As well as learning how to use weapons as a growing boy, Bohemund, like all his kind, had been schooled in tactics, and the one paramount fact of fighting mainly on horseback was that it generally allowed the Normans to manoeuvre with more flexibility than their opponents and thus allowed them to choose the field of battle as well as giving them the ability to engage or decline contact at will. Quite naturally they wanted a slope down which to attack, preferably with at least one flank closed off by topography, a river or a steep hillside, a site on which their superior discipline counted. It was highly likely that such advantages would not be available to them.
‘Then Capua must be persuaded, Father,’ he had insisted, ‘and I have a bond with Jordan.’
The reply had been cold. ‘Do not be too ready to believe him, Bohemund.’
‘I trust him and I am prepared to try to persuade him to work on his own, sire.’
That had produced an awkward pause; if they had never openly discussed the reasons Bohemund had for saying he trusted Jordan, it was no mystery — a shrewd mind would have little difficulty in seeing the outline if not the detail. Yet it seemed as if that knowledge had not acted to cause a breach; it was as if Robert had accepted it as a fact he could do nothing to alter and the subject of his successor was not one he was prepared to ever discuss. Perhaps it was because of the way he had come to the title himself, more, Bohemund suspected, because to do so tempted a fatal providence; he had a superstition that to talk of death might bring on that very fate.
‘Father and son, Capua will always pursue a policy they think benefits them, just as I will always act in my own interest.’
When his father continued, his voice had an air of detachment, as though the outcome he was speculating upon had no bearing on him or his future.
‘If Richard holds his peace with Gregory, what happens in Italy when this great host the Pope has gathered, having done that for which it was assembled, departs these shores on his mad Eastern crusade? Who then will be left to protect Apulia, and for that matter Rome itself? From being the inferior Norman overlord in the country, he leapfrogs to become the strongest, and unless our deluded pontiff can assemble another army to subdue Capua he will find himself at their complete mercy.’
‘Is that Richard’s thinking?’
‘No, Bohemund, it is mine, but do not suppose that a nephew of Rainulf Drengot is any less calculating than a de Hauteville. My brother William learnt how to think and act from Richard’s uncle and he also learnt never to repose trust in them. Remember, when William set out for Melfi he did so as a vassal of Drengot, and they would no more forget that the bond had been broken than would we. Deep in their hearts they see us still as their vassals.’
‘Then why allow me to seek their help?’
Robert smiled and his reply was as enigmatic as the look. ‘You should see more of your cousins, don’t you think?’
He’s tempting me again, Bohemund thought.
Following on from a wasted journey to Capua, it was even more depressing to join with and accompany his father to Benevento. Bohemund became part of a two hundred-strong escort of his most accomplished lances, a number that underlined his father’s concerns; Robert still did not repose any faith in the Pope but this time he came as a supplicant, not an equal, which meant he would be obliged to enter the city to meet him at his palace and when he did so he wanted enough men with him to fight his way out again if he had to. A whole raft of communications in which he humbly begged to be told how he had offended his suzerain had preceded his visit, adding a wish to be informed of what redress he could make for slights he had never intended, none of which had softened the tone of Gregory’s replies.
The Guiscard knew he was going to have to be subservient in the presence of a pontiff who would take much pleasure in his grovelling humiliation. To the north of the city was assembled his massive host, seemingly made up of half the knights in Christendom. Calculation had persuaded Robert to leave his own forces in Apulia, for no good would come of being thought to be playing a double game; it was time to extract from this meeting what he could and that might amount to no more than salvage — at the very least he knew he would lose the Province of Benevento.
In his palace Pope Gregory was ebullient and hardly able to contain his excitement; here, in the very same reception chamber in which Pope Leo had been made to eat dirt, he would make amends for the defeat of Civitate and extract from the Duke of Apulia a price so high he might be prepared to spill blood rather than meet it. Benevento would be his again and he had his eyes on depriving him the cities of the Adriatic coast, places he and his families had captured at such a high price. If he refused he would be crushed, but at the very least the Guiscard, whom, he was told, scoffed at the notion of a crusade to aid Constantinople, would be obliged to take ship under papal command and participate in a fight for the aims of Rome instead of his own.
Desiderius, in his last meeting, had sought to remind Gregory that for the trouble he had caused Rome, Robert de Hauteville had been a better son of the Church than for which he was being given credit. In every conquest he had made, the Guiscard had advanced the spread of the Roman rite, importing priests and monks, discouraging if not actually displacing the Basilian monks and Greek priesthood in their favour, endowing places of worship and contemplation, enforcing celibacy and even allowing his own Archbishop of Bari to be defrocked for refusing to set aside his wife.
‘You cannot buy your way into paradise,’ had been Gregory’s magisterial response.
From the top of his palace the Pope could see over the walls of Benevento to the northern plain, and there the white and multicoloured tents looked as numerous as flakes of snow upon the ground mixed with flower petals of every hue. To contemplate the anvil on which he would forge a new dispensation in the south of Italy acted like a balm to his soul, and in his mind’s eye he saw the swords and lance points being burnished, the foot soldiers being taught to employ the very basic manoeuvres required by milities, this while the mounted knights dashed to and fro to sharpen up their skills for the coming battle. That his imaginings turned to a field of broken and bloody Norman bodies did not trouble his soul; his God was a merciless one and those who did not obey his Vicar must pay the price.
In the command tent the leader of Pope Gregory’s host, Godfrey, the Hunchback of Lorraine, was trying to broker an understanding — not easy with the amount of shouted insults being exchanged. On one side was Gisulf of Salerno, deeply unpopular with everyone, Godfrey included, for his insistence that such a host should be under the command of the best man to lead it, namely himself. But it was not his misplaced military arrogance that had brought about the present rift, more the actions of his ships over many years in engaging in downright theft of the possessions of the ports with whom his city of Salerno shared the Tyrrhenian Sea.
The most vocal in demanding redress were the Pisan soldiers of Beatrice of Tuscany, whose leaders were not only well trained and numerous, but made up a substantial part of the host. Their leaders, who were also ship owners, wanted not only redress for the losses they had suffered but a binding guarantee of future good behaviour; in short, that their vessels could sail between ports in safety and profit. Lacking that, they would not go into battle with such a cluster of thieves like Prince Gisulf and his contingent of slack foot soldiers, this while Godfrey and other leaders sought to get the matter put aside until the Guiscard had been dealt with. With agreement impossible, there was no choice but to call in Pope Gregory to mediate.