A dark light appears in the black eyes of the old warrior “If you are talking about the German knights that forced their way through the Catalan infantry towards the end of the battle … I think they were able to save their hides … together with the Englishmen … but they took a serious beating … their leader has only one eye and a broken nose, right?” “Yes … he’s Hagen” Hanno answers all in one breath “He made it for sure … he smashed more Catalan skulls than the whole Pisan army was able to, today.” “I’d like you to tell me something … why do you lose your time saving crippled soldiers, instead of looking after your own safety? You are risking a lot …” “I, Gabinius, recruit ‘balentes’ in villages throughout the island … and bring them to fight for the side that pays the best money … Pisa’s wages weren’t bad … but those dimwits have never even opened a military treatise … so when I saw things were taking a bad turn I thought: what shall I tell Tzitza Peppa, Columba, Bonaccattu, what shall I tell all of the matres that entrusted their balentes to me? Could I come back bringing them their dead sons’ swords? And why? So I decided to listen to the advice of a friend I was chatting with a few days before the battle …”
“But you did not answer my question … why save random mercenaries?” “Not random … Germans … and a German once has drunk my wine in my house.” The darkness was now complete and the squad travelled rapidly in the brush … since a while the fragrance of the sea had been reaching them mixed together with that of laurel, myrtle and lentisk essences through the dense thicket. “He was a soldier of fortune just like you … he had come on Genua’s pay to fight against Pisa … he found shelter in our lands owning little more than his sword … but he was of good character … he fitted well in our community and worked with us … pulled in the fishing nets, repaired the palisade traps … who knows perhaps it was because of the beautiful eyes of Reparata, a virgin in the atedeo of Bainzu … who knows … he was a strapping, well-built man and worked in peace with us … He was our guest and we became friends.
Then one morning at dawn while we were preparing the nets to go out to the ‘praniggiu’ … a Saracen galley showed up … coming from Antiogu for sure … it approached rowing, sliding on water in the morning still … twenty or thirty of them swam to the beach and came to shore as ghosts … it was just three of us on the beach … the youngest of us run away as fast as the wind … but they would have caught him if it hadn’t been for Wolfram … who picked up an oar and confronted the band of “faccis nieddas” … and he killed so many with the oar, so many with the weapons he grabbed from the fallen enemies … when a group of balentes arrived the “faccis nieddas” were running away … Wolfram was on the ground … covered with the bodies of the killed enemies … he had protected our village … Do you understand, Hanno? I owed something to Wolfram … and you and your friends have collected on it …”
“Yes … something similar happened in my village as well … in Carinthia, at the time I was a child … a Frisian … a strong man, a heathen as big as a bear, got himself killed by the Hungarians to save a group of children that were playing on the river’s dry bed … we found seven or eight Hungarians with their skulls crushed like walnuts and five or six more with broken necks … he had perhaps twenty arrows stuck in his body but he was still alive, while the children hugged him and cried … so my grandfather told me … it took him many days to die and we buried him without his iron collar and with a sword … he had earned his freedom at least in the afterlife.”
“Do you see Hanno? It does not matter whether German or Sardinian or Frisian … we are all men under the sun … perhaps one day we will shake hands with the faccis nieddas and with the Hungarians as well … who can say?” “What shall I do now?” “I would like to introduce you to a friend of mine … someone who pays better than Pisa and can perhaps promise us a better future … for soldiers of fortune like us.”
A lanky man emerges from the shadows, wrapped in a purple-dyed woollen cloak … his dark skin and black, perfectly groomed beard make him look like an Oriental, but his gray eyes show a Slavic inheritance. “Hanno … I introduce you to Costantino Lascaris, he comes from Byzantium, on behalf of Alexius Comnenus, Basileus of the Romans … the Csar of the Bulgarians has decided to ally himself to the Republic of the St. Marcus Lion to wage war against the Basileus … and Costantino is recruiting men for the Saint Legions of the Stratiots to send against the Bulgarians … he already recruited many soldiers in the Rus, and now he has come till here …” The Byzantine remains silent, his eyes reflecting the fires … like an open door.
