The Kingdom in the Sun

by John Julius Norwich

  Roger was plainly in a very different mood from that in which he had dealt with Tancred of Conversano and the Apulian rebels the year before; and in token of reconciliation he restored to Rainulf his wife and son—the causes, willing or not, of so much of the trouble. They seem to have been happy enough to return home—an indica­tion that Countess Matilda's erstwhile desertion of her husband may have been less straightforward than at first appeared. There were limits, however, to the King's forgiveness. Those lands which had been part of his sister's original dowry remained confiscate; and Rainulf was further required to surrender all the territory he had won since the outbreak of hostilities.

  The last enemy was Robert of Capua. He was still, so far as anyone knew, remonstrating with the Pisans for having let him down; and it was at Pisa that a royal messenger now sped to him with Roger's terms: if the Prince returned to Capua before the middle of August and made his submission, he would be confirmed in his possessions, saving only those which the King had captured in the recent fighting. Alternatively, if he preferred to remain absent, his son could be installed on the Capuan throne, with Roger himself acting as Regent on his behalf until the boy became of age. If, however, Robert were to continue in rebellion, his lands would be seized; his principality itself would forfeit its separate identity and revert to the direct control of the Kingdom of Sicily. He could take his choice. Receiving no answer, the King made his formal entry into Capua.

  It was, the Abbot of Telese tells us, a great and prosperous city, defended not only by its walls and towers but also by the broad Volturno winding around its base, with scores of little floating water-mills moored along the banks. Now, however, it offered no defence; the King was welcomed in the cathedral with honour and—if we can accept the Abbot's word for it—with rejoicing. Afterwards he received Duke Sergius of Naples, a faintly ambivalent character in this story, who had always resented Roger's South Italian claims and had made no secret of his sympathy for the insurgents, but who had yet somehow managed to hold himself and his city aloof from any actual fighting. With Capua in the King's hands, Sergius found that he too had no longer any alternative but to come to terms. He too knelt before Roger, and swore him fealty and homage.

  The revolt, it seemed, was over. A week or two previously the citizens of Benevento, after yet another internal upheaval, had thrown out Pope Innocent's representatives and declared once again for Anacletus and the King; at last, for the first time in three years, all South Italy was quiet. In each of those three years the autumn had been well advanced before Roger had been able to return home to his family in Palermo; in 1134 he felt free to leave by the end of July.

  But if Roger appeared to have solved his problems, for the historian there is still one that remains unanswered. What happened to the reinforcements promised to the rebels by the great maritime city-republics of the north? Negotiations had been completed, prices arranged, dates fixed. The final agreement had been signed at Pisa, in the presence of Pope Innocent himself, the previous February and had been ratified by the rebel barons a week or two later. The hundred ships contracted for, fully manned, were to have arrived in March. Had they done so, the course of events in the summer of 1134 would have taken a very different turn. But they never appeared. What prevented them ?

  Two of St Bernard's letters, written in 1134 to the Pisans and Genoese respectively, provide us, perhaps, with a significant clue. To the Pisans,1 characteristically using the Almighty himself as his mouthpiece, Bernard wrote:

  He has said to Innocent his anointed, Here let my dwelling be, and I shall bless it. . . . With my support the Pisans shall stand firm under the attacks of the Sicilian tyrant, not shaken by threats, enticed by bribes or hoodwinked by cunning.

  To the Genoese,2 he made himself clearer:

  1 Letter 130. 2 Letter 129.

  I have heard that you have received messengers from Count [sic] Roger of Sicily, but I do not know what they brought or with what they returned. To tell the truth, in the words of the poet, Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.1 If you should find that anyone amongst you has been so depraved as to have held out his hand for filthy lucre, take prompt cognisance of the matter and judge him as an enemy of your good name and as a traitor.

