Luscombe D., Riley-Smith J. The New Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. 4: c. 1024-c. 1198, Part 2

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Northern and central Italy in the eleventh century 91

now being incorporated into the powers of the local nobility and were helping

these lords to become aware of it. The consequent fragmentation of political

power created the possibility of communication between the lords and the

rural people who were their dependants in terms of land, as the agreements

drawn up locally from the mid-eleventh century show. These were the roots of

the rural communes which subsequently came to be organized in the twelfth

century.

The political fragmentation had, however, both complications and correc-

tives in the web of relationships which proliferated among all the centres of

power. There were, ﬁrst of all, the connections at all levels between the churches

and the lay nobility, who might be their founders or patrons, or else their vas-

sals. Especially vast were the donations and protection granted to the monastic

churches by Adelaide of Turin and Matilda of Canossa. To these should be

added the associations, not only religious, but also involving protection and

temporal dependence, among the churches themselves, both greater and lesser.

The control exercised by the metropolitan churches over those to which they

held title should be particularly considered. Again, feudal relationships among

lay nobles persisted and increased. This might either be because the holders of

fortresses, the representatives of the nobles who were the true owners of the

ﬁefs, were in the process of becoming lords themselves, bound to the owner by

the claims of vassalage, or, alternatively, because certain allodial lords took on

the bonds of vassalage from other lords through acquiring lands as ﬁefs. There

were also relationships among equals within a group of vassals, all depending

on the same feudal lord. The most famous case is that of the many vassals of

Matilda, who maintained a certain unity even after the death of the count-

ess, electing a leader although not thereby disavowing their fealty as vassals to

Henry V as heir to the estates of the house of Canossa.

The demographic and economic growth in both the countryside and the

cities was remarkable in the kingdom of Italy, as opposed to the lands on the

other side of the Alps, and this too had its political implications. In most cases,

from the tenth century on, the urban centres showed their inclination to self-

government, in collaboration or the reverse with the temporal government of

the bishop; and their awareness of their own strength was much clearer than

in the countryside. Under the Salian dynasty, thanks to the development of

commerce and the means of production, the growing attention paid to the

landed proprietors of the surrounding area and the client vassals of the bishop

and other powerful men served to stress, especially in the Po valley, the impor-

tance of this military class, an aristocracy which was also urban. This led to

alternating alliances and disagreements with the other groups within the urban

population, which served at the same time to feed ecclesiastical, commercial

and military competition among the various cities. The disagreements were

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92 giovanni tabacco

complicated by the spread of a number of religious movements, Patarine in

ﬂavour, and also by the conﬂicts between the reforming papacy and the em-

pire, with resulting ecclesiastical schisms in the episcopal cities. This became

obvious from the late eleventh to the early twelfth centuries through the ap-

pearance in the main cities of a suitable organ for political administration: the

‘consulate’. This was an ofﬁce of variable duration, although it subsequently

tended to become annual: it was formed by a limited group of eminent citizens,

chosen from among the notables outstanding for their economic position or

their military standing.

The most powerful communes, through their economic and military

strength and the breadth of their ﬁelds of action, were Milan, heir to the

political authority of the archbishop in Lombardy, and the maritime republics

of Genoa and Pisa. In Milan, the dominant military class was formed from the

military clients of the archbishop and was in its turn distinct within the so-

cially supreme group of the ‘capitanei’ and within that immediately below, the

vavasours. At Genoa and Pisa, the dominant class was a mixture of shipowners

and great landowners. They were generally speaking active in the hinterland,

in the tradition of the minor aristocracy, and also to a large extent at sea. They

undertook military operations against the Muslims settled in the large islands

of the Tyrrhenian Sea, in North Africa and in the Iberian peninsula. The events

in the Lagoon of Venice held a position all their own, for the region had always

remained apart from the kingdom of Italy and from the developments, both

aristocratic and urban, typical of western Europe. This was because of the

Venetians’ highly individual political traditions of Byzantine origin and also

because of their close relationship, both commercial and diplomatic, with the

Byzantine world as well as with the Germano-Latin one. During the eleventh

century, the city of Venice, as a result of the coordination of the island commu-

nities which gravitated around the Rialto, continued to rule itself politically

under a duke, who held the position for life, helped by an aristocracy which

was daring at sea and so strengthened its predominance in the Adriatic.

