Robert Guiscard

Robert Guiscard (c. 1015-1085), Norman adventurer, born near Coutances in Normandy. Like many other impoverished Norman knights, Guiscard went to Italy, arriving there about 1046. After serving in the forces of the Prince of Capua, he organized an army to secure possessions for himself in Calabria. When Pope Leo IX attempted to expel the Normans from Italy in 1053, Guiscard played an important role in defeating the papal forces at Civitate, near the modern city of San Severo. After the death of his older brother Humphrey Guiscard, Robert became leader of the Normans in Italy. The pope, seeking independence from the Holy Roman Empire, decided to enlist the Normans as allies. In 1059 Pope Nicholas II created Robert “by the Grace of God and St Peter, Duke of Apulia and Calabria and, with their help, hereafter of Sicily”. In return, Robert acknowledged the pope as his feudal overlord. Sicily was in Byzantine hands at the time and so Robert and his brother Roger I embarked on a series of campaigns, capturing Messina in 1061 and Palermo in 1072. Turning his attention to the Balkans in 1081, Robert gained a great victory over the Byzantine emperor Alexius I Comnenus at Durrës, Albania. His campaigns at Macedonia and Thessalía were being carried on, meanwhile, by his son Bohemond I. Robert was recalled from his victorious campaigns in 1085 to go to the aid of Pope Gregory VII, who was besieged in the castle of Sant'Angelo by Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV. Robert drove Henry from Rome, and reduced one-third of the city to ashes. Because of the unpopularity of Gregory VII in Rome, he took the pope to Monte Cassino. Robert then went to the support of Bohemond in the Greek campaign, but died of fever at Kefallinía a few weeks later.