Who, then, were these Normans whose successes and excesses had so angered Pope Leo that he had personally gone to war against them? What, moreover, were they doing in southern Italy, and why had they become such thorns in the sides of the imperial and papal powers there? How had they gained such a position in this new land, and could they continue to expand their lands and power?
The Normans, the men of the North, were a relatively new and still expanding presence in eleventh century Europe. Their forefathers had cut and thrust their way into the area less than two centuries earlier as part of the great Viking expansion. Dreaded and effective both as raiders and settlers, the Vikings had ravaged the coasts and penetrated up the rivers of present day Great Britain, Ireland, France, the Low Countries, and even Russia—wherever they and their versatile longboats could reach from their homelands in the Scandinavian peninsula. In France, a band of Vikings under the exiled Norwegian chieftain Hrolf had wrested control of the lower Seine River valley from the resident West Franks so effectively that the Frankish king, Charles the Simple, was obliged in 911 to grant them a small fiefdom. That fertile land formed the nucleus of what later became the Norman Duchy of Normandy, and there the Vikings soon enough settled down, began to intermarry, lose their Viking ways, and assimilate. When Hrolf died twenty year later, his funeral rites exemplified the state of the assimilation as of that date: as a convert, Rollo (his Christian name) provided substantial gifts to monasteries, and was buried with Christian ceremonies. But, just to be on the safe side with respect to his pagan Viking roots, a hundred captives were also sacrificed in his honor!
The pagan ways did not last long. Within two generations, the ex–Vikings had converted to Christianity and absorbed much of the language and culture, as well as the feudal political and military organization, of their Frank neighbors. The Norman region evolved rapidly into a prosperous and well-governed state, under powerful dukes who could keep law and justice among their energetic, ambitious, and often turbulent subjects. The Normans had, perhaps surprisingly, readily adopted two pillars of the local civilization: the law, and the Christian faith, and although they could be accused of using both for their own purposes when it suited them, they professed a pragmatic devotion to both.
What did remain of the old Viking character was a good measure of that thirst for adventure or battle, a search for glory mixed with fatalism, and that readiness to travel and take chances that had propelled the Normans’ forefathers across the hemisphere. Those traits, added to their valor, talent for political organization, and group cohesiveness in times of need, would fuel the great Norman successes of the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
The adoption of Frankish feudalism gave the Normans a much more structured political system than their Viking forefathers had experienced, and one that they eventually took with them into southern Italy. At a time when central government was weak and landed estates were the principal source of wealth for the ruling class, the feudal system provided an effective way to tie the responsibilities of governance directly to landholding. A noble could only hold land (and, consequently, wealth) legally through a fief granted by his superior lord in the feudal hierarchy. In return, he became that lord’s vassal, and pledged to him both loyalty and military service. In Normandy, the ruling duke granted major fiefdoms or holdings to his counts, who in turn granted estates within their counties to their barons, and each member of that hierarchy in turn owed loyalty and specified military obligations to his lord. In practice, of course, the chain of mutual responsibilities was much more complicated. As land and its obligations could also be obtained (through inheritance, marriage, purchase, or seizure) in differing counties—or even duchies or kingdoms—the result was often, for a knight with multiple properties, a complex skein of responsibilities and potential loyalties rather than a simple hierarchy. In Normandy as elsewhere, disputes about landholding were both common, and inseparable from questions of loyalty and obligation.
Land, as the principal source of wealth, was inevitably the main source of social promotion, and hence competition, among the secular aristocracy in Europe. Normandy was no exception. In fact, because of its small size and growing population, eleventh century Normandy was rife with competition for land. And, not unexpectedly in view of the fact that the major part of the lay aristocracy at that time constituted a professional military class, many of those disputes were resolved by force.
