The Normans Who Went East
The Hautevilles — a Norman family of western-Norwegian Viking stock, from a small fief on the Cotentin — whose sons expelled the Byzantine Empire from Italy, took Sicily from its Muslim rulers, founded the Kingdom of Sicily, and led the First Crusade to Antioch — the southern and eastern counterpart to England in 1066, and the mark one family left on Italy and on Europe.
1. The family and the men
Hauteville was a small fief near Coutances, on the Cotentin peninsula in western Normandy. Around the year 1000 its lord was Tancred of Hauteville, a minor Norman noble. He had twelve sons by two wives, with daughters besides, and a single small fief could not be divided twelve ways.
The family were Normans, descended from the Norsemen who had taken the Cotentin a century earlier. That coast was settled largely by Norwegians, many arriving by way of the Irish Sea, independently of Rollo’s Danes on the Seine and added to Normandy only in 933, under Rollo’s son William Longsword. The Hautevilles came from the same broad western-Norwegian Viking world as the earls of Møre, but by a separate road; no record ties them to Møre, and they were not of Rollo’s band. By family tradition the founder was a Viking named Hiallt who gave his name to the “high estate,” Altavilla — almost certainly a legend invented to supply a Viking ancestor.
What defined them was circumstance and character, not blood. They were landless younger sons in a Normandy with no room for them, and southern Italy was hiring. They went south as mercenaries, fought for whoever paid, then for themselves. The trait the chroniclers return to is adaptability: they took service under Lombards, Greeks and popes; married into the families they found; kept the laws and administrations of the peoples they conquered; and turned every alliance to their own advantage. A hostile contemporary called them little better than brigands. He was not wrong, and it was also not the whole story.
The other half of the story is that they built. This is what separated them from the Vikings they descended from: they did not raid and leave, they conquered and stayed — holding the land with castles and legitimising their rule with churches. Castle and cathedral were the twin instruments of a Norman conquest, one to subjugate and one to sanctify, from the abbeys of Caen and the keeps of Normandy, to the White Tower and Durham Cathedral in England, to the palace-churches of Palermo in Sicily. The pattern that built the Duchy of Normandy and the Kingdom of England built the Kingdom of Sicily: conquer, fortify, endow, govern. They were state-builders, not raiders.
2. The conquests, in brief
Southern Italy (c. 1035–1071). William Iron-Arm and Drogo arrived around 1035. By 1042 the Normans held Melfi and William was Count of Apulia. They defeated and briefly captured Pope Leo IX at Civitate in 1053; six years later the papacy reversed course and, at Melfi in 1059, invested Robert Guiscard as duke. Robert took Bari, the last Byzantine city in Italy, on 16 April 1071 — ending more than five centuries of Byzantine rule in the south.
Sicily (1061–1091). The youngest brother, Roger, led the island campaign. Messina fell in 1061, Palermo in January 1072, Syracuse in 1086, and Noto in 1091 — ending roughly two centuries of Muslim rule.
The Balkans (1081–1085). Robert Guiscard crossed the Adriatic and beat the Byzantine emperor Alexios I at Dyrrhachium on 18 October 1081, aiming at Constantinople. Recalled to rescue Pope Gregory VII from the Western emperor Henry IV, his army then sacked Rome in 1084. He died on Cephalonia in 1085.
The Kingdom (1130). Roger II united the island and the mainland and was crowned King of Sicily at Palermo on 25 December 1130.
The Crusade (1096–1099). Guiscard’s son Bohemond and grandson Tancred were among the leaders of the First Crusade. Bohemond took Antioch on 3 June 1098 and held it as his own principality — the first of the Crusader states.
3. The men as leaders
Robert Guiscard (c. 1015–1085) arrived in Calabria with five horsemen and thirty foot and died a duke who had beaten two emperors. The nickname — Guiscard, “the cunning” — was earned. He was an opportunist of genius: ruthless, restless, never holding a position he could improve on, as ready to capture a pope as to kneel for his blessing. Anna Komnene, who had no reason to flatter him, described a tall, fierce man whose war-cry was said to put thousands to flight.
