Norman conquest of southern Italy

Between about 999 and the 1130s, adventurers from Normandy turned themselves from hired swords into the rulers of southern Italy and Sicily. Arriving as mercenaries for Lombard princes and Byzantine governors, they carved out counties of their own, drove out the Byzantine Empire, conquered Muslim Sicily and finally united their lands as the Kingdom of Sicily in 1130. Unlike the swift Norman conquest of England, it was a piecemeal process spread over generations, with many battles and few decisive ones.

Southern Italy around 1000 was a patchwork of Lombard principalities such as Salerno, Capua and Benevento, Byzantine provinces in Apulia and Calabria, small coastal duchies like Naples and Amalfi, and an Arab emirate in Sicily. Medieval chroniclers tell two stories of how the Normans arrived: Norman pilgrims helping Prince Guaimar III of Salerno drive off Muslim raiders in 999, or pilgrims meeting the Lombard rebel Melus of Bari at the shrine of Monte Gargano in 1016. Either way, Normans were soon fighting for Melus against Byzantium, until a Byzantine victory at Cannae in 1018 nearly wiped out their contingent.

The survivors sold their services to whoever paid best, often fighting on both sides. In 1030 Duke Sergius IV of Naples granted the Norman leader Ranulf Drengot the county of Aversa, long regarded as the first Norman lordship in the south. From 1035 the sons of Tancred of Hauteville began to arrive. In 1041 the Normans defeated the Byzantines in several battles in Apulia, and in 1042 they recognised William Iron Arm, eldest of the Hautevilles, as their leader in Apulia, under the overlordship of Guaimar IV of Salerno.

Norman rule was harsh, and Lombard hatred of the newcomers grew. Pope Leo IX raised an army to expel them, but on 18 June 1053 the Normans under Humphrey of Hauteville destroyed it at Civitate and captured the pope. The papacy soon changed course. When Humphrey died in 1057, his brother Robert Guiscard succeeded him and became a papal vassal in return for the title of duke, and in 1059 Pope Nicholas II confirmed Norman rulers in their lands, with the Drengot Richard recognised as prince of Capua. Later popes, among them Gregory VII, took sides in the quarrels between rival Norman princes.

Robert Guiscard and his younger brother Roger crossed to Sicily in 1061, taking advantage of quarrels among its Muslim rulers. The conquest was slow: Roger won at Cerami in 1063, Palermo fell in January 1072, Syracuse in 1086, and the last Muslim stronghold, Noto, in 1091. On the mainland, Guiscard took Bari, the Byzantine capital in Italy, in April 1071, ending centuries of Byzantine rule there. He went on to take Amalfi and, in 1076–1077, Salerno, the most important city of the south. In 1097, during a Norman siege of Amalfi, his son Bohemond and many other Normans were drawn away by the First Crusade.

Roger I ruled Sicily as count, governing a mixed population of Greeks, Arabs, Lombards and Normans and establishing Latin bishoprics. His son Roger II also acquired the mainland Duchy of Apulia after his cousin's death in 1127, and on Christmas Day 1130 he was made king, with a crown granted by the antipope Anacletus II. Naples, the last independent duchy, was absorbed in 1139. Palermo became the capital, though on the mainland royal power still depended on bargains with powerful counts and lords.

The Hauteville line did not last long as kings. Roger II's daughter Constance married the German emperor Henry VI, who conquered the kingdom in 1194 and brought it under the Hohenstaufen dynasty of the Holy Roman Empire. Their son Frederick II became king of Sicily in 1198. Through him the Norman inheritance passed into the wider history of medieval Italy and Germany.

Our 1000 map shows southern Italy just before the Normans arrived, divided between the Byzantine Empire, the Lombard Duchy of Benevento, the Holy Roman Empire and the Emirate of Sicily.