In the eleventh century Norman knights, led by the rapacious progeny of Tancred de Hauteville, a minor Norman noble, descended from northern France into southern Italy to seek their fortune. Within a few decades they accomplished what the Byzantine Empire, the German Empire and the Papacy could not: the conquest of southern Italy and Sicily. By the middle of the following century they would extend their authority to Malta, North Africa and the eastern shores of the Adriatic while challenging such great maritime powers as Byzantium, Venice, Genoa, Pisa and Islam. They could have done none of this without some sort of naval capability. It is, thus, the contention of this study that the Normans, famed for their prowess as mounted warriors and castle-builders, forged and wielded a formidable naval presence which enabled them, for a time, to dominate the central Mediterranean, militarily and commercially.

Historiography

Curiously, modern historians have largely overlooked this critical aspect of Norman history. There are only two substantial works on the subject: a 104-page booklet on the Norman fleets of Sicily written in 1910 by Willy Cohn and a few chapters of Camillo Manfroni's three volume study, Storia della Marina Italiana, published in 1899. Both accounts are essentially narrative in nature and offer little information about how the ships were acquired, crewed and deployed. In addition, there are a few short papers like D.P. Waley's ‘“Combined Operations” in Sicily, A.D. 1060–78’ written in 1954 and Matthew Bennett's ‘Norman Naval Activity in the Mediterranean c. 1060–c. 1108’ composed in 1991.