Download PDF | Paul Oldfield - Sanctity and Pilgrimage in Medieval Southern Italy, 1000–1200-Cambridge University Press (2014).
322 Pages
Sanctity and Pilgrimage in Medieval Southern Italy, 1000–1200
Southern Italy’s strategic location at the crossroads of the Mediterranean gave it a unique position as a frontier for the major religious faiths of the medieval world, where Latin Christian, Greek Christian and Muslim communities coexisted. In this study, the first to offer a comprehensive analysis of sanctity and pilgrimage in southern Italy between 1000 and 1200, Paul Oldfield presents a fascinating picture of a politically and culturally fragmented land which, as well as hosting its own important relics as significant pilgrimage centres, was a transit point for pilgrims and commercial traffic. Drawing on a diverse range of sources from hagiographical material to calendars, martyrologies, charters and pilgrim travel guides, the book examines how sanctity functioned at this key cultural crossroads and, by integrating the analysis of sanctity with that of pilgrimage, offers important new insights into society, cross-cultural interaction and faith in the region and across the medieval world.
Paul Oldfield is Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Manchester. His previous publications include City and Community in Norman Italy (Cambridge, 2009).
Introduction
Saints, pilgrimage and southern Italy The day after the chest carrying the most holy Nicholas was transported by Abbot Elias [...] into the church of San Benedetto [of Bari], the rumour of an event so great and glorious spread with extraordinary speed beyond the walls of Bari. First it reached the settlements and villages in the territory of Bari, scattering this most happy news through the ears of everyone. And immediately, as if they were in a race, from all parts men and women of all ages rushed [to Bari]. What more can I say? Because of the dense ranks of men and women, of old and young, of the sick of all types, the widest streets and paths were extremely crowded; from here and there echoed hymns of praises sung with the highest voice. And in truth everyone together competed to praise, bless, and glorify Almighty God, who had deigned to enrich this region with so great a treasure, to have rendered it famous with such a great brilliance, to have visited upon it such great consolation and blessing.1 Thus John the Archdeacon of Bari described the ecstatic reception of the relics of St Nicholas at Bari in 1087, and the foundation in southern Italy of one of medieval Europe’s most celebrated cults. Over recent decades scholars have significantly deepened our understanding of the sentiments, interrelationships, and cultural, religious and political exchanges which intersect in events such as those described by John.2
As a result, we are able more than ever to appreciate how saints’ cults, the practice of pilgrimage and the accompanying hagiographical texts, open new perspectives on all manner of fundamental features of medieval society. The region of southern Italy and Sicily, boasting an extensive body of hagiographical works, is no exception. It experienced profound transitions in the period running from 1000 to 1200, moving from a politically, ethnically and religiously diverse entity, with Muslim, Greek and Latin communities, to a unified monarchy (from 1130) ruled by descendants of Norman infiltrators, which was increasingly Latinized and subject to papal influence. During the same time span, southern Italy also experienced a renewed flourishing of saints’ cults and pilgrimage, which functioned on a number of levels: the devotional, the psychological, the individual, the communal, the economic and the political. An investigation of saints’ cults and pilgrimage in southern Italy offers new contributions towards a holistic understanding of both the diversity and uniformity present in a fragmented and complex region as it moved through deep changes. Fundamentally, it can focus our understanding of how the region functioned at the frontier of the Muslim, Greek and Latin worlds, and how sanctity itself developed in a liminal zone. Saints’ cults thrived and pilgrimage remained ever popular because of their multi-faceted value. Saints were divine intercessors; having walked on earth they thereafter mediated between the terrestrial and celestial.
