Simon Suttmann
PhD project: “Practices of a Warlords’ Society in an Imperial Periphery. Rank Conflicts and Political Culture in Narrative Sources from Southern Italy around 1100 A. D.”
My project aims at analysing the portrayal of social practices of political culture, rank communication, and conflict behaviour portrayed in historiographical texts on the so-called Norman conquest of Southern Italy.
Rank, I consider to be a central category in the medieval conception of society, essential for determining hierarchy and thereby create social order, especially within the strata of socio-political elites. The factors contributing to a medieval person’s position in social hierarchy include titles, holdings, possessions or noble descent, but also renown, prestige and personal reputation gained through deeds of prowess or largesse. The efficacy of these factors depended to a great extent on the aristocrat’s capacity to display them in front of other noblemen, peers and followers, whose approval was crucial. Consequently, the means by which rank was expressed were manifold and encompassed a variety of gestures, rituals and performative acts, that followed unwritten but widely acknowledged rules of communication and therefore could be understood and interpreted by participants and spectators alike.
At the beginning of the conquest, the territories in southern Italy — whose population was heterogeneous also in linguistic, cultural, and religious terms — lay on the periphery of theByzantine Empire (as well as of the Holy Roman Empire). This location in an imperial periphery was characterised above all by the fact that the individual regions were integrated into the empire in different ways, and that the degree of influence exercised by the imperial centre as well as the incorporation of local elites into an imperial power structure varied considerably depending on place and time.
The so-called conquest was by no means a planned undertaking. It was not orchestrated by one ruler nor conducted by a specific army. Instead over the course of decades, various bands of warriors, that gathered around different more or less powerful leaders, established themselves in the region. While in the beginning they served local Lombard princes and Byzantine generals as mercenaries, successively they replaced theses potentates with warlords from their own ranks. Thus, almost all of the Norman counts, dukes, and princes can be considered as social climbers whose ancestors had been of little significance in Normandy. And the conquest created a situation in which the socio-political order was reshaped and new rank hierarchies were established. As the warlords had acquired their titles and holdings as well as their rank positions mainly due to military success, the newly established orders of rank were fragile and could easily be contested by almost any participant who had sufficient military capabilities. Consequently, the process of conquering territories in the Byzantine periphery was accompanied by intense rank competition between its protagonists.
In this context, I am going to analyse rank competition by examining how rank conflicts arose, by which means they were fought, by which means they could be solved, and how their outcome affected the relationship between the regions’ new social elites and the Byzantine Empire.
To this end, I rely on narrative sources which portray in detail single episodes as well as entire sets of conflicts, and thus contain rich descriptions of aristocratic conflict behaviour. Although critical analysis of these sources does not always allow definitive statements on how the participants behaved in a particular historical situation, it does allow conclusions to be drawn on how participants were expected to behave in similar situations, and consequently, on the practices that were generally in use.