Any gathering of the sons of Tancred de Hauteville was bound to end up in reminiscence and this, taking place in the vestry of an Italian cathedral, given there were five of his offspring present, was no exception: they recollected the memories of growing up in the unruly Normandy region of the Contentin, of escapades, past quarrels, fights they had engaged in with each other, but more importantly with their neighbours, as well as raiders from the islands that lay off the Norman coast. And they talked of their father, sometimes in awe, sometimes with gales of laughter, but mostly with wry affection.
Tancred de Hauteville had been a noted warrior, as well as a man who bred sturdy and numerous sons – there were another seven brothers still at home, the product of two wives – and he had raised them to be puissant warriors like himself; their rank as the offspring of a petty Norman baron required no less. From their very first-taken steps they had been tutored in the use of weapons, toy wooden swords and shields, replaced by metal as soon as they could handle the weight, growing strong by constant practice, gifted on land and in water, swimming in the river that ran through the family fields and then in the crashing waves of the nearby great ocean.
The time came when they could mount first a pony and then a horse; they had been taught to ride and use a lance so that one day they could, if fortune favoured them as it had their father, serve in battle under their liege lord, the Duke of Normandy, as part of a mounted fighting force greatly feared throughout Europe. Well fed on the produce of Tancred’s fertile demesne, the sons came eventually to match and even tower over a parent whose own great height was often remarked upon.
Tancred never let them forget their Viking heritage, or that the five elder boys, through their mother, were half-blood relations to the ducal house. They came from a race and a lineage bred for combat: it was not for them but for others to cut timber, grow food, to sow and reap crops, to work the family salt pans and exploit the fishing rights which provided the means by which they could be armed.
Each had been provided with the weapons and equipment necessary for the tasks that lay ahead: the horses needed to carry them and their equipment to war, as well as a destrier to ride in battle, a sharptipped lance, a heavy, double-edged sword, a shield framed in metal, covered with hard wood and leather and painted in the de Hauteville colours of blue and white. Most expensive of all, but vital, each had been gifted a set of protective armour: a chain mail hauberk, gloves and a helmet.
The duty of vassalage obliged Tancred to provide to his duke ten lances, and that he had done – a task made so much easier as his elder sons, one by one and a year apart, grew to match then surpass his fighting ability. They also aided him mightily in his endemic disputes with neighbours, usually over land, water, or rights to the produce of the Atlantic shoreline, and given their talent for combat the name de Hauteville had soon become one to be respected in the Contentin.
Yet that very number of sons brought with it a greater problem: the petty barony of Hauteville-la-Guichard could feed them as they grew to manhood, could arm and mount them to be warriors, but it was too small a demesne to satisfy their needs as adults. They required land of their own on which to raise families and to provide for them the revenues which supported a fighting knight.
Tancred had sought to get them placed as personal knights, part of the familia of his liege lord, the son of the man he himself had served so faithfully. That suzerain, Duke Robert of Normandy, had ignored written requests more than once, and had then rebuffed the same appeal in a face-to-face meeting. For men bred to war, with no hope of advancement in their homeland, the brothers de Hauteville, first William and Drogo, and now joined by Humphrey, Geoffrey and half-brother Mauger, had taken the well-worn route to Italy and mercenary service, where the martial prowess of the Normans was highly prized and well rewarded.
‘Enough,’ William insisted, as Drogo continued to relate those amatory adventures he had indulged in at home, quite forgetting the trouble his activities had caused: he was the father of more bastards than could be counted on the fingers of his hands. ‘Home is far off in time and distance. We must turn our thoughts to that which concerns us here.’
Drogo frowned more from habit than irritation; William might be the oldest and Tancred’s heir, but too often in their growing years he had assumed near-parental powers.
Yet he deferred to him, not just as an older sibling but also as a chief; Rainulf Drengot commanded the Normans of Campania, but William was his senior captain and had led the mercenary contingent in the recent invasion of Sicily. A measure of his stature, gained in that conflict, was his soubriquet: he was now more commonly referred to by those he led as Bras de Fer, a title bestowed on him by his confrères after a single-combat encounter outside the walls of Syracuse. William Iron Arm had fought and defeated the ruling Saracen emir, a giant of a man who claimed to have on his belt the notches of a hundred skulls.
Humphrey, his beetle brow furrowed, stood suddenly, and went to the door that led from the vestry to the chancel of the cathedral, opening it to ensure no one was listening.
‘Suspicious as ever,’ said Mauger.
‘The only people I trust are in this room,’ Humphrey insisted, before sweeping the assembly with a glare on a face that, with its large overbite and close-set eyes, lacked beauty, ‘and that is not wholehearted.’
‘You sleep with your purse between your legs,’ scoffed Drogo, Humphrey’s parsimony and mistrustful nature being a family joke.
‘He would when you are around, brother,’ crowed Geoffrey.
Drogo laughed. ‘He has not got between his legs anything else to tempt me.’
