At the death of Charlemagne the Empire that he had built up stretched from Denmark to the Pyrenees and the Duchy of Spoletum south of Rome, from the Atlantic on the West to the Baltic, Bohemia, and the Dalmatian coast. It had been a brave attempt to realize the old Roman ideal of all civilized Europe gathered under one ruler; but he himself was well aware that the foundations he had laid were weak, his own personality that must vanish the mortar holding them together. Without his genius and the terror of his name his possessions were only too likely to fall away; and therefore, instead of attempting to leave a united Empire, he nominated one son to be emperor in name, but made a rough division of his territory between three. Only the death of two just before his own defeated his aims and united the inheritance under the survivor, Louis.

The new Emperor was like his father in build, but without his wideness of outlook. His natural geniality was sometimes marred by uncontrollable fits of suspicion and cruelty, as in the case of his nephew, Bernard, King of Italy, whom he believed to be secretly conspiring to bring about his overthrow. Louis ordered the young man to appear at his court, and when Bernard hesitated, fearing treachery, his uncle sent him a special promise of safety by the Empress, whom he trusted. Reluctantly Bernard at last obeyed the summons, whereupon he was seized, thrust into a dungeon, and his eyes put out so cruelly that he died. Shortly afterwards the Empress died also, and Louis who had loved her believed that God was punishing him for his broken word. Overcome by remorse he became so devout in his religious observances that his subjects called him ‘Louis the Pious’. Louis, like his father, was ever ready to listen to the petitions of those who were oppressed and to pass laws for their security. For the first sixteen years of his reign the Carolingian dominions, put to no test, appeared unshaken, and then of a sudden, just as if a cloud were blotting out the sunlight, prosperity and peace were lost in the horrors of civil war.

Louis the Pious had three sons by his first wife, and following Charlemagne’s example he named the eldest, Lothar, as his successor in the Empire, while he divided his lands between the other two. It was only when he married again and another son, Charles, was born to him that trouble began. This fourth son was the old Emperor’s favourite, and Louis would gladly have left him a large kingdom; but such a gift he could only make now at the expense of the elder brothers, who hated the young boy as an interloper, and were determined that he should receive nothing to which they could lay a claim.

When Charles was six years old Louis insisted that the country now called Switzerland and part of modern Germany (Suabia) should be recognized as his inheritance; and on hearing this all three elder brothers, who had been secretly making disloyal plots, broke into open revolt.

The history of the next ten years is an ignominious chronicle of the Emperor’s weakness. Twice were he and his Empress imprisoned and insulted; and on each occasion, when the quarrels of his sons amongst themselves led to his release, he was induced to grant a weak forgiveness that led to further rebellion.

When Louis died in 840, the seeds of dissension were widely scattered; and those of his House who came after him openly showed that they cared for nothing save personal ambition. Lothar, the eldest, was proclaimed Emperor, and obtained as his share of the dominions a large middle kingdom stretching from the mouth of the Rhine to Italy, and including the two capitals of Aachen and Rome. To the East, in what is now Germany, reigned his brother Louis, to the West, in France, Charles ‘the Bald’, the hated younger brother who had succeeded at the last in obtaining a substantial inheritance.

This division is interesting because it shows two of the nationalities of Europe already emerging from the imperial melting-pot. When the brothers Louis and Charles met at Strasbourg in 842 to confirm an alliance they had formed against Lothar, Charles and his followers took the oath in German, Louis and his nobles in the Romance tongue of which modern French is the descendant. This they did that the armies on both sides might clearly understand how their leaders had bound themselves, and the Oath of Strasbourg remains to-day as evidence of this new growth of nationality that had already acquired distinct national tongues.

The Partition of Verdun, signed shortly afterwards by all three brothers, acknowledged the division of the Empire into three parts, France on the West, Germany in the East, and between them the debatable kingdom of Lotharingia, that, dwindled during the Middle Ages and modern times into the province of Lorraine, has remained always a source of war and trouble.

