Robert Guiscard: Portrait of a Warlord

This is the first of two volumes of translated and annotated texts and essays on the Normans in eleventh century southern Italy and Sicily. The first, which includes William of Apulia’s Gesta, one of the ‘key’ texts of the eleventh century, focuses on Robert Guiscard ‘the terror of the world’, the most effective and arguably the last of the great Norman warlords. It was Robert who finally established a permanent Norman presence in southern Italy in the 1050s and 1060s replacing Lombard and Byzantine rule with Norman hegemony. Whatever Robert’s skills as a military commander and strategist, he was less successful in establishing anything other than the beginnings of a Norman ‘state’. This was something left to his son Roger Borsa and grandson William and their efforts were dwarfed by the statist aspirations of Count Roger of Sicily, the subject of the second volume—an annotated edition of Malaterra’s history.

The ways in which the historiography of southern Italy changed and the problem with the sources is the subject of the opening chapter. Chapter 2 translates the Breve Chronicon Northmannicum, a source that was originally believed to have been written in the twelfth or thirteenth century but that is today seen by many historians as an eighteenth century forgery. If this is the case, then its value to historians is extremely limited other than providing a fairly accurate chronology of the Norman conquest of southern Italy. Chapter 3 contains extracts from the Annals of Lupus Protospatharius that are relevant to the career of Robert Guiscard. Chapter 4 is a translation of William of Apulia’s Gesta Roberti Guiscardi, one of the most important and detailed Italo-Norman sources on the Norman invasion. Three chapters provide commentaries on the dispute between Pope Gregory VII and the emperor Henry IV. Lambert of Hersfeld was bitterly opposed to Henry IV and he is especially valuable on the events of 1075-1077. By contrast, Archbishop Liemar of Bremen’s letter written in late January 1075 gives the views of an imperialist ‘party’ that was intensely critical of the ‘Gregorian’ reforms viewing them as an infringement of existing episcopal rights. The next chapter is an extract from the Chronicle of Montecassino and deals with the controversial interview between abbot Desiderius and the emperor Henry IV in 1082 during the dispute between the Empire and Pope Gregory VII. Desiderius, a strong supporter of Gregory VII and later Pope himself sought to show that while he favoured dialogue with the emperor this did not alter his own, strongly held Gregorian convictions. The volume ends with a selective bibliography.