William’s successes in Africa were short-lived; the garrisons he placed in the conquered towns sorely oppressed the Arabs, and a Moslem patriot of Sfax roused his fellow-citizens to the destruction of their oppressors. William retorted by the cruel execution of a hostage, and the African towns replied by something like a general rising. William sent twenty galleys to reduce the insurrection, and merciless butchery restored his power for a while; but a general movement of the Arabians which extended as far as Morocco was prepared, the Arabs, or Bedouins, dug wells along the proposed line of march, and during three whole years stored up grain by plastering the sheafs of wheat with clay, and Spain joined Africa in manning a fleet of seventy galleys. Before such a force Tunis soon fell, and the Christian garrison was bidden to choose between death and Mohammed’s creed. In other cities the Christians shut themselves up in the forts and prepared for a long resistance, and months passed before the Sicilian fleet, which was engaged in the Balearic Islands, could come to the rescue. But under the walls of Mehdia it was put to flight by a few Arab vessels; the treacherous Majo brought word to King William that the cities of Africa were amply provisioned; and when the unfortunate garrisons had devoured their horses, they only escaped slaughter by the magnanimity of their foes. Majo lost his life in the first outbreak of a revolution in which every member of the house of Tancred took part; King William was taken prisoner in the council chamber, and the insurgents divided among themselves the women of his harem and the accumulated treasure of King Roger; the infuriated Normans, not satisfied with Majo’s death, slew all the Moslem eunuchs of the palace and slaughtered the Moslems in the streets; but discord soon broken out in their own ranks, the bishops appealed to the populace to free the king, and presently the people of Palermo were in arms to a man. Quick to take advantage of the situation, the king made terms with the multitude, promised them anything and everything, and with their help took bloody vengeance upon the barons, the murderer of Majo was blinded and hamstrung, and a sort of order was restored. A second conspiracy, which broke out ten years later, ended in the immediate death of all the conspirators, but the religious hatred between Moslems and Christians, which King Roger’s wisdom had almost entirely allayed, had now broken out with renewed fury; the massacre of Moslems was followed by a furious reaction under a king who was half a Moslem himself, the reign of the eunuchs was restored, every Moslem had a father, a brother, a wife, or a sister to avenge, and a friend in the palace ready to execute his private vengeance; where Mohammedans had been murdered in the public places their Christian murderers now perished wholesale on the scaffold, until the whole country was tired of slaughter, and sank, with its sovereign, into an apathy of weariness. Then William the Bad, giving over the government of his kingdom to his ministers, amused his slothful hours with the building of a magnificent palace, which was called the Zisa, but before that beautiful retreat was ended, he breathed his last at the age of forty-six years; and when he was borne to the grave, the matrons of Palermo, and more especially the Moslem women, followed in thousands, with dishevelled hair, and robed in sackcloth, striking the funeral cymbal in time with their doleful lamentations. Afterwards it was known by a few that the king had been dead several days before his death was announced, the secret having been kept in order that the chief men might gather in council to assure the succession and coronation of the boy William the Second, then barely fourteen years of age. This was in 1166.
When the days of mourning were passed, the royal lad strode in state through Palermo, and radiantly handsome as he was, says the chronicler Falcandus, his beauty was strangely perfected on that day, and there was such imperial grace in his features, that even they who had most bitterly hated his father, and whom no one had expected to be loyal to his heirs, loved the youth forthwith, and cried out that it would be shameful and unmanly to visit the sins of the sire upon the son. The queen, also, his mother, Margaret of Navarre, who was regent till he should be of age, bestowed great gifts, and many pardons, and all manner of gracious treatment upon those who had been discontented.
