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ROGER OF SICILYAND THE NORMAN CONQUEST IN LOWER ITALY1016-1154 EDMUND CURTIS
The Normans in European historyThe Normans In England 1066-1154History of the Northmen: or, Danes and Normans, from the earliest times to THE CONQUEST OF ENGLAND BY WILLIAM OF NORMANDY.William the Conqueror and the rule of the NormansEngland under the Normans and Angevins, 1066-1272
INTROSOUTHERN ITALY CIRCA 1.000 AD
“A LAND destined to receive from the South its civilisation, from the
North its masters”. So has the history of Italy from Honorius been summed up in
a single phrase. From 400 AD to 1050 AD, three Northern races descended without
thought of return into the sunny land of corn, olive, and vine. After the East
Goths, the Lombards, and after these the Normans, who, coming in isolated bands
and not as a nation, yet represent the last considerable immigration of
Teutonic invaders.
Italy, south of a line drawn from the Tronto to Rieti, and from that again
to Terracina, was the arena of Norman conquest; the genius of Robert Guiscard,
of Richard of Aversa, and after them of Roger of Sicily, formed this part of
Italy into a political entity which, lasting for 800 years, has been variously
called “the kingdom of Sicily”, “the two Sicilies”, or more familiarly the “Regno”
or “Kingdom”. Geography at once favours and hinders the unity of Lower Italy.
The vast mountain-barrier of the Abruzzi, the “Gran Sasso” of Italy, continued
by the mountains that approach to Benevento, cut it off from the central and
northern part of the peninsula. Yet Nature has deeply divided its component
parts. Great mountain ranges sever from one another the fertile plain that is
watered by the Volturno and Garigliano, the plateaux of Apulia, the great
depressed lowlands stretching from Otranto round the Gulf of Taranto to the
basin of the Crati, and make each of them self-contained and isolated. The
whole of the Abruzzi was in the mediaeval ages almost inaccessible, with vast
forests, mountains, and waste, offering little passage or attraction. Apulia,
divided from Calabria by woods, torrents, and narrow gorges, communicating with
it only by Potenza, or the long shore-route, shut off from the western plains
by the great backbone of the Apennines, and only to be entered from that
direction by Troja, Melfi, and the passes under Monte Vulture, presents in
itself much diversity of soil and altitude. Prom the Apennines down to Andria
is a great grassy extent covered with sheep. A low-lying tract stretching along
the coast from Siponto to Brindisi, fertile and full of towns, ascends into a
tableland which stretches from Monte Gargano, “the spur of Italy”, to the foot
of Monte Vulture, and the whole is called “fat” or “fertile” Apulia. Thence begins
the Murgia, a line of hills styled in contrast “stony Apulia”. Over the
Apennines, from Salerno north to Benevento and the borders of the former Papal
states, there are great and fertile plains called to the north Campania, but
even here considerable mountains rise like spurs of the great central ranges,
and from Salerno to Sorrento runs a great wall of hills south of which Amalfi
sits on the sea.
Geography makes the history of Lower Italy in the early mediaeval
centuries. Calabria, poor and isolated, a “citadel of granite”, offering little
in the way of harbours or towns, necessarily plays little part in the story of
Norman conquest. The northern Abruzzi serve to check Norman aggression and to
fix its limits. The mountains and sea enable Naples and Amalfi to play for a
long period the part of free Sea-Republics. The Greeks are able to keep a long
hold on the plains and towns of the Adriatic side. The Lombard states are more
easily conquered by the invaders, but when the Norman feudatories plant themselves
in the numberless valleys of western Apulia and the lower Abruzzi they are hard
to force either into unity or loyalty to the Duke or King who strives to make
of South Italy a nation. The wars of Guiscard and Roger against their Norman
vassals are not a chronicle of open battles, but of continual sieges of
mountain fortresses and petty isolated towns.
At the beginning of the eleventh century, just on the eve of the Norman
conquest, the future Kingdom presents a very diversified map. There are three
great Lombard duchies, Benevento, Capua, Salerno, while a fourth, Spoleto,
touches it in its southern half. The two coasts and nearer inland are studded
with cities, Capua, Benevento, Naples, Salerno, Gaeta, Amalfi, Brindisi, Bari,
and so on. A line drawn from the north of Monte Gargano across to the
neighbourhood of Potenza, and again to the northern limit of Calabria, contains
between it and the southern and eastern sea a Greek “Theme” or province, called
variously the Capitanata, or Langobardia. Sicily is in Moslem hands.