Their relics were deemed to have supernatural qualities, which increased in potency the nearer one was to them. The Central Middle Ages were a golden era of pilgrimage as more and more people of all backgrounds sought cures and spiritual assistance at the tombs of saints. In all manner of ways, saints and their shrines offered protection, legitimacy and support in an unstable and rapidly transforming world. Holy relics would especially reappear at times of insecurity and political turmoil. In the political landscape of southern Italy in which parvenu powers were a recurrent feature, whether they were Norman dukes, kings or emergent urban communities, sources of legitimacy were highly prized and carried great weight. Many power-holders and communities sought associations with a saint; their choice revealed much about their self-identity and conception of authority. Saints’ acceptance could often signify important sociopolitical transitions, as when members of the Norman elite began to be treated favourably by South Italian saints in hagiographical works and historical narratives.3 Conversely, a saint’s disapproval of a ruler or a community served as a powerful rebuke generated by an opposing party. So significant was the role of saints, and the need to obtain their favour and their relics, that violence and crime often occurred and were justified in their name, as Patrick Geary has demonstrated so clearly.4
Consequently, as well as being home to one of the most celebrated of furta sacra (St Nicholas at Bari) southern Italy and Sicily witnessed a series of other translations and relic thefts during the Central Middle Ages. Because of the qualities attached to them saints were often able to fuse fractious communities together and saints rapidly became symbols of cross-cultural interaction and unity for many, especially in Europe’s expanding cities, and even (as we shall see in southern Italy) between Latin and Greek Christians. But these very virtues in turn created tension and, paradoxically, violent rivalries within and between communities. This assortment of qualities ensured that shrine centres remained at the core of communities, and that innumerable individuals opted to visit them, thus rendering the act of pilgrimage a conspicuous feature of the medieval landscape. More widely still, in southern Italy in the Central Middle Ages sanctity and pilgrimage operated within, and reflected the collision of, diverse worlds: the meeting of different faiths, and ancient and contemporary forms of worship; the simultaneous flourishing of eremitism and urbanization; and the continued centrality of the local, while horizons were broadening and cross-cultural communication increasing.
The fact that southern Italy could also boast possession of the relics of a series of ‘A-list’ universal saints meant that their shrines became important pilgrimage centres. The symbiosis between sanctity and pilgrimage was accentuated in southern Italy through its strategic position at the crossroads of the Mediterranean. It operated as a constant transit point for pilgrims and other commercial traffic, much of it moving to Rome and the eastern Mediterranean, and the evolution of international pilgrimage and the crusading movement would have a profound effect on South Italian sanctity. In exploring sanctity and pilgrimage one must acknowledge and identify the limitations inherent in using hagiographical works. Myth, embellishment and plagiarism abound within the hagiographical text. Awareness of the hagiographer’s aims is vital; his task was to place his saintly subject on a par with other, usually ancient, holy men and to do so required the use of a common set of exemplary motifs. John Howe called this ‘hagiographic light’ which reduced ‘earthly events to silhouettes against a golden backdrop’. 5
Indeed, simply put, the hagiographical text was not designed to assist historical enquiry. But literary patterns contained within the texts carry important messages as does the seemingly incidental material included within these works. The historiography of relic cults has also long attempted to identify the varying influences upon their construction.6 Recent studies by scholars such as Simon Yarrow and Samantha Herrick have shown that both clerical and secular inputs into cults and their associated representations were crucial and often convergent. It would be misleading, for instance, to suggest that churchmen manipulated a submissive lay community. Recurrent evidence in miracle collections and other sources for lay dissent and unbelief indicates that churchmen could not simply ignore secular opinion and needed to structure its responses and messages in a manner which would resonate with the laity.7 Certainly, the hagiographer often wrote for an audience that was not solely ecclesiastical or elite, for many of these texts formed the basis of sermons for feast celebrations, were thus read out publicly, often shaped to engage and entertain, and could be transmitted and transformed in oral exchanges within the wider lay community.8 As saints’ cults often functioned in a shared space and culture, the approval of both laity and clergy was integral.
Thus hagiographical works can reasonably be viewed as constructions of a variety of communities, creating different traditions, and thus reflecting a mosaic of interests and beliefs. As is the case for most regions of medieval Europe, hagiographical works are among the most abundant sources available to the historian of medieval southern Italy. Vitae (accounts of saints’ lives), miracula (collections of, usually, posthumous saintly miracle-working) and records of translations of relics survive for many of southern Italy’s saints, some produced almost contemporaneously, others decades or centuries after the saint’s death. In many instances a number of overlapping local hagiographical traditions developed, some of which were wholly spurious.
Those produced much later, and even the suspiciously inauthentic, still retain their value but in different ways – they elucidate how memory and truth functioned, how the past was understood and could be manipulated, and they show the splicing of contemporary concerns onto older subject matter. For example, wandering/eremetical saints were often founders of religious houses which subsequently developed into monastic orders, which then retrospectively composed vitae within a predominantly monastic framework.9 Southern Italy in the period 1000 to 1200 could boast a prodigious production of hagiographical material, both textual and visual.10 With its rich library, the renowned abbey of Montecassino led the way, especially in the eleventh century.11 In the early to mid-twelfth century, the abbey’s librarian Peter the Deacon also proved to be a prolific hagiographer, historian and forger.12 Elsewhere, bishops and abbots composed or sponsored hagiographical works. Alfanus of Montecassino (d. 1085) continued to produce hagiographical material as archbishop of Salerno. Amandus, bishop of Bisceglie, compiled a hagiographical dossier on the discovery in 1168 of saints at Bisceglie, and earlier as a deacon of Trani wrote an account of the translation of St Nicholas the Pilgrim.
