Norman Historiography

The First Crusade was an unprecedented religious and socio-political campaign of the late 11th century in which thousands of Latin Christians assembled and made their way from various areas of western Europe to the Holy Land.  It would be funded by the wealthy nobles and lead by the knightly, warrior class.  They were called together by one man, Pope Urban II, to save their Christian brothers in Jerusalem from religious persecution under Muslim control.  Jerusalem held great importance to three major religions;  Judaism, Christianity and Islam.  Jerusalem is said to be the site of Christ’s crucifixion and burial in the view of Jewish and Christian doctrine, as well as the place of the Ascension of Muhammad in relation to Islamic doctrine.  To the Jewish community, Jerusalem is also their ancestral home.  While there are many synagogues, churches and mosques throughout the city, Temple Mount is a singular site recognized by all three religions.  Because of the holy significance held by multiple religious communities, Jerusalem has been the site of many brutal conflicts.  Most notable of these were the newly Christian Romans and ancient Islam of the 7th century where, in 638 CE, Islamic forces took Jerusalem by siege from the Byzantine Empire.  Over the centuries, Islam had expanded to stretch across Northern Africa from the Iberian Peninsula, and well into Asia.  By the late 1090’s, Byzantium found themselves in a vulnerable position with the Seljuk Turks coming from the Asiatic steppe lands.  It was at this time, in the spring of 1095, that Byzantium Emperor Alexios I requested aid from Pope Urban II in the west, who would answer back by sending the Emperor thousands of armed Latin Christians.  To the aristocratic princes and the rest of the nobles in Latin Christendom, Urban II offered them penance in the form of an armed pilgrimage, one meant to purge Islam from the Holy Land and open the possibility of a once again unified Church.1  Modern historians often focus on the First Crusade as a militarized pilgrimage to save the persecuted Christians of the Holy Land from Islamic rule, rather than recognize the possibility of a larger plan, one that might have included the specific goal of uniting the Roman Catholic Church with the Eastern Orthodox Church.2  Both goals do not have to be considered independently from each other.  It is far more likely that Pope Urban II envisioned this army of Latin Christians freeing those Christians being persecuted by the barbaric Muslims, as the Western Church is united with the Eastern Church, under the rightful rule of the Pope in Rome.

Symeon of Durham and the memoria of Bede Bede (673-735), the great Northumbrian scholar saint, left a legacy of erudition that was celebrated through the Middle Ages in England and on the Continent. Although his renown was was sufficiently widespread to survive the destruction of Northumbrian holy places, starting with Lindisfarne in 793, it was not until the revival of monasticism in the North under the supervision of Anglo-Norman churchmen that a shrine was built in his honor. The process by which the memory of Bede, his intangible memoria, came to be expressed in an elaborate burial-place, a visible memoria 1 , can be traced in documents from the twelfth century on the history of the church of Durham. Chief among these is the Libellus de exordio atque procurso istius, hoc est Dunhelmensis, ecclesie (Tract on the origins and progress of this the church of Durham) 2 , of which ten manuscripts survive. The date of composition of the Libellus de exordio is unknown, but the earliest manuscripts are from very beginning of the twelfth century (1104-1107 x 1115). It is believed that the work was written by a team of compilers under the leadership of Symeon of Durham († c.

The mid-twelfth-century anonymous history of the Norman conquest of Southern Italy and Sicily, the so-called Historia Sicula, has been transmitted in six Latin copies (five of which written as late as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) and in two vernacular translations, a Middle French one of the fourteenth century, and an Italian translation of the seventeenth. The article discusses a number of passages in which the Middle French translation appears to be helpful in choosing between apparently adiaphorous variant readings of Latin manuscripts or even provide basis for reconstruction of readings that seem to have been disfigured in all existing witnesses of the Latin text. It is therefore argued that the French translation should be taken into consideration in the still missing critical edition of the Latin Historia Sicula.

In the creation myth of the Crusades, Pope Urban II (r. 1088-1099) is the founding father and 1095 is the critical year. During the twentieth century, French, Spanish, and English scholars challenged this myth; yet this myth remains as durable as ever. Because the origins of the crusading enterprise came to be associated with the so-called First Crusade (1095–1102), scholars have created a vision of crusading at odds with Pope
Urban’s vision, which views the ‘‘First’’ Crusade as the third part of a triptych: first, the Norman conquest of Sicily (1060–1091); then, the Castilian and Catalan advances in Iberia; and finally the 1095 Eastern Crusade. Today, the study of the Crusades is
hampered by a failure to concentrate on the direct evidence and to take into account what contemporaries understood by crusading. To get a sense of what contemporaries understood
by crusading, this paper examines the Norman Crusade in Sicily, drawing upon both Christian and Islamic sources.

In the creation myth of the Crusades, Pope Urban II (r. 1088-1099) is the founding father and 1095 is the critical year. During the twentieth century, French, Spanish, and English scholars challenged this myth; yet this myth remains as durable as ever. Because the origins of the crusading enterprise came to be associated with the so-called First Crusade (1095-1102), scholars have created a vision of crusading at odds with Pope Urban’s vision, which views the ‘‘First’’ Crusade as the third part of a triptych: first, the Norman conquest of Sicily (1060-1091); then, the Castilian and Catalan advances in Iberia; and finally the 1095 Eastern Crusade. Today, the study of the Crusades is hampered by a failure to concentrate on the direct evidence and to take into account what contemporaries understood by crusading. To get a sense of what contemporaries understood by crusading, this paper examines the Norman Crusade in Sicily, drawing upon both Christian and Islamic sources.

Examines the role of peace in the chronicle of Falco of Benevento and the history of Alexander of Telese.  Argues that Falco's text emphasizes the ecclesiastical nature of peace.  Further asserts that Alexander's history purposely demonstrated peace as a monarchical responsibility in order to attack the papacy's authority in mainland southern Italy.

The Norman expansion in eleventh-century Europe was a movement of enormous historical importance, which saw men and women from the duchy of Normandy settling in England, Italy, Sicily and the Middle East. The Norman establishment in the South is particularly interesting, because it represents the story of a few hundred mercenaries who managed to establish a principality in the Mediterranean that would later develop in to the Kingdom of Sicily.
In this book the author examines the clash of two different "military cultures" - the Normans and the Byzantines - in one theatre of war - the Balkans. It is the first study to date of the military organization of the Norman and Byzantine states in the Mediterranean, and of their overall strategies and their military tactics in the battlefield. It is also the first to examine the way in which each military culture reacted and adapted to the strategies and tactics of its enemies in Italy and the Balkans. The author closely follows the campaigns conducted by the Normans in the Byzantine provinces of Illyria and Macedonia and their battles against Imperial armies commanded by the Byzantine Emperor. He also examines the ways in which the Italian-Norman and Byzantine military systems differed, and their relative efficiencies.