The native forces in Lower Italy were the Lombard duchies and the
princely City-Republics. The former had for two centuries followed an almost
unbroken course of disintegration. At the end of the eighth century one great
duchy had contained what were now three or more separate states. The glory of
the duchy of Benevento had been in the period when the northern Lombard kingdom,
founded by Alboin in 568, with its capital at Pavia, fell before Pippin and his
son Charles the Great; Lombard independence and civilization then found a
refuge in the South with Arichis II, Duke of Benevento.
The ancestors of Arichis had governed in Benevento since 591; he himself
was a man of great character, his territory was of wide extent, and the
overthrow of the northern kingdom served to enhance his fame. Benevento was no
mean successor to Pavia. Built where the Sabato and Calore unite, seated at the
junction of the Via Appia and the Via Trajana, it was the gateway between
Southern and Central Italy. The Arch of Trajan, the Porta Aurea, which had escaped ruin, was the natural boast of its
citizens. Santa Sofia, built by Gisulf II, 732-749, harboured a famous school
of philosophy; strong walls and a Lombard castle crowning the hill on which the
city is built, secured its defences.
Arichis was able to stave off Charles with a tribute; he took the title
of Prince in 774, was crowned and anointed by the bishops of his duchy, struck
coins bearing his own effigy, and, as a final mark of independence, dated his
acts by the year of his reign. Capua and Salerno were also his capitals; he
fortified the latter and built in it a palace of great size and beauty to rival
the Sacrum Palatium at Benevento. All South Italy was his except the Greek sea
towns and the duchy stretched from sea to sea.
Among those who sought an asylum with the great Duke, appeared Paul the
Deacon, a Lombard patriot and the greatest man of letters among all his race. After
the overthrow of King Desiderius at Pavia he came south to Benevento to adorn
the court of Arichis, and after his patron’s death he went north to join the
literary circle which surrounded Charlemagne at Aachen; finally he sought
refuge in Monte Cassino, and there set himself to write the epic of his race,
the “History of the Lombards”.
Arichis left his throne to a son, Grimoald. But the glory of Benevento
was short-lived. On the death of Duke Sicard in 839, the duchy was usurped by
Radelchis, one of his officers; Salerno thereupon broke away under Siconulf,
who called himself “most glorious prince of the Lombard race” (849). Shortly
afterwards, Capua formed a third state, and thus there arose out of the
original duchy three Lombard dynasties. In Benevento and Capua, there followed
one another a bewildering succession of Pandulfs and Landulfs, in Salerno of
Gaimars and Gisulfs. Alongside the greater three, small Lombard dynasts,
offshoots of the princely families, eventually established themselves in
Teano, Sorrento, and elsewhere. To the north, again, was the duchy of Spoleto,
governed since 575 by Lombard princes who in 842 founded an hereditary dynasty;
this race however had become extinct when the Normans appeared in Italy, and
the invaders were able to add to their conquests the southern portion, the
Abruzzi.
The boundaries of Benevento, Capua, and Salerno at the beginning of the
eleventh century were as follows: the former stretched, on the west, from Alife
to Avellino, and touched Capua near Sant' Agata and on the Volturno. On the
north it extended from Alife by Boviano and Molise to Trivento, thence to the
coast at Termoli. Its south-eastern border ran from the mouth of the Fortore by
Lucera, Ascoli, and Melfi, where it met Greek territoiy, to Nusco and Avellino,
where it faced the duchy of Salerno. The latter had, by agreement with Benevento
in 847, received territories stretching as far south as Taranto and north to
Teano, but it had sadly diminished. It now met the Greek frontier along a line
from Melfi, Potenza, and Policastro. Again, it touched Beneventan soil at Nusco
and Avellino, and Neapolitan along the Sarno. The frontier of Capua on the
south towards Naples reached from the Lago di Patria along the river Clanius to
Abella; on the east, it ran from about Abella to Sant' Agata along the upper
Volturno to Sora from which, turning south-west to Aquino, it followed the
course of the Garigliano to the sea. The boundaries of the Salerno and
Benevento naturally fluctuated, thus the territory of Monte Gargano from Lesina
and Lucera to Viesti and Siponto was debated between Benevento and the
Byzantines.
The Lombard race was undoubtedly the eminent factor in Lower Italy.
Three great principalities represented their temporal sovereignty; in Monte
Cassino and in Monte Gargano, they held the spiritual capitals of the southern
half of the peninsula, the one the mother of Western monasteries, the other a
shrine for pilgrims from all the West. Salerno again was a city celebrated
beyond the borders of the Lombard race; it is described as rich with the
traffic of Moslem Africa and Sicily; its trade with Constantinople was great;
above all it was famous for its ancient School of Medicine.
