The Normans In The South

by John Julius Norwich

  It was, therefore, under the command of Admiral Christodulus that the expedition set sail from Marsala in July 1123. Almost at once a storm arose—the Normans were always very unlucky with their weather—and the ships were forced ashore on Pantelleria, where the troops lost no time in practising all the things that they intended to do to the Arabs of Mahdia. But they were soon able to put to sea again, and on 21 July the fleet hove to off some little islets then known simply as the Ahasi (the sandy ones) some ten miles north of the town.1 They seemed adequately protected from enemy attack by the narrow strait which separated them from the mainland; but this strait was itself dominated by a castle, known locally as ad-Dimas, which accordingly became the first Sicilian objective. Before moving to the attack, Christodulus needed more information about Saracen strength in Mahdia itself. A detachment of cavalry was put ashore under cover of darkness and headed south towards the town; and the following morning the admiral personally led twenty-three ships on a similar sortie to brief himself on the maritime defences.

  He was not gone for long; the most cursory inspection was enough to convince him that, from the sea at any rate, Mahdia was virtually impregnable. To a commander who thought largely in

  ' There is some doubt as to which precisely these islands were. My own inclination is to identify them with the Kuria group; but the area is full of shallows and shoals, and the whole conformation may well have changed significantly in eight centuries.

  terms of naval power, this was a serious blow; but worse was to come, for he returned to the islands to find the Sicilian camp in desolation. Somehow an Arab raiding party had managed to cross the straits, liquidated such opposition as it had encountered, sacked the commissariat and returned with a rich plunder of arms and equipment. Suddenly Christodulus saw his whole expedition threatened with failure. That night, in what was left of the camp, Sicilian morale was at a very low ebb indeed.

  Meanwhile, however, the admiral's young lieutenant George of Antioch had not been wasting his time. This extraordinary man, whose imagination and initiative were soon to make him famous throughout the Mediterranean, had been born in Antioch of Greek parents; but at an early age he had accompanied his father to North Africa where they had both taken service with Sultan Temim. On Temim's death, George found himself on bad terms with his successor, Yahya; he probably also recognised that it was Palermo, and not Mahdia, that held the key to future power in the Mediterranean. One Friday morning in 1108, while his Muslim superiors were all at prayer, he accordingly disguised himself as a sailor and slipped on to a Sicilian ship that was lying in the harbour. It took him to Palermo, where he went straight to the palace and presented himself for government service. Within a few years, first in the revenue department and later on an official trade mission to Egypt, George established himself as one of the ablest and most devoted servants of the Sicilian state, and won the favour of Christodulus and of the Count himself. It was not surprising; his qualifications alone made him unique. Here was a skilled administrator, a Christian bilingual in Greek and Arabic and a fine seaman whose knowledge of North Africa's coastal waters matched his understanding of her political, economic and diplomatic affairs. Thus, when Christodulus had begun to plan his expedition against Mahdia, he had had no hesitation in appointing the brilliant young Levantine as his second-in-command.

  And George, for his part, had not been slow in justifying the appointment. By means unknown he quickly succeeded in suborning the garrison commanders of ad-Dimas, and on the third day after their arrival the Sicilians gained possession of the fort without a struggle and installed their own garrison—estimated by at-Tigani at a hundred men. Here was victory of a kind; but even this was to be turned, all too soon, to defeat. In the two years that had passed since the death of Ali, his son Hassan, though still only fourteen, had managed to assert his authority over most of the country; and this unprovoked invasion—for he appears to have had nothing to do with the Nicotera raid—was just what he needed to rally the waverers to his banner. At the first approach of the Sicilian fleet he had proclaimed a jihad—holy war on the infidel—and on 26 July, the fourth night after the landing, he struck. His army advanced quietly from the south, under cover of darkness; and then suddenly, with a great shout of 'Akbar Allah!' which, the chroniclers tell us, caused the very earth to tremble, flung itself against ad-Dimas.

  Once more we are forced to rely on later Arab sources for the story of the battle that followed, though at-Tigani reproduces the text of the official report circulated by Hassan immediately after his victory. We may therefore suspect, even though we cannot entirely discount, tales of the blind panic that seized the invading army, of the headlong rush to the ships, of the terrified cavalry pausing only to cut the throats of their horses rather than see them fall into Saracen hands. What seems certain is that Roger and his advisers had again miscalculated. Pride in their fleet had led them to neglect the land army and to underestimate the strength of the African opposition. It was their second humiliation in five years; and on this occasion, trounced by a child of fourteen, they had lost their honour and a good deal more besides.

