Robert Guiscard

Richard, with three hundred horsemen, marched toward Rome and on the way reduced all the strongholds of the refractory nobles, Tusculum, Mentana, Palestrina, and finally Galeria, as soon as Benedict was given up.

At the same time Desiderius, Abbot of Monte Cassino, who was made a cardinal and apostolic vicar in Campania, Apulia, and Calabria, strengthened the alliance of the papacy with the Normans by establishing friendly relations with Robert Guiscard.

Whilst Hildebrand had been busy in the south of Italy, securing the bravest warriors of the age for the defence of the papacy, Peter Damiani had been vigorously establishing papal authority in Lombardy.

A fierce contest had long been raging in Milan between the clergy, led by the archbishop and a body of zealous, not to say fanatical reformers who denounced clerical marriage as if it were a deadly sin.

But if the papacy was backed by the moral force of public opinion in France, Aquitaine, Burgundy, Flanders, and northern Italy, it was to the Normans in the south of the peninsula that it looked for the material strength which only valor and skill in arms could supply.

In the summer of 1059, the pope, accompanied by Hildebrand, went to Monte Cassino, thence to Melfi in Apulia, where a great synod was held at which the decrees were proclaimed forbidding clerical marriage, especially common in that region, owing partly to Greek influence.

More important was the formal removal of the ban which Leo IX had imposed upon the Normans, and a confirmation of the alliance between pope and the Norman chiefs Robert Guiscard and Richard of Capua.

Both took the oath of fealty to the pope as suzerain, who now invested Robert with the dukedom of Apulia, Calabria, and Sicily, although the first two regions were not thoroughly conquered, and in Sicily he did not possess a foot of land.

He had not struck the right chord, and Hildebrand failed to see the West gird itself for the great conflict with the enemies of the faith.

For a time he may have supposed that the great fire was already kindled, when with a fleet of one hundred and fifty ships and an army of thirty thousand men Robert Guiscard set sail from Brundusium in 1081.

But the conqueror who had done so much in Italy was to do but little to the east of the Adriatic.

While his army put forth its whole strength before the walls of Dyrrachium, his fleet under the command of his son Bohemond was miserably defeated, and nothing but the wretched jealousy felt by the emperor Alexios for his general Palaeologus saved the army of Guiscard from ruin and turned the threatened disaster into victory.

When being compelled to return to Italy he left Bohemond to carry on his enterprise in 1082, the latter overran Epirus and had well-nigh succeeded in reducing the Thessalian Larissa when he too was compelled to hasten to Italy for reinforcements both in men and money in 1083.

In his absence his deputy Brienne, the constable of Apulia, was constrained to abandon the siege of Castoria in 1085 and to bind himself not to invade again the territories of the Byzantine emperor.

Not many months later Robert Guiscard gathered another armament for the conquest of the east.

He raised the siege of Corfu and had reached Cephalonia when his career was cut short by death and his scheme for the time seemed utterly brought to naught.

Now, in the next episode, uh, we are getting our old friend Peter Frankopan, who always keeps Anita and I in our place and corrects our many errors as he sees fit.

Uh, and, uh, Peter, um, is gonna be telling us about stuff that I think, again, is, is much less well-known than Hastings and, uh, the story of William the Conqueror, which is the story of the Normans first in South Italy, uh, Robert Guiscard, uh, conquering Puglia.

Then the extraordinary story of the Normans conquering the, uh, the Arab Sicilian kingdom, the Fatimid kingdom in Sicily, and, and, uh, the, the story of Roger II, the baptized sultan, and his extraordinary Cappella Palatina with its very Muslim-looking roof and its Byzantine mosaics.

And finally, the furthest shore of all, we're following Bohemond, um, who, uh, has always been rather a hero of mine, but I know Peter Frankopan doesn't like at all, this, uh, uh, this rather swaggery, uh, uh, Norman, um, uh, conqueror and, uh, I think Frankopan would probably call him a pirate.