It would be wearisome to trace in detail the history of the years that followed the Partition of Verdun. One historian has described it as ‘a dizzy and unintelligible spectacle of monotonous confusion, a scene of unrestrained treachery, of insatiable and blind rapacity. No son is obedient or loyal to his father, no brother can trust his brother, no uncle spares his nephew.... There were rapid alterations in fortune, rapid changing of sides, there was universal distrust and universal reliance on falsehood or crime.’

In 881 Charles ‘the Fat’, son of Louis the German, of Strasbourg Oath fame, succeeded, owing to the deaths of his rival cousins and uncles, in uniting for a few years all the dominions of Charlemagne under his sceptre; but, weak and unhealthy, he was not the man to control so great possessions, and very shortly he was deposed and died in prison on an island in Lake Constance. With him faded away the last reflection of the Carolingian glory that had once dazzled the world. In France the descendants of Charles ‘the Bald’ carried on a precarious existence for several generations, despised and threatened by their own nobles, as the later Merovingians had been, and utterly unable to defend their land from the hostile invasions of Northmen, that, beginning in the eighth century, seemed likely during the ninth and tenth centuries to paralyse the civilization and trade of Europe as the inroads of Goths, Huns, and Vandals had broken up the Roman Empire.

The long ships of the Northmen had been seen off the French coasts even in the days of Charlemagne, and one of the chroniclers records how the wise king seeing them exclaimed, ‘These vessels bear no merchandise but cruel foes,’ and then continued, with prophetic grief, ‘Know ye why I weep? Truly I fear not that these will injure me; but I am deeply grieved that in my lifetime they should be so near a landing on these shores, and I am overwhelmed with sorrow as I look forward and see what evils they will bring upon my offspring and their people.’

The Northmen, we can guess from their name, came from the wild, often snow-bound, coasts of Scandinavia and Denmark. Few weaklings could survive in such a climate; and the race was tall, well built, and hardy, made up of men and women who despised the fireside and loved to feel the fresh sea-wind beating against their faces. Life to them was a perpetual struggle, but a struggle they had glorified into an ideal, until they had ceased to dread either its discomforts or dangers.

Here is a description of the three classes, thrall, churl, and noble, into which these tribes of Northmen, or ‘Vikings’, were divided.

‘Thrall was swarthy of skin, his hands wrinkled, his knuckles bent, his fingers thick, his face ugly, his back broad, his heels long. He began to put forth his strength binding bast, making loads, and bearing home faggots the weary day long. His children busied themselves with building fences, dunging ploughland, tending swine, herding goats, and digging peat.... Carl, or Churl, was red and ruddy, with rolling eyes, and took to breaking oxen, building ploughs, timbering houses, and making carts. Earl, the noble, had yellow hair, his cheeks were rosy, his eyes were keen as a young serpent’s. His occupation was shaping the shield, bending the bow, hurling the javelin, shaking the lance, riding horses, throwing dice, fencing and swimming. He began to wake war, to redden the field, and to fell the doomed.’

‘To wake war.’ This was the object of the Viking’s existence. His gods, ‘Odin’ and ‘Thor’, were battle heroes who struck one another in the flash of lightning and with the rumble of thunder as they moved their shields. Not for the man who lived long and comfortably and died at last in his bed were either the glory of this world or the joys of the next. The Scandinavian ‘Valhalla’ was no such ‘paradise’ as the faithful Moslems conceived, where, in sunlit gardens gay with fruit and flowers, he should rest from his labours, attended by ‘houris’, or maidens of celestial beauty. The Viking asked for no rest, only for unfailing strength and a foe to kill. In the halls of his paradise reigned perpetual battle all the day long, and, in the evening, feasts where the warrior, miraculously cured of his wounds, could boast of his prowess and rise again on the morrow to fresh deeds of heroic slaughter.

