Before the Normans

Southern Italy in the Ninth and Tenth Centuries

Barbara M. Kreutz

• Editorial: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Año: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780812205435
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: European Medieval History

Histories of medieval Europe have typically ignored southern Italy, looking south only in the Norman period. Yet Southern Italy in the ninth and tenth centuries was a complex and vibrant world that deserves to be better understood. In Before the Normans, Barbara M. Kreutz writes the first modern study in English of the land, political structures, and cultures of southern Italy in the two centuries before the Norman conquests. This was a pan-Meditteranean society, where the Roman past and Lombard-Germanic culture met Byzantine and Islamic civilization, creating a rich and unusual mix.

I. The Beginnings

AS JULES GAY NOTED LONG AGO, the lower half of the Italian peninsula, the portion lying below Rome, first became a separate and distinct geopolitical region in 774, with the Carolingian conquest of northern Italy.¹ It is true that it was not politically unified until the late eleventh century, under the Normans. From 774 on, however, southern Italy mostly pursued its own separate destiny, and indeed, as the Kingdom of Naples, it continued to do so until the unification of Italy in the nineteenth century.

The events of 774 not only drew a new boundary and set southern Italy apart; they also altered the dynamics of the ethnic and political forces within that region. There, for the next three centuries, Byzantium and the southern Lombards, both now restricted to the lower half of the peninsula, would confront each other. Moreover, both would be profoundly affected, if in different ways, by the shrinking of the distance between Italy and the Islamic world in the ninth century as a result of the Arab conquest of Sicily. Interaction with the Islamic world would have major significance for southern Italy over the course of three centuries. In time, for at least a portion of the region, it would mean growing prosperity. But the Arab factor would also make southern Italy the graveyard of papal, Carolingian, and Ottonian ambitions in the south.

This study concentrates on the ninth and tenth centuries, the period which largely formed the southern Italy the Normans entered. To set the stage, however, it is necessary first to review the main developments of the preceding centuries. We can then consider the scene at the end of the eighth and the beginning of the ninth century.

The Sixth to Eighth Centuries

Southern Italy had been devastated by the troubles of the sixth century, when Justinian's armies battled the Ostrogoths for control of Italy and then plague and the invading Lombards ravaged the survivors. Grim times leave few records, but we know a bit about the fate of Naples, which can serve as a symbol of the whole.

The entire area around the Bay of Naples had signified prosperity and pleasure in the Roman era. Local tradition stressed the Greek roots of civilization in that region, a matter of great local pride. Local tradition also emphasized associations with Aeneas and the founding of Rome, and with St. Peter and the introduction of Christianity to Italy. (According to a local legend, St. Peter had come first to Naples, before going on to Rome, and had founded there his first church on Italian soil.)² Despite these associations, however, Naples had readily come to terms first with Odoacer and then with Theodoric. And, for a time, this policy of accommodation had paid.³ Cassiodorus, in the early sixth century, described Naples as still a delightful and populous place.⁴ But then came Belisarius and the Byzantine campaign of reconquest, beginning in 535; Naples held out against him and was terribly punished for its resistance.⁵ The city was taken by the Byzantines at great cost to its defenders, and the surrounding area was then ravaged alternately by the Ostrogothic and Byzantine armies until the Ostrogoths (under Teias, Totila's successor) were conclusively defeated at the foot of Mount Vesuvius. By the time of Gregory the Great, only a generation later, Naples’ glories were dimmed. There are references to internal disorders, and in 581 had come the first of the Lombard attacks from which Naples was to suffer intermittently throughout the early medieval period.⁶ Over the next two centuries, Naples continued nominally Byzantine, and there was some consistency of communication with Constantinople. Yet at best the city was a beleaguered outpost, cut off from overland communication with the Byzantine exarch at Ravenna and to a considerable degree reduced to living, marginally, on its memories.

