THE WESTERN MEDITERRANEAJ\ KINGDOMS 1200-1500worry about a serious recovery of Byzantine control in all of
southern Italy.^7 Nevertheless, the south-east, Apulia, was con-
trolled by Byzantine governors, as was occasionally the toe
of Italy (Calabria), and both areas retained a substantial
Greek-speaking population throughout the Middle Ages,
although only tiny Greek remnants survive now.H Apulia and
indeed virtually all south Italian towns were also home to a
Jewish community that may have numbered^5 per cent of
the overall population, and which was well integrated into
wider society, being heavily engaged in textile production."
In the island of Sicily, by contrast, there were many Greeks,
maybe 40 per cent of the entire population around AD 1000,
and significant numbers of Jews, but almost no Latins or
'Italians'; the majority was an Arabic-speaking population of
Muslims, some of them descendants of the ancient popula-
tion who had converted to Islam after the Muslim invasions
of the ninth century, some descendants of Arabs and Berbers
from north Mrica, some very recent settlers from as far afield
as Persia and Yemen, who took advantage of the island's
prosperity astride the key trade routes of the Islamic world
to take up residence in such great cities as Balarm (Palermo),
more generally known to the Arabic-speakers as simply
Madinat Siqilliyah, 'the city of Sicily'.
THE NORMAN STATE
The conquest of these areas by the Normans was not the
result of a master plan to subdue the region and transform
into into a single kingdom. The region would, indeed, for
long retain its diversity in language, religion and social struc-
ture. The Norman conquest in the eleventh century reveals,
rather, how a small group of foreign mercenaries who first
arrived at the start of the century could make themselves so- The most recent major study of Lombard Italy is that of H. Taviani, La
principaute lombarde de Sa/erne, /Xe-XI siecle,^2 vols (Rome, 1991); see
also B.M. Kreutz, Before the Normans. Southern Italy in the ninth and tenth
centuries (Philadelphia, 1991); J. Gay, L 'ltalie meridionale et !'Empire
byzantin (Paris, 1904). - V. von Falkenhausen, Untersuchungen uber die byzantinische Herrschajt in
Siiditalien vom 9. bis ins 11. jahrhundert (Wiesbaden, 1967). - N. Ferrorelli, Gli Ebrei nell'Italia meridionale dall'etii romana al secolo XVIII,
ed. F. Patroni Griffi (Naples, 1990).