Decline & Fall - Byzantium 03 by John Julius Norwich Read Free Book Online Page A

fleet recaptured Durazzo and Corfu; and by the end of 1083 Norman-held territory in the Balkans was once again confined to one or two offshore islands and a short strip of the coast.
    Across the Adriatic, on the other hand, Robert Guiscard was doing splendidly. The insurrection in Apulia had admittedly taken him longer to deal with than he had expected, largely owing to the generous subsidies that the rebels had been receiving from Constantinople; but by mid-summer the last pockets of resistance had been satisfactorily
    1 See Byzantium: The Early Centuries, p. 288.
    eliminated. He had then set about raising a new army with which to rescue Pope Gregory - who had barricaded himself into the Castel Sant' Angelo - and to send Henry packing. Early the following summer he marched; and on 24 May 1084, roughly on the site of the present Porta Capena, he pitched his camp beneath the walls of Rome. The Emperor, however - who had deposed Gregory and had had himself crowned by a puppet anti-Pope on Palm Sunday - had not waited for him. Three days before the Duke of Apulia appeared at the gates of the city he had retired, with the greater part of his army, to Lombardy.
    Had the Romans not been foolish enough to surrender to Henry the previous March, the Normans would have entered the city as deliverers; instead, they came as a conquering enemy. On the night of 27 May, Robert silently moved his men round to the north of the city; then at dawn he attacked, and within minutes the first of his shock-troops had burst through the Flaminian Gate. They met with a stiff resistance: the whole area of the Campus Martius - that quarter which lies immediately across the Tiber from the Castel Sant' Angelo — became a blazing inferno. But it was not long before the Normans had beaten the defenders back across the bridge, released the Pope from his fortress and borne him back in triumph through the smoking ruins to the Lateran.
    Then, and only then, came the real tragedy. Despite all the depredations it had suffered, Rome still offered the Guiscard's men possibilities of plunder on a scale such as few of them had ever before experienced; and the entire city now fell victim to an orgy of rapine and pillage. For three days this continued unabated - until the inhabitants, able to bear it no longer, rose against their oppressors. Robert, for once taken by surprise, found himself surrounded. He was saved in the nick of time by his son Roger Borsa, who in an uncharacteristic burst of activity smashed his way through the furious crowds with a thousand men-at-arms to his father's rescue - but not before the Normans, now fighting for their lives, had set fire to the city. The Capitol and the Palatine were gutted; churches, palaces and ancient temples left empty shells. In the whole area between the Colosseum and the Lateran hardly a single building escaped the flames. When at last the smoke cleared away and such Roman leaders as remained alive had prostrated themselves before the Duke of Apulia with naked swords roped round their necks in token of surrender, their city lay empty, a picture of desolation and despair.
    A few weeks later, Robert Guiscard returned to Greece. As Anna Comnena has occasion to point out, he was nothing if not tenacious. Though now sixty-eight, he seems to have been in no way discouraged at the prospect of starting his campaign all over again; and in the autumn of 1084 he was back, with Bohemund, his two other sons Roger and Guy, and a new fleet of 150 ships. At the outset, things could hardly have gone worse: bad weather delayed the vessels for two months at Butrinto, and when at last they were able to cross the straits to Corfu, they were set upon by a Venetian fleet and soundly beaten in pitched battle twice in three days. So severe were their losses that the Venetians sent back their pinnaces to the lagoon with news of the victory; but they had underestimated the Guiscard. Few of his ships were in fit condition to venture a third