And these relations were deteriorating fast. Innocent was not normally a difficult man. Though he came from an ancient and noble family of Rome—the Papareschi—contemporaries like Bishop Arnulf of Lisieux speak of his robust simplicity and the quiet modesty of his manner. He never raised his voice which, we are told, was gentle and pleasant. His private life was without blemish. Before he became Pope he had no enemies, and even afterwards no one was ever able to level any serious accusations against him. Yet behind this rather colourless exterior lay a fundamental stubbornness which, particularly when he had St Bernard at his elbow, made him incapable of compromise. He was determined to be reinstated in Rome before he died, but he was already nearly seventy and time was growing short. Meanwhile the imperial army, during the best part of a year in Italy, had consistently ignored or overridden him. While it wore itself out on cheap triumphs in the remotest corners of the peninsula, he was as far from the throne of St Peter as ever.
We can imagine the Pope speaking, quietly but forcibly, on these lines to Lothair when they met at Bari; and his words doubtless lent additional colour to the stories the Emperor had already heard from his son-in-law about Innocent's attitude at Viterbo, Monte Cassino and elsewhere. But these political and personal differences were themselves only reflections of a more ominous discontent, now making itself felt throughout the camp. The coolness which had long existed between the German army and the papal retinue was developing into open hostility. To some extent this may have been due to a natural antipathy between Teuton and Latin, or between men of the sword and men of the spirit; but there were other, more immediate causes. The climate of Bari is damp and enervating, its summers merciless; malaria was a constant scourge; and the month that the imperial troops were forced to spend besieging the citadel— the longest period that they had stayed in one place since the previous winter—had lost them both their momentum and their morale. Suddenly they seem to have woken up to the pointlessness and inconclusiveness of a campaign against an enemy who refused to come out and fight. If they were ever to force Roger into battle it would mean marching another several hundred miles in almost the opposite direction, passing through barbarous and increasingly hostile country and undertaking a sea crossing which, though short, would in the circumstances be both complicated and dangerous. It would also mean at least another year—and they had been away ten months already—separated from their homes and families. And for what? Just so that a bunch of haughty, endlessly complaining Italians could install themselves in Rome, another two hundred miles away and once again in a different direction, where it was quite obvious that they were not wanted and where there was a perfectly acceptable Pope already.
If Lothair ever in fact intended to march on through Calabria to Sicily—and it is far from certain that he did—this new mood in his army soon dissuaded him. Feudal law laid down precise time limits for the military service due from a vassal to his liege-lord, and not even the Emperor could force his men to go far beyond these limits against their will. After the capitulation of the Bari garrison— whose tenacity he punished by hanging a number of them from gibbets all round the city and flinging the rest into the sea—he decided against any further advance down the coast. Retracing his steps as far as Trani, he turned sharply inland. Perhaps the air of the Apennines would cool his army's temper.
It did nothing of the sort. Nor even, a few days later, did the satisfaction of capturing Melfi, the earliest Hauteville stronghold in Italy, and massacring three hundred of its defenders. By now the imperial camp had been thoroughly permeated by Roger's agents, who were working on the growing disaffection and backing up their arguments with liberal dispensations of Sicilian gold; and they actually succeeded, while the army was still at Melfi, in provoking some of the soldiers to take up arms against the Pope and his Cardinals with the intention of murdering them in cold blood. Lothair heard of the attack just in time; he called for his horse, galloped to the papal tents and somehow managed to restore order before any serious harm had been done. But it was an angry and resentful cavalcade that trailed off once more through the mountains.
At Lagopesole the Emperor called a halt. For a fortnight his army rested while, in the presence of Abbot Rainald and a delegation from Monte Cassino, the whole status of the abbey, including its relations with both Empire and Papacy, was subjected to exhaustive investigation. A full account of what took place—even if we were able to sift truth from falsehood in the distressingly unreliable chronicle of the monastic librarian, Peter the Deacon—need not detain us here; but the conclusions were clear enough. Rainald and his brethren were made to promise 'obedience to Pope Innocent and all his successors canonically elected', and to 'renounce and anathematise all schism and heresy', with particular condemnation for 'the son of Peter Leone, and Roger of Sicily, and all who follow them'. Only then were they received, barefoot, by Innocent and accepted back, with the kiss of peace, into the Church's bosom.