So the new reign prospered, and in the days of William the Second the cause of law and justice flourished in the land, every man was satisfied with his lot, peace and security prevailed everywhere, the traveller feared not the ambush of highway robbers, nor did the sailor dread the violence of pirates. William was the flower of kings, the crown of princes, the mirror of the citizens, the glory of his nobles, the hope and trust of his friends, and the terror of his enemies. So at least says Richard of San Germano, with much more to the same purpose. Even the discontented Amari, who outdid Gibbon in sarcasm, rivalled him in learning, but was painfully inferior to him in judgment, admits that the young William was crowned amid hopes which he never wilfully disappointed. It is no wonder that he was surnamed the Good, as compared with his father; they lie side by side in stupendous Monreale, and it may be by an accident that the son, who built that great cathedral, should have been placed in a fair sarcophagus of white marble with traceries of gold, and the father in one of plain dark porphyry, almost black.
William reigned three and twenty years, and so changed the character of the court of Palermo and of the government of Sicily that the Mohammedan element sank into abeyance. According to Richard of San Germano the king’s chief counsellors, his ‘two most sturdy pillars of support,’ were Walter of the Mill, the English Archbishop of Palermo, and the Chancellor Matthew. It was by the advice of the archbishop, says this chronicler, that William the Second gave his aunt Constance in marriage to Henry of Hohenstaufen, afterwards Henry the Sixth, making the counts of the kingdom swear upon the sacraments that if the king died childless they would obey Constance of Hauteville and her husband. Also, this Walter of the Mill first built for William the great cathedral where it stands to‑day.
But when William died, and left no heirs, a great dissension arose among the nobles, and they forgot their oaths, many aspiring to the throne; and at last, lest the archbishop should prevail and thrust Constance upon them, they agreed to choose for their king, Tancred, not the great crusader, but the natural son of William the Bad’s elder brother, who had died in early manhood. They could not have chosen a braver or a truer man of his race, and he laboured with all his might for the cause of peace; by a liberal expenditure of the royal treasure, which he was the first to touch, and by some brave fighting, he restored the kingdom of the south, and even the Abbot of Monte Cassino swore fealty to him. He was crowned in 1189, the year before Barbarossa died; and Joanna, the widowed queen of the young king, was Joanna of England, own sister of King Richard the Lion-hearted.
It was not to be expected that a man of such temper as Henry the Sixth would tamely relinquish his just claims to the south, but his father was still alive, and the stirring events of the third Crusade intervened; so that it was not until Frederick Barbarossa had perished in the East that Henry came into Italy; and meanwhile Tancred had no small difficulty in prevailing upon Richard the Lion-hearted and Philip Augustus of France to restrain their men from wrangling in his city of Messina and to proceed on their way.
For Richard was a quarrelsome man, and Roger of Hoveden has left a record of his journey through the south, how he left Salerno when he heard that his fleet had reached Messina, and proceeded to Cosenza by way of Amalfi, which is a geographical impossibility that need startle no one accustomed to the chronicles. He came down by Scalea, and saw the island, where, says Roger, ‘there is a fine chamber beneath the ground, in which Lucan used to study’; and he slept at Cetraro and at other places till he came to Mileto, where ‘there is a tower of wood close by the abbey, by means of which Robert Guiscard attacked and took the castle and town,’ in his quarrel with his brother the Great Count, a hundred years before Roger of Hoveden — but he did not take it, as has been seen. And then, ‘the king of England, departing from Mileto with a single knight, passed through a certain small town, and, after he had passed through, turned towards a certain house in which he heard a hawk, and entering the house
took hold of it. On his refusing to give it up, numbers of peasants came running from every quarter, and made an attack on him with sticks and stones. One of them then drew his knife against the king, upon which the latter, giving him a blow with the flat of his sword, it snapped asunder, whereupon he pelted the others with stones, and with difficulty making his escape out of their hands, came to a priory called Bagnara.’ Thence he hastily crossed the straits and slept in a tent ‘near a stone tower which lies at the entrance of the Faro on the Sicilian side.’ It must be admitted that the royal progress lacked dignity, but on the following day Richard made up for it by making ‘such a noise of trumpets and clarions, that alarm seized those who were in the city,’ that is, in Messina; and by way of making himself at home in a friendly country he seized a monastery, ejected the monks, and fortified himself, and presently, ‘a disagreement arose between the army of the king of England and the citizens of Messina,’ which soon became an open quarrel between the two kings— ‘and to such a pitch did the exasperation on both sides increase, that the citizens shut the gates of the city, and, putting on their arms, mounted the walls.’
