Robert the Weasel arrived in Italy leading bandits and ended up a duke
Around 1047 the sixth son of a minor Norman knight rode into southern Italy with five horsemen and thirty men on foot, and soon led a band of robbers. His nickname, Guiscard, meant the cunning one, the fox or the weasel. Within a few decades he ruled Apulia and Calabria and had begun seizing Sicily.
Robert was born around 1015, one of twelve sons of Tancred de Hauteville in Normandy. Normans had been drifting south since 999 to fight as mercenaries for Byzantines and Lombard lords, and his older brothers William Iron Arm and Drogo had carved out a Norman county in Apulia with its capital at Melfi. With land scarce, Robert had to make his own way. The Byzantine princess Anna Komnene, no admirer, described him as huge, ruddy and fair-haired, with a bellow said to put tens of thousands to flight.
He sold his sword where he could and married for troops: his first wife, Alberada, came with the promise of her nephew's 200 knights. He fought at Civitate in 1053, where the Normans defeated Pope Leo IX's coalition, and was reportedly unhorsed three times. In 1057 he succeeded his brother Humphrey as count, and his first marriage was annulled on grounds of close kinship, reportedly the first annulment for that reason. He then married Sikelgaita, sister of the prince of Salerno.
The papacy, locked in its struggle with the Holy Roman Emperor, decided the Normans were more useful as allies. In the Treaty of Melfi of 1059 Pope Nicholas II made Robert Duke of Apulia and Calabria and future Lord of Sicily, a title that anticipated conquests not yet made. He completed Calabria by taking Reggio, then crossed to Sicily with his younger brother Roger, capturing Messina in 1061. One push toward Palermo in 1064 was abandoned because the camp was overrun with tarantulas, but the city fell in 1072.
He also expelled the Byzantines from Italy, taking Bari in 1071 after a four-year siege by land and sea, and then absorbed Salerno in 1076 and Benevento in 1078. For his elegant dark clothing during the Sicilian campaigns he was also remembered as Black Shirt Robert. He died on 17 July 1085.
Source: Robert Guiscard
