Normans Sentence Examples
With the rest of the north of England, Bridlington suffered from the ravages of the Normans, and decreased in value from £32 in the reign of Edward the Confessor, when it formed part of the possessions of Earl Morcar, to 8s.
But in the view of general history Normans and Northmen must be carefully distinguished.
The Normans in England did not die out; they were merged in the existing nation.
In 1081 the Normans under Robert Guiscard possessed themselves of Durazzo; Guiscard's son Bohemund defeated the Greeks in several battles and again (i 107) laid siege to Durazzo, which had been surrendered to them by treachery; failing to take the city, he retired to Italy in 1109.
It is mentioned so early as the 7th century and in 868 Baldwin of the Iron Arm, first count of Flanders, who had been entrusted by Charles the Bald with the defence of the northern marches, built a castle here against the Normans raiding up the Scheldt.
From one point of view the expeditions of the Normans may be looked on as continuations of the expeditions of the Northmen.
Like as the Norman still is to the Northman, the effects of a settlement of Normans are utterly different from the effects of a settlement of Northmen.
There can be no doubt that the establishment of the Norman power in England was, like the establishment of the Danish power, greatly helped by the essential kindred of Normans, Danes and English.
In fact the Normans met with the steadiest resistance in a part of England which was largely Danish.
These two conquests, wrought in the great island of the Ocean and in the great island of the Mediterranean, were the main works of the Normans after they had fully put on the character of a Christian and French-speaking people, in other words, after they had changed from Northmen into Normans.
AdvertisementThe same spirit of enterprise which brought the Northmen into Gaul seems to carry the Normans out of Gaul into every corner of the world.
He sets the Normans before us as a race specially marked by cunning, despising their own inheritance in the hope of winning a greater, eager after both gain and dominion, given to imitation of all kinds, holding a certain mean between lavishness and greediness - that is, perhaps uniting, as they certainly did, these two seemingly opposite qualities.
The cunning of the Normans is plain enough; so is their impatience of restraint, unless held down by a strong master.
If Normans, as Normans, now exist anywhere, it is certainly only in that insular fragment of the ancient duchy which still cleaves to the successor of its ancient dukes.
But Geoffrey hardly did justice to the Normans if he meant to imply that they were simple imitators of others.
AdvertisementThe Normans did just the same.
It is perhaps less wonderful that this characteristic should have been left out in a picture of the Normans in Apulia and Sicily than if it had been left out in a picture of the Normans in Normandy and England.
The Conqueror beyond doubt sincerely aimed at being a religious reformer both in his duchy and in his kingdom, while it is needless to say that his immediate successor was exceptionally ungodly, whether among Normans or among other men.
His disappearance in both cases is an illustration of one of the features which we have spoken of in the Norman character, the tendency which in fact made Normans out of Northmen, the tendency to adopt the language and manners of the people among whom they found themselves.
By the end of the 12th century the Normans in England might fairly pass as Englishmen, and they had largely adopted the use of the English language.
AdvertisementThe Normans in England therefore became Englishmen, because there was an English nation into which they could be absorbed.
The Normans in Sicily could hardly be said to become Sicilians, for there assuredly was no Sicilian nation for them to be absorbed into.
While the Normans in England were lost among the people of the land, the Normans in Sicily were lost among their fellow-settlers in the land.
The Normans who came into Sicily must have been much less purely Norman than the Normans who came into England.
The army of Duke William was undoubtedly very far from being wholly made up of Normans, but it was a Norman army; the element which was not Norman, though considerable, was exceptional.
AdvertisementStill there was a wide difference between the duke of the Normans and the duke of Apulia, between an hereditary prince of a hundred and fifty years' standing and an adventurer who had carved out his duchy for himself.
And the circumstances of his conquest were such that the true Normans among his following could not possibly lose themselves among the existing inhabitants of the island, while everything tended to make them lose themselves among their fellow-adventurers of other races, among whom, by the time the conquest was ended, they could hardly have been even a dominant element.
The Normans in Sicily, so far as they did not die out, were merged, not in a Sicilian nation, for that did not exist, but in the common mass of settlers of Latin speech and rite, as distinguished from the older inhabitants, Greek and Saracen.
