ABSTRACT
As Vera von Falkenhausen has argued, when each ‘ethnic’ group in Sicily is viewed in turn, none offers any sense of homogeneity.1 Already in this work, the point has been made that careless use of the appellation ‘Norman’ is in danger of introducing conceptually misleading notions, particularly concerning the nature and development of authority in Sicily. In addition, Me´nager has shown that a quarter of all ‘Normans’ in the kingdom were not ‘Norman’ anyway.2 A similar misnomer is the tag ‘Lombard’, which is generally applied to a somewhat nebulous group of once Germanic tribes that had invaded the Italian peninsula in the sixth century. Although originally bound by shared dialects and law, by the start of the eleventh century, they were already well assimilated into the society of the southern parts of the peninsula. ‘Lombards’, as referring to settlers from the north were and are sometimes differentiated from ‘Longobards’ or the indigenous inhabitants the former southern Byzantine province of Longobardia.3 To add to the complexity of the situation, many ‘Greeks’ had intermarried with ‘Lombards’ and ‘Normans’ and even with Muslims and ‘Berbers’. In all the above cases, individual instances, usually in the form of mixed names, can be cited to show that the margins of these groups were often, and probably had been for some centuries, raggedly indistinct.
