furnished the occasion. The first definite trace of the Normans in Italy appears in or about the year 1016, when a band returning from Jerusalem is found at Monte Gargano on the eastern coast. There was here an ancient shrine of St. Michael, older even than the famous monastery of St. Michael of the Peril on the confines of Normandy with which it had shared the red cloak of its patron, and a natural object of veneration on the part of Norman pilgrims, who well understood the militant virtues of the archangel of the flaming sword. Here the Normans fell into conversation with a Lombard named Meles, who had recently led an unsuccessful revolt in Apulia and who told them that with a few soldiers like themselves he could easily overcome the Greeks, whereupon they promised to return with their countrymen and assist him. Another story of the same year tells of a body of forty valiant Normans, also on their way home from the Holy Sepulchre, who found a Saracen army besieging Salerno and, securing arms and horses from the natives, defeated and drove off the infidel host. Besought by the inhabitants to stay, they replied that they had acted only for the love of God, but consented to carry home lemons, almonds, rich vestments, and other products of the south as a means of attracting other Normans to make their homes in this land of milk and honey. Legend doubtless has its part in these tales,--the good Orderic makes the twenty thousand Saracens in front of Salerno flee before a hundred Normans!--but the general account of the occasion of the Norman expeditions seems correct. Possibly a Lombard emissary accompanied the pilgrims home to help in the recruiting; certainly in 1017 the Normans are back in force and ready for business. There was, however, nothing sensational or decisive in the early exploits of the Normans on Italian soil. The results of the first campaigns with Meles in northern Apulia were lost in a serious defeat at Canne, and for many years the Normans, few in number but brave and skilful, sought their individual advantage in the service of the various parties in the game of Italian politics, passing from one prince to another as advantage seemed to offer, and careful not to give to any so decisive a preponderance that he might dispense with them. The first Norman principality was established about 1030 at Aversa, just north of Naples, where the money of Rouen continued to circulate more than a century afterward; but such definite points of crystallization make their appearance but slowly, and the body of the Normans, constantly recruited from home, lived as mercenaries on pay and pillage. Their reputation was, however, established, and when the prince of Salerno was asked by the Pope to disband his Norman troop, he replied that it had cost him much time and money to collect this precious treasure, for whom the soldiers of the enemy were “as meat before the devouring lions.”[63]