Part 14

Among the Norman leaders the house of Hauteville stands out preëminently, both as the dominant force in this formative period and as the ancestor of the later princes of southern Italy and Sicily. The head of the family, Tancred, held the barony of Hauteville, in the neighborhood of Coutances, but his patrimony was quite insufficient to provide for his twelve sons, most of whom went to seek their fortune in the south, an elder group consisting of William of the Iron Arm, Drogo, and Humphrey, and a younger set of half-brothers, of whom the most important are Robert Guiscard and Roger. At the outset scarcely distinguishable from their fellow-warriors, _li fortissime Normant_ of their historian Aimé, the exploits of these brothers are celebrated by the later chroniclers in a way which reminds us less of sober history than of the heroes of the sagas or the _chansons de gestes_. William of the Iron Arm and Drogo seem to have arrived in the south about 1036 and soon signalized themselves in the first invasion of Sicily and in the conquest of northern Apulia, where William was chosen leader, or count, by the other Normans and at his death in 1046 succeeded by Drogo, who was soon afterward invested with the county by the Emperor Henry III. It was apparently in this year that Robert Guiscard first came to Italy. Refused assistance by his brothers, he hired himself out to various barons until he was left by Drogo in charge of a small garrison in the mountains of Calabria. Here he lived like a brigand, carrying off the cattle and sheep of the inhabitants and holding the people themselves for ransom. On one occasion he laid an ambush for the Greek commandant of Bisignano whom he had invited to a conference, and compelled him to pay twenty thousand golden _solidi_ for his freedom. Brigand as he was, Robert was more than a mere bandit. His shrewdness and resourcefulness early gained him the name of Guiscard, or the wary, and his Byzantine contemporary, the princess Anna Comnena, has left a portrait of him in which his towering stature, flashing eye, and bellowing strength are matched by his overleaping ambition and desire to dominate, his skill in organization, and his unconquerable will. Allied by marriage to a powerful baron of the south, he soon began to make headway in the conquest of Calabria, and while Drogo and his brother Humphrey were jealous of Robert’s advancement, at Humphrey’s death in 1057 he was chosen to succeed as count and leader of the Normans. Leaving to the youngest brother Roger, just arrived from Hauteville, the conquest of Calabria and the first attempts on Sicily, Guiscard gave his attention particularly to the affairs of Apulia, and after a series of campaigns and revolts completed the subjugation of the mainland by the capture of Bari in 1071. Five years after the battle of Hastings the whole of southern Italy had passed under Norman rule. The south had been conquered, but for whom? Robert was no king, and a mere count must have, for form’s sake at least, a feudal superior. And this part, strangely enough, was taken by the Pope.

The relations of the Normans with the Papacy form not the least remarkable chapter in the extraordinary history of their dominion in the south. This period of expansion coincided with the great movement of revival and reform in the church which was taken up with vigor by the German Popes of the middle of the century and culminated some years later in the great pontificate of Gregory VII. So far as the Italian policy of the Papacy was concerned, the movement seems to have had two aspects, an effort to put an end to the disorders produced by simony and by the marriage of the clergy, evils aggravated in the south by the conflicting authority of the Greek and Latin bishops, and a desire to extend the temporal power and influence of the Pope in the peninsula. In both of these directions the conquests of the Normans seemed to threaten the papal interests, and we are not surprised to find the first of this vigorous series of Popes, Leo IX, interfering actively in the ecclesiastical affairs of the region and acting as the defender of the native population, which appealed to him and, in the case of Benevento, formally placed itself under his protection. Finally, with a body of troops collected in Germany and in other parts of Italy, he met the Normans in battle at Civitate, in 1053, and suffered an overwhelming defeat which clearly established the Norman supremacy in Italy. The Normans could not, however, follow up their victory as if it had been won over an ordinary enemy; indeed they seem to have felt a certain embarrassment in the situation, and after humbling themselves before the Pope, they treated him with respect and deference which did not prevent their keeping him for some months in honorable detention at Benevento. Plainly the Normans were not to be subdued by force of arms, and it soon became evident to the reforming party that they would be useful allies against the Roman nobles and the unreformed clergy, as well as against the dangerous authority of the German emperor. Accordingly in 1059, the year in which the college of cardinals received its first definite constitution as the electors of the Pope, Nicholas II held a council at the Norman hill-fortress of Melfi, attended by the higher clergy of the south and also by the two chief Norman princes, Richard of Aversa and Robert Guiscard. In return for the Pope’s investiture of their lands, these princes took an oath of allegiance and fealty to the Holy See and agreed to pay an annual rent to the Pope for their domains; in Robert’s oath, which has been preserved, he styles himself “by the grace of God and St. Peter duke of Apulia and Calabria and, with their help, hereafter of Sicily.” As duke and vassal of the Pope, the cattle-thief of the Calabrian mountains had henceforth a recognized position in feudal society.

