Normans II

Who Were the Normans?

The Normans took their name from the Northmen, the Viking war bands who had raided the coasts of West Francia for most of the ninth century. In 911 the West Frankish king Charles the Simple, unable to keep them out, granted their leader Rollo a stretch of land around the lower Seine on condition that he accept baptism and defend the river mouth against other raiders. Rollo took the bargain, and within three or four generations his descendants had become something genuinely new. They spoke French rather than Norse, worshipped in Latin, fought on horseback in mail rather than on foot with axes, and ruled their duchy from stone castles rather than from longships. Yet they kept a memory of their northern origin and a restless instinct for movement, and by the early eleventh century, when small bands of Norman adventurers began turning up as mercenaries in southern Italy, that instinct was about to remake half of Europe.

Homeland and Way of Life

Normandy was a green, well-watered country of mixed farmland and woodland, with a long coastline of cliffs and small harbors and a network of rivers that all eventually drained into the Seine. The soil was good for wheat in the south and for pasture in the cooler north, and Norman cattle and horses were already prized by the eleventh century. Rouen, the old Roman city on the Seine, was the ducal capital and one of the largest towns in northern France, with a busy river trade and a community of Jewish merchants who handled long-distance credit. Caen, refounded by William the Conqueror as a second seat, grew into a city of cut stone almost overnight, and the famous quarries around it sent the pale Caen limestone across the Channel to build the cathedrals and castles of Norman England. The countryside was studded with the small motte-and-bailey castles that the Normans had perfected, an earthen mound topped by a wooden tower and surrounded by a ditched enclosure, cheap to build and almost impossible for unarmed peasants to take.

Warfare, Power, and Limits

The Normans fought as heavy cavalry, and they were probably the best heavy cavalry in eleventh century Europe. A Norman knight was bound to his lord by the oath of homage, held a fief of land in return for forty days of mounted service a year, and trained from boyhood in the long, balanced charge with a couched lance that became their signature on the battlefield. They were also unusually flexible. At Hastings in 1066 William's army combined cavalry, archers, and infantry in a way that English commanders of the period rarely matched, and the long day of feigned retreats and renewed charges that broke Harold's shield wall was as much a triumph of coordination as of valor. The same qualities made the Normans formidable in southern Italy, where small bands of brothers from minor Norman families, the most famous of them the sons of Tancred of Hauteville, hired themselves out to Lombard princes and Byzantine governors and ended up taking the country for themselves. Robert Guiscard drove the Byzantines out of Apulia and Calabria in the 1060s and 1070s, his younger brother Roger conquered Muslim Sicily over the following thirty years, and by 1130 the Norman kingdom of Sicily, ruled by Roger II from Palermo, was one of the richest and most cosmopolitan states in the Mediterranean.

Beliefs, Customs, and Society

The Normans took Christianity seriously and used it well. The reformed Benedictine monasteries of Bec, Jumieges, and Mont-Saint-Michel were among the great intellectual centers of eleventh century Europe. Bec in particular produced two of the most important archbishops of Canterbury after the Conquest, Lanfranc and Anselm, both of whom carried Norman legal and theological habits across the Channel and helped reorganize the English church on a continental footing. In Sicily the Normans inherited a population of Greek Christians, Latin Christians, Arab Muslims, and Jews, and for the better part of a century they ruled it with a tolerance that astonished visitors from the rest of Latin Europe. The royal chancery in Palermo issued documents in Latin, Greek, and Arabic; Roger II employed Muslim architects, Greek mosaicists, and Jewish geographers; the chapel he built inside his palace combined a Latin floor plan, Byzantine mosaics, and an Arab wooden ceiling, and somehow it all worked. Normans also went on crusade in large numbers. Bohemond, another son of Robert Guiscard, led one of the main contingents of the First Crusade and made himself prince of Antioch in 1098, and Norman knights were prominent in the Latin states of the East throughout the twelfth century.

Contacts, Conflicts, and Legacy

For nearly two centuries the Normans were the connective tissue of Latin Christendom. A noble family might hold land in Normandy, fight for the king of England, marry a daughter into a baronial house in Apulia, send a son on crusade to Antioch, and bury its old men in a Norman abbey founded by their grandfather. The Anglo-Norman realm of William the Conqueror and his descendants stretched from the Scottish border to the Pyrenees by the time Henry II added his wife Eleanor's vast Aquitaine inheritance in the 1150s, and for half a century the kings of England were the most powerful rulers in France. Then it came apart. In 1204 King John of England lost Normandy itself to Philip Augustus of France in a single fast campaign, and the Anglo-Norman aristocracy was forced to choose between its English and its continental estates. Most chose England, and within two or three generations they had stopped speaking French at home and started thinking of themselves as English. The Norman kingdom of Sicily had already passed by marriage to the German Hohenstaufen in 1194 and would be a German and then a French and then an Aragonese possession in turn. The Normans as a distinct people did not so much disappear as dissolve into the larger nations they had helped to make, leaving behind castles, cathedrals, legal habits, and a story that medieval chroniclers would still be telling with admiration and unease three centuries later.