The vita of St Gerard, bishop of Potenza, was composed by his successor Manfred, and The History of the Translation of the Body of St Agatha from Constantinople to Catania was the work of Maurice, bishop of Catania. In the late twelfth century the bios of the Greek-Italian saint, Vitalis of Castronuovo, was translated into Latin at the instigation of the bishop of Tricarico. Other hagiographers of medieval southern Italy tended to be part of the lower echelons of the Church, or were often simply anonymous: Nicephorus and John, who wrote competing accounts of the translation of St Nicholas to Bari, were a Benedictine monk and archdeacon respectively; John of Nusco, author of at least some sections of the vita of St William of Vercelli, was apparently a monk of Monte Goleto.
However, as these works almost exclusively related to saints connected to their particular sees or monasteries, it remains difficult to identify any of these hagiographies as emerging from scriptoria which could be defined as centres of broader hagiographic production akin to Montecassino. Significantly, the important monasteries of Cava and Montevergine, both boasting saintly founders, as well as the city of Benevento where so many saints were translated in the Early Middle Ages, never developed into established centres for hagiographic output.13 Likewise, in the Early Middle Ages Naples arguably created the most significant body of hagiographical works anywhere in Europe, and yet after 1000 production diminished dramatically.
Nevertheless, collectively a huge body of hagiographical works was still produced in southern Italy between 1000 and 1200. In addition, the historian of South Italian sanctity and pilgrimage can also utilize a much wider base of material: calendars, martyrologies, necrologies, exultet rolls, charters (particularly those on urban privileges), narrative chronicles (Falco of Benevento’s chronicle represents a valuable lay perspective on sanctity), pilgrim travel guides and onomastic patterns.14
To these can be added evidence from coin dies, church dedications and, as art historians have long acknowledged, iconographic decoration in religious buildings, most famously from the royally sponsored Cappella Palatina and the Cathedral of Monreale.15 Despite, or perhaps because of, the existence of such a diverse range of source material pertaining to an equally diverse and fragmented region, a comprehensive analysis of the salient features of sanctity and pilgrimage in southern Italy in the Central Middle Ages has, to my mind, yet to be achieved. This is the principal aim of the present study. Of course, several superb works have been produced on particular elements of South Italian sanctity and pilgrimage by, among others, Thomas Head, Amalia Galdi, Oronzo Limone, Jean-Marie Martin and Antonio Vuolo. Yet, these tend to fall into three main categories: (1) works on sanctity and pilgrimage within particular regions;16 (2) works on particular saints’ typologies, or on individual saints;17 (3) broader works on religion, belief and interfaith relations in medieval southern Italy.18
The present study thus aims to combine all these separate strands into one work, in a blended approach which spans two centuries, which does not exclude any region of southern Italy, which engages with an array of diverse source material, and which integrates an analysis of sanctity with that of pilgrimage in order to deepen our knowledge of society, cross-cultural interaction and faith in the region. It is important here to establish some points of qualification and classification. First, unless specified, the label ‘southern Italy’ is used to cover the entire southern zone of modern-day Italy, stretching from the Abruzzi and the Campanian zones just south of Lazio to, and including, the island of Sicily. Second, the definition of ‘saint’ is of course a contested issue, and I opt for a more holistic interpretation.
In other words, formal canonization, a surprisingly rare phenomenon in the Middle Ages, or the existence of contemporary forms of ‘official’ hagiographical and other evidence to affirm a cult are not here deemed the sole measures. A number of South Italian saints were either not officially approved by Rome, or their associated vitae or miracula were produced much later than their alleged lifetimes. Nevertheless, it is clear that contemporaries still deemed these figures to have saintly qualities, and that many of the later vitae or miracula were likely based on more contemporary accounts. Indeed, Aviad Kleinberg has shown that medieval perceptions of sanctity were extremely fluid and should be understood on a case-by-case basis. Beyond this, the attributions of ‘supernatural spiritual power’ and ‘moral excellence’ were the only loose criteria within which various hazy typologies of sainthood could function.19 In short, if attempts were made in the period 1000 to 1200 to promote devotion for an individual as a saint, whether they were contemporary or ancient, or if a cult arose only after 1200 for an individual living between 1000 and 1200, these will all be considered. I have similarly aimed at a more inclusive interpretation of how to identify pilgrimage, as revealed in Chapters 5 and 6, which I hope brings new evidence into play. In both cases I am convinced that considering the widest spectrum offers the richest outcome.