Guiscard, however, was not the man to rest content with the position he had won, or to interpret his obligation of vassalage as an obligation of obedience. He was soon in the field again, pushing up the west coast to Amalfi and up the east into the Abruzzi, taking no great pains as he went to distinguish the lands of St. Peter from the lands of others. The Pope began to ask himself what he had secured by the alliance, and a definite break was soon followed by the excommunication of the Norman leader. By this time the papal see was occupied by Gregory VII, who as Hildebrand had long been the power behind the throne under his predecessors, the greatest, the most intense, and the most uncompromising of the Popes of the eleventh century; yet even he failed to bend the Norman to his will. Fearing a combination with his bitterest enemy, the Emperor Henry IV, he finally made peace with Guiscard, and in the renewal of fealty and investiture which followed, the recent conquests of the Normans were expressly excepted. No great time elapsed before the Pope was forced to make a desperate appeal for Norman aid. After repeated attempts Henry IV got control of Rome, shut up Gregory in the Castle of Sant’ Angelo, and installed another Pope in his place, who crowned Henry emperor in St. Peter’s. Then, in May, 1084, Guiscard’s army came. The emperor made what might be called ‘a strategic retreat’ to the north, the siege of Sant’ Angelo was raised, and Rome was given over to butchery and pillage by the Normans and their Saracen troops. Fire followed the sword, till the greater part of the city had been burned. Ancient remains and Christian churches such as San Clemente were ruined by the flames, and quarters like the Cælian Hill have never recovered from the destruction. The monuments of ancient Rome suffered more from the Normans than from the Vandals. Unable to maintain himself in Rome without a protector, Gregory accompanied his Norman allies southward as far as Salerno, now a Norman city, where he died the following year, protesting to the last that he died in exile because he had “loved justice and hated iniquity.” The year 1085 also saw the end of Robert Guiscard. Sought as an ally alike by the emperors of the East and of the West, he had begun three years earlier a series of campaigns against the Greek empire, seizing the ports of Avlona and Durazzo which were then as now the keys to the Adriatic, and battling with the Venetians by sea and the Greeks by land until his troops penetrated as far as Thessaly. He finally succumbed to illness on the island of Cephalonia at the age of seventy, and was buried in his Apulian monastery of Venosa, where Norman monks sang the chants of Saint-Évroul over a tomb which commemorated him as “the terror of the world”:--

Hic terror mundi Guiscardus; hic expulit Urbe Quem Ligures regem, Roma, Lemannus habent. Parthus, Arabs, Macedumque phalanx non texit Alexin. At fuga; sed Venetum nec fuga nec pelagus.[64]

