by Jack Ludlow
‘Who told you to look in that direction?’ his father demanded.
Like all boys of his years, Tancred had a scowl that was too often present, but was now deeper given he felt he had good cause to feel aggrieved. ‘No one, Father, but it seemed to me that a couple of my confreres riding north were sufficient and that for all of us to head in one direction was a waste.’
‘How many lances?’ Bohemund asked.
‘Eighty conroys under Count Radulf.’
‘That seems precise, and anyway, how do you know it is him?’
‘I went into Squinzano to ask and to count.’
‘Tancred, you are a fool,’ Ademar growled. ‘What would have happened to you if you had been caught?’
‘I have de Hauteville blood, Father,’ Tancred replied, with utter assurance. ‘I would have been spared and ransomed.’
‘Or drawn and quartered,’ Reynard opined. ‘And no bad thing unless we want to increase the birth rate.’
‘Did you observe their readiness?’
‘They were sharpening their swords with the smith’s wheel, Uncle, so it may be they are ready to move.’
‘He will know how we march,’ Ademar said, ‘lances to the fore, so he means to let us proceed and come up on our rear and surprise us, attack our milities with we having to get through them to do battle.’
‘And on the wrong kind of mount,’ added Reynard. ‘Against near twice our number.’
Those thoughts got a nod as well as an appreciation of what it portended: there was no way in such a situation his lances would be anything but disorganised, whereas Radulf would be prepared and that would hand him a great advantage, to be doubled or even trebled by the fact that his men would be on destriers and Bohemund’s on their riding horses. Only now Radulf’s aim was obvious and the trick was to play him false for, given the numbers, it was risky to turn to face him.
‘Then it is as well we surprise him,’ Bohemund declared.
It was not a road on which they were travelling; there was a sort of wide track made by traders and their donkeys, but that was insufficient for the number of men seeking to march along it and they had thus spread out over a wide area, one which Bohemund expanded, for in doing so they sent up a great cloud of obscuring dust. He had to hope that Radulf was unaware that his aim had been discovered, yet as in all war situations many things had to be left to develop. But he had one advantage and that was the terrain, especially a flank protected by the almost endless sandy beach, on the shore of the shallow water, occasionally interspersed with rocky promontories.
Once more the squires were employed to be his eyes, this time at the rear of the marching host, set there to warn of the enemy approach and, being mounted on swift ponies, able to tell their commander when he must react. Given the low state of training of his foot soldiers Bohemund stiffened them with extra commanders and gave them a simple instruction to carry out when the horns blew. Had he been at the rear of the host Bohemund would have laughed to see what Tancred had contrived: he had got all his confreres to sit facing backwards on their mounts, wearing cowls in which they had cut eyeholes, so that from afar it looked as if they were facing the right way — forward. There was thus no need to look over their shoulders, an act anyone observing them might have seen as odd and caused them to be more cautious.
Count Radulf saw the cloud of dust long before Tancred and his like saw his men, and such was the dun-coloured clothing of the lookouts they did not show up against it. Thus, having slipped in behind Bohemund, he brought his speed up to a steady canter, though not pushing too hard to keep fit his mounts. It was the dust that set up which caused the alert and the first of Tancred’s squires was sent to both inform the men commanding the milities and then ride on to warn Bohemund.
To canter half a league, on a destrier carrying a mailed knight, exceeded that for which they had been trained; these sturdy animals were designed for short rides into a fierce battle and if Radulf wondered how fit they would be on contact it was a concern that quickly faded. Horses like to run — they do not have to be taught how do so, only when — and his mounts seemed, as he looked along the front line, to be enjoying themselves, heads up and jerking, nostrils flaring and hooves pounding rhythmically, with no sign of impending fatigue. The time came to put them into a faster pace, which he calculated as the point where those foot soldiers would hear the noise of hooves over that of their own numerous feet.
The blowing of the horns did not come as a surprise; what did was the way these men, who had to be barely trained, spun as one and took up a position to defend themselves, shields up and lance points at the ready in an unbroken line. Being committed, Radulf could not let this deter him and he made no attempt to stop his men, which he could have done with a horn blast of his own. Thus the first line hit the shield wall, then on the requisite command split left and right so the second wave could engage, with Radulf now taking up a position from which he could direct matters.
He was not downhearted; the men he was hoping to meet were behind that shield wall and so solid was it they had no chance of breaking through unless the milities opened up to let them pass in file, in which case he would have the fight he wanted: his solid conroys on horses trained to fight, against men yet to form up and very likely on skittish and fearful cavalry mounts. That Bohemund’s foot soldiers held their line began to make Radulf curious and then to frustrate him to the point where he began to curse their stupidity; they could not beat his conroys, just delay them, and so, instead of beating against them for his original purpose, he ordered his lances to break their line, for if they did, Bohemund would be obliged to then commit what he was obviously holding back, his own knights, who, even if they had remounted, he knew he outnumbered.
