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

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

Norman Sicily in the twelfth century 461

until the summer of 1139.) Similarly, while King Roger promulgated some laws,

especially relating to the coinage, at an assembly at Ariano in 1140,itisbyno

means clear that either of the two surviving texts detailing different versions of

King Roger’s legislation is to be connected with that assembly, although this

legislation probably does date from the 1140s.

The legislation ascribed to King Roger was derived, indeed usually verba-

tim,fromRoman Law, and it reﬂected the exalted view of the sovereign which

that law embodied. But the preface to the earlier text of this code (if it may

be described as such) said that the customs and laws of the different peoples

under his rule should be maintained unless they were in direct contravention of

royal law. For most purposes therefore Lombards (i.e. native Italians), Greeks,

Muslims and French remained under the sway of local customary law, admin-

istered by their own local judges (especially in the towns) or by aristocrats who

possessed judicial authority in their own lands. Royal justiciars dealt with se-

rious criminal offences (particularly those to do with public order), important

property disputes – principally those involving ﬁefs, and cases referred to them

from other tribunals by the royal court because of ‘defect of justice’ – they

presided therefore over a court of appeal. Such cases were often the result of

pressure from below, with a dissatisﬁed plaintiff going to the royal court to

secure a mandate for a case to be tried before the justiciars.

The mainland justiciars were drawn from the lesser nobility, and very occa-

sionally the knightly class, and often held ofﬁce for long periods. They were

usually landowners in the area in which they ofﬁciated. From the ﬁrst there

would appear to have been ﬁxed areas of jurisdiction, even though express ter-

ritorial titles (‘Justiciar of the Terra di Bari’ etc.) do not appear in the sources

until the 1170s. Usually a pair of justiciars ofﬁciated together in each circuit.

The rewards of long service as a justiciar could be considerable. For example

Henry of Ollia was one in the Monte Gargano region of northern Apulia from

c. 1141 until 1153; his son Geoffrey was granted the county of Lesina, forfeited

by its previous incumbent, in 1155.

The chamberlains were primarily ﬁnancial ofﬁcials who supervised crown

lands and royal revenues on the mainland, and oversaw other more minor

ofﬁcers such as local bailiffs and portulani. They also presided over some legal

cases in what the thirteenth century would have called ‘civil’ issues.

They

could too exercise a supervisory role over local judges, and it is in fact probable

enager (1969)is(rightly) very critical of the supposed ‘Assizes of Ariano’, but his suggestion that

neither of these codes should in fact be attributed to the Rogerian period is very controversial. See

now Houben (2001), pp. 135–47.

How far there was an express distinction between civil and criminal law in the twelfth century

is disputed; see Caravale (1966), pp. 263–4 contra Jamison (1913), pp. 322–30, but in practice the

limitation of the chamberlains’ judicial competence is clear.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

462 g. a. loud

that there was no hard and fast distinction between their judicial competence

and that of the justiciars, although the latter dealt with the more important

cases. In Calabria and Sicily (where local justiciars are found from the be-

ginning of William I’s reign) the justiciars seem sometimes to have performed

purely administrative tasks, which they apparently did not in Apulia and Capua

where their duties remained exclusively legal. However, a number of mainland

justiciars also functioned as royal constables, responsible for the levying and

organization of troops. While as time went on the competence of various

ofﬁcials doubtless became more closely deﬁned, there would seem therefore

to have been some overlap of functions. Furthermore, the jurisdiction of the

justiciars did not extend to the lands of the mainland counts, who themselves

exercised criminal justice and acted as the royal legal ofﬁcers within their coun-

ties. What is signiﬁcant, however, is that they did this not as an exercise of their

proprietary right but as the delegated ofﬁcers of the king, acting in effect as

justiciars. Indeed there are instances of men of comital rank describing them-

selves expressly as ‘count and justiciar’. Furthermore, the ‘counties’ were often

very disparate collections of lands, and not coherent territorial units. (The

county of Andria is a particular case in point.) In addition, legal immunities

in the kingdom of Sicily, even to the most favoured churches, did not extend

to the ‘pleas of the crown’, those cases involving violence or treason, which

were reserved to the royal prerogative and to be judged only by royal ofﬁcials.

Similarly in 1144 there was a major investigation of privileges throughout the

kingdom. These were in future to be valid only if expressly conﬁrmed by the

king.

