The Norman Kingdom of Sicily

In the early decades of the eleventh century, Norman knights began going from Normandy to Italy, singly and in small groups, to serve as mercenary soldiers and otherwise to make their fortunes.

For centuries Italy south of Rome had been chiefly under the rule either of Byzantium or of Islamic caliphates, or of both, and the population was predominantly Greek and Arab but also Latin, and, to a lesser extent, Jewish. In addition, some places were under Lombard rule. That was the situation when the Normans came on the scene. However, in the 1050s the papacy, which was preparing to cast off the shackles of imperial domination, and was even dreaming of leading a crusade against Islam for recovery of the Holy Sepulchre, also turned its eyes to southern Italy. In 1053 Pope Leo IX made the serious blunder of leading an army of more than a thousand Swabian, Lombard, and other

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mercenaries into battle against the Normans, thinking finally to stop these brigands and marauders.

The papal troops were slaughtered at Civitate, east of Naples. 6__

Thereafter the papacy took a different tack: it sought to enlist the Norman leaders as allies in the impending struggle against the emperor. In 1059 at a synod held at Melfi in Apulia, Pope Nicholas II received two of Tancred's sons, Robert Guiscard (Robert the Crafty) and his brother Richard, as his own vassals -- Richard as Prince of Capua and Robert as "Duke of Apulia and Calabria, by the Grace of God and of St.

Roger, who took upon himself the title Great Count of Sicily, which he held until his death in 1105, was technically not a king, though he is usually referred to as Roger I; and Robert Guiscard (who died in 1085) was a king only by his own designation. They both had strong ambitions, however, to play the kind of role which was attributed to kingship in the eleventh century and which is described in the Norman Anonymous of 1100: the role of vicar of Christ, chief priest and chief ruler, divinely endowed with unlimited sacral as well as political authority. Forty years before the papacy summoned the whole of Western Christendom to a crusade for the liberation of Palestine, Robert Guiscard and Roger viewed their military campaigns as Holy Wars. Embarking on battles against Moslem forces, they exhorted their followers to fight as soldiers of the army of Christ. In describing Robert Guiscard's preparations to invade Sicily, his chronicler quotes him as saying, "My desire is to deliver Catholics and Christians from the Saracens and to be an instrument of God's vengeance." During the ensuing campaigns he is represented as urging his followers to go into battle fortified by the sacrament.

In addition to leading their followers in Holy Wars against the

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heathen Saracens, and incidentally against the Christian Greeks as well, Robert Guiscard and Roger also exercised supreme authority over the church within their domains. They reorganized the established bishoprics within the conquered countries and formed new ones, and they appointed th eir own bishops_______ Norman prelates or prelates with Norman sympathies. "In the course of my conquest

of Sicily," said Roger, "I have established the Sicilian bishoprics," 8 He and Robert Guiscard were ardent churchmen. Both were concerned with strengthening the canon law, and they created separate ecclesiastical jurisdictions for trial of clerics. But it was their church and their canon law. They remained supreme heads of the ecclesiastical jurisdiction within their respective domains.

For this, too, they were able to secure papal support. The pope "might denounce lay investiture in unmeasured terms, but he normally confirmed without effective protest the episcopal arrangements which had been made in Sicily by that 'champion of the Christian faith the warrior Roger,' 'a man excellent in counsel and valiant in war.'" 9Indeed, in 1098 Pope Urban II by papal bull actually conferred upon Count Roger and his successors the hereditary powers of a papal legate in Calabria and Sicily. This notorious bull (which was not revoked until 1867, shortly before the unification of Italy) gave assurance that no papal legate would enter Roger's dominions without his consent.

Why was the papacy -- at the height of the Papal Revolution -- willing to sacrifice, for the sake of an alliance with the Norman rulers of Sicily, the basic principle for which the revolution was being fought, namely, the freedom of the church?

First, the papacy needed the support of the Norman military power to defend the city of Rome against the emperor; and in fact, in 1084 when Henry IV, after a long siege, entered Rome, Robert Guiscard moved against him with a large force of Calabrian and Saracen mercenaries and forced him to withdraw.

Second, the papacy needed an alliance with the Norman Kingdom of Sicily in order to legitimate its struggle for the political independence of the church, and especially in order to legitimate its revolt against political domination of the papacy by the emperor. In 1059, when the Easter Council at Rome proclaimed freedom of papal elections, the papacy was, from a political point of view, still an integral part of the empire. It lacked the capacity to have independent political relations with any other body. The existence of the Norman polity gave the papacy an opportunity to establish political relations with another power, independently of the emperor or of anyone else. The fact that Robert Guiscard and his brothers were wholly outside the empire enhanced the significance of this assertion of an independent papal power to conduct foreign relations. Thus the alliance with the Normans

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of the south marked an important step in the emergence of the papacy as a state in the modern sense.

