Battle of Civitate

The Battle of Civitate was fought on 18 June 1053 in southern Italy, between the Normans, led by the Count of Apulia Humphrey of Hauteville, and a Swabian-Italian-Lombard army, organised by Pope Leo IX and led on the battlefield by Gerard, Duke of Lorraine, and Rudolf, Prince of Benevento. The Norman victory over the allied papal army marked the climax of a conflict between the Norman mercenaries who came to southern Italy in the eleventh century, the de Hauteville family, and the local Lombard princes. By 1059 the Normans would create an alliance with the papacy, which included a formal recognition by Pope Nicholas II of the Norman conquest in south Italy, investing Robert Guiscard as Duke of Apulia and Calabria, and Count of Sicily. Background The arrival of the Normans in Italy The Normans had arrived in Southern Italy in 1017, in a pilgrimage to the sanctuary of St. Michael Archangel in Monte Sant'Angelo sul Gargano (Apulia). These warriors had been used to counter the threat posed by the Saracens, who, from their bases in Sicily, raided South Italy without much resistance from the Lombard and Byzantine rulers of the affected lands.