problem was simple: if he knew that he had the advantage in mounted warfare, so did his opponent. He would not emerge to fight Normans, so some excuse must be manufactured to deceive him, and time was no more on his side than it was on that of Argyrus.
The Guiscard had his own problems, common to every siege: the constant need to rotate his soldiers out of the immediate vicinity of the walls to avoid the kind of sickness that would decimate his strength; the requirement to forage in a wider area to provide food for men and fodder and oats for his horses, without so weakening his force that he handed over advantage to the defenders. He also had a healthy respect for Argyrus: the fellow was a crafty enemy, the first Lombard ever entrusted by Constantinople to hold high office in the fertile south Italian provinces known as the Langobardian Theme. At one time an ally of the Normans and his fellow Lombards, as well as the titular leader of a Lombardled revolt against Byzantine rule, he had spectacularly betrayed his race and their cause for personal gain, only to be forced to immediately flee for his life.
Many cursed him for this; his present opponent, who had been a witness at the time to his treachery, saw it as sound common sense. More powerful Lombard princes had been using Argyrus as a figurehead who could be discarded once success had been achieved: the man had seen the sense of looking out for himself while the chance still existed to do so. Yet by his act he had done more than let down his fellow Lombards. The amount of distrust his treachery generated allowed William Iron Arm to take leadership of the revolt, turning it from a Lombard insurrection into a Norman bid for territorial gain, one that had been increasingly successful, as first William, then Drogo and the old misery Humphrey, all now gone to meet their Maker, had expanded Norman rule.
Elevated to the office of Catapan, Argyrus had returned to Apulia and proved a thorn ever since, launching plots and strategies to seek to hold back the Norman tide. Finding their expansion relentless he had even tried an alliance with the papacy, only to see that rebound on him at the decisive Battle of Civitate. On that field the de Hauteville brothers, massively outnumbered, had combined to soundly rout a huge papal army. If there had been genius in the fruits of that victory it had come from Robert, the youngest de Hauteville on the field.
It was he who had seen an opportunity, with the Pope now humiliated, isolated and a Norman prisoner, to turn them from Norman banditti, hated throughout the whole of Italy, into, if not loved overlords, legitimate rulers. With cunning and foresight the Guiscard had reasoned that a now defenceless pope, a man with no army who had need of one, had the authority to recognise the titles they had assumed through combat. All they had to do was bow the knee to the man they had defeated and accept him as their suzerain.
In the tangled world in which they lived, a thousand years after the crucifixion, no man could hope to hold a title not given credence by one of the triumvirate of great powers in the Christian world, two temporal, one ecclesiastical: Byzantium, a mortal enemy ripe for dismemberment, was out of the question; the Holy Roman Empire was too Frankish, too disdainful of Norman upstarts, wherever they resided, to reward them with titles unless absolutely obliged to do so. But the papacy, struggling to assert itself and beset by difficulties left over from the time of Charlemagne, had provided the key: the de Hautevilles, thanks to the Pope and his blessing, now stood as equals to any magnate in Christendom. Robert would thank Argyrus once he was captured, just before he hanged him: after all, he must be made to pay for the murders of William and Drogo.
‘Has he told you everything he knows yet?’ asked Robert, approaching the point where the latest captured messenger seeking a way into Brindisi was slowly spinning, naked, over an open fire pit.
‘All he does is pray to God in his screaming, begging his forgiveness as a miserable sinner.’
‘A true monk, then?’
‘So it seems, My Lord.’
Robert stepped forward to examine the flapping skin, scorched and blackened, that hung from the suspended body, aware of the heightened pork-like smell of his roasting. There was no screaming now, the fellow was long past that, just a low hiss of what he assumed was continued prayer.
‘Such an honest man it would be good to spare, so it is a pity he did not speak. It is rare to meet a monk who is not venal, truly a holy person.’
‘He is too far gone for life, sire.’
‘True,’ Robert replied. ‘Put him out of his misery.’
