Download PDF | Hervin Fernández-Aceves - County and Nobility in Norman Italy_ Aristocratic Agency in the Kingdom of Sicily, 1130-1189-Bloomsbury Academic (2020).
293 Pages
Preface
This monograph offers a rounded account of the local ruling elite in mainland south Italy during the first dynasty of the Sicilian kingdom. It does so through a chronological, wide-ranging exploration of the counts’ activities, and an in-depth analysis of both the role the counts played during the development of the kingdom's aristocracy and the function the county acquired in the establishment of social control on the mainland. This is supported by an extensive and detailed prosopographical survey of the vast relevant diplomatic material, both edited and unedited, combined with a comparison of the diverse available narrative sources, both local and external.
The study has two central objectives: The first is to uncover the composition of the peninsular upper nobility and its continuities and discontinuities, by revealing how lordships were reorganized through the appointment and confirmation of counts, the total number of counties after this reorganization, and the transactions and major events in which the counts were involved throughout the kingdom’s Norman period. The second is to interpret the extent of the upper aristocracy’s capacity to act selfreliantly, by explaining how the counts operated and exercised their own authority between other economic and political agents, such as lesser barons, royal officials and ecclesiastical institutions.
I argue that the creation of the kingdom of Sicily did not hinder the development of the nobility’s leadership in southern Italy, but, in fact, the Sicilian monarchy relied on the county as both a military cluster and an economic unit, and, eventually, on the counts’ agency, in order to keep the realm united and exercise effective control over the mainland provinces - especially in Apulia and the Terra di Lavoro. Such a finding should encourage further revision of the traditional interpretation of the kingdom’s social mechanisms for military mobilization, administration of justice and political stability. By emphasizing the importance of the comital rank and the changeability and endurance of the members or the peninsular nobility, this study underlines the complexity of medieval, south Italian societies and the intersecting agencies which allowed the kingdom of Sicily to be a viable polity.
Acknowledgements
The completion of this book would not have been possible without the support and assistance of many colleagues, friends and family members. A few of these have made such a contribution that it is my duty and pleasure to recognize them in particular.
It has been a privilege to be a part of the cadre of students that came together under the supervision of Graham A. Loud; his knowledge, direction and resources have been an invaluable pillar upon which I was able to conduct my research. I am very grateful also to Isabelle Bolognese, Francesca Petrizzo, Daniele Morossi and James Hill for their advice, exchange of opinions and debate. Also, I regularly benefited from the efficacy, kindness and patience of the staff of the Brotherton Library, and especially that of the Documentary Supply Service - all of whom provided invaluable support. Among the esteemed and dear company that I found in Leeds I must recognize Otavio Luiz Vieira Pinto, loannis Papadopoulos, Mike Burrows, Catalin Taranu, Christian Aragon Bricefio, Lourdes Parra and Martin Lima for their companionship; I especially thank Otavio and Mike for kindly commenting on drafts of this thesis. Great colleagues, but even greater friends. I will miss your sincere support and our enjoyable tertulias.
This entire research would not have been possible without the very generous funding of the University of Leeds’s research scholarship, and the overseas programme of the National Council for Science and Technology (CONACYT - Mexico). I am keenly aware of how fortunate and privileged I was to be given their support. Preparation for this book was also carried over a number of months at the British School at Rome, as an award-holder. To them, all my gratitude.
Beyond the confines of the University of Leeds, I must also attribute special thanks to my friends Antonella Furno and Paola Massa who provided me with very valuable material and advice. I am likewise indebted to Piero Scatizzi and Elia Mariano, archivists of the Biblioteca S. Scolastica in Subiaco, for their assistance. Also, I am greatly thankful to Hiroshi Takayama, Paul Oldfield, Markus Krumm, Alan Murray and Antonio Macchione, for sharing their work and opinions with me and providing useful suggestions. I also thank my friend and paisana Isell Chavarin, who facilitated my access to resources from the University of $. Barbara, California. I am especially grateful to Alex Metcalfe, for his encouragement, guidance, generosity and kindness. Finally, I must devote special thanks to Kate Solomon, who not only helped me correcting my English but also was a fountain of patience and support.
