The Normans at Civitate, 1053 (MED0094)

The Normans at Civitate, 1053

In June 1053, near Civitate in Apulia, a few hundred Norman knights faced the army assembled by Pope Leo IX to drive them out of southern Italy. They won, captured the pope and held him for nine months. The episode compresses into a few hours what the Normans achieved in the south over two generations: they arrived as mercenaries and ended up governing.

From mercenaries to lords

The first Normans had reached Apulia and Campania early in the eleventh century, hired in turn by Lombard princes, by the Byzantines and by their opponents. They were landless younger sons from a duchy where inheritance went to the eldest, selling the only asset they had: the ability to fight on horseback. Within thirty years the sons of Tancred de Hauteville had turned contracts into counties, and counties into an autonomous lordship nobody had authorised.

Why Civitate mattered

The papal army was a composite force: Swabian contingents sent by the emperor, Italian militias, locally raised troops. The Normans, under Humphrey de Hauteville, Richard of Aversa and Robert Guiscard, fielded homogeneous cavalry trained to charge in close order. They struck the weaker wings first, scattered them, then turned on the Swabian infantry, which fought to annihilation. It was a victory of quality over numbers, and the pope was left negotiating with the men he had come to expel.

Equipment

Giuseppe Rava shows the Norman knight of the mid-eleventh century: mail hauberk split for the saddle, conical helmet with nasal, kite shield — a shape developed precisely to protect the leg of a mounted man — lance and long sword. It is the same equipment that would fight at Hastings in 1066, on the other front of Norman expansion.

Consequences

Six years later at Melfi the papacy formally recognised Robert Guiscard as duke of Apulia and Calabria in exchange for vassalage: from enemies to defenders of the Church. From that base the Normans took Sicily from the Arabs over thirty years of campaigning and founded the kingdom that would unify the Italian south.