Rethinking Norman Italy

Studies in honour of Graham A. Loud

C. E. Beneš, Joanna Drell, Paul Oldfield

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781526138552
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

This volume on Norman Italy (southern Italy and Sicily, c. 1000–1200) honours and reflects the pioneering scholarship of Graham A. Loud. An international group of scholars reassesses and recasts the paradigm by which Norman Italy has been conventionally understood, addressing varied subjects across four key themes: historiographies, identities and communities, religion and Church, and conquest. The chapters revise and refine our understanding of Norman Italy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, demonstrating that it was not just a parochial Norman or Mediterranean entity but also an integral player in the medieval mainstream.

1

Introduction: rethinking Norman Italy

Joanna H. Drell

Graham A. Loud has been a pioneering scholar, indefatigable researcher and forceful presence in the field of Norman Italy (c. 1000–c. 1200) since the late 1970s and remains one of its most active contributors. His many publications and his dedicated mentorship of students have resulted in the burgeoning of the study of medieval southern Italy and Sicily. This pluralistic society where Christian, Muslim, Jew, Greek, Latin, Lombard and Norman commingled is now a fixture at academic meetings and in classrooms, journals and other publications in the UK, the US, the Continent and elsewhere. It spans a range of scholarly interests: a Mediterranean society, an economic crossroads, an innovator in lay and ecclesiastical governance, and a multicultural frontier. Norman Italy has moved from the wings to centre stage in medieval studies and is in fruitful interplay with other popular corners of medieval interest: the crusading movement, medieval Spain and the putative home of modernity, northern Italy.¹ Thanks to Loud’s efforts, references to Norman Italy as ‘the other conquest’ have waned.²

This volume brings together a number of Graham Loud’s colleagues – some of them his former students – to celebrate his extraordinary career and his seminal contribution to the study of Norman Italy. Loud’s groundbreaking research is not only the common influence underpinning this collection of chapters by some of the field’s leading scholars but it also continues to inspire the traversing of scholarly frontiers and the re-evaluation of the relationship between Norman Italy and the broader medieval world, enquiries fruitfully in progress.

From the outset it is important to delineate the geographical and chronological boundaries of this volume. What is meant by ‘Norman Italy’ and what period is addressed here? To be sure, some chapters focus on southern Italy and others on Sicily while yet others reference the kingdom of Sicily. This is not uncommon in scholarship on the region. Depending on context, ‘medieval southern Italy’ refers to the territory from the Abruzzi down to Sicily or simply the peninsula south of Rome but excluding Sicily. The varying definitions are all legitimate. While it is generally agreed that Norman Italy ‘begins’ with the arrival of the first Norman mercenaries and pilgrims around the turn of the millennium, as recounted by William of Apulia in The Deeds of Robert Guiscard and Amatus of Montecassino in The History of the Normans, the period’s close cannot be so precisely located.³ Some scholars strictly mark the passing of the Norman period with the end of King Tancred’s reign in 1194. Upon Tancred’s death the throne entered into the orbit of the House of Hohenstaufen (also referred to as ‘the Staufen’) through Tancred’s aunt, Constance – daughter of Roger II, wife of Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI and mother of future Emperor Frederick II, the next king of southern Italy and Sicily. Others, however, consider the same Frederick II a ruler of ‘Norman Italy’ owing to his descent from Roger II and consequently they extend Italy’s ‘Norman’ era through his death in 1250.

There is also scholarly disagreement regarding when Norman Italy ceased to be ‘Norman’ because of the extent of Norman intermarriage and intermingling with the local populace and the petering out of Norman immigration into the south. Moreover, scholars often conflate ‘Norman’ with ‘French’, which further muddies the waters regarding Norman influence.⁴ Loud himself made what many deem the definitive argument on this topic in his 1981 article, ‘How “Norman” was the Norman conquest of southern Italy?’⁵ As prosopographical work on charters and other evidence continues, we may gain further clarity regarding the contours of Italy’s ‘Normanness’ in the future. In this volume we acknowledge the mutability of ‘Norman Italy’ not only as a concept but also as a discrete chronological period.

Also by means of introduction, in a volume that honours Graham Loud it is appropriate to reflect on Loud’s contributions to the field.⁶ While he was not the first scholar to explore the fertile research ground of medieval southern Italy, he has done much over his career to introduce Norman Italy to a broader anglophone audience.⁷ His publications range so widely in genre and subject that this introduction cannot possibly touch upon them all. However, several themes and priorities in his scholarship stand out. First of all, his key monographs (thus far) largely though not exclusively explore Norman Italy’s political and ecclesiastical history: Church and Society in the Norman Principality of Capua, 1058–1197 (1985), The Age of Robert Guiscard: Southern Italy and Norman Conquest (2000) and The Latin Church in Norman Italy (2007).

