Download PDF | (Medieval Mediterranean volume 38) G. A. Loud, A. Metcalfe - The Society of Norman Italy-Brill Academic Publishers (2002).
381 Pages
PREFACE
The idea for a volume of essays by leading historians of the Norman kingdom of Sicily, to be published in English, was first raised during a conversation between Jeremy Johns and myself on an aeroplane flying from Palermo to London in the spring of 1992. That it has come to fruition is largely due to the encouragement of Julian Deahl, commissioning editor at Brill publishers.
The original intention was to commission a series of entirely new essays, both on the various regions of southern Italy and on a variety of themes relating to the kingdom as a whole. The completed volume still bears traces of this plan, but is neither so comprehensive as originally envisaged nor has it been entirely written de novo. Considerations of length and the availability of suitable participants, as well as the many other commitments of those who wished to play a part, inevitably modified the original concept. Thus only some provinces have been discussed separately, and while a number of themes have been examined there have been others that might equally merit attention, but which we have been unable to include.
A chapter on the aristocratic social structure was commissioned but never delivered, and although several contributors, notably Martin and Metcalfe, touch upon them, in retrospect we might well have devoted more attention to the peasants whose labours underpinned the whole edifice of south Italian society, as indeed they did every medieval society. It was also decided, with regret, to exclude art historical, and intellectual and cultural, chapters.
Here the editors were conscious that, while there are many gaps in the field, there is a reasonably broad range of studies available in English, whereas other aspects of the society of the Mezzogiorno have received little or no attention in that language, a state of affairs that this book is intended to remedy. Furthermore, having for some years taught a course on Norman Sicily to university students, first as a second-year option and latterly as a document-based special subject, I was very conscious not just of how limited the scope of the available scholarship in English was, but also of how much Anglophone students missed through being unable to read the work of distinguished historians from Europe who have made important and stimulating contributions to the study of medieval southern Italy.
Hence, while four of the eleven contributors to this book are from the English-speaking world, the other seven, all acknowledged experts in the field, are from Continental Europe and have rarely if ever previously published their findings in English.
Two of our authors, Professors Herde and Houben, who were especially busy with other projects, asked that English versions of previously published essays be included in this collection, and sadly Professor Norbert Kamp died in October 1999, soon after he agreed to take part. With the kind agreement of his widow, the editors have included an updated version of one of his many fine essays on the south Italian Church. The two other essays in this category have also been modified and updated—neither is a straight translation of an existing work. All three of these essays appeared well-worth bringing to the attention of those who would find difficulty reading the original German versions.
We have tried to present all the chapters, whether revised or entirely new, in a common format, even if their lengths and focus may have been rather different. However, while we have sought agreement on matters of fact, and have attempted to bring consistency to the referencing, the editors have tried to let the contributors speak for themselves, and not sought to impose a spurious uniformity on those whose views on some issues may differ one from another, even at the cost of some internal consistency within the volume. History remains a subject of debate and discussion, not received truth.
I am very grateful to the contributors for agreeing to take part, for (in most cases) their adherence to deadlines, their patience in answering the editors’ queries and tolerating quibbles about footnotes, and their care in checking and correcting English translations. Special thanks should go to Trish Skinner for completing her chapter ahead of time while on maternity leave. ‘The work and encouragement of Alex Metcalfe as co-editor has been invaluable, not least with regard to Greek and Arabic terminology, as has the technical expertise of Mrs. Angela Softley and Katherine Fenton in remedying the defects of the principal editor’s IT education.
Had he lived to read it, Norbert Kamp would have rejoiced to see this collaborative project, for no scholar was more generous than him in giving assistance to others, and especially in encouraging younger workers in his field.! We are pleased and honoured to dedicate this volume to his memory.
G.A. Loud Leeds, November 2001
CONTRIBUTORS
Joanna Drell is Assistant Professor of Medieval History at the University of Richmond (Virginia). Her first book, Ainship and Conquest: Family Strategies in the Principality of Salerno during the Norman Period 1077-1194, will be appearing shortly from Cornell University Press.
Horst Enzensberger is Professor of the Ausciliary Sciences of History at the University of Bamberg. His edition of the charters of King William I of Sicily was published in 1996, and he is currently editing the charters of William IL.