The political disintegration which has been observed in the kingdom of

Italy can also be seen in the regions where the rights of the empire intersected

with the more or less theoretical ones of the church of Rome, of Romagna

and Marche, across the territories of Perugia and as far as Lazio. But the

ecclesiastical expansion of the reforming papacy was reﬂected also at a level

of regional politics, above all in Lazio. Here, steps were taken to eliminate or

reduce the power of the aristocratic centres most dangerous to the independent

action of the papacy; among the numerous noble and allodial fortresses, those

belonging to the church of Rome increased and multiplied. Meanwhile, a

central ﬁnancial administration and a chancery were organized and use was

made of the college of cardinals, with the help of the new bureaucracy in order

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Northern and central Italy in the eleventh century 93

to ensure likewise the temporal dominion of Lazio. While local ascendancy,

whether on an ecclesiastical or dynastic basis, was in decline in the heart of the

kingdom of Italy, along its southern edges a form of regional rule was being

organized, hinging on the church of Rome, which was destined to play an

active role in the political history of Italy, together with the city communes of

the north and the Norman might in the south.

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chapter 4(b)

SOUTHERN ITALY IN THE

ELEVENTH CENTURY

G. A. Loud

in the year 1000 southern Italy was divided into three distinct zones. Apulia and

Calabria were ruled by the Byzantine empire, the island of Sicily by the Arabs (as

it had been since the conquest of the ninth century) and the central mountains

and the Campania were divided between three Lombard principalities, those

of Capua (from a few miles north of Naples to the Monti Ausoni and the upper

valley of the River Liri, the border with the papal states), Salerno in the south

(from the Amalﬁtan peninsula down to the Gulf of Policastro) and Benevento

(in the inland mountain district, from Avellino northwards to the Adriatic). In

addition, to the north of the principality of Benevento, in the Abruzzi (roughly

from the River Trigno northwards), lay a series of independent counties, partly

Lombard, partly Frankish in origin, but this region was in almost every aspect,

geographic, economic and social, separate from the south proper. On the west

coast there were three small duchies, Gaeta, Naples and Amalﬁ, which had

throughout the earlier middle ages retained a determined, if at times precarious,

independence from their larger neighbours, the principalities of Capua and

Salerno. Both Naples and Amalﬁ still acknowledged some dependence on

the Byzantine empire, largely as a means of protection against the aggressive

instincts of the Lombard princes.

Fragmented as the political divisions of southern Italy were, the cultural and

religious divide was more complex still, for it did not coincide with the political

boundaries. In the Byzantine dominions the population of northern and central

Apulia was almost entirely Lombard, by this stage speaking a Latin-Romance

dialect, and observing Latin religious rites. Southern Apulia and Lucania were

more mixed, although the Greek part of the population was probably in the

majority, and had been strengthened in Lucania by emigration from further

south during the course of the tenth century. Calabria was mainly, and in the

south entirely, Greek, but with still some Lombards in the area north of the

Sila Grande which had in the ninth century been part of the principality of

Salerno. On the island of Sicily, although conversion and emigration had taken

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Southern Italy in the eleventh century 95

their toll, a substantial Greek Christian population remained, concentrated in

the north-east of the island between Mount Etna and Messina.

Hence in both

the Byzantine and the Muslim zones there were potentially disaffected sections

of the population whose loyalties, particularly their religious afﬁliations, were

suspect.

The Byzantine government in Italy was under considerable threat c. 1000,

both from internal disaffection and from sporadic, but from the 990s increas-

ingly serious, raids from Arab Sicily, which affected both Calabria and southern

Apulia. In the summer of 1003 Bari, the capital of Byzantine Italy, was besieged

for four months, and only relieved by the arrival of a ﬂeet from Venice. In 1009,

quite possibly sparked off by the impact of a very harsh winter immediately

before, revolt broke out in the coastal cities of Apulia, and for some months,

and possibly longer, Bari and Trani were in the hands of the rebels. Reinforce-

ments had to be despatched from Constantinople to quell the uprising, whose

leader, a Lombard from Bari called Melus, ﬂed to the Lombard principalities

of the west. The threat had been made more serious by a simultaneous Muslim

attack on northern Calabria, in which Cosenza had been sacked.

