by Jack Ludlow
‘Is it true that your namesake murdered his brother to take the dukedom?’
‘What does it matter if it is true or false, given so many see it as likely? I think my father believed it to be true. He always referred to him as Robert the Devil.’
There was a temptation to elaborate then, to refer to Duke Robert of Normandy’s then tenuous hold on his title, with so many of his vassals, like Tancred, suspicious that he had come to it by poisoning his elder brother Richard. On the day following the dispute with Tancred, prior to leading his host into battle, Robert the Devil had named his bastard William as heir to the dukedom and made every one of his vassals swear fealty by acclamation, but that was a slender oath to make to a child only five years old and one too easy to break.
Tancred suspected the Duke would not give employment to his sons for fear that they carried a measure of the same blood as William and would seek to usurp power if he died before the boy had grown to manhood. That is what came to pass, and who can say what would have happened if William and Drogo had remained in Hauteville-le-Guichard? Robert of Normandy was dead two years later and his bastard son, however successful he had been subsequently, had held on to his inheritance with great difficulty; given their bloodline and their subsequent rise to prominence, perhaps it was wise to refuse close service to the de Hauteville brothers.
‘After that confrontation, and denied any prospect of service with the Duke, William and Drogo left for Italy, but know this: before they did Tancred made them swear never to raise their swords against each other or to do one another harm. It was at the time, and still is, I daresay, not unknown for brother to kill brother in Normandy without a desire for anything so grand as a dukedom. That oath he administered to each and every one of us who left the Contentin and it is one we held to, though the Good Lord knows sometimes it was a trial for me to keep my word.’
Robert slapped the cold stone wall hard. ‘If we have risen as a family then to that must be ascribed much of the reason, but know this, Bohemund. There is not a Norman lance in my domains that sees it as a natural duty to bow the knee to a de Hauteville. They will not say it in my presence but there are many from families who hold that they are superior in blood to us. We have what we have because we have fought for it.’
‘I have been told that it required a fair amount of cunning as well.’
‘That too, and if I am known as the Guiscard, then the best of your uncles were just as crafty as ever I have been.’
‘I look forward to hearing from you of their exploits.’
‘Do not pretend to me you have not heard of them from others.’
‘There is a difference as to the memories of one who shared their exploits.’
‘Ademar speaks highly of you.’
‘An opinion I would return in full measure.’
‘All this talk of family, Bohemund, what does that tell you?’
‘That if we are to hold what we have, Father, as well as extend it, that can only be achieved by the same combination which built the triple dukedom in the first place.’
That admission of his paternity, as well as the acknowledgement of the need for the unity of blood, rendered much of what Robert had intended to espouse unnecessary; his son had reasoned that his father wanted him by his side and he also had discerned why. The Guiscard was famed for never trusting anybody unless he was obliged to do so by circumstances. That was the way it had been with all of his brothers, all the way down to Count Roger, but if he ever reposed faith in anyone it was one who shared his blood. Could that be carried on through another generation?
‘I feel the need to walk, Bohemund. My words come more easily when my feet are moving.’
CHAPTER THREE
The trapdoor was lifted and both made their way down the stone steps to the arch that led on to the wooden stoop that ran along the battlements, where previously Robert had questioned Ademar of Monteroni. The parapet was lit by flaring torches with a man-at-arms standing sentinel every twenty paces; the lack of a known enemy close by did not interfere with what was set practice for an assembled host. Likewise there were mounted pickets out in the approaches to Corato with orders to look out for threats; the Duke of Apulia had enemies in abundance outside those who had so recently broken their oath of fealty.
He began to talk of them now, taking no cognisance of what Bohemund might already know; best to have it all out to ensure he fully understood what his father had to contend with. The province of which Robert was overlord had been carved out, over twenty-five years of continual warfare, of possessions that had either been held by Byzantium, been fiefs of the Holy See or tenuously claimed by the Holy Roman Empire, and they had been hard won. Sicily was a separate affair, for on that island they had fought the Saracens under the auspices of a papal banner – the same holy banner that had been granted to the Christian monarchs of Spain – in what Rome saw as a crusade to push back the infidels who had invaded both Sicily and the Iberian Peninsula centuries before to desecrate churches and turn them into mosques.
Such a banner did not imply any love for the Normans or the Guiscard, him especially; it was more a piece of papal pragmatism that would allow any subsequent pontiff to claim to be the island’s suzerain should the Normans of Apulia succeed in turning out the Saracens. Outside that campaign he was in constant dispute with Rome and suffering excommunication, not for the first time, over the jointly claimed Principality of Benevento. Added to that were the depredations of many of his followers in the Abruzzi, where it was said, thanks to their banditry, that no man was safe to travel for fear of being robbed down to his very small clothes.
Rome’s demand that this cease had only been met in recent months because Apulia needed all its fighting men to put down the revolt, and it would shortly be resumed; as far as Robert was concerned, it was best if any of his unemployed knights sought their plunder outside his domains, not within them.