Roger I, the Great Count (c. 1031–1101) was the patient counterpart to his brother. The conquest of Sicily took him thirty years, with few men and frequent reverses. What set him apart was what he did after winning: he left the Greek and Arab populations their religion, law and language, took Muslims into his army and administration, made a treaty with the Zirids of North Africa to cut Sicily off from relief, and was named papal legate in 1098. He conquered as a soldier and ruled as a pragmatist.
Roger II (1095–1154) was the first of the family born to rule rather than to fight for rule. Educated by Greek and Arab tutors in Palermo, he turned his father’s conquest into a state: a centralised monarchy with a trilingual chancery, a cosmopolitan court, and a written body of law. He was bookish, autocratic and image-conscious — he commissioned the geographer al-Idrisi and built the great churches — and he took the crown in 1130 over papal objection.
Bohemond of Taranto (c. 1054–1111), Guiscard’s eldest son, was disinherited in Italy and went east to find his own realm. Anna Komnene — daughter of the emperor he fought — left the most famous portrait of him: a man who towered over the tallest, fair-skinned with a reddish tint and hair cut short, his blue eyes showing spirit and dignity, a certain charm about him shadowed by menace, and a wit that found a way out of every corner. He was among the ablest field commanders of his generation: he had fought the Byzantines under his father at Dyrrhachium in 1081, and on the First Crusade he held the ambushed vanguard at Dorylaeum in 1097, beat off the relief armies through the long siege of Antioch, and led the sortie that broke Kerbogha’s far larger army outside the city on 28 June 1098 — the victory that saved the Crusade and opened the road to Jerusalem. He took Antioch and held it as his own principality, and in 1107 turned his crusading energy against Byzantium itself — a campaign that failed, ending in his submission at the Treaty of Devol in 1108. Antioch then stayed in his family: his son Bohemond II ruled it, then Bohemond II’s daughter Constance of Hauteville (1130–1163), and through her descendants — who kept the dynastic name Bohemond — the principality survived until it fell to the Mamluk sultan Baybars in 1268, some 170 years after Bohemond took the city.
4. The impact on Italy
A single state where there had been a dozen. Before the Normans, the Italian south was a patchwork: Lombard principalities at Capua, Benevento and Salerno; Byzantine Apulia and Calabria; the independent duchies of Naples, Amalfi and Gaeta; and Muslim Sicily. Within a century the Normans subdued or absorbed all of them and welded the lot into one realm. The Kingdom of Sicily, declared in 1130, covered the island, the southern third of the Italian peninsula, and Malta. For the first time the whole Mezzogiorno answered to a single crown.
Three foreign powers driven out. The conquest ended Byzantine rule in Italy after more than five centuries, Lombard princely power after some three hundred years, and Muslim rule in Sicily after about two hundred. In their place stood one Latin Christian monarchy. The political and religious map of the south was redrawn, and stayed redrawn.
A kingdom that outlasted the family by seven centuries. Founded in 1130, the Kingdom of Sicily passed in turn to the Hohenstaufen, the Angevins, the Aragonese and Spanish, and the Bourbons; it became the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in 1816; and it was absorbed into a united Italy only in 1861. The Norman conquest drew the southern border of Italian politics that held, under one dynasty after another, for more than seven hundred years.
A different road from the north. While the Normans made the south a centralised feudal monarchy, the centre and north of Italy were fragmenting into self-governing city-communes — Milan, Florence, Genoa, Venice. The two halves of the peninsula set off on divergent paths from this period. How much of the later north–south divide — the “Southern Question” — traces to the Norman kingdom is debated, and later Spanish and Bourbon rule weigh in the argument; but the structural fork is real, and it begins here.
