1 That part of Rome on the right bank of the Tiber, including the Vatican and the Castel Sant' Angelo, which was fortified in the ninth century by Pope Leo IV immediately after the sack of the city by the Saracens.
It is a characteristic of wars that they are apt to last considerably longer than the combatants expect. Roger and his men, slipping across the straits of Messina on that moonless May night in 1061, were neither the first nor the last warriors to embark on their troopships in the probable hope that it would all be over by Christmas. As we have seen, by the Christmas of that year the Normans had secured little more than a bridgehead, while at the end of 1062 such celebrations as the unfortunates in Troina may have permitted themselves can have been anything but festive. In 1063 some progress had been achieved but, as the days began to draw in towards the third autumn since the launching of the expedition, Roger must have been conscious of a growing atmosphere of frustration and disappointment among his countrymen. Admittedly their three seasons in Sicily had won them the control of perhaps a quarter of the island, but even this moderate success had been due to a remarkable early run of luck and to a combination of special circumstances which could never be repeated. If they had not managed to take Messina by surprise there was no reason to suppose that a siege of the city would have been any more successful than their attempts on Enna or Agrigento. Most of their advance had been through largely Christian territory where they had become more accustomed to deputations of welcome than to armed resistance; and they had throughout enjoyed the protection of Ibn at-Timnah, who had been able to guarantee them against attacks from the south and south-east while they advanced towards the centre. By contrast, the unconquered land that lay before them was Muslim through and through. Ibn at-Timnah was dead; his enemy Ibn al-Hawas, despite heavy losses, was still holding out at Enna, and the Saracens were now more united than they had been for a century. As the Normans advanced, their supply-lines would grow steadily longer and more vulnerable, and recent experience had proved that not even the native Christians could be trusted to support them once their backs were turned. Finally, as always, they were pitiably few—a factor which might enhance the glory of their victories but, for practical reasons, augured ill for the future. With their present numbers they might conquer, but they could never control.
When the exhilaration of Cerami had passed, these must have been the gloomy reflections that occupied Roger's mind and led him, among other considerations, to reject outright the next opportunity which was put in his way. It came, suddenly and unexpectedly, from Pisa. Whether the Pisans were merely enraged by the incessant incursions of Sicilian-based Saracen pirates or whether, with their well-known eye to the main chance, they were deliberately trying to associate themselves with the Normans in anticipation of their eventual victory is not known. Pisan contemporary records, however, confirm Malaterra's report that in August 1063 the city sent a fleet to Sicily, where it sought Roger's co-operation in a combined land and sea attack on Palermo. Roger's reply was disappointing. He had other unfinished business and could take on no further commitments. Later, perhaps, something of the kind might be arranged; for the moment the Pisans would have to wait. The Pisan admiral argued with him, but it was in vain; Roger merely repeated that he was not ready, and that he could not risk his men in such conditions. At last, despairing of any help from the Normans, the admiral sailed off in dudgeon to attack Palermo by himself. Without any shore support, the attempt was doomed to failure, and the Pisans were lucky to escape more or less unscathed. According to Malaterra their only prize was the great chain with which the Palermitans had blocked their harbour mouth. This, he tells us, they seized; and then 'believing, like true Pisans, that they had achieved some great matter, they returned forthwith to their homes'.1
It cannot have been an easy decision for Roger to take. He had no particular love for the Pisans and may well have resented their intervention; at the same time the offer of a fully-equipped fleet for such an operation must have been tempting for an ambitious and
' An inscription in Pisa Cathedral claims that the Pisans did in fact manage to land a small force near the mouth of the Oreto, where they laid waste the villas and gardens in the neighbourhood. It also records the capture of six Saracen ships—five of which, however, they burned. All this may well be true; Malaterra probably had no first-hand knowledge of what took place and anyway tends to minimise their achievements as much as he can. What is certainly false is the passage in the Chronica Pisana (Muratori R.I.S., vol. VI, p. 167), according to which the Pisans captured Palermo and returned with so much plunder that they were able to start construction of their Cathedral. This was indeed begun in 1063, but Palermo stood until the Normans captured it nine years later.
