NORMANS IN SICILY
. In 1016, Norman pilgrims returning from the Holy Land disembarked at Bari, then in
revolt against the Byzantine emperor. Hiring themselves out as mercenaries, first to one
and then to another side in the wars waged between and among Byzantines in Apulia and
Lombards in Campania, both of whom were threatened by Arabs in Calabria and Sicily,
they enriched themselves and invited their friends and relatives to join them from
Normandy, where many lesser nobles had landless younger sons.
Of the Normans who came south, twelve brothers of the Hauteville family gradually
got the upper hand, finally annexing the principality of Capua in 1078. William Iron
Arm, Drogo, and Humphrey had conquered northern Apulia. William was elected count
of all the Normans in Italy, a position inherited by Drogo in 1046. Their younger brother
Robert, surnamed Guiscard (“wily”), a virtual brig-and in Calabria, where he and his
followers maintained themselves by pillaging the inhabitants, succeeded Humphrey as
count in 1057. Robert and his youngest brother, Roger, completed the conquest of
southern Italy by capturing Bari, the last Byzantine stronghold, on April 16, 1071. The
Byzantines could not effectively resist them because most of their army had to face the
Seljuk Turks, who crushed them at Manzikert in August of that year.
In 1053, at Civitate, the Normans captured Pope Leo IX, who had opposed their
encroachments on the papal states. Pope Nicholas II used the Normans as allies against
local enemies as well as the German and Byzantine emperors. He made Robert Guiscard
a duke and his vassal in 1059. The Norman-papal alliance bore fruit in 1084, when
Robert responded to the appeals of his suzerain and routed the emperor Henry IV, who
was besieging Pope Gregory VII in the Castel Sant’ Angelo in Rome. Robert himself
died in 1085, during a three-year campaign against the Byzantines and Venetians, during
which he seized Avelona and Durazzo and penetrated as far as Thessaly. By that time, his
brother Roger had nearly completed the conquest of Sicily, which he had invaded from
Calabria, seizing Messina in 1061. Noto, the last Arab outpost, fell to him in 1091.
During the First Crusade, Robert’s oldest son, Bohe-mund, seized Antioch and took
the title of prince in the face of Byzantine claims to the city. Hostility between the
Hautevilles and Constantinople undermined cooperation between crusaders and
Byzantines. Antioch remained a Latin principality until 1287. Roger’s younger son,
Roger II of Sicily (r. 1105–54), inherited Apulia in 1127 from his cousin, Bohemund’s
son William, and added Capua and Naples (1139) and Abruzzi (1140). In 1130, he
received the crown of Sicily at Palermo from the antipope Anacletus II. Roger continued
his father’s policy of romanizing the Orthodox and protecting Greek, Arab, Jew, and
Lombard in his French-speaking court, which promulgated documents in Arabic and
Greek as well as in Latin. He combined Arab and Byzantine autocratic law, taxes, and
bureaucratic traditions with Norman feudalism. Normans came to Sicily from England,
the other most developed Catholic monarchy of the 12th century. The institutions of each
kingdom influenced the other’s, but the Sicilian realm was more advanced. Its economy
was more monetized, its trade more valuable, its cities larger and richer, and its culture
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