The Lombards were both an aristocratic caste and a race of merchants and
cultivators. As the former, they had stamped themselves all over Italy; from
north to south the personal names of the whole noble class were Lombard. Their
distinctiveness as a Teutonic nation had indeed vanished, and their origin
revealed itself, apart from historic tradition, only in their names, in their
law, certain terms in that law, the titles of some officials, and a few place
names. They had become at once Catholic and Italian. But the word Lombard
survived stubbornly attached to a people whose blood must have been largely
mixed. The three duchies were of course the main seat of the Lombard race, but
it was also numerous along the western coast, while the occupation of Apulia by
Zoto and Arichis II had left behind a numerous race of peasants and townsmen
who preserved the Italian speech and the laws of Rothari all along the
hinterland of the Adriatic and even in the cities of the coast.
Not only the race, but also the laws and administrative system of the
Lombards were far diffused beyond the borders of the three duchies. Apulia was
under Byzantine domination, but in all essentials it closely resembled the
neighbouring states. Benevento, Capua, and Salerno were divided for
administrative and judicial purposes into areas governed by counts and “gastalds”,
agents of the ducal power. Similarly in the nearer parts of Apulia, Lombard
gastalds are called in by Greek officials to decide cases. The charters and
acts of Bari, Bitonto, and other towns of the Adriatic coast, from the early
part of the tenth century, attest how lightly Byzantine institutions affected
the population. The names are mainly Lombard, the practices referred to are
those of Lombard law, secundum ritus
gentis nostrae langobardorum, the language in the vast majority of cases is
Latin, while however the acts are dated by the reign of the Greek Emperor.
Even among the purely Italian people of Italy, the laws of Rothari and
Liutprand contested the ground very vigorously with the Roman or Roman-Byzantine
codes. In Rome itself, the very seat of the more refined legal system, the
nobles and many of the clergy are found in the eleventh century living by the
old barbarian customs.
Far into the thirteenth century, these customs retained the affections
both of the people of the old duchies and the burgesses of the Apulian towns,
and the once Teutonic race continued to cling to customs bearing old Germanic
names such as the morgengab or
settlement on the newly married wife of part of the husband’s effects, the
subjection of the women to the mundoald or guardian, the launegilt, or
acknowledgment in kind made for some grant or gift. The Lombard law even had
its attraction for those free cities Amalfi, Gaeta, and Trajetto which broadly
speaking were Greek-Italian and non-Lombard. The Consuetudines or Customs of Amalfi, which were collected in 1274
but existed three centuries earlier, show that the basis of dowry and
succession among the Amalfitans is Lombard and not Roman law; the morgengab is at home there as in Bari or
Benevento.
The second of the great native forces of Lower Italy was in the
non-Lombard civic states, in Naples, Amalfi, Gaeta, and a few lesser towns of
the western coast which were their satellites. Of these, the greatest was
Naples.
The Basileus Constantine IV may be said to have founded the Neapolitan
duchy in 661; he defined its territories within a line reaching from above
Gaeta in the north to Amalfi in the south. As Naples itself gradually formed a
nucleus of self-government out of the wrecks of Greek dominion, so other units
of independence formed themselves out of Naples. In the ninth century Amalfi
emerges as a free state. At the same time with Amalfi, the remoter Gaeta
(Cajetta or Caieta) begins to run a course of her own. The contado of Naples was therefore much reduced by the dawn of the
eleventh century; the duchy had then for its borders the sea, Nola, the Capuan
territory along the Volturno, and the course of the Sarno.
The immediate ruler of Naples held two titles, Duke and Magister Militum. The latter implies a
military jurisdiction; the Duke was commander of a militia or military caste
which had its own domains and privileges in and about the city. As a civil
official he governed Naples in the name of the Emperor at Constantinople; in
this capacity he was assisted by a council of nobiliores, while comites and tribuni acted as magistrates
under him.
The Greek character of Naples took long to disappear. Until 1139 the overlord
of the city was the “Great Emperor” in whose name all acts were ratified.
Political and commercial intercourse with Constantinople strengthened the
traditional ties, and the Greek tongue was for long as common in the streets as
the Italian. Practically, however, Naples grew into a free republic at once
maritime, civic, and aristocratic. Her dukes became hereditary, although they never
ceased to be in a large measure constitutional princes. The earlier rulers of
the city were nominated by the Exarch of Ravenna, who represented Byzantine
authority in Italy; their names are Greek such as Stephanus, Johannes and
Sergius. Finally Sergius I, in the middle of the ninth century, was the last to
be nominated from Ravenna or Constantinople; from him there descended a line of
hereditary dukes which ran to the seventh of the founder’s name, and ended
three centuries after him.
