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.
* * * * *
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
The annals of the Norman conquest of southern Italy and Sicily are
best given by F. Chalandon, _Histoire de la domination normande en
Italie et en Sicile_ (Paris, 1907), I. O. Delarc, _Les Normands
en Italie_ (Paris, 1883), is fuller on the period before 1073,
but less critical. The Byzantine side of the story is given by J.
Gay, _L’Italie méridionale et l’empire byzantin_ (Paris, 1904);
the Saracen, by Michele Amari, _Storia dei Musulmani di Sicilia_
(Florence, 1854–72), III. There is nothing in English fuller
than the introductory chapters of E. Curtis, _Roger of Sicily_
(New York, 1912). Interesting historical sketches of particular
localities will be found in F. Lenormant, _La Grande-Grèce_ (Paris,
1881–84); and F. Gregorovius, _Apulische Landschaften_ (Leipzig,
1877). On the sanctuary of St. Michael on Monte Gargano, see E.
Gothein, _Die Culturentwickelung Süd-Italiens_ (Breslau, 1886), pp.
41–111.
* * * * *
No study has been made of the Normans in Spain; for the
pilgrimages to Compostela, see Bédier, _Les légendes épiques_,
III. For the Normans in the Byzantine empire see G. Schlumberger,
“Deux chefs normands des armées byzantines,” in _Revue historique_,
XVI, pp. 289–303 (1881).
* * * * *
There is nothing on the share of the Normans in the Crusades
analogous to P. Riant, _Les Scandinaves en Terre Sainte_ (Paris,
1865). The details can be picked out of R. Röhricht, _Geschichte
des Königreichs Jerusalem_ (Innsbruck, 1898), and _Geschichte des
ersten Kreuzzuges_ (Innsbruck, 1901). There is no satisfactory
biography of Robert Curthose; the legends concerning him are
discussed by Gaston Paris in _Comptes-rendus de l’Académie des
inscriptions_, 1890, pp. 207 _ff._ For the Norman princes of
Antioch, see B. Kugler, _Boemund und Tankred_ (Tübingen, 1862);
and G. Rey’s articles in the _Revue de l’Orient latin_, IV, pp.
321–407, VIII, pp. 116–57 (1896, 1900).
VIII
THE NORMAN KINGDOM OF SICILY
Of the widely separated lands which made up the greater Normandy of the
Middle Ages, none have drifted farther apart than Norman England and
Norman Sicily. Founded about the same time and not greatly different
in area, these states have lost all common traditions, until the
history of the southern Normans seems remote, in time as in space,
from their kinsmen of the north. With the widening of the historical
field, southern Italy and Sicily no longer occupy, as in Mediterranean
days, the centre of the historic stage, and the splendor of their early
history has been dimmed by earthquake and fever, by economic distress,
and by the debasing traditions of centuries of misrule. Neither in
language nor race nor political traditions does England recognize
relationship between the country of the Black Hand and the ‘mother of
parliaments.’ Yet if the English world has lost the feeling of kinship
for the people of the south, it has not lost feeling for the land. It
was no mere reminiscence of ‘Vergilian headlands’ and the thunders
of the Odyssey that drew Shelley to the Bay of Naples, Browning to
Sorrento, or, to take a parallel example elsewhere, Goethe to the
glowing orange-groves of Palermo. And it is not alone the poet whose
soul responds to
A castle, precipice-encurled,
In a gash of the wind-grieved Apennine;
or
A sea-side house to the farther South,
Where the baked cicala dies of drouth,
And one sharp tree--’tis a cypress--stands.
No land of the western Mediterranean has burnt itself so deeply into
the imagination and sentiment of the English-speaking peoples. Twice
has this vivid land of the south played a leading part in the world’s
life and thought, once under the Greeks, of “wind-swift thought and
city-founding mind,” as we may read in the marbles of Pæstum and
Selinus and in the deathless pages of Thucydides; and a second time
under the Norman princes and their Hohenstaufen successors, creators
of an extraordinarily vigorous and precocious state and a brilliant
cosmopolitan culture. If our interest in this brief period of Sicilian
greatness be not Norman, it is at least human, as in one of the
culminating points of Mediterranean civilization.
