HISTORY
Dan Jones
The Normans Power,
Conquest and Culture in
11th-Century Europe
by Judith A Green
Yale UP £25 pp368
In AD911 Charles the Simple,
king of the Franks, held a
summit with a man who had
been a thorn in his side. That
man was Rollo, a Viking leader
who for more than 30 years
had been enthusiastically
plundering settlements across
royal territory in what is now
northwest France. Heartily
fed up, Charles had decided to
make peace, granting Rollo a
tract of land around the River
Seine, centred on the city of
Rouen. This became known as
the land of the Northmen — or
as we call it today, Normandy.
As part of the deal, Rollo
had agreed to convert from
Scandinavian paganism to
Christianity. He was baptised
and took the name Robert.
But he did not immediately
change his ways. When
bishops attending the summit
suggested that Rollo kiss the
Frankish king’s foot as a mark
of respect, Rollo refused. He
palmed off the job onto one of
his henchmen, who grabbed
Charles’s foot and yanked it to
his lips so that the king fell on
his backside.
This story, written down a
century after the fact by the
chronicler Dudo of St-Quentin,
may well be apocryphal. But it
has remained popular because
it strikes at an essential truth
about the Normans of the
High Middle Ages. They were
violent roughnecks, tough
negotiators and no respecters
of established authority.
They also got around.
Between the early 10th and
the early 12th centuries, Rollo’s
countrymen and descendants
conquered England and Sicily
and invaded southern Italy,
terrorising Popes, tussling
with Byzantine emperors, and
hustling into the Reconquista
wars against the Muslims of
Iberia. They also played a
prominent role in the First
Crusade to Jerusalem, when a
Norman principality was
established around Antioch in
northern Syria. How and why
this particular tribe of Viking
pigs in lipstick made it so far
in the world has puzzled
historians for generations.
These were some of the 12
sons of a magnificently virile
Norman lord called Tancred
of Hauteville; they included
the memorably named
William Iron Arm, along with
his younger brothers Drogo,
Robert Guiscard (meaning
wily) and Roger.
Originally soldiers of
fortune — Robert Guiscard
left Normandy with just five
knights and 30 foot soldiers at
his back — the Hauteville boys
managed to carve out a series
of Norman strongholds in the
Mezzogiorno, playing off
various warring factions in
Italy. In 1071 Roger drove the
Arabs out of Sicily and
proclaimed himself the
island’s count; a generation
later it became a full-blown
Christian kingdom.
By this stage, Normans
seemed to be everywhere —
and they were hard to miss.
When the First Crusade
set off in 1096, one of its most
striking leaders was Robert
Guiscard’s son Bohemond,
who would become the first
prince of Antioch.
We have a striking
description of Bohemond,
recorded by the Byzantineemperor’s daughter, Anna
Komnene. She found him tall,
handsome, broad-chested
and muscular with striking
light-blue eyes. “There was
a hard, savage quality in his
whole aspect,” she wrote,
“due, I suppose, to his great
stature and his eyes; even his
laugh sounded like a threat to
others.. .” She also found him
insufferably arrogant and
duplicitous: the epitome of
what Green in her book calls
the “Stormin’ Normans”.
This is a faultless study,
although perhaps one for
those who already know their
Bohemonds from their
Tancreds. Throughout, Green
tries to pin down the secret of
the Normans’ success, but she
finds broad conclusions hard
to reach because, like many of
the most capable conquerors
before them, the Normans
were chameleons. Wherever
they went, they came, they
saw, they conquered, then
they melted into the
background. “There was
no single Norman world,”
Green writes. But there
was a typical Norman alpha
male, and for a time, that
was good enough. ccharismatic, opportunistic
leaders to flourish. And the
Normans had plenty of those.
The most famous of them,
after Rollo himself, lived in
the late 11th century.
He was best known on these
shores, of course, as William
the Conqueror, who in 1066
sailed to England to enforce his
claim to the throne of Edward
the Confessor. William crushed
his Saxon rival Harold at the
Battle of Hastings and was
crowned king at Westminster
on Christmas Day. William
was plainly an adept military
leader, but he was more than
that. The sweeping reforms he
and a generation of Norman
colonisers imposed on England
— reorganising bishoprics,
replacing virtually the entire
ruling class of aristocrats,
brutalising the north and
commissioning the Domesday
Book — were the work of a
pitiless but visionary ruler
whose hand we can still feel in
the fabric of the nation today.
Yet he was not alone. At
roughly the same time as
William and his allies were
conquering England, a band of
Norman brothers were tearing
a path through southern Italy.GETTY IMAGESWere they an exceptional
race? Or lucky? Or both?
Judith Green, professor
emerita of medieval history at
Edinburgh University, is the
perfect person to tackle these
questions. Green has written
extensively about Henry I, the
third Norman king of England
— and she has the scholarly
range to weave together the
histories of all the other
places to which the Normans
travelled too. She tells us
ruefully that she does not read
Arabic. But she can do almost
everything else, as endnotes
and a bibliography of more
than 100 pages demonstrate.
Green’s central argument
is that around the turn of the
first millennium, Europe was
a wild west: a place where
unstable polities allowedThe stormin’ Normans
How did these ‘Viking pigs in lipstick’ conquer everywhere from Britain to Sicily?
Normans
were violent
roughnecks
Into battle Hastings in 1066,
from the Bayeux Tapestry3 April 2022 27