In their dragon-ships, the huge prows fashioned into the heads of fierce animals or monsters, the Viking ‘Earls’, weary of dicing and throwing the javelin at home, or exiled by their kings for some misdeeds, would sweep in fleets across the North Sea, some to explore Iceland and the far-off shores of Greenland and North America, some to burn the monasteries along the Irish coast, others to raid North Germany, France, or England. At first their only object was plunder, for unlike the Huns they did not despise the luxuries of civilization—only those who allowed its influence to make them ‘soft’. At a later date, when they met with little resistance, they began to build homes, and thus the east coast of England became settled with Danish colonies.

‘In this year’, says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, writing under the date 855, ‘the heathen men for the first time remained over winter in Sheppey.’

During the fifty years that followed it seemed as if the invaders might sweep away the Anglo-Saxons as completely as the ancestors of these Anglo-Saxons had exterminated the original British inhabitants and their Roman conquerors. That they failed was largely due to one of the most famous of English kings, Alfred ‘the Great’, a prince of the royal house of Wessex. Wessex was a province lying mainly to the south of the River Thames, and at Wantage in Berkshire in the year 849 Alfred was born, cradled in an atmosphere of war and danger. From boyhood he fought by the side of his brothers in a long campaign of which the very victories could not hold at bay the restless Danes. When Alfred succeeded to the throne he secured a temporary peace and began to build a fleet and reform his army; but in a few years his enemies broke across his boundaries once more, and he himself, overwhelmed by their numbers, was forced to take refuge in the marshes of Somerset. Here at Athelney he built a fort and, collecting round him the English warriors of the neighbouring counties, organized so strong a resistance that at last he inflicted a decisive defeat upon the Danish army. King Guthrum, his enemy, sued for peace and at the Treaty of Wedmore consented to become a Christian and to recognize Alfred as King of Wessex, while he himself retained the Danelaw to the north of the Thames.

This was the beginning of a new England, for from this time Alfred and his descendants, having secured the freedom of Wessex, set themselves to win back bit by bit the territory held by the Danes. First of all under Edward ‘the Elder’, Alfred’s son, the middle kingdom of Mercia was won back, and the Danes beyond its border agreed to recognize the King of Wessex as their overlord, while later other Wessex rulers overran Northumbria and the South of Scotland, so that by the middle of the tenth century it could be said that ‘England from the Forth to the Channel was under one ruler’.

The winning back of the Danelaw had not been merely a matter of hewing down Northmen, nor did Alfred earn his title of ‘the Great’ because he could wield a sword bravely and lead other men who could do the same. He was a successful general because in an age of wild fighting he recognized the value of discipline and training. In order to obtain the type of men he required he increased the number of ‘Thegns’, that is, of nobles whose duty it was to serve the King as horsemen, while he reorganized the ‘fyrd’ or local militia. Henceforth, instead of a large army of peasants, who must be sent to their homes every autumn to reap the harvest, he arranged for the maintenance of a small force that he could keep in the field as long as required. Its arms were to be supplied by fellow villagers released from the obligation to serve themselves on this condition.

Alfred, besides remodelling his army, set up fortresses along his borders, and constructed a fleet; and, because he believed that no great nation can be built on war alone, he made wise laws and appointed judges, like Charlemagne’s Missi, to see that they were carried out. He also founded schools and tried, by translating books himself and inviting scholars to his court, to teach the men around him the glories and interests of peace. Amongst the books that he chose to set before his people in the Anglo-Saxon tongue was one called Pastoral Care, by the Pope Gregory who had wished to go to England as a missionary, and The Consolations of Philosophy, written by Boethius in prison.4

‘I have desired,’ said Alfred the Great, summing up his ideal of life, ‘to leave to the men who come after me my memory in good works’; and English people to-day, descendants of both Anglo-Saxons and their Danish foes, remember with pride and affection this ‘Wise King’, this ‘Truth-teller’, this ‘England’s darling’, as he was called in his own day, who like Charlemagne believed in patriotism, justice, and knowledge. For three-quarters of a century after Alfred’s death his descendants kept alive something at any rate of this spirit of greatness, but in 978 there succeeded to the crown a boy of ten called Ethelred, who as he grew up earned for himself the nickname of ‘rede-less’ or ‘man without advice’.

