IN April 1063 a woman from Salerno, left a widow with three children under fourteen, sold some land to a certain John son of Mastalps of Atrani, The reason given for this sale was that ‘these children proclaim themselves to be dying of hunger and nudity because of the wicked race of the Normans who have plundered in the province’. The infiltration and eventually conquest of southern Italy by the Normans in the eleventh century gave many cause for lamentation. Churchmen in particular felt vulnerable. The chronicler of the monastery of St Vincent on Volturno, writing c. 1120, described the Normans ‘seizing everything for themselves . . . acting without king and without law’. Among the churches which suffered from the more rapacious among the invaders was the archbishopric of Salerno. Four years after the widow’s sale to John of Atrani, Pope Alexander II excommunicated three Normans, William son of Tancred (the later Count of the Principate), Guimund des Moulins and Turgisius of Rota, for their alienations of the see’s property.

There were however many south Italian churchmen who were less than enamoured with their existing rulers, and who saw in the eventual victory of the Normans opportunity for profit rather than loss. An instructive story comes from the same Principality of Salerno. The villain of this particular piece was no hungry interloper but the last of the Lombard princes, Gisulf II (1052—77). He was at war with the men of Amalft, and was accustomed to have fearful tortures inflicted on any of them unlucky enough to be captured. Abbot Leo of the monastery of Holy Trinity, Cava, often intervened to protect and succour these unfortunates. One day he was sitting at table with the brothers of his abbey when a messenger appeared, announcing to him that three Amalfitans were about to be blinded on the prince’s order, and begging his help to avert this. Then, we are told, ‘the venerable father, rising from his table like another Tobias leaving his dinner, hurried with hasty step to Salerno’. (Salerno is some 11 kilometres from the monastery.) He stopped the executioners before they could perform their dreadful task.