Vera von Falkenhausen is Professor of the Auxiliary Sciences of History at the University of Rome “Tor Vegata’, having previously taught at the Universities of Potenza and Chieti. She has written the standard work on the administration of Byzantine Italy (1967), and many essays on the Greek provinces of early medieval Italy, especially on their ecclesiastical and urban history.
Laurent Feller is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Marne-la-Vallée. He is the author of Les Abruzzes médiévales. Territoire, économie et société en Italie centrale du IX’ au XH° siécle (1998).
Peter Herde has recently retired as Professor of Medieval History at the University of Wiirzburg. He has written extensively on the history of the papal chancery and on other aspects of papal history, notably his biographical study of Celestine V (1981). He has also written a biography of Charles I of Anjou (1979), and has made a number of contributions to the study of late medieval Germany, including to the New Cambndge Medieval History.
Hubert Houben is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Lecce, and has also taught at the University of Bologna. He has written widely on the ecclesiastical history of southern Italy in the Norman period, including an important monograph on the monastery of Venosa, the first mausoleum of the Hauteville dynasty, published in 1995. His Roger HT. von Sizilien. Herrscher zwischen Orient und Oksident (1997) has just appeared in English translation from Cambridge University Press.
Norbert Kamp (+) was the first President of the University of Géttingen from 1979 to 1992, having previously taught at the University of Braunschweig. His monumental prosopography of the episcopate of the kingdom of Sicily under the Staufen appeared in four volumes between 1973 and 1982.
Graham A. Loud is Reader in Medieval Italian History at the University of Leeds. His most recent book is The Age of Robert Guiscard. Southern Italy and the Norman Conquest (Longmans, 2000). He is currently preparing a volume of translated sources on the age of Roger II.
Jean-Marie Martin is a research professor at the Centre National des Récherches Scientifiques in Paris and at the Ecole Frangaise in Rome. He is the author of La Pouille du VIF au XH Siécle (1993), and Italtes Normandes, XI’°—XII’ Siécles (1994). The most recent among his several editions of medieval south Italian documents is that of the chartulary-chronicle of St. Sophia, Benevento (2000).
Alex Metcalfe is a British Academy post-doctoral Research Fellow | in the Department of Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Leeds. His first book, Muslims and Christians in ‘Norman’ Sicily: Arabic-Speakers and the End of Islam, will shortly be published by
Curzon Press.
Patricia Skinner is Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Southampton. Her publications include Family Power in Southern Italy. The Duchy of Gaeta and its Neighbours, 850-1139 (1995), Health and Medicine in Early Medieval Southern Italy (1997), and most recently Women in Medieval Italian Society, 500-1200 (Longmans, 2001).
INTRODUCTION
The foundation of the kingdom of Sicily in 1130 drastically altered the political composition of twelfth-century Europe and created a new state, which lasted, despite the vicissitudes of the late Middle Ages and the Spanish take-over in the fifteenth-century, until the age of the Risorgumento. The early years of this new kingdom were by no means easy, for King Roger’s unification of southern Italy was achieved in the face of repeated internal rebellion and external threat, exacerbated by the papal schism of the 1130s.
The recognition of his royal status by Anacletus I, the pope who lost the schism, did little to commend the kingdom to churchmen, and it was not until 1177 that its existence was reluctantly recognised by the rulers of the German empire who still claimed to be the overlords of southern Italy. Many of his contemporaries saw the first king of Sicily as little more than a criminal, who ought not to be admitted to the family of European monarchs. The influential Cistercian leader Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux wrote to the Emperor Lothar c. 1133 that: ‘it is the duty of Caesar to uphold his own crown against the machinations of that Sicilian usurper’.! A German abbot who described Lothar’s expedition to southern Italy in 1137 said that when the emperor rejected Roger’s peace offers, ‘he flatly refused to hand over that province to a semi-pagan tyrant’.
