Normans in European History

The Normans began as raiders, Viking pirates who swept across the North Sea in their dragon-prowed ships. Within three centuries, these same Northmen had become the most sophisticated rulers in medieval Europe. They conquered England, annexed southern Italy, and built a multicultural kingdom in Sicily where Christians, Muslims, and Jews served together in government. Charles Homer Haskins, one of America's greatest medievalists, traces this extraordinary transformation in a work that remains startlingly fresh more than a century after its original lectures. The book moves from the Normandy of William the Conqueror to the Angevin empire of Henry II and Richard the Lionheart, across territories spanning half of France. Haskins shows how the Normans absorbed French language while retaining their Viking vigor, how they created in Sicily a state of remarkable religious tolerance, and how their administrative innovations laid the groundwork for the English common law. The Bayeux Tapestry becomes a窗口 into their world, its embroidered figures caught between the old Viking age and the new civilization they were building. This is history written with conviction and clarity, by a scholar who believed the past still had lessons to teach.