  Did the King of Sicily, in the early spring of 1134, bribe the Pisans and the Genoese—and possibly the Venetians as well—to break their commitments and deliberately to delay the help they had promised to Robert of Capua ? We shall never be certain. We do know, however, that Sicily, with her unrivalled trading position and financial effici­ency, was rich—richer for her size than any other state on the Mediterranean with the possible exception of Venice; and we know too that Roger was a consummate if tortuous diplomatist who always preferred buying off his enemies to fighting them and had long experience in the arts of corruption. St Bernard's suspicions of him may not have been charitable; but it is to be doubted whether they were very far wrong.

  11 fear the Greeks when they come with gifts. Virgil, Aeneid, II, 49.

  3

  THE IMPERIAL INVASION

  So they embarked on a journey Into the land of Apulia.

  This was the Prince's will.

  The Prince's name was Roger

  Whom King Lothair pursued To Sicily.

  Lothair's Kaiserchronik, II, 17084-89

  The King who sailed back to Palermo in the high summer of 1134 must have been a happy man. Peace and order had been restored to South Italy, and now reigned throughout his kingdom. Though he had not yet managed to prove himself a general worthy of his Hauteville forbears, his courage on the battlefield was no longer in doubt. He was respected in Italy, by friend and foe alike, as he had never been before. The Emperor of Germany had returned across the Alps rather than take up arms against him; the Pope whom he, alone of all the princes of Europe, continued to uphold was still firmly established in Rome. He had done his work well.

  But Roger's troubles were not yet over. Soon after his return to Sicily he fell dangerously ill. He recovered, but only to see his wife in her turn struck down, probably by the same infection. The Greek and Arab doctors of Palermo were among the best in the world, and at Salerno the King had at his disposal the foremost medical school of Europe; but their efforts were in vain. Some time during the first week of February 113 5, Queen Elvira died. She remains a shadowy figure, this Spanish princess who married Roger—in circumstances unknown to us—when he was twenty-two and shared his life for the next eighteen years. Unlike his mother Adelaide, she seems never to have involved herself in affairs of state; and she certainly never accompanied her husband on his campaigns in the manner of his aunt, the redoubtable and unforgettable Sichelgaita of Salerno. Alexander of Telese notes that she was renowned for her piety and charitable works, but there is no record of any monastic founda­tions or churches endowed by her; the abbot's words should probably be taken as being little more than the perfunctory tribute expected from friendly chroniclers on the death of a royal personage. The most moving testimony to her remains her husband's reaction to her death. He was broken-hearted. Now he retired with his grief, seeing no one but a few members of his court and curia until, as Alexander puts it, not only his subjects far away but even those who lived close to him believed that he had followed his wife to the grave.

  Knowledge of his recent illness lent additional strength to this belief, and word of Roger's death spread quickly to the mainland. There could, at such a time, have been no more dangerous rumour. The King's eldest son was barely seventeen, untried in war or statecraft. In the hearts of Rainulf of Alife and of all the erstwhile rebels hope surged anew; they resolved to strike at once. The Pisans, after months of browbeating from Innocent, Bernard and Robert of Capua, no longer malingered, and on 24 April—thirteen months late—their promised fleet, carrying eight thousand men led by Robert himself, dropped anchor in the port of Naples, where Duke Sergius, effortlessly changing sides once again, gave it a warm welcome. News of its arrival decided the waverers. Within days Campania had reverted to it
s old chaos.

  The history of Italy during the Middle Ages—and indeed beyond—is shot through with accounts of inconclusive wars; of tides of battle ebbing and flowing, up the peninsula and then down again, of cities besieged and captured, relieved and recovered, in a dreary struggle that never seems to end. To the historian they are tedious enough; to others they can be insufferable. Readers of this book will therefore be spared the minutiae of the campaigns that were necessary before Roger succeeded once again in establishing his authority.1 Suffice it here to say that the insurgents soon had

  1 Any who yearn for further information can find it, in relentless detail down to the last beleaguered citadel, in the pages of Chalandon.

  cause to regret their precipitate action. For the first six weeks, assisted by continuing rumours of the King's death and the absence of any counter-indications from Palermo, they were able to make some minor advances; but Roger's mainland governors and the various garrisons under their command kept a firm grip on the country and blocked any real progress. Then, on 5 June, the Sicilian fleet appeared off Salerno.

