Chapter VIII: The Norman Kingdom of Sicily 218 (6)

For a measure of the intellectual activity of the Norman monasteries and cathedrals nothing could serve better than an examination of the contents of their libraries, where we might judge for ourselves what books they acquired and copied and read. This unfortunately we can no longer make. The library of Bec, partly destroyed by fire in the seventeenth century, was scattered to the four winds of heaven in the eighteenth, and while the legislation of 1791 provided for the transfer of such collections to the public depositories of the neighboring towns, the libraries of Avranches, Alençon, and Rouen, reënforced by the Bibliothèque Nationale, have garnered but a small part of the ancient treasures of Mont-Saint-Michel, Saint-Évroul, and the establishments of the lower Seine. Works of importance as well as curiosities still survive--autograph corrections of Lanfranc, the originals of the great histories of Robert of Torigni and Ordericus Vitalis, service-books throwing light on the origins of the liturgical drama, cartularies of churches and abbeys,--but for a more comprehensive view of the resources of the twelfth century we must turn to the contemporary catalogues which have come down to us from the cloisters of Saint-Évroul, Bec, Lire, and Fécamp, and the cathedral of Rouen. After all, as that delightful academician _Silvestre Bonnard_ has reminded us, there is no reading so easy, so restful, or so seductive as a catalogue of manuscripts; and there is no better guide to the silence and the peace of the monastic library, as one may still taste them in the quiet of the Escorial or Monte Cassino. Let us take the most specific example, the collection of one hundred and forty volumes bequeathed to Bec by Philip, bishop of Bayeux, at his death in 1164, or rather the one hundred and thirteen which reached the monastery, twenty-seven having fallen by the way and being hence omitted from the catalogue. Like the other libraries of the time, this consisted chiefly of theology--the writings of the Fathers and of the Carolingian and post-Carolingian commentators and theologians, ending with Philip’s contemporaries, St. Bernard, Gilbert de la Porrée, Hildebert of Tours, and Hugh of St. Victor, and his metropolitan, Hugh of Amiens. Wise in the wisdom of this world, the bishop possessed the whole _Corpus Juris Civilis_ in five volumes, as well as the leading authorities on canon law, Burchard, St. Ives, and the _Decretum_ of Gratian. He had none of the Roman poets, although they were not unknown to Norman writers of his age, but a fair selection of prose works of a literary and philosophical character--Cicero and Quintilian, Seneca and the Younger Pliny, besides the mediæval version of Plato’s _Timæus_. There is a goodly sprinkling of the Roman historians most in vogue in the Middle Ages, Cæsar, Suetonius, Valerius Maximus, Florus, Eutropius, and the Latin version of Josephus, besides such of their mediæval successors as came nearest to Anglo-Norman affairs. Science was confined to Pliny’s _Natural History_ and two anonymous treatises on mathematics and astronomy, while the practical arts were represented by Palladius on agriculture and Vegetius on tactics. On the whole a typically Norman library, deficient on the imaginative side, but strong in orthodox theology, in law, and in history; not in all respects an up-to-date collection, since it contained none of those logical works of Aristotle which were transforming European thought, and, save for a treatise of Adelard of Bath, showed no recognizable trace of the new science which was beginning to come in through Spain; strikingly lacking also, save for a volume on Norman history, in products of Normandy itself, even in the field of theology and scriptural interpretation, where, for example, Richard abbot of Préaux had written marvellous commentaries upon Genesis, Deuteronomy, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs, and the Proverbs of Solomon, and had “discoursed allegorically or tropologically in many treatises upon obscure problems of the Prophets.”[55]

After all, works on the history of Normandy were the most Norman thing a Norman could produce, and it was in this field that the duchy made its chief contribution to mediæval literature and learning. All the usual types appear, local annals, lists of bishops and abbots, lives of saints, biographies of princes, but the most characteristic are the works in which the history of Normandy is grasped as a whole: the half-legendary account of the early dukes by Dudo of Saint-Quentin, the confused but valuable _Gesta_ of William of Jumièges, at last restored to us in a critical edition,[56] the _Chronicle_ of Robert of Torigni, and especially the great _Historia Ecclesiastica_ of Ordericus Vitalis, the _chef-d’œuvre_ of Norman historiography and the most important historical work written in France in the twelfth century.