My most personal thanks are for my family and friends from ‘back home. Both my parents and my sister Chantal, all of whom I deeply love, have been greatly supportive and caring. They know how important they all are.
Introduction
Documenting Italo-Norman agency
Although Norman Italy has caught the attention of many English-speaking scholars in the last decades, they have so far failed to adequately cover a crucial component of its history: the composition and role of its nobility. Trapped between the agency of characters, such as Robert Guiscard and Roger II, and a structuralist tradition that has forced research into certain avenues of study, such as long-duration processes of civic identity and rural life, modern scholarship has left the upper aristocracy of southern Italy a somewhat marginalized group.
Errico Cuozzo, one of the most renowned scholars in the field, had by 1985 already identified one of the most important challenges facing current scholarship. In his exploration of the origin and development of the county of Montescaglioso, Cuozzo claimed that the county of the Norman Kingdom in Italy had not been subject to systematic research, and that the few researchers occupied with the matter - himself included — had done so in an indirect and episodic manner, limited to piecing together the biographical and prosopographical data of some specific counts and baronial families.’ Despite Cuozzo’s extensive work, this challenge remains to this day. His attempts to disentangle the fragmented and intricate diplomatic evidence have resulted in an invaluable collection of material, yet a wide-ranging study of all the exempla of counts and counties under the Norman monarchy is still missing.
It is only with a systematic examination of the comital class and the documented activities of its members that an accurate identification of the original south Italian counties and a synchronic analysis of the nobility’s social capacity can be conducted. We are yet to fully understand these important lords, and the sources lend themselves better to this than to understanding the lesser aristocracy, which included landholding knights and barons, and other lower social strata. At that time, public-record-keeping was not yet a generalized and systematized practice, so the vast majority of the surviving documents relate to the estates of ecclesiastical foundations or prominent aristocratic families whose political importance was maintained in the following centuries.
It is therefore impossible to reconstruct the entire edifice of the aristocracy from its individual building blocks, and the structures of society are wrapped in a fog almost impossible to clear. Nevertheless, the available data on the upper nobility allows us to overcome this by reaching a better understanding of the social interactions of this group and identifying the capacity for action of its components. To do so, I propose neither a top-down examination of political hierarchies nor a bottom-up study of social structures; instead, I will perform a comprehensive and detailed dissection of the activities and capabilities of a group apparently subdued by a new monarchy but positioned high enough for their members to be identifiable and consistently documented. To reach this aim, the study stands on one key pillar: a prosopographical exploration of the counts who were made, confirmed and displaced under the first dynasty of the kingdom of Sicily.
I now present the epistemological reflection and methodological definitions upon which this work is based.
A contribution to current Italo-Norman historiography
To build a sound social interpretation it is necessary to first set the foundations. For Norman Italy, a great deal of prosopographical work was necessary before beginning to analyse the whole region’s social strata, or even to discuss modern historiography. In recent decades, historians have started to explore the less hierarchical relationships through which collectives, active in medieval communities, were embodied: for example, and to mention just a few, Skinner, Drell, Metcalfe and Oldfield.? These approaches have relied on both a more careful understanding of the sociological implications of the object of study and a reconsideration of classic socio-economic structuralism.
Historians have traditionally called this period ‘anarchical’ or ‘feudal’ but recently scholars have begun to look at the various ways in which people in this decentralized society transacted their social interactions. Indeed, the predominant theory which still informs the thought of both historians and archaeologists - unconsciously or not — is French structuralism. An example of this trend has been the fixation with ‘feudalism: From the foundational works of Bloch and Cahen to the recent monograph by Carocci, researchers have continued to focus on the systematization of the ‘feudal relationship, with its critiques of landholding, lordship and settlement patterns.’ Structuralist thinking has proved a useful tool, but it has also had an important conditioning and distorting effect on our assumptions, preconceptions and interpretations.