Ruling a wide contado in the
islands and mainland, commanding the sea-routes, an outpost of Greek learning
and cultivation in the West, Naples was a city at once splendid, vigorous, and
wealthy. Yet she was followed close by the more recent Amalfi, which with
Naples, with Gaeta, with Terracina formed a chain of cities at once Italian,
self-governing, and attached to Byzantium by unofficial bonds. Amalfi too had
her contado and now tended to gather
under her sceptre a little empire of the sea-towns and now saw them follow her
own lesson in self-dependence. We can trace from the middle of the ninth
century a native dynasty establishing itself in Amalfi with Marinus I, which
becomes finally hereditary at the end of the tenth century. At first they call
themselves “imperial prefects”; from 958 they too become dukes and so last
until 1073. Gaeta again began to have consuls of her own as early as 823, and
in 872 a certain Docibilis is found as Duke of Gaeta, Fondi, Trajetto, and
Terracina. He was succeeded in this compact little state by dukes more or less
hereditary and bearing such Greek or non-Lombard names as Sergius, Leo,
Marinus. Terracina and Fondi again tended to break away from Gaeta, and the “particularism”
of Lower Italy was irrepressible until the Normans welded it together by the
strong hand.
The glory of Amalfi was in the tenth and eleventh centuries. A poet of
the latter century describes it as wealthy and populous, full of gold and
silver, a famous port of Arab, Sicilian, and African merchants, an emporium for
the goods of Egypt and Syria. Built on the lower slopes of a high and
inaccessible mountain group, it fronted only the sea which gave it its
importance; the hill country behind isolated it from the Campanian plain. Its
fleet and marine were at the beginning of the eleventh century the most
numerous and active of all the lower western coast. Its traders and seamen made
its name renowned; they secured from their nominal lord, the Basileus, valuable
trading immunities in Constantinople; the Lombard Liutprand, visiting the Greek
capital in the interests of his master Otto I in 968, found Amalfitans as
numerous and as much in evidence there as the Venetians.
Such were the city-states of Lower Italy which we might distinguish
sharply from the inland Lombard states did not the Lombard law exercise no
small influence upon the native customs of Amalfi and even of Naples, did they
not also aim at dominion in the hinterland itself. Nor can we call them Greek
in any definite sense inasmuch as their populations were mainly of Italian
stock, of Italian speech, and living by Roman law.
Lombards and Italians were not the only races in South Italy which might
be called native. Sicily of course contained a preponderating Moslem
population, with an understratum of Greeks surviving in the eastern part of the
island. On the mainland four centuries of Byzantine ascendancy had left a large
Greek-speaking population. In Apulia, indeed, Hellenization had not proceeded
far; the Lombards, backed by the free states, preserved their race and speech;
veterans of the imperial troops were seldom pensioned off upon the land; in the
towns such as Bari, and in the towns alone, does there seem to have been any
considerable Greek element. But around the Gulf of Taranto, and in the toe of
Italy, Greek influences were all-powerful. The whole of Calabria, the southern
part of Lucania, the coast from Brindisi to Taranto and Otranto, the valleys of
Agri and Sinno contained a population completely Greek. The reigns of the
Iconoclastic Emperors 775-867 had resulted in great numbers of nonconforming
monks abandoning Greece and settling in Greek Italy, where the Greek language,
law, and Church struck their roots deeply. In these districts Greek was the
language of administration, and the Code of Justinian was the law of the land.
The Byzantine law lived on to influence the edicts of the Norman kings; the
Greek speech lived on till the scholars of the Renaissance procured native
scholars of Calabria to teach them the language of Plato.
South Italy then contained, from the Garigliano and Tronto to Brindisi
and Syracuse, four races, four systems of law, three Churches, numerous free
states, and sovereignties both civic and national in character. If unity could
be imposed upon this meeting-ground of races, churches, and civilizations, it
was less likely to be achieved by native force than by the action of the
external powers which pressed their title to the sub-peninsula. For Lower Italy
was not only a confusion of races internally, it was an arena in which clashed
against one another the three great powers that contested the Mediterranean. The
Moslems, the Byzantines, the German successors of Charlemagne in the Holy Roman
Empire met in conflict on the battleground of Southern Italy.