  It was not just the renewed threat to the tranquillity of his main­land dominions that had roused Roger from the torpor into which his wife's death had sunk him; it was anger. He had never been a choleric man by nature, and even now he seems to have felt no deep resentment against the Prince of Capua. Although by ignoring his call for surrender the previous year Robert had remained a declared rebel, although as a sworn vassal of the King he had violated his oath of fealty, at least he had not compounded his offence by swearing a new oath only a few months before taking up arms again. But with the Count of Alife and the Duke of Naples it was different. Within the past year these two had knelt before Roger, placed their hands in his and pledged their allegiance. Rainulf indeed had gone even further, taking advantage of his kinship with a display of mawkish sentimentality which it must have been nauseating to recall. This was treason at its blackest and most shameless; and it would not be forgiven.

  We should remember, in fairness to the Count of Alife, that he may have genuinely believed the stories of the King's death. Brother-in-law or not, however, he knew that he could expect no further mercy. He must play for time. Pope Innocent from his Pisan exile was maintaining the pressure on the northern sea-republics— especially on Genoa, whose men and ships, also promised for 1134, had still not arrived; while beyond the Alps the Abbot of Clairvaux was thundering from every pulpit against the schismatic Pope in Rome and his creature-King, vowing that he would never rest until he had launched a new Crusade against them. Even now, if the rebels could hold out long enough, they might still be saved. With his four hundred remaining followers, Rainulf hurried to Naples. Robert of Capua, ignoring the King's offers of a separate peace, accompanied him; and Duke Sergius, more fearful than either, received them with alacrity and began to prepare his city for a siege.

  To the average observer of the South Italian scene in 1135, possibly even to King Roger himself, the events of that summer must have seemed merely a continuation of the struggle for power which had been continuing almost uninterruptedly for the past eight years. In fact, from the moment that the King's three principal Campanian adversaries barricaded themselves in Naples, the whole complexion of that struggle was changed. Hitherto it had been fundamentally an internal, domestic issue, a trial of strength between a King and his vassals. The fact that that King was largely respon­sible for the continued existence of an Anti-Pope in Rome, and thus for a schism which threw the whole foundation of European political and religious stability into jeopardy, was incidental. No foreign state had actually taken up arms against Roger—unless we count a body of unpunctual and remarkably ineffective Pisan mercenaries—and when Lothair himself had made his long-awaited descent into Italy he had been able to see no further than his own coronation.

  The retreat to Naples marks the point at which the leadership of the opposition to Roger passes out of the hands of his vassals and on to the international plane. Pope Innocent and Bernard had long since accepted that Anacletus could never be dislodged from Rome while the King of Sicily remained able to protect him. Clearly, Roger must be eliminated; equally clearly, the Emperor was the man for the job. And St Bernard made sure that Lothair knew it. Towards the end of 113 5 we find him writing to the Emperor:

  It ill becomes me to exhort men to battle; yet I say to you in all con­science that it is the duty of the champion of the Church to protect her against the madness of schismatics. It is for Caesar to uphold his rightful crown against the machinations of the Sicilian tyrant. For just as it is to the injury of Christ that the offspring of a Jew should have seized for himself the throne of St Peter, so does any man who sets himself up as King in Sicily offend against the Emperor.

  At about the same time a similar exhortation, though made for very different reasons, reached Lothair from a less expected quarter.

  In Constantinople the Emperor John II Comnenus had been watch­ing developments in South Italy with concern. The Apulian sea­ports—themselves until less than a century earlier part of the Byzantine theme of Langobardia, to which the Eastern Empire had never renounced its claim—were only some sixty or seventy miles from the imperial territories across the Adriatic; and the rich cities of Dalmatia constituted a temptation to a little gentle freebooting which, in recent years, Sicilian sea-captains had not always been able to resist. Other raids, on the North African coast, had indicated that the King of Sicily would not long be content to remain within his present frontiers and, if not checked, might soon be in a position to close the central Mediterranean at will. There was also some uncertainty about the Principality of Antioch, founded by Roger's cousin Bohemund during the First Crusade. Bohemund's son, Bohemund II, had been killed in battle early in 1130 leaving no male heir, and the King of Sicily had made formal claim to the succession. His South Italian responsibilities had so far prevented him from pursuing it actively; but he could be counted on to revert to the matter as soon as he had the chance, and the last thing the Emperor wanted was to find a Sicilian army digging itself in along his southern frontier. It looked, in short, as if Roger might soon prove himself a thorn in Byzantine flesh every bit as sharp as Robert Guiscard had been half a century before, and John was determined to stop him. In 113 5 he sent ambassadors to Lothair with promises of generous financial backing for a campaign to crush the King of Sicily once and for all.