Anna Komnene, the daughter of Alexios, John Kinnamos, a bureaucrat and confidant of Manuel I, Niketas Choniates, a judge and civil servant, Michael Psellos, a savant and counselor, and finally George Akropolites, a chancellor and commander.

The first major challenge that Alexios Komnenos faced was the Norman invasion of Robert Guiscard in 1081 which had three major implications.

And this is the Beaumond who is going to betray Alexios.

So thi- this Norman, uh, king right here who rules the southern part of Italy, not only is he going to invade Byzantium, but he's going to be one of the Crusaders.

The most dangerous and capable of the leaders, at least in the judgment of the Byzantines, was Bohemond of Taranto.

He was a Norman from southern Italy, the son of Robert Guiscard, a famous adventurer who had carved out a kingdom in Sicily and southern Italy and had spent years trying to conquer Byzantine territory.

Bohemond himself had fought the Emperor Alexios before, on the losing side, and the two men knew and distrusted each other thoroughly.

He was huge, charismatic, brilliant, and utterly self-interested, a man who saw in the Crusade, above all, an opportunity to win himself a principality in the East.

William of the Iron Arm and Drogo seem to have arrived in the south about 1036, and soon signalized themselves in the first invasion of Sicily and in the conquest of northern Apulia, where William was chosen leader or count by the other Normans, and at his death in 1046 succeeded by Drogo, who was soon afterwards invested with the county by the emperor Henry III.

It was apparently in this year that Robert Guiscard first came to Italy.

Refused assistance by his brothers, he hired himself out to various barons until he was left by Drogo in charge of a small garrison in the mountains of Calabria.

Here he lived like a brigand, carrying off the cattle and sheep of the inhabitants and holding the people themselves for ransom.

Indeed, they seem to have felt a certain embarrassment in the situation, and after humbling themselves before the pope, they treated him with respect and deference, which did not prevent their keeping him for some months in honorable detention at Benevento.

Plainly, the Normans were not to be subdued by force of arms, and it soon became evident to the reforming party that they would be useful allies against the Roman nobles and the unreformed clergy, as well as against the dangerous authority of the German emperor.

Accordingly, in 1059, the year in which the College of Cardinals received its first definite constitution as the electors of the pope, Nicholas II held a council at the Norman hill fortress of Melfi, attended by the higher clergy of the south, and also by the chief Norman princes, Richard of Aversa and Robert Guiscard.

In return for the pope's investiture of their lands, these princes took an oath of allegiance and fealty to the Holy See, and agreed to pay an annual rent to the pope for their dominions.

But the Normans, with their superior fighting skills and their ambition, quickly realized that they were fighting for other people's land when they could be taking it for themselves.

One of the most famous of these early Normans was Robert Guiscard, a man of immense physical stature and even greater ambition.

His name, Guiscard, meant the wily one, and it was a name he earned.

He was a master of political intrigue and a brilliant military strategist.

The Pope had a powerful new military force to protect him from his enemies, and the Normans had the papal blessing for their new kingdom.

It was a beautiful example of two different kinds of power, the spiritual and the temporal, coming together for mutual benefit.

Robert Guiscard and his brother, Roger I, went on to conquer Sicily from the Saracens, a campaign that lasted for over 30 years and was a testament to their incredible tenacity.

The Muslims had held Sicily for over two centuries, and it was a land of immense wealth and culture.

At, at what point does that... 'Cause I, I'm particularly curious.

What I was thinking about is in the year, I wanna say 1083, something like that, we've got the Normans under Robert Guiscard doing their thing in Italy, setting up their own mini state in Italy, and Guiscard, being a Viking at heart, is like, "Well, I wanna raid somebody else." So he attacks Byzantium.

He crosses the Adriatic and attacks around Dyrrachium, so the, the Balkans.

And what happens is Emperor Alexios is there to defend Byzantium, and with him he has his Varangian guards.