the island, and the brief cessation of their direct raids on the mainland which began c. 889 did not last long.
Subdivision and intestine wars for independence and predominance paralysed South Italy in its struggle against the Saracens. The greatest power there was the Byzantine Empire, after Basil I and his general Nicephorus Phocas had revived its power in the West. Two themes were set up in Italy, each under its strategos or general[1], that of Longobardia with its capital at Bari which included Apulia and Lucania from the river Trigno on the Adriatic to the Gulf of Taranto, and that of Calabria with its capital at Reggio which represented the vanished theme of Sicily. These detached and frontier provinces, usually scantily supplied with troops and money owing to the greater needs of the core of the Empire, were beset with difficulties occasioned by hostility of the Italians to the corrupt and foreign Greek officials. The Lombard subjects in Apulia were actively or potentially disloyal; and a long strip of debateable land formed the western part of the Longobardic theme, which was always claimed by the Lombard principality of Benevento, its ancient possessor. Then there were the native Italian states, all considered as its vassals by Byzantium in spite of the competing pretensions of the Western Empire. Three of these, Gaeta, Naples and Amalfi, were coast towns, never conquered by the Lombards, and, like Venice, had long enjoyed a complete autonomy without formally denying their allegiance to East Rome. They were all now monarchies, all trading, and all inclined to ally with the Saracens, who were at once their customers and their principal dread. The three remaining states were Lombard, the principalities of Benevento and Salerno and the county of Capua. The prince of Salerno acknowledged Byzantine suzerainty. Benevento had been conquered by the Greeks in 891, only to be recovered by the native dynasty under the auspices of the Spoletan Emperors of the West, and then conquered by Atenolf I of Capua in 899. This union of Capua and Benevento was the beginning of some kind of order in a troubled land, hitherto torn by the struggle of furious competitors.
It was the Saracen plague, however, which at length brought the petty states to act together. If the invasion of Calabria by the half-mad Aghlabid Ibrāhīm who had conquered Taormina, the last Byzantine stronghold of Sicily, and threatened to destroy in his holy war Rome itself, "the city of the dotard Peter," ended in his death before Cosenza in 902, and civil wars distracted Sicily till she submitted to the new Fatimite Caliphate at Ḳairawān; the Moslems of the Garigliano still ate like an ulcer into the land. The countryside was depopulated, the great abbeys, Monte Cassino, Farfa, Subiaco and Volturno, were destroyed and deserted. At last the warring Christians were so dismayed as to be reconciled, and Atenolf of Capua turned to the one strong power which
- ↑ See for the system of themes Vol. IV. and its maps.
