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Russo Surname

Russo is a Sicilian name, the most popular name in all of Sicily, where it originated, and it is also popular throughout Southern Italy1. The meaning behind the name itself denotes nobility2. Many Southern Italians and Sicilians have been led to believe that the name means, “red,” but “Russo” is the Italian word from Medieval Latin for “a Russian.” So, who exactly were all of these Russians in Sicily and Southern Italy during Medieval times, such that the word should come to denote them? The Normans. The Medieval Latin word Russo meant a Norman long before it ever came to mean a Russian. Let us travel a little further back in time to explore the etymology of Russo.

The root word of Russo, “Rus',” comes to Italy from Byzantine Greek in which it was adopted from Scandinavian.3 “Rus'” means, “the men who row.” The Rus' people were the original Viking founders of the later Northern Russian Principalities4. The primary language spoken in Sicily when the Normans appeared there was vastly Byzantine Greek and seconded by Arabic.

All Vikings, and later their direct descendants, the Normans (French for Norsemen), were referred to as “Rus'” by the Byzantine Greeks, the Arabs, the Sicilians and Southern Italians. The most extensive Arabic account of the Rus' is by the Muslim diplomat and traveler Ahmad ibn Fadlan, who in 922 described people called Rūs/Rūsiyyah at length when he wrote “I have seen the Rus' as they came on their merchant journeys and encamped by the Itil5.

The first Western European source to mention the Rus' is the Annals of St. Bertin6. The Annals relate that Emperor Louis the Pious’s court at Ingelhiem in 839 was visited by a delegation from the Byzantine emperor. In this delegation there were two men who called themselves Rus (Rus vocari dicebant). Louis enquired about their origins and learnt that they were Swedes (suoni). Fearing that they were spies for their allies, the Danes, he incarcerated them, before letting them proceed after receiving reassurances from Byzantium.

The most telling is a later Western source which comes from Lituprand of Cremona, a 10th-century Lombard bishop who in a report from Constantinople to Holy Roman Emperor Otto I wrote that he had “met the Rus whom we know by the other name of Norsemen.”7

The name Russo should never be taken out of the context of the Byzantine world when the Rus Vikings aka Varangians were bodyguards and mercenaries to the Emperors of the Greek Byzantine Empire that included Sicily and Southern Italy. One cannot remove Magna Graecia nor Byzantine Southern Italy from the context of Southern Italian culture, history, language or names. Many Southern Italian words and last names are themselves Greek words and names. To this day in pockets of Southern Italian States and in Sicily, too, the Griko People still speak Greek. The word Russian in Greek is Roussos (Pronounced Russos). The word in Turkish for Russian is Rus. All of these words stem from the Viking tribe called Rus'.

A fun and notable example of how Greek culture has permeated Southern Italian culture, differentiated it from Northern Italian culture, and remains pervasive through modern day, is a simple gesticulation known as “The Greek No.” In his book, Manwatching (1977), Desmond Morris tells this tale of very different cultural practices across northern and southern Italian boundary lines:

“To test this, a special study was made in central Italy. It was found that despite the mobility of modern populations in Italy and the existence of a national television network covering the whole country, modern Romans still say no with a Head Shake (right to left) and Neapolitans still say no with a Head Toss (up and down). Traveling between the villages between the two cities, it became clear that there was a fairly sharp dividing-line coinciding with the first mountain range north of Naples. South of this, nearly everybody used the Head Toss; north of it they used the Head Shake. As far as the Head Toss is concerned, it’s almost as if the Greeks never left the south of Italy.”

Part of the fascinating history of this Magna Graecia part of Italy is that it was conquered from the Greek world by the Romans and incorporated into Rome, only to be later lost to the Goths. It was in the Gothic War of 535-554, during the reign of Emperor Justinian I and the Ostrogothic Kingdom of Italy -- the Italian peninsula, Dalmatia, Sardinia, Sicily and Corsica -- that the famous military genius, Byzantine General Narses recovered the Southern Italian Provinces from the Goths for the Byzantine Greek Emperor.

Next came the Muslim Arabs who took much of Southern Italy and Sicily. Then came the Normans and the Norman Conquest of Southern Italy and Sicily. It was actually the Normans who slowly reintroduced Latin back into Sicily.

The Normans saw a great opportunity to advance themselves and take title to lands as war lords, just the same as Rollo, the famous Viking Norseman who had secured a permanent foothold on Frankish soil in the valley of the lower Seine. Charles the Simple had ceded the Vikings lands between the mouth of the Seine and what is now Rouen, in exchange for Rollo “agreeing to end his brigandage” and provide the Franks with protection against future Viking raids 8-9. Having settled in Northern France, the Normans became Roman Catholics whereas theVarangian Rus who were similarly employed as mercenaries for the Byzantines, were Christianized by the Byzantine Greek Orthodox Church. By turning the newly conquered Italian lands over to the Roman Catholic Church and replacing the Greek language by reintroducing Latin after many hundreds of years, the Norman warlords curried favor with the Pope and were granted land and title. The very word Russo, from the Scandinavian, “Rus,” is probably the only word of Scandinavian origin left by the Normans in their tireless work to reinstate Latin into a culture indoctrinated by Byzantine Greek.

