Desiderius was, as ever, the mediator and fount of knowledge when it came to dealing with Capua and Apulia. He was sent for and he advised Gregory of the obvious: that he must, in such a precarious situation, seek some kind of accommodation with the Norman rulers. That was easier with Prince Richard than the Guiscard, given the latter was an excommunicate and no pontiff could even dream of holding talks with anyone not in a state of grace, while papal dignity meant it could not be lifted without good reason. The first task as Desiderius saw it was to pacify at least one branch of the threat, not least in order to protect his own monastery of Monte Cassino, which overlooked the road from Capua to Rome and was thus likely to become embroiled in any dispute with Richard regardless of any wish to stand aside.
Envoys were despatched to offer a treaty of peace to the Prince of Capua in order to keep him quiet, with the granting of various benefits in terms of disputed revenues as an inducement. To initiate that was unsettling enough but Christ’s Vicar on Earth nearly choked when it came to Robert de Hauteville. If compromise had been anathema when he had been Hildebrand, then as Pope Gregory it was even more unpalatable. Yet he had, on the pragmatic advice of Desiderius, to write to Roger, Count of Sicily, who was still on the mainland, hinting his elder brother could find his way back to the bosom of the Holy Church if he showed a degree of repentance. An offer that would have been declined out of hand by Robert caused surprise by being accepted; there was, after all, the future capture of Salerno to take into account and it would help if the Guiscard could persuade Gregory to disown the unreliable and foolish Gisulf.
After months of comings and goings, which must have taxed the body of a man well past his prime, and just enough give and take to allow the excommunication to be lifted, Desiderius got both the Guiscard and Gregory to Benevento, where the Pope had a palace, for if the Duke of Apulia held the lands of the principality, the city itself was still papal territory.
There this outburst of harmony stopped; Robert would not enter the city for fear of assassination, Gregory would not leave his palace for the dread of a further loss of papal dignity. Thus an encounter designed to make peace and foster concord did exactly the opposite and both went their separate ways without meeting. Gregory was already fuming when news came that the Duke Sergius of Amalfi had passed away, leaving only an infant son to inherit a city and trading port that had been in conflict with its nearest neighbour Salerno for decades, a conflict deepened by the fact that the Amalfians had participated in the murder of Prince Gisulf’s father.
So, to protect themselves against the Prince of Salerno’s oft-stated desire for retribution — he would hang half the citizens if he took the city — Amalfi asked the Duke of Apulia to accept the title. A letter from Gregory forbidding the Amalfians to allow Robert to accept was ignored and he was again excommunicated. But that was insufficient for the Pope, who decided he had to finish off the Guiscard once and for all. Hildebrand’s memory of Apulian humiliations was long; he had served Pope Leo, only to see him humiliated by the de Hautevilles at Civitate — it was time to rectify that stain on the office he now held.
Since he was relatively secure in the north, and having that just-signed treaty with Richard of Capua that would, he hoped, keep him out of any conflict, Gregory sent out his envoys to those powers that he could count upon to aid his cause: Beatrice of Tuscany, her daughter and her hunchback husband who held Lorraine, to the port cities of the Tyrrhenian Sea, Salerno, Pisa, to Amadeus of Savoy, the Count of Burgundy and Raymond of Toulouse, all Christian knights in good standing with Rome.
Gregory was cunning in his appeal; the object of such a host, he insisted, was not to just spill Christian blood; indeed he desired that the gathering would bring the Guiscard to heel without a drop being shed. The prize was singular: once the Normans were subdued — Capua would be much more amenable if Apulia was humbled — the assembled forces would find themselves free to use the ports of the Adriatic coast. Given that access, they should not disband but proceed by ship to Constantinople to aid their Christian brethren suffering under the constant attacks from the followers of their so-called Prophet.
‘Imagine it, Desiderius,’ Gregory enthused, his eyes alight as he looked at a map of Asia Minor, his finger tracing the route from the Bosphorus to Palestine, ‘a huge body of knights under a papal banner, riding in crusade to the rescue of the Eastern Empire, driving back the Turks and every other infidel. Can you not see a great Christian army entering the city of Jerusalem to celestial trumpets and bringing back under the control of our faith the very place where Jesus rose from the dead? Surely in doing that we could claim to be serving the will of God. And what ruler or patriarch, with our soldiers outside his palace, will deny the rights of the Bishop of Rome to universal hegemony?’
‘Let us see to the Guiscard first,’ the abbot replied; even if he too hankered after a great Eastern crusade he had been too long troubled by the Normans, had seen them slip too many a noose, to see what was coming as straightforward.
‘My father declines to receive you, Bohemund,’ Jordan insisted, ‘for he can guess the errand on which you have come and he cannot agree to that which you are bound to seek.’
‘It is simple: if we fall, so in time will Capua.’
‘While the route to Apulia from Rome is through our principality,’ Jordan replied. ‘If we contest the passage of Gregory’s great host, the lands we possess will be destroyed much sooner by joining your father than standing aside and giving them free passage.’
Was Jordan uncomfortable? Bohemund could not tell; he hoped so, believing as he did that he had some regard for both him and his father. Yet he could not help but reprise the conversation he had shared with his sire at Melfi prior to allowing him to embark on this mission, for Robert knew very well the contents of the letters sent out by Pope Gregory, as well as the fact that his only potential ally was treaty-bound to his enemy. Capua had made no moves to show they might break that attachment and combine to meet the threat to Duke Robert. And he needed aid, for it would be potentially deadly to face on his own, as well as a serious risk even if he could repeat the alliance and the good fortune that was won at Civitate.
The army he might face was the largest to come south of Rome since a previous Emperor Henry had descended with all his imperial might to put in his place a previous Prince of Capua, a fellow named Pandulf who was unusually avaricious even for a Lombard. Pandulf had not only appropriated the lands of Monte Cassino and rendered beggars the monks who lived there, but had thrown its venerated abbot, a predecessor of Desiderius, into his dungeons. Count Roger, who had not long departed, had been summoned to return with every lance he could muster, for if Robert went down, Sicily would cease to be a secure Norman fief.
Increasingly allowed into his father’s confidence, much to the disgust of Sichelgaita, Bohemund had no difficulty in observing that the Guiscard was worried; his assessment of the quality and quantity of the forces Gregory had managed to combine was alarming. Being outnumbered was always a concern, but a deeper concern came from facing a vastly superior number of warriors of a fighting capacity little short of those he could muster. Whatever the Normans put in the field as milities — and they would be inferior in numbers — it was his mounted knights on which he relied to win his battles, and if the reports he had received were true, then it was in that arm most danger threatened.