Perceptions of Byzantine Virtus in Southern Italy, from the Eighth to Eleventh Centuries

In regard to Lombard and Norman perceptions of Byzantine virility ('virtus') in eleventh-century southern Italy, scholars have regularly assumed that the characterisation of 'effeminate Greeks' present in certain works is merely a reiteration of an age-old stereotype found throughout chronicles of medieval western Europe. In 1928 Ernesto Pontieri, editor of the southern Italian 'gesta' by the Norman Geoffrey Malaterra, suggested as much when juxtaposing a passage with one in Liudprand of Cremona's tenth-century 'Relatio de legatione Constantinopolitana' (RLC). The idea has been more forcefully underscored in recent times by Ovidio Capitani, Kenneth Baxter Wolf and Emily Albu. Wolf has argued that the derogatory epithet was a 'common device used by "barbaric" Latins to deprecate "civilized" Greeks'. Albu has since concurred, noting that the 'accusation is a cliché among western writers'. Yet a contrary view is very much demonstrable that the notion of Byzantine effeminacy is essentially restricted to one of the works written by that famous Ottonian propagandist and satirist. However, Liudprand's RLC, regularly cited as evidence of western disdain for Byzantium, is rarely compared with his earlier literary outing - the Antapodosis - in which the empire is an exemplar of 'virtus' ('manliness', 'strength', 'power', 'excellence'). Significantly, while Liudprand wrote of his intention to narrate the 'actions of feeble kings and effeminate princes' in the 'Antapodosis', such individuals reside in the West rather than the East.