Lothair himself, who had strong feelings about the monastery's imperial status, may have been rather less satisfied than Innocent over the outcome of the Monte Cassino affair. But he could not risk an open breach with the Pope and probably wanted to make some amends for the incident at Melfi. Besides, news had just reached him of far more immediate interest. A Pisan fleet a hundred strong had appeared off the Campanian coast; Ischia, Sorrento and Amalfi had all made their submission. ThePisans had then tried to relieve Naples but, finding the Sicilian blockade too strong for them, had headed south and were now attacking Salerno, Roger's mainland capital.
Eager to give the Pisans every support—and also, one suspects, to be properly represented on the spot in the event of any further quick victories—the Emperor hurriedly despatched Duke Henry, with Rainulf of Alife and a thousand knights, to Salerno. They arrived to find the city already under siege by Robert of Capua, with whose help they had no difficulty in sealing it off completely from the landward side. Meanwhile the Pisans, having commandeered the whole Amalfitan fleet of some three hundred vessels, had been joined by a further eighty from Genoa. Their Sicilian opponents, with only some forty ships in the harbour of Salerno, were hopelessly outnumbered. The siege of Naples, which had now been dragging on for two years, was lifted in order to liberate all available fighting men and ships for the defence of the capital; but against a combined force of such proportions the defenders had little hope and they knew it.
Even now, with his Italian kingdom overrun and its very capital threatened, Roger himself made no move. His attitude, craven as it must have appeared, was in fact the only one possible. To have sailed out from Palermo at the head of a new army of Saracens would have been the action of a hero, but hardly that of a statesman; it would have invited a defeat from which, even if he had survived, he could never have recovered. And so he stayed in Sicily, leaving the defence of Salerno to his local governor—an Englishman, Robert of Selby.
This Robert was the first of a long line of his compatriots who, as the century wore on, were to travel south to take service with the Kings of Sicily. We know nothing of his early life; but in the years since his arrival he had clearly gone a long way towards earning the reputation he was to enjoy ten years later, when a contemporary English historian, John of Hexham, was to describe him as 'the most influential of the King's friends, a man of great wealth and loaded with honours'. He had been appointed governor in Campania only a few months before, and he now proved himself worthy of the King's trust. Salerno, throughout that disastrous summer, had remained unflinchingly loyal to its sovereign. Its garrison of four hundred knights was strong and in good heart; soldiers and citizens together were ready to defend themselves, and for three weeks they fought fiercely and with courage.
Then, on 8 August, the rest of the imperial army appeared over the mountains to the east, the Emperor himself riding at its head. Lothair had originally intended to leave the siege to his son-in-law; but the summer was creeping on, and the unexpected force of the city's resistance had caused him to change his
mind. Events proved him right. To the Salernitans, his arrival meant two things; first, that in the face of such reinforcements they themselves could no longer hope to hold out until the winter, when they had counted on the Germans to withdraw; and second, that by a quick surrender to Lothair and a simultaneous request for imperial protection they might yet escape being sacked and pillaged by the Pisans. These views, eminently sensible as they were, were fully shared by Robert of Selby. Summoning the elders of the city, he told them so. He himself, representing the King over the entire province, could of course have no part in any capitulation; it would be a matter for Salerno only. Nevertheless, his advice to them was to lose no time in sending a deputation to the imperial camp to seek peace and protection.
The next day it was all over. Lothair, surprised, delighted and doubdess gratified by this new proof of his prestige, imposed unusually mild terms. In return for a war indemnity, the lives and property of all Salernitans were guaranteed; even the four hundred knights of the garrison were given their freedom. Meanwhile Robert of Selby, with a small picked force, had withdrawn to the high citadel above the city—that same so-called castello normanno that had witnessed the stand of Salerno's last independent prince against Robert Guiscard sixty years before and whose ruins can still be seen—where he intended to keep the Sicilian banners flying until the King himself should relieve him. When that moment came, he would at least find his mainland capital still standing.