Byzantine rule was becoming unpopular in Apulia, not least because of the

ﬁscal burden exacted by a centralized and efﬁcient administration, and the

1009 revolt, and a second and almost equally serious one in 1017–18,wereput

down only with difﬁculty. Nevertheless it would be wrong to see Byzantium

as necessarily weak. If anything its power grew stronger in the early eleventh

century, certainly by comparison with the other zones where authority was

tending to disintegrate. In Sicily the emirs of the Kalbid dynasty were still

more or less in control, but the deposition of the amir Ja‘far in 1019 after a

revolt in Palermo was a sign that all was not well, and indeed from the 1030s

onwards the internal cohesion of the island was to collapse almost completely,

which had the beneﬁcial effect of freeing the Christian mainland from the

threat of piratical raids. In the Lombard principalities central authority was

already growing progressively weaker, particularly in Benevento, and although

for a brief period between 1008 and 1014 the two principalities of Benevento

and Capua were re-united, as they had been for most of the tenth century,

this had no practical effect.

Already, in the 960s and 970s, the Byzantines had

been able to consolidate their hold over Lucania, and in the closing years of the

The extent of this emigration and of the shift of the Greek population northwards in Calabria has

been much debated. See M

enager (1958/9); Guillou (1963) and (1965); Loud (1988), pp. 215–18, and

(2000), pp. 54–8, for a summary.

Hoffmann (1969), pp. 112–14, would prefer to date Melus’s rebellion to 1011 on the basis of the Annales

Barenses (MGH S, v,p.53), but most authorities prefer 1009.

Capua and Benevento were ruled by two branches of the same family. Pandulf IV of Capua (1014–49)

and Landulf V of Benevento were in fact brothers. Given this relationship, the practice of associating

sons with their fathers’ rule during the latter’s lifetime, and the use of a very limited stock of personal

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96 g. a. loud

tenth century they had extended their rule into the area between the southern

Apennines and the Gargano peninsula, northwards as far as the River Fortore,

at the expense of the prince of Benevento to whose authority this region had

earlier at least nominally been subject. The Byzantine catepan (governor) from

1018,Basil Boiannes, was to devote considerable attention to strengthening the

empire’s hold in this area.

Southern Italy was thus politically and culturally fragmented, and something

of a power vacuum. If Byzantium was, despite all local difﬁculties, the strongest

force in the south of the peninsula, the ability of the Byzantine government

to intervene there was dependent on having resources to spare from its heavy

commitments in other parts of its far-ﬂung empire. In the ﬁrst years of the

eleventh century the emperor Basil II was grappling to enforce his authority in

the Balkans and to incorporate the Bulgarian kingdom into the empire. Only

when this was successfully accomplished could troops and money be spared

on any scale for southern Italy. Similarly, while the German empire claimed

overlordship over the whole of Italy – including the south, and in particular

over the Lombard principalities – in practice imperial intervention was sporadic

and ineffective. Only when Otto I had worked in alliance with Pandulf I of

Capua in the 960s and 970s had the German emperor had much inﬂuence, and

Otto II’s disastrous defeat by the Arabs in Calabria in 982 was not a precedent

designed to encourage German involvement in the south. Nor indeed was Otto

III’s foray to Capua and Benevento in 999; while less catastrophic, it had been

equally barren in result.

Distance, and the pressure of other and more vital

interests, inevitably prevented the western empire from taking more than an

occasional interest in southern Italy.

Despite the political fragmentation of the region, contemporary chroniclers

believed it to be prosperous: ‘the land which brings forth milk and honey, and

so many good things’.

