The poor burghers were probably only too pleased to comply. Roger's threats offered them a means of escape from an impossible position. Robert was sent for, and hastily handed over; and all waited breathlessly to see what chastisement had been reserved for him. They were due for a surprise. Roger dropped his mask of anger and strode forward, arms outstretched, to greet his brother; and within a moment the two were embracing each other like Joseph and Benjamin—the phrase is Malaterra's—and weeping tears of joy at their reconciliation. Robert immediately promised full satisfaction of all Roger's territorial demands and, still beaming, the brothers rode off together to Mileto. As subsequent events were to prove, the quarrel was even now not entirely over; once the Duke found himself reunited with his wife and the main body of his army he began to regret his too easy acquiescence, and for a short while the fighting broke out anew; but his heart was no longer in it and before long the two greatest of the Hautevilles were friends again.
The manner in which, after this unlovely wrangle, Calabria was finally divided between Robert and Roger is still not altogether clear. It seems to have been based on a scheme according to which each town and castle was individually divided into two separate areas of influence, being thus prevented from giving active support to either brother against his rival. Such a system suggests that the degree of mutual trust now established between the two still fell some way short of the ideal; in practice it must have been so complicated and cumbersome that we can only wonder that it worked at all. And yet both brothers seem to have found it satisfactory enough. Certainly it must somehow have enabled Roger to bestow upon Judith the Morgengab she deserved, and upon her family such estates as befitted their new dignity. For Robert Guiscard it had been an expensive lesson, but he had learnt it well.
For Roger, too, the quarrel with his brother had been expensive. It had cost him several valuable campaigning months which should have been spent in Sicily, and it was not until the high summer of 1062 that he was able to return to the island. This time, no doubt remembering the tears which she had shed when he had left her behind in the spring, he took Judith with him. They landed, with an army of three hundred, in early August and went straight to Troina. Despite the ignominious flight of the Norman garrison after Ibn at-Timnah's assassination, the town had suffered no Saracen attacks in Roger's absence, and if he noticed that the welcome which the
Greek inhabitants now extended to himself and his young wife seemed rather cooler than on his first arrival, he attached no particular importance to the point. Everything seemed peaceable enough. After a week or two spent putting the fortifications in order Roger left Judith in the care of the new garrison and set off on his long-delayed campaign.
This was the moment for which the Greeks of Troina had been waiting. As so many of their compatriots and co-religionists were to find during the early years of Norman domination, their new masters were often worse than the old. They were more demanding than the Saracens, tougher and more unscrupulous in getting what they wanted. Even their Christianity was incomprehensible, crude in its practices, barbaric in its language; and their free and easy ways with the local women were already notorious throughout the island. The Troinans had suffered particularly in this last respect. The hasty departure of their first Norman garrison had seemed to them a deliverance; but now it had been replaced, and by a still larger body of troops than before. They laid their plans carefully; and so soon as Roger and his army were a safe distance away, they struck. Their primary objective was the person of Judith. Once they had her in their power they could hold her hostage until the Normans agreed to withdraw from the town. But they had reckoned without the new garrison, who now fought back with all the courage and determination that their predecessors had lacked. All day long the battle continued, up and down the precipitous streets, while messengers sped to Roger with the alarm.
Roger, who had been besieging Nicosia, returned at full gallop, and arrived to find the situation worse than he had feared. Seeing a chance to rid themselves for ever of their Norman oppressors, several thousand Saracens from the neighbouring country had poured into Troiana and had made common cause with the Greeks. Against such numbers the Normans could not hope to defend the whole town; Roger at once ordered a general retreat to the few streets immediately surrounding the citadel. Barricades were hastily erected, look-outs stationed, outposts manned. This time it was the Normans' turn to be besieged. And so they were, for four months— perhaps the most testing period in the entire history of Norman Sicily. They had been caught completely by surprise; provisions were already dangerously low and, worst of all, Sicily was soon in the grip of the earliest and most merciless winter in living memory. Troina stands nearly four thousand feet above sea level; the Normans were without warm clothing or blankets, and the area behind their roughly-improvised fortifications possessed little, short of the buildings themselves, that could be used as fuel. Somehow morale remained high; Malaterra reports that despite their hunger, toil and lack of sleep, the besieged Normans kept up each other's spirits, 'hiding their sorrow and feigning a sort of hilarity in countenance and speech'. Poor Judith, too, sharing a single woollen cloak with her husband by day and huddling with him under it by night, put on as brave a face as she could; and yet 'she had only her own tears with which to quench her thirst, only sleep to palliate the hunger that tormented her'. Somehow one feels that, for all her courage, she was no Sichelgaita.
