When the ferocious Norman warlord, Boamund of Taranto, arrived outside the gates of Constantinople

in 1097, at the head of tens of thousands of Western Europeans clamoring for war, the Byzantine

Emperor Alexius Comnenus had good reason to be nervous. Despite the fact that these newcomers were now nominally allied to the

Byzantines, Norman adventurers had been carving out portions of his empire for almost a century,

most notably in the now Norman dominated south of Italy, where Bowman's father, Robert Giscard,

and his uncle, Roger the Great Count, had risen from humble roots to carve out duchies for themselves in recent years that were arguably now more powerful than their original homelands, not to mention the fact that Alexius had personally dealt with his fair share of opportunistic Normans over the years, both as emperor and before, during his military career as a general.

Whilst Bowman, Robert Geiscard, and the Great Count, were arguably the most famous Norman

adventurers to capitalize upon the growing Byzantine weakness of the 11th century, others had

also tried their luck. Of these, none was more feared than a certain mercenary commander named Roussel de Baleel,

who, for a brief time in the 1070s, during the disastrous civil war,

which followed in the wake of the Byzantine defeat at Manzikert against the Seljit Turks,

managed to carve out a Norman principality for himself, at the very heart of Asia Minor,

with the modern-day city

of Ankara as his capital.

Whilst almost nothing is known of Russell's early life before he arrived in Norman

Italy, speculation suggests that he may have been exiled from Normandy for some unrecorded crime.

It's unknown exactly when he arrived in Apulia, but by the late 1050s, he was probably,

like the other minor lords and knights who had flooded into Italy, seated at his own castle,

from where he launched occasional raids upon the local population,

whilst also pledging his overall allegiance to Robert Giscard, the foremost Norman in Italy at the time.

Once Giscard was officially legitimised by the Pope in 1059, through a combination of threats and offers of help

in the Papacy's struggle against the Holy Roman Empire

...