A Byzantine dromon sailed beyond the Isla de Is Cavurus in the following days … eastbound, carrying the destinies and hopes of a diverse group of men. Hanno was thinking about the seas of grass in his Carinthia, and about the crazy island that he thought he was leaving forever behind him … who can say where one’s life goes when a man is at sea?
“But you did not answer my question … why save random mercenaries?” “Not random … Germans … and a German once has drunk my wine in my house.” The darkness was now complete and the squad travelled rapidly in the brush … since a while the fragrance of the sea had been reaching them mixed together with that of laurel, myrtle and lentisk essences through the dense thicket. “He was a soldier of fortune just like you … he had come on Genua’s pay to fight against Pisa … he found shelter in our lands owning little more than his sword … but he was of good character … he fitted well in our community and worked with us … pulled in the fishing nets, repaired the palisade traps … who knows perhaps it was because of the beautiful eyes of Reparata, a virgin in the atedeo of Bainzu … who knows … he was a strapping, well-built man and worked in peace with us … He was our guest and we became friends.
Then one morning at dawn while we were preparing the nets to go out to the ‘praniggiu’ … a Saracen galley showed up … coming from Antiogu for sure … it approached rowing, sliding on water in the morning still … twenty or thirty of them swam to the beach and came to shore as ghosts … it was just three of us on the beach … the youngest of us run away as fast as the wind … but they would have caught him if it hadn’t been for Wolfram … who picked up an oar and confronted the band of “faccis nieddas” … and he killed so many with the oar, so many with the weapons he grabbed from the fallen enemies … when a group of balentes arrived the “faccis nieddas” were running away … Wolfram was on the ground … covered with the bodies of the killed enemies … he had protected our village … Do you understand, Hanno? I owed something to Wolfram … and you and your friends have collected on it …”
“Yes … something similar happened in my village as well … in Carinthia, at the time I was a child … a Frisian … a strong man, a heathen as big as a bear, got himself killed by the Hungarians to save a group of children that were playing on the river’s dry bed … we found seven or eight Hungarians with their skulls crushed like walnuts and five or six more with broken necks … he had perhaps twenty arrows stuck in his body but he was still alive, while the children hugged him and cried … so my grandfather told me … it took him many days to die and we buried him without his iron collar and with a sword … he had earned his freedom at least in the afterlife.”
“Do you see Hanno? It does not matter whether German or Sardinian or Frisian … we are all men under the sun … perhaps one day we will shake hands with the faccis nieddas and with the Hungarians as well … who can say?” “What shall I do now?” “I would like to introduce you to a friend of mine … someone who pays better than Pisa and can perhaps promise us a better future … for soldiers of fortune like us.”
A lanky man emerges from the shadows, wrapped in a purple-dyed woollen cloak … his dark skin and black, perfectly groomed beard make him look like an Oriental, but his gray eyes show a Slavic inheritance. “Hanno … I introduce you to Costantino Lascaris, he comes from Byzantium, on behalf of Alexius Comnenus, Basileus of the Romans … the Csar of the Bulgarians has decided to ally himself to the Republic of the St. Marcus Lion to wage war against the Basileus … and Costantino is recruiting men for the Saint Legions of the Stratiots to send against the Bulgarians … he already recruited many soldiers in the Rus, and now he has come till here …” The Byzantine remains silent, his eyes reflecting the fires … like an open door.
A Byzantine dromon sailed beyond the Isla de Is Cavurus in the following days … eastbound, carrying the destinies and hopes of a diverse group of men. Hanno was thinking about the seas of grass in his Carinthia, and about the crazy island that he thought he was leaving forever behind him … who can say where one’s life goes when a man is at sea?
Matres mothers
Atedeo family (??)
Bainzu a man’s proper name (equivalent of Salvatore?)
Praniggiu the low waters in the bay
Antiogu S. Antioco (an island off the coast of southern Sardinia)(??)
“faccis nieddas” blackfaces
balente valiant man
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