By the beginning of 1063 Roger knew that he could not hold out much longer. There was hardly any food left, and his soldiers were too undernourished to support the cold as stoically as they had at the outset. Fortunately there were signs that the Saracens who kept the night watch beyond the barricades were also feeling the strain. These men had one defence against the cold which was denied to the Normans—the rough red wine of the region, forbidden by the Prophet but now temporarily hallowed in Muslim eyes for its calorific properties. It did indeed keep them warm; but, as the Norman look-outs were quick to report, they were consuming it in larger and larger quantities with other more dangerous effects. Roger saw his chance. One January night, with the wind whistling colder than ever down the narrow streets, he prepared his men for a final offensive. Waiting till silence descended on the Saracen watch-posts, he stole silently over the barricades. All was as he had suspected. The sentries had surrendered to the effects of their potations, and were sleeping like children. Quickly he beckoned to his followers. Their footsteps made no sound in the deep snow; the Greek and Saracen forward positions were taken before their defenders knew what had happened, and by morning Troina was once again in Norman hands.
Roger's vengeance was swift. The ringleaders of the insurrection were hanged instantly, and the penalties reserved for their accomplices were probably hardly less severe. Malaterra spares us the details, preferring to tell us instead of the great feast with which the Normans celebrated the end of their ordeal. They had deserved it. In the past four months Roger, Judith and their followers had been subjected to hardships greater than those which any Norman leader had been called upon to face since the first of their number appeared in the South. They had come through magnificently, thanks to their courage, their initiative and, above all, their endurance. But they had seen, too, just how precarious still was their Sicilian foothold.
12
CONQUEST
Dexter a Domini fecit virtutem.
Dextera Domini exaltavit me.
(The right hand of God gave me courage.
The right hand of God raised me up.)
Roger's motto, inscribed on his shield after the battle of Cerami
THERE was no denying it; Sicily was proving a more formidable proposition than Roger—or anyone else—had expected. His fundamental problem was the same as it had always been, the chronic shortage of manpower. This was not of overriding importance in pitched battles; the Normans had shown at Enna and elsewhere that, at least in mountainous terrain, their superior discipline and military technique would prove decisive over sheer
weight of numbers. But a few hundred men could not be everywhere at once, and the advantages of victory were soon lost if political domination could not be maintained. At present their strength was inadequate to keep effective control even in the north-east. Moreover it was now nearly two years since the start of the Sicilian operation, and the element of surprise, one of the most valuable of all weapons to a numerically inferior army, had long since been forfeited. The Norman presence in Sicily had by now had the inevitable catalytic effect on the Saracens, who, once rid of the baleful influence of Ibn at-Timnah, had set aside their differences in the face of a common enemy. The Zirid Sultan Temim had sent his two sons Ayub and Ah, each at the head of an army, to help their Sicilian brethren stem the Christian tide; while Roger had been
fighting for survival at Troina, these two young princes had landed at Palermo and Agrigento respectively and had at once begun preparations for a concerted attack.
Roger still had only three or four hundred men; and it was unlikely that Robert Guiscard, fully occupied with the Byzantines in Apulia, would be able to spare him many more. To make matters worse, he had lost all his horses at Troina—where they had probably provided the staple diet for four months—and he now had to make a hurried journey back to the mainland for replacements. It says much for the thoroughness with which he had crushed the revolt that he should have been willing, once again, to leave Judith in the town during his absence; but she had learnt a lot in the past few months, and Malaterra writes approvingly of the way in which she now assumed command of the defences, making regular daily and nightly rounds of the garrison to ensure that all the soldiers were awake and on the alert. After nine centuries it would perhaps be unchivalrous to suggest that these tours of inspection were prompted more by nervousness than by conscience; but in view of what had happened the last time she was left behind, the poor girl could hardly be blamed for feeling a little uneasy.
Her husband, however, was soon back again, with horses and supplies in abundance—though still with very few men. Throughout the spring of 1063, working out from Troina, he and his young nephew Serlo—already the ablest of his commanders and a Hauteville to his fingertips—engaged the Saracens in a quantity of minor skirmishes from Butera in the south to Caltavuturo in the north. Plunder was good and the store-rooms at Troina began to fill up nicely again, but it was not until midsummer that the Normans were able to get to grips with the main Saracen army, now tempered with the newly-arrived Africans, which had recendy left Palermo and was now heading east, under the green banner of the Prophet, towards the Christian strongholds.
Eight miles or so to the west of Troina lies the time town of Cerami, in a fold of the hills above the river that shares its name. Rivers seemed to bring the Normans luck; on the mainland the Olivento, the Ofanto and above all the Fortore had run red with the blood of their enemies, and in Sicily the Dittaino had already witnessed a similar triumph. After the events of the previous winter Roger wished at all costs to avoid another siege; the Cerami, on the other hand, provided an admirable rallying-point for his tiny army, together with plenty of good look-out positions from which he could survey the enemy assembling on the hills opposite. Once again, as at Enna, the Normans were heavily—it seemed hopelessly—outnumbered. The size of the Saracen army is unknown; Malaterra estimates it at 'thirty thousand, not counting the foot-soldiers, whose numbers were infinite'. As usual he exaggerates; but a major force of this kind, gathered from all over Sicily and reinforced with important detachments from North Africa, must certainly have run into thousands. Against them Roger could muster only a hundred knights, with another thirty under Serlo; assuming proportionate numbers of infantry, the Norman army in its entirety cannot have been more than five or six hundred strong.