The papacy, however, paid a heavy price for taking this step. The Norman rulers of southern Italy were ruthless tyrants, and they and their followers not only dominated the church in their domains but also displayed a sadistic cruelty that was wholly incongrous with their passionate belief in Christianity. For example, in 1084, three days after Robert Guiscard and his troops had liberated Rome from Emperor Henry IV, they proceeded, because of an uprising, to burn, ransack, and destroy the city, to rob, rape, and murder, and to send many leading citizens into slavery. Pope Gregory VII fled in desolation from his capital -- ravaged not by his imperial enemies but by his Norman allies and liberators.

To turn to the other side of the coin, why were the Norman rulers willing to risk, for the sake of an alliance with the pacy, a possible challenge to their absolutist theories of power and their conception of the sacral kingship? Why, indeed, for the sake of that alliance, were they willing to fight the emperor even though at the time they had no other reason to do so and were quite preoccupied with the Arabs and Greeks in the south?

First, Robert Guiscard and Roger needed the blessing of the papacy to make them kings.

Second, under the papal party, the Roman Church gave a new mission to the kings and the kingdoms of Europe, a mission which coincided particularly with the interests of the Norman rulers of the south and in which those rulers ardently believed. In part, the mission was geopolitical -- to unite the West against the Saracen world, to turn the West militarily and politically and economically to the south and east. In part the mission was national -- to inspire secular rulers to organize their respective territorial polities and to establish peace among warring tribes and among warring feudal lords. In part the mission was legal -- to establish justice, and to reform the world by law. The Normans of

-412- southern Italy enthusiastically embraced these goals of the papal party. They were delighted to lead armies in crusades against the Saracens (and Greeks), and eventually to establish peace and trade among the polyglot peoples of their own and neighboring kingdoms. Also they were, like their fellow Normans in Normandy and in England, great administrators and lawyers; they came to share the papacy's faith in the reforming and redeeming power of legal institutions.

Their ties with Rome helped the Normans to create in southern Italy not only a legitimate state power but also a brilliant civilization -- indeed, the wealthiest and most powerful state and the greatest center of art, science, and technology in the West in the mid-twelfth century. Under Roger II ( 1112-1154), its capital, Palermo, was the largest and most cosmopolitan city in the West. Its commercial fleet was the greatest in Europe. It was the granary for North Africa and the largest supplier of silks and silk fabrics to the European continent. It was foremost in astronomy, geography, and other sciences, drawing heavily on the intellectual resources of the Moslem world and, through it, on those of the East, including possibly China. Its medical school at the University of Salerno was the best in Europe. Literature and learning at the royal court at Palermo combined the best of the Latin, Arabic, and Greek traditions. French poetry and Arabic poetry were read, and Plato, Euclid, and Ptolemy were translated into Latin. The palaces and cathedrals of twelfth-century Sicily, combining the Norman Romanesque style of architecture with Byzantine mosaic art, remain among the greatest artistic treasures of Europe.

Yet the Normans, too, eventually paid a heavy price for their alliance with the papacy. The tensions between their belief in the Roman Church and their total domination of the clergy within their own domain, between their belief in legality and their own tyrannical power, between their passionate Christian faith and their own barbaric cruelties, as well as the tensions among the Western, Byzantine, and Moslem, the Norman, Greek, and Arab components of their culture, led them into their self­destruction. That self-destruction came after Roger II's grandson, Emperor Frederick II -- who was also the grandson of Emperor Frederick Barbarossa-used his mighty power to restore imperial authority over the church and to include under his domination not only southern Italy and, nominally, the German territories, which he ruled by heredity, but also the Italian cities of the north. Indeed, Frederick, who was perhaps the most brilliant and the most powerful monarch in the history of Europe after Charlemagne and prior to Napoleon, did not stop with Italy but led a crusade in defiance of papal excommunication and crowned himself King of Jerusalem. When he died in 1250, his son Manfred continued his policy of subduing the northern Italian cities, until Pope Urban IV found a champion in Charles of Anjou, to whom

-413- the pope offered the crown of Sicily if he would eliminate Manfred. This Charles finally did, in 1266. However, Charles, too, succumbed to overweening ambition, arrogance, and cruelty. His downfall came on the island of Sicily, which he had subjected to despotic rule by Frenchmen. The Sicilian population rose in 1282 and massacred the French oppressors. Called the Sicilian Vespers, this uprising resulted eventually in the expulsion of the French from the island of Sicily and their confinement to Calabria and Apulia, henceforth called the Kingdom of Naples. Sicily itself was henceforth ruled by Aragon. Both parts of what was called later "the two Sicilies" were devastated and demoralized by the wars that led to their separation, and neither fully recovered.