For the Lombards now dominated southern as well as northern Italy. In 571, only two years after they had swept down into the Italian peninsula, the Lombards had established a southern Lombard duchy centered on Benevento. Benevento itself was a venerable Roman city, strategically located in the high interior of the peninsula, at the junction of the Via Appia and the Via Appia-Traiana, and thus midway between the city of Rome and the key Adriatic seaports of Bari and Brindisi.⁷ Because of its distance from the main center of Lombard power in the north, the duchy of Benevento soon became virtually autonomous. Its Lombards soon also began to demonstrate great destructive force, moving quickly to wipe out virtually all vestiges of Byzantine control over the south Italian land area, and plundering churches and monasteries. Even Monte Cassino was sacked, in about 580. Its monks fled, and for the next century and a half the site stood abandoned. In many cases, as bishoprics fell vacant, new bishops seem not to have been appointed. To the extent that major Roman landowners had survived in southern Italy to witness the Lombard arrival, they now presumably became tributaries of the invaders.⁸ In fact, however, the entire population must have been drastically reduced. In the latter seventh century, roughly a hundred years after the Lombards had come, the Lombard duke of Benevento allowed a number of Bulgarians to settle on Beneventan lands “quae usque ad illud tempus deserta erant.”⁹

In 663, a Byzantine emperor did make one attempt to reassert Byzantine supremacy in southern Italy. In that year, Constans II landed with a large army at Taranto, the major port on the instep of the Italian boot. Moving northward, his army apparently met with considerable success until it neared the core area of Beneventan Lombard strength. But there Constans proved unable to take the crucial hill-town of Acerenza (Roman Acerentium), roughly halfway between Taranto and the city of Benevento. And shortly thereafter he abandoned his campaign entirely when Benevento also proved impossible to storm.¹⁰

It is instructive to note what happened subsequently with Constans and his army. After giving up his attempt to crush the southern Lombards, Constans had gone on to Rome (where he stripped off the Pantheon's copper roof as booty) and then, heading south again, he had called at Naples, that Byzantine outpost. He was warmly welcomed there, as one might expect, but what is interesting is that, next, he and his army apparently proceeded overland, without interference, all the way down the Tyrrhenian coast to Reggio before crossing over to Sicily. In theory, most of the territory between Naples and Reggio was then held by the Beneventan Lombards. Perhaps at that time it was so underpopulated, seemed such unpromising country, that the Lombards had no interest in defending it. Or perhaps this unhindered journey should simply remind us that “sovereignty,” throughout the early medieval period, had very limited implications. It certainly never implied all-encompassing control and supervision. For south Italian land areas well away from the core centers, sovereignty, as such, must have been irrelevant much of the time. This appears to have been the case in Constans’ day and, indeed, would continue to be true for several more centuries.

In practical terms, “sovereignty” mainly then meant, for rulers, the ability to extract taxes. (This may seem an obvious statement, but the sharpness of focus on revenue is striking. In the tenth century, Constantine Porphyrogenitus would note the significance of southern Italy to Byzantium primarily in terms of payments into the imperial fisc.)¹¹ For the upper layer of a ruler's subjects, sovereignty also meant access to mechanisms for the adjudication of disputes. But for the populace as a whole, particularly those eking out an existence at any distance from the major fortified centers, sovereignty meant little; certainly it offered virtually no hope of protection in time of trouble. The acknowledged ruler of a region usually fought only to defend key castra, fortified towns; enemy forces typically moved across rural areas almost without opposition.

Of course, this state of affairs was not peculiar to southern Italy; it was typical of the whole of western Christendom in the early medieval period. Thus we find the French monk Bernard, when traveling through Arab Egypt and Palestine in the late ninth century, quite astonished at the degree of law and order he found there, even—and he stresses this—in the countryside.¹²

Furthermore, in the early medieval period sovereignty was often confidently asserted without any real basis in fact. Byzantium, throughout the ninth and tenth centuries, continued to describe as part of the Byzantine Empire some areas of southern Italy which in reality had had no meaningful subordination to Byzantium for a very long time. Twentieth-century historians have not always recognized the illusory nature of some of these Byzantine claims, and this is an issue to which we will revert. Meanwhile, however, it is well to bear in mind the situation in relation to rural areas, which often constituted, at best, a sort of no-man's-land.

