1061 & All That

THE OTHER CONQUEST by John Julius Norwich. 355 pages. Harper & Row $6.95.

The Normans are well remembered for 1066 and all that. But if the conquest of England is a triumphant chapter in the Norman chronicle, it is no more so than one written with blood and steel on another island at almost the same time. Historians have scanted the Normans' other conquest, and the world has all but forgotten it. This book by a British nobleman, the second Viscount Norwich,* should handsomely redeem both oversights.

Sicily, that tragic outcropping of volcanic rock that looms from the Mediterranean just two miles off Italy's toe, was the prize. Neither the centuries nor Etna, Sicily's restless mountain, had ever let the island sleep. Eight waves of plunderers had overrun it before the Normans arrived in 1061 to add it to their already extensive holdings in southern Italy. In 31 years of savage combat, the Normans subdued the Saracens, who then controlled Sicily, ushering in an era of nationhood and peace the likes of which the island had never known before--nor was ever to know again.

Author Norwich is fascinated by the stocky warriors who came down from Normandy as pilgrims and found the lower Italian peninsula, with its brittle alliances and private wars, exactly to their taste. The Normans raised sword against anyone who blocked their way, even the Popes, to whom they swore fealty. As Norwich writes, they "mastered the art of being on the winning side."

They were also masters of the art of combat, perhaps unequaled before or since. In the field, they enjoyed it when the odds were at least 20 to 1--against them. Espionage, reconnaissance, subversion, psychological warfare--they knew and practiced all these supposedly modern martial stratagems. To "psych" his adversaries before the siege of Palermo, the Norman commander, Roger de Hauteville, released a flock of captured carrier pigeons--after tying to their legs scraps of cloth soaked in Saracen blood.

Though the Normans were experts at "piracy, perjury, robbery, rape, blackmail and murder," as Norwich puts it, they were also uncommonly gentle conquerors. In all of their exploits, they proved less interested in imposing their own customs on their captives than in adopting the ways--not to mention the possessions--of those they had subdued. Little more than a century's residence in France sufficed to erase the maritime traditions of what was once a seagoing Viking people. In Norman Sicily, says Norwich, the victors "created a climate of enlightened political and religious thinking in which all races, creeds, languages and cultures were equally encouraged and favored."

Viscount Norwich, whose first essay into history was inspired by a holiday visit to Sicily six years ago, has retold the story of the Normans' little-remembered adventure there with infectious enthusiasm and commendable skill. It is difficult not to be swept up in the momentum of those violent times--and not to look forward impatiently to the next installment of the story, in which Norwich aims to tell how "the cultural genius that was Norman Sicily's chief legacy to the world bursts at last into the fullness of its flower."

* Son of the first Viscount Norwich (Alfred Duff Cooper) and Lady Diana Cooper.

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