‘You must do as I say.’
‘No, brother, if it is that or a nunnery, I will take the veil. I will not be whore to a Norman.’
‘Very well,’ Guaimar replied, which should have made Berengara suspicious: he had long since ceased to be the kind of person who gave up easily, and he was a prince who knew that men such as he had had trouble always with unwilling female relatives. He would get his way, with the help of an apothecary if he could not have consent.
Berengara went through the ceremony of marriage to William de Hauteville in a daze, induced by the infusion she had unknowingly consumed, before the whole assembly gathered at Melfi, a signal to them all that these Norman de Hautevilles were no longer mere mercenaries: they had become lords in their own right and elevated enough to be attached by matrimony to a princely house. Drogo orchestrated the acclamation of Guaimar as Duke of Apulia and Calabria, and he in turn granted William the appellation of count, with the land and title of Ascoli, then acknowledged him as what his confreres now hailed him, the Norman leader in Apulia.
Drogo got Venosa, lesser demesnes being granted to the rest of the de Hauteville clan, except Robert, who was, as his nature dictated, furious. Rainulf was given a small barren county near the coast as a sop, not enough to satisfy his pride, while Melfi was to be held in common, the place where the one-time rebels could combine to hold on to that which they had gained. Yet no sharp eye was required to note that the garrison now was entirely Norman and that the captain of the castle was none other than William de Hauteville.
The nocturnal part of the nuptials, after much feasting, passed for Berengara in the same haze as had her wedding and the effects of the drug only wore off as she slept. When she awoke, the first thing she registered was the fire in her lower belly, which told her, along with the bloodstained bedding, that she had been violated. Next she realised that the chamber she was in and the bed she occupied was not her own, a mystery soon solved by the great banner hanging on one wall, the blue and white standard of the de Hautevilles, spilt across at an angle with a chequer in the same two colours.
Of the man to whom she had been given there was no sign: he was in another chamber, with the arms of the shepherd girl Tirena wrapped around his naked, sweat-soaked, but slumbering body.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
News of the triumphs in Apulia had been slow to reach Normandy, but when it arrived and was digested, it stirred ambition in many a thwarted breast, not least in the still-unruly Contentin, though the knights in that county were not alone in seeing that opportunity, much frustrated in their homeland, was truly on offer in the fiefs of South Italy. What had been a trickle of lances heading there did not turn into a torrent, but instead of men travelling in twos and threes, bands of warriors now formed, sometimes as many as fifty in number, especially of those who had no love for, or saw no future in, serving the present duke.
William of Falaise made no effort to stop such men departing: he saw much advantage in the removal from his domains of those who might unite to oppose his rule. It was like cutting off an affected limb. Tancred, still under a cloud, was unsure what to do about the rest of his sons. Roger was, of course, too young, but there was no doubting his desire, once he had reached his majority, to join his mercenary brothers. Serlo was safe from ducal justice in England, serving in the far north, protecting the coasts of Mercia against the Danes, but that left four sons still to decide on their future. The only solution was to seek advice from his nephew.
If the uncle had suffered banishment from court, Geoffrey of Montbray had endured just as much, even if he was still, in the physical sense, close. Prior to the murder of Hugo de Lesseves he had been climbing to prominence in the councils of the dukedom. Given his role in extricating the culprits, he had then been frozen out as untrustworthy, though there had been no attempt to remove him from his ecclesiastical office.
Yet Duke William was not so rich in clear-sighted minds that he could forgo one so sound, one so attached to his cause, and nor had the victim of Serlo’s knife been a man he had much favoured, so slowly but surely Montbray found the atmosphere thawing in his favour. Thus his advice to his uncle was that it would be best to wait: perhaps if he could be absolved of blame so could Serlo’s brothers; perhaps there was a chance of ducal service after all.
One knight fired with the desire to go to Italy was Richard Drengot, a nephew of Rainulf, and such was his attraction as both a person and a leader, and so well found was he in monies commuted back from Aversa, that when he rode off from the family lands around Alencon, he did so at the head of forty knights, all well mounted and equipped. In his progress south he suffered none of the travails of those who had gone ahead individually. Richard Drengot travelled in the style that suited his attachment to his uncle’s wealth, the only experience he shared with the likes of Robert de Hauteville that of passing through a Rome of stillwarring popes.
He and his band were not far south of there when an even more potent force arrived from the north, a whirlwind that would shake the Eternal City to its foundations: the new arrival was no other than the Emperor of the West, Henry III, heir to Conrad Augustus and a man committed to putting an end to the stench of papal politics. Trained since childhood to exercise power — he had been King of Germany since the age of eleven — Henry, a conscientious and overtly pious ruler, knew he would never have integrity in his domains without an end to the machinations of the Roman aristocracy and their endless warring over who held the office of pope.
Although a cause of endless dispute, every Emperor of the West held that the papacy was an office in their gift: no man could rise to be pontiff who did not have their approval. Opposed to that were not just those Roman aristocrats but also a majority of cardinals, bishops and abbots of the great Christian monasteries. Even in his own German domains siren voices were raised against what was seen as imperial presumption, but it had been a right exercised by Charlemagne and no successor of his was inclined to surrender it.
Riding in Henry’s entourage was one of the holiest men in Western Christendom, Suidger, Bishop of Bamberg, and the aim of this imperial mission was made plain at once: a synod was convened in St Peter’s at which all of the three competing popes whose rivalry had so rocked Rome were dethroned, and Suidger was proclaimed as Pope Clement II, his task, to bring back to order the Church of Christ, to put an end to simony and the selling of indulgences, and to perform the ceremony of marriage for Henry and his imperial bride.
So honest was this Suidger that, even with imperial approval, he insisted his elevation be confirmed by a convocation of the leading churchmen, so, for the first time in decades, one upright and properly holy man held the office of pontiff without dispute, yet it was an office with temporal as well as spiritual responsibilities: the Papal States were extensive in both land and wealth and they bordered on Campania and Apulia, so naturally lay matters were also raised at the imperial synod, not least the turmoil in the south.
The removal of Byzantium from Italy was to be welcomed: it had been a desire for centuries, though one every emperor had struggled to achieve. The Eastern Empire was formidable, and even if it was rocked by constant succession strife, even if in the last four hundred years it had lost all of Arabia, most of Persia and the entire North African coast to Islam, it always seemed able to regenerate itself closer to its spiritual homelands. Now it seemed, at last, it was on the rack of near expulsion.
Yet no imperial ruler could be content with vassals appointing themselves to lands and titles, so the great cavalcade, with the Pope in attendance, made preparations to proceed to Capua where another synod would be convened to deal with these temporal problems. Guaimar would be summoned, along with Rainulf Drengot, the de Hautevilles and the Prince of Benevento, now in a state of open conflict with Salerno, to attend upon their ultimate liege lord, Henry III, Emperor of the West.
‘Argyrus got more than gold, William,’ reported a dustcovered Drogo, freshly returned from an expedition to the south and now drinking successive goblets of wine to get that grime out of his throat. ‘The Emperor Constantine has appointed him Catapan of Apulia and he has taken possession of Bari.’
William sighed. ‘A city that assured us of their support not two months past. Lombards are bad enough, brother, but a combination of them and Greeks is worse. I pity the Italians, though I have no reason to think them more scrupulous.’
‘You would be wise to think so. Look what they did at Montecassino.’
‘The men they slew got their just deserts at Montecassino, brother. You will get no less if you steal the sustenance out of people’s mouths. But let us concentrate on the enemies before us.’
