Norman Empire

There is no doubt that William the Conqueror, whether by accident or more likely by design, built an empire for himself. By 1066, he had already campaigned on the southern and western frontiers of Normandy, in Maine and Brittany. After 1066, not only did he add England to his conquests, but the Normans continued to press southwards towards the Loire, establishing a frontier against the rival power of the counts of Anjou. William’s son and successor, William Rufus, was to die in 1100 dreaming of a vast campaign of conquest that would carry Norman authority southwards to Aquitaine and Bordeaux. This official record of conquest was only part of a much wider story of heroic Norman endeavour. At almost precisely the same time that the Normans were conquering England or pushing southwards into Maine, groups of exiles, either no longer welcome or unable to prosper at the ducal court, many of them from the frontier regions of southern Normandy, took their ambition elsewhere, to southern Italy where, from the 1050s onwards, they began to carve out what would eventually become the Norman kingdom of Sicily, comprising not just Sicily itself but a large part of mainland Italy, as far north as Naples and the southern hinterlands of Rome. One of the reasons why the Pope was so anxious to appease William the Conqueror, both in 1066 and thereafter, was that on his own back doorstep the papal lands were menaced by the rise of this new Norman power in the south.

The Norman conquest of southern Italy was guaranteed in 1071, when the Byzantine empire was at last forced to abandon its outpost at Bari, and finally crowned in 1130, when the last of the Norman dukes in Apulia began to style himself not merely as a duke but as King. In the meantime, both from their northern and their new southern lands, the Normans of Normandy, England and Sicily played a glorious part in what was widely portrayed as one of the more glorious episodes in the history of Christendom: the ‘liberation’, after 1095, of the Holy Places of the East, culminating on 15 July 1099 with the capture by the army of the First Crusade of Christ’s own city of Jerusalem. No matter that, like a lot of Norman enterprise, this was a bloody affair, and that the fall of Jerusalem was followed by a massacre, not just of its former Islamic occupiers but of all those members of the population foolish enough to have swallowed their valuables in the hope of preserving them from harm. The crusaders (if reports are to be believed, although these reports are themselves merely copied from the Jewish writer Josephus, describing what the Roman imperial army had done in Jerusalem after its capture in 70 ad) made a large bonfire and reduced the bodies to ash, in the hope of extracting precious metals and jewels from the pyre. Like many such ‘liberations’, the liberation of Jerusalem by the crusaders might be read as something closer to an enslavement of those it supposedly freed. From a Norman perspective, what mattered here was that the Normans had played so prominent a role in yet another great conquest. From Hastings, via Bari to Jerusalem, they were now indisputably the greatest warrior-race that Europe had experienced since the Romans or the Huns.

And here, of course, hubris began to lurch inexorably towards nemesis. The idea of the Normans as a master race, as we shall see, was a myth no less attractive and no less fictitious than any others of the myths that the now-conquered Anglo-Saxons had once told about themselves. From their reading of Virgil or Caesar, the Normans learned how to behave like imperialists, how to carve out an imperial destiny for themselves. From the very monuments and methods of their success, however, they perhaps acquired that delight in irony and the absurd that has ever afterwards been a central feature of the English sense of humour. To what extent, one wonders, did the Normans themselves ever truly believe in their own invincibility? Seriousness often begets self-mockery and the very richest talent for irony.