Son of Blood (12 page)

‘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 night, 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.

A message had to be sent to the Duke of Apulia, but he already knew what had happened and soon found out why, and that restored his mood. Such an outcome made the ride back to Melfi a jolly affair
and Bohemund was detached halfway to turn for Capua, and once there to request from Prince Richard that the Apulian army should be permitted to cross Capuan territory and to undertake the siege of Salerno, so much easier now that Gisulf, who had never had many friends, now had none at all. No one in South Italy had garnered to themselves so much hatred.

T
he city, the most populous in Italy south of Rome, had stout walls and was nearly as hard to crack as Bari; it was not a siege to undertake without serious purpose and the notion of it lasting for more than one year had to be accepted. Fortunately the land around the city was some of the most fertile in Italy, easily able to support the force the
Guiscard
mustered: Normans, Lombards and Greeks, as well as Saracens sent from Sicily. He had the soldiers, the skill, as well as the will to triumph, but his most important advantage lay in the nature of the man he was determined to depose.

Gisulf had been much hated for years by a populace whom he treated as a source to feed his vanity and fill his coffers with gold. He, of course, saw this very differently, perceiving them as a multitude of men and women who loved and were devoted to his person, willing to die for him at any time he required them to spill their blood or surrender up their possessions. If he was a man with a tenuous grip
on his personal reality, he was not so stupid as to be unaware of the way others lusted after his stronghold, especially his brother-in-law; he had, after all, pursued an anti-Norman policy ever since coming to power, as much with Capua and Apulia, in what was a gift for making enemies.

Suspecting an attack could not be deflected he had demanded that his citizens, on pain of being thrown out of the city, lay in and keep topped up two years’ supplies of food, reasoning, not without sense, that such a long campaign posed a threat of disease to the besiegers, which would go a long way to saving his city. This would have remained good sense if Gisulf had not, as soon as the Apulian forces appeared outside the walls and a Norman fleet occupied the great bay, sequestered one-third of those stores for his own personal granaries. Not satisfied with such theft, as summer turned to autumn he sent his soldiers round the city to seize the rest, or at least that portion those citizens had not so successfully hidden. Few complained at such larceny, for retribution was vicious; anyone who questioned Gisulf’s actions was likely to find himself or herself blinded or to suffer castration if the mood on that day sent his malice in that direction.

Despite such impositions the population fought hard for Salerno, and it was before the walls of that city that Robert saw his bastard son in real action for the first time, leading his knights against the walls in an opening assault, which came close to breaching what were formidable defences by the sheer brio of the attack. Getting the siege tower into place was in itself a major task; built just out of arrow range by the skilled carpenters who travelled with the Apulian army, it was constructed from the massive wheels up with local timber – they and the axles were brought from afar, built in a workshop where the solid timber rounds could be iron-hooped and the connections
greased to run smoothly. The outer body was lined with reed matting and on the morning of the assault soaked with water. From the base, internal ladders led up to the assault platform, which matched the height of Salerno’s curtain walls at the point chosen for the attack.

The tower was pushed into place by those knights tasked to back up the initial assault, this made by a body of men already in place on the upper platform, Bohemund among them. In siege warfare this was the point of maximum exposure to risk but also the place of most valour. They had a high ramp to protect them as they approached, long enough to match the distance created by a surrounding ditch. This was riddled with long, needle-sharp spikes, which would drop onto the heads of any defenders too slow to pull back, and once that was down Bohemund and his men were required to rush across it and engage.

Above them another floor was occupied by bowmen, their task to drive the defence back from the parapet long enough to allow the chain-mailed knights to get onto the walls and stay there. They were obviously outnumbered, the only advantage being that the constricted space meant not all the defenders could mass against them, and if they could hold long enough, those knights who had pushed the tower from its start point to its place against the walls could ascend to reinforce them. Naturally the countermeasures were just as set: bowmen firing at an acute angle to skewer the
Guiscard
’s bowmen, knights with extended lances ready to spear their opponents, fire pots ready to throw, as well as tar-tipped arrows to set fire to the exterior screen of wetted reeds.

