IV.

Normans in Italy and the Mediterranean

In the early 11th century, a band of Normans arrived in southern Italy as mercenary soldiers fighting against Muslim Arabs at Salerno. Others arrived and soon began to carve out territories, which they took forcibly from their former employers and neighbors. The most outstanding of the Norman adventurers were the sons of Duke Tancred of Hauteville, who in 1042 seized Apulia and divided it among themselves. In 1053 they defeated the army of Pope Leo IX, and the pope made peace by granting them their conquests at Apulia and Calabria to hold as fief for the Roman Catholic Church. By 1071 all southern Italy had fallen to the Normans under Duke Robert Guiscard, one of Tancred’s sons.

Robert’s brother, Roger I, undertook the conquest of Sicily from the Arabs. Messina in northeastern Sicily fell in 1061, but the island was not completely controlled by Normans until 30 years later. Roger II united Norman possessions in southern Italy and Sicily and in 1130 became the first king of Sicily. Over time, the Normans merged with the native populations and gradually disappeared as a separate culture.

The Normans were active in the Crusades, during which they helped form the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem and the Latin Empire of Constantinople (see Byzantine Empire).