Both external recognition and indeed the creation of a stable internal régime within the kingdom took a long time, and these processes were far from complete when King Roger died in 1154. King William I faced a series of rebellions, as well as attacks from Byzantium and the recalcitrant nobles whom his father had exiled. Relations with the papacy were settled only with the Treaty of Benevento in 1136, and those with the trading ports of northern Italy remained volatile until the 1170s.* The evolution of what was eventually to be a highly organised royal administration continued for some years after the innovations of the early 1140s. Thus the government of the mainland provinces underwent considerable restructuring as late as c. 1168.4
Nor did the kingdom survive under its original dynasty for more than a relatively brief period. A bare two generations elapsed between the coronation of King Roger, in Palermo cathedral on Christmas Day 1130, and that of the German conqueror of the kingdom, Henry VI, in the same church and on the same day in 1194. The political unit however endured, and there were strong continuities between the ‘Norman’ kingdom before 1194 and the Staufen era thereafter. Administrative personnel from King Tancred’s cura, like the notary and later justiciar Thomas of Gaeta, served his successors.°
Furthermore, Henry VI died young, his son Frederick If was through his mother the grandson of King Roger, and the government after 1197, first of the Empress Constance and then of a minority régime under the overall supervision of Pope Innocent III, sought to limit the influence and property-holding of the German followers of the Emperor Henry. Later on, most of the German nobles granted south Italian lordships by Frederick II in the 1220s soon abandoned them to return home, and the German presence within the kingdom was reduced to a small number of families only.*
Meanwhile, families of Norman origin like the San Severino and the Filangieri, and even those whose power and title dated back to before the Normans such as the Counts of Aquino, remained important in thirteenth-century southern Italy.’ Indeed, as Norbert Kamp shows below, among the main profiteers from the Staufen conquest was a nexus of aristocratic families from the hitherto-marginal region of the Abruzzi. Nor were other developments within South Italian society underway during the twelfthcentury brought to an end by the change of dynasty in 1194, and hence a number of the essays below extend their focus into the time of Frederick II, and even beyond.
To contemporaries from north of the Alps the kingdom of Sicily appeared unusual, and even exotic, and so it has to this day. These medieval observers noted its wealth, but also its climate, often inimical to north Europeans, and the (to their eyes) unusual and threatening natural phenomena. “The mountains are always vomiting forth hellfire’, wrote Peter of Blois, who spent a brief and unhappy period in Sicily in 1167-8 as one of the followers of the chancellor Stephen of Perche.’ Indeed, the peculiarities of the regno became something of a literary genre, exemplified by the long letter describing his experiences there sent back to Germany by Henry VI’s chancellor, Bishop Conrad of Hildesheim in 1196.
Like Peter of Blois he was much impressed by the volcanoes therein; the mountain on Ischia, for example, ‘in which fire and sulphur fumes are continually vomited forth’, as well as Vesuvius and Mount Etna—this last had appalled Peter. As a good classical scholar the bishop was also impressed by the sight of places whose names were familiar to him from his reading, Sulmona the home of Ovid, Naples with its links with Virgil and the Fountain of Arethusa at Syracuse.? Yet to many outside observers one of the most striking features of the Sicilian kingdom was the presence of both Greek Christians and, much more disturbingly, Muslims within its bounds; for example ‘the many thousands of Pagans’ whom the Englishman Eadmer noted as part of the army of Roger I of Sicily at the siege of Capua in 1098.'°
The use of Muslim troops against fellow Christians was to be one of the charges regularly made against the Sicilian kings by hostile commentators right through until the fall of the Staufen.'!
Some modern historians have in consequence seen the kingdom of Sicily as a bastion of tolerance, even as a precursor of a more ‘modern’ state, and have pointed to the use made of Greek and Arabic officials, titles, practices and artistic forms at the Sicilian court. Certainly Arabic administrators played an important role in twelfthcentury Sicily, although most of these were at least nominally Christians. Furthermore, King Roger enjoyed close and friendly diplomatic relations with the Fatimid court in Cairo, some of the administrative practices and protocols at his court were derived from Fatimid exemplars, and contemporary Islamic models even influenced the design of his palaces.’ Yet the reality of such toleration as was extended to non-Christians, was, as both Alex Metcalfe and Hubert Houben point out in this volume, more uncertain and less generous than has sometimes been suggested; it was, rather, pragmatic and driven by circumstance.
As the demographic balance on Sicily swung against the Muslims, their position became increasingly precarious. Indeed, one of the principal themes of this volume is the way in which the Muslims and Arabic-speaking Christians on the island of Sicily, and also the Greeks of Calabria and north-east Sicily, were faced with both the immigration of Latin Christians adhering to the Church of Rome and the forces of acculturation, religious and social, that were to lead their communities, first to become minorities, and ultimately to isolation and (apart from the Calabrian Greeks) to virtual obliteration.
