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This article analyzes how the neighbors of the Byzantines, the Lombards (who occupied a portion of southern Italy), and the Normans (who put an end to Byzantine rule in southern Italy in 1071), described their common adversary. The examination of the features that the chroniclers living in early medieval southern Italy attributed to the Byzantines demonstrates that, at least for this part of Europe, there is evidence of strong hostility to Byzantium before the twelfth century, a period traditionally perceived as crucial for the deterioration of relations between Westerners and Constantinople. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The forest is an extremely important entity in the medieval Southern Italy, conditioning significantly the economic structures and the imagery. The forest seems characterized of ambiguous meanings, where the usual rigid dividing line between the living world and the otherworld becomes suddenly passable, where are materialized ancestral anguishes and supernatural forces. This magmatic space, apparently crystallized in the image of an immutable medieval forest, is subject to an evolution in material reality and perception that unfolds over the Middle Ages and reaches, dramatically, nowadays. This essay attempted to trace, through a survey in the vast collection of the southern italian sources, a general profile -certainly not exhaustive- of the conceptual idea of forest the evolution in the Southern Italy, trying to identify the transformations of representation that the contemporaries have done, from the Early Middle Ages to the thirteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the end of the ninth century, the Cassinese monk Erchempert composed a chronicle (ca. 774-889) blaming the southern Italian Lombard leaders for recent Lombard defeats. Erchempert hoped that future generations might learn from their forebears' folly. This article analyzes the reasons why, in the wake of his monastery's destruction by Muslim raiders, Erchempert did not express a generalized criticism toward all the elites of his homeland. The article also demonstrates that Erchempert's attachment to his people and his pride in being Lombard sometimes led him to stray from his intended narrative of Lombard failures and catastrophes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents an essay `Coinage, Wealth and Plunder in the Age of Robert Guiscard.'