Warfare, in the eleventh century, was the normal business of this armed, ruling aristocracy. Small-scale warfare for private purposes was endemic, as normal to the knights as peace; it was indeed their occupation. Since the feudal system provided each landholder with some of the attributes of sovereignty in his own territory, he was to a large degree free to compete militarily with his peers—to extend his landholdings, pursue a family feud, or simply to enrich himself by plundering his neighbor’s lands, or by seizing and ransoming unwary merchants or other travelers. This warfare involved few battles, but was rather a process of raids, sieges, and pillage in which the main victims were often the poor peasants whose crops were despoiled. While the Church tried to limit the damages of this constant state of war by instituting a truce of God, which enjoined war against Church properties, women, or the poor, it had little capability to force the knights to respect such a truce. In Normandy, the powerful dukes had more authority to limit the private, proprietal warfare of their barons, but were still not able to end it. Nor perhaps did they entirely wish to; after all, the competition assured that the most able barons would keep the warrior traditions of the duchy fresh, and moreover the requirement that the most recent winners be confirmed in their new landholdings gave the dukes grounds to demand periodic oaths of fealty and submission.
To be a landholder or an aspiring landholder, then, was to be a knight, since only the Church could hold lands without the attendant military obligations. And to be a knight was to be a warrior, trained in arms and in the uses of power. A Norman knight was trained from childhood in horsemanship, hunting and outdoor survival skills, and learned at least a smattering of literacy, etiquette and the practical skills of command. At adolescence, his long and arduous military training began: still more horsemanship, physical conditioning, and the use of arms. By the time he reached manhood, a young Norman knight was strong enough to wear over 50 pounds of armor for extended periods, adept at controlling his warhorse, or destrier, in a charge or a melee, proficient in protecting himself with his kite-shaped shield, and effective in the use of his lance, sword and dagger. Individually excellent fighters, with much of the courage and hardiness of their Viking ancestors, the Norman horsemen had also learned to train and fight in group formations, and the cavalry charge had become their prime offensive weapon.
The Norman knight’s armament was not markedly different from that of the other fighters they would meet, but it was particularly well-adapted to their preferred cavalry tactics. The helmet was conical in shape, and over time added a long nose guard designed to deflect blows. The straight sword was descended from the Viking great-sword, but less than three feet long for effective use on horseback. The Norman chain mail shirt, or hauberk, was generally longer than that of other soldiers of the time; it could protect the knight’s legs while he was in the saddle, while his shield with its long tail also served the same purpose. The saddle was deep and equipped with long stirrups, giving the knight an exceptionally firm seat in battle. Thus equipped and trained, the Norman knights became renowned fighters. In addition, during their days in southern Italy they mastered a technique that made their charges virtually irresistible. This technique, which they probably adapted from a little used Byzantine practice, consisted in charging with their lances held in a couched position, that is, secured between the arm and the body. This allowed them effectively to add the horse’s weight and momentum to the force of the blow, and made a rapid and focused cavalry charge their weapon of choice to turn the tide of battles.
A knight’s equipment was expensive. A set of armor, a destrier for battle and one or several palfreys for travel, plus the other kit for a life in the field, could cost as much as a small farm and represented a major investment by a young knight’s family in his future. In peacetime, that investment was wasted unless the knight could find rare employment in a lord’s retinue. No wonder that warfare was attractive, as it provided possibilities for employment, booty, ransom of captured knights, or even seizure of land. Of course, going to war had its costs, too; a knight was responsible for the squires, other attendants, or infantry who accompanied him on campaign. Often, in addition, an experienced knight would have in his troop, and be responsible for, a number of other knights as well as sergeants (trained fighters who could not afford a horse, but aspired to knighthood in a warrior class that at the time provided reasonable social mobility). The costs of such a retinue also had to be borne. Warfare, in the circumstances, was the principal avenue for advancement available to the Norman knight, the means through which he could earn a return on his investment, profit through a share of any spoils, or even gain land or honor—the latter two often being synonymous.
These, then, were the men who traveled to southern Italy, and who would in time upset the balance of power there. An energetic and warlike people, they seemed to have excess energy to burn, and ambition to expand. The chroniclers of the time, whether friendly or hostile, are all but unanimous in characterizing the Normans as bold, desirous for domination and riches, and cunning. None of these were attributes that had unfavorable connotations at the time. Indeed, the description of a friendly chronicler—in terms which seem somewhat unflattering to our modern sensibilities—was intended as praise1:
They are a shrewd people indeed, quick to avenge injury, scorning the fields of their homeland in hopes of acquiring something more, avid for profit and domination, ready to feign or conceal anything, achieving a certain balance between largess and avarice…. Unless checked by the yoke of justice, they can be most unrestrained. They are ready to endure great effort, hunger and cold when fortune requires it. They devote themselves to hunting and falconry. They delight in luxury when it comes to horses and to the rest of the tools and costumes of war.