It is only fair before condemning Ethelred’s conduct to point out the heavy difficulties with which he was faced; both the renewed Danish attacks on his shores, and also the jealousies and feuds of his own nobles, the Earls, or ‘Ealdormen’, who had carved out large estates for themselves that they ruled as petty kings. Even a statesman like Alfred would have needed all his strength and tact to unite these powerful subjects under one banner in order to lead them against the invaders. Ethelred proved himself weak and without any power of leadership. The policy for which he has been chiefly remembered is his levy of a tax called ‘Danegeld’, or Danish gold, the sums of money that he raised from his reluctant subjects to pay the Danes to go away. As a wiser man would have realized, this really meant that he paid them to return in still larger numbers in order to obtain more money. At last, alarmed at the result of this policy, he did something still more short-sighted and less defensible: he ordered a general massacre of all the Danes in the kingdom.

The Massacre of St. Brice’s Day, as this drastic measure is usually called, brought on England a bitter revenge at the hands of the angry Vikings. One well-armed force after another landed on the coasts, combining in an attack on the Anglo-Saxon King that drove him from the country to seek refuge in France. Very shortly afterwards he died, and Cnut, one of the Danish leaders, forced the country to accept him as her ruler.

This accession of a Danish foe might have been expected to undo all the work of Alfred and his sons, but fortunately for England Cnut was no reckless Viking with his heart set on war for war’s sake. On the contrary, he was by nature a statesman who planned the foundation of a northern Empire with England as its central point. He maintained a bodyguard of Danish ‘Hus carls’ supported by a tax levied on his new subjects in order to ensure his personal safety and the fulfilment of his orders, but otherwise he showed himself an Englishman in every way he could. In especial he made large gifts to monasteries and convents, bestowed favour and lands on English nobles, and accepted the laws and customs of the country whose throne he had usurped. King of Denmark, and conqueror of England and Norway, he was anxious to ally his Empire with the nations of the Continent. With this in view he went on a pilgrimage to Rome to win the sympathy of the Pope and took a great deal of trouble to arrange foreign alliances. He himself married Emma, widow of Ethelred ‘the Rede-less’, and a sister of the Duke of Normandy, thus pleasing the English and bringing himself into touch with France.

The mention of Normandy brings us to a second invasion of Northmen, for the Normans, like Cnut himself, were of Scandinavian origin. When some of the Vikings during the ninth century had sailed up the Humber and the Thames in the search of plunder and homes, others, as Charlemagne, according to the chronicler, had foreseen, preferred the harbours of the Seine, the Somme, and the Loire. In their methods they showed the same reckless daring and brutality as the early invaders of England, leaving where they passed smoking ruins of towns and churches.

Charles ‘the Bald’ and the feeble remnant of the Carolingian line who succeeded him were quite unable to deal with this terror, and it was only the creation of a Duchy of Paris, whose forces were commanded by a fighting hero, Odo Capet, that saved the future capital of France.

‘History repeats itself,’ it is sometimes said; and certainly the fate that the Carolingian ‘Mayors of the Palace’ had meted out to their Merovingian kings their own descendants were destined to receive again in full measure.

In 987 died Louis ‘the Good-for-nothing’, the last of the Carolingian kings, leaving as heir to the throne an uncle, Charles, Duke of Lorraine. In his short reign Louis had shown himself feeble and profligate; and the nobles of northern France, weary of a royal House that like Ethelred of England preferred bribing the goodwill of invaders to fighting them, readily agreed to set Charles on one side and to take in his place Hugh Capet, Duke of Paris, descendant of the famous Odo.

‘Our crown goes not by inheritance,’ exclaimed the Archbishop of Reims, when sanctioning the usurper’s claims, ‘but by wisdom and noble blood.’

The unfortunate Duke of Lorraine, captured after a vain attempt to gain his inheritance, perished in prison, and with him disappeared the Carolingians. The House of Capet, built on their ruin, survived in the direct line until the fourteenth century, and then in a younger branch, the Valois, until France in modern times was declared a republic.