There is a distinction between Christians and Saracens; among Christians there seems to be again a distinction between Greeks and Latins, though perhaps without any distinct use of the Latin name; there is again a further distinction between "Lombardi" and "Franci"; but Normans, as a separate class, do not appear.
That is to say, there were several purposes for which it was convenient to distinguish "English" and "French" - the last name taking in all the followers of the Conqueror; there were no purposes for which there was any need to distinguish Normans as such, either from the general mass of the people or from others who spoke the French tongue.
French, the language which the Normans brought with them, did not become an official language in England till after strictly Norman rule had passed away.
French, as a separate tongue from Latin, already existed as a literary speech, and no people had done more than the Normans to spread it as a literary speech, in both prose and verse.
Both Normans and English came to Scotland in crowds in the days of Margaret, Edgar and David, and Scottish national feeling sometimes rose up against them.
At least Giraldus Cambrensis, the Norman Welshman or Welsh Norman, was certainly more alive to the distinction between Normans and English than any other of his contemporaries.
In Sicily the Normans found the two most outwardly civilized of the nations of Europe, the two which had as yet carried the arts to the highest pitch.
They had simply to make Saracen and Greek work in partnership. In England, on the other hand, the Normans did really bring in a new style of their own, their own form of Romanesque, differing widely indeed from the Saracenic style of Sicily.
To this style it is no wonder that the Normans preferred their own, and that style therefore supplanted the older one.
Where, as in Sicily, the Normans felt that they could not improve, they simply adopted the style of the country.
Many sources for the history of the Normans were collected by Andre Du Chesne in his Hist.
In 1071 Romanus again took the field and advanced with ioo,000 men, including a contingent of the Turkish tribe of the Uzes and of the French and Normans, under Ursel of Baliol, into Armenia.
To the Normans particularly the Crusades had an intimate appeal.
Bohemund of Otranto, the destined leader of the Crusade, with his nephew Tancred, led a fine force of Normans by sea to Durazzo, and thence by land to Constantinople, which he reached about the same time as Raymund.
The establishment of a kingdom in Jerusalem in i ioo was a blow, not only to the Church but to the Normans of Antioch.
Antioch lay in one of the most fertile regions of the East; Bohemund was almost, if not quite, the greatest genius of his generation; and when he visited Jerusalem at the end of 1099, he led an army of 25,000 men - and those men, at any rate in large part, Normans.
Again, in 1104, the Normans, while attempting to capture Harran, were badly defeated on the river Balikh, near Rakka; and this defeat may be said to have been fatal to the chance of a great Norman principality.'
In IIIo, for example, he was enabled to capture Sidon by the aid of Sigurd of Norway, the Jorsalafari, who came to the Holy Land with a fleet of 55 ships, starting in 1107, and in a three years' "wandering," after the old Norse fashion, fighting the Moors in Spain, and fraternizing with the Normans in Sicily.
We have seen that the action of Bohemund at Antioch was the negation of this theory, and that Alexius in consequence helped Raymund to establish himself in Tripoli as a thorn in the side of Bohemund, and sent an army and a fleet which wrested from the Normans the towns of Cilicia (1104).
He accelerated the process of substituting Normans for Englishmen in all preferments of importance; and although his nominees were usually respectable, it cannot be said that all of them were better than the men whom they superseded.
It was burnt by the Normans in 858, and unsuccessfully besieged by them in 911.
Avlona played an important part in the wars between the Normans and the Byzantines, during the iith and 1 2th centuries.
In this period of anarchy the native princes of Glamorgan had their principal demesne, not at the camp but a mile to the north at Llystalybont, now merely a thatched farmhouse, while some Saxon invaders threw up within the camp a large moated mound on which the Normans about the beginning of the 12th century built the great shellkeep which is practically all that remains of their original castle.
On the conquest of the district by the Normans under Fitz Hamon, Cardiff became the caput of the seigniory of Glamorgan, and the castle the residence of its lords.
During the 9th and 10th centuries it was the subject of dispute between more than one count of Galicia and the suzerain, and its coasts were repeatedly ravaged by the Normans.
It first became a flourishing place under the Normans and during the crusades, but attained the acme of its prosperity as a seat of trade with the East under the Angevin princes.
Towards the close of the 11th century a castle was built here by the Normans, and for the next two hundred years town and castle were frequently taken and retaken by Welsh or English.