  Safely aboard their ships and out of range of Hassan's archers, the Sicilians regained a little of their morale—enough, at least, to enable them to assess the situation. Their main concern now was for the garrison still holding out at ad-Dimas. Christodulus was unwilling to leave them to their fate without making an attempt at rescue. For a week his galleys hovered off the coast awaiting their opportunity; but they waited in vain. The Muslims, well aware of Sicilian intentions, maintained ceaseless vigilance over the castle; and at last, with his own supplies beginning to run short, the admiral saw that the situation was hopeless. He gave the order to depart; and his fleet spread its sails to the wind and vanished over the northern horizon. In the whole unedifying campaign, it was now left to the garrison to show the first—and last—flicker of Sicilian spirit. All attempts to buy their lives from the Saracens having failed, they resolved to sell them dearly. They held out as long as they could; then on 10 August, their supplies of food and water alike exhausted, they burst out from ad-Dimas, sword in hand. They were slaughtered to a man. Meanwhile their returning comrades had once again run into bad weather; many ships were lost; and of the three hundred that had sailed so confidently from Marsala a month before, only a hundred—according to Hassan's claim—returned to Sicily.

  Virtually overnight, young Hassan—whose appreciation of the value of publicity and whose technique in its handling marks him out as a ruler far in advance of his time—had become the hero of Islam, to be celebrated by poets from Cordova to Baghdad. Roger, on the other hand, had suffered a loss of prestige from which he would take long to recover. The first important military enterprise of his reign, his first venture into the international field to prove himself a major power in Europe, had ended in fiasco. He does not seem to have looked for scapegoats. Christodulus, who must be held largely responsible for the disaster, was to decline in influence from this time, but he was neither disgraced nor dismissed; while George of Antioch, whose initial capture of ad-Dimas was the only triumph —however shortlived—of the whole campaign, emerged with his reputation untarnished. But for all the Christians in Sicily it was a bitter blow; and a contemporary Arab historian1 reports an eyewitness account of a 'Frankish knight' in Roger's audience-chamber, tearing at his beard until the blood streamed down his face and swearing revenge. The Count himself, though less demonstrative, must have felt much the same. There was a strong streak of vindictiveness in his character, and he never forgot an injury. But he was also a patient man, and he had no intention of risking his reputation still further with a third attack—not, at least, for the moment. Hostilities with Hassan continued for some years, but only in a desultory way; an alliance which Roger was to form in 1128 with Count Raymond of Barcelona was directed principally against the Almoravids of Spain,

  1 Abu es-Salt, quoted by Amari, Storia dei Musulmani di Sicilia, vol. Ill, p. 387.

  rather
than the Zirids, and anyway it came to nothing. By then, however, he had preoccupations elsewhere. He was to experience many more triumphs and disasters before that day, just a quarter of a century later, when George of Antioch would carry his banner proudly into Mahdia and set the record straight at last.

  22

  REUNIFICATION

  The ducal towns like Salerno, Troia, Melfi, Venosa, and others which were left without protection of their lord, were seized with tyrant force by this man or by that. And each man did that which seemed good in his own eyes, for there was no one to say him nay. And since none feared punishment in this life, so did men deliver themselves up more and more freely to evil deeds. Thus it was not only travellers who journeyed in fear of their lives, but the very peasants themselves, who could not even till their own fields in safety. What more can I say ? If God had not kept alive a scion of the Guiscard's line to preserve the ducal power, the whole land would surely have perished of its own wickedness and cruelty.

  Alexander of Telese, Bk I, ch. I

  DURING the forty-odd years that had elapsed since Robert Guiscard's death, the fortunes of the Duchy of Apulia had suffered a steep and steady decline. Roger Borsa, plodding miserably in his father's footsteps, had done his pathetic best to hold it together, and indeed after the submission of Capua in 10981 could even boast technical dominion over all South Italy—more than Robert had ever been able to achieve. But Capua, like most of his other successes, had been won only by courtesy of his uncle, the Count of Sicily, who always demanded territorial concessions in return; and when, after the Count's death, the poor Duke of Apulia found himself largely deprived of Sicilian help, his patrimony began to disintegrate faster than ever into anarchy. Roger Borsa died in February 1 in, a week or so before his old enemy Bohemund and ten days after Pope Paschal had been carted off by an implacable Henry V into captivity, still pleading in vain for Norman assistance. He was laid to rest in his father's cathedral of Salerno, where his tomb —a somewhat unsuitable fourth-century sarcophagus carved with

  1 See p. 273.

  figures of Dionysus and Ariadne, but covered with a contemporary representation of its present occupant in high relief—stands in the south aisle. For all his inadequacies as a ruler, he had been a good and upright man in his way; but his death was not widely mourned outside his immediate family and the churches and monasteries he had so loved to endow—as, in particular, the Abbey of La Cava near Salerno where prayers are still offered every evening after compline for the repose of his soul.1

