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Cambridge Medieval Textbooks
The Norman Kingdom of Sicily (Cambridge Medieval Textbooks) by Matthew, Donald (1992) Paperback
An introductory account of the kingdom of Sicily established in 1130 by Roger II, a 'Norman' king, and ruled by Roger, his son and grandsons until 1194 when the kingdom was conquered by his son-in-law, Henry VI of Hohenstaufen.
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First published July 30, 1992
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About the author
Donald Matthew
13 booksDonald James Alexander Matthew (born 1930), British medievalist and Emeritus Professor since 1995 at Reading University, his particular interests are in the High Middle Ages in Europe, especially the Normans, and British interaction with the continent.
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June 8, 2019The Norman Kingdom of Sicily had been built up by adventurous Norman and French settlers to southern Italy. Sometimes they worked for local lords as mercenaries, sometimes they were self-employed as cattle thieves and bandits, or as we would call them these days - entrepreneurs. Over time they acquired lands by fair and foul means, built up lordships which swallowed each other up until in 1130 Roger II, taking advantage of the need of a Pope for allies, was crowned King.
Southern Italy then was a little different to today. Sicily had been conquered by the Normans from Muslim Emirs and there was a substantial Muslim population in the west of the island as well as a Greek population in the east, Malta was entirely Muslim at this time too, coastal areas of south-eastern Italy had been conquered from the Byzantine empire and there was a substantial Greek speaking population with churches and monasteries that practised the Greek Orthodox rite rather than Latin, 'Roman Catholic' ones. The rest of the population included the recent French speaking settlers from Northern Europe, a Jewish population - concentrated perhaps in certain trades, while the bulk of the population was Italian speaking and Roman Catholic. Unlike the picture in Christ Stopped at Eboli and despite the long period of wars and disorder until Roger II found himself without political rivals south of Rome, the south of Italy at this time seems to have been relatively prosperous.
Donald Matthew's book is a textbook account of the Kingdom that takes in the Norman kings but also gives over about a third of the book to Frederick II, his parents and his bastard son Manfred who maintained the Kingdom until a weapon based fatality on the field of battle in 1265 (something much regretted in The Divine Comedy) lead to the end of the line of rulers descended from the original Normans.
A non-textbook account of the Norman kingdom,The Normans in the South and The Kingdom in the South was written by John Julius Norwich. It is a bit Romantic and if you've ever had the hankering to write some historical fiction but been stuck for a subject or a time period well worth having a look at, but as I say a bit Romantic with a taste for a story rather than analysis, administration and daily life. This is the truly fun stuff that makes a historian's heart beat a little stronger, particularly perhaps when it involves the privileges won by sailors in their home port as a reward for stealing a saint's body from another city.
Matthew's book has quite a few strengths. The main one is that it is very clear. He's dealing with a lot of complexity, popes and anti-popes, politics that stretched across the Mediterranean in all directions, an internal mish-mash of customs and peoples - this is a function of length. Matthew has 380 pages of text so he has the space to explain the situation.
He points out throughout the text how little the Kingdom has been studied - always a major downside of not having a direct modern successor - with archives not fully exploited, critical editions of chronicles absent. If one was looking for material to build a PhD around the Norman Kingdom is the place to go, unfortunately an acquaintance with medieval Greek, Arabic and Latin possibly Hebrew too as well as a smattering of modern European languages, appears to be indispensable for getting around the hills, valleys and fertile fields of the archives.
One of the main themes in the historiography has been the modernity of the Kingdom, naturally always without a definition of what modernity might mean to the historian with limited if any administrative or political experience. Matthews by contrast is quite open to the huge variety of administrative powers and practises throughout the South. Naturally this reflected the way the kingdom had been built up out of piecemeal conquests and accommodations with local traditions. Administration in Sicily seems to have been strongly influenced and staffed (at junior levels) by Muslims, at least at first, since by Frederick II's time there seem to be very few Muslim clerks in Royal service. The office of the Diwan, which came to be responsible for customs and exercise, may be the source of the term Douane and cognate forms throughout Europe. Equally senior officers of the King included Emirs, from which we get the term Admiral. In other parts of the Kingdom Greek influences were stronger and generally the rights of Lords seem far more extensive than in north-western Europe.
