The fortunes of Robert Guiscard’s dynasty presaged those of many later crusaders, the family business of war now accorded religious legitimacy and gaining enormous success. Guiscard had conquered Calabria by 1060 and Apulia in 1071 with the surrender of the last Byzantine garrison in Bari. Despite Guiscard’s failure to carve out a principality for his eldest son Bohemund in the western Balkans in the 1080s, to die in 1085 as ruler of southern Italy and arbiter of the destiny of the Vicar of St Peter was no mean feat for a younger son of a minor Norman aristocrat, Tancred of Hauteville. The conquest of Sicily by Guiscard’s brother Roger (d. 1101) provided a new focus for profit and a centre of Norman-Italian political endeavour. Once finally subdued after a bitter three decades’ fighting, Sicily proved far wealthier than the family’s mainland holdings. Under Roger’s son, Roger II, the two parts of the Hauteville inheritance were brought together to the anxiety of popes and western and eastern emperors. In 1130, in return for support, the anti-pope Anacletus II crowned Roger II king of Sicily, Calabria and Apulia, and acknowledged his overlordship over Capua, Naples and Benevento, titles that Roger retained by forcing the legitimate pope, Innocent II, whom he had just defeated and captured, to recognize them in 1139. The combined lands of the kingdom of Sicily created one of the wealthiest, culturally and politically most dynamic, ambitious and disruptive powers of the twelfth-century Mediterranean. By comparison, the Norman-Italian enclave founded by his cousins Bohemund and Tancred in Antioch in 1098 scarcely matched Roger’s lavish regime, which, at its height, sought to emulate, rival, even usurp Byzantium itself. Such entrepreneurial opportunism supplied one vital context for the early crusades. It may have been no coincidence that Alexius I timed his invitation to the west to send military aid shortly after the end of the Sicilian conquest, when, at least in the mind of the canny Greek emperor, there would be available a rich stock of soldiery, some disappointed perhaps at the Sicilian land settlement and eager for new chances to make their fortunes and save their souls.
In many ways the rise of the Hautevilles constituted an experience typical of eleventh-century France. The disintegration of the Carolingian empire in the late ninth century not only permanently divided the constituent political entities into East Francia (essentially Germany from Lorraine to the Elbe), Italy and West Francia (between the Rhine and the southern Pyrenean marches). The chaos of civil war and invasions by Vikings from the north and Arab pirates in the south also caused effective civil power within West Francia to become devolved on to the local royal agents, the counts, who wielded vice-regal military, fiscal and judicial authority. By the end of the tenth century the kingdom of France remained a legal and ideological construct, but its kings exerted little genuine power outside their own family lands. The main political foci were the great counties ruled as autonomous principalities by comital families who rapidly acquired their own grand, if often fictional, pedigrees to match their practical status. The most important counties, some later elevating themselves into duchies, were Flanders, Champagne, Normandy, Brittany, Burgundy, Blois-Chartres, Anjou, Paris (i.e. the Ile de France), Poitou-Aquitaine, which acquired the duchy of Gascony, Toulouse and Barcelona, which was to be attracted away from the French orbit by the opportunities and successes of its Iberian neighbours. Beside these, numerous lesser counties sprang up, some owing allegiance to the greater lords, some autonomous.
To this political patchwork were added wide geographic, economic, linguistic and ethnic contrasts. Brittany was still a Celtic region; the Basques had given their name to Gascony. Elsewhere the chief linguistic divide was between those in the north who spoke langue d’oil (so described after the word used for ‘yes’, oil) and the speakers of langue d’oc in the south, the dividing line running east–west well to the north of the modern Midi. These linguistic contrasts mirrored different histories, customs and laws. The far south retained a tradition of written law and limited urbanization to match its Mediterranean climate. Elsewhere, there was no uniformity of rules of landholding, judicial systems, weights, measures or currency. A kingdom often in name alone, nonetheless in 987 the great magnates of northern France, perhaps on the promptings of pro-German interests, decided to change the royal dynasty from the remnants of the attenuated Carolingians to the family of the counts of Paris, in the figure of Hugh Capet (987–96), his descendants being known as the Capetians. The exclusion of the Carolingian claimant suited the Germans, whose kings now came from a non-Carolingian, relatively parvenu dynasty from Saxony. Once installed, the Capetians set about securing their hold on the monarchy by reducing the elective element in French kingship not least by consistent, determined and remarkably successful efforts to ensure that each Capetian king left a son to succeed him. (Louis VII had to wait until his third wife and his mid-forties before he had a son.) The unique Capetian genetic triumph, which saw son succeed father in an unbroken line from 987 to 1316, transformed the nature of the French monarchy, but only over time.
The Capetians were aided in their ambitions by three factors. Their family lands, centred on the Ile de France, were among the richest in western Europe and straddled the main trade routes: the Seine, Marne, Loire river systems, which linked eastwards to the Rhine, Meuse and Low Countries, west to the Atlantic, north to the English Channel and south to the Saône-Rhône corridor and the Mediterranean. The church lent the Capetians ideological support and material assistance. The king was patron to wealthy monasteries and controlled appointments to important bishoprics and archbishoprics outside his own lands. The final advantage possessed by the Capetians lay in the role of kingship itself. Although few of the great princes in France bothered to pay the king homage and fealty (some counts of Anjou were happy to), the office of king legitimized those of the counts. A king, however feeble, was needed, as the events of 987 recognized. When, as rarely occurred, a foreign invasion was threatened, as in 1124, the counts rallied round. The potential for the king, as legal overlord, to interfere in the affairs of any county in the realm was undeniable but only enforceable in political circumstances that did not regularly occur until the late twelfth century.
On the other hand, the political cohesion of France was undermined by another three facts of political life. For the vast majority of Frenchmen, their spheres of economic, public and private life operated entirely beyond the reach or necessity of royal influence or power, a matter of geography, communications and the absence of national institutions. This was reflected and exacerbated in the years around 1000 in an ever more local search for protection and arbitration. Even the authority of counts was challenged and ignored as provincial gangsters and racketeers commandeered lands, markets, churches, monasteries and fighting men to impose a rough order on localities often centred on the construction of castles. Although this devolution of power has been regarded by some as a sign of a collapse of social order and its replacement by anarchy, the networks linking these petty lordships with the regional counts, bishops and local monasteries suggest a structure, however undisciplined in places. The period of supposed anarchy was accompanied, perhaps not coincidentally, by the establishment of new strength by a number of active comital dynasties, such as in Normandy, Anjou, Flanders, Blois and Champagne. Yet in valleys distant from Paris, dominated by a castle and a local boss with a posse of armed thugs (later known as knights), royal power and national sentiment were for stories and romances of a glamorous Carolingian past not daily life.