Mediterranean were the outgrowth of those pilgrimages to holy places
which play so important a part in mediæval life and literature.
Originating in the early veneration for the shrines associated with
the beginnings of Christianity and the sufferings and death of the
Christian martyrs, pilgrimages were in course of time reënforced by
the more practical motives of healing and penance, until the crowds of
pilgrims who haunted the roads in the later Middle Ages included many a
hoary offender who sought to expiate his sins by this particular form
of good works. Sometimes these penitents would be sent to wander about
the earth for a definite time, more frequently they would be assigned
a journey to a neighboring shrine or to some more famous fountain of
healing grace, such as Compostela, Rome, or Jerusalem. Compostela,
hiding among the Galician hills the bones of no less an apostle than
St. James the Greater, who became in time the patron saint of Spain and
spread the name of Santiago over two continents, was early a centre of
pilgrimage from France, and claimed as one of its devotees the mighty
Charlemagne, the footsteps of whose paladins men traced through the
dark defiles of the Pyrenees in the _Song of Roland_, as well as in
the special itinerary prepared for the use of French pilgrims to the
tomb of the saint. Rome was of course more important, for it claimed
two apostles, as well as their living successor on the pontifical
throne. It needed no pious invention to prove that Charlemagne had
been in Rome and had received the imperial crown as he knelt in St.
Peter’s, and men told how in their own time the great king Canute had
betaken himself thither with staff and scrip and many horses laden with
gold and silver. Already the number of strangers in Rome was so great
that guide-books were compiled indicating its principal sights and
marvels--“seeing Rome,” we might call them--; and as the processions
wound into sight of the Eternal City, they burst into its praise in
that wonderful pilgrim’s chorus:--
O Roma nobilis, orbis et domina,
Cunctarum urbium excellentissima,
Roseo martyrum sanguine rubea,
Albis et virginum liliis candida;
Salutem dicimus tibi per omnia,
Te benedicimus: salve per secula.
Jerusalem was most precious of all, by reason both of its sacred
associations and of the difficulty of the journey. No Charlemagne was
needed to justify resort to the Holy Sepulchre, where the mother of the
great emperor Constantine had built the first shrine; but the great
Charles had a hostel constructed there for Frankish pilgrims, and soon
legend makes him, too, follow the road to Constantinople and Jerusalem,
as we are reminded in the great Charlemagne window at Chartres. There
were manuals for the pilgrim to Jerusalem also, but these were chiefly
occupied with how to reach the heavenly city, though one of them
contents itself with advising the traveller to keep his face always to
the east and ask God’s help.
In all this life of the road the Normans took their full share.
Michelet would have it that their motive was the Norman spirit of gain,
no longer able to plunder neighbors at home, but glad of the chance of
making something on the way and the certainty of gaining a hundred per
cent by assuring the soul’s salvation at the journey’s end. Certainly
they were not afraid to travel nor averse to taking advantage of
the opportunities which travel might bring. We find them, sometimes
singly and sometimes in armed bands, on the road to Spain, to Rome,
and to the Holy City. At one time it may be the duke himself, Robert
the Magnificent, who wends his way with a goodly company to the Holy
Sepulchre, only to die at Nicæa on his return; or a holy abbot, like
Thierry of Saint-Évroul, denied the sight of the earthly Jerusalem
which he sought, but turning his thoughts to the city not made with
hands as he composed himself for his last sleep before a lonely altar
on the shores of Cyprus. In other cases we find the military element
preponderating, as with Roger of Toeni, who led an army against the
Saracens of Spain in the time of Duke Richard the Good, or Robert
Crispin half a century later, fighting in Spain, sojourning in Italy,
and finally passing into the service of the emperor at Constantinople,
where he had “much triumph and much victory.” In this stirring world
the line between pilgrim and adventurer was not easy to draw, and
the Normans did not always draw it. Often “their penitent’s garb
covered a coat of mail,” and they carried a great sword along with
their pilgrim’s staff and wallet.[61] We must remember that Normandy
exported in this period a considerable supply of younger sons, bred to
a life of warfare and fed upon the rich nourishment of the _chansons de
gestes_, but turned loose upon the world to seek elsewhere the lands
and booty and deeds of renown which they could no longer expect to find
at home. The conquest of England gave an outlet to this movement in one
direction; the conquest of southern Italy absorbed it in another.