Under Roger II the overall supervision of the mainland was vested, at least

nominally, in the king’s sons as duke of Apulia and prince of Capua, although in

practice their role seems to have been mainly military and there is no evidence

that they took any active part in administrative or judicial matters. In the 1140s

the king himself still frequently visited the mainland, and the royal chancellor

Robert of Selby (d. 1151) seems also to have been actively involved in mainland

administration, though not necessarily on any continuous basis. Under Maio of

Bari, from 1155–6 onwards, more systematic arrangements for the supervision

of the mainland administration and the command of its defence were created,

with overall control being invested in two ‘master captains of Apulia and Terra

di Lavoro’ (i.e. the principality of Capua), and a similar ofﬁcial being appointed

for Calabria. A master chamberlain was appointed for each of these two regions

to oversee ﬁnancial matters and the operations of the chamberlains. From the

death of Maio onwards the master captains (after 1170 master justiciars) were

invariably mainland counts. In the 1170sRobert of Caserta (d. 1183), held ofﬁce

in Apulia and Terra di Lavoro with, as his colleague, ﬁrst Richard of Gravina,

and then (from 1176)Tancred of Lecce, the king’s cousin. Count Hugh of

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

Norman Sicily in the twelfth century 463

Catanzaro was the master justiciar of Calabria from 1163, and would seem to

have been succeeded by Richard of Gravina (d. 1177/8). In the 1180sTancred

and Count Roger of Andria were in ofﬁce together in Apulia and Terra di

Lavoro.

The administration of Sicily itself was kept separate from that of the main-

land and run directly from the royal court, although, as said, justiciars were

appointed on the island from c. 1154. The chief administrative ofﬁce was known

by the Arabic name of diwan, and many of its ofﬁcials were indeed converted

Muslims. (‘Falcandus’ alleged that they were only nominally converted.) From

c. 1145, when there was a substantial reorganization of the Sicilian central ad-

ministration, there were two separate sections – the ad-diwan al-ma

mur –

the general administrative and ﬁnancial ofﬁce, which also administered the

crown lands, and the d

ıw

an at-tahq

ıq al-ma

mur or (Latin) Duana de Se-

cretis, which was the land registry, keeping details of ﬁefs, boundaries and

transfers of ownership. The functions of these two ofﬁces were clearly dis-

tinct, but in practice there was a considerable interchange of personnel. And,

rather than it being simply a development of existing practice, the inspira-

tion for the administrative reorganization of the 1140sprobably came from

Fatimid Egypt, with which the Sicilian administration, and in particular

George of Antioch, was in close and friendly communication during the 1130s

and 1140s.

Under Maio of Bari the judicial activity of the royal court was put on

a more professional footing with the appointment of three master justiciars

permanently attached to it. The royal court in formal session, with one or

more of these specialist judges present, acted as the court of appeal for Sicily,

dealt with cases involving royal ofﬁcials, defect of justice or failures in enforcing

judicial decisions (sometimes on the mainland too) and conducted political

trials such as that of Count Richard of Molise in 1168.One of the master judges

in the 1160s was a Greek called Tarentinus.

The most signiﬁcant administrative change thereafter came c. 1168 when

the mainland ﬁnancial administration was brought more closely under the

supervision of the central government, with the abolition of the two master

chamberlains’ posts and the creation of a branch ofﬁce of the diwan on the

mainland, known as the Duana Baronum and based at Salerno. Its competence

was limited to Apulia and Capua, and the chamberlains of Calabria were

henceforth under the direct administrative control of the diwan at Palermo. It

was probably in connection with the setting up of the new Duana Baronum,

Johns (1993), pp. 138–9, 145–7.For the administration generally, Takayama (1985) and (1993). Jamison

(1913)isstill fundamental for the government of the mainland.

SeeJamison (1967) here.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

464 g. a. loud

which like the Duana de Secretis kept registers of ﬁefs, that a revision of the

‘Catalogue of the Barons’ was put under way c. 1168,toupdate the government’s

list of landholders and military obligations in the mainland provinces at a time

when the kingdom was still facing a signiﬁcant (if perhaps diminishing) external

threat.