* * * * *
It must be emphasized at the outset that the history of this Norman
kingdom was brief. It had two rulers of genius, Roger II, 1130–54,
and his grandson Frederick II, 1198–1250, separated by the reigns of
William the Bad and William the Good,--contemporaries of Henry II of
England, and neither so bad nor so good as their names might lead us
to suppose,--Tancred of Lecce and his son William III, and Constance,
Roger’s daughter and Frederick’s mother, wife of the Hohenstaufen
Emperor Henry VI. It is usual to consider the Norman period as closing
with the deposition of William III in 1194 and to class Constance and
Frederick II with the Hohenstaufen. In the case of Constance there
seems to be no possible reason for this, for she was as Norman as any
of her predecessors and issued documents in her own name throughout
the remaining three years of her husband’s life and during the few
months of 1197–98 by which she survived him. With their son Frederick
II, half Norman and half Hohenstaufen, the question is perhaps even,
and the science of genetics has not yet advanced far enough to
enable us to classify and trace to their source the dominant and the
recessive elements in his inheritance. No one, however, can study him
at close range without discovering marked affinities with his Norman
predecessors, notably the second Roger, and the whole trend of recent
investigation goes to show that, in the field of government as in that
of culture, his policy is a continuation of the work of the Norman
kings, from whom much of his legislation is directly derived. Half
Norman by birth, Frederick was preponderantly Norman in his political
heritage. It was in Sicily that he grew up and began to rule, and in
Sicily that he did his really constructive work. To judge him as a
Hohenstaufen is only less misleading than to judge him as a German
king, for the centre and aim of his policy lay in the Mediterranean.
In Frederick’s sons, legitimate and illegitimate, the Norman strain
is still further attenuated, and as they had no real opportunity to
continue their father’s work, it matters little whether we call them
Normans or Hohenstaufen. The coming of Charles of Anjou ends this
epoch, and his victory at Tagliacozzo in 1268 seals the fate of the
dynasty. We may, if we choose, carry the Norman period to this point;
for all real purposes it ends with the death of Frederick in 1250. The
preceding one hundred and twenty years embrace the real life-history
of the Norman kingdom. Brief as this is, it is too long for a single
lecture, and we must limit ourselves to Roger and the two Williams,
touching on the developments of the thirteenth century only in the most
incidental fashion.
Throughout this period the territorial extent of the realm remained
practically unchanged, comprising Sicily, with Malta, and the southern
half of the Italian peninsula as far as Terracina on the western
coast and the river Tronto on the eastern. There were of course
times when the royal authority was disputed within and attacked from
without,--feudal revolts, raids by the Pisans, expeditions of the
German emperor, diplomatic contests with the Pope,--but it was not
permanently limited or shorn of its territories. There were, on the
other hand, moments of expansion, particularly by sea, for Sicily was
of necessity a naval power and early saw the importance of creating a
navy commensurate with its maritime position. The occupation of Tripoli
and Tunis by Roger II seized the Mediterranean by the throat; the
possession of Corfu threatened the freedom of the Adriatic; but neither
conquest was permanent, and in the main the Greek empire and the powers
of northern Africa succeeded in keeping the Sicilian kings within their
natural boundaries.
In area about four-fifths the size of England, the southern kingdom
showed far greater diversity, both in the land and in its inhabitants.
Stretching from the sub-tropical gardens of Sicily into the heart of
the highest Apennines, it was divided by mountain and sea into distinct
natural regions between which communication continues difficult even
to-day--the isolated valleys of the Abruzzi, the great plain of Apulia,
the ‘granite citadel’ of Calabria, the rich fields of Campania, the
commercial cities of the Bay of Naples and Gulf of Salerno, the
contrasted mountains and shore-lands of Sicily itself. The difficulties
of geography were increased by differences of race, religion, and
political traditions. The mass of the continental population was, of
course, of Italian origin, going back in part to the Samnite shepherds
of primitive Italy, and while it had been modified in many places by
the Lombard conquest, it retained its Latin speech and was subject to
the authority of the Latin church. Calabria, however, was now Greek,
in religion as in language, and the Greek element was considerable
in the cities of Apulia and flowed over into Sicily, where the chief
foreign constituent was African and Mohammedan. Politically, there was
a mixed inheritance of Lombard and Roman law, of Greek and Saracen
bureaucracy, of municipal independence, and of Norman feudalism,
entrenched in the mountain-fortresses of upper Apulia and the Abruzzi;
while the diverse origins of the composite state were expressed in the
sovereign’s official title, “king of Sicily, of the duchy of Apulia,
and of the principality of Capua.” The union of these conflicting
elements into a single strong state was the test and the triumph of
Norman statesmanship.