The arrangement, in fact, was welcomed by all the parties concerned—except one. The Pisans were furious. Not only had they looked forward to rich plunder from a captured Salerno; they had also been relying on this opportunity to annihilate one of their principal trading competitors for years, perhaps decades, to come. To the Emperor they had been an indispensable ally, without whom the city would never have been won; to the Pope they had provided a refuge for much of the past seven years; and in return they had received nothing. If that was all imperial alliances meant, they would have no more of them. If the Emperor could make a separate peace with his enemies, so could they. One of their ships sped off to Sicily to make terms with Roger; the others turned sulkily home.
Pope Innocent was later to have some moderate success in calming the Pisans down; but to Lothair their defection was of no importance. His campaign was over. He was probably none too sure himself just how much lasting good he had achieved. He had certainly failed to crush the King of Sicily as completely as he had hoped; on the other hand he had equally certainly dealt him a blow from which he must have seemed unlikely to recover. Everything now depended on the arrangements that could be made to govern South Italy and fill the vacuum of power once the imperial army had gone. There were three possible candidates for the Dukedom of Apulia—Sergius of Naples, Robert of Capua and Rainulf of Alife. Sergius and Robert were already powerful princes, and he had no wish to strengthen them still further. The Count of Alife, on the other hand, despite—or perhaps because of—his kinship with Roger, had more reason to fear him than either of the others. Two-faced and slippery as he had shown himself to be on occasions, wherever his own interests were concerned he was brave and determined. Furthermore—though Lothair may not have been consciously aware of the fact—he possessed an insidious, persuasive charm which had in the past won over even Roger himself and to which, more recently, the gruff old Emperor had fallen an easy victim. And so Lothair had made up his mind. Only Rainulf, he had decided, could be trusted to hold the dukedom safe for the Empire. His investiture would be the last official ceremony of the Italian expedition, and would set the seal on the campaign.
But who would perform it? The moment the question arose, the old imperial-papal rivalry flared up again as fiercely as ever. It was no good Lothair protesting that the first Apulian investiture, that of Drogo de Hauteville, had been by the Emperor Henry III ninety years before; Innocent quietly pointed out that Robert Guiscard owed his title to Pope Nicholas II. At last a compromise was reached—a tripartite ceremony, at which Rainulf received his symbolic lance at the hands of Emperor and Pope together, Lothair holding the shaft and Innocent the point. Henry of Bavaria, who had long chafed at what he considered the spineless attitude of his father-in-law towards papal pretensions, was outraged; and many of the German knights agreed with him. But Lothair cared little. He had saved his honour; that was enough. He was old and tired, and he wanted to go home.
As August drew to its close, he started on his way. At Capua, disagreeable news awaited him: Abbot Rainald of Monte Cassino, scarcely a month after his oath at Lagopesole, had been in contact with the agents of the King of Sicily. Innocent, with St Bernard's support, had seized on the opportunity to demonstrate his authority over Monte Cassino and had at once appointed, on his own initiative, a commission of two cardinals and Bernard himself to enquire into the canonicity of the abbot's recent election. It was several days before yet another compromise was patched up. On 17 September, before a joint tribunal consisting of both the Emperor and the papal representatives—including St Bernard who, as always, took it upon himself to be principal spokesman—Rainald's election was pronounced uncanonical. The unfortunate abbot had no choice but to lay down ring and staff on the grave of St Benedict; and Wibald, Abbot of Stavelot, a tough Lorrainer who had accompanied the expedition from the start, was 'elected' in his place. We are not told by what means the monks were induced to accept so obvious an imperial nominee; but with the German army encamped at the foot of the hill they probably had little choice in the matter.
Lothair's health was now failing fast; and to all those around him it was plain that his days were numbered. He himself knew it as well as anyone, but he refused to take to his bed; he was a German, and it was in Germany that he wished to die. Rainulf, Robert of Capua and the Campanian vassals accompanied him as far as Aquino, the border of Norman territory. From there, leaving eight hundred of his knights to help the rebels to maintain themselves after his departure, he took the road to Rome; but before reaching the city he turned off towards Palestrina. For him there could no longer be any question of returning the Pope to St Peter's. At the monastery of Farfa he bade him farewell. Henceforth Innocent would have to fight his own battles.