In addition to the themes that fuel Loud’s historical enquiries, a signal feature of his work is how much of his output has contributed to the creation of a research field virtually from the ground up and in effect has blazed the path for others to follow. As Abulafia’s chapter in this volume suggests, the scholars working on Norman Italy in any language were not numerous before Loud. For Loud, as for many of us working in the closing decades of the twentieth century, basic information about Norman Italy was not easy to uncover. Graham helped to create a base of knowledge for the field not only with his major monographs but also with dozens of articles, studies fanning out in manifold scholarly directions.⁸ He, moreover, has written encyclopedic and synthetic accounts of the Norman period flowing from his unrivalled knowledge of original sources.⁹ Beyond his trailblazing original scholarship, among Loud’s most enduring legacies are his meticulous and readable translations of the principal southern Italian chronicles, among them the works of Alexander of Telese, Romuald of Salerno, Falco of Benevento and ‘Hugo Falcandus’, as well as other major texts.¹⁰ These translations have made the field accessible to a new group of anglophone researchers and students. And it is now possible to teach medieval southern Italian history in the classroom, to bring the field more clearly into the orbit of medieval Italian history and to integrate it into the narrative of the broader medieval world.¹¹

By the time this volume appears, it is likely that Loud will have neared completion of his next major project, The Social World of the Abbey of Cava, c.1020–1300. It plumbs the vast archive of the Benedictine monastery of the Holy Trinity at Cava de’ Tirreni as a springboard for a social and economic history of the principality of Salerno. In undertaking this research project on the abbey and its social world in the central Middle Ages, Loud acknowledges the influence of Annaliste historians – among them Jean-Marie Martin, whose work appears in this volume – who explored fundamental cultural, geographic, environmental, economic and social structures.¹² Loud’s familiarity with the Cava materials makes him uniquely well suited to pursue this project. Indeed, it was Loud who introduced a number of us to the documentary riches contained in this monastic archive in the small town south-east of Naples, just outside Salerno.

Finally, the breadth of Loud’s impact on the field is reflected in the international assemblage of scholars eager to participate in this volume. It is no coincidence that this collection’s non-anglophone contributors remark upon Loud’s membership in the European community of scholars, especially scholars in southern Italy and Germany.¹³ The embracing of Loud by these academic circles has in turn enabled him to make the international corpus of scholarship accessible to English-speaking scholars lacking the connections he has carefully forged and tended across his career.¹⁴ Here, the internationally diverse contributors uncover fruitful interconnections within the ever-growing British, North American, Italian, French and German historiographies of Norman Italy, a testament to the field’s fracturing of national and regional academic boundaries, one of Professor Loud’s greatest legacies.

This collection offers a wide-ranging, holistic examination of Norman Italy’s role in some of the medieval world’s most important transitions, and, conversely, assesses how these currents of change made themselves manifest in Norman Italy. Until recently, there have been few volumes of essays dedicated to Norman Italy since Loud and Metcalfe’s 2002 overview of the field.¹⁵ Collections more commonly include contributions on Norman Italy but focus more broadly on the greater Norman world and largely conceive of Norman Italy within the old paradigm of frontier and periphery.¹⁶ The contributions here emphasise the socio-cultural, religious and political histories of Norman Italy and then, either explicitly or implicitly, evaluate the region’s place in much wider transitions.

The contributors, moreover, reassess and recast the paradigm by which Norman Italy has been conventionally understood. Within the scholarly field, Norman Italy’s uniqueness has long rested on its geographic location on Latin Europe’s periphery, an environment that intermixed Latin Christians with Byzantine Greeks and Muslims and fostered a vibrant multiculturalism. While elements of this characterisation remain valid, continuing scholarly exploration is sparking a rising awareness of cross-pollination between Norman Italy and the wider medieval world in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. This collection’s studies underscore that Norman Italy was not just a parochial Norman nor Mediterranean entity but also an integral player in a number of medieval worlds. This volume consequently endeavours to move the field’s emphasis beyond the frontier and to articulate both Norman Italy’s contribution to broader historical currents and the impact in turn of these currents upon Norman Italy, an instance of reciprocal influence perhaps surpassing the sum of its parts. This focus has led the volume’s scholars to explore many broader realms in which Norman Italy participated, including the secular and monastic Church, aristocratic networks, the papacy, crusading, urbanisation, Byzantium and Islam.

The volume clusters around four major strands in current scholarship about Norman Italy, themes that Loud himself pioneered:

1 Historiographies

2 Identities and communities

3 Religion and the Church

4 Conquering Norman Italy and beyond

(1) Historiographies: Abulafia and Russo address different aspects of the historiographical development of Norman Italy studies. Abulafia’s focused exploration of British scholarship on Norman Italy from its inception through the early 1970s shows how the historiographical construction of the region has evolved and provides the context in which Loud’s pioneering work emerged. Russo reassesses modern historiography with an eye to the rising interest since the mid-1970s in the Italian portion of the Norman experience, and he then revisits medieval writers of history to test how comfortably the framing of Norman expansion in Italy as part of an ‘imperial’ venture fits. D’Angelo offers a provocative rereading of an incident in the Regno’s political life that is recounted by one of the major chroniclers, Falco of Benevento, and shows how our understanding both of the history of Norman Italy and of the Normans’ own historiography remains a work in progress. Metcalfe edits, translates and contextualises a name-list of Sicilian Muslims subject to a Christian abbey at Cefalù, a document suggesting new historiographical pathways, especially for prosopography and socio-economic history.

(2) Identities and communities: Birk, Krumm, Tounta and Oldfield all speak to the formation of identity by individual communities in Norman Italy’s multicultural environment. Birk examines the evolving impressions of a Muslim intellectual, Ibn Jubayr, regarding the vicissitudes of the Muslim experience as he visited far-flung Muslim communities not only under Muslim rule in the Dār al-Islām but also under Christian sway in the kingdoms of Jerusalem and Sicily. Krumm looks at the emergence of urban identity with its attendant civil strife through the...