While the workings of the royal administration had a dynamic of their own, and were obviously vulnerable to political changes in the court, the trend to Latin ascendancy at the expense of Greek and Arabic-speaking personnel can be traced in the quantative output of royal charters. Before Roger II of Sicily became king the documents issued in his name were compiled almost exclusively in Greek (with a few in Arabic), and a Latin section to his chancery was only set up in the wake of the take-over of the mainland in 1127-8." However, of the surviving documents from the chancery of his grandson William II, 92% are in Latin, and only 8% in Greek or Arabic."* The exact figures may be slightly misleading, in that the attrition rate for the latter has surely been greater than for documents written.
in Latin, but the overall contrast is still striking. As Vera von Falkenhausen shows in this volume, documents issued by royal officials and private charters from Sicily followed a similar pattern. Yet, as she also demonstrates, Messina, the commercial centre of the island, remained a largely Greek city until at least 1200, there were still some Sicilian documents written in Greek in the thirteenth century, and a few Greek clergy remained even in the early fourteenth. The marginalisation of the ‘minority’ communities was a long-term process, which only began under the Normans, and needs to be examined within a broad time frame.
As Peter Herde shows, papal attitudes to the Greeks of southern Italy hardened primarily in the thirteenth century, in response to wider developments within the Church as a whole. Even so there were still Greek bishops in Calabria in the late Middle Ages, and the last Calabrian see to be converted to the Latin rite, Bova, lasted in Greek hands until 1573.'° Indeed, Greek dialects survived in a few isolated communities in southern Calabria until the twentieth century. The Muslims of Sicily felt themselves to be under threat by the time of William II, and conversions were already occurring.
However, it was the large-scale deportations to the mainland ordered by Frederick I that catastrophically diminished their role on the island, and these only began in the late 1220s, while the Muslim colony that Frederick established at Lucera in northern Apulia continued until 1300.'® But to understand the roots of the deportation of many of the Sicilian Muslims to the Capitanata, one still needs to look at the Norman period. Furthermore, as Alex Metcalfe demonstrates, the role of Arabic-speaking Christians on the island was much more significant than has hitherto been recognised, and their cultural identity was undermined by assimilation rather than by the threat of forcible resettlement.
Other issues discussed in this book also require examination over a long period. The whole structure of society ultimately rested upon the agrarian economy, and there the pace of change was slow. Yet change there was. One of the most significant was the process known to Italian historians as incastellamento, the grouping together of the bulk of the rural population in (often relatively large) fortified or defensible villages, known in the sources as castra or castella—words which should very definitely not be translated as ‘castle’. (The usual south Italian term for a castle, in the north European sense, was rocca).
This process has been one of the main preoccupations of Italian historiography over the past generation. The classic study has been that by the French historian Pierre Toubert of medieval Lazio, the area to the south and east of Rome, published in 1973.'’ But as historians have come to study the phenomenon more, and in different regions, its complexity and the extent of local variations have become apparent. Jean-Marie Martin contributes a masterly overview, in the first chapter of this volume, of the evolution of the settlement pattern in southern Italy, and of the regional variations in the local agrarian economies of the mainland.
Fernand Braudel, in his rightly acclaimed book on the early modern Mediterranean, suggested that throughout this whole region there was a basic similarity to the agricultural economy, ‘the same eternal trinity, wheat, olives and vines... an identical agricultural civilization, identical ways of dominating he environment’.'’® Yet as Martin shows, this was far from being the case in the eleventh and twelfth century Mezzogiorno. The duchy of Amalfi was very different from the Abruzzo, and likewise Capua and Calabria. Much of the Capitanata in northern Apulia was only settled in the century after c. 1080, and here castella, as opposed to open settlements, played only a peripheral role, while the rise of olive cultivation, to dominate the economy in the plains around Bari, was probably the decisive ‘event’ in twelfth-century Apulia.'?
One might add that the development of wheat as effectively a monoculture in much of central and western Sicily was a product of the later thirteenth century, in the wake of Frederick II’s deportation (‘ethnic cleansing’?) of the Sicilian Muslims, and also entailed a large-scale alteration in the geography of settlement.” It is clear that close study of regional variations is needed to understand the economy, and hence the social structures, of the Norman kingdom, and that there was substantial change underway in this period. Yet, as Martin is at pains to point out, we cannot separate the Norman era from what went before and after, for the process of economic and environmental change was evolutionary, and slow moving.