The duke and his Normans were enabled, by Tostig's invasion of northern England, to land unmolested at Pevensey on the 28th of September 1066.
One of his sons, Henry, called margrave and duke in Franconia, fell fighting against the Normans in 886; another, Poppo, was margrave in Thuringia from 880 to 892, when he was deposed by the German king Arnulf.
Under the Normans Matera was a countship for William Bras de Fer and his successors.
Accordingly, to gratify the pope and the emperor Lothair II., the Pisans entered the Neapolitan territory to combat the Normans.
The Normans made it the capital of the Abruzzi.
In 822 and 823 two great diets were held in the palace, and at the former there were present deputies from the eastern Sla y s, the Avars and the Normans.
However, after the peace between Charles and Louis in 860 Robert came to terms with his sovereign, who made him count of Anjou and of Blois, and entrusted him with the defence of that part of his kingdom which lay between the Seine and the Loire, a district which had suffered greatly from the ravages of the Normans and the Bretons.
Though restricted to the citadel, the medieval town became the administrative and ecclesiastical capital of Peloponnesus, and enjoyed a thriving trade and silk industry until in 1147 it was sacked by the Normans.
The Normans came as fellowChristians and deliverers; they found very few Arabs in Malta.
In 1090 Count Roger the Norman (son of Tancred de Hauteville), then master of Sicily, came to Malta with a small retinue; the Arab garrison was unable to offer effective opposition, and the Maltese were willing and able to welcome the Normans as deliverers and to hold the island after the immediate withdrawal of Count Roger.
Under the Normans the power of the Roman Church quickly augmented, tithes were granted, and ecclesiastical buildings erected and endowed.
The Normans, like the Arabs, were not numerically strong; the rule of both, in Sicily as well as Malta, was based on a recognition of municipal institutions under local officials; the Normans, however, exterminated the Mahommedans.
All this time the Normans had not ceased ravaging the country; a brave man was needed to defend it, and finally towards 861, Charles the Bald entrusted it to Robert the Strong, but he unfortunately met with his death in 866 in a battle against the Normans at Brissarthe.
Moreover, in the wars of king Lothaire against the Normans and against the emperor Otto II.
The bishop's seat had to be fortified against the incursions of the heathen Frisians and Northmen, and the security thus afforded attracted population till, after the destruction of its rival Dorestad by the Normans in the 9th century, Utrecht became the chief commercial centre of the northern Netherlands.
Frederick, who had been raised to the cardinalate by Leo IX., acted for some time as papal legate at Constantinople, and was with Leo in his unlucky expedition against the Normans.
He showed great zeal in enforcing the Hildebrandine policy as to clerical celibacy, and was planning the expulsion of the Normans from Italy and the elevation of his brother to the imperial throne when he was seized by a severe illness.
By the Normans it was made the capital of Apulia in 1041, and fortified.
After a fourth Easter synod in 1053 Leo set out against the Normans in the south with an army of Italians and German volunteers, but his forces sustained a total defeat at Astagnum near Civitella (18th June 1053); on going out, however, from the city to meet the enemy he was received with every token of submission, relief from the pressure of his ban was implored and fidelity and homage were sworn.
By the treaty of Verdun in 843 Saxony fell to Louis the German, but he paid little attention to the northern part of his kingdom which was harassed by the Normans and the Sla y s.
He died in 866, and was succeeded by his son Bruno, who was killed fighting the Normans in 880.
It was destroyed by the Normans, but was rebuilt in the 10th century by Baldwin III.
The next year he took part in the desperate stand against the Conqueror's rule made in the isle of Ely, and, on its capture by the Normans, escaped with his followers through the fens.
He obtained for his kingdom a certain degree of security in face of the attacks of Normans, Hungarians, Moravians and others.
In the middle ages the possession of Jerba was contested by the Normans of Sicily, the Spaniards and the Turks, the Turks proving victorious.
Comnenus to the throne in 1081; he is also noted for his brave defence of Durazzo against the Normans in that year.
He served under his father in the great attack on the East Roman empire (1080-1085), and commanded the Normans during Guiscard's absence (1082-1084), penetrating into Thessaly as far as Larissa, but being repulsed by Alexius Comneus.
With the help of the Normans, Hildebrand seized the castle of Galeria, where Benedict had taken refuge, and degraded him to the rank of a simple priest.