Salerno and the recovery of medicine. Robert Guiscard took Salerno in 1077 and made it his capital. The city was the seat of the Schola Medica Salernitana, the foremost medical school of medieval Europe, then near its height. Through Constantine the African — invited to Salerno and later a monk at Monte Cassino — the major Arabic and Greek medical texts were translated into Latin and passed north into Europe. The southern Italian mainland, not only Sicily, was a genuine channel for that learning.
The papacy’s southern neighbour. The new kingdom sat on Rome’s southern border, and its rulers were the papacy’s vassals and protectors as often as its rivals. The Normans captured one pope and rescued another; the relationship between the papacy and the southern kingdom shaped central Italian politics for centuries.
5. The impact on Europe
A new kind of state, watched across Europe. The Kingdom of Sicily was among the largest and richest realms of twelfth-century Europe, and its government was unusual: a trilingual Latin–Greek–Arabic administration, a treasury modelled partly on Fatimid practice, Greeks, Arabs and Jews holding office, and conquered peoples left under their own laws. This is the “tolerant Norman Sicily” of popular history. It was real, but it was pragmatic statecraft serving a centralising monarchy, not a modern ideal of coexistence — and specialists caution against the romance.
A bridge for learning — real, but secondary. Palermo’s court drew scholars working across Greek, Arabic and Latin. Sicilian translators put Greek texts directly into Latin, among them the first Latin version of Ptolemy’s Almagest and works of Plato and Euclid, feeding the twelfth-century recovery of classical learning. The honest qualifier: Sicily was the lesser channel. The main conduit for Arabic science was Toledo in Spain, whose translations circulated far more widely; the Sicilian Almagest survives in only a handful of manuscripts. Sicily and Salerno mattered, but as tributaries, not the main stream.
The Crusades and the Latin East. Bohemond and his nephew Tancred were among the leaders of the First Crusade. Antioch — taken in 1098 and held as a Hauteville principality — was the first of the Crusader states and the anchor of the Latin presence in the north. The same family also widened the East–West breach: Guiscard and then Bohemond attacked Byzantium directly, and Bohemond’s anti-Greek campaign of 1107 prefigured the Latin hostility that sacked Constantinople in 1204.
A style, and a bloodline. The fusion of Norman, Byzantine and Islamic forms produced the Arab-Norman architecture of Palermo, Cefalù and Monreale, now a UNESCO World Heritage listing. And the dynastic line ran on: Roger II’s daughter Constance married the emperor Henry VI, and their son was Frederick II — the half-Hauteville “wonder of the world,” who inherited the Sicilian state and court. Alongside England in 1066, all this made the Normans a Mediterranean and not merely a northern power.
6. The reckoning and the footprint
From a single small fief, in about 150 years: the Byzantines expelled from Italy, Arab Sicily conquered, the southern peninsula unified into a kingdom that would last seven centuries, a Crusader principality planted in Syria, two emperors faced down, and the bloodline carried into the Empire.
The footprint is visible — the monuments of Palermo, Cefalù and Monreale; an administrative template later studied across Europe; the memory of a mixed and literate court. But the same record carries a warning. The state endured, yet its mixed character did not. After 1194 the kingdom passed to the Hohenstaufen, who dismantled its balance. Sicily’s Muslims were deported to Lucera on the mainland in the 1220s, and Lucera was destroyed in 1300 — ending some four hundred years of Islam on the island. The tolerant kingdom was gone within a century of its height, even as the state itself ran on to 1861. The achievement and its undoing belong in the same account.
This is the overview. Detailed treatments of each campaign — Apulia and Civitate, Robert Guiscard’s wars, the conquest of Sicily, Roger II’s kingdom, the governance of Norman Sicily, Bohemond and the Crusader East, and the fall to the Hohenstaufen — will follow as companion memos. The family’s origin is the subject of The Men of Møre; the wider dynasty is traced in The Norman Conquest of Europe.