Of course, it must be understood that a work of this scope can make no claims to cover all aspects of all saints’ cults and patterns of pilgrimage which functioned in the years 1000 to 1200. Inevitably, I have not been able to explore certain themes and sources as deeply as they deserve – much more could be said, for example, on theological discourses on sanctity, on toponymic sources, or on the typology of miracles performed by specific saints. In most cases, cults enjoyed brief surges of activity before settling down to longer periods of seeming dormancy. I have mostly aimed to identify these surges and explore them thematically in order to highlight the main patterns in the evolution of sanctity and pilgrimage in southern Italy. Thus, the present study is divided into the following sections.
The second part of this introductory chapter offers a brief overview of the socio-political history of southern Italy from the Early Middle Ages until 1200 in order to assist readers in contextualizing what then follows. Chapter 1 provides an examination of South Italian sanctity in early medieval Italy in order to understand the legacies and models, and the continuities and disruptions, which shaped the evolution of sanctity after 1000. Geographically it covers the whole of southern Italy, exploring how sanctity in Campania functioned under the Lombards, created conflicts and aided the creation of embryonic civic identities; how saints’ cults in Apulia were marked by instability; and how Siculo-Calabrian sanctity was forged within a triangular relationship between Rome, Byzantium and Islam.
Thereafter, Chapters 2, 3 and 4 examine sanctity between 1000 and 1200, doing so along both geographic and thematic lines. Chapter 2 focuses primarily on saints and their cults in the Latin zones of mainland southern Italy and assesses the impact on them of some key forces – the Normans, Church reform and urbanization. Chapter 3 addresses evidence for cross-cultural interaction between Latins and Greeks by analysing Greek–Italian saints and cults, and locates its findings within the wider relationships that evolved between eastern and western Christianity. Chapter 4 examines the role of sanctity in the island of Sicily as it was re-Christianized under Norman rule, tracing the extent to which old cults were revived and new saints found to augment Sicily’s sacred map.
As Palermo also became the centre of the new Kingdom of Sicily after 1130, the chapter also considers the role of saints in the ‘capital’, and the promotion of cults by the monarchy. The second part of the book, composed of Chapters 5 and 6, focuses directly on pilgrimage. Chapter 5 examines southern Italy’s fundamental role in the topography of international pilgrimage. Its strategic location, its emerging infrastructures and its own renowned shrines attracted streams of pilgrims on their path to salvation. At the same time, southern Italy’s classical and folkloric traditions, and its challenging landscapes, conferred upon it a sinister and dangerous quality which many pilgrims could not have avoided.
Chapter 6 considers more directly pilgrimage activity at South Italian shrines, and tracks the origins, identities and destinations of the pilgrims found there. In addition the chapter addresses the extent to which these patterns might have eroded internal frontiers within southern Italy, and also examines the presence of southern Italians at shrines beyond the region. Throughout this study South Italian sanctity and pilgrimage will be consistently located within their wider context, and contrasts and comparisons made where appropriate.
Indeed, Chapters 3 and 5 are implicitly based on the region’s connectivity with other territories. To be able to identify any defining patterns within sanctity and pilgrimage in medieval southern Italy would allow fruitful comparison with other regions of Europe, and further pursuit of the age-old question of southern Italy’s perceived marginality. Indeed, it seems in fact that southern Italy should be placed more to the centre rather than on the periphery of many core medieval developments, as a result of its location in the Mediterranean, and of its simultaneous and intimate interfaces with the Latin, Greek and Islamic worlds. In the context of sanctity and pilgrimage, these factors undoubtedly made the region a holy crossroads, one which played a pivotal role in the growing internationalism of sanctity. At the same time, its unique location at a crossroads heavily shaped South Italian forms of sanctity and pilgrimage, opening them to a myriad of external influences.
Religion, society and politics: the South Italian background (i) Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages The development of saints’ cults in southern Italy before 1000 was set against the backdrop of some of the great socio-religious and political transitions which took place in the Mediterranean: the metamorphosis of structures inherited from the Roman world, cycles of invasion and changes in rulership, and the increased interaction of different religious faiths.20 Unified control of southern Italy and Sicily, achieved in the Roman period, and briefly reasserted by the Byzantines during the Gothic War (536–54), proved thereafter to be a chimera which would not rematerialize in any substantive form until the twelfth century.21 The region suffered recurrent invasions and the establishment of various, competing regimes.