To the princes and people of Italy it was not apparent that the Moslem
danger was almost past. All North Africa was Moslem, and Sicily was a
stepping-stone to Calabria and Apulia. In the ninth century the Aglabite rulers
of Tunis and Kairouan had wrenched Sardinia, Corsica, and most of Sicily from
the Greeks. About the year 846 their fleets had appeared at the Tiber mouth and
sent inland troops who plundered Rome; about the same time Ban, Taranto,
Salerno, one after another, were threatened or taken. South Italy for a time was
in considerable danger of becoming Semitic, and even if the danger seemed to
pass, Islam had a unique power of revival. To the Aglabites succeeded the
Fatimite caliphs of Egypt, whose ships and armies in 965 drove the Greeks out
of Rametta, their last stronghold in Sicily. Their lieutenant Abul-Kasem seemed
at one time likely to add Apulia and Calabria to his Sicilian emirate; at
Cotrone in Calabria he overwhelmed the German Emperor, Otto II, with the whole
of his forces, but died in the fight with all his ambitions (982). The next
century saw the Moslems without an inch of ground on the mainland, and even in
Sicily the strong hand was relaxed. The emirs of the island, like the
newly-sprung Zirid dynasty of Tunis on the coast opposite, renounced the
overlordship of the Fatimites; the Moslems of Sicily devoted themselves to a
peaceful trade with the Italian sea-towns on the one hand and Africa and Egypt
on the other; their island became a paradise of wealth and culture, and its
capital, Palermo, a second Cordova.
The claim of the Western or Holy Roman Empire to Lower Italy had a more
legal aspect. In the theory of the Imperium Italy was as necessary a part of
the Emperor’s dominion as Germany. Yet even the dominion of Charles the Great
in Italy had actually only reached to a line drawn eastward from Gaeta to the
south-ern boundary of the lordship of Chieti. His indefinite claim to the
portion south of that received from Arichis of Benevento only the
acknowledgment of a tribute which left the Duke a sovereign prince. His
successors both of the Frankish and the Saxon House made several appearances in
the south; practically however, the imperial power below the Garigliano was a
mere supremacy only occasionally enforced. Again their claims were contested by
their own protégé, the Papacy. In 774, Charles the Great conferred upon Pope
Hadrian the Duchy of Rome. This grant of the Patrimony of Peter was held on the
Papal side to have included Spoleto and Benevento; the claim was never allowed,
but an impression was created that the Pope was the real viceroy of Italy. Behind
it all there was the all-accredited Donation of Constantine to fall back on;
had not that left all Italy to the Pope? But whatever Pope, Greek, or other
opponent might affirm, the imperial claim to Southern Italy was never more than
in abeyance, and till the Norman kingdom itself passed away the transalpine
Emperors continued haughtily to denounce as interlopers all who claimed any
dominion in the southern fringe of the Empire.
The Byzantines were no less tenacious in asserting a legal sovereignty
over the much-debated land. If their realm was, as it claimed to be, the real
heir to the Empire of the Caesars, if the Emperor of the West was in truth
merely a barbarian King of Franks or Saxons, there was no doubt in law that the
Basileus of Constantinople was lord of Southern Italy. Fact and not theory,
however, was to decide the question, and the actual authority of the Greeks in
that country at the end of the tenth century was both strong and widely
diffused.
The recovery of Italy to the Empire under Justinian had been partially
undone by the Lombard incursion of 568. In the south, Greek dominion was
narrowed by various dukes of Benevento to the mere peninsula of Otranto. Later,
Sicily had to be yielded to the Moslems (827-878). Yet the reaction came. The
commanders of Basil the Macedonian (867-886) and Leo the Wise (886-912)
recovered Apulia and Calabria both from the Saracens and the Lombards and laid
down a frontier which only the Normans were able to cross. Greek authority in
the south was now represented by the Catapan or viceroy, ruling over the Theme
of Langobardia, a name which in itself testifies to the wide diffusion of the
Lombards over Lower Italy. After the expulsion of the Saracens, Basil I had
made Bari the capital of his viceroy in the south, whom we hear of for the
first time in 975 as the Catapan, a title probably implying “he who is above
all others”. He was the supreme civil and military official, head under the Basileus
of all Byzantine administration, and commanding the garrison troops, the local
militias, and such reinforcements as were sent at need. Now that Sicily was
lost, a concentration of the remaining dominions took place; but the Catapan’s
command, covering provinces so diverse, was perforce accommodated to the prevailing
differences. The boundaries of the Theme to north and west were drawn from the
flat coast-land about the Fortore through the mountains. The western half of
the Theme, Calabria, was in two portions: viz., the Basilicata, or Lucania,
from Monte Vulture and the neighbourhood of Troja, Melfi, and Potenza to Policastro
and the valley of the Crati; and Calabria proper, south and west of it. The “toe
and instep of Italy” were Greek; a “citadel of granite”, Calabria was preserved
by its mountains from the rest of the Theme. The other half of the Catapan’s
province, Apulia, offered every contrast, even if only because of its wealth.