The Norman conquest of the eleventh century has often attracted the attention of historians, both contemporary and modern. Figures such as Robert Guiscard, the first Norman Duke of Apulia, have drawn the attention; a man who, according to one medieval chronicler, ‘performed many prodigies in magnificent style, abounded in wealth, and continually enlarged his territories, overshadowing all his neighbours’.”! All this may have been true, and certainly the Normans changed the political structures of southern Italy—although one should note that this did not lead to the immediate unification of the southern section of the peninsula, which only took place half a century after the conquest of the mainland was completed. However, such hyperbole also obscures the reality that the Norman conquerors were a small minority who never completely conquered the region, and were too few to initiate a thorough-going change in its society.
In particular, their impact on the larger towns, such as Amalfi, Bani, Benevento, Naples and Salerno, in which they rarely settled, was very limited.2? Two of the chapters below, by Laurent Feller and Patricia Skinner, examine peripheral regions of the zegno, incorporated into its structure by King Roger, but where the Normans arrived late and had only a limited effect on local society. Before 1130 neither the city-states of the western coast, nor the Abruzzo, were ever fully conquered. Naples had, for example, successfully resisted the Normans in the eleventh century, albeit with some losses to its outlying territories, and only finally submitted to Roger IT in 1137. Not surprisingly society in these coastal duchies remained in many respects distinct from that of the interior.
In the Abruzzo new Norman lordships were created, but indigenous aristocrats also prospered, and retained their place within the twelfth-century kingdom, notably the Borrell family who dominated the Sangro Valley. At the same time, and despite the destabilisation of the later eleventh century, the great abbey of St. Clement of Casauria, founded by the Carolingian Emperor Louis II in 873, remained a key influence in local society, just as the abbey of Montecassino did in the northern part of the principality of Capua.”
Who these ‘Normans’ were, and how long their consciousness of a separate identity continued, has been the subject of considerable debate. A detailed prosopographical study of identifications by origin (so-and-so ‘the Norman’, etc.), personal names of Scandinavian derivation, and surnames using French toponyms contained in south Italian documents of the period has concluded that between two thirds and three quarters of the invaders did indeed come from the duchy of Normandy.**
The use of the term Norman, at least for the period of the conquest, would therefore appear perfectly valid, although (just as in England) the conquerors were never exclusively Norman and there were clearly quite a number of other newcomers who derived from different areas of France, and particularly from those provinces neighbouring Normandy, such as Brittany and Maine. Yet how long a sense of Norman identity persisted in southern Italy is problematic.
The twelfth-century historian known as ‘Hugo Falcandus’ claimed that King Roger favoured men from north of the Alps; ‘since he derived his own origin from the Normans and knew that the French race excelled all others in the glory of war’.” One recent study has suggested that consciousness of separate Norman and Lombard identity remained significant, at least within the principality of Salerno, until the later twelfth century. Other commentators, including the present editor, remain unconvinced, and one might rather suggest that the significance of Norman/French descent or identity was already declining during the first third of the twelfth century, as immigration from Normandy largely ceased and the forces of intermarriage and acculturation began to take effect.**
Needless to say, further examination of this problem is needed, looking in detail at different regions of southern Italy, for it may well be that the pattern varied from one area to another. One tool for this is how law and custom actually worked in practice, above all in such issues as marriage and inheritance, studied by Joanna Drell in this volume. Certainly the new Norman rulers, even in those areas where they were unequivocally in charge, did not rely exclusively upon men of their own ethnic group. There was never that virtually complete take-over of the upper ranks of society that took place in England under William the Conqueror; in southern Italy the invaders were never numerous enough nor strong enough.
Some local aristocrats, like the Borells and the Counts of Aquino, were never dislodged. And, just as in England, they required native collaborators to assist them, and especially to staff the lower reaches of their administration. One of the signs of the strength of the indigenous tradition was the tenacious survival in the former Lombard areas of the local Beneventan script, both as a book hand in ecclesiastical, especially monastic, seripiona and as a notarial hand in private charters.
