Jack Ludlow: Conquest

Looking to the sandglass, now with the last grains running through the neck, he added, ‘In one turn of the glass the sun will come up and we will deploy. Go to your men and encourage them, as I have encouraged you. Remember, if our enemies are not asleep when we attack they will not be long from their slumbers, for they will not think to be assaulted so soon after dawn. Go!’

Two dozen fists thudded into leather breastplates as Argyrus received from his captains the salute that had been the right of an imperial general since the time of the Roman legions.

The first hint of grey on the Adriatic skyline saw the great oak and metal-studded gates, oiled to be silent, swung open, the first troops out, the limited force of cavalry, animals led — not ridden — for silence. Out on the plain they mounted up and waited, horses snorting and prancing but held in check. Their task, once the milities had exited, was to engage in that wild charge, to pin in their lines the besieging army, to harry them mercilessly and spread alarm and confusion, making an organised defence impossible.

Argyrus was not a general to lead from the front where he feared, being indecisive, he might cause more uncertainty than clarity. He was watching from the highest point of the exterior walls on the landward side of the city, surrounded by those leading citizens he had promised to impoverish, delighted, once the signal was given, by the way his horsemen performed when the order was given to attack.

Nothing was harder to control than cavalry; indeed it was in that which lay the Norman strength. But for what he required this day, a horde of galloping men, yelling and waving their swords, was the very thing, they being insufficient in number to otherwise affect the battle. Behind them the foot soldiers had exited, their captains yelling and using the flats of their weapons to keep them in order, tight cohorts that their Catapan hoped would come up against disorganised bands, hastily assembled, men who would break when presented with their more organised opponents. Cool as was the morning he found he was perspiring, his body jerking involuntarily as he sought to urge on his men.

‘Good, good, keep to that line,’ he shouted, even if he knew he could not be heard, happy that his captains were doing as he had planned, leading their fighting men in a straight line away from the gates, heading directly inland where they could wheel, hopefully without losing their cohesion, to outflank the enemy at the point of maximum weakness, far from the active siege lines, to roll them up and drive them towards that fatal shore and slaughter.

Agony attends all warfare for a leader; so much can go wrong and so quickly does what looks possible vanish like a chimera, yet for all his fretting and anxiety Argyrus watched with increasing hope as his tactics seemed to unfold in a perfect reproduction of that which he had ordered. Truly, he had caught his enemies unaware. His risk of deploying before the sun was fully up, no doubt a manoeuvre thought to be beyond his poorly trained levies, was paying a huge dividend. His horsemen had suffered much, attacking a vastly more numerous foe, but they had sown the necessary disarray.

Far out from the walls Argyrus could see his foot soldiers, now with the sun on their backs: the uneven ground had spoilt their perfect symmetry, that was to be expected, so it was a heaving mass that began to wheel north towards the main enemy encampment and the tents of their leaders, two crowned by fluttering pennants bearing the blue and white chequer of the de Hautevilles. Robert would be gone, but was his brother Geoffrey still present? Nothing would crown this day more than that a member of the hated family should be taken alive or dead, preferably the former, so that he could make the Guiscard crawl for the chance to ransom. A dead body he would return naked and despoiled.

‘The day will be ours,’ Argyrus cried as his tangled levies hit the even more muddled Lombards and Italians, the milities of the Count of Apulia’s army. ‘They are turning to a rabble, look.’

Eager to watch the cessation of nearly a year of increasing gloom, albeit with even less ability than Argyrus to make sense of what was actually happening, those around him pressed forward to see what was nothing more than a mass of bodies pressing against each other, pikes and other weapons flashing in the morning sun, men in dun-coloured padded tunics, making it hard to tell friend from foe. But if their leader was excited, it behoved them to be the same, until a point came where even the most untutored eye could see that one faction was falling back.

‘Look, a de Hauteville banner and the device of Geoffrey of Loritello. Get me a messenger.’ A youth came forward to stand before a man now wild-eyed with excitement. ‘Go to the leading captains, tell them I will give them all of the ransom for a de Hauteville. Tell them it is an express command, to take him alive.’

Argyrus was back leaning over the parapet as the lad ran off, eagerly pointing out to those around him how favourably the battle was progressing. The news that the Venetian galleys were slipping their anchors and rowing furiously for the shore only added to his glee.

‘Let them try to take off Guiscard’s army, for they will fail, and if God is truly on our side then they too will suffer the fate as those they seek to embark. We will turn their hulls to cinder and drown every man who dared to ply an oar.’

‘They do not give in easily, Catapan,’ said one of the men beside him.

That was true; there was no rout and he sought to soothe his own anxiety by allaying that of those around him. ‘They are Robert de Hauteville’s men and he has trained them, his brothers before him, making them the best foot soldiers in all Italy. But the Guiscard is not here to lead them, for I tell you, if he was I would yet be fearful. Thank the Almighty his brother is not half the general he is.’

Having wheeled and committed their entire force, the captains of Brindisi were pressing their opponents back to a point right under the eyes of their leader, so that the line of those engaged ran straight before them. Argyrus fretted that his enemies were retreating in too orderly a manner: he needed a collapse, prayed for a slaughter and swore to heaven above to bring that on.

‘God be praised,’ he yelled as his wish was granted.

The line of Apulian levies broke and ran, hotly pursued by his own, now jumbled cohorts. Then, inexplicably, they halted, leaving him near to foaming with frustration, which had him running along the walls to shout at them to push on. The sight that stopped him nearly did the same for his heart. It was, without question, the death of his hopes.

In a line, before the beach, stood a serried mass of mailed warriors, obviously Normans by their helmets and tear-shaped shields. In the middle stood the banner of the Count of Apulia and even at a distance, due to his height and build, the Guiscard was visible. The men, his retreating army, were not routed, they broke and ran left and right of their confreres and as soon as the ground before the Normans was clear they began a slow and measured advance. Frantically he could see his captains forming their men into a line of defence, beating them again, and hard, with flattened swords, while their best-trained soldiers went to the rear to put a stop to desertion.

All the noise was coming from there: the Normans were advancing in silence, pennants fluttering on their lances, with not even a beating drum to set their pace, as if to underline they needed no sound to control their pace. Behind them, drawn up on the soft sand of the beach, were the galleys that had fetched them ashore, leaving Argyrus to wonder how the Guiscard had managed it.

Those beacons he had seen in the night would not have been lit for horses; they would only have been fired when Norman cavalry was seen to have gone by. Yet here they were before him, and worse, they were advancing on troops he knew in his pounding heart would not be able to repel them: the Normans knew how to fight on foot and would not break. The choice for him was simple; to watch the slaughter or to prepare to flee, for he had no illusion of what would happen to him if he fell into the hands of Robert de Hauteville.