The Normans In The South

by John Julius Norwich

  In the winter of 1050-51 Leo travelled to Germany to discuss matters with the Western Emperor, and on his return to Rome in March found awaiting him another delegation from Benevento with the news that the nobles of the city had swept away their erstwhile rulers and had decided to surrender themselves entirely into his hands. It was an offer the Pope had fully expected, and one he could not refuse. A synod in Rome prevented him from leaving immediately but he was in Benevento at the beginning of July, when he found the principality entirely submissive to the Holy See. The next problem was to ensure its protection, and for this purpose Leo invited Drogo and Gaimar to a council. They came at once, and readily gave the Pope all the guarantees he sought—too readily as it

  1 F. Chakndon, Histoire de la Domination Normande. 1 Migne, Af.P.L., 143, Col. 777 begins.

  turned out. Drogo's authority as Count of Apulia was far from complete, and hardly had he left Benevento to return to Melfi when messengers arrived at Salerno, whither the Pope had continued with Gaimar, to tell of further Norman outrages on Beneventan territory. Leo was furious, and was only slightly pacified by Gaimar's explanations that Drogo was undoubtedly doing his best, but had not yet had a chance of bringing his wilder compatriots under control. Still fuming, he at once dictated a letter to Drogo demanding his further immediate intervention, the speedy restoration of order and whatever reparations might be thought appropriate.

  This letter never reached its destination, for the messenger to whom it was entrusted heard news on the way which sent him back at full speed to Salerno. Drogo de Hauteville had been assassinated.

  As the Normans' unpopularity grew, so the opposition to them had crystallised into three separate factions—the pro-Byzantines, encouraged and subsidised by Argyrus, who were working for the restoration of Greek power in the peninsula; the Papalists, who would have liked the whole region to follow the recent example of Benevento; and the independents, who saw no reason why the South of Italy should not be left to itself and governed by the old Italo-Lombard aristocracy that could already boast five centuries' experience. Though the pro-Byzantine party must bear the lion's share of suspicion, we shall never know for sure which of these three factions was responsible for Drogo's death. All we can be certain about is that on St Lawrence's Day, 10 August, 1051, the Count of Apulia went to the chapel of his castle at Monte Ilaro (now Montella) to attend a celebratory mass. As he entered the building he was set upon by a certain Risus, who had been lying in wait behind the door, and killed instantly. Risus was presumably not alone, for we are told that several of Drogo's followers perished with him; and since a number of other Norman chiefs throughout Apulia met their deaths on the same day and in similar circumstances we can only conclude that his assassination was part of a vast conspiracy to rid the land once and for all of its oppressors.

  If such a conspiracy in fact existed, it was a sad failure. The Normans' hold on the country was not appreciably weakened; they had merely been roused to anger. Moreover, they had lost their leader and, showing little eagerness to elect another, were meanwhile able to take their vengeance free from all control. Drogo had been a moderate man—sage chevalier, Amatus calls him—Godfearing and fundamentally honest; and though he may have lacked that last ounce of steel necessary for the full enforcement of his authority, he was well aware of the need for discipline. In spite of the recent events at Benevento, his death therefore marked a further worsening of the situation from Leo's point of view. Drogo had at least been willing to discuss matters reasonably and respectfully and had shown himself amenable if not always effective. Now there was no longer even a spokesman empowered to speak for the Normans as a whole, and the land was declining fast into anarchy. If order and tranquillity were to be restored, it would have to be by force. The Pope had masses said on Ascension Day for Drogo's soul and began to raise an army.

  The task proved harder than he had expected. Henry III, though he had been partly responsible for the present situation, was probably still nettled at the Pope's take-over of Benevento; he was also involved in a war with Hungary and various internal problems. He refused all military support. So too did the King of France, who was having quite enough trouble with the Normans at home. Help came, however, from the one quarter whence Leo had least expected it—Constantinople. Argyrus, recently ennobled as a reward for his past services with the empty title of Duke of Italy, Calabria, Sicily and—surprisingly—Paphlagonia, was still his Emperor's principal expert and adviser on Italian policy; and he had recently returned from the capital where he had managed to convince Constantine— in face of furious opposition from the Greek Patriarch—of the necessity of a rapprochement with the Latins. The Normans, he argued, were now a far greater menace to Byzantine interests than the Western Emperor, the Lombards or the Pope had ever been, and there was no other way of breaking their power over the peninsula. Argyrus's own Lombard origins may have lent additional feeling to his words; his counsels prevailed and before the year 1051 drew to a close he had reached full agreement with Leo on joint military action.

  In Italy itself most of the petty barons of the south and centre answered the Pope's call readily enough. Many had already suffered from Norman raids and were beginning to fear for their own survival, while others simply saw the tide approaching and were anxious to stem it while there was still time. When, however, Leo appealed to Gaimar (whom he had deliberately left till last) he met with a point-blank refusal. It can hardly have surprised him. Drogo had married Gaimar's sister; the Norman-Salernitan alliance had been virtually uninterrupted for fifteen years, to the immeasurable benefit of both sides. If Gaimar were now to desert his allies—and incidentally his vassals—they might well topple his own throne before Leo or anyone else could come to his assistance. Moreover, if things went according to the Pope's plan and the Normans were driven from Italy, there would be nothing to protect the Prince of Salerno from the triumphant Byzantine—Papal alliance; and Gaimar's past record was hardly such as to endear him to the Greeks. He therefore returned to Leo a message, polite but firm, pointing out not only that he could never join any league against the Normans but also that he would find it impossible to stand aside and allow them to be attacked.