* * * * *
In the eleventh century, as in the early nineteenth, Italy was merely
a geographical expression. The unity of law and government which it
had enjoyed under the Romans had been long since broken by the Lombard
invasion and the Frankish conquest, which drew the centre and north
of the peninsula into the currents of western politics, while the
south continued to look upon Constantinople as its capital and Sicily
passed under the dominion of the Prophet and the Fatimite caliphs of
Cairo. Separated from the rest of Italy by the lofty barrier of the
Abruzzi and the wedge of territory which the Papacy had driven through
the lines of communication to the west, the southern half followed
a different course of historical development from the days of the
Lombards to those of Garibaldi. Nature had thrust it into the central
place in the Mediterranean world, to which the gulfs and bays of its
long coast-line opened the rich hinterland of Campania and Apulia and
the natural highways beyond. Here had sprung up those cities of Magna
Graæcia which were the cradle of Italian civilization; here the Romans
had their chief harbors at Pozzuoli and Brindisi and their great naval
base at Cape Miseno; here the ports of Gaeta, Naples, Amalfi, and Bari
kept intercourse with the East open during the Middle Ages. And if the
genius of Hamilcar and Hannibal had once sought to tear the south and
its islands from Italy to unite them with a Carthaginian empire, their
close relations with Africa had again been asserted by the raids and
conquests of the Saracens, while their connection with the East made
them the last stronghold of Byzantine power beyond the Adriatic. In
the long run, however, it has been pointed out that, if the culture
of this region came from the south, its masters have come from the
north;[62] and its new masters of the eleventh century were to unify
and consolidate it at the very time when the rest of the peninsula was
breaking up into warring communes and principalities. In the year 1000
the unity of the south was largely formal. The Eastern Empire still
claimed authority, but the northern region was entirely independent
under the Lombard princes of Capua, Benevento, and Salerno, while the
maritime republics of Naples, Gaeta, and Amalfi owed at best only a
nominal subjection. The effective power of Byzantium was limited to the
extreme south, where its governors and tax-collectors ruled in both
Apulia and Calabria. Of the two districts Calabria, now the toe of
the boot, was the more Greek, in religion and language as well as in
political allegiance, but its scattered cities were unable to defend
themselves against a vigorous attack. The large Lombard population of
Apulia retained its speech and its law and showed no attachment to its
Greek rulers, whose exactions in taxes and military service brought
neither peace and security within nor protection from the raids of the
Saracens. There was abundant material for a revolt, and the Normans
furnished the occasion.
The first definite trace of the Normans in Italy appears in or about
the year 1016, when a band returning from Jerusalem is found at Monte
Gargano on the eastern coast. There was here an ancient shrine of St.
Michael, older even than the famous monastery of St. Michael of the
Peril on the confines of Normandy with which it had shared the red
cloak of its patron, and a natural object of veneration on the part
of Norman pilgrims, who well understood the militant virtues of the
archangel of the flaming sword. Here the Normans fell into conversation
with a Lombard named Meles, who had recently led an unsuccessful revolt
in Apulia and who told them that with a few soldiers like themselves
he could easily overcome the Greeks, whereupon they promised to return
with their countrymen and assist him. Another story of the same year
tells of a body of forty valiant Normans, also on their way home from
the Holy Sepulchre, who found a Saracen army besieging Salerno and,
securing arms and horses from the natives, defeated and drove off the
infidel host. Besought by the inhabitants to stay, they replied that
they had acted only for the love of God, but consented to carry home
lemons, almonds, rich vestments, and other products of the south as
a means of attracting other Normans to make their homes in this land
of milk and honey. Legend doubtless has its part in these tales,--the
good Orderic makes the twenty thousand Saracens in front of Salerno
flee before a hundred Normans!--but the general account of the occasion
of the Norman expeditions seems correct. Possibly a Lombard emissary
accompanied the pilgrims home to help in the recruiting; certainly in
1017 the Normans are back in force and ready for business. There was,
however, nothing sensational or decisive in the early exploits of the
Normans on Italian soil. The results of the first campaigns with Meles
in northern Apulia were lost in a serious defeat at Canne, and for
many years the Normans, few in number but brave and skilful, sought
their individual advantage in the service of the various parties in
the game of Italian politics, passing from one prince to another as
advantage seemed to offer, and careful not to give to any so decisive
a preponderance that he might dispense with them. The first Norman
principality was established about 1030 at Aversa, just north of
Naples, where the money of Rouen continued to circulate more than a
century afterward; but such definite points of crystallization make
their appearance but slowly, and the body of the Normans, constantly
recruited from home, lived as mercenaries on pay and pillage. Their
reputation was, however, established, and when the prince of Salerno
was asked by the Pope to disband his Norman troop, he replied that it
had cost him much time and money to collect this precious treasure,
for whom the soldiers of the enemy were “as meat before the devouring
lions.”[63]
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.