With the passing of Robert Guiscard the half-century of Norman conquest is practically at an end, to be followed by another half-century of rivalry and consolidation, until Roger II united all the Norman conquests under a single ruler and took the title of king in 1130, just a hundred years after the foundation of the first Norman principality at Aversa. Guiscard’s lands and title of duke passed to his son Roger, generally called Roger Borsa to distinguish him from his uncle and cousin of the same name. The Norman possessions in Calabria and the recent acquisitions in Sicily remained in the hands of Guiscard’s brother Count Roger, nominally a vassal of the duke of Apulia, while the northern principality of Capua kept its independence, to be subsequently exchanged for feudal vassalage. Roger of Apulia, however, was a weak ruler, in spite of the good will of the church and his uncle’s support, and the revolt of his brother Bohemond and the Apulian barons threatened the land with feudal disintegration. Want of governance was likewise writ large over the reign of his son William, who succeeded as duke in 1111 and ruled till 1127. Guiscard’s real successor as a political and military leader was his brother Roger, conqueror and organizer of Sicily and founder of a state which his more famous son turned into a kingdom.

Once master of Calabria, Count Roger had begun to cast longing eyes beyond the Straits of Messina at the rich island which has in all ages proved a temptation to the rulers of the south. No member of the house of Hauteville, their panegyrist tells us, ever saw a neighbor’s lands without wanting them for himself, and in this case there was profit for the soul as well as for the body if the count could “win back to the worship of the true God a land given over to infidelity, and administer temporally for the divine service the fruits and rents usurped by a race unmindful of God.”[65] The language is that of Geoffrey Malaterra; the excuse meets us throughout the world’s history--six centuries earlier when Clovis bore it ill that the Arian Visigoths should possess a fair portion of Gaul which might become his, six centuries later when Emmanuel Downing thought it sin to tolerate the devil-worship of the Narragansetts “if upon a Just warre the Lord should deliver them” to be exchanged for the “gaynefull pilladge” of negro slaves;[66] nor is the doctrine without advocates in our own day. We may think of the conquest of Sicily as a sort of crusade before the Crusades, decreed by no church council and spread abroad by no preaching or privileges, but conceived and executed by Norman enterprise and daring. Like the greater crusades in the East, it profited by the disunion of the Moslem; like them, too, it did not scruple to make alliances with the infidel and to leave him in peaceful cultivation of his lands when all was over.

The conquest of Sicily began with the capture of Messina in 1061 and occupied thirty years. It was chiefly the work of Roger, though Guiscard aided him throughout the earlier years and claimed a share in the results for himself, as well as vassalage for Roger’s portion. The decisive turning-point was a joint enterprise, the siege and capture of Palermo in 1072, which gave the Normans control of the Saracen capital, the largest city in Sicily, with an all-anchoring harbor from which it took its name. The Saracens, however, still held the chief places of the island: the ancient Carthaginian strongholds of the west and centre, Eryx and ‘inexpugnable Enna,’ known since mediæval times as Castrogiovanni; Girgenti, “most beautiful city of mortals,” with its ancient temples and olive groves rising from the shores of the African Sea; Taormina, looking up at the snows and fires of Etna and forth over Ionian waters to the bold headlands of Calabria; and Syracuse, sheltering a Saracen fleet in that great harbor which had witnessed the downfall of Athenian greatness. To subdue all these and what lay between required nineteen years of hard fighting, varied, of course, by frequent visits to Roger’s possessions on the mainland and frequent expeditions in aid of his nephew, but requiring, even when the great count was present in person, military and diplomatic skill of a high order. When, however, the work was done and the last Saracen stronghold, Noto, surrendered in 1091, Count Roger had under his dominion a strong and consolidated principality, where Greeks and Mohammedans enjoyed tolerance for their speech and their faith, where a Norman fortress had been constructed in every important town, and where the barons, holding in general small and scattered fiefs, owed loyal obedience to the count who had made their fortunes, a sharp contrast to the turbulent feudalism of Apulia, which looked upon the house of Hauteville as leaders but not as masters. Roger was also in a position to treat with a free hand the problems of the church, reorganizing at his pleasure the dioceses which had disappeared under Mohammedan rule, and receiving from Pope Urban II in 1098 for himself and his heirs the dignity of apostolic legate in Sicily, so that other legates were excluded and the Pope could treat with the Sicilian church only through the count. This extraordinary privilege, the foundation of the so-called ‘Sicilian monarchy’ in ecclesiastical matters, was the occasion of ever-recurring disputes in later times, but the success of Roger’s crusade against the infidel seemed at the moment to justify so unusual a concession.