The end of it was that the kings agreed together, took Messina and forced Tancred to pay over an exorbitant sum of money, supposed to represent the dowry of the childless Joanna. Roger of Hoveden says that before the conclusion of this so‑called treaty of peace more than a hundred thousand pagans who were in the kingdom of Sicily indignantly refused to serve under King Tancred, both because Henry of Hohenstaufen had laid claim to the throne of Sicily, and also because Richard of England had taken possession of a great part thereof; and that these Saracens fled to the hills with their families and herds, attacking and plundering Christians. It is interesting to learn that while Richard was making such unjustifiable claims he was profoundly impressed by the prophecies and wise sayings of a certain Abbot of Curazzo, who interpreted the revelation of Saint John the Evangelist in a modern spirit; and that, the ‘divine grace inspiring thereto, Richard, being sensible of the filthiness of his life, after due contrition of heart, having called together all the bishops and archbishops who were with him at Messina, made a general confession of his sins and from that time forwards became a man who feared God, and left what was evil and did what was good.’
So at last the turbulent crusaders departed, and Tancred had leisure to go over into Apulia and insure the fidelity of his vassals by a general exhibition of strength and generosity. And now Henry the Sixth and his wife Constance came to Rome and were crowned emperor and empress in the Church of Saint Peter’s, and the Emperor Henry, being pleased with the Romans, made them a present of Tusculum, then the stronghold of the Colonna family, and the Romans promptly destroyed it, as he expected.
Henry immediately entered Tancred’s kingdom in spite of the opposition of the Pope who had just crowned him, and the timid monks of Monte Cassino hastened to swear fidelity to him, while many towns, being taken unawares, placed themselves in his hands; and the emperor received the submission of Salerno and left the empress there, while he himself made a futile attack upon Naples. But as usual desertion and disease did their work in the German army; Henry left Constance in Salerno, and retiring with the remains of his forces returned to Germany. In no long time after this the Count of Acerra received back for Tancred most of the towns the emperor had taken, and he went up to Monte Cassino and entered the abbey, no one opposing him; but when neither prayers nor promises could prevail upon the monks to return to their allegiance to Tancred, he departed without doing them any violence. Henry the Sixth, however, had not given up the struggle; he sent a strong army to the south, while Tancred brought up a considerable force from Sicily, after crowning his eldest son Roger as his successor in case of his own death. He fought desperately for his kingdom, and had he lived he might have held his own. As it was, his son Roger came to an untimely end, and Tancred himself, says Richard of San Germano, died of grief. He left his crown to a child, the infant William the Third and the regency to his queen, a woman of no great spirit. The chancellor Matthew, the wise counsellor of William the Good and the friend of Tancred, was also dead, and Sicily was defenceless before the arms of Henry the Sixth. Tancred’s widow fled from Palermo with her infant son to a safer place, whence she treated with Henry for her life and safety. She surrendered to him at last, and he handed her over with her royal child to one of his faithful captains, ‘to do with them according to his will.’ Then Henry, having got possession of the capital, received the keys of the treasury from the eunuchs of the palace and was shown coffers full of gold, gems, and precious objects, part of which he distributed to his followers, while he sent a part back to Germany; and to this day in the museum of Vienna may be seen the cloak of King Roger, the tunic and leggings of William the Good, richly embroidered with gold and pearls and Arabic characters, with many objects of like interest and value. The emperor established himself in the magnificent palace called the Cuba, now used as a barrack, though almost quite uninjured, and on Christmas Day, in the year 1194, presiding over the council of Palermo, he summoned before him Tancred’s widow and the infant William, a great many bishops and counts of the kingdom, and indicted them for high treason; and he commanded some to be blinded, some to be burnt alive, some to be hanged, and some to be sent captive to Germany. So perished Tancred’s house; and on Saint Stephen’s Day, being the very day after that general condemnation, Constance of Hauteville, the empress, being no longer young, brought forth her only son, who was to be the Emperor Frederick the Second. It is said also that because of her years and because Sicily had been so greatly disturbed concerning the succession, she feared lest it should be said thereafter that the child was not her own. Therefore she caused a tent to be pitched before the cathedral, and the curtain was raised that all the women might come and see her at their will; and so the great emperor was born in a public place.
