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King Alfonso warned Yusuf against invading. ‘Wait and see what happens!’ replied Yusuf. In 1086, some 15,000 men including 6,000 shock cavalry from Senegal crossed to Gibraltar on rafts, with elephants and camels. Yusuf’s blue-veiled warriors defeated Alfonso, who just managed to hold on to Toledo and appealed to the pope for a holy war. When Yusuf sailed back to Africa, El Cid helped Alfonso restore his power over his Islamic allies before striking out for Valencia, which he captured, declaring himself the prince – an independent ruler at last. But Yusuf was not finished: in 1090, he crossed the straits again, exiling or killing the decadent Islamic kinglets.^*

While the Veiled Ones besieged Valencia, its prince, El Cid, died and his wife Jimena held out for three years until Alfonso evacuated her. She then rode into Burgos with the body of the Champion. Yusuf had conquered a new Islamic empire in Spain. Christendom was in crisis.

Only in Sicily had Islam been overcome by the Hauteville brothers. In 1081 Wily Robert, sensing Constantinople’s weakness, attacked the Basileia Romaion, sending a vanguard under his eldest son, the twenty-seven-year-old Bohemond, across the Adriatic into the Balkans. Son of Wily’s first wife, Bohemond, even more colossal and flaxen-haired than his father, was nicknamed after the mythical giant Buamundus Gigas. Robert and his duchess Sichelgaita marched east. In Constantinople, an aristocratic general named Alexios Komnenos, who was lucky, tireless and talented, seized the throne, facing enemy advances on all fronts – Normans in the Balkans, Pechenegs and Cumans in Ukraine, Seljuks in Anatolia – but backed by his Varangian Guard (which now included Anglo-Saxon axemen) and by the fleet of Constantinople’s client city Venice, he marched into the Balkans to stop the Hautevilles.

Sichelgaita rode into battle with her husband and stepson. When the Hauteville troops almost broke, Sichelgaita rode after them with a spear, a sight so fearsome to her fleeing soldiers that they turned, rejoined the battle and won. But Alexios, aided by the plague, broke the Hauteville forces, and Robert was recalled by the pope. Alexios switched to repel Pechenegs and Cumans of Ukraine and then pushed back the Seljuks – a remarkable performance that saved the Basileia Romaion. No wonder his daughter Anna adored Alexios, who reminded her of ‘a fiery whirlwind … His dark eyebrows were curved, the gaze of his eyes both terrible and kind … his broad shoulders, muscular arms and deep chest were of heroic mould’ – and he would be the hero of her history, The Alexiad.

Afterwards, Alexios rewarded Venice, founded in 421 by refugees from Roman Aquileia and Ravenna escaping from barbarians, by granting it special trading rights in the empire and bestowing on its elected ruler the titles ‘dux of Venice’. Isolated on its lagoon, Venice had developed from a Constantinopolitan colony into an aggressive seafaring state, ruled by a dux who became the doge of the Serenissima Respublica which expanded into Dalmatia and took up the trading of spices and slaves before starting to seize its own colonies. It was not the only sea state thriving on trade with the east: Genoa and Pisa, both similar Christian oligarchies, were its rivals.

Alexios enjoyed another stroke of luck. In 1085, Wily Robert died of the plague aged sixty-nine, succeeded by his brother Great Count Roger of Sicily, who was now invited by Genoa and Pisa to attack Islamic Tunis, an early crusade. Roger was more interested in selling Sicilian wheat to Tunisia than in massacring Muslims. His response was pungent: ‘Roger lifted his foot and made a great fart, saying “Here’s better counsel!”’ But the Hauteville fart was not enough to still the winds of holy war. A new pope was about to rearm Christendom with a new mission: Crusade.

CRUSADERS: THE GIANT AND THE EMPEROR’S DAUGHTER

Emperor Alexios appealed to the new pope Urban II for aid in fighting the Seljuks. All popes had to balance the power of the German emperors against the Hautevilles. Urban’s election had been opposed by the German emperor, who had set up a counter-pope. Already eager to reinvigorate the Church, to buttress Alexios and probably also to divert Germanic baronial aggression, Urban learned of a new Turkic massacre of Christian pilgrims to Jerusalem. He convened a council at Clermont, where on 27 November 1095 he incited an assembly of princes, clerics and people ‘to destroy that vile race’ of infidel Turks and ‘enter upon the road to the Holy Sepulchre; wrest that land from the wicked race, and subject it to yourselves … for the remission of your sins, with the assurance of the imperishable glory of the Kingdom of Heaven’.