 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 Austro-Gothic kingdom to migrate 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, and 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 deserved 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 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 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 are forced to be reckoned with, although things are going worse for them after this time, especially after the defeat at Mansikart 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 power, so 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 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 Evela, 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, they 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 saw these 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. We can take in the Eastern Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, when the Muslims they exploded onto the world seed 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 black pill 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. 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 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 Vlad Dracula, 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, almost always. Southern Italy and Sicily were colonized by Greeks during the heyday of ancient Hellas, so both Sicily and southern Italy 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 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 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. I will go out and Sunmax, take a music break and then we'll get back and I will elaborate. I will share the great story of how the Normans first came to be in Italy.