Free A History of the Crusades-Vol 1 by Steven Runciman Page B

direct rule of Byzantium. There the population was mainly Greek. On
the west coast were the three merchant city-states of Gaeta, Naples and Amalfi.
All three were nominally the vassals of the Emperor. The Amalfitans, who by now
had a considerable trade with the Moslem East, found the Emperor’s goodwill
useful in their negotiations with the Fatimid authorities; and they kept a
permanent consul at Constantinople. The Neapolitans and the Gaetans, though
equally ready to trade with the infidel, were less punctilious towards the
Emperor. The interior of the country was held by the Lombard princes of
Benevento and Salerno, acknowledging alternately the suzerainty of the eastern
and the western emperor and equally disrespectful to both. Sicily was still
held by the Moslems, despite many Byzantine attempts to reconquer the island;
and raids along the Italian coasts from there and from Africa added to the
chaos of the country.
    Into these districts had come large numbers of
Norman adventurers from northern France, pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem or
to visit their favourite shrine of St Michael on Monte Gargano, many of them
soldiers of fortune who stayed on to serve the Lombard princes. There was a
land-hunger in Normandy, whose thickly populated estates offered no scope for
ambitious and restless younger sons and landless knights. This impulse for
expansion, which was soon to make them undertake the conquest of England,
turned their eyes towards the East and all its riches; and they saw southern
Italy as the key to a Mediterranean empire. Its confusion gave them their opportunity.

 
    The Sons of
Tancred de Hauteville
    In 1040 six brothers, the sons of a petty
Norman knight, Tancred de Hauteville, seized the town of Melfi in the Apulian
hills and founded there a principality. The local Byzantine authorities did not
take them seriously; but the western emperor, Henry III, eager to control a
province for which the two empires had long contended, and the German Pope whom
he had nominated, resentful that the Patriarch of Constantinople should rule over
any Italian see, both gave the Normans their support. Within twelve years the
sons of Tancred had established a mastery over the Lombard principalities. They
had driven the Byzantines into the tip of Calabria and to the Apulian coast.
They were threatening the cities of the west coast; and they were sending raids
through Campania northward to the neighbourhood of Rome. The Byzantine
government was alarmed. The governor of Apulia, Marianus Argyrus, was summoned
home to report and sent out again with fuller powers to repair the situation.
Militarily, Marianus achieved nothing. The Normans easily repulsed his small
army. Diplomatically he was more successful; for the Pope, the Lorrainer Leo
IX, was equally nervous. The Norman successes were greater than he or Henry III
had envisaged. Henry was now occupied with a Hungarian campaign; but he sent
help to the Pope. In the summer of 1053 Leo set out southward with an army of
Germans and Italians, proclaiming that this was a holy war. A Byzantine
contingent was to have joined him; but as he awaited it outside the little
Apulian town of Civitate the Normans attacked him. His army was routed and he
himself made prisoner. To obtain his release he disavowed his whole policy.
    This was the last serious attempt to curb the
sons of Tancred. Henry III died in 1056. His successor was the child Henry IV;
and the regent, Agnes of Poitou, was too busy in Germany to concern herself
with the south. The Papacy decided to be realist. In 1059, at the Council of
Melfi, Pope Nicholas II recognized Robert Guiscard, ‘Robert the Weasel’, the
eldest survivor of Tancred’s sons, as ‘Duke of Apulia and Calabria, by the
grace of God and Saint Peter, and, by their help, of Sicily’. This recognition,
considered by Rome but not by Robert to involve vassaldom to Saint Peter’s
heir, enabled the Normans easily to finish off their conquest. The maritime
republics