This is not least because the supposed structures of lordship and settlement nucleation have become the model of choice for explaining historical representations of coreperiphery systems: society and power, urbanization and urban communities, the rural economy and the diverse arrangements of the countryside. However, structuralism in general still provides a bottom-up model for societal formation which seeks to explain economic transformation, acculturation and, ultimately, broader processes of social change as derived from a putative incastellamento and ‘feudal’ movement of localized lordship. While this can be helpful, the diplomatic evidence for southern Italy, at least in the twelfth century, does not portray a uniform or defined process of land acquisition and ‘ownership.*
The unclear pre-modern definition of ownership, nevertheless, does not mean that grants of lands or other transactions were meaningless. Every donation conveyed a significance that was not only economic but also enhanced by an array of ideological and political mechanisms. The territorial holdings and economic privileges that these transactions concerned appear to remain tied to their original tenants, granted away and then taken back, exchanged, redefined to then be claimed or relinquished again.° This fluid back and forth could last for several generations of barons, and the changes in the upper social echelon do not appear to have obstructed it; the higher aristocracy seem to have consolidated their roles as territorial leaders by mediating the complexity caused by a mutable understanding of land ownership. It is clear therefore that it is wrong to impose our own notions of property on earlier periods.
A more careful reading, not bound by the traditional legal notions common in continental historiography, can help shatter the chains of our modern mental constructs, and allow the sources to take their own shape. I present here an alternative to assuming the modern, Western preconception of property that has forced scholarship to see land tenure either as allodial - owned outright or as a freehold - or as ‘feudal’ I offer a more balanced view of so-called feudal ties in southern Italy in the twelfth century, advocating that medieval communities and local authorities were grounded in this case on a grid of autochthonous notions, where fluidity and multiplicity of usage was the rule rather than the exception.
The emphasis placed on state, state-formation, kingship and structures of authority, as well as administrative ‘systems’ in the kingdom of Sicily, for instance by Jamison, Marongiu, Takayama and Johns, is no less problematic.’ The so-called royal assembly of Silva Marca has become, for example, an almost undeniable fact adopted by many scholars. As suggested by Jamison and advocated by Cuozzo, this assumes the existence of a constitutional assembly at which King Roger gathered all the men of the realm in 1142 at Silva Marca to introduce a new central administrative system for the entire kingdom, which allegedly included the establishment of a regular military service, the creation and reorganization of counties and the introduction of “feudalism:* This premise, however, raises fundamental questions on the chronology of the south Italian counties and the documented political and military role played by the counts.
Who made up the ruling class of the new kingdom in southern Italy? The reduced group of royal appointees and commanders or an aristocracy integrated by a coherent, albeit diverse and complex, group of powerful landholders and local overlords? After the kingdom’s creation and almost ten years of civil war, there was no actual discernible, fixed form of central authority that would embed the higher nobility within an established administration. The diverse royal functionaries attested in the surviving documentation appear to keep mutating, and the control exercised by the royal regime would only start to consolidate and be widely documented on the basis of the actual role played by the peninsular nobility and local lords.
The dominant social force at the local level was represented by the group of major landholders and overlords. The ‘royal state, as it existed at least in the peninsular provinces, consisted of the image of a recurrently absent monarch, a scattered staff of justiciars, constables and chamberlains, and a mobile court of the king's justice (which the king and his entourage could attend, if he was on the mainland) that appeared at itinerant provincial assemblies.
However, one of the most important studies on this topic repeatedly speaks of ‘administrative systems’ at work in the ‘central government’ in capital cities - Palermo in Sicily and Salerno on the mainland.’ Furthermore, a recent 800-page monograph that deals with such state-andsociety history has been conceived in exactly the same tradition;"° one reviewer politely concluded that ‘this great history book lacks further reflection in anthropology and sociology."' The importance of such state-driven views of structures and systems has been exaggerated, inviting thus both a historical and historiographical reconsideration of the available evidence and, other, dismissed social actors.
The Italo- Norman counts of the Sicilian kingdom provide a precise example of a societal group whose importance has been disregarded in modern scholarship, commonly placed at the margins of a central political structure preconceived as highly administrative and subordinating. I argue instead that in the historical study of society and power, it is necessary to engage in a discussion of the documented interactions and interconnectivity that make up social phenomena, therefore providing a nuanced account of the composition and capacity of a predominant societal group to act autonomously.
The snapshots in time and connections presented here do not necessarily imply the total hierarchy or property of the Italo-Norman nobility. Instead of modelling hierarchies of lords and vassals, my exploration focuses on the morphing positions and community groups that formed the upper layers of society under the Sicilian kingdom. The survey and hypotheses constructed by my research map the intersections of social agents of political, ideological, economic and military control, and the upper aristocracy in the south Italian mainland.” Among other things, the studied relationships were revealed, created, confirmed and supported through charters. The legal proceedings and the guarantees included in the charters acted as a bond between the territorial leaders and the lords of the land. The charters in which the counts are attested reflect the bonding through which social control was exercised in the peninsular domains.
The recorded economic and legal interactions functioned to define and validate the individual's role and enforce social cohesion. The secular use of monastic donations and judicial records, the military and monetary fees demanded, and the flux of property and wealth created a grid of interactions and relationships. I label this grid ‘social, and not merely ‘secular; ‘political’ or ‘economic; because of the importance of the relationship that affirmed or created transactions, a bond that functioned as the actual channel through which social control - political, ideological, economic or military - could be exercised and implemented.
The mechanisms of control expressed by charters and other documental records go beyond their transactional function due to the presence of extra-economic and legal factors: specific frameworks, active enough that political activity maintains its ability to preserve social order. In other words, social relations are maintained within a political shell, a wrap of sorts that gave coherence to the count’s transactions and allowed them to exercise their own activities and role, connecting thus a society often seen as centrally oppressed and locally divided. In this way, my exploration of the counts’ agency revolves around how power was distributed among the upper Italo-Norman aristocracy and how this distribution developed.
Ishouldalso clarify the extent of this study’s contribution. Although at times it invites comparison with different realities, be that the contemporary societies of Normandy, England and the Latin East, or the socio-institutional vestiges of the Carolingian and Byzantine empires, this raises problems of interpretation beyond the scope of this book. Some discussion and contextualization are provided when particular common areas are identified, but this is neither a work that aims to argue assumptions of a ‘pan-Normar culture nor a comparative exploration of other medieval and European aristocracies. I expect, however, that the findings and arguments presented here will serve as a basis for further, more nuanced comparative studies, so that the ItaloNorman nobility is considered in its own terms, more integrally and carefully.
The observatory: Timescale, sources and diplomatic evidence
The vast and relatively accessible quantity of material available forced certain limitations on the study, for obvious reasons of space. Its chronological scope has been chosen for a number of reasons; it gives a broad enough timescale to discern relevant continuities and disruptions, while not being so broad as to prevent in-depth analysis. Also, a considerably rich corpus of charters survives for twelfth-century southern Italy, along with a series of chronicles and accounts composed by foreign and native contemporary witnesses. Last but not least is the fact that the creation of the Sicilian monarchy and its first dynasty was a watershed in southern Italy’s history, after which the local social and political arrangements were developed and defined. However, this book goes beyond the kingdom's creation and Roger II's reign and connects these episodes to the entire period of the Norman dynasty.
A diverse range of chronicles, histories and other narrative accounts have been employed. The chronicles composed by Alexander of Telese and Falco, a notary of Benevento, in the first half of the twelfth century contribute vital material on the early decades before and after the creation of the kingdom of Sicily, a transformative period when the peninsular nobility changed greatly. Alexander's work stops in 1135, while Falcos chronicle in its present, incomplete, form ends in 1140, although it seems to have been continued until 1144; a rudimentary version of the last section has survived in the anonymous chronicle of Santa Maria of Ferraria in Vairano Patenora.'* This chronicle, together with the also anonymous annals of the abbeys of Montecassino (Annales Casinenses) and Fossanova in Ceccano (Annales Ceccanenses), were written in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, and provide a useful view of key events and activities in the northwestern border of the realm, which confirm both the changes in the nobility of the Terra di Lavoro and some of the military operations the kingdom was involved in.
One of the most important narrative sources is the history attributed to the so-called Hugo Falcandus (henceforth Pseudo-Falcandus), which provides a vivid and detailed account of the political machinations and rebellions under William I and the first years of William II (1154-69). Although the identity of this author remains a mystery, PseudoFalcandus’s testimony has become, for better or worse, key to understanding the kingdom of Sicily’s nobility and curia regis in the second half of the twelfth century — this curia, sometimes translated as ‘court’ or council, was the political body comprised of the king and his ministers and offices. Likewise, the Salernitan chronicle, attributed to Romuald Guarna, archbishop of Salerno, offers a rich and crucial testimony for both the external events that surrounded southern Italy from a pan-European scope, and the kingdom's internal politics, a useful tool for checking and comparing with Pseudo-Falcandus's account.
It is possible that Romuald Guarna himself wrote the entries in the Salernitan chronicle starting in c. 1153-6, after he became archbishop of Salerno and subsequently a crucial eyewitness, given the archbishop’s role as a Sicilian diplomat and occasional member of the royal curia. The authorship of the chronicle is expressly declared at the end of the description of the peace conference at Venice in 1176-7, which he himself attended as a chief Sicilian negotiator.'‘ However, Donald Matthew has suggested that, due to the inconsistencies in the older part of the chronicle, Romuald wrote only the account of the conference of Venice. Matthew doubts that Romuald penned the entries after 1127, but his argument is not conclusive.'®
External testimonies also offer useful, brief information about the Italo-Norman nobility and the key events in the development of the Sicilian monarchy. The histories of John Kinnamos and Niketas Choniates recorded the presence of several Apulian noblemen, both rebels and royal generals, in the Constantinopolitan court and the military campaigns between the kingdom and the Eastern Empire. William of Tyre also recorded relevant episodes which attested members of the Italo-Norman nobility. Likewise, complementary information can be drawn from German testimonies such as the Annalista Saxo, Otto of Freising and the letters of Wibald of Corvey, who cover the conflicts in the 1130s and the subsequent contact between the German Empire, the south Italian nobility and the Sicilian monarchy.
Other types of textual material were also helpful. A collection of ordinances that contain the legislation of Roger II - better known, albeit inaccurately, as his assizes or constitutions of Ariano - shed some light on the relationship between the nobility and the kingdom's government. The work of Arabic cartographer Al-Idrisi, often called “The Book of King Roger’ provides a topological description of the mainland territories which proved useful in the identification of the northern Adriatic borders of the kingdom; Al-Idrisi used many sources, including route descriptions and portable maps. The critical edition and translation prepared by Amari and Schiaparelli, although focused solely on a geographical description of Italy, was more than sufficient for this study.
Other useful documentary sources include the Abruzzese cartulary-chronicles from Casauria, Carpineto and Maiella, which offer both diplomatic and narrative evidence, at times otherwise unattested, for the activities in northern Apulia in the twelfth century.
These codices were more than a cartulary — a hybrid but integral textual instrument used to attest and corroborate the abbey’s estates - which not only provided a collection of documents but also gathered many other texts and testimonies. The chronicle of John Berard, monk of Casauria, was written c. 1175-80, in the margins of the chartulary of the abbey of St Clement in Casauria, whose bulk is composed of 2,150 documents, dating back to the foundation of the monastery (c. 872).'° Alexander the monk, the author of the chronicle of the abbey of St Bartholomew of Carpineto, composed his work in the last decade of the twelfth century, appended to a collection of 161 documents from the same monastery.'’ Similarly, the Liber instrumentorum monasterii Sancti Salvatoris de Maiella is an unedited codex composed by the monks of the Holy Saviour at M. Maiella between the twelfth and the thirteenth centuries that compiles both transcribed charters and narrative testimonies."
In addition to textual material, the available diplomatic evidence formed an integral part of the sources for this study. Donations, exchanges, disputes and any other legal transactions that illustrate the links established by the counts place us at the very heart of this aristocratic society. The documentary heritage for the study of the Norman kingdom of Sicily comes mostly from archives with an overwhelmingly ecclesiastical provenance; the relative wealth of monastic archives compared with the small number of surviving episcopal ones is noteworthy. The archbishoprics of Salerno and Bari, and the bishoprics of Aversa, are the only substantial such survivals - other episcopal archives that preserve twelfth-century evidence (e.g. Benevento, Brindisi, Caiazzo, Capua, Chieti, Taranto and Troia) are smaller, and preserve only a fraction of what once existed. Some also have more from the thirteenth century than the twelfth century, for example Benevento. There is also a geographical imbalance; there are far more from Campania and Adriatic Apulia than the Basilicata and Molise.
This surviving corpus of charters has been mostly assembled from cartulary collections, which provide thousands of private and public documents. Important collections include the Codice diplomatico barese and pugliese, Le pergamene dellarchivio diocesano di Salerno, Codice diplomatico normanno di Aversa, Le pergamene di Capua, Le pergamene normanne della Mater Ecclesia Capuana, Regesto di S. Angelo in Formis, Codice diplomatico molisano, Syllabus Graecarum membranarum, Codex Diplomaticus Cajetanus and the Codice diplomatico verginiano, which considerably facilitated the diplomatic exploration of this study.
Compilations of charters that are not specific to a particular city or region were also employed; the Codex Diplomaticus Regni Siciliae contains a variety of royal charters from the twelfth century, and Ughelli and Coleti’s eighteenth-century Italia Sacra, a historical survey of Italy's bishoprics, offers copies of certain documents that are otherwise unedited or unidentified. The royal charters that survive now form a small fraction of what was once written, and their edition is still incomplete.” Neither the charters of William II nor the Greek documents of Roger II are available in print yet; Enzensberger is still working on Guillelmi II Diplomata, although many of his edited charters are available online.
The study of the surviving production of the Sicilian royal chancery reveals, nevertheless, a great deal about the regnum’s government.” Moreover, a seventeenth-century manuscript supplied material that was fundamental for this study: the Historia delle famiglie di Salerno normande, by Giovan Battista Prignano (Rome, Biblioteca Angelica, cod. 277-76). Prignano was one of the first scholars to systematically survey archival repositories for the study of the genealogy of the Norman aristocracy, visiting numerous archives and producing summaries and excerpts from the sources. Many of these documents have since been lost, making Prignanos Historia the only known surviving source for many of these transactions. Additionally, this study has relied on editions appended to academic articles and a handful of local prosopographies. All the published charters have been used extensively for histories of southern Italy and peninsular communities, having been heavily mined by scholars including Jamison, Ménager, Martin, Takayama, Cuozzo, Loud and Houben.
Unpublished charters found in repositories in Rome, Benevento (specifically in the Museo del Sannio), Naples and Cava de’ Tirreni were equally fundamental. Of special importance is the abbey of the Most Holy Trinity of Cava, which contains one of the largest and most relevant archives for the study of the medieval Mezzogiorno — most of its twelfth-century charters remain unedited. The charters from Cava not only attest the economic and legal interactions among the local aristocracy and the abbey itself but also shed light on the genealogies of southern Italy and the activities of local functionaries, including judges, justiciars, constables and comital officials.
Given the range of available diplomatic material, it was necessary to define a theoretical framework and data gathering method that would allow for a systematic survey of the relevant charters and the preparation of a prosopographical database. The first decision involved defining the medieval charter. In the last decades, charters have experienced a sort of historiographical resurgence: Rosenwein’s and Barton’s research and the collected works edited by Davis and Fouracre are a good illustration of this.”” ‘The transactions attested in charters are not as straightforward as they might appear. Donations, for example, might actually conceal a sale. As is the case with many south Italian charters, a document that initially records a grant may subsequently present another clause in which ‘compensation’ is given to the donor. Additionally, although classical charter elements are present, the surviving diplomatic material for twelfthcentury southern Italy is relatively heterogeneous, and there is little standardization between charters from either different regions or different social strata (royal vs. baronial). Moreover, many documents only survive in later copies that follow different formats, or in summaries compiled in a non-charter layout.
Two persistent challenges of compiling data from diplomatic material are recurring names and vague geographical definitions. One way to tackle the former is to manage and correlate the names of the social actors attested in the charters together with the other names recorded in the same context and organize them under a single ‘key’ spelling. The vague geographical definitions can be organized under the recurring geographical terms found in the charters themselves. For the south Italian documents of the twelfth century, these include casale, castrum, villa, campus and mons. ‘The boundaries of the campus were not as certain as many researchers may think, and those of the mons are broader than those of the villa and the casale. A subsequent issue of geographical definitions is place-name identification. Any modern equivalent of a place-name in the south Italian charters is bound to be approximate. The very organization of the land upon which the charters are drawn was changing into a layout that most likely remains the underlying pattern of the south Italian communes and countryside. Overall, these are identified on a case-by-case basis.
My methodological proposal is indebted to multiple lines of social interpretation and diplomatic research. If new questions are formulated and new answers suggested, it is because many of the old issues have already been resolved. Nevertheless, my efforts are bound to the axiomatic limitation of the available diplomatic material; the fragmented corpus of surviving charters is in many ways unsatisfactory, many documents have been lost and others only survive as interpolated or even forged documents. Although charters do not necessarily attest what actually happened, they do reflect how people wanted themselves and their social spaces to be recorded. The documents offer thus a public impression of a social system lost in time. The recorded interactions might not tell us the whole story, but they are the closest approximations we may have to the social environment in which they were constructed. The charters present valuable insights into at least four aspects of the period in question: (1) the flux of land and wealth between individuals, families and communities; (2) the exercise of authority between the aristocracy and people of lesser rank; (3) the public display of prestige and authority; and (4) the practical implementation of laws and customs.
Alongside charters, another key document employed is the Quaternus magne expeditonis, which is a contemporary record present in the compendium known as the Catalogus Baronum. This administrative document has been identified as a general register of the military service owed to the royal curia for the auxilium magne expeditionis: the ‘aid of the great military campaign’ - an expeditio in this context is a military operation.” I have discussed before the terminology, structure and use of this source in ‘Royal comestabuli and Military Control in the Sicilian Kingdom, whose proposal stands behind the historical exploration of this book.” I argued that the Quaternus magne expeditionis reveals two overlapping structures: a military layer drawn above an economic one. Accordingly, the feudum provided a basic reference to the royal curia for the computing and demand of the military aid levy from the landholding aristocracy.
Where in Southern Italy?
The study focuses on mainland territories of the kingdom of Sicily, especially the contemporary provinces of Apulia and the Terra di Lavoro. Although the regions of Abruzzo and Calabria are not discounted, they are not fully covered because their regional and cultural differences set them apart from the constituent peninsular provinces of the kingdom, and these variations require further and careful consideration.
Not all the regions are represented equally by the surviving documentary evidence; the available documentation for the peninsular territories of Apulia and the Terra di Lavoro is far more extensive and accessible than the surviving material for Calabria. Likewise, the Calabrian territories are not covered in the Catalogus Baronum. In addition, and as is argued throughout this work, Sicily was essentially different from the mainland because there were no actual counties on the island during this period, and the counts who conducted transactions in Sicily were tied to a mainland lordship.
The Quaternus magne expeditionis is divided between the two constituent provinces of the kingdom: the duchy of Apulia and the principality of Capua. These once separated polities became united aeque principaliter under the Sicilian crown. The full royal title normally concerned the duchy and the principality, as well as the highest royal offices on the mainland (e.g. magister iustitiarius totius Apulie et Terre Laboris). The former principality of Capua, however, was more commonly identified as the “Terra di Lavoro’ in most of the surviving charters and chronicles of the second half of the twelfth century, except when enunciating the king’s full titles. Consequently, this study uses the principality of Capua and the Terra di Lavoro as interchangeable terms for the same territory, from the county of Fondi to the former principality of Salerno.
The former duchy of Apulia was far more extensive than the modern region of Apulia; the province included the former principality of Salerno, the mountainous district of Irpina and the region of modern Basilicata. For clarity, although the principality of Salerno ceased to exist formally, and this princely title was no longer used, I employ it as a geographical identifier. When it is helpful to emphasize the coastal area of modern Apulia, I refer to Adriatic Apulia.
Structure of the argument
This book focuses on the counts as the members of the highest levels of the aristocracy, because it has been possible to situate them historically with a considerable degree of certainty. In this way, the activities of the upper nobility and the configuration of the counties provide a sound platform upon which to start looking at the operation of social control on the mainland and analyse how these people were embedded in the new social order as nodes of regional authority.
To achieve these aims, the opening chapter explores the immediate origins of the peninsular counts in the decade before the instauration of the Sicilian monarchy. Chapter 1 surveys thus the political background, social context and kinship of the south Italian upper aristocracy on the eve of the kingdom's creation, in order to understand the original features of the peninsular nobility.
Chapter 2 discusses the implications of the related findings and the calendar of activities of the peninsular nobility during the reign of Roger II. The kingdom's social arrangement cannot be discussed without knowing the composition of the upper aristocracy and their roles as agents of war and order. I present hence a complete picture of the peninsular nobility’s new configuration. Here, the social meaning of the aristocracy’s documented activities is examined around the concept of the comital rank and the county.
The following two chapters present a more detailed analysis of the altered roles and new relationships the counts acquired during periods of intense political and military turmoil. Chapter 3 and 4 explores William I’s reign and the presence and role of the nobility when the endurance and relevance of the social arrangement achieved in the previous period was tested. Through a discussion of the episodes of conflict and rebellion surrounding, first, the leadership of the count of Loritello (Chapter 3) and then the position acquired by the count of Gravina in the midst of the counts’ rebellion (Chapter 4), these chapters present a detailed description of the comital activities and acquired competences. These two chapters also offer an analysis of the aristocracy’s development with, without and against the Palermitan authority.
After having analysed in Chapter 4 the transformative role played by the count of Gravina and its effect in the power balance in the peninsular provinces, Chapter 5 will then survey the political and military control exercised by the counts during the regency of Queen Margaret. I present a reconstructed picture of the mutated continental nobility, a result of both counts and relatives of the queen becoming central agents in affairs of the royal curia, and the re-assignation of vacant counties. This serves to identify spheres of action which delimit the extent of the counts’ agency during this pivotal stage.
Chapter 6 offers a complete account of the new and consolidated ruling elite in the peninsular provinces, covering each county separately from 1169 to 1189. Although the argument progresses chronologically up to this point, here I provide a sequential account of all the documented activities of the kingdom’s counts and an analysis of the development and consolidation of each county until the end of the Norman period, on the eve of the succession wars and the Hohenstaufen takeover.
The final chapter encompasses a long-deferred discussion of the kingdom's social mechanism for military mobilization and administration of justice during the last stage of the development of the Italo-Norman counts. This deferral is necessary to avoid falling into the circular argument which expects to see an effective model of centralization and royal state-building in the Norman kingdom of Sicily. Chapter 6 therefore discusses the enhanced role played by some counts as active agents of the king’s justice and army, and contextualizes their position within the peninsular nobility.
This book is supplemented by a reflection on the Sicilian duana baronum; a chronological chart which illustrates the number of counts and the existence of specific counties at any given time throughout the kingdom’s Norman period; a genealogical chart in which the ancestry of those counts and the kinship connections between their families can be traced and visualized; and two maps of which show all the locations relevant to comital activities and transactions.
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