CHAPTER TWELVE
The city, the most populous in Italy south of Rome, had stout walls and was nearly as hard to crack as Bari; it was not a siege to undertake without serious purpose and the notion of it lasting for more than one year had to be accepted. Fortunately the land around the city was some of the most fertile in Italy, easily able to support the force the Guiscard mustered: Normans, Lombards and Greeks, as well as Saracens sent from Sicily. He had the soldiers, the skill, as well as the will to triumph, but his most important advantage lay in the nature of the man he was determined to depose.
Gisulf had been much hated for years by a populace whom he treated as a source to feed his vanity and fill his coffers with gold. He, of course, saw this very differently, perceiving them as a multitude of men and women who loved and were devoted to his person, willing to die for him at any time he required them to spill their blood or surrender up their possessions. If he was a man with a tenuous grip on his personal reality, he was not so stupid as to be unaware of the way others lusted after his stronghold, especially his brother-in-law; he had, after all, pursued an anti-Norman policy ever since coming to power, as much with Capua and Apulia, in what was a gift for making enemies.
Suspecting an attack could not be deflected he had demanded that his citizens, on pain of being thrown out of the city, lay in and keep topped up two years’ supplies of food, reasoning, not without sense, that such a long campaign posed a threat of disease to the besiegers, which would go a long way to saving his city. This would have remained good sense if Gisulf had not, as soon as the Apulian forces appeared outside the walls and a Norman fleet occupied the great bay, sequestered one-third of those stores for his own personal granaries. Not satisfied with such theft, as summer turned to autumn he sent his soldiers round the city to seize the rest, or at least that portion those citizens had not so successfully hidden. Few complained at such larceny, for retribution was vicious; anyone who questioned Gisulf’s actions was likely to find himself or herself blinded or to suffer castration if the mood on that day sent his malice in that direction.
Despite such impositions the population fought hard for Salerno, and it was before the walls of that city that Robert saw his bastard son in real action for the first time, leading his knights against the walls in an opening assault, which came close to breaching what were formidable defences by the sheer brio of the attack. Getting the siege tower into place was in itself a major task; built just out of arrow range by the skilled carpenters who travelled with the Apulian army, it was constructed from the massive wheels up with local timber — they and the axles were brought from afar, built in a workshop where the solid timber rounds could be iron-hooped and the connections greased to run smoothly. The outer body was lined with reed matting and on the morning of the assault soaked with water. From the base, internal ladders led up to the assault platform, which matched the height of Salerno’s curtain walls at the point chosen for the attack.
The tower was pushed into place by those knights tasked to back up the initial assault, this made by a body of men already in place on the upper platform, Bohemund among them. In siege warfare this was the point of maximum exposure to risk but also the place of most valour. They had a high ramp to protect them as they approached, long enough to match the distance created by a surrounding ditch. This was riddled with long, needle-sharp spikes, which would drop onto the heads of any defenders too slow to pull back, and once that was down Bohemund and his men were required to rush across it and engage.
Above them another floor was occupied by bowmen, their task to drive the defence back from the parapet long enough to allow the chain-mailed knights to get onto the walls and stay there. They were obviously outnumbered, the only advantage being that the constricted space meant not all the defenders could mass against them, and if they could hold long enough, those knights who had pushed the tower from its start point to its place against the walls could ascend to reinforce them. Naturally the countermeasures were just as set: bowmen firing at an acute angle to skewer the Guiscard’s bowmen, knights with extended lances ready to spear their opponents, fire pots ready to throw, as well as tar-tipped arrows to set fire to the exterior screen of wetted reeds.
Bohemund led from the very front, employing in close-quarter fighting an axe instead of his broadsword. Even in the confusion of a melee at the top of the tower, those observing from a nearby hill, his father amongst them, could see him standing head and shoulders above his confreres, the weapon swinging, silver at first, a gleam that caught the sun, soon dulled by enemy blood. Given surprise was impossible, Bohemund and his men were up against the very best that Gisulf’s captains could pit against them and no one expected such an early assault to produce a conclusion; it would take many of these to wear down numbers and the will of the defence. Behind the siege tower, manning long ships’ cables, stood lines of milities whose task was, on their general’s command, to pull the tower back once it was clear the assault had been contained.
Bohemund was now even more visible, balanced on the top of the wall; somehow he had acquired a lance, the axe having been thrown — probably a weapon he had dragged from the dying hand of an enemy knight — and he was using it like a mad fisherman, jabbing with furious strokes at a quite remarkable speed, half his strength, those watching surmised, required to remove it from the bodies and entangled mail of those he struck. He was still there when his father gave the signal to pull the tower back, yet he did not move as others alongside him did to get to safety, which led to an anxious moment. Only the length of his stride saved him, for on his own he would have succumbed regardless of his fighting skill. Where other warriors would have had to jump, Bohemund seemed to step over the now open gap, his final command a shout that carried, telling his confreres to pull the ramp back up to give them cover.
Never able to openly express his pride that a product of his loins should behave with such valour, Robert de Hauteville’s gratification was evident in a palpable change of attitude; on his return to report, Bohemund was embraced then kissed on both cheeks, while also being subjected to much praise by a general keen to show him off to his assembled forces. As the siege progressed he was more and more brought fully into his father’s council, which happened despite the strong displeasure of Robert’s wife, given it diminished the standing of her own son, Borsa, who was kept from combat for fear of loss.
As reward for his valour, and in front of the host assembled, Robert gave his bastard son the title of Lord of Taranto. No subsequent assault was launched without Bohemund’s concurrence and it was he, not Borsa, who was despatched to Amalfi to bring from there the ships that would, by backing up the Guiscard’s fleet, finally block Salernian egress to the sea, cutting off their inward supply as well as any chance of escape. In another assault Bohemund stood shoulder to shoulder with his father as together they fought in a narrow breach the ballista had made in the walls, with Reynard of Eu on his other side. That they failed to break through did nothing to diminish any of them as warriors; even their fellow Normans saw this trio as supreme.
In the end it was Gisulf’s insistence that his belly should be full, while others went without, that did more than valour to ensure his downfall. Winter brought hunger and that lowered morale for citizen and soldier alike; the population was reduced to eating their horses, dogs and cats. Finally they were reduced to rats, which was the precursor of full-blown famine, and only then did their prince open his bulging storehouses. Yet he did not do so to supply his subjects; he sought to sell back to them that which he had stolen at prices few could afford. With the choice of dying from hunger or Gisulf’s greedy malevolence, a large number of the citizenry, seeing the Normans advance once more, opened the gates to the enemy and then surged out to pay homage to the man who would become their new ruler.