The milities having ceased to march, the dust they had been sending up was now settling and the corresponding amount produced by his horses was much less. Because of that the air began to clear, and if it was a ghostly chimera at first, it rapidly began to take form, which led Count Radulf, not an especially religious man, to wonder if God had decided to send his celestial legions to participate in the fight. All along the shoreline, several ranks deep, with some lances up to their thighs in seawater, the first rank on the sand, sat outlines of the disciplined ranks of Bohemund de Hauteville’s conroys, all on short and solid destriers, their teardrop shields and lance points catching the sun.
It was their horns that blew now, their destriers that came forward at a proper canter, and they hit his men as they sought to wheel to face them, yet unable to do so in the required orderly way. Count Radulf had the battle he had envisaged, except that the positions were reversed and his numbers counted for less, very obviously so when his lances began to go down to sword and axe blows, more to couched lances which unseated them. Worse, those stubborn foot soldiers now rushed forward to employ their lances on what was now a flank, then to use sharp blades on the throats of the fallen. He watched as their helmets were pulled back hard to expose soft flesh, and he could even see the founts of bright blood that erupted and rose half the height of a man into the air.
He had ordered the horns to blow the retreat and they soared above the cacophony of noise that came from thousands of men fighting, only to find he faced another predicament: his horses had run a long way, and if they were not blown they were tired, too much so to outrun the fresh mounts now chasing his conroys. They had broken up, there was no discipline, and knowing that he was about to be in receipt of a defeat that might be so total few of his lances would survive, Count Radulf spun his horse round to face his enemies, lowered his own lance and charged with utter disregard into the midst of them.
They found his much-punctured body when the fighting died down, while the milities were going around cutting the throats of men not yet dead, as well as horses that would never be fit to use all four legs again. There were some of the enemy still breathing and when questioned they readily told Bohemund that Count Radulf had denuded Brindisi to make up the force that had just been utte
rly destroyed. With no time to waste, Bohemund set off north at a forced-march pace and that brought the result he desired. With too few men to defend its walls, the captain of the castle of Brindisi surrendered as soon as he was sure his honour had been satisfied.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
While Borsa had the support of his mother, he also had the backing of the latest pope, none other than the Abbot Desiderius, who had, after much wavering and indecision, and under relentless pressure from his fellow divines, taken up holy office as Victor III. Not that he was going to enjoy a comfortable pontificate, for the imperial antipope Clement was still alive and contesting Victor’s right to the Lateran, albeit from a distance. Rome itself was split, which meant Victor was not in possession of much more than the Castel St Angelo and the Vatican Hill, so much of his rule was carried out from his monastery at Monte Cassino. He was better off than Clement: the Romans had chased him out of the city altogether and that sent him north to Milan.
So, thunderous bolts pronouncing anathema sped south with every advance Bohemund made, papal demands that he desist from his actions and bow the knee to his half-brother. The backing of Borsa had many strands, which dovetailed into papal policy. When Victor was appealed to — and he was almost weekly — he supported Borsa, first of all because he was his vassal and the legitimate heir to the Guiscard; secondly, he was known to be pious and, lacking his father’s strong personality, would be less inclined to question what edicts were handed down to him from on high.
More importantly the papacy still needed a strong Norman bulwark against imperial pretensions and Jordan was, for Pope Victor, too unreliable, blowing supportive one minute then flirting with Henry IV the next, while Bohemund represented a return to the old days of the Guiscard, the man who had sacked and burnt Rome when he had supposedly come to rescue it. Yet even with all of his threats of excommunication the one-time Abbot of Monte Cassino was a peacemaker by nature, and pleading letters also came to Bohemund with threats of excommunication, begging him to desist, for his actions could do naught but destroy the fertile lands of Apulia.
Despite his best efforts it was not papal intervention that brought an uneasy peace to Apulia, but the pleas to the Great Count of Sicily to intervene on behalf of his titular suzerain — requests which long went unanswered, given he was occupied in finally securing Syracuse. After Palermo and Messina it was the most important seat of Saracen power on the island, and more than that to many; it had been said since the time of Ancient Greece that he who held Syracuse held Sicily. Despite Bohemund’s continued success over the space of a year — he had advanced past Brindisi to take the hilltop town of Ostuni, then ejected his own two cousins from Conversano and was about to target the rich prize of Bari — Roger would not depart until his goal had been secured.
Being asked to act as mediator between these two warring half-brothers, he had much to consider, not that Borsa was doing much in the way of fighting; every time his forces — and he declined to lead them personally — came up against Bohemund’s men they were soundly beaten and forced into an ignominious retreat. The only brake on Bohemund’s advance and his eventual takeover of the duchy was the disinclination of many of Borsa’s vassals to switch their support to him — they were tardy in support for their liege lord also — added to the weathervane actions of Jordan of Capua, who could withdraw his knights at will and did so if his aggressive cousin seemed to be doing too well, too quickly.
