. In 1016, Norman pilgrims returning from the Holy Land disembarked at Bari, then in revolt against the Byzantine emperor. Hiring themselves out as mercenaries, first to one and then to another side in the wars waged between and among Byzantines in Apulia and Lombards in Campania, both of whom were threatened by Arabs in Calabria and Sicily, they enriched themselves and invited their friends and relatives to join them from Normandy, where many lesser nobles had landless younger sons.
Of the Normans who came south, twelve brothers of the Hauteville family gradually got the upper hand, finally annexing the principality of Capua in 1078. William Iron Arm, Drogo, and Humphrey had conquered northern Apulia. William was elected count of all the Normans in Italy, a position inherited by Drogo in 1046. Their younger brother Robert, surnamed Guiscard (“wily”), a virtual brig-and in Calabria, where he and his followers maintained themselves by pillaging the inhabitants, succeeded Humphrey as count in 1057. Robert and his youngest brother, Roger, completed the conquest of southern Italy by capturing Bari, the last Byzantine stronghold, on April 16, 1071. The Byzantines could not effectively resist them because most of their army had to face the Seljuk Turks, who crushed them at Manzikert in August of that year.
In 1053, at Civitate, the Normans captured Pope Leo IX, who had opposed their encroachments on the papal states. Pope Nicholas II used the Normans as allies against local enemies as well as the German and Byzantine emperors. He made Robert Guiscard a duke and his vassal in 1059. The Norman-papal alliance bore fruit in 1084, when Robert responded to the appeals of his suzerain and routed the emperor Henry IV, who was besieging Pope Gregory VII in the Castel Sant’ Angelo in Rome. Robert himself died in 1085, during a three-year campaign against the Byzantines and Venetians, during which he seized Avelona and Durazzo and penetrated as far as Thessaly. By that time, his brother Roger had nearly completed the conquest of Sicily, which he had invaded from Calabria, seizing Messina in 1061. Noto, the last Arab outpost, fell to him in 1091.
During the First Crusade, Robert’s oldest son, Bohe-mund, seized Antioch and took the title of prince in the face of Byzantine claims to the city. Hostility between the Hautevilles and Constantinople undermined cooperation between crusaders and Byzantines. Antioch remained a Latin principality until 1287. Roger’s younger son, Roger II of Sicily (r. 1105–54), inherited Apulia in 1127 from his cousin, Bohemund’s son William, and added Capua and Naples (1139) and Abruzzi (1140). In 1130, he received the crown of Sicily at Palermo from the antipope Anacletus II. Roger continued his father’s policy of romanizing the Orthodox and protecting Greek, Arab, Jew, and Lombard in his French-speaking court, which promulgated documents in Arabic and Greek as well as in Latin. He combined Arab and Byzantine autocratic law, taxes, and bureaucratic traditions with Norman feudalism. Normans came to Sicily from England, the other most developed Catholic monarchy of the 12th century. The institutions of each kingdom influenced the other’s, but the Sicilian realm was more advanced. Its economy was more monetized, its trade more valuable, its cities larger and richer, and its culture more sophisticated. Roger II occupied Malta and Tripoli and made Tunis pay him tribute. He divided his diverse kingdom into judiciarates.
Under Roger’s son William I the Bad (r. 1154–66), domestic revolts and governmental ineptitude caused the loss of Roger’s African conquests. His successor, William II the Good (r. 1166–89), supported Pope Alexander III against the German and Byzantine emperors. Both Wil-liams sought to dominate the Mediterranean from Tunisia and the Adriatic from their possessions at Corfu, Durazzo, and Cephalonia.
William II’s marriage to Joan, the daughter of Henry II of England, proved childless, and his death was followed by civil war. His preferred successor, his aunt Constance, was married to Henry VI, soon to become emperor. Her half-brother, Roger II’s illegitimate son Tan-cred, seized the throne and ruled with the support of Norman barons, but at his death in 1194 Henry VI dispossessed his son William III, bringing an end to the Haute-villes’ rule. At the death of Henry (1197) and Constance (1198), their child, Frederick II, inherited the throne under the guardianship of Pope Innocent III. The population and prosperity of Sicily continued to grow until the 1190s. Roger II was the richest sovereign in Catholic Europe, and William II’s revenues rivaled those of the king of England. En route to the Third Crusade, Richard the Lionhearted wintered in Sicily with his cousin Tancred. Along with Spain, Sicily became the chief conduit of Arabic knowledge to the West. Roger II and his successors patronized translators of Jewish and Arabic works into Latin. Its Jew-ish physicians and Arabic learning made the old Lombard capital of Salerno Europe’s leading medical center, considered by some to be the oldest university. St. Benedict’s abbey of Monte Cassino, on the border between the Regno and the papal states, and the Basilian monasteries of southern Italy, were centers of learning. To Monte Cassino came Constantine the African, a monk who translated treatises by Greek and Arabic doctors into Latin. Nowhere else did Arabic, Greek, and Latin culture coexist together in such peace and toleration, and no kingdom contributed more to the cultural renaissance of the 12th century. Roger II and his ministers, such as his grand-admiral, George of Antioch, endowed churches built in the Arabo-Byzantine style peculiar to the island, although the Gothic style predominated later with the cathedrals at Palermo and Monreale. The court of Frederick II (r. 1197–1250) witnessed the culmination of Norman scholarship.
Bruhl, Carl Richard, ed. Rogerii II regis diplomata Latina. Cologne: Bohlau, 1987. [Codex diplomaticus regni Siciliae sub auspiciis Academiae Panormitanae Scientiarum Litterarum et Artium.]
Douglas, David C. The Norman Achievement. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969.
Matthew, Donald. The Norman Kingdom of Sicily. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Norwich, John Julius. The Normans in the South. 2 vols. London: Longman, 1967.
This is the complete article, containing 1,013 words
(approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page).