The Ostrogothic invasion was followed by the Gothic War, and Justinian’s efforts to reintegrate southern Italy and Sicily into the ‘Roman Empire’. However, the arrival of the Lombards in 568 set the pattern for centuries of fluctuating zones of influence. The establishment of a Lombard duchy at Benevento, elevated to a principality in 774, increasingly confined Byzantine control to Sicily and to restricted parts of Apulia, Lucania and Calabria by the mid-eighth century. By this point, the settlement patterns of parts of southern Italy had been fundamentally altered through warfare and plague. In Apulia, for example, a number of urban centres had collapsed, and episcopal sees had been rendered defunct; by the ninth century there were only six bishoprics whereas there had been fifteen three centuries earlier.22 The political landscape of southern Italy was dramatically transformed further in the ninth century with the beginning of the Muslim conquest of Sicily in 827, an extended process which was not complete until the fall of the last Byzantine stronghold at Taormina in 902. The repercussions of the rise of Muslim power and naval dominance in the Mediterranean also impacted on the South Italian mainland.23
In Apulia intervention took on a semi-permanent manifestation when the major cities of Taranto (846–80) and Bari (847–71) fell under Muslim rule and were established as emirates.24 Elsewhere, the Muslim presence was characterized by raiding and the establishment of short-term bases. Muslim raids on Calabria and coastal Campania were frequent and devastating. In the 880s the great Northern Campanian monasteries of S. Vincenzo al Volturno and Montecassino were destroyed and their monks forced into exile, while a Muslim base was established at the mouth of the Garigliano River (c.880–915). Muslim bands on the mainland forged ad hoc alliances with local Christian powers, most notably with the Neapolitans in the mid-ninth century. Some were hired as mercenaries by Lombard rulers and played an influential role in the civil war that engulfed the Beneventan principality in the mid-ninth century. This civil war splintered South Italian Lombard power into separate principalities based on Benevento, Capua and Salerno; the three would never again simultaneously fall under the rule of one dynasty.
The rivalries of the cities on the coast of the Tyrrhenian Sea – Naples, Gaeta and Amalfi – only added further disunity. In the meantime, despite losing Sicily, Byzantine power on the mainland revived from the late-ninth century. A series of campaigns restored large parts of Apulia, especially Bari, northern Calabria and Lucania, to Byzantine control, and saw the creation of new Byzantine provinces (themata), indicative of greater stability.25 The Byzantine resurgence continued steadily throughout the tenth century, pushing into the zone of northern Apulia, where the majority population was Latin-rite, briefly intervening in Campania, and sparking a further series of inconclusive campaigns against the Lombard powers, who from the 960s were able to counter with sporadic support from the Ottonian emperors.
By the end of the tenth century Ottonian intervention had proved to be of limited success, and a more fixed border emerged between the Lombard and Byzantine zones. But southern Italy was far from stable. With the partial exception of Salerno, the Lombard principalities were becoming decentralized and vulnerable; the increasing appearance of fortified settlements (castella), a process termed incastellamento, created minor centres of aristocratic power which fragmented princely prerogatives.26 In Byzantine territories rebellions among the Lombard populations of Apulia were causing acute challenges, and Muslim raids increased in intensity. A Muslim attack, for instance, was recorded on Oria in 977, which left the city in flames and apparently saw the entire community deported to Sicily, while in 988 a raid on Bari resulted in the enslavement of men and women.27 Even in Islamic Sicily internal factionalism was creating a volatile climate as this ‘frontier’ island was split by cycles of civil strife.28 Another complex entity overlaid the mosaic of political, cultural and religious forces: the Christian Church.
As the cultural and doctrinal divide began to widen between western and eastern Christendom, some of the early manifestations of a pending religious schism between the two could be detected in southern Italy where both forms of the Christian faith converged. Both the papacy and the patriarch of Constantinople competed for jurisdictional ascendancy over southern Italy, each hoping that this would ensure the region’s loyalties. In many ways this competition was motivated as much by politics as it was by religion. During the reign of Emperor Leo III (717–41), and the Iconoclast dispute, the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of Calabria and Sicily was transferred to Constantinople from Rome. This situation prevailed broadly until the Norman conquest of Calabria and Sicily, although in the latter region it appears that diocesan structures had collapsed under Islamic rule.