Under the Capets France became not merely a collection of tribes and races as under the Merovingians, nor a section of a European Empire as under the House of Charlemagne, but a nation as we see her to-day, with separate interests and customs to distinguish her from other nations. This process of fusion was slow, and King Hugh and his immediate successors appeared in their own day more as powerful rulers of the small district in which they lived than as overlords of France. When they marched abroad at the head of a large army, achieving victories, outlying provinces hastily recognized them as suzerains, or overlords, but when they turned their backs and went home, the commands they had issued would be ignored and defied.

Amongst the most formidable neighbours of these rulers of Paris were the Dukes of Normandy, descendants of a certain Viking chief, Rollo ‘the Ganger’, so called because on account of his size he could find no horse capable of bearing him and must therefore ‘gang afoot’. This Rollo established himself at Rouen, and because Charles ‘the Simple’, one of the later Carolingians,5 was unable to defeat him in battle he gave him instead the lands which he had won, and created him Duke, hoping that like a poacher turned gamekeeper he might prove as valuable a subject as he had been a troublesome foe. In return Rollo promised to become a Christian and to acknowledge Charles as his overlord. One of the old chronicles says that when Rollo was asked to ratify this allegiance by kissing his toe, the Viking replied indignantly, ‘Not so, by God!’ and that a Dane who consented to do so in his place was so rough that he tumbled Charles from his throne amid the jeers of his companions.

This is probably only a tale, for in reality Rollo married a daughter of Charles and settled down in his capital at Rouen as the model ruler of a semi-civilized state, supporting the Church, and administering such law and order that it was said when he left a massive bracelet hanging on a tree and forgot he had done so, that the ornament remained for three years without any one daring to steal it.

The rulers of the new Duchy were nearly all strong men, hard fighters, shrewd-headed, and ambitious; but the greatest of the line was undoubtedly William, an illegitimate son of Duke Robert ‘the Devil’. William’s ambition was of the restless type of his Scandinavian forefathers, and his duchy in northern France seemed to him too small to match his hopes. When he noted that England was ruled by Edward ‘the Confessor’, a feeble son of Ethelred ‘the Rede-less’, who had gained the throne on the death of Cnut’s two sons, he determined shrewdly that his conquests should lie in this direction. Many things favoured his cause, not the least that Edward the Confessor himself, who had been brought up in Normandy and who had no direct heirs, was quite willing to acknowledge William as his successor.

The national hero of England at the time Edward died, and who promptly proclaimed himself king, was Harold the Saxon, a member of the powerful family of Godwin that had for years controlled and owned the greater part of the land in the south.

Unfortunately for Harold the north and midlands were mainly governed by the House of Morkere and their friends, who hated the family of Godwin as dangerous rivals far more than they dreaded a Norman invasion. Thus any help that they or their tenants proffered was so slow in its rendering and so niggardly in its amount that it proved of very little use.

In addition to jealousies at home, Harold, at the moment that he heard William, Duke of Normandy, had indeed landed on the south coast, was far off in Yorkshire, where he had just succeeded in repelling an invasion of Danes at the battle of Stamford Bridge. At once he started southwards, but as he marched his army melted away, some of the men to enjoy the spoils taken from the Danes, others to attend to their harvests.

The deserters could claim that they were following the advice of the Father of Christendom, since Pope Gregory VII had given William a banner that he had blessed and had denounced Harold as a perjurer.

One of the reasons for Gregory’s anger with the Saxons was that Harold had dared to appoint as Archbishop of Canterbury a bishop of whom he did not approve, while further the crafty William had persuaded him that Harold, who as a young man had been wrecked upon the Norman coast, had sworn on the bones of some holy saint that he would never seize the crown of England. He had been a prisoner in William’s power and only on this condition had he been set free to return to his native land.

