Quick correction: Rollo was not the first Viking leader to adopt Christianity. Guthrum, a Danish chieftain, was the first Viking to convert to Christianity by a treaty he made with Alfred the Great. Sorry about that error.
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When most people hear “Norman conquest”, they probably think of William defeating Harold at Hastings and capturing England in 1066. But there is another Norman conquest of the Middle Ages that is very important. In the eleventh century Norman adventurers set out from their homes in northern Europe to wrest a new kingdom of their own from the Byzantines and local princes of southern Italy, as well as the Arabs of Sicily.
The story of the Norman conquest of southern Italy and Sicily is one of the most dramatic and important of the High Middle Ages. Initially, this conquest began as little more than a rather haphazard movement of adventure and wealth-seeking young knights from Normandy who saw opportunity in the southern reaches of the Italian peninsula. However, this movement would result in the establishment of one of Europe’s most important and dynamic kingdoms of the twelfth century. Norman Italy and Sicily would be one of the great players in the rise of the Latin West, and would contribute greatly to the Christian push-back against Islam’s dominance of the Mediterranean.
In this series on Real Crusades History, we’ll take a look at how Norman adventurers found their place in Byzantine Italy, how they eventually replaced the Byzantines and other local princes as the rulers of southern Italy, and how they ultimately conquered the Muslim Emirate of Sicily, bringing Sicily back into the orbit of Christendom after some two centuries of Arab domination. Everything about this story is colored with the unique character of the Normans: their military prowess and hunger of adventure, as well as their political creativity, Christian piety, and proclivity for culture, art, and architecture. Undoubtedly the Normans were among the most dynamic peoples of the medieval world, and it’s no wonder that the story of their conquest of southern Italy is one of the most exciting tales of the era.
In the first part of the eleventh century, the young Norman knights who traveled to southern Italy had no intentions of conquest. The business of the Normans was war, and these descendants of the Vikings would go anywhere that that business would earn them a living. Their wanderlust took them as far as Spain, where they served the Christian kings of Aragon, to the Byzantine Empire, where they found employ from the emperors of Constantinople. However, due to a vacuum in firm central authority, southern Italy provided unique opportunity. Byzantine authority was often tenuous, or haphazard, and the local princes were frequently at odds with one another. It was exactly the sort of situation that the Normans were keen to recognize and turn to their advantage. It wasn’t long before certain knights sought to do more than make a living, but rather, to seize a lordship of their own. Eventually, power coalesced around the dynamic figures of Richard Dregnot and Robert Guiscard, who would expand and solidify Norman power across the southern reaches of the peninsula.
