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Introduction SOUTHERN ITALY has been largely ignored by most historians ofmedieval Europe. Since the region was both prominent and prosperous in antiquity, one might have expected more curiosity. In fact, however, most non-Italian historians have abandoned Italy altogether after the sixth century and the arrival of the Lombards, not to return (so to speak) until the eleventh or twelfth century. And even then they typically have glanced south only briefly, to consider the Normans, and thereafter have largely concentrated on developments from Rome northward. This study focuses on mainland southern Italy in the centuries immediately preceding the Normans: in particular, the ninth and tenth centuries. We should know what the Normans encountered. But that is not the only reason for paying attention to the south. In this early medieval period, southern Italy was in effect a giant laboratory, one in which polities were tested and where Byzantium, the Lombards, the Islamic world, and the Latin West constantly intersected. The politics and political misadventures of this region in Charlemagne 's day, and on through the ninth century, have a particular fascination ; we know many ofthe players from other settings. But tenth-century developments deserve consideration as well, for in the tenth century southern Italy's complex Mediterranean culture began genuinely to coalesce. And then, toward the end ofthat century, the region began to fall subject to the forces molding Europe. If early medieval southern Italy has received scant attention from modern historians, that at least is not a new phenomenon. Until the eleventh century, medieval Europe seemed scarcely aware of the region. Even after 774, when northern Italy was absorbed within the Carolingian Empire, visitors to the south still seemed mainly restricted to the occasional caller at Monte Cassino, or to the occasional pilgrim bound for the Holy Land by way of south Italian ports.l Then in 1071 a Norman force under Robert Guiscard wrested Bari from its Byzantine defenders; in 1072, the Guiscard's brother Roger seized Palermo, capital ofMuslim Sicily; and in XXIV Introduction 1077 the principality ofSalerno, southern Italy's last Lombard enclave, fell to the Normans. Adventurers from Normandy had begun drifting down early in the eleventh century; now these dramatic achievements led the whole ofwestern Europe to notice Italy below Rome. And contemporaries found much of interest there, particularly after Roger II linked the mainland and Sicily in a unified Norman R~no. For twentieth-century historians, equally drawn to Roger's R~no, its greatest appeal lies in its commingling ofpan-Mediterranean elements. The Normans' contemporaries also noted this, and the R~no's affiuence impressed them even more. Yet most chroniclers of the Norman era passed quickly over the preamble to this prosperous and unusual civilization. Like most modern historians (particularly in the English-speaking world), they seemingly assumed that everything ofinterest began only with the Nonnans. Compounding this neglect, those modern historians who have investigated the Norman period have tended to concentrate on developments associated with Roger II's court at Palermo; they have virtually ignored peninsular southern Italy. Yet there has been one notable exception, the pioneering study by Evelyn Jamison on the feudal apportionment of the south Italian mainland.2 Her investigation (and, earlier, Chalandon's monumental work) made plain that fiefs there were fiercely fought over, obviously viewed as prizes worth having.3 This may seem surprising. Most medievalists know only that mainland southern Italy, largely poor today, was in addition fragmented when the Normans arrived, part claimed by Byzantium, the rest divided among a cluster of Lombard principalities (Capua, Benevento, Salerno) and the duchies of Naples and Amalfi. What could such a confused and confusing region have to offer? No one would now make C. R. Beazley's assumption that it took "the spirit ofan imperial race," "Northern blood," to "awaken commercial and maritime activity" in the Mediterranean.4 Yet we do still retain other biases that may blind us to the facts. More than we may realize, we work within the shadow of those eminent nineteenth-century historians who thought big was better. Empires were more to be admired than kingdoms, kingdoms were interesting more or less in proportion to their size, and little worthy ofnotice could have occurred within small political entities with illdefined boundaries and institutions.5 In the nineteenth century, this attitude caused latter-day Ghibellines to deplore south Italian resistance to domination by the western emperors.6 In the twentieth century, presumably the same bias has led the history of pre-Norman...

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