Meanwhile, though the cities treated with their neighbours and the Lombards as independent powers, they seem always to have had a certain corporate consciousness as parts of the Empire and as Greeks among barbarians. Occasionally they act together; when the Imperial Government takes some step to defend what is left of its Themes, as for instance when George Maniakes comes to fight the Saracens, the Greek cities all look upon this as their cause.
As far as language goes, the Lombards spoke that Latin which was on its way to become Italian; but Greek remained the language of most of the Imperial Themes. Greek was commonly spoken in the South of Apulia and Calabria till long after the Norman conquest; it was, with Arabic, the common language of Sicily during the reign of the Norman Kings, and was heard in the streets of Naples till far into the Middle Ages.
To unite these different elements, Greek, Lombard, andSaracen, first into one political State, and then, gradually, into one people, was the work of the Norman conquerors.
The Normans first appear in the South of Italy as pilgrims, then as mercenaries, fighting for pay under either the Lombard princes or the Greek cities, in the early eleventh century. From the beginning they seem irresistible. As the news of the pleasant Southern land came to Normandy, more and more adventurers come South to join their cousins in Italy, so that a great number of Norman warriors are found in these parts. They came, as true adventurers, bringing nothing with them but a horse and a sword, ready to take whatever they could get. They got so much that after a time some of them became the strongest kings in Europe. Soon they began to see that it would pay them better to fight for their own sake than for Lombard or Greek paymasters. They become the terror of the South of Italy. Lombards and Greeks unite to oust these strangers, but in vain. The Normans at first had no shadow of right to be in Italy at all. From the point of view of legal right they form one of the worst cases of lawless usurpation in European history, quite as much so as the old Goths and Lombards. But they had that foundation of so many rights, successful conquest. Later they tried to obtain some colour of legal right by grants from the Pope.
There were two lines of Norman conquerors in Southern Italy. The first in the field, destined to disappear before its successful rival, was the line of Aversa and Capua. In 1030 a Norman adventurer, Rainulf, becomes Count of Aversa[1]
- ↑ 1 Aversa is a town about five miles due North of Naples.