The number of surviving royal documents is very small, also estimates of total possible numbers seem small by comparison with the output of the Kingdom of England, about which thanks to the survival of Domesday Book and some Pipe rolls from the reign of Henry I we have some idea about the scope of output. Some surviving documents are translations into Latin - Greek was generally the language of administration - which raises issues about the accuracy of the original medieval translation. In terms of the amount of paperwork generated the Kingdom of Sicily does not seem to have been at the leading edge of twelfth or thirteenth century administration. Nor did the kingdom have a single central treasury or audit office until the last years of Frederick II's reign. Any claim to modernity seems to flounder on the rocky reality that we simply don't have evidence to back it up, not in court records nor in remains from the administration. Although from the one surviving register of Frederick II's official correspondence covering a few months in 1239 and 1240 we can tell that four notaries were busy on Christmas Day 1239 writing fourteen pages of register entries. Which just goes to show how easy Bob Cratchit had it working for the fictional Mr Scrooge. Reality is hard work.
I was particularly struck by Matthews description of the Normans attempting to construct a Feudal framework with vassal service on top of the various existing political and social forms they found. It is easy to think of the structures described by Ganshof or Marc Bloch as being standard rather than particular to Northern France, the Rhineland and Low Countries and extended out from there to be grafted on to what could be found in other lands.
Roger II and William II in particular were fond of practising plunder politics - landing armies in North Africa or in the Byzantine Empire and sacking places. This seemed to be a curious throwback to Charlemagne or to the Ottonians in Germany, both of whom built up their power by raiding to reward followers and establishing control over areas that could no stand up against them. In a post Clausewitz world warfare is understood as a political tool deployed for political ends so this strategy of stealing stuff doesn't at first glance make much sense. Then again when the leading power brokers of your state carry swords, wear chainmail, and get so upset when they hear The Song of Roland that they refuse to name their sons Ganelon any more, then perhaps plunder was deeply political; the ultimate in pork-barrel politics. Again this illustrates the scope and ambitions of a strong state in the middle of the Mediterranean. Naturally they were concerned by the rise of the Almohades in North Africa and they did back pretenders for the throne of the Byzantine Empire - Matthews comment in respect to the raid on Salonika and Constantinople in 1185 that it was "not fanciful" but premature and a foretaste of the 1204 sack and dismemberment of the Empire was, I thought, interesting.
In line with this being a text-book there are two maps - but the dull kind showing the coastline and location of towns rather than something useful like cartographical relief. No family trees and no illustrations. Here one needs to turn to Art of the Byzantine Era or something similar to see pictures of the mosaics that these Norman kings had made to decorate a series of churches in Sicily, including at Palermo and Monreale . Matthews raises the difficulties of dating and interpreting these mosaics - there is a difference after all between these being the work of local or imported experts, but in either case they are a record of the wealth, extravagance, and ambition of the Norman Kings as well as the way in which they wanted to portray that and themselves (ie based on Byzantine models, rather than, for instance Norman French ones). Part Two of this book, which dealt with religious, artistic and daily life, was a particular strong point of the book. This was a kingdom which also produced Joachim of Fiore who dreamt and prophesied about the eras of Human history and the Antichrist.
I got the impression that Matthews is a fan of Frederick II from the final section, which isn't a problem so long as you share that inclination. But I did wonder about his comment on the last page that the papacy had become corrupted, weakened and dependant on French support as a result of the struggle against the Kingdom of Sicily. This smacked of Runciman's The Sicilian Vespers. More though, an uncorrupt papacy in the middle ages means imagining an unpolitical papacy, which seems as near to impossible as makes no odds. It seems a curious concluding point to make when the very first page introduces us to a kingdom created purely so that one Pope could gain the support of angry men with swords against a rival Pope.
