by Jack Ludlow
‘The emperor is far from weak,’ Geoffrey insisted.
Robert scoffed at the same time as he glared at Drogo. ‘He is also far from Apulia and unless he is prepared to come to that place with an army—’
William interrupted. ‘Which he could do if we gave him cause.’
‘Bearding him might do that.’
Looking at Humphrey, who had voiced that concern, William was wondering if his gloomy brother might have a point. He had not intended to rile Henry, but he had found his imperious manner hard to stomach. Yet he was the elected emperor, and entitled to respect. Was that a sign of hubris? Was he becoming too used to authority to be guarded in his tone?
That thought evaporated as he realised the company he was in: his brothers would defer to him when they thought he was right, they did not fear, and never had feared, to tell each other they were wrong. As for Henry, if he wanted respect he should show some instead of talking to him like a lackey.
‘Are we in any danger here?’ asked Robert. ‘The emperor’s Swabians hold the castle gates.’
That was possible, though unlikely. If Henry wanted to, he could stage a sudden arrest and throw them into the dungeons of this very place, which William knew, having visited them when it belonged to Pandulf, to be deep. It was the kind of ruse the Wolf would have employed and he did seem to have, as Guaimar had implied, the emperor’s ear.
‘I thought I was the suspicious one,’ Humphrey scoffed.
William was less certain and he knew the imperial escort outnumbered his own, large as it was: they also had more in numbers than Rainulf and he combined.
‘Best be safe. Robert, go to the apartments of Rainulf and speak to his nephew, not him. Raise the possibility and tell them to be on their guard, and that we will stand with them if they are threatened. Mauger, go to the quarters where our men are billeted and tell them to sleep in their mail, with their swords at the ready.’
It was a restless night for them all, and at first light it was necessary for William to test his reactions when he first heard Berengara retching; having been raised in a home where the birth of a child was an annual event, he needed no telling what the sound portended. He also knew, much as the sound pleased him, there were many ways of getting rid of an unwanted pregnancy and he recalled her threats; she would have to be closely guarded from now on.
Around him the castle of Capua was stirring, the smell of fresh baking from the kitchens permeating the chambers, and since nothing had happened in the hours of darkness he stripped off his mail and upper clothing, then dipped his hands in the chilly waters of the bowl of water to wash his face. The scuffling sound of feet had him turning quickly, but not speedily enough, and although he managed to deflect the assassin’s knife away from the centre of his body, it entered the flesh of his side.
He knew he had shouted, knew he had hold of the hooded man trying to kill him, but he could see the eyes and make out the intention: that knife had been pulled out to inflict another stab and he, being stripped, was near defenceless. The sword flying through the air was no more than a flash of steel, but the bellow that accompanied it was more than that. The blade hit the man before him, and even if it did not penetrate, it was enough to distract him from the blow he was trying to deliver, enough to allow William to gain some space between them.
It was Robert who followed that sword blade, grabbing William’s assailant in his great big hands and twisting and lifting him at the same time, so the sound of the snapping neck was as clearly audible as the snapping of a dry twig. William by that time had doubled over his wound, his hand over it, but his eyes seeing the blood seeping through his fingers. Suddenly the chamber was full of people, all his brothers and more beside, and as he lifted his head to one side he saw his wife standing holding the curtain that concealed her bed, and the concerned look on her face mystified him, not least because of all the people in this castle who might want to kill him, she could be one.
‘It would take too long to list those who might be responsible,’ said Drogo, and he was right: the Emperor Henry, Pandulf, Guaimar, Rainulf were all suspect, and that left out the notion that Argyrus had sent someone from far off Bari to carry out the deed. William did not mention Berengara, and in truth the look of concern she had carried when she saw him wounded might actually have been for the father of her coming child.
‘Is the council going ahead?’ William asked, feeling the bandages in which his belly was now swathed.
‘It is.’
‘Then get me on my feet.’