  The second part of the message came as a blow to the Pope. Though he cannot have expected Gaimar's support, he may well have had hopes for his neutrality. Meanwhile the Prince of Salerno had taken care that his message should be publicised as widely as possible, and news of the position adopted by the mightiest of all the southern rulers was having a dangerously demoralising effect on the Italian and Lombard elements of the army now beginning to assemble. Their despondency was being still further increased by hideous stories, now being spread by Salernitan agents, of the Normans' military prowess, and by warnings of the dire revenge that they would exact, after their inevitable victory, on all those who had dared to take up arms against them.

  But there were darker portents than these in the air. Amatus tells us in detail of the many 'signe merveillous which now appeared, both in Salerno and also, apparently, in Jerusalem. A Cyclopean child was born with one eye in the middle of its forehead and with the hoofs and tail of a bull. Another appeared with two heads. A river—we are not told which—ran red with blood, and an oil lamp in the Church of St Benedict was found filled with milk. All these things, Amatus assures us, foretold the death of Gaimar.

  And now indeed the Prince of Salerno came in his turn to a violent end. A pro-Byzantine party had seized power in Amalfi and had at once risen against the domination of Salerno, refusing to pay the usual tribute. Somehow the insurgents had managed to secure the support of part of Gaimar's own family; and so it was that on 2 June 1052 Gaimar V of Salerno was struck down in the harbour of his capital by his four brothers-in-law, sons of the Count of Teano, the eldest of whom now proclaimed himself as successor. Both the principal enemies of Byzantium had thus been murdered within a year, and although the Greeks do not seem to have been as directly responsible on this occasion as they do for the death of
Drogo, it is hard to absolve them altogether from guilt.

  Of that section of Gaimar's family which had remained loyal, one member only escaped capture and imprisonment by the insurgents. This was the prince's brother, Duke Guy of Sorrento, who at once galloped off to fetch help from his Norman friends. For them the situation was as serious as it was for Salerno. Gaimar had been their only ally; if Salerno should fall under Byzantine influence they would be surrounded and, with Leo in his present mood, probably doomed as well. Fortunately Guy found them already mobilised between Melfi and Benevento. Fortunately too he found that, after nearly a year of chaotic interregnum, they had at last elected a chief —his own sister's husband, Humphrey de Hauteville. It was typical of the Normans that before agreeing to help they should have negotiated with Guy a high price for their assistance; but the distracted Duke was prepared to agree to anything, and only four days after Gaimar's death the Norman army was encamped before the walls of Salerno.

  Against the massed Norman force the four brothers of Teano had no chance at all. Taking Gaimar's young son Gisulf with them, they barricaded themselves in the citadel; but their own families had fallen into Norman hands and Guy was therefore able to negotiate for the return of his nephew, before whom, as legal heir and successor of Gaimar, he immediately did homage. The Normans would have preferred to see Guy himself assume the throne of Salerno at such a moment, but they were impressed by his selflessness. They too then declared themselves for Gisulf, who confirmed them in all their existing territorial possessions. It only remained to deal with the rebels, and these within a day or two were forced to capitulate. Gisulf and Guy, showing once again a moral sense rare for their time and position, had promised that their lives should be spared; but as the prisoners left the citadel the Normans, pointing out that they for their part had promised nothing, fell upon them with their swords. They killed not only the four ringleaders but, in grisly reprisal, thirty-six others as well—one for every wound that had been found on Gaimar's body.

  Gaimar V of Salerno was the last of the great Lombard princes of South Italy. At the peak of his power his domains extended over the wide territories of Capua, Sorrento, Amalfi and Gaeta, and his suzerainty over the Normans of Aversa and Apulia. His influence was felt through the length and breadth of the peninsula, as he proved when, by the prestige of his name alone, he almost effortlessly sabotaged the military preparations of the Pope of Rome himself. Only sixteen when he came to the throne, having then and throughout his life to contend with the unscrupulous ambitions of Pandulf of Capua on the one hand and the Normans on the other, he proved a match for both, and he did so without once breaking his word or betraying a trust. Up to the day he died his honour and good faith had never once been called in question. He was then forty-one years old. Under his son Gisulf the principality of Salerno was to survive for one more generation, but it never regained its former glory, and in 1075 it lost its independence for ever. The Normans saw to that.