He inaugurated his reign by a decisive victory over the Normans in Sicily, but elsewhere his policy was less successful.
Northallerton (Alvetune, Allerton) is said to have been a Roman station and afterwards a Saxon "burgh," but nothing is known with certainty about it before the account given in the Domesday Survey, which shows that before the Conquest Earl Edwin had held the manor, but that the Normans had destroyed it so utterly that it was still waste in 1086.
At the very outset he had to meet the formidable attack of the Normans (Robert Guiscard and his son Bohemund), who took Dyrrhachium and Corfu, and laid siege to Larissa in Thessaly.
In the midst of the frequent changes of pope which went on during these years, and the political vicissitudes of Italy, Hildebrand took such measures as .enabled him to checkmate the opposition of the Roman barons by turning against them, now the armed force of the Normans, now the influence of the German king.'
The popes were under the constant sway of two contrary influences - on the one hand, the seducing prospect of subduing the Eastern Church and triumphing over the schism, and, on the other, the apprehension of seeing the Normans of Sicily, their competitors in Italy, increasing their already formidable power by successful expeditions into the Balkan Peninsula.
Dread of the Normans, too, explains the singular attitude of the Curia towards the Comneni, of whom it was alternately the enemy and the protector or ally.
To' this use has been attached the absurd origin from "ne ' god," the words in which, according to the 12th century chronicle, Rollo, duke of the Normans, refused to kiss the foot of Charles III., the Simple, king of the West Franks.
But those whom the English called knights the Normans called chevaliers, by which term the nature of their services was defined, while their social status was left out of consideration.
Besides this, Charles had to struggle against the incessant rebellions in Aquitaine, against the Bretons, whose revolt was led by their chief Nomenoe and Erispoe, and who inflicted on the king the defeats of Ballon (845) and Juvardeil (851), and especially against the Normans, who devastated the country in the north of Gaul, the valleys of the Seine and Loire, and even up to the borders of Aquitaine.
In 848 the destruction of Hamburg by the Normans led to the transference of the archiepiscopal see of Hamburg to Bremen, which became the seat of the archbishops of HamburgBremen.
The castle erected here by the Normans early in the r 2th century frequently changed owners during the course of the Anglo-Welsh wars before 1282.
This structure was ruined by the Normans, was rebuilt, but in 1248 was almost wholly destroyed by fire.
As the chief town of the province of Artois, Arras passed to Baldwin I., count of Flanders, in 863, and about 880 was ravaged by the Normans.
During the i 1 th century an enforced alliance with the Normans drew the republic into war with Venice and Byzantium; and in the 12th century it was attacked by the Bosnians and Serbs.
In the host of Maniaces were men of all races - Normans, who had already begun to show themselves in south Italy, and the Varangian guard, the best soldiers of the empire, among whom Harold Hardrada himself is said to have held a place.
At the coming of the Normans the whole Christian population was in the state of rayahs.
It would be rash to deny that traces of other dialects may not have lingered on; but Greek and Arabic were the two written tongues of Sicily when the Normans came.
Their advance in civilization is shown by their position under the Normans, and above all by their admirable style of architecture '(see' Palermo).
The Normans in short came into the inheritance of the two most civilized nations of the time, and allowed them to flourish side by side.
The most brilliant time for Sicily as a power in the world begins with the coming of the Normans.
The Normans held all Sicily as the centre of a dominion which stretched far beyond it.
The conquests of the Normans in Italy and Sicily form part of one enterprise; but they altogether differ in character.
Like the condition of the Greeks under the Saracens, so the condition of the Saracens under the Normans differed in different Saracens places according to the circumstances of each conquest.
By virtue of the old relations between the popes and the Normans of Apulia, he held his kingdom in fief of the Holy See, a position which on the whole strengthened the royal power.
The Normans brought the French tongue with them; it remained the court speech during the 12th century, and Sicily was thrown open to all speakers of French, many of whom came from England.
David, educated in England by Normans, was the maker of a Scotland whereof the anglicized part at least was now ruled by Anglo-Norman feudalism and Anglo-Norman municipal David I.
But " Normans " has for us quite different associations.
Unfortunately at this point our best authority ceases; and we cannot well explain the changes which brought about the Christianization of the Normans and their settlement in Normandy as vassals, though recalcitrant ones, of the West Frankish kings.