In its widest application Apulia reached from the Fortore in the north
to the mouth of the Bradano and the peninsula of Otranto in the south.
Practically it is seen to fall into three portions, the peninsula of Otranto,
flat, fertile, and chalky, the Capitanata, as its name generally reads, a plain
lying between Bari, the Murgia, and Monte Gargano, and Apulia itself, lying
between the two great roads of the south-east and fronting the Adriatic.
Byzantine administration in Lower Italy accommodated itself to local
circumstances. In the purely Greek areas, such as Calabria and Otranto, the
officials who carried out the orders of the Catapan were mainly Byzantine and
non-native; they were both nominated and controlled by the imperial deputies.
But in Apulia proper the Greek authorities had a more difficult problem to
face. Here the subject population was of Italo-Lombard stock, attached to an
old Teutonic code, and retaining an administrative system similar to that of
the neighbouring duchies. It was also of vital importance in the problem that
Apulia was essentially a land of “communes”. The peasants, were mainly to be
found, as they are today, in towns of greater or less extent, from which they
went out at sunrise to their fields, and to which at sunset they returned. Town
life, from the smallest oppidum to
the capital of Apulia itself, was characteristic of the Adriatic coast and the
interior country. From Bari and Trani inland to Melfi and Canosa, Apulia was
studded with considerable towns, and each showed the prevailing impulse towards
self-government. The Byzantines, then, had as a political necessity to recognize
this development. The local officials, the turmarchs and the local judges, though often nominated and always ratified by the imperial
power, have to govern by means of and with the consent of local notables who,
under the names of boni homines, act
as representative town-councils. These civic notables themselves are found
adorned with such names as protospatharii or candidati, purely unofficial
titles flowing from the fountain of honour at Constantinople.
The secret of Greek rule in Apulia seems to have been the simple one of
showering honours and petty offices on the civic notabilities and, leaving them
undisturbed in enjoyment of the same so long as they carried on the local
government in the name of the Basileus and paid him his due tributes. Nor was
any systematic attempt made to resist Lombard influences, which were naturally
strongest in the greater towns. Thus even in Bari the magistrates are found at
the end of the tenth century to be Lombard, and so are the petty local
governments farther inland. In the zone between the land of Otranto and the
free duchies Lombard gastalds and
Greek officials exist side by side. Where the inhabitants are Lombard and live
by Lombard law they are able to call in a gastald of their own race to settle a dispute, even a gastald whose sovereign is the Prince of Salerno or the Duke of
Benevento. How little oppressive the Greek rule was, and how skillfully the Catapans
yielded to the difficult conditions of their Apulian command, is strikingly
illustrated by a document of the date 1043 relating to Bari. The Catapan
Eustathius wishing to reward the fidelity of the Judex Bisantius of that city to the Emperor during the rebellion of
Maniaces and afterwards against the “Franks” (the Normans), concedes to him the
administration of the village of Foliano (or Foliniano) and its surrounding
district; he is permitted to plant strangers there as colonists, and may
collect tribute from them, himself and his heirs, without any interference from
the imperial authority. Finally the Catapan concedes to him that his new
subjects should be governed by him according to Lombard law, except, however,
in case of assassination of the Sacred Emperors or the Catapan himself; such a
case could only be judged by an. imperial official and by imperial law.
This was certainly an unusual immunity, but it remains true of Apulia as
a whole that in its cities the Lombard subjects lived according to their own
laws without molestation; boni homines representative of the community aided the turmarchs and other officials to administer justice, to ratify sales, grants, and all
other acts, public and private; the officials themselves were local and but
lightly controlled from outside or from above; the Catapan as long as his
master the Emperor drew from Apulia the customs, rents, tributes, and other
emoluments of his sovereignty was content with a much lighter hold than the centralizing
and highly-organized government of Constantinople exercised elsewhere in Italy
and the Empire.
Many circumstances seemed to favour a long continuance of Byzantine
power in Lower Italy. The commercial influences binding the province to the
Empire were all-compelling. The “Orientation” of the southern peninsula was
then and for two centuries yet a decisive fact; the face of the Apulian
coast-land was turned eastward, and the towns from Siponto round to Taranto had
more to do with the eastern Adriatic than with the western parts of Italy from
which the great central mountains divided them. Bari was important as being the
great depot for the silks, precious stuffs, and other articles of luxury which
were to be got only from Greece; Brindisi again, standing on the junction of
the two Roman roads the Via Trajana and Via Appia, was in easy touch with
Durazzo. From Durazzo again the Via Egnatia ran overland through Thessalonica
to Constantinople.
