The Kingdom in the Sun (7 page)

The Apulian rising was quickly suppressed. After a short siege in May
1132
the inhabitants of Bari surrendered Prince Grimoald and his family to Roger, who packed them off as prisoners to Sicily, while Tancred of Conversano bought his liberty only with a promise— which he never kept—to leave for the Holy Land. The whole campaign was over in a month; it was, however, symptomatic of a deeper discontent throughout the South and, more important still, it created a diversion which kept Roger occupied just at that crucial time when Rainulf and Robert were gathering their forces. If he had moved firmly against them the moment they returned from Rome— and their unauthorised departure from the city would have given him pretext enough—he might have saved himself many of the troubles which awaited him in the next few years. But he missed his opportunity. Sure-footed as he was in the conduct of Sicilian affairs, he had still not caught the measure of his vassals on the mainland. Not for the first time, he had underestimated them. He had wounded his brother-in-law in his pride but not in his effective strength, and had succeeded only in turning a potential opponent into a real one. The Count of Alife was now aggrieved and angry—and dangerous, since he could count on the support of the Prince of Capua, still the strongest military force in South Italy after the King.

Robert of Capua had never been particularly distinguished in the past for his moral courage; but rebellion was in the wind, and Lothair and the imperial army could not be long delayed. Besides, was he not Rainulf's liege-lord ? How could he hope to maintain his status as a feudal prince if he lost the confidence of his vassals ? With all the energy of which he was capable he threw himself into preparations for a new, nation-wide revolt. By the late spring of
1132
he and Rainulf could boast three thousand knights and perhaps ten times that number of foot-soldiers under arms. And most of the South Italian barons were behind them.

The strength of the opposition took the King by surprise. He had just put down one rising; the last thing he wanted was to find himself faced with another—this time of far more formidable proportions— just when he needed all his energies to deal with the danger from the north. It was his habit never to do battle if he could avoid it; some accommodation might still be possible. In mid-July he sent messengers to the rebels proposing talks. It was no use. The two leaders were adamant. They had been wronged, and there could be no question of negotiations until their wrongs were redressed.

Both armies were by this time gathered near Benevento, and for good reason. Benevento was papal territory. Ever since its citizens had expelled their ruling princes and put themselves under the protection of Pope Leo IX some eighty years before, they had remained loyal subjects of the Holy See, and they now constituted the principal bastion of papal power in South Italy. It was outside the walls of Benevento that Pope Honorius had invested Roger with his dukedom in
11
1
8, and it was from its pontifical palace that Anacletus, two years later, had granted him the crown, pledging him also the city's assistance in time of war. In the present situation this was a significant commitment; but could Roger count on it now?

At first it seemed as if he could. A certain Cardinal Crescentius, Rector of Benevento in Anacletus's name, together with the local Archbishop and a group of the leading citizens, came out to assure the King of their good will; and on hearing from him that he proposed in return to renounce several financial claims on the city, they seem to have had no hesitation in promising him active military help. It was a disastrous mistake; and it lost them, and Roger, the city. During their absence, Robert's agents had been busy; rumours were spreading fast that Crescentius and his friends had sold out to the King of Sicily, and when the terms of the agreement were revealed the Beneventans were horrified. What was the use of being a papal city if they were going to be swept up in internecine squabbles like everyone else ? At a general gathering of the entire populace, they made their position clear:

We cannot ally ourselves in this wise with the King, nor can we accept to puff and sweat and exhaust ourselves on long marches with Sicilians and Calabrians and Apulians, all under the blazing sun; for our lines are cast in quiet places, and we were never accustomed to such perilous ways of life.

There is something disarming about such a protestation, but it may not have been quite so naive as it seems. The citizens of Benevento must surely have known perfectly well that the eyes of Pope Innocent and King Lothair were upon them. When the great confrontation should occur between Pope and anti-Pope, they were still more anxious than everyone else in the South to end up on the winning side. Gentle and peace-loving as they claimed to be, their reception of Crescentius was such that the Cardinal fled back to Roger, having narrowly escaped with his life; meanwhile the wretched Archbishop locked himself, terrified, in the Cathedral.

For the rebels it was a triumph. Prince Robert now had no difficulty in securing promises of friendly neutrality, with free right of passage for his troops through Beneventan territory; and the Archbishop emerged, quaking, from his refuge to witness the solemn swearing of a new treaty between Capua and Benevento—saving always, he was careful to point out, the city's loyalty to the Pope. Just which Pope he had in mind, he did not make altogether clear; his flock seem to have thought it wiser not to ask.

For Roger the loss of Benevento to his enemies came as a severe blow. How serious it might prove in the long term was still an open question, but its immediate effect was to put his own forces in danger. They were dependent on the Beneventans for food and other supplies; and now, suddenly, the good will on which they relied had turned to open hostility. Moreover the Prince of Capua, secure in the knowledge of local support, might at any moment decide to attack. Once again Roger instinctively recoiled, as he nearly always did, from a direct confrontation. He ordered instead that every section of the army should keep a close watch on his standard and be ready to follow it, in any direction, as soon as it moved.

Shortly after nightfall the signal was given, and under cover of darkness the Sicilian army retreated across the mountains to the south. Although technically the manoeuvre might have been described as a strategic withdrawal, its circumstances and speed were distinctly suggestive of flight—for dawn broke to find the royalist forces at the foot of Mt Atripalda, just outside Avellino. Twenty miles at night over mountain paths was no small achievement for an army, but the march was not yet over; the King, so Falco tells us, had been revolving thoughts of vengeance in his mind as he rode and was determined to regain the initiative. Thus, instead of making for his mainland capital at Salerno, he swung off to his right towards Nocera—Prince Robert's chief stronghold after Capua itself. A sudden attack might take the town by surprise; and it would with any luck be several days before the insurgents, who would assume that he had returned to Salerno, discovered where he had gone. Once they found out, they would be sure to hasten to the defence of Nocera, taking the quickest—though not the most direct—route via the coastal plain and the valley running between Vesuvius and the Apennine
massif;
but this would mean a crossing of the wide lower reaches of the river Sarno, where there existed only one bridge—an old wooden construction at Scafati, a mile or two away to the west on the road to Pompeii. If this bridge were destroyed, several more days at least would be gained. A party of sappers was despatched forthwith; their work was quickly done and they returned to find the siege of Nocera under way.

It was a brave and imaginative plan, one of which Roger I or Robert Guiscard would have approved. It deserved to work, and it very nearly did. But the rebel forces moved faster than expected. Only five days after the start of the siege, they had completed a makeshift bridge and were encamped opposite the King on the broad plain to the north of the city—Robert of Capua with a thousand knights on the left, Rainulf on the right with another fifteen hundred, split into three separate divisions. Of these, two hundred and fifty were sent up to the walls to divert part of the besieging force; the remainder made ready for battle.

The date was Sunday, 24 July. Roger was reluctant no longer. He had raised the siege of Nocera as soon as he heard of the enemy's crossing of the Sarno and had made his own dispositions. The first wave of the assault force was already drawn up on the field; now, at the King's command, they lowered their lances, spurred their horses to a gallop, and charged. Prince Robert's line crumbled under their impact; the Capuan infantry in the rear, seeing the horsemen bearing down upon them, panicked and fled towards the river. The bridge, so recently and so hastily erected, proved inadequate for their numbers and their speed; hundreds plunged into the water and were drowned.

A second charge of royalists followed with similar effect; but now the Count of Alife, with five hundred of his own knights behind him, swept in from the flank and fell on the attackers. Momentarily they wavered; and before they had time to reform, this onslaught was succeeded by another, and then by yet another as Rainulf's right and left followed his centre—descending on the enemy, as Falco puts it, like a lion that has not eaten for three days.

The tide was turned. Roger, himself now in the thick of the battle, seized a lance and galloped backwards and forwards through his reeling ranks, calling upon them to rally once again around their King. He was too late. His army was in full retreat, and he had no choice but to follow. That same evening he rode into Salerno, bloodstained and exhausted; four knights only were with him. Of the rest some seven hundred, with twenty loyal barons, had been taken prisoner. The others lay dead on the field or, like the bulk of the infantry, had been cut down as they ran. The spoils were immense. Falco admits that he has not the power to describe 'the abundance of gold and of silver, the rich golden vessels, the infinite variety of clothing for men and caparisons for horses, the cuirasses and other accoutrements' that were seized; while Henry, Bishop of St Agatha, who as a staunch champion of Pope Innocent had followed Robert to Nocera, records that the victors found, among the royal archives, the very Bull by which Anacletus had granted Roger his kingdom.

 
¹
See
J.B.R.G.,
vol. V,
Monumenta Bambergensia,
p.
444.

It was Roger's first major battle, and it had been a disaster. His losses were enormous, his prestige in Italy dangerously shaken. As the news spread across the peninsula the flame of rebellion spread with it, and more and more towns rallied to the Capuan standard. In Benevento a torch-light procession visited all the principal shrines of the city to render thanks, and arrangements were made to receive a representative of Pope Innocent as Rector in place of the unfortunate Crescentius. In Bari, the population rose up again and massacred several of Roger's Saracen guard; at Montepeloso Tancred of Conversano promptly abandoned his crusading preparations and rejoined the revolt. Meanwhile reports were trickling through from Germany that King Lothair had at last got his army together and was even now marching south across the Alps.

And yet, as the King of Sicily set to work at Salerno to rebuild his shattered forces and to strengthen his fleet for the challenges ahead —his command of the sea being now more vital to him than ever— he is said to have impressed all those around him with his cheerfulness and confidence. To some extent this may have been assumed; but not, perhaps, entirely. Heretofore he had always avoided pitched battles. Diplomacy, bribery, prevarication, attrition, siege tactics— at various stages of his career he had used any or all of these rather than meet his enemy in the open field. The withdrawal from Benevento had been a case in point; many of his men would doubtless have preferred to stay and fight rather than make a shameful retreat under cover of darkness, as demoralising as it was undignified; but the long ride through the mountains had given the King plenty of time to search his soul. If he were to still the murmurings of his army and, perhaps, of his own conscience, it had been imperative for him to prove himself worthy of his race and his name. At last, he had gone some way towards doing so. His generalship may have been faulty, the day a disaster; but he had finally discovered, at the age of thirty-six, that when the call to battle came he did not lack courage.

The reports from the north were well-founded. It was nearly a year and a half since Lothair had promised to escort Pope Innocent to Rome. Unrest in Germany had delayed his departure and still prevented him from raising an army on the scale for which he had hoped. He now decided that the key to his domestic problems lay in the earliest possible acquisition of the imperial crown and the prestige it conferred; and so, in August
1132,
with his queen Richenza of Nordheim and a force that amounted to little more than an armed escort, he set off over the mountains and into Lombardy.