‘I cannot think why you bother, Humphrey,’ William said with a weary air, looking at the now closed door. ‘Who would want to overhear this foolishness?’
‘You should slacken sometimes, Gill,’ Drogo insisted. ‘A little foolishness would do your soul good.’
For ‘foolishness’, Drogo meant gaiety and that covered much of the ground that lay as a difference between the two eldest brothers. Drogo was mercurial by nature, laughing one second but equally likely to resort to a fist fight the next if he felt impugned. He was also a womaniser, never without a concubine to bed when he was at what passed for home, and ever on the lookout for companionship on campaign or when travelling. William was steady and serious, and while not, as Drogo called him, a eunuch, he was restrained in his carnality, engaging in the odd liaison, without ever forming permanent attachments.
‘I’ll leave the priests to worry for my soul, brother, because I have four of you to use up all my concern.’
‘We can look after ourselves,’ Mauger responded, with all the confidence of the youngest present.
‘Can you?’ William replied, looking past Mauger at the crucifix on the bare stone wall, the son of the God he had been raised to believe would see everything, and who would one day judge him for the sins he had committed in life. Then he looked at his brothers, all big men and broad of shoulder, all with golden hair and faces made red by the Italian sun. ‘I thought that too. I thought I had become heir to a brilliant future, only to have Rainulf snatch it away.’
‘His child may die.’
William responded to Geoffrey with a withering look. ‘And with a willing bedmate he may breed many more.’
That induced a long silence, as each of the recently arrived trio contemplated what had happened since William and Drogo had come to Italy. Both had taken service with Rainulf Drengot and both, through sheer ability, had risen to lead companies of men, William even more. He had become Rainulf’s right hand, to be consulted frequently at a time when Campania was in turmoil and the mercenary leader had himself felt under threat.
Drengot had betrayed the Duke of Salerno, a trusting soul who had granted him not only the hand of his daughter but also the dowry gift of the Lordship of Aversa, raising him from mere paid retainer to the status of influential landowner in his own right. Rainulf had shown little in the way of gratitude: when his wife died he had switched his allegiance, and thus the overpowering force he could put in the field, to a fellow of staggering mendacity called Pandulf, Prince of Capua, marrying his sister to seal the bargain. A termagant and an unwilling spouse, that was a union Rainulf had come to much regret.
Even for a Lombard, Pandulf of Capua, known to all as the Wolf of the Abruzzi, had shown a greed and lack of integrity that was remarkable. Having deposed the Duke of Salerno and dispossessed his remaining children, he had grown even more grasping, bearing down on subjects in both fiefs, people who hated him, and stripping from them, with Rainulf’s help, ever-increasing wealth. No one, petty baron, trader, farmer, priest, bishop or monk was safe from his depredations.
Pandulf loved gold, not God, and like all avaricious men, he had, in time, overreached himself, attacking and ravaging the lands of the wealthy Monastery of Montecassino. Not content to merely seize its treasury, he threw the elderly Abbot Theodore into his dungeons and parcelled out the monastery’s extensive lands to Normans, men he had suborned from Rainulf’s service. Indeed, from being the greatest source of Rainulf’s wealth Pandulf had become too powerful, a threat to the now ageing mercenary leader – childless, and, thanks to his tempestuous marriage, much given to taking refuge in drink.
The Wolf’s depredations had, through the intercession of Guaimar, the Duke of Salerno’s son, reached the ear of the Western Emperor, Conrad Augustus, but it was what he had done to the holy men of Montecassino that proved his downfall. The irate emperor had come south from Germany with a great army to restore Montecassino and put the villain in his own dungeons. William de Hauteville, advising Rainulf to leave his untrustworthy ally to his fate, had engineered a truce with Conrad – a combination of force that obliged Pandulf to flee.
The reward for Rainulf had been imperial confirmation of his title under Guaimar, the newly elevated Prince of both Salerno and Capua. This, for a Norman who had come to Italy with nothing but his horses and his weapons, was elevation indeed, a title and fiefdom from which only the emperor could remove him. At the ceremony of investiture outside the walls of Capua, Rainulf had brought forward William and embraced him, bidding him kiss the gonfalon that denoted his title, an indication from a man without offspring that his senior captain should be his heir.
William had gone off to Sicily leading all but a hundred of Rainulf’s men, sustained by that promise of a brilliant future; he had returned to find Rainulf’s termagant wife shut up in a nunnery, a new young and lusty concubine in his bed, the Imperial Count of Aversa sober and cradling in his arms a mewling male infant he called Hermann, who would one day, he made plain, succeed to his lands and title; William de Hauteville would get nothing!
‘Put the matter to the vote,’ Drogo suggested, not for the first time. ‘Let the men decide who to follow, you or Rainulf.’
William looked at Drogo long and hard. They had been through much together, growing up, in coming to this place and what had occurred since. Drogo had been his lieutenant in Sicily and had not in any way let him down; he was a fighter any man would be happy to have at his side. His flaw, if you excluded his inability to pass a woman without trying to bed her, was his lack of judgement. Yet looking around the faces of his brothers he saw they too shared Drogo’s view.