Moreover, even in the tenth century, and in a part of southern Italy unquestionably subject to Byzantine authority, Byzantium sometimes had difficulty in enforcing order. In one celebrated example, at Rossano in Calabria in the latter tenth century, the local populace refused to obey Byzantine officials when ordered to fit out ships for the Byzantine fleet—even though that fleet was to be used in part for their own protection. Not only did they refuse (probably fearing Arab reprisals), but they proceeded to burn the ships and kill the ships’ officers. This story is told in the contemporary Life of the hermit-monk St. Nilus, which goes on to report the nervous citizens of Rossano then turning to Nilus, whom they plainly viewed as a more reliable protector. (And through what must certainly be counted a major miracle, he persuaded the Byzantine commander not to punish the offenders).¹³ The hagiographer had undoubtedly embellished this tale, but clearly the inhabitants of towns like Rossano were often ambivalent about Byzantine authority.

From the sixth century on, the Lombards were continuously on the scene, so Lombard sovereignty had at least been consistently manifested. Yet in their case, too, we should surely suspect only limited effectiveness in the more isolated parts of their territory. If, in the tenth century, sovereignty would often prove more rhetoric than reality, this must have been doubly true earlier.

Nonetheless, control of key ports and castra always did matter, and by the early part of the eighth century the Beneventan Lombards once again held Taranto and Brindisi, on either side of the heel of the peninsula.¹⁴ They had also pushed the northern limits of their duchy to within fifty or sixty miles of Rome itself by taking a string of small settlements in the Liri River valley.¹⁵ Thus, in the eighth century, the Lombards could claim almost the whole of southern Italy, excepting only three fringe areas: most of a narrow strip along the Tyrrhenian coast, with Gaeta at one end, the Amalfitan peninsula at the other, and Naples in the middle; lower Calabria (the toe of the boot); and the Otranto region, at the tip of the heel.¹⁶ Constans’ reconquest, limited in any case, had been almost entirely nullified.

Indeed, in the middle of the eighth century the Beneventan Lombards’ position in southern Italy looked extraordinarily secure. Byzantium, wracked now by internal struggles over iconoclasm, was obviously no threat. In northern Italy, the Lombard kingdom was at its zenith, and the Lombard ruler appears to have treated his duke of Benevento more as ally than subordinate.

Arichis and Charlemagne

In 758, Arichis II became Duke of Benevento; in every respect a remarkable man, he married the daughter of the Lombard king Desiderius and with her presided over a cultivated ducal court that included such figures as Paul the Deacon. By now, all of the Lombards had come to terms with orthodoxy and the Church even if they were sometimes at odds with the papacy. At the northern edge of the duchy of Benevento, the monastery at Monte Cassino had been resettled about 718, and both it and the burgeoning monastic complex of San Vincenzo al Volturno (by tortuous modern roads, some fifty kilometers northeast of Monte Cassino) were richly patronized by Beneventan Lombards. At Monte Cassino, a close relative of Arichis became abbot in the late eighth century, and he devoted the twenty-one years of his abbacy to an ambitious building program. Arichis himself also erected a splendid ducal church at Benevento and named it Sancta Sophia in deliberate imitation of Justinian's great foundation.¹⁷

Yet by 787, the year of Arichis's death, the Beneventan position appeared seriously threatened. Some thirteen years earlier, the Lombard kingdom in the north had abruptly vanished, absorbed within the Carolingian Empire. Arichis's son and heir, Grimoald, had been taken north by Charlemagne as hostage for Beneventan good behavior. Arichis's brother-in-law, heir to Desiderius and brother to Adalperga, Arichis's wife, was a refugee in Constantinople, trying to enlist Byzantine support for an attempted restoration of the Lombard throne. The only positive developments in which the dying Arichis could take comfort were that he had, so far, forestalled any absolute Carolingian takeover of his duchy, and in addition he had established a second (and strongly fortified) Beneventan capital, at Salerno, on the Tyrrhenian coast south of Naples.

Given the assertiveness of the papacy under Pope Hadrian I, who enjoyed the military backing of the Franks and was certainly no friend to the Lombards, the creation of a base farther from Rome must have seemed highly desirable. In addition, both Thomas Hodgkin and Jules Gay believed that Arichis valued Salerno because it provided a Tyrrhenian port. Hodgkin speculated that Arichis wanted an entry point through which a Byzantine force might come to his aid in the event of a Carolingian attack. Gay thought Arichis had the more aggressive aim of placing his Lombards in position to dominate the Tyrrhenian littoral, including Byzantine Naples.¹⁸ This last does in fact seem the more likely motive, for Arichis II was an exceedingly forceful ruler. Hodgkin called him “in some respects the finest specimen of a ruler whom the Lombard race produced,” and his virtues certainly included a sharply honed sense of the value of strategic offense.¹⁹

