combination we have mentioned. You have massive authority through your office. Let us gather together all those who have suffered from Norman brutality, including Salerno.’
‘Guaimar?’
‘He has suffered more than most and he can hardly be said to be master in his own domains when he has Norman vassals like Richard of Aversa who do as they please. If he joins with us, others will follow, but no request from me to him would get so much as a hearing, but from you…’
‘You wish to remove the Normans from Italy?’ Leo asked.
‘Yes, but we must defeat them in battle first, then offer them that as a way out.’
‘And if they refuse?’
‘Then they must die, every one of them, down to the last boy-child. It is the only way.’
‘Would God forgive us for that?’
‘Would God forgive us for doing nothing, Your Holiness?’
‘I must go to Bamberg,’ Leo said, after a lengthy pause. ‘I must seek help from the emperor in person, but I will write to Salerno.’
When Guaimar received Pope Leo’s request to join in a grand coalition against the Normans he knew it was not a matter he could discuss with his council: the mere mention of it in public and it would be known in Aversa before a day had passed. In any other matter requiring discretion he might have sent for Kasa Ephraim, but he knew the Jew had extensive dealings with the Normans, so he could not be sure that any advice given would not be tainted by that connection. It was an indication, and an uncomfortable one, of how isolated he could become in such matters that the only person he had whom he could trust as a sounding board was his sister Berengara, and he was most discomfited, on broaching the matter, to be greeted by derisive laughter.
‘How long have I sought this,’ she said, ‘and how many times have you ignored me?’
‘I hesitated to even ask you. You have a half-Norman child.’
‘I have a girl-child who has tainted blood, but I will raise her to hate the Normans as much as I do. Did not her own relatives disown her?’
‘I have often wondered if it was you who had Drogo murdered.’
‘How I wish I had, and I would give my all to the man who did.’
‘So you had no hand in that?’
Berengara produced an enigmatic smile, one her brother had seen before and he knew was designed to bait him: he would never know if Berengara was guilty or not, for he would never hear either an admission or an outright denial from her lips.
‘Why did you laugh when I asked you if I should accede to Pope Leo’s request?’
‘How many times have you told me, brother, that a prince can not always do that which he wishes?’
‘Many times, for it is no less than the truth.’
‘So how do you think it makes me feel to tell you that if you agree to join Leo in his struggle against the Normans you would be a fool.’
‘Why?’
‘You know why, Guaimar. Look at a map. Richard of Aversa is between us and Rome and the de Hautevilles are on our border with Apulia.’
‘Argyrus could keep them occupied.’
‘If I hate the Normans, brother, I distrust Byzantium more. He would be happy to see Salerno humbled and then come to our aid when the city was in ruins.’
‘The depth of your thinking on this surprises me, Berengara.’
‘Why? Because I am a woman?’
Guaimar denied that, but they both knew it to be a lie.
‘So you think I should stand aside?’
‘I think you should return a polite response to the Pope saying that your honour does not permit you to attack one of your own vassals.’
Now it was Guaimar’s turn to laugh. ‘You expect the Pope to believe that?’
‘Who cares what he believes, brother? Much as you seek to blind yourself to it, I am my father’s daughter. He had Salerno taken from him by Rainulf and Pandulf and I often wonder if you recall how close we came to joining him in that simple tomb in which we buried him. Let Leo and Argyrus beat the Normans, and when they do we will rejoice, but I will not see Salerno destroyed first, which she will surely be, and long before either of those two can do anything to save us.’
Argyrus had entertained mixed hopes for Guaimar: he knew for the Prince of Salerno to join with him and Pope Leo would require a degree of daring. No one depended on Norman lances more than he and, while he was capable of raising armed levies of his own, as he had done in order to take Amalfi, the backbone of any force he had ever put in the field came from Aversa. What did surprise him was the way Guaimar decided to let his refusal be known: what should have been a secret, both the request and his negative response, were now known throughout Italy, severely denting any hopes of engaging the help of the other Lombard magnates.
Somehow that had to be reversed; all problems, to a mind like that of Argyrus, had a solution, while added to that was his ability to think ahead, so in order to hedge against a Salernian snub, and with other possibilities in mind, he had sent a trusted envoy to Amalfi, which might prove to be an Achilles heel, to assess matters.
That the adherents of the deposed duke hated Guaimar went without saying — they had seen power stripped from them — just as most of the citizenry disliked being ruled by another. But, from distant Bari, it was impossible to know if such hatred could be put to good purpose. The reports that came back, of seething discontent, were welcome.
Naturally, when it came to seaborne trade, Guaimar had favoured his own merchants over the needs of Amalfi, so that the once prosperous port saw the commerce off which it had lived leaching inexorably to Salerno. Being a Lombard allowed Argyrus to understand his tribe in a way that the Byzantine Greeks had never quite managed; was it not that very quality which had persuaded the Emperor Constantine to appoint him as catapan?
The leading citizens of Amalfi, be they dispossessed aristocrats or impoverished traders, were Lombards, and though they might mouth other sentiments, and pray mightily for Christian salvation, money, and the power that went with it, was their true divinity. Their other weakness was a lack of tribal loyalty, again something they would mouth, but a feeling which came a poor second to personal advantage.
Nestled in a precipitous coastal valley, connected to the interior by a pass through the surrounding mountains, and, within it, buildings piled on precarious slopes one on top of the other, it was a place built for intrigue. But the garrison and governor Guaimar had installed, supported by Normans, held the round tower that dominated the port — the easiest point of ingress and egress — feeling safe in the knowledge that control of trade from that near impregnable citadel gave them the key to an untroubled occupation.
They also held the two land gates to the city that fed a narrow coastal road: let the Amalfians grumble, and no doubt conspire, in their cliff-hugging dwellings. They lacked the means to strike out at those who lorded it over them. No adult male was allowed to bear arms, on pain of incarceration; any numerous gathering would be brutally dispersed so that conspiracy was confined to small numbers who dared not coalesce. Fear and an iron fist ruled Amalfi but the contact between oppressor and oppressed was non-existent: the former stayed in their bastions, the latter avoided them completely.
That was the message sent back to Argyrus: discontent was one thing, the ability to act quite another. The envoy had, of course, misunderstood his master’s purpose. The catapan, who would, if he had been required to, have held Bari in much the same fashion as Guaimar held Amalfi, had never thought that a revolt inside the port was feasible. What he wanted to know was the willingness of the leading citizens to act against Salerno, if he could give them a method of doing so.
Perusing the list his envoy had brought back, he chose for his purpose the well-born over the trader, for the latter would always weigh the righting of a grievance against the cost. Dispossessed nobles were more given to emotion: raised in luxury from birth, they were men who would have grown up seeing power as a birthright, and the removal of it as a personal slight. It came as no surprise to discover that many of such had landed estates outside the actual port, well inland over the mountains, with numerous tenants and peasants to work their soil.
