The Norman Achievement

In his narrative history, Levi Roach offers the coronation in 1212 of Frederick II, from a dynasty of Sicilian-Norman rulers, as the King of the Germans as the apogee of the remarkable achievements of these people. Nor was the future Holy Roman Emperor the only early-13^th century European monarch descended from Normans. There was King John of England, King Willian ‘the Lion’ of Scotland, and King Bohemond of the Crusader State of Antioch. Yet, paradoxically, the early-13^th century also witnessed the evaporation of the Norman presence as the descendants of a diaspora that had begun two hundred years earlier assimilated the cultures of the lands they had conquered. Consistent with the culmination of this process, it was King John who lost the Duchy of Normandy to King Philip II of France, severing the connection between the descendants of William ‘the Conqueror’s’ invasion force and their ancestral homeland. But by then these descendants, as Roach explains, identified themselves as Englishmen, despite continuing to speak the Norman dialect of French. The question of to what extent, if any, a figure such as Frederick II can be considered ‘Norman’ is an issue that runs throughout the book. As the author notes, “The historical Normans are…remarkably slippery subjects.” (p. 235).

Levi Roach, a graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, and Ruprecht-Karl's-Universität, Heidelberg, who is currently teaching at the University of Exeter, specializes in the study of Medieval monarchy, having produced two prior scholarly monographs, Kingship and Consent in Anglo-Saxon England (2013) and Ethelred the Unready (2016). It’s more than likely that Roach’s biography of King Ethelred of England led him to write Empire of the Normans, given that The lord took as his Queen the daughter of Duke Richard I of Normandy, the redoubtable lady Emma, establishing the Normans’ first connection with Anglo-Saxon England.

In Empire of the Normans, the author presents a lively history aimed at a general audience, beginning each of his twenty-four chapters with a dramatic scene that engages the reader. This does not mean that the book is lacking in scholarly rigor, as a perusal of the footnotes demonstrates. One of the main challenges to producing a history of the Normans is that, because they were so wide ranging, anyone setting out to write about them must become proficient in the primary sources of and secondary works about a daunting variety of societies, from the Byzantines to the French, from the Welsh and Scots to the Muslims of Anatolia and Sicily. Judging from the works that Roach relies on for his chapters covering the ‘Celtic Fringe’ of the British Isles – Scotland, Ireland, and Wales (with which this reviewer is most familiar) – he has made use of the best possible sources, containing the latest scholarship. With regard to primary sources in particular, the author is to be congratulated for bringing them to the readers’ attention, alerting them to their limitations and biases.

One indisputable aspect of the Normans that differentiated them from the other inhabitants of what was evolving into the Kingdom of France was their Pagan Viking origins. Roach, however, finds reasons to doubt the reliability of the accepted version of how they were settled on the present day northwest coast of France. A minority of foreigners living among the existing population of what became the Duchy of Normandy (Normandy, from the French for ‘Northmen’), it’s little wonder that within a few generations they had converted to Christianity, were speaking French, and had adopted the ways of the French aristocracy, including their practices in warfare. Beginning in the first half of the 11^th century, a steady flow of Normans departed their homeland to seek their fortunes abroad.

Ironically, the best known venture of the Normans, Duke William ‘the Bastard’s’ invasion of Anglo-Saxon England in 1066, was atypical. In most cases the path to conquest originated with Normans being hired as mercenaries by a faction involved in a regional conflict, be they opponents of the Byzantine Empire, such as Lombard lords in Southern Italy or the Seljuk Turks in Anatolia, contending Muslim amir's in Sicily, rivals for the throne of Scotland, or an exiled Irish king seeking to recover his throne. It should be noted that Norman adventurers didn’t always achieve victory. Attempts to carve out modest realms in Anatolia, the Balkans, and Tunisia, for instance, ended in failure.

Roach suggests that it was the political instability in the Duchy that led the younger, landless sons of the likes of Tancred de Hauteville - who sired no less than twelve boys by two wives - to set out for foreign lands such as, in the case of the Hautvilles, Southern Italy. This is likely true to some extent, but Normandy certainly didn’t have a monopoly on political volatility in France and the period of instability when the Hauteville boys departed was only a temporary circumstance, while the exodus of hopeful opportunists was not. Of course, success served as a powerful draw. In the same way that each fruitful raid had encouraged ever more Vikings to depart in search of easy pickings, news of their fellow Normans establishing their own domains overseas naturally encouraged many who lived back home to gamble their futures abroad. Yet, there may be a vital factor that has been largely overlooked. Although specifically in reference to the siege of the Italian port city of Bari, 1068 to 1071, Roach’s statement that. “The Normans were even less experienced at sea than they were with siege craft” (p.110) is contradicted by the fact that the Norman conquests in the Mediterranean and the British Isles depended upon their arrival there by ship. It may be that a significant aspect of the Normans’ Viking heritage, something that was largely missing from the rest of the nobility of the Kingdom of France, was ‘sea mindedness’, an awareness of and willingness to exploit the potential offered by travel by sea. ‘Sea mindedness’, however, is useless without ships and, as the images on the Bayeux Tapestry demonstrate, the Normans had retained their Viking ship building skills, so that they were perfectly capable of fabricating their own fleets. It’s unclear to what degree, if any, these aspects survived assimilation into local cultures, but they played an indispensable role in getting the Normans to Britain and Southern Italy in the first place.

Perhaps reflecting the author’s background in the study of monarchy, Empires of the Normans is ‘top down’ history. The focus of Roach’s account is on the actions of Norman noblemen and their counterparts against whom they fought, with speculation about each sides’ likely motives. It would have been helpful, however, if the reader had been provided with some societal context, a brief explanation of political-social-economic structures. Obviously, the nature of Anglo-Saxon England was significantly different from Sicily, Anatolia was significantly different from Ireland. As is too often the case in publications involving history, the three maps that are included are inadequate in a book that is awash with unfamiliar placenames. And given the complex relations of blood and marriage that intertwined families in webs of political power, the lack of ‘family trees’ for the different dynasties is also regrettable.

But these are minor criticisms that cannot detract from an accessible and exciting overview of a distinct people who had an outsized impact on the history of Medieval Europe and beyond. As Levi Roach relates in his animated prose, theirs was truly a real life ‘Game of Thrones’, involving treachery, the clash of armies, and strategically calculated family unions. Because Empires of the Normans is equal parts entertaining and informative, it makes for an excellent introduction for anyone seeking to learn about this most restless of people.

Note: Empire of the Normans is also available in audio- and e-editions.

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