22. The Weasel Captures the Pope
Robert Guiscard, The Weasel, defeated and captured the Pope, and forced him to bless him as the king of Calabria – the toe of the Italian boot. That angered the Byzantines, as The Weasel had designs on Bari, their naval base in Italy. A rift opened between Rome and Constantinople, which culminated in 1054 with the Pope excommunicating the entire Eastern Church – a schism between the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches that is ongoing to this day. All thanks to The Weasel. Then in 1060, The Weasel sent his younger brother Roger to wrest Sicily from the Arabs. In the meantime, he 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.
The Weasel 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 named Sichelgaita, who went into battle, armed and armored at his side. So he 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 adventures as grand and rollicking as those of his father.