Clearly this ecstatic opinion cannot have applied to

every part of it. Much of inland southern Italy is very mountainous, with com-

munication largely conﬁned to narrow river valleys. The Abruzzi and Lucania

in particular were heavily forested. Several coastal districts were marshy and

malarial, most unsuitable therefore for settlement, while other areas such as the

limestone Murge in inland Apulia and the eastern coast of Calabria are arid and

infertile. Calabria, with the Sila mountains in the north and the Aspromonte

names, the numbering of the princes (itself anachronistic) poses pitfalls for the unwary, and in

consequence not all historians agree on such numbers. The numbers used here for the Lombard

princes are those most commonly found.

Benevento had recently resisted an imperial siege, and his nominee as prince of Capua was expelled

ayear later, Loud (2000), p. 27.

‘la terre qui mene lat et miel et tant belles coses’, Amatus of Monte Cassino, Storia de’ Normanni

[henceforth Amatus], lib. i c. 19,p.24.

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Southern Italy in the eleventh century 97

in the south, can never have supported a very large population. But there were

other areas, the Terra di Lavoro around Capua and Naples, the Tavoliere of

northern Apulia, the slopes of Mount Etna in eastern Sicily, which were (and

are) notable for their rich soil and fertility. Grain from Apulia, Campania and

Sicily, wine from almost everywhere under 800 metres in height, fruit (much of

it exotic to northern eyes like ﬁgs, almonds and water melons) from the Cam-

pania and northern and eastern Sicily, olive production which was growing in

the eleventh century, especially in central Apulia, and the surprisingly exten-

sive cultivation of mulberries and silkworms in Calabria, again expanding very

rapidly in the eleventh century, all contributed to this picture of prosperity.

Letters from Jewish merchants in Cairo suggest that Calabria was second only

to Muslim Spain as a source for silk in the eleventh-century Mediterranean.

And not only parts of Calabria and Lucania but other seemingly unpromising

areas like the Cilento in the south of the principality of Salerno, another steeply

mountainous region, were being opened up for settlement at this time. The

cities of the west coast, above all Amalﬁ, played a signiﬁcant role in Mediter-

ranean trade, which had developed despite the Christian/Muslim division.

From there corn, timber, even wine, were exported to North Africa and Egypt,

while luxury items were imported from the Byzantine empire. Salerno, accord-

ing to a contemporary, ‘furnished all that one could desire by land and sea’

and Amalﬁ was ‘a wealthy and populous city, none richer in silver, gold and

garments from innumerable places’.

When therefore c. 1000 men from northern Europe whom the contemporary

sources call ‘Normans’ began to arrive in the south of Italy, at ﬁrst as pilgrims

and then in the hope of employment and proﬁt, the region was both temptingly

prosperous and also unstable enough, particularly in the area of Lombard rule in

the west and centre, to provide ample opportunities for soldiers of fortune. By

the 1030s the mercenaries were sufﬁciently numerous to be themselves a factor

undermining the stability of the south, and from the early 1040s onwards the

erstwhile mercenaries began to become masters, until by the end of the century

they controlled the whole of mainland southern Italy and had conquered the

island of Sicily from the Arabs. But, because the Normans secured mastery of

southern Italy, it would be misleading to see that process as inevitable. It was

only gradually that they transformed their role from employees to conquerors.

Their takeover was slow and piecemeal, a process of inﬁltration as much as

invasion. Furthermore, while the newcomers took over the existing provinces

and principalities, provided new rulers and introduced new institutions like

‘Et quodcunque velis terrave marive ministrat . . . Urbs haec dives opum, populoque referta videtur’,

William of Apulia, La Geste de Robert Guiscard [henceforth W. Apulia], lib. iii lines 475–9,p.190.

See generally Citarella (1968); Guillou (1974); and von Falkenhausen (1975).

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98 g. a. loud

the ﬁef, they were not that numerous and never constituted a complete and

homogeneous ruling class, either in lay society or the church. Native traditions

remained strong, especially in the towns, and there was never such a polarity

between the Norman governing class and indigenous subjects as there was in

Anglo-Norman England.