* * * * *
Plainly the terms of this political problem were quite different from
that set the Norman rulers of England. Whatever local divergences
careful study of Anglo-Saxon England may still reveal, there were
no differences of religion or of general political tradition, while
the rapidity of the conquest at the hands of a single ruler made
possible a uniform policy throughout the whole country. The convenient
formula of forfeiture and regrant of all the land, for example,
created at once uniformity of tenure and of social organization.
Moreover, as we have already seen, back of the Norman conquest of
England lay Normandy itself, firmly organized under a strong duke,
who took with him across the Channel his household officers and his
lay and spiritual counsellors to form the nucleus of his new central
government, which was in many respects one with the central government
of Normandy. In the south none of these favoring conditions prevailed.
A country composed of many diverse elements was conquered by different
leaders and at different times, so that there could be no question
of uniformity of system. Indeed there could be no system at all, for
the Normans came as individual adventurers, with no governmental
organization behind them, and the instruments of government which they
used had to be created as they went along. Whatever of Norman tradition
reached the south could come only in the subdivided and attenuated form
of individual influences. Furthermore, the Norman ingredient in the
population continued relatively small. The scattered bands of early
days were of course reënforced as time went on, but there was never
any general migration or any movement that affected the mass of the
population in town and country. If we had any statistics, we should
doubtless find that some hundreds or at most a few thousands would
cover the entire Norman population of Italy and Sicily. These brought
with them their speech, their feudal tenures, probably some elements of
Norman customary law; but, given their small numbers, they could not
hope to Normanize a vast country, where their language soon disappeared
and their identity was ultimately lost in the general mass. Under
such conditions there could be no general transplantation of Norman
institutions. The rulers were Norman, as were the holders of the great
fiefs, but, to speak paradoxically, the most Norman thing about their
government was its non-Norman character, that is to say, its quick
assimilation of alien elements and its statesmanlike treatment of
native customs and institutions. The Norman leaders were too wise to
attempt an impossible Normanization.
The policy of toleration in political and religious matters had its
beginnings in the early days of the Norman occupation, but it received
a broad application only in the course of the conquest of Sicily
by the Great Count, and was first fully and systematically carried
out by his son Roger II. In religion this meant the fullest liberty
for Greeks, Jews, and Mohammedans, and even the maintenance of the
hierarchy of the Greek Church and the encouragement and enrichment of
Basilian monasteries along with the Benedictine foundations which were
marked objects of Norman generosity. In law it meant the preservation
of local rights and customs and of the usages of the several distinct
elements in the population, Latin and Greek, Hebrew and Saracen. In
local administration it involved the retention of the local dignitaries
of the cities and the Byzantine offices of the _strategos_ and the
_catepan_, as well as the fiscal arrangements established by the
Saracens in Sicily. And finally in the central government itself, the
need of dealing wisely and effectively with the various peoples of the
kingdom necessitated the employment of men familiar with each of them,
and the maintenance of a secretarial bureau which issued documents in
Greek and Arabic as well as in Latin.
It was in the central administration that Roger II faced his freshest
problem, which was nothing less than the creation of a strong central
government for a kingdom which had never before been united under a
single resident ruler. His method was frankly eclectic. We are told
that he made a point of inquiring carefully into the practices of other
kings and countries and adopting anything in them which seemed to him
valuable, and that he drew to his court from every land, regardless of
speech and faith, men who were wise in counsel or distinguished in war,
among whom the brilliant admiral George of Antioch is a conspicuous
example. Nevertheless we should err if we thought of him as making a
mere artificial composite. The Calabria of his youth had preserved a
stiff tradition of Byzantine administration, and the Mohammedans of
Sicily had an even stronger bureaucracy at work. Roger’s capital was
at Palermo, and it was natural that the Greek and Saracen institutions
of Sicily and Calabria should prove the formative influences in
his government as it was extended to the newly acquired and less
centralized regions of the mainland. There was free adaptation and
use of experience, but the loose feudal methods of the Normans were
profoundly modified by the bureaucratic traditions of the East.