The Normans In The South

by John Julius Norwich

  The days of Salerno were obviously numbered, but it was not the first of the Lombard principalities to fall to Norman arms. Since 1052 Richard had had his eye on Capua, where the young prince Pandulf, son of the 'Wolf of the Abruzzi', showed little of the military vigour or political sense of his odious father. Once already the Count of Aversa had beaten the Capuans to their knees and forced the wretched inhabitants to pay seven thousand gold bezants to preserve their liberty; and when in 1057 Pandulf died, Richard struck again. Within days he had ringed Capua with fortified watch-towers, cutting off the citizens from the fields and farms on which they depended for subsistence. They defended themselves valiantly; 'the women carried the stones to the men and brought comfort to their husbands, and the fathers taught their daughters the arts of war; and so they fought side by side, and comforted each other together'.1 But the city was unprepared for a siege and before long the threat of starvation forced it to sue for peace. This time there was no question of a ransom; Richard was determined on conquest. The only concession he would allow was that the keys to the gates and the citadel should remain technically in Capuan hands—which, for four more years, they did. Meanwhile Richard the Norman became Prince of Capua, and the hereditary Lombard rule which had lasted for more than two centuries was extinguished.

  For Salerno the situation now became more desperate than ever; but Richard was in no hurry to finish it off when easier, quicker returns seemed to be promised elsewhere. In nearby Gaeta he had recently arranged for the marriage of his daughter with the son of the ruling Duke, Atenulf, but the boy had died in the early autumn of 1058, shortly before the wedding ceremony. The occasion should have been one for condolences from the intended father-in-law; instead the new Prince of Capua addressed to Duke Atenulf a demand for the Morgengab, by which according to Lombard law one quarter of the husband's fortune became the property of the wife after the marriage. In this Richard had not one shred of justification ; as its name clearly implied, the Morgengab was payable only on the day following the nuptials, as a mark of their successful and satisfactory consummation.2 Atenulf naturally refused. This gave Richard all the pretext he needed. Among the modest appanages of Gaeta at this time was the little county of Aquino, a short distance over the mountains to the north; within a few days this innocent, unsuspecting town found itself under siege and its outlying farms

  1 Amatus, IV, 28.

  2 'This famous gift, the reward of virginity, might equal the fourth part of the husband's substance. Some cautious maidens, indeed, were wise enough to stipulate beforehand a present which they were too sure of not deserving.' (Gibbon, ch. XXXI.)

  and villages overrun with Normans, burning and pillaging as they went.

  Here was a typical example of Norman methods at their worst: the trumping-up of some legalistic excuse, however shaky; a half-hearted attempt to pin the blame on the intended victim; and then the attack itself, whenever possible with a vastly superior force, pursued without regard for decency or humanity. Such techniques are all too familiar in our own day; what was more characteristic of the people and the time was the fact that while the siege of Aquino was still in progress the Prince of Capua took the opportunity of making his first official visit to Monte Cassino, only a few miles away, and there received a hero's welcome. The monastery, which had always formed part of Capuan territory, had as we have seen suffered long and bitterly from Richard's predecessors; and the last of the Pandulfs, while in most respects but a pale shadow of his father, had continued the old tradition of oppression and persecution with unabated vigour. Any conqueror, even a Norman, who would deliver Monte Cassino from this hated regime could be sure of an enthusiastic reception. Amatus, a probable eye-witness, has left us his own account of the scene:

  And afterwards the Prince, with a few of his men, ascended to Monte Cassino to give thanks to St Benedict. He was received with royal pomp; the church was decorated as if for Easter, the lamps were lit, the courtyard was loud with singing and rang with the prince's praise. . . . And the abbot washed his feet with his own hands, and the care and defence of the monastery were entrusted to his keeping And he vowed that he would never make peace with those who might seek to deprive the Church of its goods.1