The view that the Norman takeoverwas inexorable is largely derived from the

contemporary chronicles celebrating the conquest. The three most important

chronicle sources of the time, all written towards the end of the century,

presented the viewpoint of the conquerors, and all concluded that the victory

of the Normans was divinely ordained. To quote William of Apulia’s verse

biography of Robert Guiscard (duke of Apulia 1059–85), which was written

c. 1095–9, ‘it was pleasing to the All-Powerful King who controls seasons and

kingdoms that the Apulian littoral which had for a long time been held by

the Greeks should no longer be inhabited by them, and that the Norman

race, distinguished by its ﬁerce knighthood, should enter it, expel the Greeks

and rule over Italy’.

Similar sentiments were expressed in the ‘History of the

Normans’ by Amatus of Monte Cassino, written c. 1080.Some twenty years

later a Norman monk of Catania, Geoffrey Malaterra, writing the ‘Deeds of

Count Roger of Sicily’, took as his theme a slightly different but still closely

related concept, the moral qualities of the Normans as against the deﬁciencies of

the natives, whether Lombard or Greek, which had therefore made the conquest

inevitable and divinely sanctioned.

Yet all these viewpoints were partis pris,

and were written in the consciousness that the conquest had happened, was by

then irreversible and, because it had taken place, must therefore have been in

accordance with God’s will. But that does not mean that we should necessarily

allow medieval teleology to distort rational historical explanation, and the

use of documentary sources must inevitably modify the cut-and-dried picture

of contemporary historians. Nor should we assume that every action of the

invaders was from the ﬁrst directed towards conquest. William of Apulia might,

for example, suggest that the Normans deliberately fostered discord among

the Lombards to prevent any one party gaining a decisive advantage, which

indeed they may have done.

Butwecannot assume that the idea of conquest

was therefore present from the ﬁrst; such a tactic may have been intended to

‘Postquam complacuit regi mutare potenti, Tempora cum regnis, ut Graecis Apulia tellus iam possessa

diu non amplius incoleretur, Gens Normannorum feritate insignis equestri intrat, et expulsis Latio

dominatur Achivis’, W. Apulia, i lines 1–5,p.98.

Amatus, dedication, p. 3.Geoffrey Malaterra, De rebus gestis Roger Rogerii Calabriae et Siciliae comitis

[henceforth Malaterra]. On the Lombards, ‘gens invidissima’, ‘genus semper perﬁdissimum’, ibid.,

lib. i cc. 6, 13,pp.10–14;onthe Greeks, ‘gens deliciis et voluptatibus, potius quam belli studiis ex

more dedita’, lib. iii c. 13,p.64.OnMalaterra, Capitani (1977), especially pp. 6–11, 30–3;Wolf (1995),

pp. 143–71.

W. A pulia, i lines 156–64,pp.106–8.

Southern Italy in the eleventh century 99

continue the need for their own employment rather than a Machiavellian ploy

to undermine their hosts.

The conquest of southern Italy thus fell into three distinct stages. First, up

to the early 1040s the Normans acted as mercenaries, selling their swords to

almost every power in the south, except for the Arabs, ‘ﬁghting for the purpose

of gain’ in Malaterra’s succinct phrase.

From 1042 onwards they acted in their

own right, extending their operations from the Lombard zone into Apulia,

and in the 1040s and 1050s employment turned into conquest. The capture of

Capua in 1058 and the investiture of the Norman leaders Robert Guiscard and

Richard of Aversa by the pope in 1059 as, respectively, duke of Apulia and prince

of Capua effectively closed this phase, even though not all of southern Italy

was yet in Norman hands. The papal investiture was a sign that the Normans

were there to stay, and it recognized that by then their takeover was inevitable.

The third phase was one of consolidation on the mainland, mopping up the

last bastions of Byzantine rule in Apulia and Calabria, combined with a new

enterprise, the conquest of the island of Sicily. This last operation, begun in

1061, lasted a full generation, not being completed until the capture of the

last Muslim fortresses in the south-east of the island in 1091.While this was

still going on the Norman ruler of Apulia, Robert Guiscard, began to play a

signiﬁcant role on the European stage. From 1080 he was the main supporter

and ally of the Gregorian reform papacy in its dispute with the German emperor

Henry IV, and in addition he launched a full-scale assault on the mainland

provinces of the Byzantine empire.

the conquest: the mercenary phase

The ﬁrst signiﬁcant involvement in southern Italy of those whom the con-

temporary sources call the Normans came in the second Apulian revolt led

by Melus in 1017.According to the ‘Deeds of Robert Guiscard’ of William

of Apulia (written, it must be remembered, seventy years later) it was pre-

ceded by a seemingly chance meeting between the rebel leader and a group of

Norman pilgrims at the shrine of St Michael on Monte Gargano.

