Millenium (39 page)

A question on which a very great deal would hang indeed.

The Making of a Bastard

Cardinal Humbert's mission to Constantinople might have been ill-fated, but it had been part of a swelling trend. Travellers from the West were an increasingly common sight in the ancient capital of the East. Few of them went, as the cardinal had done, for reasons of diplomacy. Most were on their way to Jerusalem. Even though the massive surge of pilgrims that had marked the one-thousandth anniversary of Christ's Resurrection had gradually ebbed away in the wake of His failure to descend from heaven, a steady stream continued to trickle through the Queen of Cities, gawping at the relics, taking in the sights, then catching a ferry onwards across the Bosphorus. Indeed, for anyone with a guilty conscience, a taste for adventure and a travel bag full of loot, a really gruelling pilgrimage still ranked as a must-do experience. Perhaps it was no surprise, then, that the most enthusias­tic pilgrims of all tended to be Normans. Even dukes had been known to share in the mania. Back in 1026, one of them, Richard in, had spon­sored the largest single party of pilgrims that Christendom had then seen: seven hundred in all. Nine years later, and the new duke, Richard's brother, Robert, had gone one better: he had headed off for Jerusalem himself.

Even in 1035, at a time when many of the duke's countrymen were still serving the
Basileus
in Italy as mercenaries, the Byzantine high command had grown sufficiently familiar with the Normans to know that it did not greatly care for them. Nevertheless, the swagger of Robert's entry into Constantinople would long be remembered. Restless, impulsive and buccaneering, the Norman duke had cut a dash sufficient to impress even the spectacle-sated Byzantines, and to win for himself the sobriquet of'the Magnificent'. Tribute to his gilded inheritance: for his father had been Duke Richard II, that same shrewd and calculating operator who had succeeded in transforming his duchy into such an oasis of prosperity that even King Ethelred of the English had sought asylum at his court. Robert's progress to the Holy Land had duly dazzled like the arc of a meteor. His very mules had been shod with gold, it was said, and his camp-fires - in a climactic extravagance - fuelled with pistachio nuts. Even that most celebrated and seasoned of all pilgrims, Fulk Nerra, when he met up with Robert in Constantinople, had found himself put in the shade. The final seal on this image of flamboyant piety, however, had been set, not in the Holy Land, but on the journey homewards. Taken sick just south of the Bosphorus, Robert had retired to bed in the fabled city of Nicaea, a place redolent of antiquity and holiness - for it was there, back in the time of Constantine, that the creed of the Christian faith, the pro­fession of belief still spoken across the whole wide expanse of Christendom, had originally been settled upon. There he had breathed his last. Perhaps, as one monk theorised, God Himself had taken the duke, 'because he was too good for this world'.
¹

Or perhaps not. Despite the exemplary manner of Robert's death, the truth was that he made for an improbable paragon. Notorious for his bullying of bishops, and an inveterate rebel in the years before his own accession, he had never entirely escaped suspicion of a crime that would well have merited a penitential trek to Jerusalem: involvement in his brother's early death. Whether justified or hot, the rumours that Robert might have poisoned Richard III spoke volumes about the car­nivorous reputation that still shadowed Normandy. Even the disproportionate number of pilgrims from the duchy, far from dispelling the vague aura of menace that clung to the Normans, tended only to add to it. A pilgrimage was an expensive business and one that might readily lend itself to a spot of cheery freebooting on the side. It had certainly not been forgotten in Apulia, for instance, that the very first mercenaries from Normandy to be employed in the region had originally been recruited on Mount Gargano, within the shrine of St Michael itself.
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Hardly surprising, then, over the succeed­ing decades, that the reception given in Italy to Norman pilgrims should have grown increasingly hostile. Violence had bred violence in turn. The likelier Norman visitors to Mount Gargano were to find themselves being clubbed to death by irate locals, the likelier they were to travel for safety in large and well-armed bands. It had not taken long for the distinction between pilgrim and brigand to grow an exceedingly blurred one indeed.