The exact truth of events so long ago is hard to reach; but Harold, at any rate, fought under a cloud of suspicion and neglect, and not all his reckless daring, nor the devotion of his brothers and friends, could save his fortunes when on the field of Senlac, standing beneath his dragon-banner, he met the shock of the disciplined Norman forces. Chroniclers relate that the human wall of Saxon archers and foot-soldiers remained unshaken on the hill-side until William, setting a snare, turned in pretended flight. The ruse was successful; for as the Saxons, cheering triumphantly, descended from their position in pursuit, the invaders faced round and charged their disordered ranks. Only Harold and the men of his bodyguard remained firm under the onslaught, until at the last an arrow fired in the air struck the Saxon King in the eye as he looked up, so that he fell down dead. All resistance was now at an end and William, Duke of Normandy, was left master of the field and ruler of England.

These lines of Tennyson on ‘Battle Abbey’ recall the fact that just as the Danes and Saxons were fused into one race, so would the Norman invaders mingle with their descendants, until to after-generations William as well as Harold should appear a national hero.

In his own day ‘the Conqueror’ struck terror into the heart of the conquered. In 1069, when the North of England, too late to help Harold, rose in revolt, he laid waste a desert by sword and fire from the Humber to the Tees. When the Norman barons and English earls challenged his rule he threw them alike into dungeons. What seemed to the Saxon mind even more wonderful and horrible than his cruelty was the record of all the wealth of his kingdom that he caused to be compiled. This ‘Domesday Book’ contained a close account not only of the great estates, lay and ecclesiastical, but of every small hamlet, and even of the number of live stock on each farm.

‘So very narrowly did he cause the survey to be made,’ says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ‘that there was not a single hide nor a rood of land, nor (it is shameful to relate that which he thought no shame to do) was there an ox, or a cow, or a pig, passed by that was not set down in the account.’

William, it can be seen, was thorough in his methods, both in war and peace, and through this very thoroughness he won the respect if not the affection of his new subjects. Ever since the death of Cnut the Dane, England had suffered either from actual civil war or from a weak ruler who allowed his nobles to quarrel and oppress the rest of the nation. As a result of the Norman Conquest the bulk of the population found that they had gained one tyrant instead of many; and how they appreciated the change is shown by the way, all through Norman times, the middle and lower classes would help their foreign king against his turbulent baronage.

This is what a monk, an Anglo-Saxon, and therefore by race an enemy of the Conqueror, wrote about him in his chronicle:

‘If any would know what manner of man King William was ... then will we describe him as we have known him.... This King William ... was a very wise and a great man, and more honoured and more powerful than any of his predecessors. He was mild to those good men who loved God, but severe beyond measure to those who withstood his will.... So also he was a very stern and wrathful man, so that none durst do anything against his will, and he kept in prison those Earls who acted against his pleasure. He removed bishops from their sees ... and at length he spared not his own brother Odo.

‘Amongst other things the good order that William established must not be forgotten; it was such that any man who was himself aught might travel over the kingdom with a bosom full of gold unmolested, and no man durst kill another, however great the injury he might have received from him.’

A few lines farther on the chronicler, having mentioned the peace that William gave, sadly relates the tyranny that was the price he extorted in exchange:

‘Truly there was much trouble in these times and very great distress; he caused castles to be built and oppressed the poor.... He was given to avarice and greedily loved gain. He made large forests for the deer, and enacted laws therewith, so that whoever killed a hart or a hind should be blinded ..., he loved the tall stags as if he were their father. He also appointed concerning the hares that they should go free. The rich complained and the poor murmured, but he was so sturdy that he recked nought of them; they must will all that the king willed if they would live.... Alas that any man should so exalt himself.... May Almighty God show mercy to his soul!’

The monk wrote after September 1087, when the Conqueror lay dead. Not in any Viking glory of battle against a national foe had he passed to his fathers, but in sordid struggle with his eldest son Robert who, aided by the French king, had rebelled against him. His crown was at once seized by his second son William Rufus, and with him the line of Norman kings was firmly established on the English throne.