  He was succeeded by a child—William, the youngest and sole survivor of his three sons, whose mother, Alaine of Flanders, now assumed the regency. It was an unfortunate state of affairs to arise at such a moment, when a strong hand was more than ever needed; and it was made more unfortunate still by the death of Bohemund. If he had lived, he might have seized control and saved the dukedom; as things turned out, he left his widow, Constance of France, on the throne of Taranto, governing on behalf of their infant son Bohemund II. Thus, with the country in chaos, the Pope in prison and a strong-willed and determined Emperor encamped only a few miles from Rome, South Italy found itself under the titular authority of three women—Adelaide, Alaine and Constance—all of them foreigners and two without the slightest experience of politics or government. It was small wonder that, particularly among the Lombard populations, the general atmosphere of demoralisation and hopelessness should have developed into a great resurgent wave of anti-Norman feeling. What advantage, men asked, had these brigands ever brought to Italy? In the century since their arrival, hardly a year had passed without its quota of ravaged towns and devastated harvests, without its addition of further pages to the South's sad history of bloodshed and violence. Here were the destroyers of the old Lombard heritage; yet they had proved incapable of setting up anything lasting in its place. The country had only one chance of salvation—Henry the Emperor who, having just dealt so successfully with the Pope, would now doubtless turn his attention to the Normans themselves.

  1 In a letter dated St Valentine's Day 1966, the keeper of the monastic Archive, Dom Angelo Mifsud, O.S.B., writes that 'the gratitude of the monks of La Cava towards their illustrious benefactor has not ceased, nor has it ever been interrupted'.

  But Henry did nothing of the sort. He marched his army north instead of south, leaving Paschal—by now free again and growing in confidence with every step the Emperor took away from Rome— more closely linked than ever to the Normans, his only southern allies. His dependence on them was to increase still further after the death, in 1115, of the seventy-year-old Matilda of Tuscany; and meanwhile the Duchy of Apulia continued on its mouldering course. The Regent Alaine, too, died in 1115. Her son William was described by Romuald, Archbishop of Salerno, as 'generous, kind, humble and patient, pious and merciful and much beloved by his people'; he also, it seems, was a great respecter of Church and clergy. Unfortunately the good archbishop had used almost exactly the same words when speaking of Roger Borsa; and William was soon revealed as being even more disastrously incompetent than his father had been before him. Whereas Roger Borsa had at least tried to make his presence felt—and, with his uncle's assistance, had occasionally even succeeded—William hardly seemed capable of making the effort. He never lifted a finger, when Henry V descended once again on Rome in 1117, to assist his papal suzerain who had confirmed him in his rank and titles only three years before; it was to Capua, not to Salerno, that the wretched Pope had to turn in his hour of need. Nor was he any more effectual within his own dominions. Throughout South Italy his vassals had taken the law into their own hands; all were perpetually at loggerheads; and even a long-drawn-out civil war in Bari, culminating in the murder of its Archbishop, the imprisonment of Princess Constance and the enthronement of a usurper, Grimoald, elicited only a token protest from the Guiscard's grandson.

  Such was the chaos which prevailed when, in 1121, Roger of Sicily decided that the moment had come to intervene. The reasons for his timing are not altogether clear; nor do we have any certain knowledge of his area of operations, though these were presumably first directed against those regions of Calabria which had not already been acquired by his father in return for services rendered. But whatever the details, the expedition proved even more successful than Roger could have hoped. Ignoring the entreaties of the new Pope, Calixtus II, who was anxious to do all he could to buttress his ineffectual neighbour against the growing threat of Sicily, he manoeuvred his cousin during the next twelve months to no less than three separate treaties. It was not a difficult task. William was not only weak militarily; he was also desperately short of money, so that even when he could assemble an army in the field he usually found himself quite unable to pay it. Roger, for his part, always preferred to make his purchases with gold rather than blood; and thus it was that all three sets of negotiations seem to have been conducted on a largely financial basis. The last of them actually came about through an appeal from William for help; and the account by a local chronicler1 of the incident reveals as much about the character of the Duke himself as it does about the state of his Dukedom.

  And when [William] was come to the Count of Sicily, he wept, saying, 'Noble Count, I appeal to you now in the name of our kinship and because of your great riches and power. I come to bear witness against Count Jordan [of Ariano], and to seek your aid in avenging myself upon him. For recently, when I was entering the city of Nusco, Count Jordan rode out before the gates with a troop of knights, and showered threats and insults upon me crying, "I will cut your coat short for you"; after which he plundered all my territory of Nusco. Since I have not sufficient strength to prevail against him, I had perforce to endure his offences, but now I eagerly await my revenge.'

  Roger, as usual, had asked his price; and by the summer of 1122 he had gained possession not only of all Calabria that was not already his—first pledged for a consideration of sixty thousand bezants, and subsequently surrendered to him outright—but of those halves of Palermo and Messina wh
ich had heretofore technically remained ducal property. Even now he kept up the pressure against his cousin—particularly around the territory of Montescaglioso in the instep, as it were, of the peninsula—but his initial object had been achieved. For the rest, he could afford to bide his time.