  But there was another, deeper reason for the warmth of the welcome given to the Prince of Capua. Until the spring of 1058 the monastery had been under the control of Frederick of Lorraine, a veteran of Civitate and of the fateful legation at Constantinople and still rabidly anti-Norman, who had been appointed abbot the previous year and had technically retained this position throughout his eight months' papacy as Pope Stephen IX.2 On 29 March of

  1 Amarus, IV, 13.

  2 There is some confusion among historians over the numbering of the various Stephens who have occupied the papal throne, depending on whether or not they recognise a doubtful Stephen II, who was elected to succeed Pope Zachary in 752 but died four days later, before his consecration. For this reason Frederick of Lorraine is sometimes known as Stephen X. Most authors, however, prefer to call him Stephen IX; this is, moreover, the title that appears on the inscription of his tomb as ordained by his brother Godfrey the Bearded—who should have known if anyone did.

  that year, however, Pope Stephen died, and the monks elected as their new abbot the thirty-one-year-old Desiderius of Benevento. The career of Desiderius provides an admirable illustration of the doctrine of noblesse oblige as it existed in eleventh-century Italy. A member of the ruling dynasty of Benevento, he had seen his father killed by the Normans during one of the skirmishes of 1047 and had thereupon decided to renounce the world. For a Lombard prince this was not easy. Twice before he was twenty-five he escaped to a monastic cell; twice he was tracked down and forcibly returned to Benevento. After his family was expelled from the city in 1050 the situation became a little easier and he fled again, first to the island of Tremiti in the Adriatic and later to the desolation of the Majella, but soon he was recalled once more—this time by Pope Leo IX, who had just taken over Benevento and saw how greatly his hand would be strengthened against the loyalists if the young prince, who had by now been received into the Benedictine Order, were a member of his entourage. Desiderius served Leo well, but life in the Curia failed to attract him and as soon as the Pope died he settled at Monte Cassino, there to resume—he hoped—the contemplative life. For four years he seems to have succeeded, but early in 105 8 we find him nominated as member of a new papal legation to Constantinople, from which he was saved by news awaiting him at Bari of the death of Pope Stephen. Thanks to a gift of three horses and a safe-conduct from Robert Guiscard he was able to take the direct route, through Norman territory, back to Monte Cassino; and there, on the day after his arrival, he was installed as abbot.

  Always reluctantly, Desiderius was fated to play an important part in state affairs, both ecclesiastical and secular, for the next quarter of a century until his own papacy as Victor III. Soon after Civitate and certainly before any other leading churchman, he brought himself to accept the one unassailable fact of South Italian politics— that the Normans were in Italy to stay, and that opposition to them was therefore not only futile but self-destructive. Only by maintaining their good-will at all costs could the monastery hope to survive. Events proved him triumphantly right. Amatus has already told us of the promise by the Prince of Capua—doubtless the direct result of Desiderius's reception of him—to protect monastic property, and within a week or two this promise had been reinforced by a formal charter confirming the great abbey in all its lands and possessions.

  However well-advised Desiderius may have been in his new policy, the fact that he should first have made it manifest at a moment when nearby Aquino was fighting for its life against immense Norman odds must have appeared somewhat heartless; and it was probably in an attempt to retain some favour with Aquino that he took advantage of Richard's presence and generally benevolent mood to suggest that his demand for the Morgengab might be reduced, and that the Duke Atenulf might be asked for only four thousa
nd sous instead of five thousand—'because he was poor', as Amatus explains. For once, the Prince of Capua made a concession; and the luckless Atenulf, after a few more weeks of hopeless resistance during which Aquino reached starvation-point, was at last compelled furiously to pay up.