No wonder, then, that the wanderlust of the Normans appeared, when viewed from Italy or Constantinople, a characteristic no less alarming than their brutality or their daring, their ferocity or their greed. Just as the Franks, back in the age of Rollo, had imagined the lands of the Northmen as a womb splitting apart with an excess of axe- wielding progeny, so similarly, in the decades that followed the Millennium, did the objects of Norman aggression take for granted that they were the victims of a population explosion back in Normandy. As evidence for this thesis, they needed only to cite those most alarming of all Norman captains: Robert Guiscard and his brothers. Tancred, the patriarch of the Hauteville clan, had fathered twelve sons in all, five with one wife, and seven with her successor, not to mention a clutch of daughters - but his expectations, despite an aptitude for slaughtering boars that had served to win him the admiration of Duke Richard II himself, had never quite kept pace with his fecundity. So it was that most of his sons, rather than scrap over the few mean fields that were the limit of their inheritance, had opted instead to travel abroad, and attempt to carve out their fortunes in the sun. Such a resolve in itself would hardly have served to distinguish them — for other princedoms too were teeming with able warriors on the make. What did strike contemporaries as exceptional, however, was the sheer scale of the Hautevilles' designs: a craving for wealth and dominance that those who stood in its way soon came to identify as characteristically Norman. 'For this is a people who set out and leave behind small fortunes in the expectation of acquiring a greater. And they do not follow the custom of the majority who pass through this world, who are content with prospering as the servants of others - for it is their aim instead to have everyone else subject to them, and acknowledging their lordship.'
³

And so it had ever been. A century and more had passed now since Rollo and his followers, fanning out from their dragon-ships, had set about despoiling the natives of what would one day become Normandy—and yet a taste for extravagant property grabs continued to define their descendants. Lethally, joyously even, though the Normans had adapted themselves to the Frankish way of war, there remained, in the way they rode to battle, something of the instincts of the Viking war band still. A leader who could not provide his follow­ers with plunder and opportunity was a leader in deep trouble - and of no one was this truer than the Duke of Normandy himself. 'For men had to be fired with a longing to serve him: with spoils and gifts if young and untested, and with a wealth of flourishing estates if already great by birth.*
⁴
Such an obligation, however, in an age when Normandy was hemmed in all around by the mushrooming donjons of neighbouring princedoms, was not as simple to fulfil as it had once been. The same duchy which under the cunning and piratical rule of Richard II had been famed as a haven of order was starting to appear, during the reigns of his two sons, an altogether less stable proposition. The ambitions of the Norman warrior class, as vaunting and ruthless as they had ever been, were turning in on themselves. Not everyone was willing to take the road to Italy. Many preferred to satisfy their land lust at the expense of their own neighbours in Normandy. Once, under Richard II, uppity lords would have found themselves com­pelled to wear saddles on their backs and crawl before the duke for mercy-but Robert, unlike his father, had lacked the will to rein them in. The pressure on him always to fight, to expand and to succeed had grown a wearisome one; so that by the time he finally opted to shrug it aside altogether, and depart for Jerusalem, his duchy appeared on the verge of disintegration, stained as it was with bloodletting, and riven by gangsterism.

And then he died - and Normandy was left in a more perilous con­dition still. So perilous, indeed, that there were some who suspected poison, and a plot to destabilise the duchy for good. With good reason, perhaps - for there was certainly a most plausible mastermind to hand. Track record, motive and opportunity: Fulk Nerra, Robert's companion out on the eastern pilgrimage trail, combined them all.
³
The Count of Anjou, whose princedom was- separated from Normandy only by a single hoof-gashed buffer, the unfortunate county of Maine, had long been angling to roll back Norman power. Now, with Robert dead, such a goal appeared eminently achievable. Normandy had effectively been decapitated.