At his death in 1101 Roger I left behind him two sons, Simon and Roger, under the regency of their mother Adelaide. Four years later Simon died, leaving as the undisputed heir of the Sicilian and Calabrian dominions the ten-year-old Roger II, who at the age of sixteen took personal control of the government. During the regency the capital had crossed the Straits of Messina from the old Norman headquarters in the Calabrian hills at Mileto, where Roger I lay buried; henceforth it was fixed at Palermo, fit centre for a Mediterranean state. When his cousin William died, Roger II was quick to seize the Apulian inheritance, which he had to vindicate in the field not only against the revolted barons but against the Pope, anxious to prevent at all cost the consolidation of the Norman possessions in the hands of a single ruler. Securing his investiture with Apulia from Pope Honorius II in 1128, Roger two years later took advantage of the disputed election to the Papacy to obtain from Anacletus II the dignity of king; and on Christmas Day, 1130, he was crowned and anointed at Palermo, taking henceforth the title “by the grace of God king of Sicily, Apulia, and Calabria, help and shield of the Christians, heir and son of the great Count Roger.” What this kingdom was to mean in the history and culture of Europe we shall consider in the next lecture.

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Meanwhile, in order to complete our survey of the deeds of the Normans in the south, we must take some notice of the part they played in the Crusades and in the Latin East. A movement which comprised the whole of western Europe, and even made Jerusalem-farers out of their kinsmen of the Scandinavian north, could not help affecting a people such as the Normans, who had already served a long apprenticeship as pilgrims to distant shrines and as soldiers of the cross in Spain and Sicily. Three Norman prelates were present at Clermont in 1095 when Pope Urban fired the Latin world with the cry _Dieu le veut_, and they carried back to Normandy the council’s decrees and the news of the holy war. The crusade does not, however, seem to have had any special preachers in Normandy, where we hear of no such scenes as accompanied the fiery progress of Peter the Hermit through Lorraine and the Rhineland, and of none of the popular movements which sent men to their death under Peter’s leadership in the Danube valley and beyond the Bosporus. Pioneers and men-at-arms rather than enthusiasts and martyrs, the Normans kept their heads when Europe was seething with the new adventure, and the combined band of Normans, Bretons, and English which set forth in September, 1096, does not appear to have been very large. At its head, however, rode the duke of Normandy, Robert Curthose, called by his contemporaries ‘the soft duke,’ knightly, kind-hearted, and easy-going, incapable of refusing a favor to any one, under whom the good peace of the Conqueror’s time had given way to general disorder and confusion. Impecunious as always, he had been obliged to pawn the duchy to his brother William Rufus in order to raise the funds for the expedition. With him went his fighting uncle, Odo of Bayeux, and the duke’s chaplain Arnulf, more famous in due time as patriarch of Jerusalem. It does not appear that Robert was an element of special strength in the crusading host, although he fought by the side of the other leaders at Nicæa and Antioch and at the taking of Jerusalem. He spent the winter pleasantly in the south of Italy on his way to the East, so that he reached Constantinople after most of the others had gone ahead, and he slipped away from the hardships of the siege of Antioch to take his ease amidst the pleasant fare and Cyprian wines of Laodicea[67]--Robert was always something of a Laodicean! When his vows as a crusader had been fulfilled at the Holy Sepulchre, he withdrew from the stern work of the new kingdom of Jerusalem and started home, bringing back a Norman bride of the south for the blessing of St. Michael of the Peril, and hanging up his standard in his mother’s abbey-church at Caen. Legend, however, was kind to Robert: before long he had killed a giant Saracen in single combat and refused the crown of the Latin kingdom because he felt himself unworthy, until he became the hero of a whole long-forgotten cycle of romance.