impatient leader. But by now he had probably received advance information of the new campaign which Robert Guiscard was already planning for the following year. The situation had recently improved in Apulia; Brindisi, Oria and Taranto were back in Norman hands, and the Duke was once again able to turn his attention towards Sicily. Knowing this, Roger would naturally have been reluctant to risk his own meagre resources for the sake of Pisa; better far to husband them in preparation for a grand new all-Norman offensive with his brother.
And so he bided his time until, early in 1064, Robert appeared in Calabria with an army of some five hundred knights and a thousand-odd foot-soldiers. Roger met him at Cosenza to plan the campaign. This time the strategy would be different; they would waste no more energy on Enna or the interior, but would head straight along the north coast of the island to Palermo itself. Once they had the capital, the rest—even in so decentralised a land as Sicily—would surely follow. As always when Hautevilles were in command, the army moved fast. No opposition was encountered, and only a few days after crossing the straits Robert drew up his troops on what seemed a suitable site for their encampment on one of the hilltops overlooking Palermo. His choice nearly proved disastrous. Forty-six years previously the remnants of the first Norman army to appear in Italy, retreating after Cannae, had been driven from their chosen headquarters by a plague of frogs. It had been a humiliating experience, but not a harmful one. The new natural hazard which awaited them proved to be both.
The tarantula spider had long been the scourge of Southern Italy, and particularly of that region around Taranto which gave it its name; but nowhere can it have been more plentiful or malevolent than on the hill now selected by Robert Guiscard. The bite of this Sicilian variety was fortunately not followed by that wild and hysterical agitation of the body which later became famous as both the principal symptom and the only remedy for its poison—and, in the tarantella, accounted for the only dance in Europe to have been developed for purely medicinal purposes. The consequences as related by Malaterra seem, none the less, to have been unpleasant in the extreme:
This taranta is a worm which has the appearance of a spider but possesses a cruel and envenomed sting, such that those whom it attacks are forthwith filled with a most poisonous wind. Their distress increases till they are no longer able to contain this same wind, which comes forth noisily and indelicately from their backsides so that unless a hot compress or some other still more powerful calorific is at once applied, it is said that their very lives are in peril.
It was not an auspicious beginning. The camp was hastily transferred to a more salubrious site, but Norman nerve had clearly been shaken. The impetus was gone. The Conca d'Oro, that huge chain of mountains that enfolds the city of Palermo, provided a superb landward defence. Not a movement by an attacking army could pass unobserved from its fortresses and watchtowers, and even when Robert reached the city walls, he was able to make little impression on them. For three months his sorry siege continued, but to no avail. Saracen shipping continued to pass freely through the harbour mouth, and the Palermitans seemed scarcely even inconvenienced. It was like Enna all over again, only this time there was not even a pitched battle by which the Normans could redeem their pride. And so the Guiscard found himself, for t
he second time in three years, leading a dispirited army back to Italy, where the situation was again deteriorating and from which he could never be absent for long. Apart from the capture of one insignificant little town (Bugamo, now long since disappeared) he had accomplished nothing; even Agrigento, with which he attempted rather half-heartedly to console himself on the return journey, withstood his attack. He now had to face the fact that in the Muslims of western Sicily he was faced with a stronger and more determined enemy than any that he or his family had yet encountered—Lombard, Frankish or Byzantine. As 1064 drew to a close it began to look as if the Norman advance had at last reached its limit.
For four years, like a ship becalmed, the Norman army in Sicily lay isolated and powerless, all its momentum gone. No pitched battles are recorded, no new conquests, no significant advance. For tales of Norman achievement over this period we must look to Northern Europe, to the beaches of Kent and the field of Hastings;
where the Normans in Sicily were concerned, the years around 1066 were among the dullest in their history.
For Roger it must have been a time of maddening frustration. He never relaxed his pressure on the enemy; but with an army as diminutive as his the only possible tactics could be those of attrition, wearing the Saracens down by constant guerrilla activity and playing endlessly on their nerves so that they never felt safe from the danger of sudden raid or ambush. With this end in view he moved his temporary capital forward to Petralia, a town which he had captured already in 1062 but which now, its rocky escarpments newly fortified, provided an admirable advance headquarters from which all the country round Palermo was within easy range. Working out from here to the north, south and west, he was able to keep the Saracens on the defensive; but that was all. There was only one consolation; his opponents were now again hopelessly divided. Ibn al-Hawas had at first welcomed the arrival of the North African armies under Ayub and Ali; not long after Cerami, however, he had grown suspicious of the increasing power of the young princes, and the consequent dissension had quickly ripened into civil war. Even though Roger was himself still too weak to inflict any major defeat on the Saracens, he could at least watch with satisfaction while they did their utmost to destroy each other.
For Robert Guiscard too these were unprofitable years. He had stepped ashore in Calabria after the abortive expedition of 1064 only to find himself faced with a new revolt of his Apulian vassals. This, the most serious uprising with which he had yet had to contend, was led by Jocelin, Lord of Molfetta, and three of his own nephews; the brothers Geoffrey of Conversano and Robert of Montescaglioso and their cousin Abelard, whom the Guiscard had brazenly robbed of his inheritance after the death of Abelard's father, Duke Humphrey, seven years before. These three young men, making common cause with Byzantium through the agency of Perenos, Duke of Durazzo —who kept them well supplied with money and equipment from across the Adriatic—had rebelled in April 1064, soon after the Guiscard's departure for Sicily, and during the months of his absence had carried all before them. Robert's return in the late summer slowed their progress to some extent, but despite his efforts the revolt continued to spread. In 1066 it was further strengthened by a new contingent of Varangians from Constantinople, and by the end of that year not only Bari but the two other principal Apulian ports of Brindisi and Taranto were firmly in Greek hands.
The year 1067 marked a general stalemate, both in Apulia and Sicily. Then, in 1068, almost simultaneously for Robert and for Roger, came relief. At least where the Guiscard was concerned, it sprang from an unexpected quarter. For some years past the Byzantine Empire had been watching with mounting anxiety the steady westward advance of the Seljuk Turks. In little more than a generation these tribesmen from beyond the Oxus had subdued Persia and Mesopotamia. Baghdad, seat of the Arab Caliphate, had fallen to them in 1055; Armenia and Cilicia had followed; and now they were driving inexorably up through Asia Minor towards Constantinople itself. After the death of Constantine X Ducas in 1067 the Byzantines were left without an Emperor, imperial power having passed to his widow, the Empress Eudoxia; but it was clear that in the face of the Seljuk threat a leader must immediately be found, and so it was that Eudoxia was persuaded into a hasty if reluctant marriage with a certain Romanus Diogenes—so called, according to William of Apulia, because of his forked beard— a Cappadocian commander of long experience and undoubted bravery who, on 1 January 1068, was acclaimed Emperor. With the accession of Romanus and his immediate concentration on a desperate military effort against the Turks, the Greek initiative in Italy was halted; and, deprived from one moment to the next of all outside support, the rebellious vassals lost their nerve. One after another they capitulated, until by mid-February only Geoffrey of Conversano remained. Entrenched in his mountain fortress of Montepeloso he held out for several months, deserted by all his former allies, Greek and Norman alike. Then in June the Guiscard managed to suborn one of Geoffrey's officers, who, tempted by the promise of a fief of his own, secretly opened the gates. Robert's army poured in; Geoffrey, taken by surprise, had no course but surrender; the traitor duly received his fief; and the revolt was over.
The satisfaction which Robert Guiscard must have felt as he saw the Apulian opposition crumble and his own authority re-established would have been still greater had he known that, just about the time that he was besieging Montepeloso, his brother was dealing the final death-blow to all organised military resistance in Sicily. In the previous year the Saracen forces had been brought once again under a unified command. The Zirid troops under Ayub had met the army of Ibn al-Hawas in a last pitched battle, during which the redoubtable old Emir had been killed. Ayub had at once laid claim to the succession and had been formally recognised at Agrigento, Enna and Palermo. This gave him the degree of authority he needed to assume command of the entire Saracen forces. No longer hamstrung by internecine disputes, he now determined to take the first favourable opportunity of drawing the Normans out into an open conflict of the very kind which, since the defeat at Cerami, he and his compatriots had always sought to avoid; and so on a summer morning in 1068 the Norman army, out on one of its regular forays in the countryside south of Palermo, found its way blocked by a great Saracen host before the little town of Misilmeri.1
Roger must have been surprised at so radical a change in the enemy's tactics, but he does not seem to have been unduly disconcerted. Malaterra has left us a report of the speech which he made to his troops just before the battle. Smiling, he told them that they had nothing to fear; this was only the enemy that they had already beaten several times before. What if the Saracen leader had changed? Their own God remained constant, and if they put the same trust in Him as they had in the past He would accord them a similar victory. It is doubtful whether the Normans even needed these words of encouragement. Familiarity with Saracen military methods was fast breeding contempt; they themselves were, after all, soldiers of God, fulfilling His purpose; and the spoils once again promised to be excellent. All they awaited was Roger's signal; when he gave it, they charged.
It was soon over. According to Malaterra, hardly a single Saracen remained alive to carry the dreadful news back to Palermo. As things turned out, however, this proved unnecessary. Among the prizes of battle, and just as intriguing to Roger as the camels seized
1 Known in Arab times as Menzil el Emir, 'the Emir's village'.
at Cerami, the Normans had carried off several baskets of carrier pigeons. The use of these birds had been well-known in classical antiquity but seems to have died out during the Dark Ages until, like so many other ancient arts and sciences, it was revived by the Saracens. It is unlikely that Roger had ever had any in his possession before, but the idea of using them at once for his own purposes was more than he could resist. He ordered that to the leg of each bird should be attached a scrap of material dipped in Saracen blood; the pigeons were then released, to fly back to Palermo with their macabre message. It was, in its way, the culmination of the psychological warfare that Roger had been carrying on
for the past four years; and the effect that it had in the capital seems to have been all that he could have wished. 'The air,' writes Malaterra, 'was loud with the lamentations of women and children, and sorrow was great among them as the Normans rejoiced in their victory.'
The battle of Misilmeri broke the back of Saracen resistance in Sicily. Ayub had staked not only his army but his whole political and military reputation on its outcome, and he had lost. With what remained of his following he fled back to Africa, never to return. He left the island in total confusion, its Muslim population in despair. Their army shattered, their leaders gone, they could no longer hope to withstand Norman pressure. Palermo itself lay only ten miles or so from Misilmeri; they would defend it as best they could, but the truth could no longer be doubted—their capital was doomed. And once it had fallen to the Christians, the few Arab strongholds left remaining in the island would soon follow.
But Roger was not ready for the capital. Its inhabitants could not be expected to submit without a struggle; and his own forces, though adequate for pitched battles in mountainous terrain, were hardly sufficient for a siege. Besides, the capture of Palermo would be tantamount to the subjection of the whole island, and this in its turn would entail problems of control and administration which, with only a few hundred men at his disposal, he could not possibly envisage. There was fortunately no cause to hurry; the Saracens were far too demoralised to regroup themselves quickly. Better to wait, to suspend all further offensive operations until Robert had settled affairs in Apulia. Then the two could tackle the Sicilian problem together and in earnest.
The Normans In The South Page 20