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Archiver > GENEALOGY-DNA > 2006-02 > 1139190334


From: "musso1" <>
Subject: Re: R1b Analysis, EA, etc, was [DNA]
Date: Sun, 5 Feb 2006 19:45:46 -0600
References: <001501c62a90$c83d8510$0101a8c0@HighReaches.local>


As I said, the Germans that invaded the Italian peninsula in the 6th century
and settled in northern Italy had become, by the 11th century, Italian/Latin
in every cultural sense of the word. They spoke Romance dialects and adopted
legal systems comparable to those existing throughout the Italian peninsula.
They were entirely assimilated into Italian society. They practiced Roman
Catholicism and continued to practice it after the Great East-West Schism in
the Church. While they sprung from Germanic tribes centuries earlier, 11th
century Lombards would have considered Germans as foreign to them as Greeks.

They were consciously invited by the Norman rulers to settle in Sicily for
the very purpose of latinizing the island. This had the intended effect of
displacing (perhaps a euphemism for "slaughtering") the Arabic-speaking
Muslim North Africans who comprised a *majority* of the Sicilian population
at the time of the Norman conquest. Until the Normans arrived, Sicily had
much more in common with North Africa than Latin Europe.

As for the etymology of "Lombard", the "long beard" theory has been
dismissed by contemporary scholars as little more than a myth.

For some really great reading on this subject, I highly recommend the work
of Alex Metcalfe, a British Academy post-doctoral Research Fellow at the
University of Leeds. His 2003 book, "Muslims and Christians in Norman
Sicily", is a brilliant work of scholarship.

Jim


----- Original Message -----
From: "Glen Todd" <>
To: <>
Sent: Sunday, February 05, 2006 2:14 PM
Subject: RE: R1b Analysis, EA, etc, was [DNA]


>
> > To add to Mike's comments, Lombard settlement in northeast Sicily was
> > extensive during the 11th and 12th centuries (the Norman period).
> > "Lombard" in this context, refers to those northern Italians descended
> > from a "somewhat nebulous group of once Germanic tribes that had
> > invaded the Italian peninsula in the sixth century." By the 11th
> > century, they had been assimilated into Italian society. Genetically
> > speaking, though, they were German, and they were invited in waves by
>
> For what it's worth, in my extensive trivia file, "Lombard" is supposedly
a
> corruption of "Langobard" or "long beard", a reference to the German' full
> beards.
>
> IMO, though, I strongly doubt that "Latinizing" the land would have been
the
> reason, since the Italians were Latins while the Germanics not only were
not
> but had very little use for the Romans and their ilk.
>
> Glen
>
>
> ==============================
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