His other conclusion about the importance of Manfred's defeat and death at the battle of Benevento is that this had a profound effect on Italian and Mediterranean history. Until that point the Kingdom of Sicily had been the most powerful state in Italy, afterwards a long series of wars was to leave southern Italy poor and weak. This was then potentially the turning point that shifted the balance of power in the Italian peninsula from south to north. Oddly this kingdom that was built up over a mixture of territories that had never previously formed a single territorial unit was to have a history that continued even without the Normans down to 1860 when as we learn from The Leopard everything had to change so that it could stay the same.
Southern Italy then was a little different to today. Sicily had been conquered by the Normans from Muslim Emirs and there was a substantial Muslim population in the west of the island as well as a Greek population in the east, Malta was entirely Muslim at this time too, coastal areas of south-eastern Italy had been conquered from the Byzantine empire and there was a substantial Greek speaking population with churches and monasteries that practised the Greek Orthodox rite rather than Latin, 'Roman Catholic' ones. The rest of the population included the recent French speaking settlers from Northern Europe, a Jewish population - concentrated perhaps in certain trades, while the bulk of the population was Italian speaking and Roman Catholic. Unlike the picture in Christ Stopped at Eboli and despite the long period of wars and disorder until Roger II found himself without political rivals south of Rome, the south of Italy at this time seems to have been relatively prosperous.
Donald Matthew's book is a textbook account of the Kingdom that takes in the Norman kings but also gives over about a third of the book to Frederick II, his parents and his bastard son Manfred who maintained the Kingdom until a weapon based fatality on the field of battle in 1265 (something much regretted in The Divine Comedy) lead to the end of the line of rulers descended from the original Normans.
A non-textbook account of the Norman kingdom,The Normans in the South and The Kingdom in the South was written by John Julius Norwich. It is a bit Romantic and if you've ever had the hankering to write some historical fiction but been stuck for a subject or a time period well worth having a look at, but as I say a bit Romantic with a taste for a story rather than analysis, administration and daily life. This is the truly fun stuff that makes a historian's heart beat a little stronger, particularly perhaps when it involves the privileges won by sailors in their home port as a reward for stealing a saint's body from another city.
Matthew's book has quite a few strengths. The main one is that it is very clear. He's dealing with a lot of complexity, popes and anti-popes, politics that stretched across the Mediterranean in all directions, an internal mish-mash of customs and peoples - this is a function of length. Matthew has 380 pages of text so he has the space to explain the situation.
He points out throughout the text how little the Kingdom has been studied - always a major downside of not having a direct modern successor - with archives not fully exploited, critical editions of chronicles absent. If one was looking for material to build a PhD around the Norman Kingdom is the place to go, unfortunately an acquaintance with medieval Greek, Arabic and Latin possibly Hebrew too as well as a smattering of modern European languages, appears to be indispensable for getting around the hills, valleys and fertile fields of the archives.
One of the main themes in the historiography has been the modernity of the Kingdom, naturally always without a definition of what modernity might mean to the historian with limited if any administrative or political experience. Matthews by contrast is quite open to the huge variety of administrative powers and practises throughout the South. Naturally this reflected the way the kingdom had been built up out of piecemeal conquests and accommodations with local traditions. Administration in Sicily seems to have been strongly influenced and staffed (at junior levels) by Muslims, at least at first, since by Frederick II's time there seem to be very few Muslim clerks in Royal service. The office of the Diwan, which came to be responsible for customs and exercise, may be the source of the term Douane and cognate forms throughout Europe. Equally senior officers of the King included Emirs, from which we get the term Admiral. In other parts of the Kingdom Greek influences were stronger and generally the rights of Lords seem far more extensive than in north-western Europe.
