The historian of the Norman conquest of the South finds in its three main chroniclers, Amatus of Montecassino, William of Apulia, and Geoffrey Malaterra, both a precious resource and a problematic one. All written between 1080 and 1100, and therefore within a short time of the completion of the conquest of the Mezzogiorno and during the last years of the conquest of Sicily, these sources present their readers with both the value of their testimony and its flawed origin. Written to bear witness to and, in two cases, openly celebrate the Norman takeover, the sources inevitably bear the imprint of their stated or unstated but self-evident goals, and using them for the purposes of military history demands a careful work of unpacking their themes, bias, and aim. This chapter will demonstrate how this can be done, by focusing as a case study on the sources’ treatment of the Hautevilles’ coming to southern Italy and to Sicily, and what this can tell us about the challenges of mining the chronicles for information about the military aspects of the Norman conquest.

The choice of looking at the treatment of the Hautevilles in particular – as opposed to an examination of the depiction of the entire Norman invasion – has been made so as to overcome a particular difficulty that it is fundamental to keep in mind when examining these three chroniclers collectively: the challenges of reconciling these works’ differences from each other and of analysing them together. While the Ystoire de li Normant, Gesta Roberti Wiscardi and De rebus gestis Rogerii et Roberti were written during a relatively short time-frame, they appear to be wholly independent of each other: their transmission histories differ greatly and they are marked by distinct literary styles, aims, and geographical and ethnographical focuses. While their time and place of origin and theme make them indispensable for any study of the Norman conquest, they do not sit naturally next to each other as part of the same historiographical discourse.

Nonetheless, it is possible to find a point of contact between them in their presentation of the coming to Italy of eight of the twelve sons of Tancred of Hauteville, an obscure Cotentin knight whose kin group came to dominate among the Normans in the South.