Gregory needed the Normans and he required them to be united and on his side, more the powerful Guiscard than the Prince of Capua who had so singularly failed him. Ever an intensely proud man — he had stood on his dignity at Benevento seven years previously by refusing to meet with Duke Robert — he had to accept that there was now no time for such conceits. Yet he was not prepared to grovel and the melting of enmity took much time. Messages were sent but in a subtle way, as in an invitation for any magnate with grievances to bring them to his attention. As usual Abbot Desiderius was brought into the equation to smooth ruffled feathers until finally a meeting was arranged.
For the first time since Gregory’s election, Robert de Hauteville walked into the same room as his papal suzerain, there to kneel and do homage as he had to Gregory’s predecessors for his ducal titles of Apulia, Calabria and Sicily. No mention was made of Amalfi or Salerno; apple carts were required to remain stable not overturned, but in remaining silent upon them it implied a tacit agreement regarding their legitimacy. As he held Robert’s hands in his, seeing how puny were his in comparison, and pronounced the required prayers over his bowed head, Gregory could be forgiven for enquiring if God was truly on his side.
If the places Robert had taken in defiance of Gregory were ignored there were still matters to discuss. Letters had to be composed and sent to Bamberg to let Henry know, without in any way sounding like an outright threat, that the Guiscard was concerned about the election of a pope to replace Gregory. Clement was a man in whom he could repose no faith — as good a way as any of telling the Emperor-elect that Rome was under Norman protection and that any attack on the city would be met with as much if not more force as any he could bring to bear.
Gregory had been satisfied on that concern but he still had all his usual concerns in the East. With the Holy Sepulchre in the hands of people he saw as heretics, problems were bound to surface. There were an increasing number of grim stories of Jerusalem pilgrims being badly ill-treated, denied access to the holy places, assaulted and robbed and even in extreme cases facing the enforced demand to convert to Islam. Had not Robert and his brother Roger dealt with that problem in Sicily by taking back the churches made into mosques? For all their efforts, the Pope was irritated that the infidels were still allowed to freely worship throughout the island, adding that he felt Count Roger could also do more to bring those of the Orthodox persuasion into the bosom of the Roman Church.
Robert brushed aside these concerns but got a blessing for what he proposed next, which would create difficulties for the still-excommunicated Emperor Botaneiates, who was struggling to hold his place in the face of constant threats and had also failed to shore up the Byzantine Empire. In the main it was a satisfied Duke of Apulia who left his suzerain; he had, after all, everything for which he had come. Gregory, still working hard on his notion of religious reconciliation between Rome and Constantinople, had kept up the pressure without once ever offering any concessions and what was proposed to him, nothing less than an invasion of Illyria, appeared a good way to concentrate minds in Constantinople.
It was irritating that Borsa, whom Robert had been obliged to bring along as his heir, seemed to incline to the papal point of view regarding both what was happening in Jerusalem, as well as the papal opinion on Sicily. He seemed willing to believe what he was told and less ready to give credence to his father’s assertion that, when it came to the Holy Land, although pilgrims to the city faced difficulties — and how could they not? — much of what had been propounded was, as far as he knew, exaggeration. That it was so suited Gregory and his ilk; the spreading of this embroidery was used to drive home his desire for a great Eastern crusade, in which the whole of Western Christendom was being called to participate.
‘It would be a noble thing to do, Father,’ Borsa opined, as they made ready to take the road back to Salerno. ‘To have in our possession the place where Jesus gave his life so that we could be saved.’
‘All this blather about a crusade is so much stuff. Gregory talks as if the distance to Palestine is the same as crossing the sea from Reggio to Messina. You tell me how we are to get any army to the Holy Land and maintain it there?’
‘Surely we would do that in concert with Constantinople?’
‘Right at this moment, they could not swat a fly, never mind a Moslem.’
‘With our help-’
Robert asked his next question gently, in a tone that he had to force upon himself. ‘Tell me who is going to pay for this great expedition, for the Pope will not, in which, I will point out to you, there can be no plunder to meet the bill. We cannot sack Jerusalem as if it was any other city.’
That made his son think, which is what the Guiscard intended; he knew which levers to press in that penny-pinching breast.
‘And when it comes to Sicily and letting Moslems worship in their mosques, ask Gregory how a few hundred Norman lances, which is all your uncle has, are going to rule a population in the hundreds of thousands if we force them into a form of piety they dislike?’
‘So giving succour to the pilgrims of Jerusalem is impossible?’
‘No, but it cannot be done in the way Rome proposes.’
That got an intrigued look from Borsa, who wondered what it portended; he knew his sire as well as his father knew him. He was aware, if not of the whole purpose, that one of the Guiscard’s vassals, Count Radulf, had been sent as an envoy to Constantinople, ostensibly to enquire after Borsa’s sister. That was a tale in which it was hard to believe, given his father had shown scant interest in her welfare since the overthrow of the man who had promised her his son in marriage. That he was part in ignorance did not surprise the heir to Apulia; he was used to that, as was everyone who dealt with his father.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Ever since he had received that despatch regarding the overthrow of the Emperor Michael Dukas, as well as the transfer of his daughter to a convent, the Guiscard had kept Byzantium in his sights as a crumbling edifice ripe for future exploitation. In the time since, other matters had kept him fully occupied: first his preparation against Capua, the siege of Benevento and then his need to put down the revolt Jordan had helped to engineer. He had, of course, made protestations about the fate of his daughter, but they were not heartfelt — as far as Robert was concerned her continued presence in Constantinople gave him every excuse to push a problem into a rupture at any time of his choosing.
Now, with peace restored throughout his domains, he could at last concentrate on what to him was a prize of immeasurable potential — nothing less than the overthrow of the Eastern Empire, which with him at the head would become the greatest centre of Norman power in Christendom. He had fought and triumphed over Greeks, a race he despised, all his fighting life, so there was little doubt in his mind he could achieve such a great object. That it was what he hankered after had never been in any doubt, and while many might wonder at such vaulting ambition no one even thought to ask the Duke of Apulia whether such intentions were either wise or necessary.
The wellsprings of that were many and varied; no Norman warrior worth his salt saw what they held as sufficient, which explained the trouble Robert constantly had with his vassals, and he was no exception. As a race they were by nature’s design committed to expansion and that was down to their Viking blood. Byzantium was a prize to tempt a saint, never mind a sinner, rich in a way that made even the Guiscard’s present possessions look feeble, and they used part of that endless stream of gold as a means to carry on a proxy war against him. Right now those like Abelard, who had rebelled and fled, both Lombard and Norman, were safe on the imperial soil of Illyria, just across the Adriatic, able to cock their noses at his demand that they be sent back.