Altered Landscapes: The Process of Conquest in the Eleventh-century Norman Chronicles of the Mezzogiorno and Sicily

This dissertation examines the first generation of Latin chronicles patronized by the Norman conquerors of southern Italy and Sicily in the eleventh century: Amatus of Montecassino’s Ystoire de li Normant, William of Apulia’s Gesta Roberti Wiscardi, and, Geoffrey Malaterra’s De Gestis Rogerii Comitis et Roberti Guiscardi Ducis. These chronicles constitute meaningful assertions regarding the nature and actuality of Norman lordship in the region at a time of great precarity for the Siculo-Norman imperial project: the succession of the second generation of Norman lords. Indeed, I argue that these early texts must be examined in their pre-kingdom context, as the heavy work of conquest is often clearest in spaces of imperial precarity and anxiety. In addition, this dissertation is grounded in an understanding of the world-creating function of historical texts. It contends that each chronicle’s curated historical world reveals the ways in which the eternally-incomplete process of conquest continuously remade the collective identities, affinities and alterities, that gave shape to the socio-political, historical, emotional, and geographical landscapes of Norman Italy and Sicily. It first explores the internal logic of each history (and its respective historical world) individually, focusing on the specific preoccupations and aims of each historian, in order to explore their implications for current historians’ understanding of medieval conquest. These three distinct and interconnected worlds are then brought into conversation with each other in order to examine the logic of the Norman conquest more broadly. In particular, this dissertation contends that the process of conquest embodied in these histories was grounded in the twinned forces of alienation and appropriation as the chronicles worked to naturalize the bodies, emotions and lineage of the foreign conquerors within the landscape while simultaneously alienating their local subjects from it. In doing so, the chronicles obscured the rupture inherent in conquest behind the mask of continuity provided by these acts of naturalization.Ph.D