  To the population of South Italy the progeny of old Tancred de Hauteville must have seemed interminable. Already no fewer than seven of his sons had made their mark in the peninsula, four having risen to the supreme leadership and the remaining three firmly established in the first rank of the Norman baronage. And still this remarkable source showed no sign of exhaustion, for there now appeared on the scene an eighth brother, Roger. He was at this time some twenty-six years old, but though the youngest of the Hautevilles he was soon to prove himself a match for any; while to the devotee of the Norman Kingdom in Sicily he is the greatest and most important of them all.1

  Like the majority of young Normans on their first arrival in Italy,

  1 Roger is sometimes surnamed Bosso; but as the name is neither frequent, necessary or melodious it can be ignored. It tends also to create confusion with Roger's nephew, Roger Borsa, whom we shall meet anon.

  Roger made straight for Melfi; but he cannot have stayed there long, for already in the autumn of 1057 we find him in Calabria with Robert Guiscard, who had returned there as soon as his investiture was over. The new Count of Apulia apparently saw nothing in his former freebooting life that was incompatible with his recently-acquired dignities, and it was to this profitable if precarious existence that he now introduced his young brother. Roger proved an apt pupil. Camped near Cape Vaticano, on the summit of the highest mountain in the district so that the local population should remain ever conscious—and fearful—of his presence, he and his men soon subdued much of western Calabria. Such was his success that when, a few months later, the Guiscard had to return in haste to quell a local rising in Apulia—an emergency that was to become ever more familiar in the years to come—he had no hesitation in leaving Roger in charge; and when this rising, despite his efforts, assumed such dangerous proportions that Melfi itself was captured and Robert's leadership seriously imperilled, it was to Roger in Calabria that he called for help. His brother's arrival proved decisive and the revolt was quashed.

  It was a happy partnership, but it did not last. The rupture seems to have been Robert's fault. He had always been famous for his generosity towards his followers; now, in his dealings with his brother, he suddenly began to display a parsimoniousness as inflexible as it was uncharacteristic—until Roger, who had in the first months of their association dutifully forwarded to Robert in Apulia much of the plunder resulting from his first Calabrian campaign, now found himself unable even to pay his own retinue. Such at least is the story given us by Malaterra. His chronicle, which was written some years later at Roger's request, may well be tendentious at this point, but it is not altogether improbable. Could it not, perhaps, indicate a new aspect of the Guiscard's character now appearing for the first time—jealousy of his brother, many years younger and possessed of ambitions and qualities in no way inferior to his own? Was there in fact room in Italy for both of them ?

  At all events, some time at the beginning of 1058 Roger angrily left Robert Guiscard's service. One of the advantages of his late arrival in the peninsula was that he had plenty of brothers already established to whom he could turn, and he now accepted the invitation of William de Hauteville, Count of the Principate, who in the four years since his arrival in Italy had captured nearly all the territory of Salerno south of the city itself and who had sent Roger a message offering him an equal share of all that he possessed— 'excepting only', as Malaterra is careful to point out, 'his wife and children'. Thus it was that Roger soon found himself ensconced in a castle towering high over the sea at Scalea, an admirable vantage-point from which to make regular inroads, largely for the purposes of horse-stealing and highway robbery, into the Guiscard's territories. It must have been a profitable time; Malaterra tells us of one single coup—the ambush of a group of wealthy merchants on their way to Amalfi—with the profits from which, in plunder and ransom money, Roger engaged a hundred more soldiers for his growing army.

  But the young man was destined for greater things than a life of brigandage, and looking back at him down the perspectives of history we can see that the decisive turning-point of his life in Italy came in 1058, when Calabria was overtaken by a terrible famine. The Normans had brought the trouble on themselves; their deliberate scorched-earth policy had left, over an immense area, not an olive-tree standing, not a cornfield to harvest.

  Even those who had money found nothing to buy, others were forced to sell their own children into slavery. . . . Those who had no wine were reduced to drinking water, which led to widespread dysentery and often an affection of the spleen. Others on the contrary sought to maintain their strength by an excessive consumption of wine, but succeeded only in so increasing the natural heat of the body as to affect the heart, already weakened for want of bread, and thus to produce further internal fermentations. The holy observance of Quadragesima, so strongly upheld by the holy and reverend fathers, was set aside so that there was much eating not only of milk and cheese but even of meat—and that, moreover, by persons who had some pretensions to respectability.