As Horst Enzensberger shows, even where those writing documents in the chanceries of the new rulers employed the imported minuscule script, they themselves might well be natives, as with Urso, the principal notary of Robert Guiscard, and Grimoald, who fulfilled the same function for Guiscard’s son, Duke Roger Borsa, from 1086 until 1102. Both Enzensberger and von Falkenhausen demonstrate how much close study of the surviving documentation can reveal to us, not just of the workings of the central and local administrations, but of how south Italian society changed after the Norman conquest—although not necessarily as a result of that conquest.
The Church was another area where one might conclude that the Norman impact was relatively limited.2’ Norbert Kamp’s prosopographical survey of the south Italian episcopate over some two centuries shows conclusively that, despite the evidential problems to which he draws attention, a variety of different influences, both internal and external, played their part in changing the leadership of the local Church. One cannot separate what was going on within the Church in the regno from wider developments within Christendom— that is clear also from Herde’s study—and at times, especially after the death of Robert Guiscard and once again after that of the Empress Constance in 1198, papal involvement had an effect both on the appointment of individual prelates and on the overall calibre of the episcopate, as also did cultural changes within Christendom as a whole.
Yet other factors were more localised—the impact of great monasteries like Montecassino, the clientage network of ambitious ecclesiastical careerists like Walter of Pagliaria, and the foundation of the University of Naples by Frederick II. Kamp was characteristically modest in pointing out the problems of his method, and the high proportion of sees and bishops about whom we can discern little or nothing. (The suppression of sees, in Apulia in the early modern period and throughout the mainland south in the early nineteenth century, caused a disastrous attrition of cathedral archives). Yet Kamp’s prosopography of the episcopate was based upon a huge range of documentation, published and unpublished, and represents a monumental achievement, of which the essay published here is but a small part.
These studies focus very much on the structure of, and developments within, the society of Norman Italy—-and to some extent also of the Staufen kingdom that followed. There is very little concern here with the Austowe des événements, for the political history both of the conquest and of the twelfth-century kingdom is reasonably well covered elsewhere, and to some extent at least in English. What we have sought to provide here is a reflection of the growing concern among Continental scholars with the social history of the regno.
This tendency has been especially apparent in the series of biennial conferences held since 1973 by the Centro di studi normanno-svei of the University of Bari, in which some of the most interesting recent studies of Norman Italy have been presented. The early conferences each focussed on a period, such as the age of Robert Guiscard (no. I) or that of Roger II (no. III), and while the agenda was never exclusively political, there was a strong political and institutional focus. Since 1987 each conference has had a clear theme relating to south Italian society, as ‘Man and the environment’ (VIII), ‘land and men’ (IX), or ‘centres of cultural production’ (XII). In this present collection we have also sought to provide studies of aspects of eleventh- and twelfth-century south Italian history which have hitherto received little attention in English. It is somewhat ironic that the one contribution to this volume that stands somewhat apart from the others is my own, on the relations of the papacy with the rulers of southern Italy.
Yet while more overtly ‘political’ in its approach than the other studies, and on an issue which has received probably more than its fair share of scholarly attention, it seemed both that the subject was too important to omit, and that there was still a need for a wide-ranging and up-to-date general survey over the whole of the ‘Norman’ period. Most of the relevant documents have long been available to scholars, but there is much still to be gained by careful analysis. That is of course true for all the chapters here, but the question of documentation is an important one, for the scale of the contemporary evidence surviving from Norman Italy is far larger than those unfamiliar with the field might suppose. Admittedly, the narrative sources are relatively few, certainly as compared with the number available from Anglo-Norman and Angevin England, or Sahan and Staufen Germany.
There are periods for which we have relatively little chronicle evidence, or even much in the way of brief annals, notably the early 1100s and the last decade of King William II’s reign, while Geoffrey Malaterra is the only one among contemporary historical writers to tell us much about Calabria.” But for all the archival losses of more recent periods, including the destruction of almost the entire contents of the Naples State Archive in 1943, we still possess a very large number of eleventh to thirteenth century charters from southern Italy. While a great-many of these are now in print, especially from Apulia, there are also some very substantial and important sources of new evidence, surviving in manuscript and as yet unpublished, which can deepen our knowl edge and understanding of the subject.