The number of surviving royal documents is very small, also estimates of total possible numbers seem small by comparison with the output of the Kingdom of England, about which thanks to the survival of Domesday Book and some Pipe rolls from the reign of Henry I we have some idea about the scope of output. Some surviving documents are translations into Latin - Greek was generally the language of administration - which raises issues about the accuracy of the original medieval translation. In terms of the amount of paperwork generated the Kingdom of Sicily does not seem to have been at the leading edge of twelfth or thirteenth century administration. Nor did the kingdom have a single central treasury or audit office until the last years of Frederick II's reign. Any claim to modernity seems to flounder on the rocky reality that we simply don't have evidence to back it up, not in court records nor in remains from the administration. Although from the one surviving register of Frederick II's official correspondence covering a few months in 1239 and 1240 we can tell that four notaries were busy on Christmas Day 1239 writing fourteen pages of register entries. Which just goes to show how easy Bob Cratchit had it working for the fictional Mr Scrooge. Reality is hard work.
I was particularly struck by Matthews description of the Normans attempting to construct a Feudal framework with vassal service on top of the various existing political and social forms they found. It is easy to think of the structures described by Ganshof or Marc Bloch as being standard rather than particular to Northern France, the Rhineland and Low Countries and extended out from there to be grafted on to what could be found in other lands.
Roger II and William II in particular were fond of practising plunder politics - landing armies in North Africa or in the Byzantine Empire and sacking places. This seemed to be a curious throwback to Charlemagne or to the Ottonians in Germany, both of whom built up their power by raiding to reward followers and establishing control over areas that could no stand up against them. In a post Clausewitz world warfare is understood as a political tool deployed for political ends so this strategy of stealing stuff doesn't at first glance make much sense. Then again when the leading power brokers of your state carry swords, wear chainmail, and get so upset when they hear The Song of Roland that they refuse to name their sons Ganelon any more, then perhaps plunder was deeply political; the ultimate in pork-barrel politics. Again this illustrates the scope and ambitions of a strong state in the middle of the Mediterranean. Naturally they were concerned by the rise of the Almohades in North Africa and they did back pretenders for the throne of the Byzantine Empire - Matthews comment in respect to the raid on Salonika and Constantinople in 1185 that it was "not fanciful" but premature and a foretaste of the 1204 sack and dismemberment of the Empire was, I thought, interesting.
In line with this being a text-book there are two maps - but the dull kind showing the coastline and location of towns rather than something useful like cartographical relief. No family trees and no illustrations. Here one needs to turn to Art of the Byzantine Era or something similar to see pictures of the mosaics that these Norman kings had made to decorate a series of churches in Sicily, including at Palermo and Monreale . Matthews raises the difficulties of dating and interpreting these mosaics - there is a difference after all between these being the work of local or imported experts, but in either case they are a record of the wealth, extravagance, and ambition of the Norman Kings as well as the way in which they wanted to portray that and themselves (ie based on Byzantine models, rather than, for instance Norman French ones). Part Two of this book, which dealt with religious, artistic and daily life, was a particular strong point of the book. This was a kingdom which also produced Joachim of Fiore who dreamt and prophesied about the eras of Human history and the Antichrist.
I got the impression that Matthews is a fan of Frederick II from the final section, which isn't a problem so long as you share that inclination. But I did wonder about his comment on the last page that the papacy had become corrupted, weakened and dependant on French support as a result of the struggle against the Kingdom of Sicily. This smacked of Runciman's The Sicilian Vespers. More though, an uncorrupt papacy in the middle ages means imagining an unpolitical papacy, which seems as near to impossible as makes no odds. It seems a curious concluding point to make when the very first page introduces us to a kingdom created purely so that one Pope could gain the support of angry men with swords against a rival Pope.
His other conclusion about the importance of Manfred's defeat and death at the battle of Benevento is that this had a profound effect on Italian and Mediterranean history. Until that point the Kingdom of Sicily had been the most powerful state in Italy, afterwards a long series of wars was to leave southern Italy poor and weak. This was then potentially the turning point that shifted the balance of power in the Italian peninsula from south to north. Oddly this kingdom that was built up over a mixture of territories that had never previously formed a single territorial unit was to have a history that continued even without the Normans down to 1860 when as we learn from The Leopard everything had to change so that it could stay the same.
December 7, 2023
Read this for a uni assignment and the previous owners annotations were so useful so shoutout to that mysterious person
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews