neighbouring count — a protection which might too easily be converted into a tyranny. The Lombards retained their own laws and customs, but they were despised by their Greek lords, and ground down by fiscal oppression. Hence arose perpetual revolts, perpetual attempts to expel the foreigner. The Saxon emperors came to the aid of those whom they affected to consider their own oppressed subjects; but without success. The first two Othos had to retire discomfited, the third died in Campania in the bloom of youth. The Lombards now sought help from the warrior-pilgrims who had landed on their shores, and yet the first attempt of the Normans also ended in signal disaster. And when the day of deliverance came at Melfi, the natives merely underwent a change of rulers. Southern Italy was regained for the West; the new masters of the Lombards were of like race with their subjects, and the Normans, if not more liked, were perhaps less hated than the Greeks.
The previous history of Sicily had been different. Owing to its position the island remained in possession of the Greeks from the time of Belisarius till its conquest by the Arabs in the ninth century. After being subject to the African caliphs for one hundred years, it acquired independent emirs of its own. Under infidel dominion respect was had for the laws and customs of the previous inhabitants; art and science flourished; but political dissensions which ensued after the separation from Africa weakened the powers of defence, and the resistance which Roger encountered, though often determined, was never united.
Such being the character of the conquerors and the circumstances of the subject peoples, it is easy to understand the peculiar features of the conquest itself; and both in manner and in result the conquest of the mainland differed greatly from that of the island kingdom.
We cannot follow the chroniclers into the details of the conquest. It will suffice to call attention to the nature of the foundation at Melfi. It was based on a federative principle. Each of the twelve chiefs obtained a city and district of his own, and each a distinct quarter in the federal capital. There too all general councils were to be held, thence all general edicts promulgated. William of the Iron Hand, the eldest of the sons of Tancred, was chief of the confederacy — chief by election of his peers. He acknowledged a titular supremacy in the Lombard prince of Salerno, whilst his brother and successor, Drogo, four years afterwards, following the example of the early Norman counts of Aversa, received investiture from the hands of the Western emperor. The original conquest of Apulia, therefore, was at once feudal and federal. Not so that of Sicily. Feudal institutions and customs were introduced into the island by the conquerors for the regulation of their own political and social life, but federalism never.
Furthermore, these many masters at Melfi were a perpetual source of weakness to the Norman power. Guiscard reduced them to subjection. but on his death the minority of his children — that curse of the Norman-Sicilian kingdom — undid his work. Each successive sovereign had to recover this supremacy for himself, and the desertion of the Apulian barons at the battle of Benevento was but the last act in a long drama of treachery.
Whilst on the mainland the Normans affected to be champions of liberty against foreign oppressors, in Sicily they assumed the character of crusaders. The conquest of the island was a holy war of Christian against infidel. "I would desire," says Guiscard to his knights, "to deliver the Christians and the Catholics from their subjection to the unbeliever. I desire much to rescue them from this oppression, and to avenge the injury done to God." Such ever afterwards was the orthodox mode of speaking of the conquest. Neither Robert nor Roger, it is true, wanted any fellow-crusaders to join them in their enterprise. They embarked in it at their own risk, and they meant to reap the benefit of it for themselves. That the Sicilian Christians in most cases helped the conquerors against the infidel is probable; that they did not in all has been conclusively shown by Signor Amari.
Let us turn now from the conquerors to the conquered, and examine, with the help of Signor Amari, what was the social and political condition of the Greek and Mussulman subjects of the Norman kingdom. We shall find that during the best period toleration, religious and political, was a reality. We shall find the Greek, the Mussulman, and the Lombard (for in the country round Etna there was a large Lombard colony, then lately settled and still there resident) living peacefully side by side under the powerful protection of the Norman princes.
When Palermo was surrendered by the Mussulmans to Roger, a Greek archbishop was found in the city enjoying full liberty