  On its way to Germany the Byzantine mission appears to have stopped in Venice to enlist the support of the Republic. Venetian merchants had also been suffering at the hands of Sicilian privateers; already they estimated their losses at forty thousand talents. The Doge was therefore only too glad to help, and promised a Venetian fleet whenever necessary. Meanwhile Venetian envoys joined the Byzantines to give additional strength to the Greek appeal.

  They found that Lothair needed little persuading. The situation in Germany had improved over the past two years—thanks largely to the new prestige conferred upon him by the imperial crown—and his Hohenstaufen enemies had been forced into submission. This time he would have no difficulty in raising a respectable army. With it he would be able to reassert his authority in Lombardy and then, entering his South Italian dominions for the first time, mete out to the Hauteville upstart the punishment he deserved. After that he foresaw little trouble from Anacletus. The anti-Pope's last remain­ing northern stronghold, Milan, had gone over to Innocent in June, and the schism was now confined to the Sicilian Kingdom and to Rome itself. Once Roger were out of the way Anacletus would be left without a single ally and would be obliged to yield. It would be a fitting climax to Lothair's reign. He sent the Bishop of Havelberg off to Constantinople to carry his compliments to John and to inform him that he intended to march against Roger the following year. Then, with something akin to relish, the old Emperor declared a special tax on all Church property—to defray his own share of the costs of the expedition—and began to prepare his army.

  For Roger, 113 5 had been a bad year. H
is own illness, his wife's death, the resurgence of trouble in Italy just when law and order seemed to have been re-established—it was enough to make any man want to turn his face to the wall. But the year had at least ended more satisfactorily than it had begun; and the three ring­leaders of the revolt, Robert, Rainulf and Sergius, by taking refuge with such unseemly haste behind the walls of Naples, had virtually admitted their inability to carry on the struggle without assistance from outside.

  And yet, while there was still hope of this assistance, they refused to surrender. By now Robert of Capua too had lost his last chance of reconciliation. The King's patience was exhausted. A short time before, he had created his eldest son, Roger, Duke of Apulia and his second, Tancred, Prince of Bari, thus dispossessing the rebellious Prince Grimoald. That autumn he invested his third son, Alfonso, with the Principality of Capua in Robert's stead—a ceremony which was shortly afterwards followed by Alfonso's solemn enthronement in Capua Cathedral. The boys were still mere fledglings, Duke Roger only seventeen and Tancred a year or two younger, while Alfonso was barely adolescent. But all three were old enough to play their part in their father's grand design, and in this design there was no longer a place for powerful vassals outside his own family. At the end of 1135, for the first time, every principal South Italian fief was in Hauteville hands.

  All through that winter Naples held out. By the spring of 1136 there was serious famine. Falco records that many of the inhabitants, young and old alike, men and women, collapsed and died in the streets. And yet, he adds proudly, the Duke and his followers remained firm, 'preferring to die of hunger than to bare their necks to the power of an evil King'. Fortunately for them, Roger's blockade was never entirely effective; though the besiegers had cut off all access by land, the Sicilian navy never managed to achieve similar success in the sea approaches, with the result that both Robert and Sergius were able on separate occasions to slip away to Pisa for essential supplies. Even so, it is unlikely that Naples could have maintained its morale much longer had not Robert also made a hurried journey to Lothair's court at Speyer and returned, laden with imperial honours, to reveal that the Emperor was already well advanced with his preparations for the relief expedition.