  To Leo IX, watching from Benevento, these developments can have afforded little comfort. The murder of Gaimar, much as it must have shocked and revolted him, had momentarily strengthened his position; but in the events which followed, the Normans and Salernitans had given unmistakable proof of how quickly and devastatingly they could act in unison, and the lesson had not been lost on the already apprehensive papal troops. Many of these had discreetly deserted and the remainder, if they were to be persuaded to fight at all, would have to be heavily reinforced. Back went Leo to Germany, to make a second, more urgent appeal to Henry III. His journey was not entirely in vain; while celebrating the Christmas of 1052 with the Emperor at Worms he managed to obtain formal imperial recognition of the papal title to Benevento and certain other South Italian territories. But thanks to the machinations of Leo's old enemy, Bishop Gebhard of Eichstatt, the army which Henry had at last reluctantly put at his disposal was recalled before it reached the frontiers of Italy, and the Pope found himself with no alternative but to do his own recruiting. Fortunately he had with him his chancellor and librarian, Frederick, brother of the Duke of Lorraine; and this warlike priest—later to become Pope Stephen IX —was able to procure a body of some seven hundred trained Swabian infantry which was to prove the mainstay of the army. Around this solid nucleus there quickly gathered a motley and undisciplined collection of mercenaries and adventurers, most of whom had apparently thought it wise to leave Germany—'a la suite', as a French historian1 puts it, 'de facheuses aventures'.

  As it decended through Italy in the spring of 1053, the army continued its snowball growth. As Gibbon describes it:

  In his long progress from Mantua to Beneventum, a vile and promiscuous multitude of Italians was enlisted under the holy standard: the priest and the robber slept in the same tent; the pikes and crosses were intermingled in the front; and the martial saint repeated the lessons of his youth in the order of march, of encampment, and of combat.2

  Although few of the new adherents may have been persons of unblemished moral character, Gibbon's description is exaggerated; it is unlikely that the Papal forces were much more tatterdemalion than most of the other armies of the Middle Ages. But by the time that they reached Benevento at the beginning of June they were numerically more than a match for anything the Normans could put into the field, and nearly all the non-Norman barons of South Italy had rallied again to Leo's standard. The Duke of Gaeta, the Counts of Aquino and Teano were there, and Peter, Archbishop of Amalfi; there too were detachments from Rome and the Sabine hills, from Campania and Apulia, from the Marsi, Ancona and

  1 Chalandon. 1 Gibbon, ch. LVI.

  Spoleto, all drawing new courage from each others' presence and, most of all, from that of their solemn, white-robed leader, who had now assumed personal command of the army and was steadily infusing them with his own serene confidence.

  Leo had been in contact with Argyrus during the journey south and had arranged to join the Byzantines near Siponto in northern Apulia. Since, however, the main road east from Benevento was dominated by the Norman-held fortresses of Troia and Bovino, he now led his army along a more circuitous northern route, through the valley of the Biferno and thence east behind Monte Gargano. The Normans watched his progress carefully. Their own situation, they now knew, was more serious than at any time since the first of their number had arrived in Italy thirty-six years before. On the results of the fighting that lay ahead depended their whole future in the peninsula; if they lost, there would be no second chance. And victory looked a good deal less certain than it had in 1052. They were outnumbered and without allies; even the Salernitans, who owed their city and probably their lives to Norman valour, had let them down in their hour of need. Ranged against them were not only two armies, the Papal and the Byzantine, but also the entire indigenous population of Apulia, who looked upon them with unconcealed loathing and were determined to do all they could to ensure their destruction. On their side they had only their formidable military reputation; courage, cohesion and discipline; and their own sharp swords.

  Richard of Aversa had already joined Humphrey with all the warriors he could muster; Robert Guiscard had arrived from the depths of Calabria with a sizable force of his own; and the combined army which must by now have comprised, apart from certain essential garrisons, virtually the entire adult male Norman population of South Italy, threaded its way through the mountains and down on to the Apulian plain. Its first task was, obviously, to prevent Leo from linking up with the Byzantines. Once reaching Troia, therefore, it turned north and, on 17 June 1053, on the bank of the river Fortore near Civitate, found itself face to face with the papal army.

  The story of the battle of Civitate is one of the best-documented chapters in the whole history of the Normans in the South. All the principal chroniclers on the Norman side recount it in detail, and their accounts agree. More surprising is the extent to which these versions are confirmed by German and papal sources—including a letter to the Emperor Constantine from Leo IX himself.1 Naturally some allowanc
e for personal or political bias has to be made; but in general the different versions resemble each other so closely that we can piece together what is probably a fairly accurate picture of the course of events.

  Neither side was eager for immediate battle. The Pope wished to wait for the arrival of the Byzantines, while the Normans, who, for all their unscrupulousness in the affairs in this world, suffered genuine misgivings at the prospect of raising their swords against the Vicar of Christ, still hoped to reach a peaceful settlement. No sooner were they encamped, therefore, than they sent a deputation to Leo, humbly putting their case before him and offering him their homage. William of Apulia adds that they admitted their past wrongs and promised their loyalty and obedience. But it was no use.

  The tall, long-haired Teutons jeered at these Normans of shorter stature. . . . They surrounded the Pope and arrogantly addressed him: 'Command the Normans to leave Italy, to lay down their arms here and to return to the land whence they came. If they refuse this, then accept not their peaceful proposals.' The Normans departed, sorrowful that they had failed to make peace, and carried back the haughty replies of the Germans.2