Though he marched with all the speed of which his dispirited, half-disbanded army was capable, it was mid-November before the Emperor reached the foothills of the Alps. His companions implored him to winter there. The sickness was daily increasing its hold on him; it would be folly, they pointed out, to attempt a crossing of the Brenner so late in the year. But the old man knew that he could not afford to wait. With all the determination of the dying he pressed on, and by the end of the month was descending towards the valley of the Inn. But now his last remaining strength deserted him. At the little village of Breitenwang in the Tyrol he stopped at last; he was carried to a poor peasant's hut; and there, on 3 December 1137, at the age of seventy-two, he died.1
1 Passing recently through Breitenwang and enquiring whether there was any memorial to Lothair, I was directed to a fair-sized house on which was fixed a plaque. It read:
Hier starb am 3 December 1137
Lothar II Deutscher und Romischer Kaiser
in den Armen seines Schwiegersohnes
Heinrich des Stolzen.
In Ehrfurcht gewidmet von
Frederick R. Sims London und Holzgau.
4
RECONCILIATION AND RECOGNITION
Thanks be to God who has given victory to the Church. . . . Our sorrow is turned into joy and our mourning into the music of the lute. . . . The useless branch, the rotten limb has been cut off. The wretch who led Israel into sin has been swallowed up by death and thrown down into the belly of hell. May all those like him suffer the same fate!
St Bernard, on the death of Anacletus (Letter to Abbot Peter of Cluny)
During the twelve years since his accession, Lothair of Supplinburg had proved himself to his German subjects a worthy occupant of the imperial throne. Upright, brave and merciful according to the standards of his time
, he had brought back peace to a land riven with civil war; jealous as he was of his imperial prerogatives, he was also a genuinely pious man who had worked hard to heal the schism within the Church; and he left his compatriots happier and more prosperous than he had found them. Once south of the Alps, however, he seemed to lose his touch. Italy to him was a strange and foreign land; its people he mistrusted and misunderstood. Ever unable to make up his mind whether his principal task was to restore the rightful Pope or to crush the King of Sicily, he failed in both; and the indecision produced in him a state of general insecurity which led him to veer between uncharacteristic excesses of cruelty on the one hand and dangerous errors of omission on the other.
Above all, he never realised till it was too late that his show of strength through the mainland dominions of the King of Sicily was nothing but a piece of empty shadow-boxing; and that the only way of bringing Roger under control was by exterminating him altogether. Had he thrown all his strength, at the very outset, into an amphibious attack on Palermo, he might—just possibly— have succeeded; but by the time he learnt this lesson his army was in a state of near mutiny, the Pope was becoming more of an antagonist than an ally, and he himself, worn out by his exertions, the South Italian climate and his own swiftly encroaching disease, was a dying man.
It was less than three months after the imperial part} left Monte Cassino that the Empress Richenza closed her husband's eyes in death; yet already by that time Roger had regained control of a large part of his territory. There could be no more conclusive justification of his policy over the past year. He was welcomed at Salerno when he arrived there at the beginning of October; and as he swept up through Campania scarcely a hand was lifted against him—though his newly-arrived Saracen regiments left a trail of death and destruction in their wake. Capua suffered worst. Prince Robert was away in Apulia but his city, if we are to believe Falco, was seized as if by a furious tempest and depopulated by fire and the sword. 'The King,' he goes on, 'commanded that the city should he totally despoiled . . . the churches plundered and stripped of their ornaments, the women and even the nuns brought to dishonour.' Falco, as we know, could not have written objectively if he had tried; but even after allowance is made for his hatred of the Normans it seems clear that Roger was bent once again on making an example of the rebel towns, just as he had after the earlier Apulian insurrection. Benevento he spared out of respect for its papal status; Naples too escaped lightly after Duke Sergius, for the second time in three years, had flung himself at Roger's feet and pledged his allegiance. Few adversaries would have forgiven a twofold treason such as this, but Roger was by nature a merciful man; he may have decided that after so long and arduous a siege the Neapolitans had suffered enough.
The Kingdom in the Sun Page 7