Fortunately for the Beneventan Lombards, Arichis's widow Adalperga appears also to have been an impressive individual. Paul the Deacon paid tribute to her intellectual attainments in dedicating to her his history of the Roman Empire, and she was to prove as adept as her late husband at saving Benevento from Carolingian domination. In 787, her first task was to persuade Charlemagne to free Arichis's heir Grimoald so that he could come home to govern what had now become the “principality” of Benevento; after the fall of Desiderius, Arichis had begun to style himself Prince of Benevento (rather than duke), in recognition of the fact that there was no longer any other Lombard ruler. Given that demonstration of Lombard ambition, one might have expected Charlemagne to refuse Adalperga's request; certainly some of his advisers (and, most vociferously, Pope Hadrian) urged him not to surrender Grimoald.²⁰ But Charlemagne chose to disregard the advice. He may have been influenced by Paul the Deacon, who had moved on to the Carolingian court but retained strong personal ties to the Beneventan dynasty. Perhaps Paul the Deacon (now back at Monte Cassino) argued that a strong but loyal principality in the south of Italy would keep Byzantium in check.

In any case, Grimoald was released. In return, the Beneventans were to recognize Carolingian hegemony on their coinage and in the indictions of their charters—and to shave in the manner of the Franks.²¹ This last touch appears to have been Charlemagne's response to one of Hadrian's most recent salvos. The previous year, just before Arichis's death, Charlemagne had led a force south as far as Capua with the aim of extracting submission from Arichis. The latter, however, had refused to come to Capua; instead, he had merely sent hostages (including Grimoald) together with the promise of an annual tribute of 7,000 solidi. Somewhat uncharacteristically, Charlemagne had not made an issue of this act of defiance.²² But no sooner had he returned north (reported the ever-vigilant Hadrian) than the Beneventans demonstrated their contempt for him and their lack of good faith by seeking Byzantine aid and—most outrageous, in Hadrian's view—promising to adopt Byzantine-style dress and hairstyles.²³ Charlemagne's new agreement with Grimoald therefore committed the Beneventans to personal and visible demonstration of their loyalty to the Franks. Charlemagne had seemingly been persuaded by Hadrian's superior knowledge of the south Italian scene; the new agreement recognized the importance of tangible symbols in a region where Byzantium, however weakened temporarily, still generally set the aesthetic and sartorial standard.

Soon after Grimoald's return home, he had occasion to demonstrate his loyalty. His uncle, claimant to the Lombard throne, invaded Italy with a combined Byzantine-Lombard force, and Grimoald, surely disappointing his uncle, helped the Franks repel the invasion.²⁴ Thereafter, however, the principality of Benevento gradually drifted back to its independent ways. All references to Charlemagne soon disappeared from charters and coinage; doubtless the Frankish style in barbering was abandoned equally quickly.²⁵

In other words, as Pope Hadrian had endlessly warned Charlemagne, the Beneventan Lombards were not to be trusted. They would be deferential when necessary, but never reliably subservient. One of Hadrian's most indignant reports of Lombard perfidy concerned a plot purportedly hatched at the very moment Charlemagne was debating whether to free Grimoald. According to Hadrian, four Frankish legates, journeying toward Salerno to meet with Arichis's widow, learned something that sent them scurrying back north to safety. Allegedly, some Salernitan Lombards had persuaded neighboring Naples and its then-dependencies, Sorrento and Amalfi, to help in disposing of the envoys. Apparently, Naples, Sorrento, and Amalfi were prepared to forget the Lombard attacks they had...

Índice

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Maps
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. The Beginnings
• 2. The First Arab Impact
• 3. A Carolingian Crusade
• 4. Firming the Elements
• 5. Amalfi in Context
• 6. Salerno’s Southern Italy in the Tenth Century
• 7. The Late Tenth Century and South Italian Structures
• 8. Campania and Its Culture in the Tenth Century
• 9. Epilogue: The Eleventh Century and After
• Notes
• Appendix: The Southern Lombard Rulers, 758–1000
• Bibliography
• Index