‘I do.’
‘Yet you will not know that the new Pope Nicholas, urged on by Archdeacon Hildebrand-’
‘Archdeacon?’
‘He has been elevated to that rank.’
‘Why not make him a cardinal?’
‘Hildebrand runs the papal office, if not the Pope himself. He is more powerful than any cardinal.’
‘So?’
‘Pope Nicholas, no doubt at Hildebrand’s bidding, called a synod at the Lateran and promulgated a bull on future papal elections, which takes scant notice of the privileges of either the Roman aristocracy or of the imperial claim of approval, though the emperor is to be consulted.’
‘Does that mean anything?’ demanded Robert. ‘“Consulted”.’
‘A courtesy is what it means, a piece of verbal flummery to sow confusion and buy time.’
‘Time to…?’
‘From now on it is intended that it should be the sole right of the leading dignitaries of the Church to elect a pope.’
Robert rounded on his brother. ‘You must have known of this, so why did you not tell me?’
‘I only found out before you summoned me to hear that papal envoy.’
‘I came from Capua, where the news of this was received just before my departure. It surprises me, yet it shows how important the needs of the pontiff are, that this envoy of his has arrived here so swiftly.’
‘You can fathom what this means, Robert.’
The answer was so obvious it did not need to be spoken: with a child on the throne in Bamberg, thus lessening the chance of an army imposing his will, a chance had come to detach the papacy from imperial control. Richard of Capua had so recently, with a fraction of his lances, helped depose the papal choice of the Roman aristocracy. The decision of that synod at the Lateran could only hold if Rome could count on the same armed force and someone, probably Hildebrand, was shrewd enough to see that to solely rely on the Prince of Capua was unsound. To be truly secure they needed the Guiscard as well. No wonder his annulment had come through with such alacrity following on from the elevation of Nicholas: he was being wooed.
‘And what, Jew, is this pope prepared to offer me?’
‘More than you could possibly ask for.’
And so it proved: Pope Nicholas invested not only Richard of Capua with a legitimate title of prince, he created Robert Guiscard Duke of Apulia, Calabria and Sicily. That his right to do so was very dubious — the two mainland provinces were Byzantine and Capua was held to be an imperial fief, while Sicily was Saracen — was not allowed to interfere with the ceremony, nor with the aim, articulated by Archdeacon Hildebrand rather than the Pope himself, that it was now the duty of these newly elevated magnates to spread the faith as practised by Rome.
Kneeling, both Robert Guiscard and Richard of Capua swore to uphold the papacy against anyone who would threaten either its lands or the pontiff’s prerogatives, to acknowledge whoever was pope as their liege lord and to protect his person. More than the battle at Civitate, this changed the whole nature of power south of Rome. It also offered the Normans protection from the only authority which could raise a combined force against them of a size they could not overcome: the fear for these mercenaries had always been that alliance between Rome and Constantinople which had led to Civitate, or another with the might of the Holy Roman Empire; both threats were now dead!
An open-air Mass was said and a sermon preached, one that had only one real message from this new pope to the thousands of knights attending. ‘It is our Christian duty to uphold the power of my office. I also command you to purge Sicily of the infidel and spread the word of God.’
Kasa Ephraim, a witness to the ceremonies in Melfi, was not the only person present to ask which god, nor did he, far-sighted as he was, realise that this pope had just initiated a movement which, over the next two centuries, would dominate the world in which they lived and spill rivers of blood — a crusade to take back from Islam lands that had once been Christian.
The problem for the Guiscard was concentration: he returned to Calabria after the investiture to resume his final attempts to subdue the region by taking Reggio. A settlement of note since early antiquity and an important commercial centre of what had once been Magna Graecia, it was the key to trade with the fertile island of Sicily — the Saracens might be at religious and political odds with their neighbours across the water but that did not interfere with commerce. So important was Reggio to the exchange of goods that it, of all the cities in Calabria, had suffered least from their raiding.
Yet no sooner had the new duke invested the city than he was once more called away to face a Byzantine army that had landed on the Adriatic shore at Bari, leaving his brother in command. Over the winter, Roger accomplished something never before attempted by the Normans themselves: the building of ballista with which to attack the walls, a tactic they had hitherto relied on the Lombards to provide. But to just sit around watching carpenters and metalworkers toil was anathema, so he mounted a small raid on the Sicilian shore with fifty knights, only to find he and his lances facing the garrison of Messina, which led to a hasty re-embarkation.
Nevertheless, he saw it as valuable in the way it identified the core problem, one that had faced Byzantium in the aborted invasion in which his brothers William and Drogo had taken part: the need for a Saracen ally. Any thoughts of a return to the island had to be put to one side when Robert returned: Reggio had to be taken.
‘God forgive me,’ Robert said, crossing himself with a mailed glove, ‘but I love what we are about to do.’
Roger de Hauteville could see that his elder brother’s eyes gleamed with the prospect of a fight: had he been equine he would have been champing at his bit, snorting and pawing the ground. To their rear stood lines of dismounted Norman knights and ahead, not more than two hundred paces distant, lay the walls of Reggio, now being pounded by the stones from Roger’s mangonels. If it was an inaccurate mode of fire, it was a telling one, with those hitting the flat curtain wall gouging great chunks out of the masonry and the odd lucky boulder flying high enough to take out not only the top of the wall but the men defending it as well.
Yet it was the equipment which completed the elements of this assault that would most worry the defenders: two huge siege towers high enough to overcome the height of the defences, and a wheeled, metal-tipped battering ram, which would soon be pounding into the central gates, which the mangonels would seek to set alight with fire pots full of inflammable materials.
‘They may accept your terms at this sight.’
‘No,’ Robert replied. ‘They will fight until they can fight no more.’
‘And when it falls you will truly be Duke of Calabria. Our late brothers should be witness to this.’
Such a remark got a growl from Robert: he was not comfortable when reminded of how much he owed to those who had preceded him, while Roger was mindful that neither of them would be here if it were not for William Iron Arm. Those remarks of Geoffrey’s regarding Robert’s disinclination to abide comparison had, over time, been seen by Roger as a sound appreciation. It was the seat of any disagreement between them, for sometimes Robert saw in his younger brother a rival, not an ally, and no amount of reassurance seemed to be able to shake that concern. But such distractions were not allowed to interfere with the need to concentrate the ballista fire, for it was easy to see that in one spot the destruction was greater than anywhere else.
‘Time for fire pots,’ Robert said.
‘Not yet, we should stick to rocks and move their aim,’ Roger insisted, once he had pointed out the obvious fact that at one place the walls showed a telling crack.
‘That will take time.’
‘Better to waste time, Robert, than blood.’