The new duke was a boy of only eight years old, a bastard of Robert's by the name of William. In Anjou, predictably enough, much was made of his parentage. William's mother, his enemies alleged, was the daughter of a man whose loathsome duty it had been to prepare corpses for burial: a wretch irredeemably polluted by filth and rot­tenness and death.
⁶
The charge was certainly a damaging one - for it served directly to cast aspersions upon the new duke's fitness to rule. The science of heredity was a serious matter, after all. As the ancients had long since proved, both sperm and menstrual blood were suffused with the essence of an individual's soul - and since, as everyone knew, it was their commingling that served to form an embryo, it implied that baseness as well as nobility might be implanted within a womb, there to flow within a foetus's veins. Robert, by slaking his lusts upon a corpse-handler's daughter, had most likely bred a monster. The vileness of the grandfather, so William's enemies charged, could hardly help but manifest itself within the grandson. The young duke, if only permitted to grow to adulthood, appeared fated to serve as the shroud-winder, not of the dead, but of very kingdoms.

Or would have been, perhaps, had the slanders been remotely true. In fact, far from practising a low-bred and abhorrent trade, William's grandfather had been an official in the ducal court.
⁷
Not a warrior, to be sure - but then bastardy, among the Normans, had never been reckoned a fatal taint. Indeed, often they had seemed positively to approve of it: 'for it has always been their custom, for as long as they have been settled in France, to take as their princes the offspring of concubines'.
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The resigned shrugs with which outsiders tended to note this was hardly surprising, perhaps. Things might well have been worse. The marital habits of the Northmen had long been a matter of scandal. In Sweden, for instance, a barbarous land so remote that it lay even beyond the limits of the North Way, it was reported that men might have up to three or four wives at a time — 'and princes an unlimited number'.
⁹
But then the Swedes were unregenerate pagans. In lands where the Northmen had become Christians, princes were generally content to satisfy themselves with two. So it was, for instance, that even the ostentatiously pious Canute, when he married Emma, Ethelred's Norman widow, and restored her to her former status as Queen of the English, had opted not to dwell on the awkward fact that he was already married. Aelfgifu, an Englishwoman who had been with him since the very earliest days of his arrival in England, had already given him two sons: a reserve of heirs that Canute had not the slightest intention of squandering. Indeed, in 1030, he packed one of them off, along with Aelfgifu herself, to govern the Norwegians, who had recently been brought to submit to his rule. Although his own bishops might fulminate sternly against bigamy, the practice brought Canute too many advantages for him to contemplate abandoning it. In Normandy too, it had often proved a godsend. One wife from the Frankish world, and one from the Norman: such had long been the preference of the dukes. In the marriage bed as elsewhere, they liked to face both ways.

Except that even in Normandy the times were gradually changing. For there too, as the decades of the new millennium slipped by, the fathering of children on numerous wives was coming to seem an increasingly unacceptable habit, the practice of sinister peoples 'igno­rant of divine law and chaste morals':
¹⁰
the Saracens, for instance, or - most barbarous of all - the Bretons. Such an attitude shift reflected, in part, the sheer smouldering weight of the Church's disapproval: its insistence that marriage was properly an exclusive partnership of equals. Perhaps even more significant, however, was the nobility's own vague but dawning realisation that it was not plunder which repre­sented the surest guarantee of establishing a family's greatness, but the transmission, Capetian-style, of an undivided patrimony. That being so, the right of a lord's heir to succeed to his father's lands had to be established beyond all possible doubt. William might have been ille­gitimate —and yet it was significant that he was also an only son. Duke Robert had very consciously refrained from taking a wife. Only once he had summoned the lords of Normandy to his court, and formally presented William to them as his successor, had he ventured to leave for the Holy Land. No one had been left in any doubt as to who his heir was to be.

Not that, in a society as loot-hungry as that of the Normans, an oath of loyalty to an eight-year-old could be taken for granted — nor was it. The years of William's minority would long be remembered in Normandy as a time of violence and cruelty exceptional even by the standards of what had gone before. Rival warlords, with no one to leash them in, found themselves free to indulge all their most razor- clawed instincts. Nothing more brutally illustrated what might be at stake than the fashion, one bred of increasingly savage and incessant feuding, for abducting rivals, even from wedding feasts, and subjecting them to horrific mutilations. Blindings were particularly popular; cas­trations too. As well they might have been: for those who aimed to found a flourishing dynasty naturally had to look to neuter the com­petition. Meanwhile, 'forgetful of their loyalties, many Normans set about piling up mounds of earth, and then constructing fortified strongholds on them for themselves'.