Geoffrey of Malaterra

Geoffrey of Malaterra (Normandy ?, 11th cent.).

De rebus gestis Rogerii Calabriae et Siciliae comitis et Roberti Guiscardi ducis fratris eius.

Apart from the fact that he was a monk at the monastery of St Agatha in Catania, very little is known about Geoffrey of Malaterra’s life. It is not even certain whether he came from Normandy or was a native of southern Italy.

In Geoffrey’s work, the fact that it was commissioned by Roger I of Sicily is very evident. Although De rebus gestis Rogerii Calabriae et Siciliae comitis et Roberti Guiscardi ducis fratris eius is formally dedicated to the bishop of Catania, Angerius, it reflects in its entirety the taste and propaganda requirements of the conquerors. Recounting the early stages of the Norman conquest - especially the deeds of Robert Guiscard and his brother Roger, who conquered Sicily from the Arabs - it continues up to 1099.

The genre - as the title explains very clearly - is biography (the parts in prose alternate with sections in verse). Yet Malaterra’s work is not wholly bound by the rigid canons of court history: it is freer and franker and is, in a sense, a history of an ethnic type, the principal aim of which is not the exaltation of one leader or another, but rather that of a whole people - the Normans. And the exploits of the Normans were favoured by God; they were, in a manner of speaking, providential. The account is very vivid and expressive, with a tendency towards a new, freer taste in narrative, even in the passages that are particularly partisan in nature. It is in the fourth book that these characteristics of the work become less evident, making way for a more rational and judicious account - more ‘political’ perhaps - in parallel with the end of the great epic of the conquest and the beginning of Roger I’s government of Sicily.

 

MODERN EDITION

- Gaufredi Malaterrae, De rebus gestis Rogerii Calabriae et Siciliae comitis et Roberti Guiscardi ducis fratris eius, ed. E. Pontieri, Rerum Italicarum Scriptores 2, V (1), Bologna, 1928.