prince to another as advantage seemed to offer, and careful not to give to any so decisive a preponderance that he might dispense with them. The first Norman principality was established about 1030 at Aversa, just north of Naples, where the money of Rouen continued to circulate more than a century afterward; but such definite points of crystallization make their appearance but slowly, and the body of the Normans, constantly recruited from home, lived as mercenaries on pay and pillage. Their reputation was, however, established, and when the prince of Salerno was asked by the Pope to disband his Norman troop, he replied that it had cost him much time and money to collect this precious treasure, for whom the soldiers of the enemy were "as meat before the devouring lions."[1]
Among the Norman leaders the house of Hauteville stands out preëminently, both as the dominant force in this formative period and as the ancestor of the later princes of southern Italy and Sicily. The head of the family, Tancred, held the barony of Hauteville, in the neighborhood of Coutances, but his patrimony was quite insufficient to provide for his twelve sons, most of whom went to seek their fortune in the south, an elder group consisting of William of the Iron Arm, Drogo, and Humphrey, and a younger set of half-brothers, of whom the most important are Robert Guiscard and Roger. At the outset scarcely distinguishable from
- ↑ Aimé, Ystoire de li Normant, p. 124.