The ofﬁcials of the central government remained mainly of Greek and Arabic

origin until the death of Roger II. The rise of Maio of Bari led to much greater

inﬂuence by the Latin element. The majority of royal charters were henceforth

written in Latin, and Latin bishops, hitherto largely excluded from the direction

of affairs, provided the majority of familiares after 1166.But converted Muslims

still fulﬁlled important roles, notably Caid Peter as a familiaris in the 1160s and

Caid Richard, the master chamberlain of the royal palace, who directed the

Duana de Secretis throughout the reign of William II. If anything the growth

of Latin inﬂuence was at the expense of the Greek ofﬁcials who had been most

important under King Roger. Nevertheless Greeks too still held important

posts, notably the judge Tarentinus as a legal expert, Eugenius, one of the

masters of the Duana Baronum from 1174 onwards (and later head of King

Tancred’s administration), and Margaritus of Brindisi, commander of the ﬂeet

from the late 1180s.

By the time of William II the kingdom of Sicily had therefore a complex

and sophisticated administrative system, which functioned efﬁciently under

the overall direction of the familiares in Palermo. The king himself, even after

he grew to manhood, was much less active than his grandfather had been, and

spent most of his time in Palermo, only occasionally visiting the mainland. But

the structure of government had evolved sufﬁciently to allow this. Furthermore

the great wealth which contemporary commentators attributed to the king of

Sicily – while it was a product of the scale of the crown lands, especially in Sicily

itself, and of the island’s position at the centre of Mediterranean trade routes –

was also the result of the king having an efﬁcient administration through which

he could exploit his dominions. The relatively small number of known royal

documents (only 66 from the reign of William I and 240 from that of his son)

in no way reﬂects the scale of governmental activity, although the increasing

proportion of mandates (that is, executive orders) known from the time of

William II is certainly a sign of an increasingly active central government.

The king of Sicily was no tyrant, but he did rule a strong and centralized

kingdom.

The full texts of only 35 charters of William I now survive; of the 240 documents of William

II known (103 of which are mandates) the texts of 156 now survive (55 of which are mandates),

Enzensberger (1981), pp. 111–13. 72 documents of King Tancred are known, of which the texts of

only 35 now survive. Br

uhl (1978), p. 35, suggests that the 166 surviving Latin charters of Roger II

represent perhaps only 10 per cent of the total written.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

Norman Sicily in the twelfth century 465

king, pope and church

The kingdom of Sicily was technically a papal ﬁef, as the duchy of Apulia

and principality of Capua had been from 1059 onwards. Roger II’s royal title

had been granted by Anacletus II in 1130;hedid homage to Innocent II in

1139,asdid William I to Adrian IV in 1156, and both kings agreed to pay an

annual census to the papacy in return for their ﬁef. But in practice this ‘feudal’

relationship was of very little importance; nor did it enhance papal authority

within the kingdom.

Admittedly, relations between king and pope remained uneasy between 1139

and 1156.But this stemmed not so much from differing interpretations of the

vassalic relationship as from the continued dislike among many at the papal

court for a kingdom created by a bull from the antipope Anacletus, the existence

of which Innocent II had been forced to recognize in 1139, and from a number

of unresolved territorial and ecclesiastical disputes. The conquest of Marsia by

Roger’s sons in the early 1140s encompassed territory claimed by the papacy, as

well as being a potential threat to the security and communications of Rome

itself. The control exercised by the king over the church was an infringement

of ecclesiastical liberty. The reorganization of the episcopal structure on the

island of Sicily undertaken at Roger’s behest by Anacletus in 1130–1 was by

deﬁnition unacceptable to his successful rival in the schism. The well-informed

English commentator John of Salisbury alleged that because of these disputes

the papacy had forbidden the consecration of bishops-elect within the Sicilian

kingdom.

But eveninthe1140srelations were never entirely severed; there

was for example something of a thaw during the brief pontiﬁcate of Lucius II

(1144–5), in 1148 Roger sent troops to assist Eugenius III against the rebellious

Romans, and in 1150 the meeting between pope and king at Ceprano led to a

rapprochement and the consecration of the Sicilian bishops-elect. Admittedly,

relations collapsed once again less than a year later after the coronation of the

king’s son as co-ruler without consultation with the papacy (almost the only

evidence of the pope’s role as overlord being of any signiﬁcance), and Adrian IV

was a party to the attacks on the kingdom in 1155–6.But the treaty of Benevento

of June 1156 marked a deﬁnitive end to this period of hostilities. It saw the full

recognition of the kingdom of Sicily, including the Marsian territories, and the

deﬁnition of the special ecclesiastical privileges claimed by the king in virtue

of Urban II’s privilege to Roger I of 1098 (the right to control appeals to Rome

and legations was recognized, but only for the island of Sicily and not for

the mainland). The royal right of veto in episcopal elections throughout the

kingdom was also tacitly allowed.