Especially in the second half of the tenth century, both the papacy, aiming to recover its lost jurisdiction in southern Italy and influenced equally by Ottonian policies, and Byzantium attempted to create new episcopal structures in southern Italy to safeguard intervention from the other side, or as a tool to advance further jurisdictional claims. The papacy promoted Capua (966), Benevento (969) and Salerno (c.983) to archiepiscopal status. Some were given suffragan sees in areas located in Lombard–Byzantine borderlands, as well as within Byzantine Italy itself: Benevento was given suffragan sees in Byzantine Capitanata, and Salerno in Byzantine Lucania and Calabria.29 In response Byzantium, hoping to affirm local loyalties to the empire, raised a number of sees to archbishoprics, particularly in the Lombard areas of Byzantine Apulia (these included Trani, Brindisi and Siponto). For both parties these represented potentially incendiary redrawings of the South Italian ecclesiastical map. It was also apparent that by the later tenth century the papacy was aiming to establish a more ordered Church organization in southern Italy.
The roots of the great eleventh-century Church reform movement were visible, but still, as one eminent scholar noted, the Church in southern Italy remained distinctly disorganized by 1000. Effective archiepiscopal authority was embryonic at best; some areas of the ecclesiastical map remained merely as blueprints whereas others were riddled by competing claims, and lay influence on the Church was marked.30 By c.1000, the main feature of both the secular and monastic churches in southern Italy was their fluid and amorphous character. South Italian monasticism had suffered from a combination of invasions, raids and aristocratic usurpations in the Early Middle Ages, which was only partially offset by the Christianization of the Lombards and patronage from their elites.
In Sicily, under Islamic rule, some important fragments of a monastic network survived, and the Christian faith may have been more robust there than traditionally considered, but it was still in a highly disordered state, and the secular church fared worse still.31 Only in the second half of the tenth century is it possible to detect early signs of recovery throughout mainland southern Italy in the form of new monastic foundations and restructuring programmes. Monasticism was also peculiarly varied in southern Italy where it was heavily influenced by Greek forms emanating from Sicily, Calabria and Lucania. Eremitic, lavriotic and cenobitic forms of Greek monasticism coexisted alongside Latin forms, among which the Benedictine rule was not even the most common. Inevitably, such fundamental political and jurisdictional upheavals were mirrored by equally fundamental transitions in the socio-religious make-up of the populations of southern Italy. By around 1000, on the mainland, a Latinized Lombard population was spread across Campania, large parts of Apulia and some zones in Lucania and northern Calabria.
On the other hand, Greek Christian communities were most evident in the traditional strongholds of mainland Byzantine Italy: southern and central Calabria, southern Lucania, the Salento peninsula in southern Apulia, and even Sicily under Islamic rule. However, the Byzantine revival of the tenth century generated a concomitant process of Hellenization, while Muslim raids in southern Calabria, and instability in Sicily, may also have displaced Greek Christians further north on the mainland. Consequently, zones in northern Calabria, Lucania and central Apulia which were reintegrated into Byzantine control also experienced demographic shifts, and the increasing establishment of immigrant Greek communities.
These zones also acted as springboards for Greek migration further north, into regions such as the Cilento and areas around Salerno, which had never been under Byzantine control. On the island of Sicily, Muslim rule led to a gradual, but incomplete, Islamicization of the island’s population. The south and west evolved into areas populated primarily by Muslims, a mixture of converted Sicilians or immigrants from other regions of the Islamic world. Nevertheless, as Alex Metcalfe has demonstrated, varying shades of socio-ethnic ambiguity operated on the island.32 Acculturation created groups whose faith and cultural background were difficult to distinguish and who fused traditional Islamic and Christian identities. Indeed, since the late seventh century Sicily had been classed as a distinct administrative province (theme) in the Byzantine empire, and Greek cultural and religious influences increasingly spread across the island, enhanced further when Sicily passed under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of Constantinople in the mid-eighth century. The Greek Christian rite thus gradually predominated in Sicily, and even after the Muslim conquest a sizeable Greek Christian population remained on the island, increasingly concentrated in the north-eastern Val Demone region.
The extent to which the Greek Christian communities moved between Sicily and Calabria, and the reasons why, have been hotly debated.33 The idea of an apparently large-scale exodus of Greek Christians from Sicily now no longer seems sustainable, and although significant movement did take place, it is questionable how much was driven by direct maltreatment by the island’s Muslim communities. It is, above all, most apparent that early medieval southern Italy’s ‘shifting political frontiers were often quite distinct from the linguistic and cultural ones’, which thus created a fluid landscape of interface and assimilation between different communities.34 Hostilities and rivalries played out at the highest political levels were not always matched in localized contexts. Clearly, southern Italy was a frontier zone, but one which acted more as a gateway than a barrier.