For the mainland, this unpublished evidence largely derives from the great Benedictine monasteries. Laurent Feller’s studies of the Abruzzi have drawn heavily on the chartulary-chronicle of St. Clement of Casauria (Paris, B.N. MS. Lat. 5411), a huge manuscript containing some 2000 documents, of which only a fraction have been published, mostly by Muratori in the early eighteenth century. The chapters in this book by Joanna Drell and Patricia Skinner both use a number of unpublished twelfth-century charters from the abbey of Holy Trinity, Cava, near Salerno—and Professor Drell’s forthcoming book will be one of the first publications fully to exploit that rich resource. The Cava archives contain more than 3500 documents from the twelfth century, and just over 2000 from the thirteenth, of which only a small proportion have been published.
They represent not just an important source for the history of the abbey, or the local Church, but for the social and economic history of the principality of Salerno. Similarly the (as yet virtually unexplored) abbatial registers from both Cava and Montecassino are key sources for the history of the later thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and there are also several thousand unpublished documents, from the eleventh century onwards and primarily of monastic provenance, in the Museo del Sannio at Benevento.” For the island of Sicily, the most exciting evidential discovery of recent years has been a substantial cache about a thousand pre-1500 documents (some 150 of which are in Greek) from Messina and its environs, in the archive of the Dukes of Medinaceli in Seville. These were removed to Spain in 1679 after the suppression of a serious revolt at Messina.””
Vera von Falkenhausen has been one of the first scholars to make extensive use this new resource, the importance of which can be seen from her chapter in this collection. Documents from the Medinaceli archive will also greatly enhance the value of the soon to be forthcoming book by Jeremy Johns on the twelfthcentury royal administration of Sicily. Dr Johns is also about to publish important editions and translations of the Arabic diwanit documents and private charters, and, in collaboration with Alex Metcalfe, a critical edition of the royal Monreale registers of lands and men. Finally, some guidance is necessary as to the availability of published textual editions, and the references to them in this collection.
Footnotes have, where possible, been standardised to refer to the most recent editions of narrative sources, but one should, for example, note that there have been three competent editions of Peter of Eboli’s Liber ad honorem Augusti in the last century, and that the most recent of these (in 1994) is not easily available, even in the principal academic libraries, in Britain and the U.S.A. Hence reference has sometimes been made to the relatively widely available edition by Siragusa (1906). However, some nineteenth-century editions, especially the (once widely-used) collection of Latin chronicles by Giuseppe Del Re, are far from accurate and, if possible, best avoided.*! Similarly, there have been three editions of the laws attributed to King Roger, by Brandileone (1884), Monti (1940, reprinted 1945) and Zecchino (1984). Since the most modern edition is not generally available outside Italy, we have also used that by Gennaro Maria Monti, which is.**
It should be noted in passing that Ménager’s argument that the earlier of the two versions of these laws (in Cod. Vat. Lat. 8782) ought not be identified as the text of the so-called ‘Assizes of Ariano’, the laws whose promulgation in 1140 was mentioned by the chronicler Falco of Benevento, is now generally accepted, even if his further contention that this collection was actually compiled in the early thirteenth century is far less plausible.** References to the indispensable Liber Augustalis of Frederick I have been standardised to the recent MGH edition, as well as to the English translation by James Powell. A complete edition of the royal charters from the twelfth century, the Codex Diplomaticus Regni Siciliae, has been under way for some twenty years, but is as yet incomplete. What have been published so far are the Latin charters of Roger II, and the documents of William I, Tancred and William III, and of the Empress Constance.
Horst Enzensberger’s edition of the charters of William II, of which there are some 250 extant, is eagerly awaited. So too is the eventual publication of the documents of the pre-1127 Dukes of Apulia, and those of Roger I of Sicily, a project left incomplete when their editor, Leon-Robert Ménager died in 1993. The edition of the 105 known documents of Roger I will be especially welcome, given that those previously edited have been published in widely scattered places, in publications often unobtainable outside Italy, and that many of the texts present serious evidential problems.”
The student of Norman Italy and Sicily thus faces a challenging, and often difficult, field, but one in which there are exciting possibilities for further research. There are many subjects still to be explored, and many sources still to be exploited, but the publication of this collection of essays should provide food for thought, both for those discovering the Norman regno for the first time, and (we hope) even for those who already know it well, but wish to consider new and stimulating insights.
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