Now, I suppose most of you have listened to my episode titled The Gothic Heirs of Rome.
Now, I didn't have the heart to tell you what happened after Theodoric's death during the 500s.
So, basically, his glorious kingdom, his empire, his successor state to the Western Roman Empire, it fell to the blasphemous Byzantines.
They launched a reconquest or rather conquest campaign against Italy and yeah, they shattered the flourishing Ostrogothic kingdom to my great sorrow and lament.
But it is what it is, that is how history goes.
So, anyway, the Gothic kingdom there, it didn't survive the centuries to come.
Now, of course, they did flourish more in Spain until they got conquered by the Moors.
And I would say, though, that the Gothic spirit, it survived in the Spanish nobility and they ultimately reconquered the Iberian Peninsula.
Both Portugal and Spain would embark on a great Faustian conquest and exploration spree, which I will detail in another episode, or many different episodes, I suppose, because those adventures and stories they deserve to be retold.
Now, anyway, back to Italy.
The Byzantines, they established control there for a while, but then another Germanic tribe, the Lombards, came down and conquered much of Italy.
And usually, of course, if you hear the name the Lombards, you think of Lombardy in northern Italy, and it's true that the northern Italians they have more Germanic blood in general and Lombard blood in particular, especially in that area, of course, in Lombardy.
But they also ventured south and established some dukedoms of their own, thus creating an ethnicity which we can call what the author of the book, John Julius Norwich, he calls Italo-Lombard.
So that is the one of these players at a stage of southern Italy at the time.
So those are the local nobility.
So Lombards, Germanic people, travel down to Italy, establishing themselves as an aristocracy, ruling caste there.
So that is one of the players that the Normans will encounter.
Then of course you still have the Byzantines, which, you know, they still have some holdings left in Italy at this stage.
Now keep in mind that the Byzantines, they embarked upon their conquest of Italy almost 500 years earlier.
So a lot of things have happened since then.
But the Byzantines, even during the 11th century, still a force to be reckoned with, although things are going worse for them after this time.
Especially after the defeat at Manseckert by the Seljuk Turks, but that is another story.
So two of the players there, Italo-Lombards, local nobility, and Byzantines, still wanting to be an influential player in that part of Europe.
Then you have the papacy, the papal forces, of course, based in Rome.
And I'm going on a tangent now, but this will be important for this story as it unfolds.
So during this time in 1054, the great schism between Constantinople and Rome in terms of Christianity I'm talking about.
So the split between Catholicism and Orthodoxy, it occurs during this time.
And as the author notes in this particular book I'm referencing, that was an inevitable split.
Then there were some intrigues that made it happen then and there, but I am very much inclined to agree that it would happen sooner or later because you can't really have two poles of great powers, Rome and Constantinople.
And of course, this split, it goes back to the split of the Eastern and Western Roman Empire itself.
And then, of course, it continues with the Papacy in Rome and the Patriarch in Constantinople.
So this happens at least, and of course, makes the Byzantine Empire and the Latins of the West go different ways.
And this would be very important for later crusades.
During the Fourth Crusade, the Latins, under the influence of the mischievous Venetians, they sack Constantinople and establish a kingdom there.
But yeah, I am going on a proper tangent now.
I just wanted to have that said so you understand the difference between Christian forces.
So you have the Orthodox Byzantines and the Catholic Latin powers.
So then we have the Italo-Lombards, we have the Papal forces and we have the Byzantines.
And then of course we have in the north the great empire of Charlemagne.
Now this Empire has been split by this stage.
So you have what would be France and what would be Germany and what would be Germany, the Holy Roman Empire, that is the main player in Italy during the Middle Ages.
And something interesting here as well is that during this time, so the 11th century, the Pope, so the Papal forces of Rome and the German Emperor, they were actually allied.
And this is interesting if you have, if you are an astute disciple, if you are an enjoyer of this podcast and an enjoyer of my book reviews, and if you are also an enjoyer of Julius Evola, you will remember that one of the main conflicts during the Middle Ages was that between the Holy Roman Emperor in Germany and the Pope.
So at this stage they had a still sound relationship, but this relationship would soon turn sour as we shall discover later on.
Anyway, in setting the stage for the Norman conquest of Italy, the Emperor and the Pope were still friends.
So we are continuing the count of factions in this cauldron that was southern Italy back in the day.
So we have the Italo-Lombard nobility, we have the Papal forces, we have the Byzantine forces, we have the we can call them Germans, so the forces of the Imperial forces.
And then, of course, we have, not to forget, the very same forces that I just mentioned that so viciously conquered the glorious Visigothic kingdom of Iberia.
We have the Saracens.
Now, of course, there are different types of Saracens.
The Moors that conquered Iberia, they were at this stage not the same entity as the ones who raided Sicily and southern Italy, but still global south Muslims.
So this Arabs they had embarked upon.
Had I been Muslim, had I been Arab myself, I would have said a heroic and epic conquest campaign.
That I can reluctantly admit that for them it was, of course, for the other players in the area, it was a catastrophic defeat.
So you can take in the East, the Eastern Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, when the Muslims exploded onto the world with the Arab conquests of the 600s.
So the Byzantine Empire and the Persian Empire had spent many centuries fighting each other, they were exhausted and then in that vacuum of power the Arabs come to conquer.
And as already noted twice now, I don't want to blackpill you by reminding you of it, but they did conquer Spain and they did conquer Sicily and they raided the southern coasts of Europe for many centuries.
They would continue to do so and for the purpose of setting the stage here for the Normans they did raid Italy quite severely and thus the Saracens they constitute the last of the major players of this particular drama.
So now that we have introduced both the different factions and the landscape itself we can introduce the Normans themselves.
So basically, southern Italy at this time was a cauldron, a place of total chaos and war where no strong authority could keep the peace.
Because these Lombard princes, they weren't strong enough to stave off influence from abroad, so they sort of had to, you know, make deals, alliances and, of course, other entities.
They wanted to expand their influence there as well.
So, in a similar way as I've talked about before, similar way as Wallachia during the time of Vladiacula, they were stuck between the Hungarians and the Ottomans.
They sort of had to wheel and deal to get the best out of a bad situation.
And now, on a last note regarding the ethnic composition of the southern Italians, they were Greek always, had been well, almost always.
Southern Italy and Sicily were colonized by Greeks during the heyday of ancient Hellas.
So both Sicily and southern Italy, they had been under Roman rule for many centuries, but the culture was still a bit distinct, and this is something I've talked about many times before that you have in southern Italy and northern Italy, stemming back from even before the Germanic invasions of the later stages of the Roman Empire.
You have still a difference between the more Greek south and the more Latin north.
So, even though the, the ruling caste, the nobility of southern Italy.
At the time, they were the aforementioned Lombards, Italo Lombards.
The general population, for the most part, were still Greek.
So yeah, that's something I thought to mention as As well, of course, the population's attitude towards greater powers also come into play whenever we're talking about this.
And speaking of which, I will get into this later as well, but the Normans, they were quite heavy-handed, and this resulted in resentment by the local population, so the regular Greeks.
But now, anyway, I have introduced the main players on the scene.