Perhaps because William was the eldest of a large and unruly clan he had a better grasp of reality, the very quality which had led Rainulf to previously rely on him for advice. All his life, when Tancred and his parental wrath needed to be kept in the dark about some family problem, he had been required to intercede with one brother against another and, in Drogo’s case, with more than one irate father. For every time his judgement had been accepted, there had been many more where he had been obliged to ensure acceptance of the right course with a thump around the ear. That would not serve now they were all grown men. Yet he needed them on his side.
‘Right now it would break the band apart, Drogo. Not all the men would follow me and Rainulf would not let such an insult pass. A split like that would lead to bloodshed, which, I suspect, might please many people, but in the end it would resolve nothing. Rainulf would still not reinstate me as the heir to his title and I am not prepared to fight and kill my fellow Normans for something I cannot have.’
‘Go back to Prince Guaimar,’ suggested Humphrey. ‘He has the power to force Rainulf to keep his word.’
Having tried that once, and been rebuffed, William had no desire to do so again. ‘That would be to beg and, besides, you are wrong. To make Rainulf bend the knee in such an important matter would cause Prince Guaimar more trouble than he desires to have, and do not doubt for a moment he takes pleasure in our mutual dissension.’
‘So you just accept being cheated?’
‘It’s Duke Robert all over again,’ said Mauger.
That took William back to Normandy, just days before the first major battle of his life, to the great ducal pavilion hard by the hamlet of Giverny, in which he had first laid eyes on his then liege lord. Duke Robert had not been happy at the way Tancred de Hauteville, leading his sons, had forced his way into his presence, even less joyful when he had been reminded that five of those boys shared with him a bloodline through their late mother, albeit one carrying the taint of illegitimacy.
It had been a less than joyful interview for a man who liked to be styled Robert the Magnificent: Tancred was not one to show excessive respect, of the kind Robert had come to expect from fawning courtiers. Like an uncle to the family of the duke, this was a man he had known since childhood, who he had, along with his elder brother, tossed high in the air. Rumours abounded that Duke Robert had poisoned that elder brother to gain his title; those who believed such an accusation to be a literal truth called him Robert the Devil.
Tancred had raised his sons with one aim in mind: the prospect of joining the familia knights of the ducal household, the men who served their liege lord close and would die in battle to keep him safe, the reward for good service being the captaincy of a castle, maybe even lands and possibly a title of their own. Duke Robert had disabused him: he had no trust in the connection of bastard blood, even less in Tancred or his sons.
He would not allow any de Hauteville to serve him close, for fear of what they might do to his own born-out-of-wedlock son, who was now, following Robert’s death, the reigning Duke of Normandy. Rabidly ambitious himself, Robert could not be brought to even consider that these tall and sturdy boys were free of that trait, nor that the solemn vow Tancred had made to his own father would bind them to his service, a refusal which had brought them to this place and this conundrum.
‘We have no choice but to do now what we did then,’ William insisted. ‘We must look for good fortune elsewhere. I want to be sure that whatever I do I can count on your support.’
‘To whom else would we give it?’ asked Mauger, who could not hide the look in his eye, one that told all present how much he worshipped a brother many years his senior.
That brought forth a smile. ‘No one, Mauger, but I wish to remind you all we are bound together, that we are de Hautevilles, in the same way our father was wont to remind us—’
‘Endlessly,’ Humphrey interjected, champing those very prominent top teeth, he being one son who was sure he had never truly enjoyed his father’s love.
Geoffrey spoke next. ‘You are our leader by right as well as birth, William.’
‘Is it sacrilegious to puke in church?’ asked Drogo, though he grinned to make sure all understood he was joking.
‘From now on there are two worlds, that outside and ours. I will seek your support when there is no time to explain why, but know this: I will always act in all our interests, not just my own. I ask you, as our father did, to swear on the Holy Cross that you will follow me wherever that may lead us, and I ask you to renew the vow he made us all swear before we left Normandy, never to raise a weapon against each other.’
William hauled out his sword and knelt, the others following, each using hilt and pommel as a personal cross, to take the oath William had asked of them, their eyes fixed on the crucified Christ as they pledged their word.
‘You said elsewhere,’ Drogo said as they stood again. ‘Where would that be?’
‘Apulia.’
‘Why Apulia?’
That question was posed with a look of deep suspicion. William, he well knew, was capable of laying deep and long-sighted plans. He was also inclined to keep such things to himself and this time was no exception.
‘Wait and see. Now stir yourselves, it is time we ended our devotions and returned to camp.’
‘What devotions?’ Geoffrey demanded, a reasonable question since no prayers, barring the oath just taken, had been said.
William smiled. ‘The ones I told Rainulf were due today, a Mass for the soul of our late mother.’
‘But…’ Geoffrey paused before stating the obvious: this was not the day on which the mother he shared with everyone except young Mauger had passed away.