Joanna H. Drell, Kinship and Conquest: Family Strategies in the Principality of Salerno during the Norman Period, 1077-1194. Cornell University Press, 2002 (original) (raw)
Related papers
County and Nobility in Norman Italy. Aristocratic Agency in the Kingdom of Sicily, 1130–1189
Bloomsbury Academic, 2020
Whilst historians often regard the Norman Kingdom of Sicily as centralised and administratively advanced, County and Nobility in Norman Italy counters this traditional interpretation; far from centralised and streamlined, this book reveals how the genesis and social structures of the kingdom were constantly fraught between the forces of royal power and a re-invented local aristocracy. The result of thorough research conducted on the vast source material for the history of this fascinating twelfth-century world, this book sheds important new light on medieval Italy.
The Pervasiveness of Lordship (Italy, 1050–1500)
Past and Present, 2022
The impact of medieval lordship on the society it dominated has not received the attention it deserves. This article stresses the need to look at lordship from the bottom up, making an effort to understand how much and in which ways lordship weighed on the life of subjects, by developing the notion of its ‘pervasiveness’. Such a concept is arguably the most effective if we want to evaluate how seigneurial power was more, or less, able and willing to deeply influence the people subject to it. It highlights that in the world of lordship there was a disconnect (or at least potentially) between political power and socio-economic domination. Which factors enabled lordships to become pervasive, and which lords, from which regions, were best equipped with these characteristics? Using the influential French historiographical framework as a starting point, the article considers as case studies a set of signorie in several Italian regions. It highlights the differences between the great territorial lordships of the counts of the Kingdom of Sicily, the barons of Rome and the lords of Lombardy, on the one side, and the innumerable knightly lordships at a lower level on the other. The use of pervasiveness helps us to re-conceptualize lordship itself with different criteria.
Ex Historia, 2016
The ruling class and the nobility had undoubtedly changed in almost a century since the Normans settled in the south; but despite the existence of new formal polities, the territory that would later form the kingdom of Sicily was still submerged in a quarrelling polyarchy in 1127. In the words of the royal apologist Alexander of Telese, ‘just as the great wickedness of the Lombards was formerly overcome by the violence of the Normans when they arrived, in the same way now it is certain that it was either given or permitted to Roger by Heaven to coerce the immense malice of these lands by his sword.’ It is in this complex political reality that the first step towards the counts’ new organisation took place. But, how did the counties in the middle of the twelfth century differ from the lordships held by the counts when the kingdom was founded? To what extent did the new monarchy employ the creation of counts and counties for either restructuring the organisation of the mainland or rewarding loyal territorial leaders? These are ambitious questions, and in the space available here I can at best offer a sketch, rather than a finished picture. One principal aspect of these questions is nevertheless considered: the changes to the comital class during King Roger’s new monarchy.
White Rose College of the Arts & Humanities Journal, 2016
One the of most interesting documents concerning the social and political history of the Norman Kingdom of Sicily can be found in the first instance in Giuseppe Del Giudice’s appendix to his diplomatic collection of Angevin documents. The document records Robert, Count of Civitate, restoring some lands that Robert Guiscard and Roger II had formerly granted to Abbot Unfredus of Terra Maggiore, and agreeing upon some exemptions and privileges. The edited document, though seemingly unimportant and relevant only at a local level, is not only crucial for the understanding of King Roger’s rearrangement of the nobility and their dominions in the mainland. What I argue here is that it also exemplifies the contemporary usage of the notion of county as a construction of something more than just a ‘countship,’ and rather a cluster of lordships defined by the social role exercised by the Norman count.
Striving for a Comital Title. The Disputed Succession to the County of Guînes, 1137-1142
This paper will not focus on prominent princes and their brilliant estates, but rather on "small" counts and comital lordships that flourished at the periphery of most French principalities. As you know, these smaller counties were castle-based centers of lay authority, held by ancient families keen to defend their political autonomy and local privileges, both against princely (or royal) centralization and against the pretentions of surrounding castellan lords.
Medieval Prosopography, 2019
When the Sicilian monarchy was established after years of conflict, King Roger II began to consolidate his authority on the Italian peninsula. The establishment of titles for the organization and control of the continental provinces has been noted by several scholars as an instrumental feature of the kingdom’s social arrangement. Yet, contemporary scholarship has dismissed the royal comestabuli as unimportant social agents, either as 'officials' documented in the Catalogus Baronum or as territorial lords. As a result, several questions surrounding the issue remain unanswered: to what extent did the local, lesser aristocracy shape the kingdom’s effective social, and military, control over Southern Italy, and who were the nodal characters that allow us to discern this process? Was a comestabulia a fixed administrative district, or rather a type of social authority? This article offers the results of a recent prosopographical exploration of South Italian sources for the Norman period. By taking the comestabuli as a starting point, I study the intermediary position that particular barons held as both royal agents and para-comital supervisors of the military contingents levied from the kingdom’s aristocracy. This article attempts not only to shed some light on this almost ignored class of functionaries, but also to further explore the social roles established amongst the Italo-Norman nobility.
thirteenth century was an era of growing population, extensive land clearance, expanding towns and rapid social mobility. Governments grew more powerful and legal systems more complex. Distinctions of legal and social rank also became more elaborate. All these developments affected the aristocracy of thirteenth-century Europe, but none will serve to define the aristocracy itself as a group within society. Rather, the aristocracy of thirteenth-century Europe defined itself by its self-conscious adherence to a European-wide set of common cultural values and assumptions embodied in the cult of chivalric knighthood. Before we discuss how the aristocracy changed, we must first know who they were. It is with chivalry, therefore, that we must begin.