Robert Guiscard

Robert was born in Normandy, probably around 1015, in the small lordship of Hauteville near Coutances ^[1]. His father, Tancred of Hauteville, was a knight of modest means who fathered twelve sons by two wives, far too many heirs for a single minor estate to support. Robert belonged to the second family, born to Tancred's wife Fressenda, and so stood behind several older half brothers in any claim on the family land ^[2].

The Hauteville sons answered the problem of their inheritance by emigrating. Southern Italy in the early eleventh century was a fractured region where Lombard princes, Byzantine governors, and independent city states competed for territory, and all of them hired Norman mercenaries. Robert's older half brothers William Iron Arm and Drogo left first, took service in these wars, and by the 1040s had won the county of Apulia for themselves ^[1].

Robert followed them south around 1047, arriving with a handful of followers and no resources of his own ^[2]. Drogo, then the leading Norman in Apulia, gave his ambitious half brother little help, assigning him instead to a rough frontier posting in Calabria. There Robert lived essentially as a brigand chief, raiding villages and monasteries from hilltop strongholds to feed his men. The Byzantine historian Anna Komnene later described him in this period as a man of obscure origin driven by a domineering temper, and even hostile witnesses conceded his physical presence, his height, and his commanding voice ^[3]. It was in these lean Calabrian years that he earned the byname Guiscard, from an old French word meaning cunning or wily ^[1].

Calabria taught Robert Guiscard how to win with limited means. Stories gathered around his early career, including a famous tale in which he seized the town of a local magnate by feigning a funeral and hiding armed men around the coffin. Whether or not every anecdote is literally true, the pattern they describe, of stratagem preferred to open assault, matched the reputation he carried for the rest of his life ^[2].

His fortunes changed through marriage and through the deaths of his brothers. Around 1048 or 1049 he married Alberada of Buonalbergo, whose family brought him a substantial force of knights, the first real army he had commanded ^[4]. When his half brother Humphrey, who had succeeded Drogo as count of Apulia, died in 1057, Robert pushed aside Humphrey's young sons and took the countship for himself ^[1].

The decisive moment came in 1059 at the synod of Melfi. The reforming papacy, isolated in its conflicts with the German empire and the Roman aristocracy, chose to legitimize the Normans it had once fought. Pope Nicholas II invested Robert as duke of Apulia and Calabria, and of Sicily once he should conquer it, in exchange for an oath of fealty and military protection for the Roman church ^[5]. A landless younger son from Normandy now held a ducal title recognized by the pope, though most of the territory named in it remained to be taken. Around the same time Robert set aside Alberada, citing consanguinity, and married Sichelgaita, sister of the Lombard prince of Salerno, a union that tied the Norman newcomers to the old Lombard ruling houses ^[4].

The list of Robert Guiscard achievements begins with the destruction of Byzantine rule in Italy. Through the 1060s he ground down the remaining imperial territories in Apulia and Calabria, and in April 1071, after a siege of nearly three years by land and sea, he took Bari, the last Byzantine stronghold in the peninsula ^[1]. More than five centuries of East Roman presence in Italy ended with that surrender, in the same year that the empire suffered its catastrophic defeat by the Seljuk Turks at Manzikert.

Sicily came next in ambition if not in sequence. From 1061 Robert and his youngest brother Roger campaigned against the island's divided Muslim emirs, and in 1072 the two brothers captured Palermo, one of the largest and richest cities of the Mediterranean ^[6]. Robert kept the ducal overlordship but left the continuing conquest and the government of Sicily to Roger as count, a division of labor that allowed him to concentrate on the mainland. In 1076 and 1077 he besieged and took Salerno, the principal Lombard city of the south, displacing his own brother in law and making the city his capital ^[2].

His most audacious project was aimed at the Byzantine Empire itself. Using the deposition of Emperor Michael VII, to whose son his daughter had been betrothed, as a pretext, Robert crossed the Adriatic in 1081 with a large fleet and army. Outside Dyrrachium, on the coast of modern Albania, he defeated the new emperor Alexios I Komnenos in a pitched battle in October 1081, a clash described in detail by the emperor's daughter Anna Komnene, who recorded that Sichelgaita rode armed among the troops and helped rally fleeing Normans ^[3]. Dyrrachium fell early in 1082, and Norman forces pushed inland toward Thessaly before rebellion in Italy forced Robert home ^[1].

Robert Guiscard's relationship with the popes swung between excommunication and alliance. He was excommunicated more than once, notably by Gregory VII in 1074 after Norman encroachment on papal territory, yet the papacy could never afford his permanent enmity. In June 1080, at Ceprano, Pope Gregory VII absolved him and renewed his investiture, since the pope was locked in the Investiture Controversy with the German king Henry IV and needed a sword to match the empire's ^[5].