Bohemund led from the very front, employing in close-quarter fighting an axe instead of his broadsword. Even in the confusion of a melee at the top of the tower, those observing from a nearby hill,
his father amongst them, could see him standing head and shoulders above his confrères, the weapon swinging, silver at first, a gleam that caught the sun, soon dulled by enemy blood. Given surprise was impossible, Bohemund and his men were up against the very best that Gisulf’s captains could pit against them and no one expected such an early assault to produce a conclusion; it would take many of these to wear down numbers and the will of the defence. Behind the siege tower, manning long ships’ cables, stood lines of
milities
whose task was, on their general’s command, to pull the tower back once it was clear the assault had been contained.

Bohemund was now even more visible, balanced on the top of the wall; somehow he had acquired a lance, the axe having been thrown – probably a weapon he had dragged from the dying hand of an enemy knight – and he was using it like a mad fisherman, jabbing with furious strokes at a quite remarkable speed, half his strength, those watching surmised, required to remove it from the bodies and entangled mail of those he struck. He was still there when his father gave the signal to pull the tower back, yet he did not move as others alongside him did to get to safety, which led to an anxious moment. Only the length of his stride saved him, for on his own he would have succumbed regardless of his fighting skill. Where other warriors would have had to jump, Bohemund seemed to step over the now open gap, his final command a shout that carried, telling his confrères to pull the ramp back up to give them cover.

Never able to openly express his pride that a product of his loins should behave with such valour, Robert de Hauteville’s gratification was evident in a palpable change of attitude; on his return to report, Bohemund was embraced then kissed on both cheeks, while also being subjected to much praise by a general keen to show him off to
his assembled forces. As the siege progressed he was more and more brought fully into his father’s council, which happened despite the strong displeasure of Robert’s wife, given it diminished the standing of her own son,
Borsa
, who was kept from combat for fear of loss.

As reward for his valour, and in front of the host assembled, Robert gave his bastard son the title of Lord of Taranto. No subsequent assault was launched without Bohemund’s concurrence and it was he, not
Borsa
, who was despatched to Amalfi to bring from there the ships that would, by backing up the
Guiscard
’s fleet, finally block Salernian egress to the sea, cutting off their inward supply as well as any chance of escape. In another assault Bohemund stood shoulder to shoulder with his father as together they fought in a narrow breach the ballista had made in the walls, with Reynard of Eu on his other side. That they failed to break through did nothing to diminish any of them as warriors; even their fellow Normans saw this trio as supreme.

In the end it was Gisulf’s insistence that his belly should be full, while others went without, that did more than valour to ensure his downfall. Winter brought hunger and that lowered morale for citizen and soldier alike; the population was reduced to eating their horses, dogs and cats. Finally they were reduced to rats, which was the precursor of full-blown famine, and only then did their prince open his bulging storehouses. Yet he did not do so to supply his subjects; he sought to sell back to them that which he had stolen at prices few could afford. With the choice of dying from hunger or Gisulf’s greedy malevolence, a large number of the citizenry, seeing the Normans advance once more, opened the gates to the enemy and then surged out to pay homage to the man who would become their new ruler.

Gisulf, with the few still loyal to him, fled to the Castello di Arechi, the citadel that had been his family’s refuge of last resort for decades.
Holed up in the home of his ancestors and with much of the food stolen from his subjects, they held out for a full six months, seeking terms from an opponent not prepared to grant him any, and he was only persuaded to give himself up when he was promised on binding oaths that he would be safe from his own people and be provided with both his goods and his treasure. Robert agreed because he wanted the city, not his brother-in-law’s blood or money.

