Last summer, one day stands out. While on holiday on the Ionian island of Kefalonia, I persuaded three friends to spend a morning investigating a castle that has intrigued me. Situated on a high hill, the ruins command breathtaking views of the island’s mountains and blissful seaways. Picturesque though this place is, it is its association (which may be true or false) with an 11th-century anti-hero – Robert Guiscard – that has gripped my imagination.
Kefalonia is the largest of the archipelago of Ionian Islands running up the western flank of Greece. Unlike Corfu to the north, it struggled to maintain a major town in antiquity and after. Much of it is mountainous, with fine arable ground restricted today to the south coast near the airport, as well as around the small ports of Lixouri and Sami. In the Roman period, its ports at Fiskardo (known as Panormos) and Sami were modest and Kefalonia’s one maritime villa at Skala, south of Poros, is relatively small. This makes the supposed status of Kefalonia in the Byzantine period all the more intriguing. Little is known about the island between c.700 and 1000, except its propensity to issue distinctive lead seals. Its administration, far from Constantinople, certainly made itself felt, to judge from the dispersal of these seals, far and wide. Possibly this was down to Kefalonia’s position. It sat on the seaways leading up the Balkan coast to Venice and across to Sicily. Later in its Venetian history, its role as a Mediterranean stopover is well documented. Massive Venetian forts were erected at Assos on the west coast and at St George’s overlooking the island’s luxuriant south coast.
One historical incident illustrates the esteem in which it was held in Mediterranean circles. In mid-July 1085, the irascible Norman buccaneer Robert Guiscard was heading for landfall on the island when he suddenly died. He was master of much of western Byzantium from Dyrrachium, modern Durrës, down to Vonitsa. Robert the Weasel, as he was sometimes known, was the architect of Norman dominance over southern Italy. His curriculum vitae was extraordinary. He had sacked Rome, captured a Pope, and, in 1085, aged 70, was hell-bent on conquering no less a state than Byzantium itself. Kefalonia was his next objective. He never quite made it.
Secret Tunnels