The Age of Robert Guiscard

Southern Italy and the Northern Conquest

Graham Loud

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317900221
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Founded upon an unrivalled knowledge of the original sources for the conquest, this is a cogent and lucid analysis of a key medieval subject hitherto largely ignored by historians.

CHAPTER I

Southern Italy before the Normans

When the first Normans arrived in southern Italy early in the eleventh century, the region to which they came was already very fragmented: divided not only politically but ethnically, religiously and culturally. There were three principal and contrasting areas. Apulia and Calabria were part of the Byzantine empire, ruled from Constantinople. The island of Sicily had been conquered from Byzantium by the Arabs during the ninth century, and remained under Islamic rule. The Campania, the western coastal region, along with the mountainous centre of the peninsula, was ruled by princes, and inhabited by people who considered themselves to be Lombards – descendants of the Germanic invaders of the peninsula in the sixth century. How many of them really were of Lombard blood is immaterial: not least because modern scholarship views the Germanic tribes who invaded the Roman empire as themselves cultural rather than ethnic units, united by language and law rather than race or common descent. But by the eleventh century these ‘Lombards’ had long since been assimilated, linguistically and socially, with the indigenous inhabitants, rule over whom they had seized from the Roman empire of Justinian. A chronicler writing in the later tenth century referred, significantly, to ‘the Germanic language which the Lombards once spoke’.¹ By the year 1000 they may therefore be considered as, in our terms, native Italians.

However, all three of these regions were themselves divided. The provinces ruled by the Byzantine emperors Basil II and his brother Constantine VIII had a mixed population, partly Greek-speaking but also in part (and in some areas almost entirely) Lombard, and that Lombard population was often extremely restive under Byzantine rule and apparently growing more so by the early eleventh century. Sicily was not only subject to frequent internecine disputes among its Arabic rulers, but religiously divided. A combination of immigration from north Africa and the conversion of many of the existing inhabitants meant that by now the majority of the island’s population was indeed Muslim, but there remained a substantial Christian minority, perhaps still as much as a third of the total population. These Greek-speaking Christians were concentrated in the north-east of the island, in the area known as the Val Demone, with a few also in the Palermo area. They were to provide a very useful fifth column to the Normans when they invaded the island in the early 1060s. And while the Lombard area proper was culturally and linguistically more united than the other two regions, it was far from being so politically, being split into three contending principalities, based at Benevento, Capua and Salerno, whose rulers were often at odds with each other. In addition, there were several small duchies on the west coast which had never been conquered by the Lombards and retained an at times precarious independence, playing off the Lombard princes against each other and sometimes looking to Byzantium for political and military support. These duchies, from north to south Gaeta, Naples and Amalfi, had only very restricted (and in Amalfi’s case extremely mountainous) territories, but derived much of their considerable wealth from commerce, including trade with the Muslim world. To the north of the principality of Benevento in the mountains of the Abruzzi were a number of more or less independent counties, theoretically subject to the duke of Spoleto in central Italy, and thus to the ruler of the north Italian kingdom (from 951 onwards the German emperor). The rulers of this area lying to the north of the River Trigno did occasionally interfere in the southern principalities, and a few southern monasteries (notably Montecassino) had dependencies or held land in the Abruzzi, but it was essentially a barrier region, geographically, politically, and to some extent socially, distinct from the south proper.

We shall return later to the situation at the start of the eleventh century. But to understand the complex political and social divisions of the region on the eve of the Normans’ arrival we need to look briefly at its history in the early Middle Ages, to explain how and why the society of the year 1000 had developed. In particular one needs to understand why Lombard Italy was so divided, how Sicily had fallen into the hands of Islam and the way in which Byzantine rule over its south Italian provinces had evolved. The roots of these developments went back a very long way, and it is to these distant origins which we need now to look.

The evolution of southern Italy

The Lombards who had invaded Italy in 568 soon spread through much of the peninsula. In addition to their kingdom of Italy in the north, they had created two other political units, the duchy of Spoleto in the centre and the duchy of Benevento in the south. By the middle of the seventh century the Lombard dukes of Benevento already ruled most of southern Italy. Though the Byzantines seem to have put up a determined resistance in Apulia, the Lombards continued to push slowly southwards, and by the middle of the eighth century the duchy of Benevento comprised virtually all the southern third of Italy. Byzantium was left in possession only of the tip of the Salento peninsula in Apulia, central and southern Calabria, and Sicily. Northern Calabria and all of Apulia north of Otranto was by this stage held by the Lombards. The existing population, probably not very numerous after the plagues of the sixth and early seventh centuries and the economic dislocation of the invasion period, was rapidly assimilated by the newcomers and became ‘Lombard’, though they in turn exercised a considerable influence on their conquerors in facilitating their speedy conversion to Christianity. However, during this period the hitherto relatively dense urban network of Roman Apulia largely disappeared. Only a small number of coastal towns remained of any importance, and then more as centres of defence and administration than as genuine urban settlements. The contrast between the late Roman and Lombard periods can be seen quite clearly from the Church, for towns of any significance were almost invariably the seat of a bishopric. In the sixth century there had been at least fifteen bishoprics in Apulia; in the ninth century there were only six.²

The duchy of Benevento remained separate and distinct from the Lombard kingdom of northern Italy, and though the two ruling dynasties frequently intermarried, the dukes managed to avoid any effective subordination to the northern ruler. The fact that the Lombards never conquered Rome and its surrounding region, and thus never had control of the easiest and least mountainous route between north and south, was undoubtedly an important factor here. Benevento remained independent when the northern kingdom was overrun by Charlemagne and his Franks in 774, and the then duke, Arichis, not only resisted Charlemagne’s attempts to enforce his lordship but proclaimed his independence by adopting the title of prince, a style which remained in use by his successors. The late ninth-century chronicler Erchempert claimed, with perhaps more local pride than strict attention to the truth, that:

Charles and all his sons whom he had now appointed as kings marched to attack Benevento with a great army of warriors, but God, under whose rule we were then prospering, was on our side. After a little while almost all of his men had died of disease and he beat an ignominious retreat with the few survivors.

