Conquest and Commerce: Normans and Venetians in Albania

Abstract

The first Normans to settle in the Mediterranean lands reached southern Italy in the second decade of the eleventh century. They came as pilgrims, a calling soon abandoned for more congenial employment as mercenaries in the wars which raged between popes, both emperors, the Saracens, the Lombard princes and a host of lesser rulers, barons and freebooters. The truth was that southern Italy was too far removed from the main centres of power to be governed effectively from any of them. The Norman ranks were soon swelled by a stream of recruits from Normandy. The most notable of these was the redoubtable family of Tancred de Hauteville whose thirteen sons by his two marriages all made their way to Italy. The eldest, William, eventually became count of Apulia and was succeeded by his brothers and half-brothers. Among the latter was the eldest son of Tancred’s second marriage, Robert, surnamed Guiscard, ‘the cunning’. Robert elevated the country to a duchy and in 1071, after a bitter struggle, drove the Byzantine forces from Bari, their last outpost in Italy. But Robert’s ambition knew no bounds. He set his youngest brother, Roger, on the course that was to make him ruler of Sicily and his successors the kings of the most glittering of twelfth-century European states. He repudiated his first wife to marry the formidable Sichelgaita, daughter of the Lombard ruler of Salerno.