Born in 1075 near Shrewsbury, Ordericus was early devoted to the monastic life, and lest family affection might interfere with his vocation and the sure hope of Paradise held out to the sobbing boy, his sorrowing parents sent him forever from their sight to spend his days at Saint-Évroul near the southern border of Normandy. Tonsured at ten, ordained a deacon at eighteen and a priest at thirty-two, he bore the burden and heat of the day under six successive abbots, until as an old man of sixty-six he laid down his pen with a touching peroration of prayer and thanksgiving to Him who had disposed these years according to His good pleasure. During this half century of poverty and obedience Ordericus had little opportunity to leave the precincts of the monastery, although on rare occasions we can trace him in England and at Cambrai, Rheims, and Cluni, and the materials of his history had to be gathered almost wholly from the well-stocked library of the abbey and from conversation with those who passed his way. These facilities were, however, considerable, for, remote as Saint-Évroul may seem in its corner of the _pays d’Ouche_, it was in constant relations with England, where it possessed lands, and with southern Italy, whither it had sent its members to found new convents; and like all such establishments it was a place of entertainment for travellers of all classes, priests and monks, knights and _jongleurs_, even a king like Henry I, who brought with them accounts of their journeys about the world and tales of great deeds in distant Spain, Sicily, and Jerusalem. There were few better places to collect materials for the writing of history, and there was no one who could make better use of them than Ordericus. He was fully launched in his great work by 1123, and he kept at it throughout the remaining eighteen years of his life, putting it aside in the winter when his fingers grew numb with the cold, but resuming it each spring in the clear round hand which meets us in many a manuscript of Saint-Évroul, and offering it at the end to future generations, a monument more lasting than the granite obelisk erected to his memory in 1912. His original purpose was limited to a history of his monastery, but the plan soon widened to include the principal movements of his time and finally grew to the idea of a universal history, beginning, indeed, with the Christian era instead of with the more usual starting-point of the Creation. Nevertheless, even in its final form the work of Ordericus is not a general history of the Christian centuries, for the general portion is chiefly introductory and comparatively brief; his real theme is Norman history, centring, of course, round the vicissitudes of his convent and the adjacent territory, but also giving a large place to the deeds of the Normans in that greater Normandy which they had created beyond the sea, in England, in Italy, and in Palestine. He is thus not only Norman but pan-Norman. The plan, or rather lack of plan, of his thirteen books reflects the changes of design and the interruptions which the work underwent; there is some repetition, much confusion, and a distinct absence of architectonic art. These defects, however, do not diminish the prime merit of the work, which lies in its replacement of the jejune annals of the older type by a full and ample historical narrative, rich in detail, vivid in presentation, giving space to literary history and everyday life as well as to the affairs of church and state, and constituting as a whole the most faithful and living picture which has reached us of the European society of his age. Neither in the world nor of the world, this monk had a ripe knowledge of men and affairs, independence of judgment, a feeling for personality, and a sure touch in characterization. He had also a Latin style of his own, labored at times rather than affected, ready to show its skill in well-turned verse or in well-rounded speeches after the fashion of the classical historians, but direct and vigorous and not unworthy of the flexible and sonorous language which he had made his own.

Latin, however, was an exclusive possession of the clergy,--and not of all of them, if we can argue from the examinations held by Eudes Rigaud,--and by the middle of the twelfth century the Norman baronage began to demand from the clerks an account of the Anglo-Norman past in a language which they too could understand. History in the vernacular develops in France earlier than elsewhere, and in France earliest in Normandy and in the English lands which shared the Norman speech and produced the oldest surviving example of such a work, the _Histoire des Engles_ of Gaimar, written between 1147 and 1151. The chief centre for the production of vernacular history was the court of that patron of ecclesiastical and secular learning, Henry II, and his Aquitanian queen, to one or both of whom are dedicated the histories of Wace and Benoît de Sainte-More. Wace, the most interesting of this group of writers, was a native of Jersey and a clerk of Caen who turned an honest penny by his compositions and won a canonry at Bayeux by the most important of them, his _Roman de Rou_. Beginning with Rollo, from whom it takes its name, this follows the course of Norman history to the victory of Henry I in 1106, in simple and agreeable French verse based upon the Latin chroniclers but incorporating something from popular tradition. Such a compilation adds little to our knowledge, but by the time of the Third Crusade we find a contemporary narrative in French verse prepared by a _jongleur_ of Évreux who accompanied Richard on the expedition. If we ignore the line, at best very faint, which in works of this sort separates history from romance and from works of edification, we must carry the Norman pioneers still further back, to the _Vie de Saint Alexis_ which we owe probably to a canon of Rouen in the eleventh century, and to the great national epic of mediæval France, the _Chanson de Roland_, pre-Norman in origin but Norman in its early form, which has recently been ascribed to Turold, bishop of Bayeux after the death of the more famous Odo and later for many years a monk of Bec. There is, one may object, nothing monastic in this wonderful pæan of mediæval knighthood, whose religion is that of the God of battles who has never lied, and whose hero meets death with his face toward Spain and his imperishable sword beneath him; but knights and monks had more in common than was once supposed, and we are coming to see that the monasteries, especially the monasteries of the great highways, had a large share in the making, if not in the final writing, of the mediæval epic as well as the mediæval chronicles.

When we reach works like these, the literary history of Normandy merges in that of France, as well as in that of England, which, thanks to the Norman Conquest and the Norman empire, long remained a literary province of France. We must not, however, leave this vernacular literature, as yet almost wholly the work of clerks, with the impression that its dominant quality is romantic or poetical. Its versified form was merely the habit of an age which found verse easy to remember; the literature itself, as Gaston Paris has well observed,[57] was “essentially a literature of instruction for the use of laymen,” fit material for prose and not for poetry. It is thus characteristically Norman in subject as well as in speech--simple and severe in form, devout and edifying rather than mystical, given to history rather than to speculation, and seeking through the moralized science of lapidaries and bestiaries and astronomical manuals to aid the everyday life of a serious and practical people.

* * * * *

Normandy had also something to say to the world in that most mediæval of arts, architecture, and especially in that Romanesque form of building which flourished in the eleventh century and the first half of the twelfth. The great Norman churches of this epoch were the natural outgrowth of its life--the wealth of the abbeys, the splendor of princely prelates like Odo of Bayeux and Geoffrey of Coutances, the piety and penance of William the Conqueror and Matilda, expiating by two abbeys their marriage within the prohibited degrees, the religious devotion of the people as illustrated by the processions of 1145. The biographer of Geoffrey de Mowbray, for example, tells[58] us how the bishop labored day and night for the enlargement and beautification of his church at Coutances (dedicated in 1056), buying the better half of the city from the duke to get space for the cathedral and palace, travelling as far as Apulia to secure gold and gems and vestments from Robert Guiscard and his fellow Normans, and maintaining from his rents a force of sculptors, masons, goldsmiths, and workers in glass. Nearly forty years later, when the church had been damaged by earthquake and tempest, he brought a plumber from England to restore the leaden roof and the fallen stones of the towers and to replace the gilded cock which crowned the whole; and when he saw the cock once more glistening at the summit, he gave thanks to God and shortly passed away, pronouncing eternal maledictions upon those who should injure his church. Of this famous structure nothing now remains above the ground, for the noble towers which look from the hill of Coutances toward the western sea are Gothic, like the rest of the church; and for surviving monuments of cathedrals of the eleventh and twelfth centuries we must go to the naves of Bayeux and Évreux and the St. Romain’s tower of Rouen. Even here the impression will be fragmentary, broken by Gothic choirs and by towers and spires of a still later age, just as the simple lines of the early church of Mont-Saint-Michel are swallowed up in the ornate Gothic of the loftier parts of the great pile. Edifices wholly of the Romanesque period must be sought in the parish churches in which Normandy is so rich, or in the larger abbey-churches which meet us at Lessay, Cerisy, Caen, Jumièges, and Bocherville. Jumièges, though in ruins, preserves the full outline of the style of the middle of the eleventh century; Caen presents in the Abbaye aux Hommes and the Abbaye aux Dames two perfect though contrasted types of a few years later, the one simple and austere, the other richer and less grand. Freeman may seem fanciful when he suggests that these sister churches express the spirit of their respective founders, “the imperial will of the conquering duke” and the milder temper of his “loving and faithful duchess,”[59] but in any event they are Norman and typical of their age and country. There are elements in the ornamentation of Norman churches in this period which have been explained by reference to the distant influence of the Scandinavian north or the Farther East, there are perhaps traces of Lombard architecture in their plan, but their structure as a whole is as Norman as the stone of which they are built, distinguished by local traits from the other varieties of French Romanesque to which this period gave rise. Not the least Norman feature of these buildings is the persistent common sense of design and execution; the Norman architects did not attempt the architecturally impossible or undertake tasks, like the cathedral of Beauvais, which they were unable to finish in their own time and style. “What they began, they completed,” writes the Nestor of American historians in his sympathetic interpretation of the art and the spirit of _Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres_. In Norman art, as in other phases of Norman achievement, the last word cannot be said till we have followed it far beyond the borders of the duchy, northward to Durham, “half house of God, half castle ’gainst the Scot,” and the other massive monuments which made ‘Norman’ synonymous with a whole style and period of English architecture, and southward to those more ornate structures which Norman princes reared at Bari and Cefalù, Palermo and Monreale. “No art--either Greek or Byzantine, Italian, or Arab--” says Henry Adams,[60] “has ever created two religious types so beautiful, so serious, so impressive, and yet so different, as Mont-Saint-Michel watching over its northern ocean, and Monreale, looking down over its forests of orange and lemon, on Palermo and the Sicilian seas.”

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

There is no general account of Norman life and culture in any
period of the Middle Ages, and no general study of Norman
feudalism. For conditions in France generally, see Luchaire, _La
société française au temps de Philippe-Auguste_ (Paris, 1909),
translated by Krehbiel (New York, 1912); for England, Miss M.
Bateson, _Mediæval England_ (New York and London, 1904). On
castles, see C. Enlart, _Manuel d’archéologie française_, II
(Paris, 1904, with bibliography), and Mrs. E. S. Armitage, _The
Early Norman Castles of the British Isles_ (London, 1912). For
William the Marshal, see Paul Meyer’s introduction to his edition
of the _Histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal_ (Paris, 1891–1901); the
poem has been utilized by Jusserand for his account of tournaments,
_Les sports et jeux d’exercice dans l’ancienne France_ (Paris,
1901), ch. 2.

* * * * *

The work of Delisle, _Études sur la condition de la classe agricole
et l’état de l’agriculture en Normandie au moyen âge_ (Évreux,
1851), is a classic.

The best studies of Norman municipal institutions are A. Chéruel,
_Histoire de Rouen pendant l’époque communale_ (Rouen, 1843); A.
Giry, _Les Établissements de Rouen_ (Paris, 1883–85), supplemented
by Valin, _Recherches sur les origines de la commune de Rouen_
(_Précis_ of the Rouen Academy, 1911); Charles de Beaurepaire, _La
Vicomté de l’Eau de Rouen_ (Évreux, 1856); E. de Fréville, _Mémoire
sur le commerce maritime de Rouen_ (Rouen, 1857); Miss Bateson,
_The Laws of Breteuil_, in _English Historical Review_, XV, XVI;
R. Génestal, _La tenure en bourgage_ (Paris, 1900); Legras, _Le
bourgage de Caen_ (Paris, 1911).

