Warriors

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.

The Prince of Salerno’s first act on hearing of Rainulf’s demise was to hurry to Aversa, to the stone donjon which lay hard by the base camp the old Norman had created so many years before, near to a town now in its own right, not to pay his respects to the dead but to converse with the living; Richard Drengot made sure that once the ceremonies of welcome were over he received Guaimar on his own.

The prince sat silently for some time, looking at a room where the bare stone walls had been broken up by tapestries and the furniture was more suited to a villa than a defensive donjon. ‘The first time I came here I was a callow youth with a message to your uncle from the late Emperor Conrad. William de Hauteville was present also, in fact he did all the talking. It was from those discussions that Rainulf got his title.’

‘My uncle told me of that meeting.’

‘You are aware of what has occurred at Melfi?’

It was an abrupt gambit, but Richard was not fazed. He nodded and tried to give the appearance of a man who had not thought something of the same would be best here, his voice, as he replied, sonorous with responsibility.

‘Hermann’s father, my uncle, bequeathed me a sacred trust, Prince Guaimar.’

The man he was talking to understood how overweight that statement was: too laden by far. Sacred indeed, and why refer to Rainulf in such an abstract manner? ‘Or he left you a heavy burden, Richard.’

‘It is not one honour would allow me to put aside.’

‘Honour and prudence are not always compatible.’

The pause which followed seemed longer than it was in actual time, as each man waited for the other to voice the conclusion. Finally it was Guaimar who broke the silence, but he knew, given Richard’s response to his first mention of Melfi, it would be unwise to be too direct.

‘When I heard that Drogo de Hauteville had assumed Bras de Fer’s title, my initial response was anger, for his presumption and also for the sake of my sister’s then unborn child.’

‘Truly it is a pity she bore a girl. A male nephew in place might have gone a long way to restoring that which the emperor removed.’

Richard said that with a wry expression: Guaimar was in no position to challenge the imperial dispensations and they both knew it.

‘I admit that was a consideration, but then I thought on this. How could a child, even if Berengara had borne a lusty and healthy son, not only lead the Normans in Apulia but control them?’ Richard did not respond so Guaimar continued. ‘I think we both know that the two go hand in hand.’

‘I cannot do the same as Drogo.’

‘He was acclaimed. I am told he was fearful to accept and I am bound to enquire, though you seem to share that reluctance, why your case is different.’

Richard hesitated to speak, as though the answer required some thought, but Guaimar knew that to be prevarication: he must have considered this deeply. ‘Drogo now leads a force very different from the men of Aversa, more mixed, lances from many different parts of Italy who came to join only after the successes achieved by his brother. They care only for what profit will come to them from conquest.’

‘And the men here do not?’

‘Captains like Turmod have served my uncle for decades, have lived here for all that time, and there are others of the same mould.’

For all this fencing, both men knew what Guaimar wanted: a guaranteed commitment from Rainulf’s nephew to take his side against Pandulf. Richard knew, regardless of his wishes, the Normans of Aversa would be caught in the middle of any Lombard dispute, and right at this moment he was unwilling to pledge to anyone, not prepared to place any faith in the promises he would receive from both Salerno and Capua. If Rainulf had gone, he had not done so without making sure his nephew understood his task was to protect that which the Normans had gained.

Yet he had died still not married to Hermann’s mother, still waiting for a papal dispensation, although the new Pope Clement had promised it would be forthcoming at Capua, which left Richard in the same position as Drogo de Hauteville: for all that a goodly number of the men he now led were loyal to Rainulf’s memory, just as many would not bow the knee to a child, and a bastard one at that.

Good sense dictated he put the boy aside and assume the title of count in his own name, yet Guaimar, who wanted him to take that route, also had to consider what he was being told: such an open declaration might split the men of Aversa asunder, which would leave the whole of Campania, and Salerno in particular, with the worst of both worlds, having to treat with multiple Norman leaders instead of one.

‘I was Rainulf’s suzerain, so it falls to me to confirm the title of whosoever succeeds him.’