‘Not wise, Gill, that was a bad wound and the monk who treated you said you should remain still to let it heal.’
‘If there is someone at that gathering who is responsible for this I want them to see my face. Now do as I ask.’
It was a painful struggle for William, and there was no way he could dress himself, a task carried out by Drogo and Listo, with his other brothers, Robert excluded, looking concerned. Finally he stood – or was it swayed? – in his family surcoat, striped in blue and white, as his sword was strapped to his waist. An imperial order dictated he should not wear arms, but that was one William de Hauteville was determined to ignore.
On the walk to the great hall of the castle he had to stop several times, to lean against a wall and gather himself, but when he entered that huge chamber he stood alone and upright, his family several steps behind him, before a crowd of nobles and churchmen who parted so that his view, from doorway to dais, was uninterrupted. Many present were surprised, but that did not indicate guilt. It took much determination to walk as if unwounded up that aisle, but walk he did, until he stood before the Emperor Henry, fixing him with a look that was as questioning as it was discourteous.
‘We are glad to see you are well, William. We have cut off the head of your assailant, even though he was dead, and it now sits on a spike by the outer walls.’
His brothers were beside him now, Drogo and Geoffrey so close that he could, if he needed to, lean on them, and when he spoke he managed a voice of full strength. ‘Let it be known, sire, that to kill me will avail whoever tried to carry it through of nothing. You see beside and behind me my brothers. If you wish to contain the name of de Hauteville you must kill us all.’
‘You have my permission, William, to be seated in my presence.’
‘I thank you, sire, but that is unnecessary.’
‘Gill,’ Drogo hissed.
‘Then let it be known,’ Henry said, standing, and his voice ringing out, ‘that in my office as elected emperor, and with the blessing of the most holy Pope Clement, I hereby repudiate the title taken unto himself by Guaimar, Prince of Salerno, in the territories recently wrested from Byzantium. He was granted the title of Prince of Capua by my predecessor and that grant I now repudiate in its entirety, and with the title thus being vacant I appoint to it, with all its lands and revenues, the previous holder, my most loyal servant, Prince Pandulf.’
‘Sire,’ Guaimar protested, but he got no further.
‘You have Salerno and Amalfi, Guaimar, be content.’
Naples and Gaeta were grinning: anyone standing close to Pandulf would have heard the Wolf say, under his breath, ‘You have them for now, Guaimar.’
‘And for you, William de Hauteville, I invest you with the title of Count and Master of all the Normans of Apulia and Calabria, and charge you to hold those provinces in my name.’
The escort William had brought to Capua were all in the keep when he emerged, looking pale but still on his own two feet. They cheered him to the echo, and two of his brothers took his arms to aid him to stay upright.
‘I can look Normandy in the eye now,’ William said. ‘How I wish our father, Tancred, was here to see this.’
‘He will hear of it, Gill,’ Drogo replied. ‘Now you must rest.’
‘I must have a seal made. I need to send greeting to my cousin and namesake, Duke William, and I also need to request that he give my father permission to build that stone donjon he has dreamt of all these y
ears. He cannot deny it now I have my title!’
CHAPTER TWENTY
The emperor, feeling his work was done in Capua, moved on to Benevento to censure the prince of that fief, only to find that Landulf would not open his gates to admit him or the Pope. Verbal thunderbolts thrown at the walls had little effect: there was not a person inside who did not suspect the purpose for which Henry had come, even if they disputed his right, namely to depose the ruler and replace him with some unknown quantity. If Landulf was not universally loved – he was too fond of display and a spendthrift – they were not prepared to trade him for someone imposed on them: that someone might be Pandulf the Wolf.
They might make jests about there only being one letter between them, but there was a lot more than that: Landulf was foppish and a little foolish, but he was not overtly cruel. His near namesake was the kind to hang his own citizens from his walls if they displeased him, and his dungeons, in his previous incarnation as Prince of Capua, had never been less than full to bursting. Rumour had it that he was filling them again: those he felt had betrayed him, if they had not been wise enough to flee, were paying a heavy price, some with their very lives.