* * * * *

The excellent account of the Norman church in H. Böhmer, _Kirche
und Staat in England und in der Normandie_ (Leipzig, 1899), stops
with 1154. On Odo and on Philip d’Harcourt see V. Bourrienne’s
articles in the _Revue Catholique de Normandie_, VII-X,
XVIII-XXIII. The register of Eudes Rigaud (ed. Bonnin, Rouen, 1852)
is analyzed by Delisle, in _Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes_,
VIII, pp. 479–99; the _Miracula Ecclesie Constantiensis_ and the
letter of Abbot Haimo are discussed by him, _ibid._, IX, pp.
339–52; XXI, pp. 113–39. For the mortuary rolls, see his facsimile
edition of the _Rouleau mortuaire du B. Vital_ (Paris, 1909). The
best monograph on a Norman monastery is that of R. N. Sauvage,
_L’abbaye de S. Martin de Troarn_ (Caen, 1911), where other such
studies are listed. See also Génestal, _Rôle des monastères comme
établissements de crédit étudié en Normandie_ (Paris, 1901), and
Delisle’s edition of Robert of Torigni.

The schools of Bec are described by A. Porée, _Histoire de l’abbaye
du Bec_ (Évreux, 1901). Notices of the various Norman historians
are given by A. Molinier, _Les sources de l’histoire de France_
(Paris, 1901–06), especially II, chs. 25, 33. For Ordericus and
St. Évroul see Delisle’s introduction to the edition of the
_Historia Ecclesiastica_ published by the Société de l’Histoire
de France, and the volumes issued by the Société historique et
archéologique de l’Orne on the occasion of the Fêtes of 1912
(Alençon, 1912). Other early catalogues of libraries, including
that of Philip of Bayeux, are in the first two volumes of the
_Catalogue général des MSS. des départements_ (Paris, 1886–88).
For the vernacular literature, see Gaston Paris, _La littérature
normande avant l’annexion_ (Paris, 1899); and L. E. Menger, _The
Anglo-Norman Dialect_ (New York, 1904). For the latest discussions
of the _Chanson de Roland_ see J. Bédier, _Les légendes épiques_,
III (Paris, 1912); and W. Tavernier’s studies in the _Zeitschrift
für französische Sprache und Litteratur_, XXXVI-XLII (1910–14),
and the _Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie_, XXXVIII (1914).
Enlart, _Manuel d’archéologie française_, I, mentions the principal
works on Norman ecclesiastical architecture. See also R. de
Lasteyrie, _L’architecture religieuse en France à l’époque romane_
(Paris, 1912), ch. 15; Enlart, _Rouen_ (Paris, 1904); H. Prentout,
_Caen et Bayeux_ (Paris, 1900); Henry Adams, _Mont-Saint-Michel and
Chartres_ (Boston, 1913).

VII

THE NORMANS IN THE SOUTH

Of all the achievements of the heroic age of Norman history, none were more daring in execution or more brilliant in results than the exploits of Norman barons in the lands of the Mediterranean. Battling against the infidel in Spain, in Sicily, and in Syria, scattering the papal army and becoming the humble vassals of the Holy See, overcoming Lombard princes and Byzantine generals, the Normans were the glorious adventurers of the Mediterranean world throughout that eleventh century which constituted the great period of Norman expansion. Then, masters of southern Italy and Sicily, they put to work their powers of assimilation and organization and created a strong, well-governed state and a rich, composite civilization which were the wonder of Europe. If one were tempted to ascribe the successes of the Normans in England to happy accident or to the unique personality of William the Conqueror, the story of Norman achievement in the south, the work of scattered bands of simple barons without any assistance from the reigning dukes, would be conclusive proof of the creative power of the Norman genius for conquest and administration.

The earliest relations of the Normans with the countries of the 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.

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.

* * * * *

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.