Severed by the great mountains from the towns of Apulia, Naples, Amalfi,
Salerno, and the western towns yet had the sea open; they traded and
corresponded with the great capital of the Eastern world, by the Straits of
Messina and the Aegean Sea. The coinage of the Greeks itself testified to the
commercial primacy of Constantinople. The golden taris or tarenes of
Amalfi and Naples and the silver coins of the Lombards were of less credit than
the Byzantine solidus of gold, the besant which for centuries remained the one international money of the Levant.
To this influence the Byzantines could add the widespread Hellenization
of South Italy in race, law, culture, and religion. At least half the Theme of
Italy was Greek in race; in Calabria and Otranto there was no need for
Byzantine officials to use aught but Greek in official documents and the work
of government. Indirectly the same language and culture were of much importance
in the life of Naples and Amalfi. The Roman Church kept but a loose hold on the
sub-peninsula. In the Lombard duchies and in the west, Latin bishops were
maintained under the influence of the dukes and of Rome, and in Apulia it seems
that the Greeks had to recognize the Latin hierarchy appointed by the Roman
pontiff. But overlying these, and in the rest of the Theme undisturbed Greek
bishops, priests, and monks in numbers held the land to the allegiance of
Constantinople. From the end of the ninth century the Patriarchs of the Eastern
Church released from dependence upon Rome the churches of Sicily, Abruzzi,
Apulia, and Calabria. In 1025 the Archbishop of Bari is a Greek of the name of Bisantius; in his time, however, and by
him the archiepiscopal see was subjected to Rome and the Latin Church.
The military power of the Eastern Empire was behind the Hellenistic
influences that operated in Lower Italy. From 959 to 1025 the throne of the
Basileus was held by the vigorous race of the Macedonians and several great
Emperors restored the frontiers of the Danube and Syria. Nicephorus Phocas
could take to the capture of Crete in 960 a fleet of 3600 vessels and a landing
force of 50,000 men. The Byzantine army was the one force in Europe that was
thoroughly equipped and scientifically trained; the one army whose officers
marched to war with text-books on the military art in their wallets, which on
the march was followed by a train of engineers and an ambulance corps, which
was drilled into an elaborate and strikingly modern system of formation and
attack. In physique and animal courage the Greeks were certainly inferior to
the barbarian Slavs, Russians, and Moslems whom they had to face, but the
confidence born of good armour, careful drill, and scientific leadership, and
the possession in the Greek fire of something corresponding to modern
artillery, gave them a pertinacity and morale which over and over again was
able to wear down mere brute valour. The discipline and science of the
Byzantine armies compel not only respect but admiration; they had recently
(972) at Presthlava and Dorystolon won the greatest battles of the age, saved
the Empire, and shown what disciplined courage could do against 60,000 invading
Russians, formidable and natural fighters, whom they drove over the Danube with
two thirds of their number dead or taken. Such an army as Zimisces had then
led, in whole or part, might at any moment be landed on the Apulian shore.
Uncertain as the destiny of Lower Italy seemed at the opening of the
eleventh century, yet two developments seemed to promise a greater stability
and a greater freedom of external forces than had so far been effected. These
were a continuous struggle among the Lombard states which seemed likely to end
in the supremacy of one or the other, and the communal movement aiming
everywhere at full civic freedom.
The Lombard duchies seemed to be aiming at unity and concentration again
after two hundred years of disintegration. If unity in Lower Italy was to come
from the principalities of Benevento, Capua, and Salerno, it would be possible
only by internal concentration, by the dominance of one of the three, and
finally by the acquisition of military resources such as the dukes had not yet
found, lacking as they were in marine power and in native armies. After-history
shows that in their own race the warlike vigour had sunk very low and that the
mercenary bands such as the ambitious princes sought in the inter-ducal
struggle could only have been provided by such a race as the Normans; their
experience of the latter, when from hired swordsmen they became their masters,
was nothing new in the story of nations.
The power of the Lombard princes seemed to be on the increase now after
two centuries of confusion. It was much that hereditary succession more or less
complete was secured. It was in their favour that feudalism so far had not
established itself. The reins of central government showed signs of being
tightened; the gastalds who governed
definite districts called from their office, the sculdais again below them, come to be subordinated from the ninth
century to new officials, counts (or comites),
whose titles, though they sometimes became hereditary, were always a gift from
the prince. Large revenues were derived from the ducal domains, from the
regalia, and from other sources, such as tributes from the subjects, called angaria. Compulsory military service
provided the prince with a militia of townsmen. Every token of sovereignty
surrounded the ruler of Benevento, Capua, or Salerno: the coinage that bore his
effigy; the assumption of sceptre and crown; the issue of sovereign acts in his
name. The centralized administration of the Basileus, the pomp and ceremony of
his court, were the models for these small Lombard potentates, whose taris, rude imitations of the imperial besants, show the Duke of Benevento or
Salerno clad in alb and dalmatic, carrying the globe and cross, and on his head
the narthex, with its hanging chains.