None of this boded well for Borsa’s future as the Duke of Apulia; he could not win, and in time and by attrition, for all his power and wealth, he might well lose. Yet to abandon him to a slow erosion of his power was not an option that held much joy for his uncle; for many years a near-autonomous ruler in Sicily, Roger de Hauteville had concerns in case a problem he thought solved repeated itself, and that not just the line of his communications to Italy. It was the constant demands he had received to come to his late brother’s aid, for he had always been much troubled by Robert’s ambitions, which were never seemingly satisfied — one conquest always led to an attempt at another — while at home the Guiscard had never had control of his unruly barons. Too many times, and at an important moment in the subjugation of the island, Roger had been dragged away from his own concerns in Sicily because Robert needed his aid. He had no desire to see in possession of those same titles a warrior who sought to match and possibly surpass his father.
He had, of course, his vow of allegiance, made at Bari and repeated at Salerno, yet on a personal plane he could not but admire Bohemund while at the same time view his titular overlord in a different light. Even if he thought himself more free than his confreres of the normal Norman prejudice, he still thought Lombards to be inferior to his own kind in every way. Both nephews bore the de Hauteville name, but only one had a pure bloodline and represented what it had come to stand for in Southern Italy. Roger was no more prepared to become the nemesis to one than the other.
These were the thoughts he ruminated on as his single galley entered the harbour at Salerno, his personal standard at the masthead so they knew who was on board. His first task was to convince his relatives — Borsa himself, Guy, now Duke of Amalfi, and his sister-in-law — that what they were bound to propose was something impossible to implement: namely, that he should go to Bohemund and threaten to take the field against him unless he desisted from his incursions and handed back the rightful Duke those possessions he had usurped. It proved to be, as he had anticipated, an uncomfortable meeting.
‘Surely, Roger,’ Sichelgaita insisted, ‘you do not dispute that Robert’s bastard is in revolt?’
‘You cannot do him the honour of using his name?’
‘Should I do so, I would require immediate communion for the utterance of a blasphemy.’
‘Bohemund seeks what he thinks is rightfully his.’
‘Which,’ Borsa responded, ‘we know not to be the case.’
‘But it is not as simple as just saying that he should bend the knee and give up his gains, which is what you wish me to propose to him.’
‘Why not?’ Guy demanded.
‘Because he would say to me what I would say to him if the positions were reversed — he would tell me where to stick my lance.’ The disappointment at his attitude was very evident in their expressions, but Roger was not about to be swayed. ‘How did our family gain Apulia? Was it gifted to us?’ No one cared to answer, only to look away as Roger added, ‘We won it by force of arms.’
‘And had our title recognised by the Pope,’ Borsa interrupted.
‘I am sure your father told you how much love was in the granting of that.’
‘Times have changed, Uncle. Pope Victor writes to me kindly and will be happy, should I journey to Rome, to lay hands upon my head and confirm me to the triple dukedom. He is also close to excommunicating Bohemund.’
Sichelgaita went straight to the nub of the quandary, in truth why he had been summoned to Salerno, not that Roger would have accepted anything other than he had come of his own volition.
‘You have the ability to force him to cease his depredations.’
‘And what do you offer him in return?’
‘His life,’ Guy spat.
That angered Roger — if Borsa was no warrior, his brother was even less of one. ‘Boast of that when you can take it, and if you wish, Guy, I will arrange for you to meet him in single combat.’
‘He must be stopped,’ Borsa said, in an almost pleading tone, this as Guy sought to look martial and ready, so easy at a distance from Bohemund.
‘He has Taranto from my husband,’ Sichelgaita snapped. ‘Let him be content with that.’
‘It may be best,’ Roger sighed, ‘to find out what he will accept.’ The way the three of them looked at him then made Roger wonder if they were beginning to see him as an enemy, and that was not comfortable. ‘I will travel to see him on the morrow.’
‘You will need a strong escort, Uncle.’
‘No, Borsa, I need only the half-dozen familia knig
hts I have brought with me from Sicily.’
That did not endear him either, underlining as it did that he, unlike them, had naught to fear from Bohemund.
‘I know why you have come, Uncle, but I would say to you now, to avoid that I must dispute with you, that I will have my father’s title.’
‘Which one, Bohemund? He had several.’
‘Duke of Apulia I will settle for.’
If Bohemund had the ability to read another man’s mind, and it did not take too much to read Roger’s, he would have seen in the eyes that such a statement was not to be given credence. In any case, his uncle added words that underlined his disbelief and not without irony. One thing the Guiscard never did was settle for what he already had.
‘And I thought you might be my brother’s son.’
At least Bohemund smiled; he did not try to dissemble. ‘Join me and I will give you Sicily.’
‘Bohemund, I already have Sicily.’
‘Not in your own right.’
‘Next you will try to tell me that Borsa will take it from me, and if you do I will be tempted to ask you how.’
‘And what else will you ask of me?’
They were sat in the round bastion of the castle of Conversano, which had been the seat of Bohemund’s cousin, and Roger made much of looking around the walls hung with fine tapestries to break up the stark stone blocks.
‘I would ask that you hand this back to Geoffrey.’
‘He rebelled several times against my father and supported my half-brother. That cost him his fief.’