  This last sentence of Malaterra suggests that in the early part of the year at any rate the situation may not have been too acute, but the unfortunate Calabrians were soon reduced to more drastic extremities.

  They sought to make bread with weed from the rivers, with bark from certain trees, with chestnuts or acorns which were normally kept for pigs; these were first dried, then ground up and mixed with a time millet. Some fell on raw roots, eaten with a sprinkling of salt, but these obstructed the vitals, producing pallor of the face and swelling of the stomach, so that pious mothers preferred to snatch such food away from the very mouths of their children rather than allow it to be eaten.

  After months of such conditions, followed by a harvest scarcely less meagre than that of the previous year, the desperate populace rose against its Norman oppressors. The revolt began with local refusals to pay taxes or report for military service, continued with the massacre of the sixty-strong Norman garrison at Nicastro and rapidly spread through Calabria. Robert Guiscard, already overextended and still actively defending his Apulian possessions, was growing used to local uprisings, but these were usually confined to small groups of discontented nobles. This time, with the whole native population up in arms over a steadily increasing area, the situation was more serious. Clearly he could no longer afford the unnecessary internecine squabbles which not only sapped his strength but, as events in Calabria and elsewhere had made plain, also encouraged insubordination among his subjects. Messengers sped to Roger at Scalea; and this time he could not accuse the Guiscard of any lack of generosity in the terms he offered. If Roger would now settle the Calabrian insurrection, half the affected territory, plus all that remained for future conquest between Squillace and Reggio, would be his. He and Robert would enjoy equal rights and privileges in every city and town.

  For the Count of Apulia it was the only possible course. He had bitten off more than he could at present chew. In so wild and mountainous a country, with its inhabitants so restless and its lines of communication so slender, no prince however strong could maintain his domination single-handed. Roger seized his chance. Down the coast he rode, at the head of all the soldiers he could muster. Whether he was able to do anything to alleviate the hardships of his future subjects is not recorded; we do not even know whether he tried very hard. Nor do the chroniclers tell us what action he took against the insurgents—but they never mention the Calabrian insurrection again.

  While his young brother was settling affairs in the South, Robert Guiscard was thinking—reluctantly, one suspects—about consolidation. His instincts were always towards acquisition rather than the maintenance of what he had already won, and his long-term ambitions were fixed, as ever, on aggrandisement
and conquest. But it was clear that he could not hope to extend his dominions any further until his Apulian vassals could be kept in more effective control. The Lombards in particular, though no longer in themselves a danger to his authority, were proving a constant irritant and a brake on his progress. As their political power had waned, their national solidarity seemed if anything to have increased. Feeling—with good reason—that the Normans, their erstwhile allies, had betrayed their trust, they remained sullen and uncooperative and made no effort to hide their resentment.

  Some means must therefore be found of reconciling the Lombards, even partially, to their Norman overlords. The traditional method of solving such problems was by a marriage alliance, but here there were difficulties. Only one Lombard family of sufficient prestige and distinction was now left in Italy—the ruling family of Salerno. Prince Gisulf had a sister, Sichelgaita; but unfortunately the Count of Apulia's only child, Bohemund, son of his wife Alberada of Buonalbergo, was still little more than a baby and even by mediaeval standards hardly of marriageable age. Possible combinations were thus limited. Robert Guiscard, however, was never afraid of taking the plunge. He now discovered, with much display of consternation, that his marriage to Alberada fell within the prohibited degrees of kinship. He was therefore legally still a bachelor, and Bohemund a bastard. Why should he himself not marry Sichelgaita, thus uniting the Norman and Lombard ruling families over his great South Italian dominion ?1