by Jack Ludlow
‘Imagine it, Desiderius,’ Gregory enthused, his eyes alight as he looked at a map of Asia Minor, his finger tracing the route from the Bosphorus to Palestine, ‘a huge body of knights under a papal banner, riding in crusade to the rescue of the Eastern Empire, driving back the Turks and every other infidel. Can you not see a great Christian army entering the city of Jerusalem to celestial trumpets and bringing back under the control of our faith the very place where Jesus rose from the dead? Surely in doing that we could claim to be serving the will of God. And what ruler or patriarch, with our soldiers outside his palace, will deny the rights of the Bishop of Rome to universal hegemony?’
‘Let us see to the Guiscard first,’ the abbot replied; even if he too hankered after a great Eastern crusade he had been too long troubled by the Normans, had seen them slip too many a noose, to see what was coming as straightforward.
‘My father declines to receive you, Bohemund,’ Jordan insisted, ‘for he can guess the errand on which you have come and he cannot agree to that which you are bound to seek.’
‘It is simple: if we fall, so in time will Capua.’
‘While the route to Apulia from Rome is through our principality,’ Jordan replied. ‘If we contest the passage of Gregory’s great host, the lands we possess will be destroyed much sooner by joining your father than standing aside and giving them free passage.’
Was Jordan uncomfortable? Bohemund could not tell; he hoped so, believing as he did that he had some regard for both him and his father. Yet he could not help but reprise the conversation he had shared with his sire at Melfi prior to allowing him to embark on this mission, for Robert knew very well the contents of the letters sent out by Pope Gregory, as well as the fact that his only potential ally was treaty-bound to his enemy. Capua had made no moves to show they might break that attachment and combine to meet the threat to Duke Robert. And he needed aid, for it would be potentially deadly to face on his own, as well as a serious risk even if he could repeat the alliance and the good fortune that was won at Civitate.
The army he might face was the largest to come south of Rome since a previous Emperor Henry had descended with all his imperial might to put in his place a previous Prince of Capua, a fellow named Pandulf who was unusually avaricious even for a Lombard. Pandulf had not only appropriated the lands of Monte Cassino and rendered beggars the monks who lived there, but had thrown its venerated abbot, a predecessor of Desiderius, into his dungeons. Count Roger, who had not long departed, had been summoned to return with every lance he could muster, for if Robert went down, Sicily would cease to be a secure Norman fief.
Increasingly allowed into his father’s confidence, much to the disgust of Sichelgaita, Bohemund had no difficulty in observing that the Guiscard was worried; his assessment of the quality and quantity of the forces Gregory had managed to combine was alarming. Being outnumbered was always a concern, but a deeper concern came from facing a vastly superior number of warriors of a fighting capacity little short of those he could muster. Whatever the Normans put in the field as milities – and they would be inferior in numbers – it was his mounted knights on which he relied to win his battles, and if the reports he had received were true, then it was in that arm most danger threatened.
As well as learning how to use weapons as a growing boy, Bohemund, like all his kind, had been schooled in tactics, and the one paramount fact of fighting mainly on horseback was that it generally allowed the Normans to manoeuvre with more flexibility than their opponents and thus allowed them to choose the field of battle as well as giving them the ability to engage or decline contact at will. Quite naturally they wanted a slope down which to attack, preferably with at least one flank closed off by topography, a river or a steep hillside, a site on which their superior discipline counted. It was highly likely that such advantages would not be available to them.
‘Then Capua must be persuaded, Father,’ he had insisted, ‘and I have a bond with Jordan.’
The reply had been cold. ‘Do not be too ready to believe him, Bohemund.’
‘I trust him and I am prepared to try to persuade him to work on his own, sire.’
