From c. 500 BCE until the Roman era, the territory of modern-day San Massimo was controlled by the Samnites, an ethnic group composed of a fusion of indigenous people and iron-age era migrants from Greece and other parts of Europe. In a series of wars, known as the Samnite Wars, Rome conquered the region. Following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, Germanic Lombards occupied the area, before they in turn were conquered by the Normans. Norman nobleman, and their descendants, first administered the region as the County of Apulia and Calabria, which later joined other Norman counties to make up the Kingdom of Sicily in 1130. When Sicily seceded in the Vespers of 1282, the mainland possessions of the Normans, including San Massimo, became the Kingdom of Naples.