did not, good credit with other rich individuals: Kasa Ephraim could buy on the promise of future payment and on terms few people could command. It was not just flour and seed that was required: bread might be a staple but it needed to be supported by other commodities. Vegetables, fruit, cuttings for olives and vines and the stocks necessary to restart herds of livestock — goats in the main, for they were hardy — as well as the more delicate sheep and cattle.
Roger had to locate a place to land all that had been purchased, then to find a means to distribute it to the best advantage. He chose a small landing stage at Cetaro, not far from the Guiscard’s fief at Fagnano, that one- time hilltop monastery now a formidable castle large enough to house the men Robert provided. That the news spread quickly of food to be had was unsurprising, but Roger did not want the starving to come to him, he wanted to go to them.
That their lords shut their gates to a Norman host, even in the midst of famine, did not surprise him, but he had with him Lombards capable of building small ballista, not required to batter walls, but to fire the loaves of bread he had baked, always from a point at which the wind would carry the smell over the ramparts. To a garrison, already hungry, and to one pressed into resistance, it was a more telling military tactic than any battering ram applied to the gates.
Just enough bread would be catapulted in to remind the defenders of what they were lacking, and when such men looked at those who commanded them to resist, most with full bellies, the will to support their overlords evaporated. The sensible, who realised their people would not fight for their title, opened their gates and sought forgiveness, readily granted provided payment was made for what had previously been withheld. Some did not, and such was the fear their people had of their revenge, the walls had to be stormed and those inside put to the sword, innocent and guilty alike, the news allowed to spread that this was the choice: surrender and you will live, eat and prosper, in time, with re-sown fields and fresh livestock, or resist and die, for no quarter would ever be given.
The speed of re-conquest surprised even Roger: many lords came in to swear allegiance and hand over the contents of their coffers, or more often their plate, this so that the lands they owned could be returned to what they had been, while the man to whom they swore eternal peace and friendship was able to ship to the coast enough wealth to reimburse Kasa Ephraim for the credit he had provided.
At every place taken Roger had a Mass said to thank God for blessing his purpose. Insisting on the Latin rite might have unsettled the laity — it infuriated the Greek clergy, but their protests were ignored, and, as if to show that what they preached was inferior, no sooner had the provinces been returned to fealty than the heavens formed heavy black clouds and the rains came to turn a land of brown grass and hillside forest fires back to fertility.
Content, free of his obligations to the Jew, Roger sent back the lances Robert had provided, laden with plunder taken from those towns that had resisted. At the head of his own men, equally burdened, Roger collected Jordan and rode to his own fief of Montenero to find that even in the midst of famine they had continued to build, his subjects praising him to the skies for the food he had sent from the coast, one of his first acts on landing. The first two towers of his fortress, built from the stones of that ancient acropolis, were up and occupied, the blocks for the curtain walls and the other two towers being quarried nearby.
With full bellies and great praise for their lord and master, the Mass that was said in a church now occupied by a priest from Normandy, obviously in Latin, was the sweetest of all.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
There was still much to be done, several Byzantine strongholds to subdue, the most important being the main city of Reggio, but now Robert Guiscard was content to see Roger as his trusted lieutenant, who could be left in command while he saw to matters in his other fiefs, where rebellion, instigated and financed from Bari, was endemic. That the Apulian Greeks were unhappy to be ruled by Normans was only to be expected: they had enjoyed privileges under Byzantium denied to the other races in the Catapanate. The Italian indigenes consisted of tribes that could trace their origins back to the old Roman Empire and they were like any people: they hated whoever taxed them from wherever they originated. They had to be stirred to insurrection, a task readily undertaken by the priests of the Orthodox persuasion to which most of them belonged.
The main problem was the Lombards, who had never shown much in the way of cohesion in the past, their leaders continually manoeuvring for personal advantage. There had been exceptions, paragons who had got them to act in concert, Melus, the father of Argyrus, being one. If he was a sainted figure to the notion of Lombard independence, he had one flaw for which they would never forgive him: it was Melus who had brought the Normans into Apulia as mercenaries to aid the revolt he led.
Driven from power, they seemed more willing to combine and act in concert with the three other elements in Robert’s fiefs: the aforementioned Greeks and Italians, plus any Norman baron dissatisfied with the dispensations of his titular overlord. With the latter, the mere appearance of the Guiscard was enough to bring them to heel — they were rebellious only in his absence and easily mollified by small concessions. It was a question oft posed but one that lacked a clear answer: how was he to so engage the others in his rule as to stop these endemic uprisings, which kept dragging him away from Calabria. To take Bari was one answer, but one he was wise to shy away from, given it was near impregnable.
‘You should have married a Lombard,’ Roger said, ‘and produced sons.’
‘Alberada has given me a daughter and Bohemund. He is big enough to be a whole family. I think, one day, I may have to strain my neck to meet his eye.’
‘Which means he will always be seen as a Norman. With a Lombard mother you could have claimed to represent them and demanded they be loyal to your heir.’
They were gazing at the walls of Cariati, a Byzantine stronghold outside of which he and Robert had been positioned for months. There was no point in discussing the tactics required to take the place: that as a subject was exhausted.
‘I should have wed a woman of greater girth in the hips, brother, who would have given me the same number of sons as my father.’
Roger felt a slight reddening of the cheeks then — had he not thought on, as well as been amused by, the image of the two of them in congress? Apparently bearing Bohemund had nearly killed tiny Alberada, the boy a credit to his sire’s dimensions, not his mother’s. It was rumoured to have caused such damage as to render any chance of her bearing more children impossible, but that was a secondary consideration: it was again revolt which was troubling Robert. Trani, outside Bari the most Greek port city in his domains, had become the seat of Lombard- inspired rebellion. Robert was promising to cast down the walls and silt up the harbour.
‘Winter is coming, brother. If you were to ask my advice-’
Robert growled. ‘That is always welcome, you know that.’
That got him a jaundiced look: he did listen to Roger, but only after a long and tedious argument, though it had to be said dissension on tactics was rare — the Guiscard was a superb soldier whose only fault, apart from his being close-mouthed, was a degree of impatience, that, Roger suspected, brought on by the frustration of never having security at his back.
‘I think we should suspend our efforts to take this place and concentrate on just keeping the garrison bottled up. You know yourself it is unwise to keep men in siege lines too long. Let me rotate them in and out while you go back to Apulia, hang a few Lombards and perhaps give some comfort to your ailing wife.’
‘I doubt she’d welcome my comfort,’ Robert growled.
Unbeknown to Roger, that casual remark of his, a joke about Robert needing a Lombard wife, was to have long-term consequences. Unbeknown to either brother, matters were moving elsewhere that would have a profound effect on the future.
Cardinal Ascletin, always the self-centred fool, was doubly stupid not to realise that anything he got up to in Bamberg would quickly be known in Rome: a longtime opponent of imperial interference in papal elections, Ascletin did a complete volte-face when he actually met the child-emperor Henry. On the journey north he had reviewed his prospects of becoming pope. His family had invested huge amounts of Pierleoni money in getting him to his present eminence; had he not had a bishopric before he was aged twenty and his cardinal’s red hat soon after?
The whole scheme had been designed to raise the family profile so that they stood in equal importance to the