That had produced an awkward pause; if they had never openly discussed the reasons Bohemund had for saying he trusted Jordan, it was no mystery – a shrewd mind would have little difficulty in seeing the outline if not the detail. Yet it seemed as if that knowledge had not acted to cause a breach; it was as if Robert had accepted it as a fact he could do nothing to alter and the subject of his successor was not one he was prepared to ever discuss. Perhaps it was because of the way he had come to the title himself, more, Bohemund suspected, because to do so tempted a fatal providence; he had a superstition that to talk of death might bring on that very fate.
‘Father and son, Capua will always pursue a policy they think benefits them, just as I will always act in my own interest.’
When his father continued, his voice had an air of detachment, as though the outcome he was speculating upon had no bearing on him or his future.
‘If Richard holds his peace with Gregory, what happens in Italy when this great host the Pope has gathered, having done that for which it was assembled, departs these shores on his mad Eastern crusade? Who then will be left to protect Apulia, and for that matter Rome itself? From being the inferior Norman overlord in the country, he leapfrogs to become the strongest, and unless our deluded pontiff can assemble another army to subdue Capua he will find himself at their complete mercy.’
‘Is that Richard’s thinking?’
‘No, Bohemund, it is mine, but do not suppose that a nephew of Rainulf Drengot is any less calculating than a de Hauteville. My brother William learnt how to think and act from Richard’s uncle and he also learnt never to repose trust in them. Remember, when William set out for Melfi he did so as a vassal of Drengot, and they would no more forget that the bond had been broken than would we. Deep in their hearts they see us still as their vassals.’
‘Then why allow me to seek their help?’
Robert smiled and his reply was as enigmatic as the look. ‘You should see more of your cousins, don’t you think?’
He’s tempting me again, Bohemund thought.
Following on from a wasted journey to Capua, it was even more depressing to join with and accompany his father to Benevento. Bohemund became part of a two hundred-strong escort of his most accomplished lances, a number that underlined his father’s concerns; Robert still did not repose any faith in the Pope but this time he came as a supplicant, not an equal, which meant he would be obliged to enter the city to meet him at his palace and when he did so he wanted enough men with him to fight his way out again if he had to. A whole raft of communications in which he humbly begged to be told how he had offended his suzerain had preceded his visit, adding a wish to be informed of what redress he could make for slights he had never intended, none of which had softened the tone of Gregory’s replies.
The Guiscard knew he was going to have to be subservient in the presence of a pontiff who would take much pleasure in his grovelling humiliation. To the north of the city was assembled his massive host, seemingly made up of half the knights in Christendom. Calculation had persuaded Robert to leave his own forces in Apulia, for no good would come of being thought to be playing a double game; it was time to extract from this meeting what he could and that might amount to no more than salvage – at the very least he knew he would lose the Province of Benevento.
In his palace Pope Gregory was ebullient and hardly able to contain his excitement; here, in the very same reception chamber in which Pope Leo had been made to eat dirt, he would make amends for the defeat of Civitate and extract from the Duke of Apulia a price so high he might be prepared to spill blood rather than meet it. Benevento would be his again and he had his eyes on depriving him the cities of the Adriatic coast, places he and his families had captured at such a high price. If he refused he would be crushed, but at the very least the Guiscard, whom, he was told, scoffed at the notion of a
crusade to aid Constantinople, would be obliged to take ship under papal command and participate in a fight for the aims of Rome instead of his own.
Desiderius, in his last meeting, had sought to remind Gregory that for the trouble he had caused Rome, Robert de Hauteville had been a better son of the Church than for which he was being given credit. In every conquest he had made, the Guiscard had advanced the spread of the Roman rite, importing priests and monks, discouraging if not actually displacing the Basilian monks and Greek priesthood in their favour, endowing places of worship and contemplation, enforcing celibacy and even allowing his own Archbishop of Bari to be defrocked for refusing to set aside his wife.
‘You cannot buy your way into paradise,’ had been Gregory’s magisterial response.
From the top of his palace the Pope could see over the walls of Benevento to the northern plain, and there the white and multicoloured tents looked as numerous as flakes of snow upon the ground mixed with flower petals of every hue. To contemplate the anvil on which he would forge a new dispensation in the south of Italy acted like a balm to his soul, and in his mind’s eye he saw the swords and lance points being burnished, the foot soldiers being taught to employ the very basic manoeuvres required by milities, this while the mounted knights dashed to and fro to sharpen up their skills for the coming battle. That his imaginings turned to a field of broken and bloody Norman bodies did not trouble his soul; his God was a merciless one and those who did not obey his Vicar must pay the price.
In the command tent the leader of Pope Gregory’s host, Godfrey, the Hunchback of Lorraine, was trying to broker an understanding – not easy with the amount of shouted insults being exchanged. On one side was Gisulf of Salerno, deeply unpopular with everyone, Godfrey included, for his insistence that such a host should be under the command of the best man to lead it, namely himself. But it was not his misplaced military arrogance that had brought about the present rift, more the actions of his ships over many years in engaging in downright theft of the possessions of the ports with whom his city of Salerno shared the Tyrrhenian Sea.
The most vocal in demanding redress were the Pisan soldiers of Beatrice of Tuscany, whose leaders were not only well trained and numerous, but made up a substantial part of the host. Their leaders, who were also ship owners, wanted not only redress for the losses they had suffered but a binding guarantee of future good behaviour; in short, that their vessels could sail between ports in safety and profit. Lacking that, they would not go into battle with such a cluster of thieves like Prince Gisulf and his contingent of slack foot soldiers, this while Godfrey and other leaders sought to get the matter put aside until the Guiscard had been dealt with. With agreement impossible, there was no choice but to call in Pope Gregory to mediate.
‘Prince Gisulf, my son, for the sake of amity and our purpose, I beg you to accede to the Pisan demands.’
Gregory had not seen Gisulf for some time, years in which the prince’s hair had gone from jet black to peppered salt, making a complexion that had always been sallow now look like a milk-based pudding. Also his taste for gaudy clothing, on a less than svelte figure, large in the midriff below a hollow chest and above extended haunches, was even more inappropriate than it had been when he had been a youth. The ability to pout like a spoilt child had not changed, nor his lack of the facility to see himself as ever being in the wrong; at this moment, in the Pope’s personal tent, he seemed deeply affronted.
‘Surely you mean Pisan lies, Your Holiness?’
‘They are good sons of the Lord, Prince Gisulf. Are you suggesting they would make up such accusations – claims, I am forced to remind you, made by others such as Amalfi and Genoa?’
The mention of Amalfi caused Gisulf’s face to screw up, giving him the air of a gargoyle. Gregory looked and behaved like the divine he was, his face concerned and his manner composed, with no hint on his countenance of his feelings. In truth he was thinking this prince before him was a sorry specimen: duplicitous by habit, conceited to an almost unbelievable degree given his manifest failings, capricious in his dealings with his own subjects and those who would be his allies, always denigrating the abilities of others while erroneously promoting his own.
Gisulf’s voice became a whine. ‘How can they not be so, when they are the opposite of the truth? I have bent my back to near breaking to see that their vessels sail unharmed, have chastised with the scourge my own subjects who have disobeyed my instructions.’
While pocketing a good half of what they have stolen, Gregory was thinking.
‘How can I make redress for what I have not done?’ came the bleat. ‘Do you not see their game for what it is, Your Holiness, an attempt to make poor my holdings, to raise Pisa up and to drive Salerno down into the pits of poverty and dearth? I would be betraying my subjects, whom you know I love as my own children, if I agreed to accept such falsehoods.’
Gregory knew full well that was hyperbole and nonsense, but he had more pressing concerns. ‘We are engaged on a higher purpose, my son.’
The hollow chest, in its colourful doublet, puffed out and the voice, weedy as it was, declaimed, ‘There is no higher purpose for a prince than to see to the needs of those God has entrusted to his care.’
‘Let us pray,’ Gregory responded, sinking to his knees and obliging Gisulf to do the same, in truth because he could think of nothing else to do. In a soft voice he asked God the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost for guidance for his good and faithful servant Gisulf, noticing that the shoddy prince nodded at the compliment. Supplications over, he took his seat again. ‘If for the sake of harmony I asked you to return to Rome and await me there, would you oblige me?’
‘Rome?’ Gisulf asked, merely to prevaricate.
‘I will prevail upon Pisa and speak to them on your behalf,’ Gregory said, hoping God would forgive him the lie he had just spouted and those coming behind it. ‘And once they have been brought to see their error, and the devil we have come to put in his place has been dealt with, I would wish you to join with our host on their journey to Constantinople, where I am sure the chance will come for Gisulf of Salerno to become a name encrusted with glory.’
‘I can only do that if I lead the host.’
Thinking he was a sly cur, Gregory said, ‘That can be made to pass.’
‘When would you like me to depart?’
‘This very day would be best.’
For three whole days Robert de Hauteville had sat outside Benevento awaiting the summons, but none came, which he put down to papal malice. It made him a poor companion for anyone of his entourage, all of whom bore the brunt of his rage, not the least of them Bohemund, who saw a side to his father hitherto hidden. Being of an even disposition he never rose to the taunts and insults aimed at him, which only seemed to drive the Guiscard to a greater level of abuse as he gnawed on what might be demanded of him, in his imagination conjuring up torments of gigantic proportions, even to the point of having his eyes put out.
Dealing with Gisulf had obliged Gregory to delay the proposed meeting, but he retained his confidence that all would be as he wished. That was severely dented and he was obliged to rush back from his palace to the encampment of his host when he heard the news: getting rid of Gisulf had done no good, the protests against Salerno and its prince had filtered down from the Pisan commanders to their men and that had led to an exchange of name-calling between them and the soldiers of Salerno.
That in turn led to the first blow being struck, as one captain slapped another, only to see weapons drawn if not employed, as several knights from other entities intervened. Yet among those other contingents men took sides, often for reasons that they would never be able to explain, but common enough in an assembled army of conscript milities that was hovering on the edge of boredom, riddled with a concern for their continued existence and holding a strong desire to engage in battle, to get it over with so they could go back to their wives, their farms or their trades.
The first death was a secret knife at n
ight, as a knight of Pisa was stabbed in his sleep. By mid morning there was a full-scale battle going on and much blood being spilt, with the aristocratic leaders of the contingents powerless to stop it. As an army fit to fight, Gregory’s host fell apart in a blink of the time it had taken to assemble and march to Benevento, while no amount of papal pleading mixed with hurled anathemas could bring the encampment to order. The troops of Savoy rode out first, Amadeus leading his men away lest they turn into a rabble, the Count of Burgundy close on his heels.
The people who had watched in wonder this proud host march from Rome to Benevento, with flutes playing and banners waving, saw them straggle back with heads bowed. In the encampment they left, the bodies of men from Salerno and Pisa littered the ground, more the former, for Tuscany was so much more of a power than Gisulf’s single city, while those troops left stood armed and between them to bring an end to the slaughter. Geoffrey, the Hunchback of Lorraine, sent off Salerno first then Pisa a day later, with a strong body of his own men to keep them apart until their routes diverged.
No more from the top of his palace could Gregory see that flower-petalled snowfield of tents; few remained standing, most left were torn and destroyed, the field now looking as what it was – a brown landscape devoid of men but rendered bereft of grass by the passage of thousands of feet. It was as desolate to look at as had become his dream and the time came, he knew, for him and his own followers to take the road back to Rome; he could not meet with and chastise the Guiscard now. The news of the falling apart of his papal army arrived in Rome before Pope Gregory, which found Gisulf of Salerno telling anyone who would listen, and they were few, that if he had been given the command, as he had demanded, this would never have happened.