Ultimately it was up to the emperor, but he was far away in Germany; Guaimar was sitting opposite. ‘True, as long as it is accepted.’

Ever wily, Guaimar saw the solution clearly. ‘It is also my right, should an acceptable heir to a title be in his minority, as Hermann is, to appoint his legal guardian. I take it if you were granted that office it would be accepted by all?’

‘I think it would.’

‘Then we require that the men Rainulf led be gathered, along with Hermann and his mother, so that I can promulgate such a dispensation.’

Guaimar was smiling at Richard Drengot, not just because matters had been satisfactorily concluded. He was wondering if, having had power and having to exercise it for at least a decade, his honour to his uncle’s memory would stay so strong he would be able to give it up.

No man, unless his election was mired in corruption, came to the papacy in the first flush of youth, and Clement was no exception: the one-time Bishop of Bamberg had been in his sixties when Henry brought him south, and travelling for nearly a year had taken its toll on a man more accustomed to a cloistered life. Few popes reigned for long periods, and that did nothing for the stability by which the Holy See was governed. Nor was any deposed pope, still living, free from a desire to resume a position which brought with it great wealth and the ability to dispense much munificence in both money and lucrative offices.

When Clement passed on there was much talk of his being poisoned, an accusation which attended the death of any man who had been pontiff. That was added to by the way the once deposed Benedict resumed his occupation of St Peter’s until a newly elected pope arrived from the north. Clement’s successor, again sent by the Emperor Henry from Bamberg, lasted no more than twenty-three days before he too went to meet his Maker, both events stirring the endemic and centuries-old dispute between the convocation of cardinals and the emperor about who had the right to choose the next incumbent.

Yet both wanted a strong pope, albeit Henry did not desire one who would challenge his authority, and for once, when they were called together to elect a successor, they were in utter agreement about the next candidate. Bruno, the Bishop of Toul, was not only a divine, he was also a soldier who had led part of an imperial army under Conrad. Tall, strong of limb and with russet hair, the Alsatian-born Bruno was imposing in person as well as piety, but he was also a man known for his steely determination.

While he was happy to accept the nomination from the bishops and abbots of Germany and Italy, as well as the emperor, Bruno, like Clement before him, insisted he would not take up the office unless the people of Rome accepted him also. Thus, dressed in simple pilgrim garb, he made his way to the Eternal City and by this straightforward approach won the hearts and affections of the most cynical populace in Europe, and was thus consecrated to universal acclaim as Pope Leo IX.

The office he came to still had all the problems faced by his predecessors: endemic simony, where rich benefices were traded for money payments to candidates who cared not for their flocks but for the profit of the place. Indulgences sold to forgive the most heinous sins and tithes that should have been commuted to Rome for the upkeep of the church spent, instead, by those who collected them, on personal luxury.

Leo had forced from the Emperor Henry a reaffirmation of his temporal rights in the Papal States, as well as an imperial admission that Benevento was a fief of St Peter’s and his responsibility. Hearing this, the people of Benevento, having found the Normans to be unpleasant masters, sent envoys to plead for mercy, and they also wished for protection from increasing pressure on their entire principality from the Normans. Leo lifted the excommunication and promised to visit their city to ascertain for himself the extent of Norman depredations.

Added to that problem were the ongoing conflicts to the south of his territories: as Guaimar fought with Pandulf, Naples played both off against each other, the people of Amalfi rose in revolt, to be severely crushed, this while the Normans of Aversa increasingly encroached on the lands of Montecassino, while their counterparts in Apulia seemed to have lost all cohesion and turned from war to outright banditry.

An active fellow, Leo set off south himself, to find out what could be done to both protect his own states and bring some order to those between them and the toe of Italy. Once in the Principality of Benevento, and seeing for himself how it was being ravaged, he set out for Salerno, summoning Drogo de Hauteville to meet him there. To both he and Guaimar, he would bring to bear the entire authority of this new and muscular papacy.