The real Norman heroes of the First Crusade must be sought elsewhere, again among the descendants of Tancred of Hauteville. When Robert Curthose and his companions reached the south on their outward journey, they found the Norman armies engaged in the siege of Amalfi under the great Count Roger and Guiscard’s eldest son Bohemond, a fair-haired, deep-chested son of the north, “so tall in stature that he stood above the tallest men by nearly a cubit.” The fresh enterprise caught the imagination of Bohemond, who had lost the greater part of his father’s heritage to his brother Roger Borsa and saw the possibility of a new realm in the East; and, cutting a great cloak into crosses for himself and his followers, he withdrew from the siege and began preparations for the expedition to Palestine. Among those who bound themselves to the great undertaking were five grandsons and two great-grandsons of Tancred of Hauteville, chief among them Bohemond’s nephew Tancred, whose loyalty and prowess were to be proved on many a desperate battle-field of Syria. Commanding what was perhaps the strongest contingent in the crusading army and profiting by the experience of his campaigns in the Balkans in his father’s reign, Bohemond proved the most vigorous and resourceful leader of the First Crusade. His object, however, had little connection with the relief of the Eastern Empire or the liberation of the Holy City, but was directed toward the formation of a great Syrian principality for himself, such as the other members of his family had created in Italy and Sicily. As the centre for such a dominion Antioch was far better suited than Jerusalem both commercially and strategically, and Bohemond took good care to secure the control of this city for himself before obtaining the entrance of the crusading forces. He showed the Norman talent of conciliating the native elements--Greek, Syrian, and Armenian--in his new state, and for a time seemed in a fair way to build up a real Norman kingdom in the East. In the end, however, the Eastern Empire and the Turks proved too strong for him; he lost precious months in captivity among the Mussulmans, and when he had raised another great army in France and Italy some years later, he committed the folly of a land expedition against Constantinople which ended in disaster. Bohemond did not return to the East, and his bones are still shown to visitors beneath an Oriental mausoleum at Canosa, where Latin verses lament his loss to the cause of the Holy Land. Tancred struggled gallantly to maintain the position in Syria during his uncle’s absence, but he fought a losing fight, and the principality of Antioch dwindled into an outlying dependency of the kingdom of Jerusalem, in which relation it maintained its existence until the line became extinct with Bohemond VII in 1287.

Two other Norman princes appear as leaders in the course of the later Crusades, Richard the Lion-Hearted, whose participation in the Third Crusade we have already had occasion to notice, and Frederick II, who succeeded to the power and the policy of his Norman ancestors of the south. For each of these rulers, however, the crusade was merely an episode in the midst of other undertakings; the day of permanent Frankish states in Syria had gone by, and neither made any attempt at founding a Syrian kingdom. The Fourth Crusade was in no sense a Norman movement, so that the Normans did not contribute to the new France which the partition of the Eastern empire created on the Greek mainland, where Frankish castles rose to perpetuate the memory of Burgundian dukes of Athens and Lombard wardens of the pass of Thermopylæ. In the Frankish states of Syria we find a certain number of Norman names but no considerable Norman element in the Latin population. The fact is that the share of the Normans in the First Crusade was out of all proportion to their contribution to the permanent occupation of the East. The principality of Antioch was the only Norman state in the eastern Mediterranean, and its distinctively Norman character largely disappeared with the passing of Bohemond I and Tancred. Unlike their fellow-Christians of France and Italy, the Normans were not drawn by the commercial and colonizing side of the crusading movement. The Norman lands in England and Italy offered a sufficient field for colonial enterprise, and the results were more substantial and more lasting than the romantic but ephemeral creations of Frankish power in the East, while the position of the Syrian principalities as intermediaries in Mediterranean civilization was matched by the free intermixture of eastern and western culture in the kingdom of Sicily.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE