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Acknowledgements
The editors would like to thank the anonymous peer reviewers of this book, Rosie Bonté at Brepols, Colin Veach and the editorial board of the series Medieval Identities: Socio-Cultural Spaces, Cath D’Alton for the maps, Maria Whelan for assistance with proofreading and copyediting, and Chris Lewis for library support during lockdown. In particular, we wish to thank Andrew Small, who assisted with the editing of this book in the first stages of the project. We are grateful for his reading of the chapters, his contribution to the Introduction, and his perspectives on Normans and conquest from his work on the eastern Roman Empire in the central Middle Ages.
For supporting the research and writing of this book, we would like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung, the Haskins Society, the John Fell OUP Fund, the Khalili Research Centre for the Art and Material Culture of the Middle East, the Royal Historical Society, the Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities (TORCH) Oxford Medieval Studies Programme, the British Museum, St Edmund Hall and the John Cowdrey Fellowship, the University of Oxford and the Bodleian Libraries, the libraries of King’s College London, and the Historisches Seminar of Johannes Gutenberg-Universitat Mainz.
Introduction
The Normans and Conquest in the Mediterranean*
Who were the Normans in the medieval Mediterranean? What did they do there, and what did they make of the world they found there? What did the people of that world make of them?
This book explores the human consequences of Norman migration and conquest in the Mediterranean. This introductory article is divided into three parts. First, we consider three things — Normans, conquest, and the Mediterranean — in light of their conceptual history. Here, we argue that conquest by the Normans in the south was nota conclusive event, but rather an ongoing and multi-faceted process, and we frame the case that the book as a whole makes for studying the impact of human agency on long-term change. Second, we narrate a timeline of key events in the Norman enterprises in the south for reference and background. This section includes a basic chronological narrative framed around southern Italy, and a sampling of the geographic dispersal of individual Normans’ careers. The point here is to counter-balance a regional grand narrative with personal, trans-regional micro-histories, and to illustrate that both were at play. Third, we present a thematic map of the book’s arguments, assess the implications of the collected chapters’ findings, and suggest avenues for future study and research.
Normans, Conquest, and the Mediterranean
‘Normans’ and ‘conquest’ go together like bread and butter. Normans in history are often remembered as conquerors, none more so than the William the Conqueror in England. Alongside the Norman conquest of England under William, Norman families also carved out new lordships, dukedoms, and eventually a kingdom in southern Italy and Sicily during the eleventh century. Bands of Norman knights were also involved in the Reconquista in Spain and carved out lordships in Anatolia during the collapse of Byzantine imperial rule in the region. These eleventh-century conquests begat further expansion. There were two unsuccessful invasions of the Balkans: Malta was captured in 1091 by Roger I of Sicily and his son Roger II briefly ruled over many coastal towns in Ifriqiya, modern-day Tunisia. Tancred and Bohemond of the Hautevilles of southern Italy played major roles in the First Crusade and the establishment of the Crusader state of the Principality of Antioch. In some of these places long-standing polities were formed with a Norman ruler at their dynastic head, like England and Sicily; other occupations were more fleeting, like Norman North Africa and the lordships in Anatolia. All were formed by a process of conquest by military bands who called themselves, or who were called, Normans."
Of the two words, ‘Norman’ and ‘conquest’, the former has received more analytical attention than the latter. There is strong historiographical tradition on the Normans: journals, conferences, and centres are dedicated to their study.” Many works consider the genesis of a specifically ‘Norman’ identity, whether a Normanitas even existed and, if it did exist, what role, if any, this group identity played in their successes. David Douglas argued that the Normans were a unified and coherent group that spanned both the Mediterranean and the British Isles.* This approach has been revisited and revised,’ not least because the idea of achievement might imply sanction or vindication of conquest — and hence, of oppression. However, there remains evidence that many felt a strong group consciousness of Norman-ness, albeit one that decayed and declined over time.®
‘Conquest’ has two compounding features.’ First, conquest has strong military connotations; second, it implies a series of events that seems to invite narration rather than analysis. Conquest is the narrative field for the military capture of land, fortifications, and cities. Some studies have made a thematic and chronological division between ‘conquest’ chapters (which include military and diplomatic matters) and later chapters, about later times, concerning government and society.’ ‘Conquest’ can seem separate from and prior to activities of legitimization and state-building.
Yet it is not clear that a sense of sequence — conquest followed by order — is the proper way to understand conquest. Graham Loud raised the question as to whether conquest was an appropriate word to describe the Norman takeover of southern Italy.? Some have called conquest an outcome of Norman migration or exile into the Mediterranean and elsewhere.’° Recent studies have looked beyond conquest to investigate cultural transmission across the ‘Norman worlds’ with migration as a key theme;" the Norman Edge projects have explored the idea of a Norman frontier, and the identities and relationships that changed with the Norman encounter.” Intermarriage in the former Lombard principalities of southern Italy was common, and Joanna Drell has shown its significance for changes in culture and identity in the families that emerged from these new relationships. Loud has examined Norman migration or infiltration as a means of conquest, showing that it is hard to reconcile the numbers of Normans who actually moved from Normandy with their widespread success in establishing new polities."* It is likely that only between 2000 and 2500 Normans came to southern Italy over the whole of the eleventh century, and that the numbers of new Norman migrants slowed after 1066.'> The small numbers of Normans involved necessarily meant that the whole-scale replacement of local elites, as in England, never occurred. One Norman’s migration and marriage into a local family was a local Lombard’s conquest and partial replacement.
This book argues that there is value in viewing Norman conquests as enterprises both military and migratory. In order to turn conquest from a descriptive term into an analytical concept — one that is useful for investigating how political, cultural, and economic change happened in the eleventh- and twelfth-century Mediterranean — the partition wall between ‘conquest’ and ‘post-conquest’ needs to be fully torn down. Conquest was a process of change, not just a term for what happened. It includes cultural syncretism, new administrative practices, changing leaderships and loyalties, and material culture. These events, relationships, and structures should not be seen as what came after the Norman conquest of a region. Carl von Clausewitz, the nineteenth-century military and political theorist, considered these phenomena the continuation of conquest by other means.” They were, as this book’s authors show, just as much the means as they were the ends. The means of conquest, whether military or otherwise, always interacted with ends or objectives, whether the resulting lordship, principality, or kingdom lasted for several generations, as did the kingdom of Sicily, or whether it survived, like the lordships in Anatolia, for only a year or two.
This book asks: by what means was conquest effected — and by whom? Across the Mediterranean, Normans used different methods, technologies, and resources that left their mark in the historical record. They introduced new technologies of conquest into the Mediterranean world, but they also adopted resources immediately to hand which they adapted for their own ends. For instance, Normans brought styles of horseriding and cavalry warfare which were widely admired and then adopted. The Byzantine writer and princess Anna Komnene describes her brother-in-law’s riding style as like a Norman's: the comparison is clearly meant to flatter.'7 The Normans also built small, private fortifications in southern Italy which replaced the larger public fortifications built by the Byzantines in the first half of the eleventh century.® On the other hand, Normans quickly incorporated Mediterranean technologies into their military capabilities, perhaps most spectacularly in the area of naval warfare: here they quickly acquired a significant edge, thanks to which they captured Bari in 1071 and Malta in 1091.”
Normans reused local resources for the purpose of conquests. We see this in the widespread use of architectural spolia in Norman building projects. Less tangible evidence — intermarriages with local elites, exploitation of economic resources, and repurposing of Byzantine imperial titles — should be seen in similar terms. Some local elites allied themselves with the Normans and took part in this restructuring. Others resisted. The character of the southern Italian lordships, as Sandro Carocci has shown, were shaped by underlying continuities of the micro-regions in which they were established, highlighting the importance of Normans’ repurposing local resources for conquest.”° This interweaving of the old and the new created something which left a profound mark on the memories of both the conquerors and the conquered alike.
Because the Mediterranean Sea was a central conduit by which the Normans who had moved south encountered other peoples, it is worth pausing to consider where, and how, the study of Normans and conquest in this region might profitably interact with Mediterranean history. A glance at a map of the Mediterranean world in the year 1000 compared with one in 1150 reveals striking political upheavals. At the turn of the millennium, strong, often centralized and long-standing empires ruled almost every part of the Mediterranean coast: the Umayyad caliphate in Spain; the Fatimids in Egypt, North Africa, southern Italy, and parts of Sicily; and the Byzantine Empire in the Balkans, Anatolia, parts of Syria and Italy. By 1100, all of them had either disappeared or suffered a partial collapse followed by a dramatic restructuring. The Umayyad caliphate in Spain disappeared entirely; the weakened Fatimids were restricted to Egypt and Byzantium lost considerable territories in Italy, Anatolia, and Syria that were never to return.” In their place new polities were created, often founded by outsiders from the Mediterranean world. The Almoravids emerged from the Sahara Desert and ruled a territory from Spain through Morocco to Ghana in west Africa.” The Christian Reconquista began in the rest of the Iberian Peninsula. In the eastern Mediterranean, the Turkish Seljuk Empire in Anatolia and the Levant appeared and, at the end of the eleventh century, the First Crusade brought Normans to Syria and Palestine.” Finally the Normans conquered southern Italy and Sicily, conquests which were consolidated under Roger II as the kingdom of Sicily in 1137.** These events involved short-, medium-, and long-term changes in Mediterranean life as dynasties, groups, and peoples formed new relationships throughout the processes of conquest.
A pan-Mediterranean history of these imperial collapses and the emergence of new polities has yet to be written. Historiography for each empire’s ‘decline’ tends to focus on internal factors, especially in Byzantine studies. The sole, partial exception is perhaps Ronnie Ellenblum’s The Collapse of the Eastern Mediterranean: Climate Change and the Decline of the East, 950-1072, although this offers an overly deterministic, single-factor, and sweeping account. The present study of the Normans in the Mediterranean suggests that there is ample scope for future researchers to write such a history. The Normans were present all around the Mediterranean. Study of the Normans in this sea-zone and the lands that border it can provide macro- and micro- histories of conquest, an examination of the technologies and methods of conquest, and an understanding of how contemporaries revised and transmitted memories of conquest.
In the nineteenth century, historians such as Henri Pirenne and Fernand Braudel famously framed Mediterranean history as an area of historical enquiry. These writers, like historians Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell who followed, have tended to emphasize long-term, deep underlying structures.”5 This is, in part, an unsurprising feature of economic history, social scientific thought, and Annales school philosophy; Braudel’s name has been taken as synonymous with longue durée. Braudel is properly credited with showing the value of the study of systems as an approach to history. His core questions centred on long-term historical trends, and he found anthropological and geological forces to be ultimately more influential than the individual deeds. However, he did not exclude individual influence and agency from his analysis. Braudel first drafted his The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II whilst a prisoner of war in Germany in 1940-1942. In his concluding thoughts to ‘Part II: Collective Destinies and General Trends’ on ‘Conjecture and History’ he offered the suggestion that in any economic recession, the dormant assets of the wealthy ‘might produce a brilliant civilization lasting years or even decades.” Is this conjecture a dispassionate analysis and economic parable? Or does it hint at an unstated opinion that, in times of great need, like times of war, those with means — or economic agency — are able and obliged to act?
Whether or not we read Braudel’s work in relation to his experience of wartime and post-war Europe in the twentieth century, Braudel was very much alert to the actions and reactions of early modern people in the Mediterranean. A good example is his chapter on the vagaries of travel and communication in the Mediterranean. This chapter — ‘Distance, the First Enemy’ (vol. 2, Chapter I.1) — frames human activity not as a passive happening in an inexorable chronology, but as a network of ongoing interactions with the geophysical world.”’ This chapter is orientated towards human experience as much as it is towards type and trend. Here we encounter the hopes of individuals making new deals and the frustrations of foiled trade; surprise at the speed of news surpassing expectation; desolation at delay. We can imagine ourselves into this world.
More recently, Horden and Purcell have proposed an underlying economic ‘connectivity’ between ecological niches situated around the Mediterranean. Consequently, the history of events (histoire événementielle), including conquests, are of value primarily for revealing underlying or long-term patterns and processes. This concept of connectivity risks creating a Mediterranean history that buzzes with activity but never fundamentally changes. Perhaps because they sought to stand in direct contradiction to Braudel, their book bears the imprint of Braudel’s thoughts. If there is room for human agency in the short term, there is very little space, in either Braudel’s work or Horden and Purcell’s, for human actions to change deeper, underlying structures over a longer period of time.
We are rather more sympathetic to David Abulafia’s argument that there is a history to be written about the connection of humans with the Mediterranean Sea, a view that emphasizes the agency of individual people over the short, medium, and long term.”® This volume shows how part of that human story played out across parts of the Mediterranean. To consider conquest as a process — one that does not end with a decisive battle — is to effect a link, latent in Braudel’s book, between the two layers of historical time, the longue durée and the histoire événementielle. Actions and decisions made by Normans and non-Normans, by elites and non-elites, both effected and constituted conquest and changed underlying political, anthropological, and even environmental structures of the Mediterranean world.
Historical Narratives
Beginnings in Italy
The military activity of the Norman conquests can, crudely, be split into two phases.”? In the first phase, running from the mid eleventh to early twelfth century, the Normans established lordships in Antioch and Italy. In the latter, most famously, Roger II established the kingdom of Sicily in 130. A second phase occurred after the establishment of these polities, such as the Normans at Tortosa during the Second Crusade and the invasion of North Africa3°
The first groups of Normans began travelling as pilgrims, living as settlers, and fighting as mercenaries in the Mediterranean from the beginning of the eleventh century. They did so in a general context of strengthening relationships between the Mediterranean world and northern Latin Christendom. The earliest record of Norman activity in the Mediterranean is in the History of the Normans by Amatus of Montecassino, a southern Italian monk of the famed Benedictine monastery of Montecassino, in the 1080s. Four hundred Norman pilgrims were passing through Salerno on the way back to Normandy after visiting the Holy Land around the year 1000. While the Normans rested in the city, raiders from Islamic Sicily arrived and the small group of Normans fought them off despite the raiders’ greater numbers. The local Lombard ruler rewarded the Normans who settled and then encouraged others back home in Normandy to join them because of the potential riches at hand.
This origin story, whether historical or not, sets out three key themes of early Norman activity in the Mediterranean. First, there existed inherent tensions between the motives of faith, martial prowess, and mercenary activity on the part of local rulers. Second, the small numbers of Normans relative to the general population contributed to a sense that they were able to overcome seemingly insurmountable odds. Third, there existed many motivations to move from Normandy to the Mediterranean, always amplified by familial and personal networks of support.
From the 1010s, rulers in southern Italy were employing small bands of Normans to help sort out their various disputes. The rulers of the small city-based polities of Campania, Lombard and non-Lombard alike, employed them and paid them in silks, linens, and gold.3+ One well-attested example of locals’ employment use of Normans is that of Melus of Bari, and the actions he took during his revolt against the catepan, the Byzantine viceroy in Italy, in 1017.5 This revolt was put down by imperial troops within a year, but Normans continued to serve local notables in the region. In 1030, Sergius IV of Naples decided to pay Rainulf Drengot not in the usual textiles or coin but instead to invest him as count of Aversa, a small fort with some land, as reward for services rendered, creating the first Norman lordship in the Mediterranean.**
The small-scale conflicts between families and polities provided plenty of employment opportunities for Normans in southern Italy. However, the use of foreign troops by Mediterranean polities was not unusual. The Byzantine Empire, the Fatimids, and the Umayyads in Spain all employed large corps of soldiers recruited from outside their territorial borders, partly because they may have been seen as more effective or more loyal. The Varangian Guard of Byzantium, composed at this time of many Rus / Scandinavian recruits, is perhaps the most famous example of this. The initial employment of Normans in southern Italy was a small-scale example of a much larger Mediterranean phenomenon.
Amatus of Montecassino, William of Apulia, and Geoffrey Malaterra, our main historical sources for this period, all draw a straight line between these early activities and the later conquests post-1050 in southern Italy” However, we must be careful not to fall into a teleological trap. These sources were all written with the benefit of hindsight, after the initial military phase of the conquest was over, by 1071, in southern Italy. They were also all written, for various reasons, with the intent of explaining why the Normans won. The narratives they present naturally shape events to fit this linear narrative.3* A different argument for the Norman ascendancy comes from another angle: the slow decay and decline of the Byzantine Empire and the Lombard principalities in southern Italy. Although decline might seem to create the opportunity for opportunistic invaders, the Byzantine Empire in particular was actually strengthening its position on the peninsula. If the Tancredis, Don Calogeros, and Salinas of Giuseppi Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard had lived in the eleventh century, they would undoubtedly have been loyal Byzantines, with heads unturned by any northern adventurers. Paradoxically this strengthening could have helped to cause the Norman conquests in southern Italy.
The Turn in the 1040s
The strength of the Byzantine Empire can be traced to the actions of the empire from the 1010s. In northern Apulia, a string of new fortress-towns were constructed to solidify Byzantine control of the interior? Even today the region of these towns is known as the Capitinata, after the catepan, the chief Byzantine official in Italy. Strong commercial and diplomatic relationships existed between Byzantium and Amalfi on the Campanian coast.*° The Lombard princes of Capua, Benevento, and Salerno all recognized, to varying degrees, the suzerainty of the Byzantine Empire.** When, in 1022, Henry II the Ottonian emperor invaded in order to assert his authority in southern Italy he captured no Byzantine towns and received a polite welcome from the influential abbey of Montecassino, as well as from some of the Lombard princes but little more.*” Soon after he departed, the Lombard princes returned to a loosely held Byzantine suzerainty. The most visible presence of Byzantium’s waxing strength in Italy was the mobilization of the large, multinational invasion force that was launched against Islamic Sicily in 1038. The army included Rus troops and the Varangian guard, including a young Harald Hardrada, later king of Norway. Contingents were despatched from the Anatolics, Thrace, the Armeniakon, Hellas, Macedonia, and the Opsikion themata, all across the empire.*? These forces joined local levies from Byzantine Apulia and Calabria, alongside auxiliaries from the Lombard principalities in Campania.*+ The Lombard princes sent units of Normans as their contribution but they also joined other Normans freshly recruited by the Byzantines for the campaign. The invasion of 1038 is the first known example of Byzantium recruiting large numbers of ‘Frankish’ mercenaries, many of whom came from Normandy.*5 Amongst those freshly recruited were members of the important Hauteville family who would come to dominate southern Italy.
The Byzantine invasion of Sicily initially went very well; however, it fell apart due to conflicts within imperial leadership and tensions between units of the army itself.*° Part of this breakdown was a mutiny of Normans and local units, upset with their treatment, which then fed into to a complex multi-sided civil war breaking out throughout Byzantine Italy. This involved Guaimar IV of Salerno, Argyrus, the son of Melus who had grown up in Constantinople, George Maniakes, a Byzantine general who eventually led his own push against Constantine IX Monomachos, and units of Normans.*”
All of these actors had divergent interests and goals that made them shift alliances, which often led to betrayals between the different parties. The actual prominence of the Normans during the initial phase between c. 1039-1042 is hard to discern fully.
The actions of Guaimar in Campania and Argyrus in Apulia, who counted Normans amongst their followers, were not substantially different from past revolts. These revolts were not necessarily anti-Byzantine Lombard ethnic revolts. Both Guaimar and Argyrus were part of a Byzantine imperial system in Italy in their separate ways, one as a Lombard prince and the other as a local notable in imperial service. Many members of the local elites actively participated as officials and soldiers of the Byzantine empire, and the empire itself was willing to adapt its administrative, economic, and religious policies and practices to local circumstances.** Political violence in southern Italy was evidence neither of secessionist movements nor of political distress, but of attempts by members of the local elites to leverage their position within the existing system, often by using imperial assets, like army units, such as the Normans. For instance, when Argyrus received an offer of support from Constantine IX Monomachos, he happily accepted it and returned to imperial service, first as a governor in Paphlagonia before returning to Italy as a doux (duke) and catepan.*? His father, Melus, had attempted something similar earlier but had failed.
The key difference between the civil war of 1038 compared to previous revolts was its greater size and scale. The number of ‘imperial assets, or the army units that could be repurposed, was much larger because of the failed Sicilian invasion. Crucially, large numbers of Normans were involved. In 1041, as part of this upheaval, Ardouin, a Milanese commander ofa Norman contingent, seized control of Melfi.5° The seizure of Melfi was done in alliance with Guaimar IV. Then in 1043, the Normans within this coalition seized control, expelled Ardouin, and agreed amongst themselves to divide the interior of Apulia into twelve counties amongst their leaders." This was a decisive, fundamental change because for the first time, bands of Normans were forcibly reshaping the political landscape, and placing themselves at the top of the hierarchy.
Making Fortunes and Families
Key to the nature of the Norman conquests in southern Italy was that there was no single overarching strategy nor one ‘Norman’ leader. Instead, the Normans were a collection of loosely affiliated autonomous bands, led by individuals from a small number of interconnected families hailing from Normandy. The most important of these families were the Hautevilles and the Drengots. The first expeditions into Calabria took place from 1044, whilst lordships were established in and around the Capitinata, Gargano, and Benevento in 1045-1047. The military phase of conquest was slow, piecemeal, and interspersed with frequent bouts of fighting between different Norman bands. For instance, in Apulia and the Basilicata several Norman leaders were able to carve out their lordships independently of the Hautevilles and the Drengots. Examples include Geoffrey of Conversano, Robert of Montescaglioso, and Peter of Troia who often clashed violently with the ambitions of Robert Guiscard, as in the repeated revolts against Guiscard in 1067-1068, 1072-1073, 1079-1080, and 1082-1083. A key moment of unity transcended individual ambition in 1053 at the Battle of Civitate, when the combined forces of Robert Guiscard, Richard Drengot, and Humphrey de Hauteville defeated a papal-Lombard-Byzantine-Ottonian alliance.s+ The Normans captured Pope Leo IX, and the battle marks the last co-ordinated and concerted effort to stop the Normans by local and outside powers.*s
In the aftermath of the Battle of Civitate, the Norman rolling-up of southern Italy continued. The conquest of Calabria was completed by Guiscard and his brother Roger (Roger I) by 1059, the invasion of Sicily began in 1060, Palermo and Mazara fell in 1072, and by 1092 the whole island had submitted to Roger.° Meanwhile, on the mainland, Richard Drengot, through intermarriage and force, became prince of Capua in 1058.57 Pope Nicholas II signed a treaty of alliance between Robert Guiscard and Richard Drengot in 1059. In return for their oaths of fealty and support, he recognized them as legitimate rulers in Apulia, Calabria, Capua, and Sicily.s* The Byzantine port cities of Apulia were gradually besieged and conquered during the 1060s. By 1071-1073, with the surrender of Bari, Brindisi, and Trani, all of Apulia was controlled by Norman lordships. In 1076, Salerno fell to the control of Robert Guiscard whose second wife, Sichelgaita, was a member of the local ruling family.° Only Naples (which remained independent until 1137) and a pocket centred around Benevento, under the protection of the papacy, remained beyond the orbit of Norman power.
These Normans worked initially by plundering and ransacking an area surrounding a fortress seized by a band of Norman soldiers.°° This was an arbitrary and harsh form of power, little different from roving banditry. The goal was to stockpile food, weapons, and plunder before moving on to the next place. Robert Guiscard’s initial rise to power in Calabria during the 1040s is a case in point. Guiscard was sent by his elder brother William Iron-Arm to carve out his own lordship,” so he gathered a small band of troops and headed off. Many of these were Normans, but Amatus of Montecassino and Geoffrey Malaterra are both quite clear that his band included others who had deserted from Byzantine service, including Slavs. Guiscard established himself on a 320-foot hill called Scribla in northern Calabria.® From there, through a mixture of kidnapping and raids he was able to extort food, textiles, and coins from local inhabitants which he then re-distributed to his followers. Hostages were taken to ensure the loyalty of local support and were forced to accompany Guiscard as he moved across Italy.°* We should not imagine that the political side of these dealings involved only men, for these hostages included women: among those taken by Guiscard, for example, was the daughter of Argyritzos, lord of Bari, in 1071.°
As Guiscard became more successful, he attracted more supporters. Other family members, like Roger, joined him and he had to find fresh resources to maintain their support. This in turn created an ambition for further conquests, like the invasion of Sicily once Calabria had been fully subjugated in 1059, or the great invasion of the Balkans in 1081. In addition to land, Guiscard acquired vast sums of moveable wealth in coins and valuable textiles that he was able to bequeath upon his death to local ecclesiastical institutions, including Montecassino.® Normans recycled local resources — economic, political, and military — to fuel their conquests, which shows how each micro-region within southern Italy has its own distinctive history of conquest. Even intermarriage between Normans and local elites, as Aurélie Thomas demonstrates, varied within micro-regions, as was the case in Campania.® If we frame success from the would-be conqueror’s perspective, Robert Guiscard was perhaps the most impressively successful Norman in being able to build conquest on conquest; but his method was a common one, and not inherently Norman in character.
Later, from the 1070s, more stable lordships were established as the profits of plunder from military campaigns began to diminish. The Normans were no longer roving but stationary bandits.°? Those Normans who now dominated a territorial space had to further diversify their strategies and tactics, and they looked to new methods and technologies beyond the military to solidify their control and to profit from that control. This was ‘conquest by other means. However, fighting, plunder, and violence did not go away. The same pattern of repurposing local resources remained an important modus operandi, meaning that there was considerable variation in the trajectories, outcomes, and even objectives of conquest because the materials were different. We see this in comparing the means of conquest in Apulia with that in Sicily or Calabria. Conquest was contingent, and local circumstance as well as individual action shaped what would become radical political, social, and economic transitions in southern Italy.
Normans beyond Italy
This historical introduction, so far, has followed the creation of the first Norman lordships in southern Italy. The southern Italian lordships are essential for the wider history of the Normans in the Mediterranean in three key ways. First, these initial conquests prompted further conquests of neighbouring regions, like Malta, Sicily, and invasion of the Balkans by Guiscard and his son Bohemond in 1081. Second, many of the Normans who ventured further across the Mediterranean began, and often ended, their careers in southern Italy. Third, these lordships lasted; and their effect in shaping future kingdoms and empires is measurable in archive, architecture, and the art of chronicling history. It is a key region, and the one explored in the greatest depth by this book’s authors. But regional history is by no means the only way to tell the story of the Normans in the Mediterranean.
This next endeavour thus takes a different cross-section of Norman history. Turning from the broad chronology events as seen from a place, southern Italy, we consider history through the perspective of individual Normans who travelled between places. What follows is a potted prosopography that samples some of these interconnecting careers. It is an approach that shows how, by eschewing an exclusive focus on Norman Mediterranean regionalism, we can highlight some of the book’s wider historical themes: among them, contingency, the agency of both Normans and non-Normans, the importance of relationships, and a lack of linearity.
William of Montreuil and Robert Crespin
We begin with the lives of two Normans involved with the Iberian Peninsula in the 1060s. In 1064, the city of Barbastro in northern Aragon was besieged and captured by a Franco-Aragonese army. Although the city was recaptured nine months later, the campaign has a prominent place in the creation of a crusading ideology before 1095.”° Prominent and large contingents of this force came directly from Normandy and also Norman Italy. Two of the leaders were William of Montreuil and Robert Crespin.” William of Montreuil had travelled from Normandy to Italy some time before 1056. When he arrived, he became a follower of Richard Drengot who had become prince of Capua in 1058. William was adopted by Richard, and he married Richard's daughter. He built lordships over Marsia, Aquino, and Richard gave him the city of Gaeta. Once established, however, he repudiated his wife and alliance with Richard and forged a new alliance with the papacy, other Normans, and local Lombards against his adopted father. At some point, he left with papal blessing for Spain and was involved in the capture of the city of Girona in 1063. He then joined the army, possibly as a representative of the papacy, that took Barbastro before returning to Italy and his lordships there. He donated two churches to the Abbey of Montecassino before passing away in Rome around 1070.”
Robert Crespin, William’s fellow Norman on the Barbastro campaign, took another cross-Mediterranean route. He and his men were recruited for service in the Byzantine army during their campaigns against the Seljuk Turks in Anatolia and Armenia.”} Dissatisfied with his pay and recognition, in 1069 Crispin mutinied and seized a castle called ‘Maurokastron’ (the Black Castle) in the Armeniakon thema from where he began to raid and plunder the surrounding countryside.” This was in a very similar manner to how the first Norman lordships in Italy were created. However, unlike in Italy, Crispin was reconciled to the Byzantine Empire, pardoned by Emperor Romanes IV Diogenes, and died as a guest in the Great Palace of Constantinople in around 1072.”5 After his death, command of Crispin’s unit was transferred to Roussel of Bailleul.
Conquest and creation ofa lordship, combined with service to local rulers, were not mutually exclusive career pathways. Normans could, and did, switch between the two depending on the situation. They did not necessarily believe themselves restricted by place or promise. These biographies in miniature offer a reminder, too, that conquest was not always the first event in a sequence, nor was it incompatible with other strategies for self-protection and self-promotion among the Normans in the Mediterranean.
Roussel of Bailleul
The Norman Roussel had been present at Roger I’s victory at the Cerami river in 1063 during the early stages of the conquest of Sicily.”° By all accounts a self-confident and aggressive commander, he was recruited for Byzantine service and inherited Crispin’s troops, at that point numbering around 2500 men.” In the chaotic aftermath of the Battle of Manzikert in 1071 between the Byzantines and the Seljuks, Roussel created a lordship over a large territory centred on Amasea in northern Anatolia.” He took over and repurposed parts of the Byzantine state in the region, including castles, troops, and administrative machinery and he provided security for the local population. Roussel was not the only person in the aftermath of Manzikert to take the opportunity to create self-sustaining principalities. Philaretus, a Byzantine official and military governor in Marash, used his connections with Armenian immigrants to Cilicia to gain control of several cities there and eventually both Edessa and Antioch.”? Whatis striking in Roussel’s case is that he appears to have had some degree of local support. When a young Alexios Komnenos (the future emperor Alexios I Komnenos) was sent to crush Roussel’s new lordship, he encountered considerable local resistance. He had to resort to a series of tricks and counter-blufts, including using Turkish soldiers in the region, in order to capture Roussel. Local people rioted, and some even tried to break in and free Roussel from Alexios’s captivity, which suggests that Roussel had local Byzantine support. In response, Alexios appeared to publicly blind Roussel in front of the people of Amasea to quell any hopes that he would return — but the blinding drama was an elaborate charade.*° Roussel played along, sight intact, and served Alexios and the empire, before another double-cross gone wrong resulted in his death.”
The actions of both Roussel and Robert Crespin show how thoroughly Normans had become embedded in the social and political systems and culture of the eastern Roman Empire. They were not regarded as Byzantine, but they were no longer seen as political outsiders.** The Normans created their own polities, but they did so in the same manner as some of their Byzantine counterparts.
Bohemond of Taranto
No Norman illustrates the ambiguous position of a Norman in the Mediterranean more than the life and legacy of Bohemond of Taranto. In her Alexiad, Anna Komnene used Roussel de Bailleul as a literary foil for Alexios I Komnenos, her father and the hero of her history. Alexios’s true foil was Bohemond of Taranto, the son of Robert Guiscard. Arguably one of the most important themes running through the Alexiad is how Alexios outwitted and defeated Bohemond, portrayed as the emperor's wiliest, strongest, most resilient opponent: he who tried and failed ‘playing the Cretan with the Cretan.*3
Bohemond was born sometime between 1050 and 1058 in southern Italy, the son of Robert Guiscard and his first wife, a Norman woman named Alberada. He was born Mark, but nicknamed Bohemond, after a legendary giant, on account of his stature.*4 Bohemond accompanied his father during his invasion of the Byzantine Empire in the Balkans, and they defeated Alexios I Komnenos in battle at Dyrrachium (1081) before invading Macedonia and Thessaly. Byzantine inducements encouraged defections from Guiscard and Bohemond’s army, a Venetian fleet recaptured Dyrrachium, forcing a retreat back to southern Italy. They attempted invasion again in 1084-1085, but the invasion was abortive because of an epidemic and the succession crisis caused by Robert Guiscard’s death in 1085.°5 Robert’s possessions were eventually split in 1090 between Bohemond and Roger Borsa, Guiscard’s eldest son from his second marriage to Sichelgaita. A further outbreak of violence occurred after Bohemond formed an alliance with his uncle Roger I of Sicily, and he eventually controlled most of the land south of Melfi in Apulia.*°
In 1097, Bohemond took the cross and joined the First Crusade with his nephew Tancred. He marched with his forces towards Constantinople, on the same roads he had taken during the invasions of the 1080s. When Bohemond arrived, he took an oath of loyalty to Alexios and received gifts and subsidies from the emperor.*” Bohemond became Alexios’s man within the First Crusade leadership and in return was possibly promised a title and lands in the east for his service.8* Bohemond used his relationship with Alexios to leverage his position within the leadership council beyond what his size of contingent would have warranted. In this, he was aided his brother Guy, who was currently serving in the Byzantine army and held the title of sebastos, and by his half-sister, Olympias / Helena, who had grown up in Constantinople as the ward of Alexios.*? Bohemond was a known almost in a familial capacity, and although not entirely trusted, formed an integral part of the emperor's plans for the First Crusade.
The relationship between Alexios and Bohemond broke down during the siege and capture of Antioch and eventually Bohemond set himself up as an independent ruler of the city, the nascent Principality of Antioch. A three-way conflict then ensued between the Byzantines, Bohemond, and the Seljuk Turk emirs in the region. Bohemond was captured by the Danishmends at Melitene in 1103, after which he was ransomed and fought and lost another battle at Harran in 1104.9° Bohemond then began a recruitment campaign in Europe to rebuild his forces and secure his rule over Antioch against the Seljuks and the Byzantines. He married Constance, the daughter of Philip I of France, and gathered a large army." Bohemond attacked Dyrrachium once more and besieged the city in 1107-1108. However, Alexios was able to blockade the Normans in their camp and force their surrender. With his brother Guy, the former Byzantine soldier, by his side, Bohemond signed the Treaty of Devol (1108), whereby he was to become a sworn vassal of Alexios and receive the title of sebastos, and would retain Antioch in return for ceding other lands to the emperor.” Tancred, Bohemond’s nephew and regent in Antioch, refused to accept the treaty and Bohemond retired to Apulia where he died and was buried at Canosa in 1111.7
Bohemond’s principality of Antioch survived until it was conquered by the Mamluks of Egypt in 1268. For much of the twelfth century, the princes of Antioch were close allies, occasionally vassals, of the Byzantine Empire.%* By contrast, all of the lordships created by Crispin, Bailleul, and William of Montreuil in Spain and Anatolia were short-lived. Each trajectory differed, and only time told which were the true conquests, and which proved abortive attempts. Yet even in these handful of examples we have seen the deliberate re-use of local resources to attempt conquest, trans-Mediterranean travel over the course ofa life, and moving between freelance operations to serving local rulers — and back again. This book is, in part, an attempt to gather evidence from key areas of interaction for the Normans in the Mediterranean, from different historiographical disciplines and to bring them into conversation with each other.
The Book: A Map of Theme and Argument
Because this book examines conquest as a series of related processes, events, and relationships, it is structured around approaches to three questions about three distinct phases of conquest. First, intentions and means: what were the motivations and strategies of the Normans as travellers, invaders, and conquerors — and of the people they encountered along the way? Second, effects and implications: what short-, medium- and long-term impact did Norman conquest and settlement have on Mediterranean society? Third, perceptions and memories: how did different people perceive and remember the process of conquest from different vantage points in space and time?
I. Triangulating Conquest: Comparing Motivations and Strategies
In this section, authors use different approaches to analyse Norman conquests: a large-scale thematic reading of Norman mentalities and the core themes of scholarship on the Normans through a first-hand introduction to the sources (Matthew Bennett); micro-studies of specific interpersonal relationships formed through conquest (Thomas); and comparison of Norman activities in eastern and western regions of Iberia and at different times, as well as between Iberia and other parts of Europe (Lucas Villegas-Aristizabal). The contrasts explored here offer opportunities to compare the effectiveness and relevance of understanding the Norman activities in the Mediterranean by taking a Eurasian perspective, a pan- Mediterranean approach, or amore focussed, ground-up stance which examines conquest as a product of new family networks.
A key finding of Part I is that initiative, even in the process of what is clearly a military conquest in retrospect, did not always lie with the Normans (see the above discussion of agency). The pope proved an extremely powerful and influential agent in Iberia.°’ Where contemporary chroniclers wrote of fortune and divine Providence as drivers, or the restless spirit of the Hautevilles,°° we might speak of luck and circumstance. Events as far away as England and Ireland in the north-west, and the successes and failures of the Crusades in the East, had repercussions for the Normans in the Mediterranean. In the years after the death of William I of England, when William Rufus ruled England and Robert Curthose the duchy of Normandy, Norman nobles with prospects and possessions in England found themselves harassed by conflicting obligations to lands and lords in two realms.*” The civil conflict over the throne in the second quarter of the twelfth century between William's grandchildren, Stephen and the Empress Matilda, may have been the tipping point of these ongoing troubles, enough to encourage Norman nobles to seek their fortunes abroad.”
The Salernitan dynasty, more so than the Capuan, proved itself to be remarkably stable in structure, in that its rulers upheld their strict rules of inheritance and managed to fold the Normans into their dynastic plans — and, as Thomas argues, they may have gained and retained strength precisely from being able to do so.?? Control lay in clarity. For the Capuans, where succession was anyone's game, the foreigner was viewed with mistrust; but this dynasty did not ultimately survive the Norman incursion. Thomas’s argument encourages us to re-think the story of just on whose terms the Normans really got a foothold in southern Italy.
In considering conquest as a process, the question ofits ‘end’, or even its desired end, needs another look. Marriage, for example, might be a way of acting strategically to secure peace, land, settlement, political gain, and future prospects, and these, as Thomas observes, are often the terms in which it has been historically discussed.'°° Yet the Norman Rotrou III of Perche acted equally strategically: he gave away the lands he had acquired in Iberia as a dowry payment in order to achieve the end of marriage, a union between Marguerite de l’‘Aigle and Garcia Ramirez, future king of Navarre.’ Which is the real Norman achievement:’” land tenure or a tenable relationship? It depends, not least, on how we define achievement; and on whether we choose to measure goals, motivations and strategies in terms of immediate, middle- or long-term objectives.
II. Human Geography in Sicily and Southern Italy: The Implications of Conquest, Urban and Rural
If the motivations and strategies that drove the process of conquest were not always those of the conquerors, it follows that the effects and implications of conquest are not wholly explicable in terms of the conquerors (or, indeed, in terms of the most visible record and events of conquest recorded in narrative sources). In this regard, the chapters in Part II follow from those in Part I. Human experience — from the undeniable predatory element of conquest to the creative solutions to changing circumstances — is a key theme here.
How, and to what extent, did conquest affect families, social structures, and the spaces in which they lived and worked? This section takes the region of southern Italy and Sicily as a case study for comparative studies of life after, and with, Norman conquest. Chapters in this section examine how we can trace processes of conquest in changing human geographies and landscapes — administrative, social, and territorial. These chapters consider how administrative practices developed and changed over time in relation to local models, the significance of the Norman presence in urban and rural settings, how coastal and inland conquest models differed, the many reasons for complex social change over time, and the movements of peoples, ideas, and individuals. A conquest involves processes with vastly different durations in time, and which occur in ways that affect human experience on both large and small scales. The studies in this section frame their enquiries on different scales, ranging from one that examines a wide region across half a century, to another that assesses a single settlement across more than three centuries.
The importance of localities and small regional differences emerge in chapters that take both wide and narrow geographic perspectives; these approaches reflect a more recent turn from seeing the Norman enterprise primarily as a monolithic, almost self-conscious enterprise.’°3 We travel from rural hinterlands of the Apennine Peninsula to the streets of Salerno, and from a mountaintop settlement on Iato to Palermo, which had long been a node of the Mediterranean Sea. Here, we can see the implications of Norman conquest in snapshots of daily life, in its new routines and sudden changes, in its normal customs and unexpected events: where the local people went to pray; where aristocrats wanted to move into ‘new builds’ ina still-vibrant city; how mountain dwellers managed to build with lower-quality building materials; the moment when and the place where the Pisans broke the chain across the harbour of Palermo and made off with six ships.
Thus, to frame this section as a whole, Carocci asks the essential question: ‘What was really happening at a local level?’ What was the experience of power really like? Rejecting the traditional story of the Norman conquest of southern Italy as a story of transition between systems, he shows that relationships in rural Norman southern Italy involved different kinds of owing and obligation. Noting key differences between theory and practice, he shows that these relationships were not exclusively clientele lordship structures. Whereas traditional studies of lordship concentrate on power, strength, and coercion, Carocci incisively studies the ‘pervasive nature’ of lordship: its felt presence in the countryside. Having reserves — and being known to have reserves — mattered, as did living in a village and knowing your surroundings, your neighbours and the animals well over years of accumulated experience.’°+
The importance of this point is difficult to overstate, in particular because it can tend to be invisible in the narrative sources. In narrative sources, like chronicles of conquest, we normally only encounter assets when something catastrophic is happening to them: they’re being stolen, attacked, given away, accumulated. But assets were also lived with, learned, and discussed. The quantitative data Carocci presents shows a balance of relationships involving judgment, clients, and debt; relationships in which knowledge — the kind you get from experience — gave you, if not ‘power’ in theory, then ‘pervasiveness’ in practice. In rural southern Italy, micro-lords and villeins learned their way around each other and the new seigneurial economy; and Carocci’s article strongly encourages us to rethink traditional debates about the nature of lordship in the central Middle Ages.’°s
As well as forgotten daily interactions, the chapters in this section restore forgotten decades to the historical register. We learn of continuing importance of Palermo as the capital of Sicily throughout the 1060s, a period often neglected or assumed irrelevant because it was an era of political turmoil and relatively few sources. Here, an urban council may have existed, and a Norman-Pisan alliance tried to conquer Muslim Palermo. We encounter the 1120s, the decade before Roger II's coronation — Palermo’s ‘Roaring Twenties’ (our term) — a period when Palermo was already becoming Roger II’s administrative centre as he sought to gain reputation and honour.’°° Theresa Jackh highlights the continuing importance of Palermo as the capital of Sicily throughout the time of the Norman conquest.’*” As part of realizing their ambition to make Palermo the centre of the realm, the Normans not only restored buildings, but also revived pre-existing offices and thus careers or occupations of people who had come before them.
We discover the neglected period of 1085-1127, between two eras: one spanning what are commonly seen as the events of the Hauteville family’s Norman conquest of southern Italy, and one ranging over the creation ofa Norman kingdom in the south.’ Graham Loud’ article places southern Italy into the picture of Europe generated by Thomas Bisson’s model of crisis and lordship. In doing so, Loud revises the narrative of the succession of counts in Norman Italy to shed light on nobles in a neglected period, wrongly considered ‘anarchic’. The aristocracy was complex, and it included Normans, indigenous people (among them Lombards from former princely families), survivors from the eastern Roman world, and immigrants from outside Normandy.
By considering charters and forgeries not as true or false documents, but as offering a spectrum of evidence for the nobility, Loud enables the real aristocrats of Norman Italy to emerge from the historical record. This study removes some of the sense of inevitability or teleology that can accompany scholarship on conquest (particularly, as Loud notes, in scholarship written over a century ago): some families died out, and the makeup of the nobility varied, of course, by region.’°? These chapters offer a clarion call for further work on what, the Norman narrative sources would imply, was a less glamorous period for Norman achievement.
Indeed, these chapters offer a useful corrective about what an historical event in a conquest actually is. Were we to draw up a chronology of conquest today, framed in true medieval annalistic fashion, what dates would we use? Based on the findings of the authors of this section, we might rather conclude that the date ofa battle or a siege, or even a date range (all too often implying an ‘era’) framed around coronations, victories, and surrenders, is not the best way to show the reality of the experience of the conquest.
There is ample evidence suggesting that the conquerors retained and valued elements of pre-existing cultures, and that cultures survived without the sanction of conquerors. For example, Robert Guiscard modelled his patronage for churches in Salerno on Lombard practices, both in the use of ancient Roman spolia and in the style of inscriptions he used; and restored and re-used Lombard places of Christian worship.”° Although Jackh and Nicole Mlk reject the idea of the new Norman kingdom of Sicily as a self-consciously multi-cultural paradise, it may have been Palermo’s very historic importance as an Islamic capital that the Norman leadership sought to adapt — as rapidly as possible — and to claim both as part of their history and as part of contemporary practice.”
A classical Roman past connected with the Hauteville family, like the classical Roman past that was imagined in origin myths and conquest stories in central and northern Europe,"” is conspicuously absent from the eleventh-century works of William of Apulia, Amatus of Montecassino, and Geoffrey Malaterra, for all that William and Geoffrey drew on classical rhetoric and exempla in writing their accounts of Norman and eastern Roman deeds.” This was not only because the eleventh-century Hautevilles had no real claim on, or interest in fabricating, royal origins. Their business was conquest, and building reality into a new imagination, rather than the other way around. And by the twelfth-century Roger II, at least, had a royal future. In Palermo, Roger did not need to translate an empire: he was already living in one, and it did not need to be falsely remembered as a Roman or Christian one.
Exciting archaeological discoveries show, in the small city of Jati on the great strategic mountaintop of Monte Iato, that Muslim culture survived both Norman conquest and founding ofa Norman kingdom in (1130), and that what perhaps became a neighbourly mountaintop community of Muslim and Christian Siculo-Norman people survived the Swabian conquest of Sicily and their dynasty’s rule (1194-1266). These finds show, perhaps most importantly, that life — albeit a life in which the people were driven to struggling, recycling and making do in living and building — persisted into the thirteenth century, despite chronicles that stated the settlement had been eradicated."+ Sometimes, chronicles that equated conquest with victory sought to cast conquest as a completed event — characterized by total mastery and total subjection of those deemed, at the moment, to be the enemy — rather than, as we do, a process.
III. Comparing Perceptions and Memories of Conquest
It should be evident that we are already well into what is the explicit theme of the final section of the book. The two chapters in this section address historiography and hagiography directly, examining how history-writing both records conquest and was at times the technology by which conquest was executed or developed. Perspectives include those of the conquerors, the conquered, and their descendants."
The perceptions and memories explored here are not just those of foreign encounter. Over time, and with experience, ideas changed — sometimes growing closer together than farther apart — and political ambitions for memory changed. The Normans saw, or chose to present, themselves as restorers of the Christian faith in Palermo."® Where Norman rulers saw themselves as consolidating political and economic power, the Zirids came to see the Normans as just one arm of a ‘Frankish’ crusading effort to conquer a different faith.”” The implications of conquest perceptions here are massive, as Matt King shows, in that the Zirids’ reading of the Normans’ motives actually came to reflect how they self-identified in their own chronicles: Muslim neighbours in other local places had now become allies by association, who shared the same threat.
Those who selected and recorded memories of conquests, too, had both power and obligations. In the Vita of St Bartholomew, it is possible to discern a hagiographer — probably Filigato of Cerami — who was attempting to balance the coincidence of political and religious motivations of Norman, Latin tradition, and Italo-Greek tradition. Kalina Yamboliev argues that Filigato made a ‘declaration of compatibility’ between the two, a point which would have been very much in the Normans’ interest by the early twelfth century. With the benefit of hindsight showing that the Normans were here to stay, the hagiographer could stress the involvement of rulers like Roger II in monastic establishments. In an Italo-Greek tradition that valued local saints and local memory, Norman commentators could write themselves back into these local stories. One is reminded of the Normans strategies in adapting Lombard city planning and architecture in Maddalena Vaccaro’s chapter (Part II). Hagiographers had to look out for their own interests as well, and in writing, one could exert power both subtle and substantial. Where Carocci delineated a model of pervasive lordship, here we encounter evidence for the creation of a memory of pervasive patronage.
The idea of conquest that emerges here is, unsurprisingly, not exclusively military; shifting kinship and alliance is part of the story as well. Yet although we do see evidence a Norman ‘diaspora,’ this was not the same kind of ‘diaspora’ as that of the Vikings." Conquest was, in many cases, an overt and unashamed objective. Geoffrey Malaterra cites divine favour, and eventually composes odes to the heirs and the future, but overall his tone is not one of obsequiously legitimizing. It is pride tending towards bragging. Look, he says; these men even captured the pope, and the pope gave them the land they already had, and he was grateful to them.”°
The Normans were not the only conquerors in the Mediterranean (across the sweep of the eleventh through thirteenth centuries we encounter in that role, to name a few, Swabians, crusaders, local factions, the pope); nor were they always successful. These too are key threads of the story of ‘Norman’ and ‘conquest’ in the Mediterranean. It is a truism that we can, and should, learn from failures. But the truism normally means that we should learn from what happened as well as from the attempt. For historians interested in understanding the past on its own terms, there is also a great deal to learn from failures before they happened: that is, about what people wanted to happen or thought might happen, but did not." Thomas makes this point forcefully in considering marriages, engagements, and even broken-off engagements as ‘unions’ and ‘strategies.’* They were real relationships, even if they did not last; and they offer a glimpse the attitudes of the Normans and the local elite who faced the prospect of forging a future with new people.
Through the study of what might have happened, goals and strategies emerge more clearly, as does the potentially revisionist nature of memory. The authors of this book seek to avoid the teleological slippage of assuming that because something happened, things that happened before necessarily caused it to happen. What emerges is a past world of possibility, and what we think is a useful research point: that one way of exploring Norman opportunism is to look at unrealized opportunities — which is what most opportunities become. As Bennett shows, the Normans were good at creating them, although they were by no means the only ones who did.
There is another crucial point to remember. Conquest was gritty and real. Siege warfare brought illness and the slow, relentless onslaught of starvation, which drove the desperate to sell their children into slavery.” A Muslim man in Sicily, Geoffrey Malaterra relates, killed his sister rather than risk her sexual enslavement to the Normans.’** Hundreds of Normans, ill-trained in naval warfare, rushed to the side of a ship with the intention of fighting, but the weight of their armour capsized the ship, and none fitted out for battle survived.’ These are not meant to be representative examples. No example is representative of any one person’s experience of conquest. But we must not forget that not all lived to see what the effects of conquest were, let alone how they might think or write about these events in years to come. On any side of a given conflict, only some lived to remember, and to remember again.
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