Only the status of the Sicilian bishoprics

John of Salisbury, Historia pontiﬁcalis,pp.65–6.

There is an English translation of the treaty in Loud and Wiedemann (1998), pp. 248–52.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

466 g. a. loud

remained unresolved; and indeed it was not until 1166 that Alexander III agreed

that Messina should become a metropolitan see and that bishops should be

consecrated for the sees at Lipari and Cefal

u–asRoger and Anacletus had

intended in 1131.

In practice not only were nearly all the problems settled at Benevento in

1156, but thereafter both sides worked together in amity. The popes only rarely

exercised their rights to send legates to the mainland of southern Italy, and the

scanty evidence suggests that such legations actually did very little. The king

secured the appointment of curiales to some of the Sicilian sees and a few key

archbishoprics on the mainland such as Salerno and Capua. But, although the

king’s permission was required before the election of a new bishop or abbot

could take place, in most cases the choice of a new prelate was then left to the

canonical electors. Indeed, given how numerous the kingdom’s bishoprics were

(some 144 in all), and also how poor many of them were, the king had little

motive for interference, except in the case of a very few wealthy or strategically

important sees.

The amicable relations between king and pope after 1156 were of course

fostered by their political alliance. With the papal schism of 1159 and the

existence of an imperially sponsored antipope, the king of Sicily became the

principal lay ally of the papacy, furnishing diplomatic, ﬁnancial and, when

the papal state was threatened, military support – as William I did against

the forces of Christian of Mainz in 1165.Indeed, with the pope remaining

in exile from Rome for almost a decade and the administration of the papal

lands in ruins, the annual census paid by the king of Sicily, which had been

increased in return for the Marsian lands in 1156,provided a very important

part of Alexander III’s income. Furthermore, for three and a half years, from

August 1167 to February 1171, Alexander was living at Benevento, the papal

enclave within the boundaries of the kingdom of Sicily, and thus under the

direct protection of the king.

In these circumstances it was not surprising that the papacy was prepared

to tolerate the control exercised by the Sicilian monarch over the church in his

dominions – a control which was for the most part benevolent, and which,

through the reassertion of law and order, was very much in the interests of local

churchmen, and inﬁnitely preferable to the disorder which had prevailed before

1127.One of King Roger’s laws stated unequivocally that ‘we shall defend and

guard inviolate all the property and possessions of the holy churches which

have been entrusted to our custody’.

That the bishoprics on the island of

‘sacrarum ecclesiarum res omnes et possessiones . . . custodia collocatas atque commis-

sas . . . defendimus et inviolatas custodimus’. Assize 2 of the Vatican MS, ed. F. Brandileone, Diretto

romano nelle legge normanne,p.96.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

Norman Sicily in the twelfth century 467

Sicily and a number of the most important sees on the mainland derived much

of their income from direct subventions from royal revenues, rather than from

their own lands, also predisposed Sicilian churchmen to acquiesce in this royal

control.

The relative unimportance of the vassalic relationship can be seen

from the fact that the king’s oath of fealty was not renewed until 1188 – and

that it was then may well have been dictated more by Clement III’s desire

to establish a precedent for the future, given that William II’s marriage was

childless and his designated heiress the wife of the heir to the German empire,

than to any wish to interfere directly with the kingdom.

There does seem to have been rather more papal activity concerning the

day-to-day workings of the south Italian church in William II’s later years, and

the papacy may never have been entirely reconciled to the authority claimed

by the king over the church – certainly in 1192 Celestine III took advantage of

King Tancred’s need for external support, given his disputed title to the crown,

to renegotiate the terms of the treaty of Benevento and diminish royal powers.

But while William II lived this control remained an unchallenged reality.

economy, demography and social structure

The wealth which contemporaries attributed to the king was derived in part

from sales taxes and tolls on trade, but to a large extent from a ﬂourishing

and expanding agrarian economy.

Although parts of southern Italy were

mountainous and infertile, other areas, notably the Campania, the coastal plain

of Apulia and (with the aid of irrigation) much of Sicily itself, were agriculturally

very productive. In the twelfth century the population was expanding, and areas

hitherto only lightly settled, such as the Tavoliere of Apulia between Bari and

Monte Gargano, were being cleared and opened for cultivation. The kingdom

became a major source of food exports, especially grain, both for northern

Italy and North Africa, as well as an important staging-post for trade between

northern Italy and the Levant. The development of the agricultural sector can

be seen for example in the spread of olive cultivation in central Apulia. (By

the late twelfth century olives had become the principal crop in this region,

and a major export commodity.) Vegetable cultivation was also introduced to

Apulia, and in the Campania new types of cereals appeared and arboriculture

spread, with the domestication of hitherto wild species.