Another contemporary, a Lombard friendly to the Normans, was still more frank. The Normans, he said, were “avid for rapine and insatiably anxious to seize the property of others.”2
To see why and how these Normans got to Italy, it will be useful to look at the reasons for their leaving Normandy in the first place, and the specific events that drew them to the south.
Normandy in the early eleventh century, according to most calculations, was beginning to suffer from overpopulation—particularly among the aristocracy, which had grown in over a century of relative peace. Since inheritance by primogeniture was not yet the custom, existing fiefs or landholdings had become smaller and increasingly fractured as the number of young knights seeking land increased. Few new fiefdoms were available; Norman territorial expansion had for some time been blocked by the duchy’s powerful neighbors in Anjou, France, and Brittany. As a result, opportunities in Normandy for young knights were increasingly limited, the competition for advancement difficult. At the same time, the strong rule of successive dukes kept lawbreakers and would-be predatory knights in check; troublemakers were regularly exiled and their goods confiscated, forcing them to find something to do abroad. Even the period of instability during the minority of Duke William the Bastard (later to be known as the Conqueror) had the ironic result of creating more Norman exiles, for once William had succeeded in defeating the rebellion of his vassals in 1047, the resultant redistribution of fiefdoms left many knightly families seeking to recover their fortunes abroad.
Because of the lack of opportunity in Normandy, many footloose, land-hungry or exiled knights chose to find their living outside of the duchy as mercenaries. The possibilities for such employment in southern Italy were beginning to be understood as the century opened. Other knights chose to go on pilgrimage, which had the double advantage of being encouraged by the Church and a kind of adventure travel. Three pilgrimage destinations in particular drew such travelers from France to southern Italy. The first was the pilgrimage to Rome, an almost routine trip for spirited men in the expanding world of the early eleventh century. The second pilgrimage route was to a more ambitious destination, the Holy Land. One of the most traveled routes, using the remains of the great Roman roads, passed along the east coast of southern Italy to Bari, in Byzantine territory, where the pilgrims embarked for the trip through what is now Albania, to the great capital of the Christian east, Constantinople, and then on to the Muslim Levant. That route also made possible a stop at a place which was a pilgrimage destination of particular interest to Normans—the shrine of their militant patron, Saint Michael, at Monte Sant’Angelo on the Gargano peninsula—the spur on the boot of southern Italy’s shape.
The shrine at Monte Sant’Angelo provided the connection that resulted in bringing the Normans to southern Italy in substantial numbers. The grotto-shrine had been visited by pilgrims since the day, in the late fifth century, when Saint Michael was said to have miraculously appeared there. (The site, indeed, was venerated even in antiquity, and the shrine to Saint Michael had been built over an earlier pagan shrine.) For the Normans, this shrine to their warlike patron saint had a particular significance. A part of the saint’s cloak, which the legends said he had left behind in Gargano, had been spirited off by a French monk in the ninth century, where it provided the impetus for building the great abbey of Mont Saint Michel on the border of Normandy.
According to the chronicles, a group of Norman pilgrims who were visiting the shrine in the early years of the eleventh century were approached by a man, dressed in Byzantine fashion, who requested their help.3 He explained that he was Melo, a Lombard from the province of Apulia, and that he represented a rebel movement among the citizens of that Byzantine-ruled province (which the Byzantines called Langobardia). The mostly Lombard population of the province were resentful, he told them, over the recently reimposed Byzantine central rule and the resultant heavy taxation. The province, he said, was ready for rebellion, but the leaders needed outside help after having failed in a previous attempt several years earlier. Melo appealed to the Normans to come back to help renew the rebellion, and to bring more warriors like themselves. What he promised them in return is not that clear, but it must have been more than enough to excite their enthusiasm. The Normans, it would appear, needed little persuasion to seize this opportunity for gain, fame, or just plain adventure, that even came with a conveniently worthy objective—helping free a Latin community from its Orthodox oppressors. In any event, their recruitment drive, supported by the nearby Prince of Salerno and other Lombard princes (who were anxious to create trouble for their Byzantine neighbors as much as to help their Lombard brethren), was successful. Within a year’s time, in 1017, Melo had obtained enough outside help to begin his rebellion. His Lombard bands and the new arrivals from the north joined forces in Capua, and fell upon the surprised Byzantine military garrisons in Apulia.