He then recorded approvingly that when Charlemagne’s son Pepin demanded the subjection of Arichis’s son Grimoald on the grounds that the latter’s father had allegedly been subject to the last Lombard king, Grimoald had indignantly refused, saying that he had been born free and intended to remain that way.³ Erchempert was a monk of Montecassino, a monastery on the northern edge of the Beneventan zone which benefited both materially and in prestige from the Carolingians’ favour, but retained a strong sense of local patriotism. Similar sentiments were to be found at another monastery equally favoured by the rulers of northern Italy, St Vincent on Volturno.⁴ Indeed contemporary south Italian Lombard writers often referred to the Franks in terms very little different, and equally unflattering, from those which they used to describe Muslims or Greeks.⁵ This sense of local Lombard identity, and not just geographical distance or political allegiance, also helps to explain the clear distinction between Lombard south Italy and the Abruzzi counties to the north: part of the nobility in this latter region were Frankish settlers, and the perception of their Frankish descent remained for a long time.⁶ Indeed this sense of ‘separateness’, not just from the Frankish intruders but between northern and southern Lombards, was to endure: in the eleventh and twelfth centuries it was made clear by an important etymological distinction – the Longobardi were the inhabitants of southern Italy, the Lombardi the people of the north.

However, the period of relative stability in the south after c. 750, which the Carolingians did very little to disturb, lasted only some three-quarters of a century. It was shattered first by the Islamic invasion of Sicily in 827, and then by the break-up of the duchy of Benevento into first two, and then three separate units. The opportunity for the Arabs to land on the island was provided by a revolt there against the Byzantine authorities led by a disaffected officer called Euphemios; and this precedent was repeated in their subsequent attacks on the mainland. Though the completion of the conquest of Sicily was to take a long time – the last Byzantine fortresses in the east did not fall until as late as 902 – the Muslims soon overran much of the island. Palermo was captured in 831 and Messina in 842, and by then some Muslims had already turned their attention northwards. A group of them had been hired as mercenaries by the duke of Naples as early as 832, but the real opportunity for interference on the mainland came when the murder of Prince Sicard and the disputed succession which ensued led the principality of Benevento to dissolve into civil war in 839. Two rival princes emerged: Sicard’s former treasurer Radelchis who ruled at Benevento, and his surviving brother Siconulf who made his base at Salerno, the fortified town on the coast south of the Amalfitan peninsula built by Arichis some sixty years earlier. Both sides sought Muslim assistance, but the erstwhile mercenaries soon ran out of control, seized coastal bases for themselves and launched devastating raids deep into the peninsula. Contemporaries were all too aware of this fatal combination of internecine dispute and external threat. Another chronicler from Montecassino, writing perhaps twenty years earlier than Erchempert, commented: ‘If a reader in the future wishes to know the reason why the Saracens ruled over the lands of the Beneventans, the circumstances are like this. Prince Sicard of the Beneventans was killed by his own men …’, and he went on to recount the succession dispute, and how one of Radelchis’s officials invited Muslims to Bari who then seized the town for themselves. Meanwhile the prince was reducing areas loyal to his rival to ashes, and as the chronicler dryly and laconically recorded, ‘from then onwards everything rapidly got worse’.⁷

How far the Muslims were seriously intent on the conquest of mainland southern Italy, and how far they were simply intent on plunder, and above all the capture of slaves, is a good question. The chroniclers’ references to them ‘depopulating’ the countryside may well be significant, and a Frankish pilgrim to Jerusalem in the 860s claimed to have seen some 9,000 newly enslaved Christians at Muslim-held Taranto in the process of being sent to North Africa.⁸ The raiders also extorted substantial sums in ‘protection money’, as for example when c. 861 the wealthy abbeys of Montecassino and St Vincent on Volturno each paid out some 3,000 gold coins to avoid being burned down.⁹ Obtaining ransoms for the return of Christian captives was another profitable enterprise. At the end of the century, by which time the monks of St Vincent were living in exile in Capua, they were able to build only a very modest new monastery there, for much of the money which they had obtained from donations or the lease of property was being used for the redemption of prisoners held by the Muslims.¹⁰ Furthermore it has been suggested that most of the Muslims who ravaged the mainland, as opposed to the invaders of Sicily, were men who were themselves marginalised in the Muslim world, many of them outsiders of low status such as Berbers, acting without the knowledge or approval of the established powers within Islam, and without their help.¹¹ But given the divisions among the Lombards, and their distrust of outside interference, even when the Carolingian ruler of northern Italy, Louis II, was anxious to assist them, these Muslim raiders were singularly hard to drive out.

The consequences of this period of instability were considerable. The split in the principality of Benevento was formally recognised in 849 when the contending parties came to an agreement mediated by Louis II, then on the first of what was to be a number of campaigns in the south. (One may note that in one of the most significant clauses of this treaty the two princes agreed to expel all Saracens from their lands and not to employ them in future.)¹² Yet, just like the Treaty of Verdun of 843 among the Carolingians and innumerable externally negotiated treaties of more recent ages, this agreement was simply the prelude to further dispute and division. In particular, the gastaldate of Capua, which in the treaty of 849 had been assigned to Salerno, rapidly became detached from its nominal ...