(ii) Norman infiltration and monarchy (1000–1200) Contact and exchange clearly occurred across the numerous political, religious and socio-cultural frontiers of early medieval southern Italy. Nevertheless, on a broad scale, by 1000 southern Italy remained a culturally and religiously divided landscape, politically unstable and fragmented. It could offer opportunities for aspiring newcomers, and the Normans fitted the bill perfectly.35 Over the first decades of the eleventh century an assortment of Norman warriors arrived in southern Italy where they mostly took up employment as mercenaries for the warring Lombard rulers in Campania. Some were also hired to assist Apulian rebels in uprisings against Byzantine rule. The Normans gradually received more wealth and land, and soon saw from the inside how weak and divided were the region’s rulers. By the 1030s and 1040s groups of Normans began to operate independently from any superior power in establishing their own power bases at Aversa and Melfi amidst growing anarchy in the south. Norman exploits became more ruthless and disruptive, and by the 1050s two leading Normans had come to the fore: Robert Guiscard of the Hauteville family, a lesser-noble kin group from Normandy, and Richard Quarrel.
The formation of a coalition force led by Pope Leo IX to oust the disparate groups of Normans resulted in the latter unifying for the first time and defeating the papal force at the battle of Civitate in 1053. The papacy promptly reversed its previous hostility, aware that the Normans were now a permanent fixture in the south, and hopeful that they might provide the military backing to forward the Church-reform movement in the face of opposition from the Salian emperors of Germany. Consequently, in 1059, a papal–Norman rapprochement was achieved which legitimized the territorial acquisitions of Guiscard and Quarrel.
The former was invested with the new title of Duke of Apulia, Calabria and in the future Sicily, and the latter was confirmed as Prince of Capua, having ousted the Lombard dynasty there in 1058. Thereafter, the papal–Norman alliance was full of friction, but managed to hold together. Subsequent Norman advances continued at a rapid pace, particularly by Robert Guiscard who pushed deep into Byzantine territories; Calabria was almost entirely subdued in the 1060s and large parts of Apulia, with some major urban centres, began to acknowledge Guiscard’s rule. The 1070s saw the Normans extinguish regimes which had been established in southern Italy in some form or other for centuries. Guiscard’s capture of Bari brought to a close the Byzantine presence in the south, his conquest of Salerno (1076/7) ended the Lombard principality, and general Norman pressure forced the Lombard prince of Benevento to bequeath rule of the city to the papacy after his death (in 1077). Benevento would remain a papal enclave in southern Italy until the nineteenth century.
All the while, Guiscard had to contend with rebellious Norman nobles who refused to defer to him, as well as periods of conflict with the Normans at Capua. By the 1080s Robert Guiscard had reached the apogee of his power, ruling parts of Campania and most of Calabria, Apulia and (as we shall see) Sicily. He was also a player on the international scene. In this decade Guiscard undertook an ultimately unsuccessful invasion of Byzantium and demonstrated to the outside world the force of his alliance with the papacy by rescuing Pope Gregory VII at Rome in 1084 from the threat of the German emperor Henry IV. At the same time, the Norman conquest of Muslim Sicily was entering its final stage.36 It had been a protracted affair, begun in 1060 and directed primarily by Guiscard’s younger brother Roger I who would eventually take the title Count of Sicily although he remained theoretically subordinate to his elder sibling. Guiscard only intermittently assisted in the campaign, and Roger had to rely on the prowess of his small number of Normans, the support of native Sicilian Christians and the disunity among the Muslims on the island.