The bulk of that quarter-century of fighting had been spent in wresting the province they called Langobardia from the Byzantine Empire, who had not surrendered control without a long and arduous contest, while taking the great port cities had led to siege after siege. The one that ended with the capture of the most important, Bari, lasted four whole years and strained the Guiscard’s tactical genius to the very limit. Every success had been followed with a reinvasion by an enemy that refused to lie down; cities and lands had been lost and recaptured for the very simple reason that the provinces of Apulia, Basilicata and Calabria dripped with fertile wealth, most notably oil from the endless olive groves. From Constantinople he felt he had, at present, little to fear if you set aside the gold they employed to bribe his vassals, of which the Eastern Empire seemed to have an endless supply.
‘Thank God, since Manzikert they lack the leaders and men to trouble me on their own.’
When word came from Anatolia, that disastrous battle, eight years previously, it had shocked the whole of Christendom to its foundations; the flower of the Byzantine army utterly destroyed by the Seljuk Turks advancing inexorably out of Asia Minor, the reigning emperor, Romanus IV Diogenes, taken captive, which led to a coup in Constantinople and one of his generals, Michael Dukas, taking the purple. Having done so, he was in no doubt as to the weakness of the Empire and he had written to both Rome and Apulia seeking support.
‘Michael Dukas sought from the Pope a Christian army that would fight the infidel, perhaps one strong enough to reverse the gains the Turks had made. The bait was his good offices to help to heal the rift between the two branches of the faith. The offer to me was more about holding his borders than pushing the Turks back. Three times he wrote and twice I did not reply.’
‘Why?’
Robert laughed. ‘If you had ever received a letter from a Byzantine emperor you would not ask; the language of flattery is enough to make a decent man vomit and if they have perfected anything it is the art of the vague promise. There were hints of high and profitable office without any commitment. In the second letter ideas
were again more floated than solid regarding an alliance by marriage to one of Michael’s family. My silence forced them to be definite and the third time their letter included a proposal they knew I would be a fool to refuse.’
Knowing all this, Bohemund cut in to hurry his father on. ‘The hand of one of your daughters, for Constantine, Michael’s son.’
Robert had accepted that with alacrity, sending east his youngest, Olympias, a child of three, to learn their ways and to have her name changed to Helena as she was instructed in the Orthodox rite.
‘Yet it was not an alliance, more a promise of future amity,’ Robert insisted, as he took up his tale in a way that ignored the interruption, maintaining he was not concerned.
Byzantium now had too much on its plate, both internally and externally, to reinvade Italy, but they still had agents willing to spread around money to foster trouble, often with his vassals but especially amongst the Lombards, in order to keep a past and possibly future enemy off balance. Of that latter race the Guiscard was scathing; at one time the Lombards had been fierce conquerors of the land he now held. Over the five hundred years since they had crossed the Alps they had become not only flabby but racked by suspicion, mistrust and endless betrayal.
Never able to agree on a leader, the Lombards of Southern Italy had first been conquered and turned into imperial vassals by the Byzantine Greeks, then held in servitude while evincing a burning desire to recover what they had lost. They had fomented incessant uprisings under the banner of the western city states such as Salerno, Naples and Capua, only to find, when they looked like they might find success, their supposed leaders being bought off by enemy gold or betraying each other out of a determination to take over the direction of the revolt. After decades of crushing defeats they had sought help, paying the Normans to come south and win their battles, yet their disunity, in contrast to the cohesion and fighting skill of those they had engaged as mercenaries, meant that they now paid those revenues to Norman overlords who were more assiduous in collection than had been their Byzantine predecessors.
The other threat was a distant one, in Bamberg, the seat of the Holy Roman Emperor, where the heir to Charlemagne held his court. He could command a host large enough and of such abilities in combat as to make even the Normans cautious, but between Apulia and the Western Empire lay Rome, not only physically but also as a place that occupied almost the whole of imperial attention. The seat of incalculable wealth, the papacy had at its disposal vast spiritual power, but that did not go uncontested and such disagreements came to the fore in the election of the Pope. The Western emperors insisted that any candidate for investiture must have their approval; the more bellicose members of the Curia maintained it was a matter for them alone and none of anyone else’s business, particularly a layman, however grand his title.
That was not a position agreed to by either the population or the senatorial families of Rome, ever ready to bribe the mob to support one of their blood to the highest ecclesiastical office, for the very good reason that it was the fount of prosperity, as well as the giver of wealthy benefices to the elected man’s relatives. The result was too often a split, with two popes in contention, one either the Emperor’s choice in conjunction with the Roman aristocrats, or the candidate from the Curia supported by those same elements who peopled the Roman Senate; they shifted their backing to wherever they saw personal or family advantage.
The so-called investiture crisis had been bubbling for almost as long as the Normans had been in Italy and showed no signs of abating. The ecclesiastical fight was led now by Archdeacon Hildebrand, a low-born but cunning Lombard who had risen from mere monk to become advisor to a succession of pontiffs. Strong in the cause of papal independence, he stood four-square against imperial interference in a battle the Guiscard had often thought those Hildebrand served might have let die down for the sake of peace. But the major difficulty was that men came to that office in their advanced years and were therefore inclined to expire instead of enjoying the long reign that might have solved the problem by extended negotiation.