In the year before Constantine's death the remnant of the Byzantine possessions in Italy was finally lost to the empire, and the chief town, Bari, taken by the Normans.
It was recovered by Belisarius in 535, sacked by the Saracens in 902 and taken by the Normans.
For the earlier history of Naples and its territory, as a republic and a dukedom, see Naples above, and for the coming of the Normans see Sicily and Normans.
It existed as early as the 9th century, and when, in 912, Neustria was ceded to the Normans by Charles the Simple, it was a large and important place.
John, attacked Richard's domains, but upon Richard's return the Normans rallied enthusiastically to his aid.
The unit of inquiry was the Hundred (a subdivision of the county which had then an administrative entity), and the return for each Hundred was sworn to by twelve local jurors, half of them English and half Normans.
But next year Godwine returned in triumph; and at a great meeting held outside London he and his family were restored to all their offices and possessions, and the archbishop and many other Normans were banished.
The laws of Howel Dda throw a flood of interesting light upon the ancient customs and ideas of early medieval Wales, but as their standard of justice is founded on a tribal arid not a territorial system of society, it is easy to understand the antipathy with which the Normans subsequently came to regard this famous code.
With the advent of the Normans, William the Conqueror, with the object of placing a firm feudal barrier between Wales and the earldom of Mercia, erected three palatine counties along the Cymric frontier.
It appears, then, that towards the middle of the second millennium before Christ, the Iranians made a great forward movement to the West, and that certain of their princesat first, probably in the role of mercenary leadersreached Mesopotamia and Syria and there founded principalities of their own., much as did the Germans under the Roman Empire, the Normans.
He did not claim the crown of France when his brother died in 898; but recognizing the supremacy of the Carolingian king, Charles III., the Simple, he was confirmed in his offices and possessions, after which he continued to defend northern France from the attacks of the Normans.
Though severely plundered by the Normans in 1146 it recovered its prosperity and was selected by the Frankish dynasty de la Roche as its capital.
The town was occupied by the Normans of Sicily in the 12th century, but after holding it for about twelve years they were driven out in 1159 by the Almohades.
Taken in 890 by the Scandinavian chief, Rollo, it was soon after peopled by the Normans and became a residence of the dukes of Normandy, one of whom, Richard I., built about 960 a castle which survived till the 18th century.
Rebellions broke out at home and abroad; the Normans conquered Lombardy, which subsequently (1055) became the duchy of Apulia, and thus Italy was lost to the empire; the Petchenegs (Patzinaks) crossed the Danube and attacked Thrace and Macedonia; and the Seljuk Turks made their appearance on the Armenian frontier.
The Normans were independent of him, with their frontier barely 25 m.
Hence the latest of the conquerors, the Saxon and other Germanic tribes, obtained an easy mastery, and spread over the whole country, holding their own against marauding Northmen, except on the northern part of the east coast; and even after the political conquest by the Normans, continuing to form the great mass of the population, though influenced not a little by the fresh blood and new ideas they had assimilated.
In 1149 Manuel recovered Corfu and prepared to take the offensive against the Normans.
In the autumn of 882 an irruption of the Normans forced the old archbishop to take refuge at Epernay, where he died on the 21st of December 882.
The Normans, in their turn, gradually superseded all powers, whether Greek, Lombard or republican, which had previously divided the south of Italy, and furthermore checked the Saracens in the advances they were making through Apulia.
From the date at which the south of Italy and Sicily were subjugated by the Normans the history of Naples ceases to be the history of a republic or a city, and becomes that of a kingdom, sometimes separate, sometimes merged, with the kingdom of Sicily, in that of the Two Sicilies.
The Normans also then began to settle in Italy.
It was successfully defended against the Normans and long afterwards against the French under Marshal de Lorges in 1654.
Under the Romans, it was a flourishing town, covering double its present extent and renowned for its schools of rhetoric. In the succeeding centuries its prosperity drew upon it the attacks of the barbarians, the Saracens and the Normans.
The district was, in Lombard times, part of the duchy of Spoleto, and, under the Normans, a part of that of Apulia; it was first formed into a single province in 1240 by Frederick II., who placed the Justiciarius Aprutii at Solmona and founded the city of Aquila.
In Saxon times it had been worth loos., but after being laid waste by the Normans was still of no value in 1086.
