It was foolish to try to surrender, though many made the attempt. A small host facing a massively larger one cannot take prisoners, and in any case these were worthless creatures, not rich men who would command a ransom. Wise heads lay down and pretended to be dead, the imprudent pleaded for mercy and died with their plea on their lips, many of them ridden down and trampled by hooves as well as cut with swords.
Soon the field was clear of fighters, the whole Byzantine host broken and in flight, even those contingents that had not faced battle. William de Hauteville, his arms soaked with victim blood, called a halt to the pursuit when the point of any further havoc had passed. Now he was in among braying donkeys and mules, animals abandoned by the sutlers who had brought them here, they running alongside what women had trailed the host from Barletta.
It was Mauger who found the pack animals that mattered: the beasts which had on their flanks the heavy brass-bound coffers of the catapan, full of the gold with which he had offered to bribe them.
‘Find out where we are, someone,’ William cried. ‘This victory must have a name.’
There were a couple of settlements called Moschella close enough by to provide that.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Arduin was cock-a-hoop when he heard of William’s triumph, though that was tempered by his not having been present to lead the fight in person. Ensconced once more in the great hall of the castle at Melfi, his crows of triumph echoed off the walls.
‘Never fear,’ said William, seeking to bring him back to reality — he was behaving as if the end result of his insurrection was a foregone conclusion: that his enemies would be driven out of Apulia by what had just occurred. ‘You will get your opportunity. Byzantium won’t give up after one reverse, and I will wager it will be harder to beat them next time. The catapan has learnt about the risks of fighting we Normans.’
Those dark Lombard eyes were alight as he replied. ‘They will face a proper army, William, not just you.’
There was some truth in that, for Arduin had been busy: Melfi was already surrounded by encampments full of Lombard volunteers, and more were arriving each day, from Benevento and even parts of Campania, where Prince Guaimar had placed no restrictions on his subjects travelling individually to enlist — not that he would have been attended to if he had. If William had ever doubted the strength of that Lombard dream he had good evidence of it now: they had not seen Byzantium soundly beaten in Southern Italy in decades.
Norman lances came in too, some from Normandy in ones and twos; others were mercenaries who had been in Italy for years, come to swell the ranks of his cavalry, not yet in a flood, but enough to encourage William to believe that more would follow. Non-fighting supporters had come too: farriers to shoe horses and blacksmiths to forge weapons and shape helmets, while men with the right eye for a pikestaff combed the surrounding forests for suitable timber.
There were leather workers and cloth weavers, saddlers and harness makers, cobblers to produce footwear, vivandiers and bakers, along with their women, who would cook and sustain their fighting menfolk on the march. A steady stream of supplies was being brought in by mule and on human backs and, most vital of all, Arduin had found a troop of crossbowmen, not as many as would be needed, but enough to train up more when weapons became available.
A message of congratulations had also come from Salerno, but — and this William held to be strange — it was a verbal one delivered by a messenger employed by Kasa Ephraim. It was also noticeable that whatever Lombard volunteers had come in from Campania few of them, so far, were from that city and its immediate surroundings, where Prince Guaimar’s inclination to stand aside would be better known and, besides that, they would have been recently engaged in the taking of Amalfi…
The Jew proved as shrewd as ever: as soon as news of Masseria reached Salerno, he reasoned there might be business to transact with the victorious Normans, who needed someone to keep safe their funds, and also to facilitate any transfer of their plunder home to their relatives in Normandy. The message that was returned to him was that it would profit him to journey personally to Melfi where there was already Byzantine gold, and likely to be more to follow.
Sending money home was an arrangement he had provided for years to the likes of Rainulf Drengot. William and Drogo had used his services before. How he did it over such distances, at the constant threat of banditry, was a mystery, and one he was determined to keep to himself, but the funds to bring south their brothers, as well as the coin needed to finance the construction of their father’s stone donjon, still waiting to be built, had been safely commuted back home by Ephraim, who made substantial fees from the transactions.
Those brothers were not present now. Apart from a garrison to man the walls of Melfi the Normans were out doing that at which they were best: raiding Byzantine territory south of Barletta, taking towns and tribute if they would submit, ravaging the countryside around those places that held out — few of those, since the catapan was too busy training his newly raised levies to interfere. With word spread throughout the province, not only of the recent victory, but the fact that the Normans were raiding at will, Lombards were trickling in from the port cities as well, which provided William and Arduin with good intelligence.
It was from that source they heard of the methods of Byzantine conscription — many had fled from the threat of that — an imposition made more harsh by necessity. No one able-bodied was spared: the whole of Apulia down to Otranto, as well as Eastern Calabria, was being scoured for men. Even if they were unwilling to serve they were being dragged in to make up a host big enough to prevail, and the training was as callous as the recruitment. Even forced to serve, they would be better drilled the next time Michael Doukeianos faced the Normans and, to stiffen them, he also had trained reinforcements, a body of Varangians recently arrived from Constantinople.
That news was enough to give William pause: he had fought alongside the Varangians in Sicily and he knew how formidable they were. They were of the same stock as the Normans, men from the Viking heartlands who had gone east into the great wilderness rather than south to the land of the Franks and beyond, using the rivers and lakes instead of the sea to penetrate deep, finally setting up a rich and fruitful kingdom on a great river that flowed all the way to the Euxine Sea and, across that great body of water, to Constantinople.
The men sent to Apulia would be uniformly huge, of a size to match any de Hauteville, and flaxen of hair and moustache. The other quality they had was steadiness in battle: they stood their ground regardless of odds and would rather die than retreat. It was they who had killed off the flame of the last Lombard revolt, and the last thing William de Hauteville wanted to do was to face such men with inexperienced levies, however fired up they were by their visions. Time to dampen his general’s enthusiasm.
‘The men you have recruited will be a proper army when they are skilled at war, Arduin. I think our encounter with the catapan proves that men who are not tend to be a liability, and they cannot stand against Varangian axes. In truth, right now, only we Normans have any hope of countering them.’
The frown that produced came and went in a flash: now that he had a steady stream of volunteers, now that he felt like a proper general in command of a proper army, Arduin did not like to be reminded of how much he depended on Norman support. William saw it come and go and knew the reason; he suspected if he thought he could beat Byzantium without them Arduin would seek to send them back to Aversa, but he could not, so it did not signify.