If the Curia elected one pope, the Holy Roman Emperor would bring on the election of a rival, his preferred candidate, so it was ever a troubled responsibility full of splits and strife; Hildebrand’s pope was likely to spend as much time under siege in the Castel St Angelo as enjoying the comforts of the Lateran Palace, either hiding from the wrath of the Emperor or the easily aroused Roman mob, while trying to deny the claims of the imperial antipope. With the last two pontiffs it had been Norman military pressure, given in return for the confirmation of their titles, that had allowed them to serve out their terms.
‘It is that which keeps them from combining, Bohemund. I have no need to remind you, that if we wrested the lands we hold from Byzantium, the titles were granted to us from the papacy.’ A discernible nod was all that was required in response. ‘And you will also be well aware they were not originally granted out of generosity but unwillingly extracted from Pope Leo after Civitate.’
There was no need to relay to Bohemund anything about that battle, which for the forces of the papacy ranked with Manzikert. The Normans of Italy, from both Capua and Apulia, under the leadership of Humphrey de Hauteville, had been ranged against and massively outnumbered by a combination of a Byzantine army and a papacy that for once had imperial contingents from Bamberg, as well as the rulers of Northern Italy south of the Brenner Pass, all combined to finally put paid to Norman depredations in Southern Italy.
Civitate is where the combined forces sought to force a decision, but the Normans got themselves between the arms of the enemy and kept them apart, which allowed them to fight against less daunting odds, though even then they had many fewer men than their opponents. But they had that one tactical gift their enemies lacked: cohesion, and the Norman victory was overwhelming – a powerful force of Swabians provided by the Emperor died to a man – and the subsequent rout resulted in the capture of Pope Leo. He was obliged, he later maintained coerced, into granting the Norman leaders legal rights to both the lands and titles they had taken by main force, this while the Byzantines melted away. The Battle of Civitate had secured the Norman place in Italy and formed the cornerstone of what Robert now held.
‘And for all we laud it, let me tell you we must have had God on our side. If we had lost that battle every Norman in Italy would have been lucky to see their homeland again. More likely our bodies would have been hung from every available tree, as the Romans were wont to treat those they defeated. Every pope since Leo, instead of confirming us as they have, would take what we gained there back and see us damned if they had an army.’
‘But they do not.’
‘Which is not to assume they never will. If Leo, God rest his soul, once gathered a host to seek to dislodge us, another may do so again and that goat Hildebrand hates us as much as he hates Bamberg. I repeat, it is only dissension that keeps our enemies weak to both the east and the north.’ There was a moment when Robert seemed to brood, as though disinclined to be open about the trend of his thoughts. ‘What do you know of Richard of Capua?’
The abruptness of that enquiry startled Bohemund somewhat; it was like being back in the Monteroni schoolroom in which he had been taught Latin and Greek by the monk Ademar had employed, a fellow of short temper and an abiding love of physical chastisement when answers were slow in coming and spittle-filled fury when his charge refused to answer. Even with that memory uppermost there was no choice but to respond.
‘He is all-powerful in Campania, is wed to your sister and was allied with our family at Civitate. It was with his uncle, Rainulf Drengot, that our family first took mercenary service.’
Robert nodded but did not immediately respond; it was as if he was pondering on that history. William and Drogo de Hauteville, newly arrived from Normandy, had first been engaged as lances by Richard of Capua’s uncle, then styled Lord of Aversa, though as was common with Normans at the time it was a title taken, not granted by any higher power. William ha
d risen through sheer prowess to become Rainulf’s right-hand man; indeed it was he who had secured for him recognition of his Aversa gonfalon, in the process bringing about the fall of the Lombard Prince of Capua.
There had been scant gratitude for his efforts; Drengot had come to resent the de Hautevilles, now five in number and much admired, seeing them as a threat to his position, which had led him to conspire at their downfall with Guaimar of Salerno, Sichelgaita’s father. William had cunningly outfoxed both to become an even greater rival to Rainulf’s power and, in time, not only his equal but superior in the land he held and the forces he could muster. After Drengot’s death his possessions and title had passed to his nephew Richard and for every time Capua and Apulia had cooperated there had been a dozen more times where they had been close to enemies, without either party able or willing to put the rivalry to the ultimate test.
‘It has ever been our habit, we Normans, to combine when threatened, as we did at Civitate, though there has never been much love lost between us, even if Richard is my brother-in-law. Never forget he’s a Drengot. I suspect in styling himself as prince, he sees us as somehow inferior to him, for he is stuffed with arrogant pride.’
That last opinion came out with a growl, causing Bohemund to pose the obvious question. ‘Do you fear him?’
‘Only in concert with another of our enemies,’ Robert replied. ‘We have ever held to our uneasy peace, but now I sense matters have shifted, for this revolt I have just crushed could not have been sustained without outside support and for once I do not see the interference of Constantinople.’
‘Ademar was sure Gisulf had a hand in the uprising.’
‘And Ademar was not mistaken,’ Robert spat.