The development of the kingdom’s external trade was encouraged by treaties

with the commercial powers of northern Italy such as that with Genoa in 1156,

though here there was clearly a political element as well, to try to deprive

Usually a tenth of royal revenues from within the diocese. See Kamp (1980), pp. 104–5, 118.

See here Abulaﬁa (1983), and for what follows Martin (1987), (1992) and (2002).

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

468 g. a. loud

Frederick Barbarossa of naval aid for a potential invasion. Such trade directly

beneﬁted the ruler, not just because of commercial taxes – where the north

Italians were given preferential treatment – but because much of the produce

exported came from the extensive royal demesne, especially in Sicily itself. Ex-

tensive royal ownership of salt pans was also very proﬁtable, although there

was at this period no formal royal monopoly as there was later to be under

Frederick II. The numerous tunny ﬁsheries off the coast of Sicily and mining

rights were, however, reserved to the crown. A favourable balance of trade with

North Africa explains the import of gold from which the Sicilian rulers contin-

ued to mint tari (in origin gold Islamic quarter-dinar coins) as the centrepiece

of their currency. Sicily was the only western European kingdom to have a gold

coinage in the twelfth century. The German chroniclers of Henry VI’s takeover

in 1194 were to comment in amazement at the profusion of precious metals,

jewels and textiles among the booty captured.

Although some raw silk was

produced in Calabria and woven in Sicily, the other valuables were imported.

However, the growth of this trade did not necessarily beneﬁt the towns of

the Regno as much as it did the ruler. Commercial concessions to the north

Italians placed the native merchants at a disadvantage from which they never

really recovered. Furthermore, Amalﬁ, the chief mercantile city of the south in

the early middle ages, was greatly harmed when it was sacked by a Pisan ﬂeet in

1134, and Bari, the principal port of the Adriatic coast, was destroyed by William

Iin1156 and for a time deserted. Nor were the kings prepared to concede more

than very limited legal privileges or autonomy to the towns, whose commercial

interests were thus subordinated to the political and ﬁnancial concerns of the

ruler.

The expansion of external trade did play a signiﬁcant part in the development

of Messina, which became the key commercial entrep

ot within the kingdom.

By the late twelfth century colonies of both Genoese and Pisan merchants

had been established there. Under Muslim rule Messina had been relatively

unimportant; by the 1180sitwas, in the words of the Spanish Muslim pilgrim

IbnJubayr, ‘the mart of the merchant inﬁdels, the focus of ships from all

over the world...teeming with worshippers of the Cross’.

But the growth of

Messina was also part of a signiﬁcant change in the balance of population in

Sicily. Immigration greatly increased the Christian population of the island,

and by c. 1200 the Muslims, who a century earlier had comprised at least

two-thirds of its inhabitants, had become a minority. Some of the immigrants

may well have been Greeks from Calabria, although the scale of any such

movement is by no means certain. Messina was considered to be a primarily

Greek city by the English chroniclers of the Third Crusade in 1190; charters

Loud (1999b), p. 818.

IbnJubayr, The Travels,p.338.

Norman Sicily in the twelfth century 469

from the city were still written almost exclusively in Greek until c. 1200, and

some documents from eastern Sicily continued to be written in Greek as well

as Latin for a century after that. But the foundation of Greek monasteries on

the island ceased after 1130, and a number of those previously founded were

later abandoned or converted to the Latin rite, which suggests that the Greek

population had already reached its peak. The majority of the immigrants were

Lombards (i.e. native Italians), both from the southern mainland and from

northern Italy. The south-east of the island was colonized by northern settlers

under the aegis of King Roger’s maternal uncle Count Henry of Paterno.

‘Falcandus’ considered Butera, Piazza Armerina and Vizzini to be ‘towns of the

north Italians’ (oppida Lombardorum –asopposed to the Longobardi or south

Italians), and recorded that in 1168 these Lombardi offered to provide 20,000

men to aid the chancellor Stephen of Perche against the rebels in Messina.

This ﬁgure was probably an exaggeration, but the scale of their immigration

was undoubtedly considerable. By this time Palermo had become a largely

Christian city, and here, and indeed elsewhere on the island outside the south-

east, the bulk of the new settlers were from the mainland parts of the Regno.

