The Kingdom in the Sun Read online

  THE KINGDOM IN THE SUN

  1130-1194

  JOHN JULIUS NORWICH

  Faber and faber

  This edition first published in 2010 by Faber and Faber Ltd Bloomsbury House, 74-77 Great Russell Street London

  Printed by CPI Antony Rowe, Eastbourne

  All rights reserved © John Julius Norwich, 1970

  The right of John Julius Norwich to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

  isbn 978-0-571-26044-7

  For my mother

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Acknowledgements

  part one:

  morning storms

  1 The Cost of the Crown

  2 Revolt in the Regno

  3 The Imperial Invasion

  4 Reconciliation and Recognition

  part two:

  the noonday kingdom

  5 Roger the King

  6 Enemies of the Realm

  7 The Second Crusade

  8 Climacteric

  part three:

  the lengthening shadows

  9 The New Generation

  10 The Greek Offensive

  11 Realignments

  12 Murder

  13 The End of a Reign

  part four:

  sunset

  14 The Counsellors of Unwisdom

  15 The Second Schism

  16 The Favourite's Fall

  17 The English Marriage

  18 Against Andronicus

  19 The Resplendent Shadow

  20 The Three Kings

  21 Nightfall

  Appendix:

  The Norman Monuments of Sicily

  Bibliography

  In Sicily one might find, all within a few miles of each other, the castle of some newly-created baron, an Arab village, an ancient Greek or Roman city and a recent Lombard colony; in one and the same town, together with the native population, there might be one quarter of Saracens or Jews, another of Franks, Amalfitans or Pisans; and among all these various peoples, there would reign that peaceful tranquillity which is born of mutual respect. . . . The bells of a new church, the chanting of the monks in a new abbey, would mingle with the cry of the muezzin from the minaret, calling the faithful to prayer. Here was the Latin Mass, modified according to the Gallican liturgy; here, the rites and ceremonies of the Greeks; here, the rules and disciplines of the Mosaic Law. The streets, squares and markets revealed a marvellous variety of costume; the turbans of the orientals, the white robes of the Arabs, the iron mail of the Norman knights; differences of habits, inclinations, celebra­tions, practices, appearances: infinite and continuous contrasts, which yet came together in harmony.

  I. la lumia,

  History of Sicily under William the Good, 1867

  Just over sixty years ago, in the preface to his own history of the Norman Kingdom of Sicily, M. Ferdinand Chalandon—a writer, heaven knows, not normally given to excessive dramatisation— noted that an unhappy fate seemed to hang over all would-be historians who tackled the subject; naming no less than three who, as he delicately put it, had 'prematurely disappeared' before their work was completed. In 1963, to a writer embarking on his first full-scale literary venture with an already distinct sensation of having bitten off more than he could chew, it was hardly an encouraging reminder; and there have been many moments in the past seven years when the end of my labours did indeed seem impossibly remote. It is therefore with more surprise than anything else that I now find that I have come to the end of my story.

  This second volume of the Hauteville saga is self-contained, in the sense that it presumes the reader either not to have read its pre­decessor or, if he has, to have forgotten it. It does, however, take up the tale where The Normans in the South left off—at King Roger's coronation on Christmas Day 1130 in Palermo Cathedral—and carries it through to that other, blacker Christmas when the most coruscating crown of Europe was laid, by an English archbishop, on the head of one of the most loathsome of German Emperors. The sixty-four short years that separated those two events—less of a span than we have the right to expect for ourselves—constituted the whole lifetime of the Kingdom; they also provided the island with its golden age when, for the first and only time in history, the three great racial and religious traditions of the Mediterranean littoral fused under the southern sun and crystallised into that flashing, endlessly-faceted jewel that was the culture of Norman Sicily.

  It is—or at least it should be—above all else the surviving monu­ments of this culture that draw us to Sicily today; monuments which miraculously translate the Hautevilles' political achievement into visual terms and in which Western European, Byzantine and Islamic styles and techniques effortlessly coalesce in settings of such magical opulence that the beholder is left dazzled and incredulous. I have therefore done my best to make this book not only an account of people and events but also a guide to these monuments. The most important of them I have described in detail, not in a separate and indigestible chapter but at suitable points in the course of the narra­tive, so as to relate them as directly as possible to their founders or to the circumstances surrounding their construction. The rest, graded according to the time-honoured star system and furnished with page references where appropriate, I have relegated to a list in the appendix. This, I like to think, records every item of Norman work worthy of the name still surviving in Sicily; it is certainly the most comprehensive one yet to appear in this country.

  But the history of Roger's Kingdom is something more than a background to its works of art, however memorable they may be. It is also one of the tragedies of Europe. Had it lasted, had it succeeded in preserving those principles of toleration and understanding to which it owed its existence, had it continued to serve as a focus of intellectual enlightenment in a blinkered and bigoted age and as the cultural and scientific clearing-house of three continents, then ours at least might have been spared much of the suffering that awaited it in the centuries to come, and Sicily might have been the happiest, rather than the most ill-starred, of Mediterranean islands. But it did not last; and this book has had to tell not only of how it flourished, but also of its failure and its fall.