Accusations of frightful cruelty have been brought against the Emperor Henry; the chronicle I have followed gives the mildest account of his vengeance, but the great weight of evidence goes to prove that he commanded innumerable and most atrocious executions, and that after men, women, laymen, and priests had been hacked to pieces, drowned, burned, or boiled in lard, his unsatisfied ferocity required the executioner to nail a kingly crown upon the living head of a descendant of Tancred of Hauteville.
But Henry did not long survive these horrors. Having gone back to Germany, he was recalled to Palermo in 1097 by the news, perhaps not unfounded, that Constance meant to hold Sicily for herself and defy him. He reached Messina, indeed, and thence proceeded to besiege one of the great vassals in Castrogiovanni; but there a deadly disease overtook him, and in a few weeks he breathed his last, and was buried in the cathedral of Palermo, in that stately tomb from which he had cast out the bones of the unhappy King Tancred and his eldest son.
By the death of these princes, a legitimate line was again established on the throne of Sicily, and the daughter of King Roger took up the reins of government in her own right, despite the will of the Emperor Henry, who had named Markwald of Anweiler, the Grand Seneschal of the Empire, to be regent. A few months after Henry’s death she had dismissed her husband’s German ministers, and crowned her son Frederick king of Sicily, he being then less than four years old. The patriotic Pope Innocent the Third applauded the action of a queen, or empress, whose energies were directed to the expulsion of the Germans from Italy, and approved the coronation of the child Frederick, while asserting for the Holy See certain rights over Apulia and the ecclesiastical revenues in Sicily; but Constance, short-lived, like many of her race, died six months after the coronation, leaving the infant king and future emperor to the guardianship of the Pope himself. Immediately the German vassals of Henry the Sixth, whom Constance had kept down, took courage again and set up a rival to Frederick, in the husband of one of Tancred’s daughters, and though the Pope gave him little countenance, he may have debated upon the possibility of bestowing upon him the Sicilian crown. As a matter of fact, t
he Pope never directly interfered in Sicily during the minority of Frederick.
Meanwhile the Christianizing reign of William the Second had produced lasting results, and the Moslem population had almost quite deserted Palermo; thousands had returned to Africa, and tens of thousands had gone out into the hill country above Mazzara on the southwest coast, and after the year 1200 there are no deeds referring to Moslems in the capital. Those in the provinces were vassals of the churches and monasteries, or of the great nobles, and when Innocent the Third, in his enthusiasm for the fourth Crusade, seized all the ecclesiastical revenues of Sicily for the year 1199, the monasteries ground the Moslems to raise more money; at the same time the Pope issued a proclamation enjoining the greatest severities against those baptized Saracens who had fallen back to Islamism. The oppressed people rose, found a ready leader in their lawful regent by Henry’s will, the German Markwald, who had secured the alliance of Pisa, and they besieged Palermo; but their defeat ruined their cause and exposed them to far greater sufferings. The Pope gave the Christians spiritual arms against the Grand Seneschal, promising the privileges and indulgences of true crusaders to those who fought against Markwald, ‘who tempted his Saracens with captive Christian women and draughts of Christian blood’; but he bade them respect the ancient privileges of the Moslems. The regents removed the boy Frederick to Messina, where he was safe, and sent a force of militia to relieve Palermo. The city had suffered a siege of seventeen days and was already reduced to want of bread when the relieving army arrived, cut the enemy to pieces, and drove Markwald to flight. He was again beaten far to eastward, in the wild country about Randazzo, on the slope of Etna, and his career would have been ended had not the Sicilian regents found it convenient to forgive him and make common cause with him against the pretender, Walter of Brienne, the husband of a daughter of King Tancred; and so the fighting went on, with varying fortune, until both Walter and Markwald perished, and the kingdom was left in comparative peace under the regency of the Pope.
Complete Works of F Marion Crawford Page 1447