Key battles were fought at Cerami (1063) and Misilmeri (1068), and the fall of Palermo (1072) and Syracuse (1085) proved pivotal events. In 1091, Roger mopped up the final remnants of resistance. As the twelfth century dawned, the main phase of the Norman military conquests had come to an end. Its three protagonists had also passed away: Richard Quarrel (d. 1078), Robert Guiscard (d.1085) and Roger I (d. 1101). At no point had any one Norman ruler unified the peninsula: the Quarrel dynasty at Capua remained outside Hauteville control, the Count of Sicily was effectively free from interference from the mainland, and Naples and Benevento were still independent city-states. In the absence of Richard Quarrel and Guiscard, political power on the mainland fragmented. The power of the Norman princes of Capua contracted dramatically, and Guiscard’s successors could not command the same authority. In the increasing power vacuum, urban communities and their leaders were forced to act more autonomously, and some nobles took an increasingly independent stance.37
The period stretching from the first arrival of the Normans up to the fateful year of 1127 had generated significant transitions, but also allowed for much underlying continuity. At the risk of making sweeping generalizations, the transitions involved the expulsion of established regimes, the creation of new secular and ecclesiastical lordships, and the growing influence of Latin Christianity, most notably in Sicily. On the other hand, the Normans were always a minority group, numbering perhaps only some 2,500 immigrants in total. As a result, they adopted pragmatic policies which encouraged continuity. There were no mass expulsions of native populations, and urban communities were allowed forms of de facto autonomy. Some Frankish customs were imported, but the Normans maintained many of the existing traditions, laws, administrative structures and the officials who operated them. Greek Christians (for more see Chapter 3) were not subject to a Latinization programme and, more notably, the Muslims of Sicily, in return for payment of a head tax, were broadly given lenient surrender pacts which allowed for indirect rule (the dhimm¯ı system) and the retention of their religion and customs, albeit restrictions and significant inequalities were inherent in the arrangement. Moreover, evidence suggests that by the first decades of the twelfth century Norman identity in the south was weakening, and that Normans and natives were assimilating.38
When Duke William of Apulia, the grandson of Robert Guiscard, died in 1127 without an heir, a succession crisis emerged which would carry huge repercussions. The duchy of Apulia was claimed by Roger II of Sicily (the son of Count Roger I), who was William’s closest relative and controlled an increasingly powerful island, which had not fragmented as the mainland had done. Roger II faced opposition from the papacy, the Prince of Capua and other mainland groups. However, in 1128 Roger II’s superior force enabled him to acquire the duchy, and then in 1130 he controversially raised the status of his territories to that of a kingdom: a novel creation with no historic precedent.39 Civil war ensued, with opposition from mainland cities and nobles, and it also took on international dimensions which saw the kingdom’s legitimacy embroiled in a papal schism which ultimately drew the intervention of the German emperor. Nevertheless, Roger’s superior resources and tenacity prevailed, and by 1139 he finally subdued mainland southern Italy, absorbing Naples and Capua, and earned papal recognition. The Kingdom of Sicily, stretching from the island of Sicily to the Abruzzi on the mainland, was a unique creation. It was a multi-ethnic, multi-faith, pariah state, for internally it was populated by a mosaic of communities, and externally it was shunned by most of the rulers of Christendom, especially the Byzantine and German emperors, and the papacy too.
The Norman kings of Sicily responded to these challenges by constructing a highly efficient administrative state, based on a combination of Lombard, Byzantine and Arab– Islamic models, but which delegated flexible autonomy to a number of entities and regions within the kingdom.40 Their control was not tyrannical, as their detractors claimed; rather it was effectively pragmatic. The kings themselves were increasingly able to rule from Palermo, and only sporadically visited the mainland. Despite the existence of tensions between some of the kingdom’s Greek, Latin and Muslim communities, and the eruption of serious revolts in 1155–6 and 1160–2, the kingdom gradually stabilized and flourished. Its pivotal setting at the heart of the Mediterranean allowed it to control a great deal of trade and commerce, and the monarchy accrued enormous wealth. Its public image exuded power, affluence and exoticism, reflected in the celebrated Palermitan royal palaces and parks, in the sumptuous decoration in the royal chapel (Cappella Palatina) and the royal cathedral at Monreale, and in the royal ceremonial. To some external observers (see Chapter 5) this was interpreted as a dangerous deviance, but gradually the Kingdom of Sicily was rehabilitated and reintegrated into the international community.
The Treaty of Benevento (1156) created a lasting peace with the papacy, the Peace of Venice (1177) ended hostilities with the German Empire, and members of the Norman dynasty forged marriage alliances with other royal houses. Furthermore, it was apparent that the kingdom was central to the geopolitical balance of the Mediterranean, to its commerce and to events in the Levant, where Byzantium and the crusader states loomed large in the mind of western Europe. Its integral importance undoubtedly aided friendly ties with western Europe, as perhaps did the general trend towards Latin dominance within the kingdom. From the 1150s the government was increasingly Latinized, with Greek officials and the Palace Saracens being gradually marginalized in favour of Latin churchmen. Sicily was opened up to more Latin immigration, and while Greek Christian communities remained relatively secure, Greek elements within the kingdom were played down. The construction of the royal cathedral at Monreale (c.1174–c.1183) articulated a more assertive Latin-Christian outlook, and King William II (1166–89) was the first Sicilian monarch to show a keen interest in Crusading. William II’s death without an heir was followed by the short reign of Tancred and his son William III (1190–4); the last of the Norman Hauteville kings was defeated by the German Staufen emperor Henry VI who had claimed the throne on William II’s death through his own Sicilian wife Constance. In 1194, the Kingdom of Sicily passed to the rule of the Staufens, who inherited a uniquely powerful, alluring, yet challenging agglomeration of territories.
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