies, a great burly swashbuckling character, nicknamed Bohemond after the giant of that name.

  The union of papacy and Byzantines against the Normans could not last. An embassy soon made things worse. Cardinal Humbert, who led it from Rome, ended by delivering a manifesto denouncing the eastern church for simony, priests’ marriages, jettisoning the Law of Moses, refusing any communion with men who shaved, encouraging castration, insisting on rebaptizing Latins and baptizing women in labour even in their death-throes. Most of the charges were false; where correct, as regards castration, they applied equally to the papacy. The papacy remained as hostile as ever to the Normans; but a party was growing which urged conciliation. How could the popes stand up against both the eastern and the western emperors if they had the terrible Normans threatening them from the south? The Normans, as the strongest power in Italy, were indispensable for a papacy that sought to assert itself against secular domination.

  Robert had been made guardian of the infant son of Humphrey, a cruel and jealous man. He was now marked out as the leader of the Normans. His elder brother Geoffrey had not distinguished himself; William and Mauger were new arrivals and younger. By August 1057 Robert had seized all the lands of his ward and was formally acclaimed his brother’s successor. In a few years he had become the biggest landowner and most stalwart warrior in the south, with only Richard of Capua as a rival. An eighth brother now turned up, Roger, twenty-six years old, who followed the usual practice of going first to Melfi. In 1057, however, we find him in Calabria with Robert, learning the freebooter’s trade. Much of west Calabria had been subdued; but soon there was a break between the two brothers, probably Robert’s fault. Though often generous, he seems to have been stingy with Roger, who couldn’t pay his retinue. Early in 1058 Roger left him angrily, turned to his brother William, and was given a castle at Scalea, well situated for horse-thieving and highway robbery. Out of the loot gained by one attack on merchants (says Malaterra, who wrote his chronicle later at Robert’s own request) he was able to engage a hundred more soldiers. In 1058 came a bad famine. The Norman depredations, we are told, had not left an olive-tree or cornfield; men had to sell their children into slavery and to make bread from river-weeds, bark, acorn and chestnuts. At last they rose in desperate revolt. Roger and Robert had to join in hunting them down.

  In 1059 the papal party which supported a union with the Normans had its way. Things had been going badly. For a year there had been no pope. A struggle went on between the adherents of reform and the old aristocratic Roman families who looked on the papacy as their property. After nominating one of his councillors, who became Victor VII, the emperor died in October 1056, to be succeeded by a five-year-old son, Henry IV. Victor died in July 1057 and the party taking his body back to Germany was ambushed and robbed at Ravenna, where they hastily buried him. Archdeacon Hildebrand of the reform group now dominated the papal curia. His anti-Norman candidate was elected, but died in less than eight months. Conflicts with the Roman nobles led to open war. Hildebrand’s next choice, a Burgundian, became Nicholas II. His party was admitted to Rome by a baptized Jew, who opened the gates of Trastevere. They stormed the Lateran, and the Roman candidate, Benedict X, fled to Galeria. Now it was that the Hildebrandines, hard put, called in the Normans, who were delighted. A large body advanced north, camped before Galeria, pillaged the regions, and stormed the walls. Benedict was publicly defrocked.

  Hildebrand, with Norman backing, was in a strong position, and helped by the fact that a child was now on the imperial throne. He set up his own system of election, which has carried on until our day. Since Lothair I (824) a pope had been chosen by the entire clergy and nobles of the Roman people, but was consecrated only after taking the oath to the emperor. In April 1059 a Lateran synod handed the election over to the cardinals; after they had chosen a pope, they might allow the rest of the clergy and people to give their assent. The throwing off of secular controls was glossed over by a vague phrase about ‘the honour and respect due to Henry’. This turning point in papal history had been made possible by the Normans, a few years earlier damned as devilish brigands. The alliance was ratified in August at a synod held at Melfi. Pope Nicholas II received Richard and the Guiscard there as his vassals: Richard was hailed as prince of Capua and Robert as ‘Duke of Apulia and Calabria by the grace of God and St Peter, and, with their help in the future, Duke of Sicily’. Robert in return swore to protect the person and status of the pope and ‘to support the Holy Roman Church everywhere and against all men, in holding and acquiring the possession of St Peter’.[166] Further, he swore to support the new method of electing a pope. A lesser issue at the synod was the marriage of priests; the condemnation had no effect, though the bishop of Trani was defrocked.

  The break between the papacy and Byzantion was intensified, and the Normans played their part by renewed attacks on the Greek areas. (The Byzantine government over these years was very preoccupied with the Turks and the Pechenegs.) Robert went on making inroads into Calabria, gaining Reggio, Gerace and other areas, as well as Otranto in the south of Apulia. Apart from the vassals of Richard of Capua, all the Normans in Italy were now subject to him; and though he had to deal with the inevitable rebellions of unruly and ambitious vassals, he was able to prepare for the decisive attack on Bari, centre of Byzantine administration. By August 1068 the siege by sea and land was beginning; and after two years and eight months the city surrended. Guiscard entered on 16 April 1071.

  But meanwhile an important new field of operations had been opened up. Robert turned to Sicily and the pope blessed his expedition. The emirs of the island were disunited and the country population was largely Christian; but the conquest was to take thirty-one years, partly because the Normans could not give it their undivided attention. Their mainland rear was continually disturbed by revolts or Byzan
tine intrusions. Robert was at Mileto in February 1061 when one of the emirs asked his help. He ravaged the coast, took Milazzo, and got a good deal of plunder, but he failed at Messina and was harried home to Reggio by a Saracen fleet. In May Roger used the night of a new moon to cross and land five miles south of Messina. Before Robert set sail with the bulk of the army, he had taken the town. Marching inland, the Normans gained a victory at Enna, but couldn’t take the stronghold. In autumn they built their first Sicilian castle near the ruins of ancient Aluntium not far from the north coast. After returning to the mainland, Roger was back in December. The stronghold Troina surrendered and he spent Christmas there.

  Judith of Evreux, whom he had wooed in Normandy, had now arrived in Calabria. She was the daughter of a first cousin of Duke William, and at home Roger would have had slight chance of winning her. Now things were changed. But what brought Judith was a quarrel between the duke and her half-brother guardian, abbot of St-Evroul-sur-Ouche. The abbot fled south with Judith, her brother and sister, and eleven monks. Robert welcomed him; he was already encouraging the settlement of Latin monks in Calabria to offset the influence of the Greek houses. Now he founded the house of St Eufemia with the liturgic and musical tradition of St Evroul, and the place became the mother-house of many Sicilian foundations.