The Normans in the Mediterranean

Falco of Benevento

Falco, notary and judge at Benevento (late 11th cent. - 1144 ?).

Chronicon Beneventanum.

Sixteen parchments drawn up and signed by Falco, a notary and judge of the papal curia at Benevento, bear witness to his activity. He was, therefore, an important official and politician in Benevento, at that time under papal rule.

The Chronicon Beneventanum, which has survived in an acephalous form and is probably mutilated at the end, relates the history of Benevento from 1102 to 1144. Until 1127 the account is wholly focused on events within the city; from that year onwards it deals with mainland southern Italy and international politics (the papacy, the Holy Roman Empire, the kingdom of France), when Roger II of Sicily began to pursue an imperialistic policy, culminating with his coronation as king of Sicily in 1130.

Falco has often been seen as the advocate of the independence of the Lombards and the city of Benevento from the Norman conquerors. In reality, it is not possible to describe his chronicle as being either anti-Norman or anti-Roger, although criticism of the first king of Sicily’s expansionist programme is not lacking. Falco was writing at a time when the Norman infiltration, and then the conquest, had been in progress for a century. For this reason, too - as well as due to its annalistic structure - the Chronicon does not have the usual characteristics of histories of the Norman period (which are either ‘state’ or ‘ethnic’, according to the categories identified by Gianvito Resta), but rather of the urban chronicle. It is the only municipal history in southern Italy comparable to the contemporary communal chronicles of northern Italy (e.g. in Genoa, Caffaro’s Annales Ianuenses). The intellectual and professional character of the author contributes to this identification: Falco is the typical notary- chronicler, who became, from the official point of view, the person most competent to write the communal chronicles. And it was no coincidence that this occurred at Benevento, a city where the institutions were very different from those of the other cities of southern Italy, and where a type of communal government developed even before that of Florence.

MODERN EDITIONS

- Falcone di Benevento, Chronicon Beneventanum, ed. E. D'Angelo, Florence, 1998.

 

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