  One further point, which I have already made in the introduction to The Normans in the South, must I think be re-emphasised here: that this is in no sense a work of scholarship. When I started it I knew no more than anyone else about Sicily or the Middle Ages; and now that I have finished I have no plans to write any more about either subject again. Here, quite simply, is a piece of historical reportage, written for the general public by one of their own number—one whose sole qualifications for the task were curiosity and enthusiasm. I hand over my typescript now with the same hope that I had when I began: that these emotions may prove infectious, and that others may grow, as I have grown, to love—and to lament—that sad, superb, half-forgotten Kingdom, whose glory shone ever more golden as the sun went down.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Much of Chapter 2 of this book was written during a fortnight in June, 1967, when the outbreak of war in the Middle East left me— largely through my own incompetence—stranded in the British Embassy, Khartoum; and I should like to thank Sir Robert and Lady Fowler for the kindness they showed, at an appall
ingly difficult time for themselves, to an uninvited, unexpected and virtually unknown guest. More thanks wing off to the Languedoc, where Xan and Daphne Fielding saw me so splendidly through Chapter 16. All the other chapters first saw the light in the London Library, of which I seem by now to have become part of the furni­ture. To Stanley Gillam, Douglas Matthews and every member of the staff—especially those who have to keep calling me down to the telephone—my gratitude is, as always, boundless.

  Dr N. P. Brooks of St Salvator's College, St Andrew's, read the book in typescript, saved me several slips and made many invaluable suggestions. Most of these I have accepted; for the few that I have not, I am every bit as grateful. My friend John Parker of the University of York, besides making the substantial indirect contri­bution listed in the bibliography, also answered several queries about the Orthodox world and solved the Dimitritza problem on p. 342. I also owe a very special debt to Barbarina Daudy, whose astonish­ing gift of tongues, combined with equally remarkable powers of impromptu translation, saved weeks of my time but cost her untold hours of her own. I can only hope that they and the many others who have given me help and advice at all levels will not feel, on reading the results, that their labours have been altogether in vain.

  J. J.N.

  PART ONE MORNING STORMS

  THE COST OF THE CROWN

  How many and what dreadful shocks and tumults resulted from that great clash when the son of Peter Leoni strove to rise up from the north against Innocent of blessed memory. . . . Did not his fall drag down with it a portion of the stars themselves ?

  John of Salisbury, Volicrathus, VIII, xxiii

  On Christmas Day 1130 Roger de Hauteville was crowned King of Sicily in Palermo Cathedral. It was a hundred and thirteen years since the first bands of young Norman adventurers had ridden down into the Italian South—ostensibly in response to an appeal for help made by a Lombard nationalist in the Archangel Michael's cave on Monte Gargano, but effectively in search of fame and fortune; sixty-nine since the army of Roger's uncle Robert Guiscard, Duke of Apulia, had first landed on Sicilian soil. Undeniably, progress had been slow: during the same period William the Conqueror had mopped up England in a matter of weeks. But the country William had had to tackle was a well-ordered, centralised state, already deeply penetrated by Norman influences, while Robert and his companions had been faced with anarchy—a South Italy torn apart by the con­flicting claims of a Papacy, two Empires, three races and an ever-changing number of principalities, duchies and petty baronies; a Sicily that had languished for two centuries under Saracen domina­tion, where the Greek Christian minority lay helpless as jealous local emirs endlessly squabbled for power.

  Bit by bit, the chaos had been resolved. Roger's father Roger I, Great Count of Sicily, had spent the last thirty years of his life welding together the island and its people. With a perception rare for his time, he had seen from the outset that the only hope of success lay in integration. There would be no second-class Sicilians. Everyone, Norman or Italian, Lombard or Greek or Saracen, would have his part to play in the new state. Arabic and Greek, as well as Latin and Norman French, would be official languages. A Greek was appointed Emir of Palermo, a beautiful and resonant tide which Roger saw no reason to change; another was given charge of the rapidly growing navy. Control of the exchequer and the mint was placed in the hands of the Saracens. Special Saracen brigades were established in the army, quickly earning a reputation for loyalty and discipline which they were to preserve for well over a century. The mosques remained as crowded as ever they had been, while Christian churches and monasteries, both Latin and Greek—several of them Roger's own foundations—sprang up in increasing numbers throughout the island.

  Peace, as always, brought trade. The narrow straits, cleared at last of Saracen pirates, were once again safe for shipping; Palermo and Messina, Catania and Syracuse found themselves thriving entrepot centres on the way to Constantinople and the new Crusader states of the Levant. The result was that by the time the Great Count died in 1101 he had transformed Sicily into a nation, heterogeneous in its races, religions and languages but united in loyalty to its Christian ruler and well on the way to becoming the most brilliant and prosperous state of the Mediterranean, if not of Europe.

  Roger II had carried on the work. It suited him perfectly. Born in the South of an Italian mother, educated during his long minority by Greek and Arab tutors, he had grown up in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of tolerance and mutual respect created by his father, and he instinctively understood the complex system of checks and balances on which the internal stability of his country depended. There was little of the Norman knight about him. He possessed none of the warlike attributes which had brought glory to his father and his uncles, and in a single generation had made the name of an obscure Norman baron famous throughout the continent. But of all those Hauteville brothers only one, his father, had developed into a statesman. The rest—even Robert Guiscard himself, for all his genius —were fighters and men of action to the end. Roger II was different.

  He disliked war and, apart from a couple of ill-starred expeditions during his youth in which he did not personally participate, had avoided it whenever possible. In appearance a southerner, in temperament an oriental, he had inherited from his Norman forbears nothing but their energy and their ambition, which he combined with a gift for diplomacy entirely his own; and it was these qualities, far more than his prowess on the battlefield, that had enabled him at last to acquire for himself the duchies of Apulia and Calabria and so to reunite the South in a single dominion for the first time since the Guiscard's day.

  On a bridge crossing the Sabato river outside the walls of Benevento, soon after sunrise on 22 August 1128, Roger was invested by Pope Honorius II with his triple dukedom; and rose from his knees one of the most powerful of European rulers. He had only one more objective to attain before he could treat as an equal with his fellow-princes abroad and impose his authority on his new South Italian vassals. That objective was a crown; and two years later he got it. Pope Honorius's death early in 1130 led to a dispute over the papal succession, as a result of which two opposing candidates were simultaneously elected to the throne of St Peter. The story of these two elections has already been told1 and there is no need to repeat it here in detail; suffice it to say that both were highly irregular and that now, as then, it is hard to decide which of the protagonists had the stronger claim. The first, however, who had taken the name of Innocent II, soon had virtually the whole continent behind him; his rival, Anacletus II Pierleoni, holding Rome but little else, turned— like so many of his predecessors in moments of crisis—to the Normans; and so the bargain was struck. Roger promised Anacletus his support; in return, and under papal suzerainty, he became King —of the third largest kingdom in Europe.

  The arrangement was, in the short term, even more beneficial to Anacletus than it was to Roger. He should have been in a strong enough position. Uncanonical as his election was, it was no more so than that of his rival, and it certainly reflected the majority view in the Curia; in any free vote by all the cardinals Anacletus would have

  1 The Normans in the South, ch. 23, pp. 323-6.

  been an easy victor. Even as things were, he had been acclaimed by twenty-one of them. His piety was generally admitted, his energy and ability unquestioned. Rome was still overwhelmingly loyal to him. Why was it, then, that only four months after the wretched Innocent had been forced to flee the city, Anacletus should in his turn have found the ground falling away beneath his feet?

  He himself, perhaps, was partly to blame. Although he has under­gone so much subsequent vilification that it is now almost impossible to form a clear picture of his character, it is beyond doubt that he was eaten by ambition and totally unscrupulous in the attainment of his ends. For all his reformist background, he had not hesitated to make use of his family's immense wealth to buy support among the aristocracy and people of Rome. There is no reason to believe that he was more corrupt than the major
ity of his colleagues, but rumours of his bribes had been assiduously spread by his enemies, who sup­ported them with lurid accounts of his spoliation of Church property once Rome was in his power; and they found a ready audience among those in Northern Italy and abroad whose ears were not temporarily deafened by the jingle of Pierleoni gold. He was also handicapped— paradoxically enough—by his tenure of the Holy City, which held him down in the Lateran while Innocent progressed through Europe whipping up support. Yet these were all secondary considerations. There was one other factor which weighed the scales against Anacletus more heavily than all the others put together, and which was ultimately to prove the destruction of all his ambitions and his hopes. That factor was St Bernard of Clairvaux.

  St Bernard was now forty years old and far and away the most powerful spiritual force in Europe. To an objective twentieth-century observer, safely out of range of that astonishing personal magnetism with which he effortlessly dominated all those with whom he came in contact, he is not an attractive figure. Tall and haggard, his features clouded by the constant pain that resulted from a lifetime of exaggerated physical austerities, he was consumed by a biasing religious zeal that left him no room for tolerance or moderation. His public life had begun in 1115 when the Abbot of Citeaux, the Englishman Stephen Harding, had effectively released him from monastic discipline by sending him off to found a daughter house at Clairvaux in Champagne; from that moment on, almost despite himself, his influence spread; and for the last twenty-five years of his life he was constantly on the move, preaching, persuad­ing, arguing, debating, writing innumerable letters and compulsively plunging into the thick of every controversy in which he believed the basic principles of Christianity to be involved.