Roussel de Bailleul

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Roussel de Bailleul (also Roscelin or Roskelin de Baieul), called Phrangopoulos, a Norman adventurer (or exile), travelled to Byzantium and there received employ as a soldier and leader of men from the Emperor Romanus IV. He may have been a Frank, but whatever the case he joined the Normans of the Mediterranean around 1060, when he appears beside Roger de Hauteville in Sicily. He was present at the Battle of Cerami in 1063, where a larger Saracen army was defeated.

He was present at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071, where he refused to join the fray. Despite this treachery, he was kept in imperial service, where good generals were needed, and was sent into Asia Minor again with a force of 3,000 Franco-Norman heavy cavalry. There Roussel conquered some territory and declared it an independent state in Galatia (1073) with himself as prince, following the example set by his fellow Normans in the Mezzogiorno. His capital was Ankara, modern capital of Turkey. He defeated the caesar John Ducas and sacked Chrysopolis, near Constantinople. He even supported a usurper candidate, but by formally ceding lands that they had conquered, the emperor Michael VII persuaded the Seljuk Turk warlord Tutush I to remove Roussel. However, the Norman evaded imperial would-be captors and found refuge in Amasea, where the population so loved him that he became undisputed governor. He was given up by the people through a ploy of Alexius Comnenus (1074), then a general, later an emperor.

In 1077, he was released (for a ransom) from his Constantinopolitan imprisonment to lead a battalion against the rebel Nicephorus Botaniates. He defeated him handily, but then played the traitor and joined him. This time, the emperor called up the Seljuks again and they defeated and captured him at Nicomedia. He was given over to Byzantium and executed.

[edit] Sources

• Norwich, John Julius. The Normans in the South 1016-1130. Longmans: London, 1967.
• Gravett, Christopher, and Nicolle, David. The Normans: Warrior Knights and their Castles. Osprey Publishing: Oxford, 2006.