Whether

William’s poem was recounting fact or legend, and whether such involvement

was purely chance or if it occurred with the connivance of one or more of the

Lombard princes or of Pope Benedict VIII, has been endlessly debated. Two

points are however clear. This was not the very ﬁrst contact of the Normans

with southern Italy, and their role in the rebellion was essentially auxiliary,

as mercenaries strengthening, probably in no great numbers, an indigenous

rising.

‘Causa militari aliquid lucrandi’, Malaterra, i.6,p.10.

W. A pulia, i lines 11–27,pp.98–100.

100 g. a. loud

The tradition preserved by the History of Amatus of Monte Cassino was that

agroup of Normans ﬁrst arrived in southern Italy, as pilgrims returning from

Jerusalem, at Salerno ‘before 1000’, and helped to repel an Arab attack on the

city. Once again attempts have been made to dismiss this episode as legend, or

to re-date it to shortly before the Apulian rebellion of 1017.But there is good

reason to suggest that there was a Muslim attack on Salerno around the turn

of the century, and it would be quite explicable if Norman mercenaries were

employed in small numbers in the south from that time onwards.

Several

different sources suggest that political exiles from Normandy were among

them. The question of numbers is also a difﬁcult one. Amatus said that there

were forty pilgrims in the group aiding Salerno. His account of the 1017–18

revolt contradicts itself, saying ﬁrst that some 250 Normans were involved and

then that 3,000 were,ofwhom only 500 survived.

One might tend towards

the smaller ﬁgure, but whatever the case it seems clear that there were not very

many Normans present, and that casualties were heavy. After initial successes

in northern Apulia, the rebels were crushingly defeated in October 1018 by a

substantially reinforced Byzantine army led by the new catepan Basil Boiannes.

Melus ﬂed, ultimately to seek the aid of the German emperor Henry II, and

the surviving Normans either went to the Lombard principalities or, soon

afterwards, enlisted in the pay of the victor.

During the decade when Basil Boiannes was catepan (1018–28), Byzantine

prestige and power in Italy was at its height. The successful conclusion of the

war with Bulgaria released resources for Italy in a way that had not been possible

for many years, and Boiannes consolidated his hold on northern Apulia by the

construction of a series of fortiﬁed settlements on hill sites along the fringe of the

Apulian plain at Troia, Dragonara, Fiorentina and Civitate, each of which was

established as a garrison and a bishopric.

Furthermore the Lombard princes

were now much more amenable to Byzantine inﬂuence than hitherto (though it

may be that Guaimar III of Salerno had always been well disposed to the eastern

empire).

Pandulf IV of Capua had not been, however, and had supported and

aided Melus’s rebellion. But after its failure he not only formally acknowledged

Byzantine overlordship, but accepted a substantial bribe to permit Byzantine

troops to enter his principality and arrest Melus’s brother-in-law, Dattus, who

was taken back to Bari and there executed.

Amatus, i.17–18,pp.21–3, and cf. Chronica monasterii Casinensis [henceforth Chron. Cas.], lib. ii c.

37,p.236. The discussion by Hoffmann (1969)isfundamental and supersedes earlier ones such as

Joranson (1948). Damage done by an earlier Muslim attack is referred to in a charter of November

1005, Codex diplomaticus Cavensis,pp.40–2 no. 898 (there misdated to 1035). See now Loud (2000),

pp. 60–6.

Amatus, i.22–3,pp.30–1.

See Borsari (1966–7); von Falkenhausen (1967), pp. 55–7.

Hoffmann (1969), pp. 123–4. The Catepan Basil Mesardonites had been at Salerno in October 1011,

vonFalkenhausen (1967), pp. 175–6.