His back was turned when the fellow’s throat was cut; all he heard was the sound of the heated blood hissing in the coals beneath. He was looking at the walls of Brindisi for the thousandth time, nagged by the thought that he might be forced to raise the siege. The rate of desertions was rising as levies brought here on the promise of plunder lost any certainty of success. He was also aware of the number of eyes upon him, the glare of attention always afforded to the leader of any warlike enterprise, as men sought in his visage a message of the true state of affairs.
If Robert de Hauteville had a fault — many would maintain he had a raft of them — it was that he was not of a trusting nature. Ready to explain any tactical manoeuvre in battle, or to outline the bones of a campaign, he was very guarded in his thinking on his future plans, so open speculation as to alternatives was never discussed. Those he led were told what they needed to know and nothing more. Right now they would have been amazed to see inside his mind: their general was castigating himself, wondering if he should have let that newly expired messenger through.
Men prepared to die rather than reveal what they know had something to tell: those with nothing of value would speak at the first lick of flame, lie to save their lives, so it would appear the man just roasted had been in possession of useful information. Killing him had only been a mercy insomuch as he was already too far gone to interrogate and it was quite possible, given he had as many spies in Brindisi as Argyrus had outside the walls, that he would have found out quicker what that was by letting him proceed rather than instructing his pickets to capture anyone trying to approach the well-defended walls at points where enough destruction had been achieved to allow secret ingress.
Argyrus would want to draw off him and his Norman cavalry; Robert wanted to give the impression of departing without actually doing so, but such a ploy was a tricky thing to manage, given there was not an educated fellow alive unaware of the use of such a tactic since the siege of Troy. He could not go unless his opponent had good cause to believe he was riding to subdue a serious threat and would thus be away for a long time, enough for him to sortie out and inflict a defeat on the remainder of Robert’s army. Argyrus was too shrewd: he would not fall for a partial departure; he would have ways of ensuring the Normans were too far off to interfere in his plans.
‘Always think your enemy cleverer than you and you will rarely be outfoxed.’
In saying that to himself he was forced to acknowledge the source, his own father Tancred. He recalled how boring he had found the constant repetition of the old man’s mantras, usually delivered when he had been drinking. They had never got on and eventually Robert had come to realise that which others had seen more easily: he and Tancred were too much alike to agree on anything. But it would never do to gainsay the old warrior, for his father had seen much and fought in a great many battles. He had campaigned in Normandy, the Frankish kingdoms ruled from Tours and Paris, as well as in Spain against the Moors. He had even sailed to fight in England to put back on the throne that useless Saxon article, King Ethelred.
‘What would he least expect you to do, this enemy?’ was another of Tancred’s sayings spoken out loud, this as a strong northerly wind, common at this time of year, blew across the siege lines sending up spirals of dust and causing the Venetian galleys to jibe on their anchors.
He fears my Norman cavalry, Robert thought, but he is missing one vital fact. The solution came to him fully formed, as such ideas always do, and so swiftly it was a matter of wonder as to why it had lain dormant so long.
‘My friend,’ he said, quietly addressing a distant enemy, ‘you forget, Normans are warriors first and cavalry second.’
Before he had finished that softly uttered statement he was striding towards his tent, shouting for the people he needed, underlings who gathered quickly to hear what their general had to impart. Suspicious as ever, unsure of who was taking Byzantine gold, he felt the need to concoct a story, to say that roasted emissary had betrayed a secret, indeed to make up the kind of revolt Argyrus had been so assiduous in trying to foment, before giving orders for his Norman captains to prepare their batailles for an immediate departure, not forgetting to sanction the use of the entire stud of spare mounts.
‘There is trouble in Trani, a serious uprising, and we must move with maximum speed, so there is no time to favour our mounts. We must push them hard, not only on the way there, but back as well, lest Argyrus sees a chance to come out and fight.’
‘Trani was ever too Greek a city, second only to Bari. We should have torn down their walls when we had the
