God's War: A New History of the Crusades Read Online Free PDF Page B

Guiscard’s brother Roger (d. 1101) provided a new focus for profit and a centre of Norman-Italian political endeavour. Once finally subdued after a bitter three decades’ fighting, Sicily proved far wealthier than the family’s mainland holdings. Under Roger’s son, Roger II, the two parts of the Hauteville inheritance were brought together to the anxiety of popes and western and eastern emperors. In 1130, in return for support, the anti-pope Anacletus II crowned Roger II king of Sicily, Calabria and Apulia, and acknowledged his overlordship over Capua, Naples and Benevento, titles that Roger retained by forcing the legitimate pope, Innocent II, whom he had just defeated and captured, to recognize them in 1139. The combined lands of the kingdom of Sicily created one of the wealthiest, culturally and politically most dynamic, ambitious and disruptive powers of the twelfth-century Mediterranean. By comparison,the Norman-Italian enclave founded by his cousins Bohemund and Tancred in Antioch in 1098 scarcely matched Roger’s lavish regime, which, at its height, sought to emulate, rival, even usurp Byzantium itself. Such entrepreneurial opportunism supplied one vital context for the early crusades. It may have been no coincidence that Alexius I timed his invitation to the west to send military aid shortly after the end of the Sicilian conquest, when, at least in the mind of the canny Greek emperor, there would be available a rich stock of soldiery, some disappointed perhaps at the Sicilian land settlement and eager for new chances to make their fortunes and save their souls.
    In many ways the rise of the Hautevilles constituted an experience typical of eleventh-century France. The disintegration of the Carolingian empire in the late ninth century not only permanently divided the constituent political entities into East Francia (essentially Germany from Lorraine to the Elbe), Italy and West Francia (between the Rhine and the southern Pyrenean marches). The chaos of civil war and invasions by Vikings from the north and Arab pirates in the south also caused effective civil power within West Francia to become devolved on to the local royal agents, the counts, who wielded vice-regal military, fiscal and judicial authority. By the end of the tenth century the kingdom of France remained a legal and ideological construct, but its kings exerted little genuine power outside their own family lands. The main political foci were the great counties ruled as autonomous principalities by comital families who rapidly acquired their own grand, if often fictional, pedigrees to match their practical status. The most important counties, some later elevating themselves into duchies, were Flanders, Champagne, Normandy, Brittany, Burgundy, Blois-Chartres, Anjou, Paris (i.e. the Ile de France), Poitou-Aquitaine, which acquired the duchy of Gascony, Toulouse and Barcelona, which was to be attracted away from the French orbit by the opportunities and successes of its Iberian neighbours. Beside these, numerous lesser counties sprang up, some owing allegiance to the greater lords, some autonomous.
    To this political patchwork were added wide geographic, economic, linguistic and ethnic contrasts. Brittany was still a Celtic region; the Basques had given their name to Gascony. Elsewhere the chief linguistic divide was between those in the north who spoke langue d’oil (so described after the word used for ‘yes’, oil ) and the speakers of langue d’oc in the south, the dividing line running east–west well to the north ofthe modern Midi. These linguistic contrasts mirrored different histories, customs and laws. The far south retained a tradition of written law and limited urbanization to match its Mediterranean climate. Elsewhere, there was no uniformity of rules of landholding, judicial systems, weights, measures or currency. A kingdom often in name alone, nonetheless in 987 the great magnates of northern France, perhaps on the promptings of