It was from the Lombard princes that the unity of Southern Italy from
within seemed once or twice likely to be achieved. The contest of the two
Empires for the debatable land gave the more skillful among them a chance to realize
that possibility, and unity and independence might be snatched out of the
struggle, by the aid of one or the other. Generally speaking the Lombard
princes were pro-Byzantine, but an alliance with the Western Empire seemed to
the greatest man among them in the tenth century more promising. It was Pandulf
Iron-Head of Capua who came nearest founding a hegemony over the Lombard and
city-states of Lower Italy, before the coming of the Normans.
The short but brilliant career of this man lasted from 966 to 981. From
966 to 969 the great Emperor Otto I was in Italy bent on expelling the Greeks
from the south; he fixed upon Pandulf, the first of his name in Capua, as the
one strong man capable of holding the country as a fief of the Holy Roman Empire,
and invested him (Christmas, 966) not only in Capua, but in Spoleto and the
March of Camerino. The Empires made peace in 969, but this was only the
beginning of Iron-Head's career. Landulf of Benevento dying, he forced his own
son into the duchy, he became lord of Gaeta, he brought Gisulf I of Salerno
into a humilating vassalage, and from his death in 977 governed the
principality in his stead. Thus he died master of the four Lombard duchies and
after achieving a hegemony over South Italy which later Pandulfs and Gaimars
strove less successfully to gain. But everything went with him, and Gaeta,
Salerno, and Benevento regained their former independence.
Accompanying the tendencies of ducal sovereignty in South Italy was the
communal impulse. The whole land of Italy before another century was finished
was trembling with the universal instinct of civic liberty. The south was awake
earlier than the north. By the beginning of the eleventh century Gaeta, Naples,
Salerno, Amalfi had all their “customs” and embryo municipal governments of electi and jurati chosen from among the civic notables. In the Apulian towns
the protospatharii grant land, etc.,
for the communitas, which divides
itself commonly into three classes. The ducal territories were no less stirred
with the democratic ideal; in 1015 Benevento itself became the seat of a
commune.
What if the two forces of Lombard sovereignty and civic freedom should
unite and at once reject the imperial claims of Constantinople and Aachen? Such
a union might effect that national independence which Lower Italy was groping
toward. At least the subject towns of Apulia looked to an alliance with the
Lombard dukes for the ousting of the Byzantines. Already in 929 there had been
an Apulian revolt which was not suppressed for five years; Capua and Salerno
had joined in against the Greeks, and for a while brought Lucania and the upper
portions of Apulia and Calabria under Lombard sovereignty.
Once again such a combination, but of a lasting effect, took shape. In 1009
Bari revolted against the Greeks; Melus, a member of the civic aristocracy,
appeared as the leader of the rising. And Apulia followed; a succession of bad
harvest, of Moslem pirate-raids on the coast, had exasperated beyond endurance
a people already murmuring under the tributes, the customs dues, the rents, the
burdens of military and naval service which Greek rule imposed upon the towns.
It was a revolt led by the petty noblesse and official classes of the Apulian
towns, who aimed at the complete overthrow of the Greek authority whose
demands, in themselves not excessive, were hateful as being imposed by a
foreign power. That they were conscious of its being a war of Lombard against
Greek it would be going far to affirm, but the junction of the rebels with the
Lombard dynasts soon gave it a racial complexion, and both felt for the Greeks
some of that contempt which every healthy Westerner very unjustly entertained.
Again, the communal spirit by its very nature aimed at nothing less than
the goal of complete self-dependence; Bari aspired to the full liberties of
Amalfi. Such a jealous temper did not need severe or long-continued Greek
oppression to arouse it; any little friction would set it ablaze and Bari would
be joined by all the resentful patriots of Apulia. The revolt once in full
swing, it was joined by Lombard dukes for their own advantage and kept alive by
Norman swordsmen to whom peace meant all their occupation gone. Too late then
the Apulian towns realized how reasonable Greek rule had been; they remained
till Roger II’s triumph oscillating between that Byzantine overlordship which
they nominally admitted when it was possible, and absolute self-government, but
they remained firm in their objection to Norman domination.
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