The adventurous spirit of the Northmen had led them from Denmark and Scandinavia to the coasts of England and France; and from France their descendants, driven by the same roving instincts, had crossed the Channel in search of fresh conquests. Other Normans in the eleventh century sailed south instead of north. Their talk was of a pilgrimage to Rome, perhaps to the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem; but when they found that the beautiful island of Sicily had been taken by the Moslems, and that South Italy was divided up amongst a number of princes too jealous of one another to unite against any invaders either Christian or pagan, their thoughts turned quite naturally to conquest.

An Italian of this time describes the Normans as ‘cunning and revengeful’, and adds: ‘In their eager search for wealth and dominion they despise whatever they possess and hope whatever they desire.’ Such an impression was to be gained by bitter experience; but not knowing it, Maniaces, the Greek governor of that part of South Italy that still maintained its allegiance to the Eastern Empire, invited these Northern warriors in the eleventh century to help him win back Sicily from the Saracens. They agreed, attacked in force, gained the greater part of the island, but then quarrelled with Maniaces over the spoils. Outraged by what they considered his miserly conduct, they invaded the province of Apulia, made themselves master of it, and established their capital at Melfi.

The head of the new Norman state was a certain William de Hauteville, who with several of his brothers had been leaders in the Italian expedition.

‘No member of the House of Hauteville ever saw a neighbour’s lands without wanting them for himself.’ So says a biographer of that family; and if this was their ideal it was certainly shared by William and his numerous brothers. Since other people’s possessions were not surrendered without a struggle, even in the Middle Ages, it was fortunate for them that they had the genius to win and hold what they coveted.

Pope Leo IX, like his predecessors in the See of Peter ever since Charlemagne had confirmed their right to the lands of the Exarch of Ravenna,6 looked uneasily on invaders of Italy, and he therefore attempted to form a league with both the Emperors of the East and West that should ruin these presumptuous usurpers. The league came into being, but the Pope’s allies failed him, and at the battle of Civitate he was defeated and all but taken prisoner.

Here was a chance for Norman diplomacy, or, as Italians would have called it, ‘cunning’, and the conquerors promptly declared that it had been with the utmost reluctance that they had made war on the Father of Christendom, and begged his forgiveness. His absolution was obtained, and a few years later, through the mediation of Hildebrand, then Archdeacon of Rome and later as Pope Gregory VII, one of the leading statesmen of Europe, a compact was arranged by which the Normans recognized Pope Nicholas II as their overlord, while he, on his part, acknowledged their right to keep their conquests. Both parties to this bargain were pleased: the Pope because he had gained a vassal state however unruly, the Normans since they felt that they no longer reigned on sufferance, but had a legal status in the eyes of Europe. Neither had any idea of the mine of trouble they were laying for future generations.

The fortunes of the House of Hauteville, thus established, mounted steadily. William died and was succeeded by a younger brother, Robert, nicknamed ‘Guiscard’ or ‘the Wise’. During his reign he forced both the Greek governor and the independent princes who held the rest of South Italy to surrender their possessions, while he even carried his war against the Eastern Empire to Greece itself. Only his death put an end to this daring campaign.

Robert Guiscard, as master of South Italy, had been created Duke of Apulia; his nephew, Roger II, Count of Sicily, who inherited his statecraft and strength, induced the Pope to magnify both mainland and island into a joint kingdom, and thereafter reigned as King of Naples. ‘He was a lover of justice’, says a chronicler of his day, ‘and a most severe avenger of crime. He hated lying ... and never promised what he did not mean to perform. He never persecuted his private enemies, and in war endeavoured on all occasions to gain his point without shedding blood. Justice and peace were universally observed through his dominions.’

Roger II of Naples was evidently a finer and more civilized character than William of England; but in both lay that Norman capacity for establishing and maintaining order that at first seems so strange an inheritance from wild Norse ancestors. Clear-sighted, iron-nerved, an adventurer with an instinct for business, the Norman of the Early Middle Ages was just the leaven that Europe required to raise her out of the indolent depression of the ‘Dark Ages’ that followed the fall of Rome.

Supplementary Dates. For Chronological Summary, see pp. 368–73.