The revolt against Byzantine rule, given surprise and the additional power provided by the several hundred Norman and other adventurer knights, was at first successful. The rebels won several preliminary battles, while the cities along the Apulian coast sought to throw off rule from Constantinople and reestablish their autonomy. Unfortunately for the rebels and their aspirations, however, Byzantium was still too strong; it had more resources and no lack of will. In the summer of 1018, the newly assigned Byzantine military governor (or katapan) of Langobardia, Basil Bojoannes, moved to crush the rebellion at the head of a powerful imperial army incorporating elements of the famed Varangian and Bucellarion guards. The two armies met the following year at the historic battlefield of Cannae in northern Apulia—the site at which Hannibal, badly outnumbered, had crushed an army of the Roman republic over twelve hundred years previously. But this time the more numerous imperial troops roundly defeated their opponents, and the rebel army, including its Norman mercenaries, suffered heavy losses.
The Lombard rebellion was over, along with any hopes the Norman recruits may have had of winning quick fortunes. Melo himself went off to northern Europe to try to seek help from the western emperor for a new effort to wrest control of the region from the Byzantines. He died on the trip but left a son, called Argyros, about whom we will hear again.
The victorious Katapan Bojoannes ruled competently and wisely until 1027—a long period in the rapidly churning world of the Byzantine bureaucracy—during which period the Lombard princes trimmed their sails to the eastern empire’s dominance in the region, and there was no more talk of revolt. To the contrary, the Byzantines were ready to go on the offensive; they took punitive action against some of the rebels, and were preparing a major expedition to solidify their new dominance of southern Italy, even to invade Arab Sicily, when Basil, the last great emperor whom Constantinople would see for sixty years, died. The expedition died with him, even though the high tide of Byzantine predominance in southern Italy persisted for well over a decade.
In Apulia, Bojoannes had consolidated his position. He had the vision to see that his recent foes, the Normans, could be put to good use. On a strategic hill near the border of Lombard Benevento, the site of ancient Aecae, he had built a fortress town called Troia, and now he garrisoned it substantially with hired Norman knights whose job would be to guard the border. The first foe against whom they would have to defend the fortress was no less than the Holy Roman Emperor Henry II, come to southern Italy in 1022 in a show of force to reassert imperial and papal claims in the face of the Byzantine resurgence. The Normans and their colleagues in arms prevailed, withstanding a three month siege by the emperor’s army and holding the border secure for the very Byzantine katapan who had defeated them at Cannae just four years before. Not for the last time, Norman knights had found that self-interest allowed them to change their military alliances to meet new demands, or satisfy new paymasters.
1. Malaterra I, C.3, p.8, as cited in Wolf, p. 149. The principal contemporary sources for details of the history of the Normans in southern Italy are friendly chroniclers, who wrote shortly after the events they described, and had the victorious Normans as their sponsors. The Normans of Italy were conscious that history is most often written by the winners, and were careful to see that their exploits were entered favorably into the record. Often short of manpower in the initial phases of their epic, moreover, they encouraged favorable propaganda, since it was useful in recruiting new fighters. Later, the favorable chronicles would help to legitimize the state that they had seized by the sword.
2. Desiderius of Monte Cassino, I.II, p. 1124, as cited in Wolf, p. 76.
3. The chronicles are not in full agreement as to the date or the exact process by which the first Norman knights were recruited to take up arms in Italy. What is clear is that a good number were recruited to assist in the Lombard rebellion of 1017, and that it marked a watershed in their infiltration into Italy.