Having only a small escort and thus lacking the military means to impose his will, the emperor was obliged to ask his newly appointed Count of Apulia for help, something an ailing William declined to provide, replying that in his new capacity as an imperial vassal he was too busy in his own province to even think of Benevento, and besides, it would involve a siege for which he lacked both the equipment and the time. In order to avoid a more pressing request he took his army off to the south to find and fight Argyrus, despite his brothers’ insistence that he was too ill to lead men into battle.
Thus a seething Holy Roman Emperor persuaded Pope Clement to excommunicate the whole population of the city, before he was obliged to retire north, blustering as he departed – for that was all it was, and a serious loss of face for a man not long elected. But before he left he let it be known that Benevento, both city and principality, was subject to his deep displeasure and that anyone who could bring the miscreants to book, and bring Landulf in chains to his imperial capital of Bamberg, would earn his gratitude. Given the only force with the power to carry out this task was Norman, it was nothing less than an invitation to William to put aside his southern adventures and take the province to the north.
Had the message come to him when healthy he might have been tempted, but he was fevered and in a sick bed, rarely able to speak, surrounded by anxious relatives and priests praying earnestly for his recovery: he had taken to his horse too soon, long before he had fully recovered from the wound to his innards. Sometimes he spoke, at other times he shouted out, a jumble of memories and aspirations, at one time even speaking calmly to ask if a message had been sent to his namesake in Normandy regarding his request.
It was Humphrey who led a force north to take Benevento, and with enough men outside their walls to eventually overcome the defences the people of the town saw safety in deposing Landulf and sending him on his way into exile, then, after a decent interval to allow him to get safely clear, to open their gates to the Norman host. An extensive and fertile province soon found itself at the mercy of bands of Normans, riding in raiding parties, who now acted like the overlords of the principality.
* * *
Bras de Fer was dead long before permission to build a stone donjon reached the tiny hamlet of Hauteville-la-Guichard. The time it had taken to come as a request to Duke William and to be acted upon took several months. It came to a manor house in which old Tancred was also fading from long years, sheer fatigue and all the wounds his body had borne in a life of combat, not aided by too hearty an appetite for the pressed products of his orchards. He would be buried beside both of his wives, whose graves lay in the churchyard where Geoffrey de Montbray had christened all his sons.
Roger, now with spots and a broken, rasping voice, was the one, along with his sisters, to greet the messenger, none other than their one-time family confessor. Geoffrey of Montbray was on his way to Coutances to adjudicate the disputes of that vacant and troubled bishopric. The rest of the de Hauteville brothers were fighting in the service of Duke William, helping him to subdue the last province of Normandy to hold out in its entirety against his cause, their own Contentin.
Tancred raised himself enough to see the first stones laid, but did not live to see his dream completed. He passed to the other side with the last rites of his nephew in his ears and the images of his distant sons before his eyes, seeing them as they were, as their younger selves, with full-flowing fair hair and deep-blue eyes, laughing, fighting, riding in the fields below the manor, training with weapons to be the warriors he wanted them to become. Roger apart, they were that now and he would be soon.
But most of all he saw the face of his eldest, his true heir, and the image of William was of him standing at the top of the old wooden tower overlooking the demesne, now being replaced by that stone donjon, as he handed him a cloak on a cold autumn day many years before, the one in which he had ridden away from his birthplace for ever. He would have thanked God, had he known, that he died in ignorance of his firstborn preceding him to the grave.
The deep knife wound was not the sole cause of his eldest son’s demise, though it had so weakened William that when his fever recurred, a reprise of that from which he had suffered at Trani, he lacked the vigour to hang on to life, and hardly had the strength to hold hard to his brother’s hand as the end approached. His body was wasted, no longer that of the warrior he had so proudly been, and the voice as he spoke was so weak Drogo had to lean close to hear him.
‘If I have a son, Drogo, raise him to make me proud.’ Drogo did not look round to where Berengara stood, with her swollen belly that might contain a boy-child: he feared to look into her eyes lest he see in them a degree of pleasure for what she was seeing. ‘He will, at least, have my title.’
‘He will, brother,’ Drogo replied, though he had doubts if that would be the case.
The Normans would not follow an infant, regardless of how much they esteemed his father: they were now too numerous and eager for further conquests and they had enemies to hand who they would ride out to fight; they needed at their head a man of similar stature to the dying man on the cot. William’s title was too new a creation to have built within it the kind of loyalty that had sustained Normandy, and it would take a strong hand and a good leader to merely hold on to what had been gained. There was no king of the Franks nearby, either, with an army to protect any child inheritor, just the bind that held together the males of de Hauteville.
One by one they came: his brothers, to kneel at his side and kiss his fevered brow; the last to do so Berengara, who allowed his hand to feel the kick of the child she was carrying. But she shed no tears, for she would not, even in the face of a coming death, be a hypocrite and pretend a love she did not possess. Tirena had to wait till he was cold to weep over his cadaver, and she had to be dragged clear, sobbing, as the monks came to prepare the body for burial. Drogo had her sent to a nunnery as soon as she had said her farewells, while her brother Listo was sent to become a monk.
The requiem mass for William de Hauteville’s soul was said in the Latin rite, as befitted a son of the Church of Rome, and his remains were interred in a vault in the local church, a building surrounded by row upon row of the silent men – Normans, Lombards and Italians – that William had led into battle. If they had come to mourn his passing, they also had a deep and abiding interest in what would happen next: they were an army now, ready to live off conquest and that alone.
As the brothers emerged into the strong sunlight, with Drogo at their head, the warriors with bowed heads ceased their prayers and one senior Norman captain, Hugo de Boeuf, who had a clear notion of what was required now, raised his head to yell out, in a clear and carrying voice.
‘All hail to Count Drogo!’
The silence that followed lasted a very short time, until the cry was taken up by
every throat, growing to an endless roar until it echoed off the high hills surrounding the town and castle of Melfi. The man being acclaimed stood stock-still and confused, still mourning for a brother he loved.
‘I do not want this,’ he whispered, even if he knew it to be the only solution to the thoughts he had as William was dying.
‘You must take it, Drogo,’ said the next oldest, Humphrey, ‘for if you do not we may as well saddle our mounts and head back to Normandy.’
Geoffrey and Mauger concurred, pushing him to the fore, but it was the brother he liked least who decided Drogo, for Robert de Hauteville said in a hard tone, ‘If you don’t accept it, Drogo, I will.’
Slowly, and not entirely willingly, Drogo raised his arms to accept the acclamation, which had the serried ranks of warriors break, as they rushed forward to lift him on their shoulders. The man they were carrying was praying that he had the strength not to disappoint them.
Before a month went by, Rainulf of Aversa followed William to the grave, leaving his young son Hermann as heir to his title, and his nephew Richard Drengot to lead his lances and guard the boy, given one was needed. The emperor’s dispensations achieved very quickly a result he had surely not intended: certainly he had split the sources of power in Southern Italy so that no one magnate could overawe the others, but that had quickly turned into a low-level conflict which sat on the brink of breaking out into all-out war, as Pandulf sought to regain all of that which he had lost and Guaimar manoeuvred to block him.
Naples and Gaeta were busy seeking defensive alliances and the Abbot of Montecassino was firing off endless missives to Bamberg, insisting on imperial protection for his lands and revenues. Pandulf, in the past, had reduced the place to such penury by his depredations that the monks had been obliged to leave the monastery just to find the means to eat and drink, and that was after he had stripped the place of not only its accumulated treasure but its priceless library of illuminated manuscripts.
