The Normans in Italy & Sicily

CNG 87, Lot: 1724. Estimate $1000. Sold for $1600. This amount does not include the buyer’s fee.

ITALY, Apulia (Duchi). Roberto il Guiscardo. 1059-1085. Æ Follaro (27mm, 6.20 g, 9h). Salerno mint. Draped bust of Christ facing, holding Gospel book and wearing nimbus crown; ‘mystic plant’ to left and right / The Virgin orans and standing facing, wearing nimbus crown; ‘mystic plant’ to left and right. CNI XVIII 3; Travaini, Monetazione type 29; MEC 14, 68-9; Biaggi 2259 (Pandolfo). VF for issue, green patina. Rare.

The Norman conquest of southern Italy, which resulted in the eventual creation of the Kingdom of Sicilia, spanned the late eleventh to twelfth centuries. The Normans (Lat. Normani) were the descendants of those Viking raiders who had settled in northern France. Like their ancestors, they served as mercenaries in the numerous battles between local princes. Eventually, the Normans began to exert a significant affect on the region’s political and social landscape. Two separate traditions, both based on near-contemporary eleventh-century sources, exist regarding their arrival in the region. According to the so-called “Salerno Tradition”, first mentioned in the Ystoire de li Normant of Amatus of Montecassino, the Norman influence began at Salerno in the very late tenth century AD, when the Duke of Salerno, Guaimario III, requested the presence of Norman knights in the Duchy to ward off Muslim invasions. The “Gargano Tradition”, related in the Gesta Roberti Wiscardi of William of Apulia, and the Chronica monasterii S. Bartholomaei de Carpineto of the monk Alexander, suggests that, in a meeting in about 1016 at the shrine of San Michele Arcangelo at Monte Gargano, an Apulian nobleman, Melo di Bari, sought Norman assistance in his rebellion for independence against the Byzantine Catapanate of Italy which, at the time, ruled southern Italy. Throughout the eleventh century AD, the Normans served as mercenaries for both the various competing princes in southern Italy and the Byzantines in Sicily, all of whom were trying to stave of the incursions of the Fatimids. Beginning around 1035, when Guglielmo Braccio di Ferro, a descendent of the Norseman, Tancred de Hautville, became Count of Apulia and Calabria, the Normans began to acquire their own territories to rule. Beginning the process of wresting Sicilia away from the Byzantines, in 1059, the Pope appointed Roberto il Guiscardo, Guglielmo’s brother, duke of the as yet unconquered island, which, in 1071, Roberto invested upon his youngest brother, Ruggero Bosso (Ruggero I) along with the title, Count of Sicilia. Although Roberto’s younger brothers, Boemond I d’Antiochia and Ruggerio Borsa, fought over this inheritance, thereby precipitating a period of warfare, Ruggero Bosso (Ruggero I) was able to defeat them and strengthen his control in in Sicilia. When he died in 1101, the throne passed to his elder son, Simone. Simone, however, died shortly thereafter, and his younger brother, Ruggero (Ruggero II), became the new Count. Ruggero then set out to unite Sicilia with southern Italy, so that by 1130, when he was formally crowned King of Sicilia, Ruggero had united all of the disparate territories of southern Italy and Sicila into one kingdom with a strong centralized government. To maintain his control over his kingdom, Ruggero II, like his uncle, Ruggero Bosso, before him, appointed close relatives to positions of power in the outlying principalities, though, unlike his uncle, these appointees were Ruggero’s sons – a policy which continued under his immediate successors – Guglielmo I, Guglielmo II, Tancredi, and Guglielmo III, the last of the Norman kings of Sicilia.