In 1071 it fell into the hands of the Normans, and frequently appears in the history of the Crusades.
His sole positive quality, over and above his piety, was a love for his mothers kin, the Normans.
The native Normans were but a third part of his host, and he himself commanded rather as director of a great joint-stock venture than as the feudal chief of his own duchy.
Moreover, unlike his Danish predecessor, he looked down upon the English from the plane of a higher civiliza- tion; the Normans regarded the conquered nation as barbarous and boorish.
He had made himself so well hated by his cruelty and vices that the Normans, forgetting their old hatred of France, had acquiesced in the conquest.
From T016 to 1030 the Normans were pure mercenaries, serving either Greeks or Lombards, and then Sergius of Naples, by installing the leader Rainulf in the fortress of Aversa in 1030, gave them their first pied-aterre and they began an organized conquest of the land.
In 1042 Melfi was chosen as the Norman capital, and in September of that year the Normans elected as their count William " Iron Arm," who was succeeded in turn by his brothers Drogo, " comes Normannorum totius Apuliae et Calabriae," and.
The army which he led towards Apulia in 1053 was, however, overthrown at Civitate on the Fortore by the Normans united under Humfrey, Guiscard and Richard of Aversa.
The Papacy, foreseeing the breach with the emperor over investitures, now resolved to recognize the Normans and secure them as allies.
The Norman attacks on Benevento, a papal fief, alarmed and angered Gregory VII., but pressed hard by the emperor, Henry IV., he turned again to the Normans, and at Ceprano (June r080) reinvested Robert, securing him also in the southern Abruzzi, but reserving Salerno.
About this time these societies, each having its headman, were called frithborhs, or peace-borhs, and the Normans translated the Anglo-Saxon word by frankpledge.
Aversa was the first place in which the Normans settled, it being granted to them in 1027 for the help which they had given to Duke Sergius of Naples against Pandulf IV.
The town was destroyed by the Normans in 882, but restored about 912.
However, the effects of Brian's revolution were permanent; the prescriptive rights of the Hy Neill were disputed, and from the battle of Clontarf until the coming of the Normans the history of Ireland consisted of a struggle for ascendancy between the O'Brians of Munster, the O'Neills of Ulster and the O'Connors of Connaught.
But the adventurers were uncontrollable, and he had to let them conquer what they could, exercising a precarious authority over the Normans only through a viceroy.
To check the Bretons and the Normans, who were attacking from the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, Charles the Bald found himself obliged to entrust the defence of the country to Robert the Strong, ancestor of the house of Capet and duke of the lands between Loire and Seine.
He united once more the dominions of Charlemagne; but he disgraced the imperial throne by his feebleness, and was incapable of using his (884-888.) immense army to defend Paris when it was besieged by the Normans.
They did not at once agree on - Charless successor; for some of them chose Eudes (Odo), son of Robert the Strong, for his brilliant defence of Paris against the Normans in 885; others Guy, duke of Spoleto in Italy, who had himself crowned at Langres; while many wished for Arnulf, illegitimate son of Carloman, king of Germany and emperor.
Eudes was victor in the struggle, and was crowned and anointed at Compigne on the 29th of February 888; but five years later, meeting with defeat after defeat at the hands of the Normans, his followers deserted from him to Charles the Simple, grandson of Charles the Bald, who was also supported by Fulk, archbishop of Reims.
By the treaty of St Clair-sur-Epte (911) their leader Rolf (Rollo) obtained one of Charless daughters in marriage and the district of the Lower Seine which the Normans had long occupied, on condition that he and his men ceased their attacks and accepted Christianity.
After unsuccessful wars against the nobles of the South, against the Normans, who asserted that they were bound to no one except Charles the Simple, and against the Hungarians (who, now the Normans were pacified, were acting their part in the East), Rudolph had a return of good fortune in the years between 930 and 936, despite the intrigues of Herbert of Vermandois.
Obeying that enterprising spirit which was to take them to England half a century later, Normans descended upon southern Italy and wrested rich lands from Greeks and Saracens.
Fortified by Charlemagne, it was captured and pillaged by the Normans in 870, and unsuccessfully besieged by the Hungarians in 953.
The Normans brought with them their own word haquenee, or hacquenee, a French derivative from the Latin equus, a horse, whence the name hackney.
He has much to say concerning the empire, the papacy, the Normans in Italy and Apulia, the First Crusade (for which he follows Fulcher of Chartres and Baudri of Bourgueil).
In 1185 the Normans of Sicily took Thessalonica after a ten days' siege, and perpetrated endless barbarities, of which Eustathius, then bishop of the see, has left an account.
To secure his position he at once entered into relation with the Normans, now firmly established in southern Italy, and later in the year the new alliance was cemented at Melfi, where Nicholas II., accompanied by Hildebrand, Cardinal Humbert and the abbot Desiderius of Monte Cassino, solemnly invested Robert Guiscard with the duchies of Apulia, Calabria and Sicily, and Richard of Aversa with the principality of Capua, in return for 'oaths of fealty and the promise of assistance in guarding the rights of the Church.
The Normans were descendants from pagan viking adventurers who had settled in the Seine Valley in 911.
Two millennia later, the Normans put a military camp in the center of this hill fort.
As ' Normans ' they achieved a second conquest of England in 1066.
The Normans achieved great fame for their castle building.
From the Romans to the Normans to the Dutch invasion of 1688, our island stories are typically global and then imperial.
But the fires burn out of control, destroying the Anglo-Saxon minster and killing many Normans.
In the 1080s, the Normans reoccupied a Roman fort and constructed a motte here.
Bury Mount, the castle motte in Moat Lane, was probably built by the Normans in the 11th century.
The Normans established the sheriff or shire reeve - their crown officer.
In between we got troubled by " Spiny Normans " .
The castle, originally built by the Normans on a spur, overlooking the river valley, stands proudly one mile upriver from Lostwithiel.
Angouleme (Iculisma) was taken by Clovis from the Visigoths in 507, and plundered by the Normans in the 9th century.
His most important act was the treaty of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte with the Normans in 911.
It takes in one case the form of ceaseless enterprise, in another the form of that lawlessness which ever broke out, both in Normandy and in every other country settled by Normans, when the hand of a strong ruler was wanting.
Brave and sage as he was, he could hardly cope at one and the same time with the hostility of the Normans on the west, of the Petchenegs (Patzinaks) on the north, and of the Seljuks on the east and south.
It was during the siege of Arca that Peter Bartholomew, to whom the vision of the Holy Lance had first appeared, was subjected, with no definite result, to the ordeal of fire - the hard-headed Normans doubting the genuine character of any Provencal vision, the more when, as in this case, it turned to the political advantage of the Provencals.
This view rests almost entirely on conjecture; there is no good evidence to show that there was any organic connexion between gilds and municipal government in England before the coming of the Normans.
With bishop Odo, a warrior like himself, he was on the battle-field of Hastings, exhorting the Normans to victory; and at William's coronation it was he who called on them to acclaim their duke as king.
He soon abandoned Italy to his eldest son, Louis, and remained in his new kingdom, engaged in alternate quarrels and reconciliations with his brothers, and in futile efforts to defend his lands from the attacks of the Normans and the Saracens.
The conclusion, therefore, to which the evidence appears to lead us is that in, say, the 7th century, B.C., the Safines spoke a language not differing in any important particulars from that of the Samnites, generally known as Oscan; and that when this warlike tribe combined with the people of the Latian plain to found or fortify or enlarge the city of Rome, and at the end of the 6th century to drive out from it the Etruscans, who had in that century become its masters, they imposed upon the new community many of their own usages, especially within the sphere of politics, but in the end adopted the language of Latium henceforth known as lingua Latina, just as the Normans adopted the language of the conquered English.
For a time he lived as a hostage in England and became king of the Scots after driving out his uncle, Donald Bane, in 1093, an enterprise in which he was helped by some English and Normans.
These Norman castles gave the Normans of 1066 power bases from which they could subjugate the English population.
However traditional cherry dishes still survive such as Cherry Batter, for example, which probably came from France with the Normans.
In between we got troubled by " Spiny Normans ".
When they want to have verification from the Normans.
Although in the course of its long history it has undergone many sieges and was sacked at various epochs by the Vandals, Normans, French and Spaniards, it preserves many monuments of its ancient days.
Twelve years later we find the Normans settled at Aversa under their Count Rainuif.
Having consolidated their possessions on the mainland, the Normans, under Robert Guiscards brother, the great Count Roger, undertook the conquest of Sicily in 1060.