The alliance was tested in 1084. Henry IV had taken Rome, installed the antipope Clement III, and received an imperial coronation, while Gregory VII held out in the fortress of Castel Sant'Angelo. Robert marched north with a large army, and Henry withdrew rather than fight him. The Normans entered Rome in May 1084 and freed Gregory, but the rescue turned into disaster for the city: fighting between Robert's troops, including Muslim soldiers from Sicily, and the Roman populace ended in a sack, with burning and destruction across whole districts ^[7].

The Romans' fury made it impossible for Gregory to remain, and the pope left with his Norman protectors, dying at Salerno in Robert's territory in May 1085 ^[5]. The episode summed up the duke's position in Italian politics. He was the papacy's indispensable defender and, at the same time, a danger to everything around him.

Robert's two marriages shaped the politics of his dynasty. By Alberada of Buonalbergo he had a son, Bohemond, who inherited his father's build, energy, and appetite for Byzantine territory, and who later became famous as a leader of the First Crusade and the first Latin prince of Antioch ^[4]. Because the marriage to Alberada had been annulled, Bohemond's claim on the duchy was weakened.

By Sichelgaita of Salerno, Robert had numerous children, among them Roger Borsa, whom he designated as heir to the duchy of Apulia ^[2]. Sichelgaita was no ornamental consort. She accompanied her husband on campaign, including the Balkan expeditions, and Anna Komnene's account of the battle of Dyrrachium presents her as a formidable figure on the field ^[3]. A daughter, Olympias, renamed Helena in Constantinople, was sent to the Byzantine court as the intended bride of the co emperor Constantine Doukas, an engagement that collapsed with the fall of the Doukas regime and gave Robert his stated grievance for war ^[3].

Contemporaries left vivid sketches of the man himself. Norman writers such as William of Apulia and Geoffrey Malaterra, who wrote for the Hauteville court, portray a leader of enormous stamina, generous to followers and ruthless to rivals, while Anna Komnene, writing from the enemy side, mixes condemnation of his ambition with open astonishment at his ability ^[3]. All the sources agree that he was never content with what he held.

The final years of Robert's life were consumed by the war with Byzantium. Recalled to Italy in 1082 to crush revolts among his Apulian barons, revolts encouraged by Byzantine money, and to fulfill his obligations to Gregory VII, he left Bohemond in command in the Balkans. Bohemond won victories but could not hold the conquests, and by 1083 and 1084 Alexios Komnenos, aided by a Venetian fleet, had rolled back most of the Norman gains ^[3].

Robert crossed the Adriatic again in late 1084, now nearing seventy. His fleet defeated the Venetians off Corfu that winter, a remarkable result against the leading naval power of the Adriatic ^[1]. The campaign then stalled as epidemic disease spread through the Norman army during the following months.

While preparing operations against Cephalonia, Robert himself fell ill, most likely with typhoid fever, and he died on 17 July 1085 on or near the island ^[1]. His body was carried back to Italy and buried in the Hauteville family mausoleum at the abbey of the Santissima Trinità at Venosa in Apulia, beside his brothers ^[2]. The Balkan venture collapsed at his death, and the succession he left behind, contested between Roger Borsa and Bohemond, weakened the duchy for a generation.

Any Robert Guiscard biography has to reckon with how much the map of the central Mediterranean changed in his lifetime. When he arrived in Italy the south was divided among Byzantine provinces, Lombard principalities, and Muslim Sicily. When he died, nearly all of it was under Hauteville rule or on the way there. That consolidation was completed by his nephew Roger II, who in 1130 united the mainland duchy with Sicily as a kingdom, a state whose institutions influenced southern Italy for centuries ^[6].

His career also reset the papacy's alliances. By binding the reform popes to Norman military power at Melfi in 1059 and defending Gregory VII in 1084, Robert helped detach the papacy from dependence on the German empire, with consequences that ran through the entire Investiture Controversy ^[5]. In Byzantine memory he became the archetype of the dangerous westerner: Anna Komnene devoted long passages of the Alexiad to him, and her father's wars against Robert and Bohemond shaped imperial suspicion of the Latin West in the crusading era that followed ^[3].

Among the harder Robert Guiscard facts to convey is how unlikely the whole story was. Dante placed him in the Paradiso among the warriors of the faith, medieval chroniclers ranked him with the great commanders of antiquity, and modern historians of the Norman south, from Ferdinand Chalandon to John Julius Norwich and Graham Loud, have treated his rise from landless knight to duke as one of the most improbable careers of the Middle Ages ^[8]. Few individuals with so little inherited advantage have left so large a mark on three worlds at once: Latin Italy, Greek Byzantium, and Muslim Sicily.