Pandulf Ironhead

He was an important nobleman in the fight with the Byzantines and Saracens for control of the Mezzogiorno in the centuries after the collapse of Lombard and Carolingian authority on the Italian Peninsula.

Sometime about 955, Pope John XII led an army of Romans, Tuscans, and Spoletans against Landulf II and Pandulf, but Gisulf I of Salerno came to their rescue and no battle was given.

The Chronicum Salernitanum affirms the co-regency, however, and the principle of the indivisibility of the united Capua-Benevento as declared by Atenulf I in 900, when it says Beneventanorum principatum eius filii Pandolfum et Landulfum bifarie regebant .

The Chronicum says Pandulf tenuit principatum una cum suo germanus annos octo, that is, "held the principality solely with his brother for eight years."

In 967, the Emperor Otto I came down to Rome and granted Pandulf the vacant Duchy of Spoleto and Camerino and charged him with prosecuting the war against the Byzantine Empire.

Even though Pandulf Ironhead was with the emperor on the border of Calabria when news of his brother's death reached him, he quickly returned to Benevento and associated with him his own eldest son Landulf, who was crowned prince in the church of Sancta Sophia, before rejoining the imperial campaign.

In that year, Otto left the siege of Bari in the charge of Pandulf, but the Lombard was captured in the Battle of Bovino (969) by the Byzantines and jailed in Constantinople.

In the 960s, Byzantium had been trying to supplant German influence in Salerno and to this end may have engineered the rebellion which temporarily unseated John XIII, a pro-German pope.

Prince Gisulf of Salerno, however, was allied both to the Greeks and to his Lombard neighbour Pandulf, whom he had rescued some years before and who was, in fact, staunchly pro-German and anti-Greek.