The history of southern Italy is often ignored prior to the coming of the Normans in the late eleventh century, except for the moments when the peninsula impinged on the consciousness of the medieval rulers of northern Europe, particularly the German emperors. Recently, though, historians have attempted to treat the South less as an appendage of the rest of Europe than as a valuable area of study in its own right. For varying reasons, however, no recent study has shed much light on the pre-Norman period, and pre-eminence in histories of the whole area is still held by works well over fifty years old.

It is very hard to package pre-Norman southern Italy neatly into one study because it was a disparate area made up of several different political jurisdictions. The Lombards who had penetrated furthest South during the invasion of the peninsula in the latter half of the sixth century had coalesced into three Germanic principalities, Benevento, Salerno and Capua. In the territories remaining under Byzantine rule, Naples had become autonomous in the eighth century, and Amalfi and Gaeta would do so in the ninth. In addition to these, Byzantium still ruled the far South of the peninsula throughout our period, but lost control of Sicily to the Arabs in the ninth century.

Loyalties did not divide along these political lines, however, and even in areas of political control by Byzantium, the culture of the Lombards might still persist strongly, and vice versa.