22. The Adventurous Weasel Married an Adventurous Amazon and Fathered an Adventurous Son
In 1060, Robert Guiscard, the Weasel, sent his younger brother Roger to wrest Sicily from the Arabs. In the meantime, the Weasel seized Bari from the Byzantines, then took the war to Constantinople by invading Greece in 1081. He won a hard-fought victory in which the Normans suffered heavy losses and was forced to return to Italy to raise more men and supplies. He found the men but had no money for supplies. So to raise the funds, he sacked Rome harder than it had been sacked since the barbarian invasions centuries earlier. His machinations finally came to an end when a sudden illness took him in 1085.
At some point, while roiling the Mediterranean world, the Weasel fell in love with a six-foot Amazon who was just as adventurous as he was. Named Sichelgaita, she went into battle, armed and armored at his side. So the Weasel divorced his wife, married Sichelgaita, and to please his new woman, disinherited his oldest son by his first wife, Bohemond. That compelled Bohemond to join the First Crusade in search of his own fortune and set him on the road to an adventurous life as grand and rollicking as that of his father.