Shortly before the year 980 a Greek monk called Nilos, a celebrated holy man from Calabria, who was the abbot of a monastery near Rossano, on the northern side of the Sila mountains, tired – so we are told – of the pressures of his renown and his would-be disciples, and worried about the danger of a Muslim attack, decided to abandon the abbey that he had founded, and leave for pastures new. Despite his considerable age – for he was then already about seventy – he travelled northwards into the Campania, the area on the western, or Tyrrhenian, coast of the peninsula, which was ruled not, as was Calabria, by the Byzantine Empire, but by the various petty native princelings who still described themselves as ‘Lombards’, but whom we may consider as, by this time, indigenous Italians. According to his biographer:

Not surprisingly, his merits soon became clear to his hosts, and the Prince of Capua, Pandulf, sought to make him a bishop, or so the biographer claimed.