There were, for example, a number of natives of Bari resident in Palermo in

the last years of Roger II,

and towns like Cefal

uwere overwhelmingly Latin

by the late twelfth century.

The population of the interior of western Sicily, including the great tract of

royal demesne given by William II to his new abbey of Monreale in the 1170s,

was still almost exclusively Arabic, and very largely Muslim. But by this time

the Muslims were beginning to feel threatened. A prominent royal ofﬁcial of

Arabic extraction called Philip of Mahdia, a Muslim convert to Christianity,

was executed in 1153 for apostasizing back to Islam. The attempted coup against

William I in 1161 saw attacks by Christians on Muslims, which occurred once

again after the death of William II in 1189. The sense of unease which permeated

the Muslims, or at least those living in the towns of western Sicily, despite their

apparent prosperity, was vividly conveyed by Ibn Jubayr’s account of his visit

to the island in 1184.Hewas told that they were under considerable pressure to

convert to Christianity (does this reﬂect the growing inﬂuence of churchmen

in the government of William II?), and that many of them wanted to emigrate

to Muslim countries.

One cannot be certain how far the rural population of

the interior felt the same pressure. Onomastic evidence suggests that there were

already some Christians of Arabic extraction among the inhabitants of western

Sicily, as for example among those serfs listed in the Monreale plateae of the

La Historia o Liber de regno Sicilie,pp.70, 155, Loud and Wiedemann (1998), pp. 121, 208.

Codice diplomatico Barese,pp.170–3 no. 100 (1146), p. 183 no. 107,pp.185–6 no. 109 (both 1154).

IbnJubayr, The Travels,pp.348–9, 357–60.

470 g. a. loud

1180s–at Corleone they formed almost 20 per cent of the total population.

ButMuslims remained very much in the majority on the Monreale lands, as

they were also in the region of Agrigento. The riots in Palermo in 1189 were the

trigger for a widespread Muslim revolt in western Sicily, which was to smoulder

intermittently for more than thirty years until its suppression by Frederick II

and the removal of many of the surviving Muslims to his military colony at

Lucera in northern Apulia.

By the end of the twelfth century therefore the Latin element in the kingdom

was dominant, to a much greater extent than it had been in the early years

of Roger II. Immigration and a slow process of acculturation were weakening

the Muslims in Sicily, and to a lesser extent the Greek population in Calabria.

Nevertheless, this process should not be exaggerated. The Greeks were certainly

under no overt pressure after 1100, and arguably not even before then in the

immediate wake of the Norman conquest. Furthermore the Latin element, at

least in the upper class, was far from being homogeneous. Romuald of Salerno

recorded that King Roger attracted and rewarded ‘virtuous and wise men,

whether from his own land or born elsewhere’,

and high-status immigrants

continued to be absorbed, if not always without tension, by the ruling class

in both church and state. From the Anglo-Norman realm there was Roger II’s

chancellor Robert of Selby, the familiaris Richard Palmer, bishop of Syracuse

from 1157 and then archbishop of Messina (1183–95), and Herbert of Middlesex,

archbishop of Conza (1169–81).

The lay aristocracy in the 1160s included two

Spanish relatives of Queen Margaret, Counts Gilbert of Gravina and Henry of

Montescaglioso, and a French immigrant, Hugh Lopinus, count of Catanzaro.

Above all, the upper class on the mainland was an amalgam of the descen-

dants of the Norman conquerors of the eleventh century and of the indige-

nous Lombards. The larger towns remained the preserve of the Lombards, and

Lombard aristocrats remained powerful in a number of areas, especially in the

border regions and in the principality of Salerno. Admittedly the distinction

between Lombard and Norman became politically less and less signiﬁcant as

time went on. However, it left its mark on the institutions and law of south-

ern Italy. The Normans had, for example, introduced both the ﬁef and the

ceremony of homage. But it was only with King Roger in the 1140s that a

universal structure of military obligation was imposed from above; and even

then, while most men owed service because of the ﬁefs they held, some still

Metcalfe (2002), pp. 309–16.

Romuald of Salerno, Chronicon sive Annales,p.234,cf.La Historia o Liber de regno Sicilie,p.6, Loud

and Wiedemann (1998), pp. 58, 220.

However, Archbishop Walter of Palermo (1168–90) and his brother Bishop Bartholomew of Agri-

gento (1171–91), who succeeded him as archbishop (and died 1199), were not Englishmen, as once

was supposed. See Loewenthal (1972).