The first person to officially take the name Russo was Richard D’Hautville. He was granted title to Sperlinga Castle and made a Baron in 1132 by his Uncle, King Roger II of Sicily. With his diploma he took the name Russo Rosso (or perhaps Russo Rubeo, there are different accounts on this but all pointing to the same conclusion), and designed a red shield with a comet on it to denote the family’s heraldry. The color and the symbol are both significant to the meanings of both names, Russo and Rosso. The comet had come to be known as a portent of doom: the Bayeaux Tapestry prominently displays Haley’s Comet in the background of the scene, an historical depiction of the Norman Conquest of England. Red is the color of war, and of warriors. It is likely that in translating a new and unfamiliar word, Russo, later Italian-speaking people perhaps misunderstood the meaning of the first Russo part of the taken name, Russo Rosso (or Russo Rubeo), conflated the meanings together, and thus determined that Russo also means, “red.” In essence, subsequent translations of the name have sought to put a Latin root to a word that was not even Latin in the first place. The origin of Russo and all of its cultural variants, such as LoRusso, Russello, the Greek Rhoussos (from Rus Greek  Ῥῶς), the French Rousseau, or the English, Russell (from Anglo-Norman) are all explicitly derived from the word Rus’, and yet, unjustifiably, the connotation of the color red remains part of the elementary explanations of their origins.

If the word, “Norman,” was the common word used and everyone was so proud of Norman ancestry, then would we not expect to find that name all over Sicily and Southern Italy? Nevertheless, we do not! The word used to historically describe Norsemen in that area was Rus, and the name to describe that ancestry is Russo. Interesting and noteworthy asides, anecdotal evidence contests that in modern day Sicily, it is common practice to refer somewhat affectionately to someone with the name Russo as, "Signor Rus,” suggesting that therein the title exists a deeper history than a mere storied description of an ancestor's physical attributes. It is also said that Russos in Sicily paint their houses white, to denote their Norman ancestry. Mario Puzo in his book, The Sicilian said: “They were so proud, for instance, that every family painted its house the same color their fathers had. They didn't know that the color of the houses gave away their origins, the blood they had inherited from their ancestors along with their houses. That centuries ago the Normans had painted their houses white, the Greeks always used blue, the Arabs various pinks and red. And the Jews used yellow. Now they all considered themselves Italian and Sicilian.”

Finally, a look at the charts and maps of the Kingdom of Sicily 1154 compared to the chart of Italian names by region shows that the name Russo appears most frequently in the exact same regions where the Norman Vikings conquered the lands. The frequency of the name Rosso is much higher in the north than in the south, and Russo is much more frequent in the south than in the north.

So, why did the last name Rosso disappear in the South and Sicily, if Richard D’Hautville had also assumed the name Rosso in tandem with Russo? A possible explanation is that in Central and Northern Italy, surnames that suggest hair color (e.g., Rosso, Bruno) were typically given by nuns to illegitimate children to denote the physical attributes of the child’s parent, if he or she was seen when the child was provided or abandoned. Such a name is inherently ignoble and would not be ostentatiously demonstrated amongst the nobility. Yet, the name Russo is proudly found in conjunction with many different noble names, such as Russo Camoli, Russo D’Altavilla, Russo Spena, and many more. Most of these houses display the Russo comet on their shields. For these reasons, the modern Russos of the world should be disabused of the notion that their glorious, Viking Warlord surname is somehow not at all an ode to a powerful ancestry but is merely an ignominious description of some poor red-headed bastard. This Russo begs to differ.

https://brilliantmaps.com/surnames-italy/ https://www.heraldrysinstitute.com/cognomi/Russo/Italia/idc/15286/lang/it/ Blöndal, Sigfús (1978). The Varangians of Byzantium. Cambridge University. pp. 1–16. Brink, Stephen (2008). The Viking World. Routledge Jones, Gwyn (2001). A History of the Vikings. Oxford University Press. p. 164. Wladyslaw Duczko, Viking Rus: Studies on the Presence of Scandinavians in Eastern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2004), pp. 10-59. Janet Martin, 'The First East Slavic State', in A Companion to Russian History, ed. by Abbott Gleason (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), pp. 34-50 (p. 36). Chibnall, Marjorie (2006). The Normans. Blackwell. pp. 15–16. Bates, David (1982). Normandy Before 1066. Longman. pp. 8-10.