For three days Normans and Saracens watched each other; on the fourth Malaterra tells us that 'our men, no longer able to tolerate seeing the enemy so close without attacking him, confessed themselves with the utmost piety, made their penances and then, trusting in God's mercy and certain of His help, rode off into battle'. Hearing that the Saracens were already besieging Cerami, Roger quickly despatched Serlo with his thirty knights to hold the town as best he could; and once again his brilliant young nephew proved equal to the task. When Roger arrived with the bulk of the army a short time later he found that the first wave of the attackers had already fled. Cerami was still his.
All this, however, as Roger well knew, was but a preliminary. The enemy was regrouping for the main attack, and the Normans barely had time to draw themselves up in fine of battle before the Saracen army charged. Ignoring Serlo on the flank, they directed the whole weight of the onslaught against the centre, where Roger himself was commanding, in one enormous and concerted effort to smash the Norman force by sheer impetus and force of numbers. They nearly succeeded, but somehow the Norman line held. Meanwhile Serlo galloped to his uncle's aid. All day the battle continued, until the mangled, trampled bodies lay thick over the field, Then suddenly, as evening drew on, the Saracens turned in flight, Roger and his men close on their heels. The pursuit led ultimately to the Saracen camp.
Loaded down with booty, the Normans now installed themselves in the tents of the Mahommedans, seizing their camels and all else that they found there. Then, on the morrow, they left to seek out those twenty thousand foot-soldiers who had fled to the mountains for refuge. Many of these they killed, the remainder they took captive and sold as slaves, receiving for each a great price. But after a little time, the contagion which arose from the rotting corpses on the battlefield drove them away and they returned to Troina.1
To Roger the battle of Cerami was of vital importance. Now at last Norman mastery of the whole region between Troina and Messina was assured. Though sporadic revolts in isolated areas would still occur, it would never again be seriously contested. Once again a Norman force had inflicted an annihilating defeat on a Saracen army many times its own strength; this time the battle had been greater, its result more significant and decisive, than that of Enna two years before. But the Normans had prevailed for the same reasons as always—by a combination of courage and discipline which was then unknown in the Muslim world, shot through with a religious enthusiasm born of their still growing belief in divine guidance. By now this belief had reached the point where Malaterra is able to record without apparent surprise how, just before the Normans rode into battle at Cerami, their ranks were joined by a fair young knight, mounted on a snow-white stallion and armed cap-a-pie, in his hand a lance from which there streamed a white pennant bearing a shining cross. It was not long before he was recognised as St George himself, come to lead the soldiers of Christ to victory; and many later testified to having seen his emblem flying also from the point of Roger's own lance at the height of the battle. In recognition of these signs, Roger ordered a sumptuous present to be sent to Pope Alexander II; and so it was that a week or two after the battle the citizens of Rome stood agape while a procession of four camels—the finest of the Saracens' military stable —shambled slowly through the streets.
Pope Alexander must have been delighted with his present; quite
1 Malaterra, II, 53.
apart from their exotic character and zoological interest, and more important than either, those camels were a living indication to him that Roger was on his side and that he could probably look to the Hautevilles for support as and when necessary. The Pope was having a trying time. The electoral reforms of Nicholas II had had the very effect that they had been specifically designed to avoid. They made a disputed papal succession inevitable, for how could the Empress-Regent Agnes accept any candidate canonically elected in Rome without giving implicit approval to the new dispensations ? Nicholas's death in 1061 thus created a situation even more hopelessly confused than usual. Once again there were two Popes struggling for the possession of St Peter's. Alexander's was the stronger claim, since his election by the Cardinal-Bishops—led, as always, by Hildebrand—had been canonically impeccable. On the other hand his rival, the ant
i-Pope Honorius II, chosen by Agnes and supported by the Lombard bishops—who, as St Peter Damian uncharitably remarked, were better fitted to pronounce upon the beauty of a woman than the suitability of a Pope—had influential partisans in Rome and plenty of money with which to nourish their enthusiasm; and it was only with the military assistance of Richard of Capua—provided now for the second time at Hildebrand's request— that Alexander had been enabled to take possession of his see. Even then Honorius had not given up. As late as May 1063, after Agnes had been removed and an imperial council had declared for his rival, he had even managed to recapture the Leonine City1 for a short time— and though he was formally deposed in the following year he was to uphold his claims until the day of his death. Throughout this period Alexander needed all the support he could find. In return for his camels he sent Roger a papal banner to go before him and inspire his army in its future campaigns. More significant still, he proclaimed absolution for all those who joined Robert and Roger in their holy task of delivering a Christian land from the domination of the heathen. Henceforth, not only in the hearts of the Normans but in the eyes of Christendom, the conquest of Sicily was a Crusade.
The Normans In The South Page 19
