San Marco Argentano Calabria Italy

Mainland southern Italian powers had begun hiring Norman mercenaries, who are Christian descendants of the Vikings, early in the eleventh century.

There soon began a bloody decades-long struggle between Normans and Romans for the rule over the Tarentine and Bariot lands.

The reformist Papacy, at odds with the Holy Roman Emperor and the Roman nobility itself, had resolved to recognize the Normans and secure them as allies.

At the Council of Melfi, on August 23, 1059, Pope Nicholas II had invested Robert Guiscard as duke of Apulia, Calabria, and Sicily.

Guiscard, now "by the Grace of God and St Peter duke of Apulia and Calabria and, if either aid me, future lord of Sicily", has agreed to hold his titles and lands by annual rent of the Holy See and to maintain its cause.

In the next twenty years he will undertake a series of conquests, winning his Sicilian dukedom.

Guiscard is the sixth son of Tancred of Hauteville and eldest by his second wife Fressenda.

According to the Byzantine historian Anna Comnena, he left Normandy with only five mounted riders and thirty followers on foot.

Upon arriving in Langobardia in 1047, he became the chief of a roving robber-band.

Anna Comnena also leaves a physical description of Guiscard: This Robert was Norman by birth, of obscure origins, with an overbearing character and a thoroughly villainous mind; he was a brave fighter, very cunning in his assaults on the wealth and power of great men; in achieving his aims absolutely inexorable, diverting criticism by incontrovertible argument.

He was a man of immense stature, surpassing even the biggest men; he had a ruddy complexion, fair hair, broad shoulders, eyes that all but shot out sparks of fire.

In a well-built man one looks for breadth here and slimness there; in him all was admirably well-proportioned and elegant… Homer remarked of Achilles that when he shouted his hearers had the impression of a multitude in uproar, but Robert’s bellow, so they say, put tens of thousands to flight.

(The Alexiad of Anna Comnena, Trans.

(from the Greek) E.R.A.

Sewter (London & New York: Penguin Books, 1969), p. 54) As lands were scarce in Apulia, the roving Guiscard could not expect any grant from Drogo, then reigning, for Humphrey had just received his own county of Lavello.

Guiscard soon joined Prince Pandulf IV of Capua in his ceaseless wars with Prince Guaimar IV of Salerno.

The next year, however, Guiscard left Pandulf, according to Amatus of Montecassino because Pandulf reneged on a promise of a castle and his daughter's hand.

Guiscard returned to his brother Drogo and asked to be granted a fief.

Drogo, who had just finished campaigning in Calabria, gave Guiscard command of the fortress of Scribla.

Dissatisfied with this position, Guiscard moved to the castle of San Marco Argentano (after which he will later name the first Norman castle in Sicily, at the site of ancient Aluntium).