Gisulf and his family left Salerno in a line of covered wagons at night, with a strong, armed escort, so that his one-time subjects could not see him, for it was obvious to the
Guiscard
they would, at the very least, take the chance to pelt him with filth if not string him up from his one-time own gates. The Duke of Apulia, Calabria and Sicily, as well as Lord of Amalfi, now had a fitting capital. If it was not his first task, it was to the
Guiscard
an important one; he set in train the construction of a new cathedral, one of a magnificence enough to house a relic he had long desired to own, a tooth of St Matthew that had been in his wife’s family for two hundred years and an object he had demanded Gisulf surrender. Naturally, the duplicitous prince had sought to palm him off with a fake; the message that persuaded him to part with the true relic was simple: surrender the real St Matthew’s tooth or forfeit every one of your own.

Gisulf headed straight for Capua, there to seek the aid of Richard in recapturing his city. He found out then of the secret arrangement previously made: the
Guiscard
’s fleet was on its way to Naples to begin a blockade of that port in support of Capua, while his fellow Norman magnate had assembled his army to march on that city. Gisulf was sent packing, forced to resume his journey towards the Pope, the only friend he felt he had left.

Gregory was not in Rome but Tuscany, where he had gone so he could be close to confronting Emperor-elect Henry, who, in defiance of his instructions, had appointed as Bishop of Milan a married prelate of whom the reigning pontiff, with his insistence on celibacy, naturally disapproved. The new bishop was just as naturally beholden to the imperial right of clerical appointment while Tuscany was also a hotbed of simony, with offices being sold to the highest bidder so that the revenues of the Church could go to lining the pockets of the already wealthy, rather than being employed to carry out God’s work.

Aware that he lacked the military power to curb young Henry’s ambition, which naturally centred on his ancient rights, the Pope had alighted on the one measure he possessed to bring him into line. For the first time in the history of Western Christendom, on a February day, a pope pronounced excommunication on an elected King of the Germans. If this was an anathema that the likes of the
Guiscard
could live with, the effect on Henry was profound and even more so on his pious subjects. North of the Alps it was catastrophic, especially given many of his vassals were already in rebellion, but more so because the entire population over which he ruled were stout devotees of the Church of Rome and genuinely saw the Pope as God’s Vicar on Earth; none of his subjects could obey or even show respect to a ruler who was not in a state of grace.

If that applied to the low-born, it was just as effective with the German princes who elected their king, especially to those who were ambitious for change. In an October meeting they joined with the religiously disquieted and threatened to designate another in Henry’s place if he did not receive absolution. He was given a year and a day from the date of the excommunication to achieve this and a diet was
called at Augsburg in February at which he must either appear before them forgiven or lose his crown.

For Henry there was no time to waste and notwithstanding the fact that it was midwinter he knew he must go to Gregory, where he would be required to abase himself, a necessity to keep his crown. With his wife and son in company he crossed the frozen Alps and eventually located the Pope at the fortress of Canossa, where Gregory was staying until the snows melted and the Brenner Pass cleared, at which time an escort would arrive to take him to the Augsburg Diet.

If Henry, holed up in an inn, suspected the Pope kept him waiting many days through a desire to make him suffer, he could not have been more mistaken. The last thing Gregory had expected was that the excommunicate would turn up on his temporary doorstep and he was at a loss as to how to respond. If Henry begged forgiveness then he could not in all conscience refuse him absolution, but that would release him to take revenge on those who had rebelled against his authority. Added to that there was no way of forcing him to hold to any of the vows he professed, or to ensure he would behave better in the future; once back in the bosom of the Church he would not only reassert his authority, but once more become a thorn in the papal breast.

Eventually he was obliged to relent and the deed was done; Henry mouthed those promises he needed to make, his excommunication was lifted and he immediately went north to deal with his rebels. Still intending to travel to Germany himself, partly to impose his moral victory and hold Henry in check, Gregory found that the Lombard magnates who controlled the Alpine passes, aided by their prelates, would not permit his passage.

After six fruitless months of trying, and much chastened, he
returned to Rome and news that was even more depressing: Salerno gone to the
Guiscard
, Naples remaining under siege. Both Richard of Capua and his son Jordan were excommunicated, the latter for his banditry in the papal province of Abruzzi, but worse than all of that came the information that Robert de Hauteville had marched on Benevento and now surrounded the city. How feeble it seemed to make his excommunication a double one!