An Adriatic Hastings, 1081
Michael E. Martin recounts how Normans from Italy invaded the Byzantine Empire and Robert Guiscard sought to inherit the Imperial Crown.
Fifteen years, almost to the day, after the battle of Hastings, Englishmen and Normans were once more to confront one another, not in the folds of the Sussex countryside, but by the shores of the Adriatic outside the walls of Dyrrachium, modern Durres in Albania, where once the opposed armies of Caesar and Pompey had contested the fate of the Roman republic. The events that took place there almost nine hundred years ago are of more than local interest.
Sir Charles Oman saw in the defeat of the Byzantine Emperor Alexius by the Norman Robert Guiscard, ‘The last attempt made by infantry to face the feudal array of the eleventh century’. He saw the Dyrrachium campaign as a landmark in military history marking the end of the old pre-eminence of the infantry and showing that the future lay with the armoured horseman.
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