Norman SouthMilitary
Norman Conquest of Bari Ends Byzantine Italy
After a three-year siege, Robert Guiscard captures Bari, the last Byzantine stronghold in Italy, completing the Norman conquest of the south.
Bari, capital of the Byzantine catepanate of Italy and the principal Greek city of Apulia, surrendered to Robert Guiscard on 16 April 1071, only months before the catastrophic imperial defeat at Manzikert in the East. With its fall, more than five centuries of unbroken Roman government in the southern peninsula came to an end. The Hauteville Normans — sons of an obscure lord of the Cotentin who had arrived as pilgrims and mercenaries earlier in the century — had now united Apulia, Calabria, and most of Campania under their rule and were preparing to cross to Sicily. Byzantine institutions, Greek liturgy, and Greek-speaking communities would persist for centuries in the Salento and Calabria, but politically the Mezzogiorno henceforth belonged to a Latin Catholic state.
