The Normans of the eleventh century had, by the intercourse of several generations of warriors with the polished nations of the Mediterranean, acquired a knowledge of the laws of humanity and the usages of social life unheard of among their barbarian forefathers, who had defied the perils of the English Channel and the Bay of Biscay in diminutive vessels of skins and osier, and carried dismay among the populous cities and rich settlements of the Seine and the Guadalquivir. Tempted by the charms of soil and climate enjoyed by that province of Northern France which still retains their name and the memory of their valor, these daring pirates exchanged without hesitation the dangers of a predatory existence upon the seas for the less exciting but more profitable employments of a sedentary life. With the abandonment of country was at the same time associated a renunciation of religion. The Pagan ceremonies and savage customs attending the worship of Woden were discarded for the imposing forms and benign precepts of Christianity. These significant events did not, however, produce any material alteration in the tastes, the character, or the aspirations of the great body of the Norman youth. The theatre of action alone was changed. In a moral point of view, no appreciable distinction exists between a pirate and a soldier of fortune. The Norman man-at-arms retained all the marauding instincts of his race, modified to some extent by the civilization with which he was occasionally brought in contact through his casual association with the accomplished inhabitants of Moorish Spain and the shrewd and adventurous traders of the Byzantine Empire. He had inherited the lofty stature of his ancestors, their enormous strength and powers of endurance, their contempt of danger, their barbarity in the treatment of a vanquished foe. Attracted to Italy by the accounts of pilgrims returning from the Holy Land, the Normans first appear in the history of that country as the mercenaries of those principalities whose close proximity to each other kept them in a condition of perpetual hostility. The intrepidity and military experience of the strangers were soon recognized as commodities of great value by the rulers of such states as Capua, Beneventum, and Salerno. From a subordinate position, their audacity and their courage soon raised them to a political equality with their former masters. They acquired territorial possessions, built castles, and plundered their neighbors with equal profit and even greater facility than did the Lombard barons, themselves descended from a race of freebooters. They figured alternately as the allies and the adversaries of both Greeks and Moslems, as the dictates of prudence or the prospect of gain suggested. Before the middle of the eleventh century they had become an important factor in the politics of the Italian Peninsula, where their ambition caused their friendship and their enmity to be regarded with almost equal fear and suspicion.