The Kingdom in the Sun

by John Julius Norwich

  monstrosities which a more enlightened administration would long ago have swept away. The best, however—Christ Pantocrator gazing in benediction from the dome, the circle of angels garlanding him with their wings, the evangelists studious in their squinches— all these are the finest, purest Byzantine, of which any church in Constantinople would have been proud. Over the choir nearly all bear Greek inscriptions, sure testimony of their date and workman­ship ; by contrast the Virgin in the northern transept,1 the scenes from the Old Testament in the nave and those from the lives of St Peter and St Paul in the side aisles were added by William I some twenty years later, after his father's death. Here and elsewhere the Latin inscriptions, the preference for Latin saints and certain stylistic attempts to break away from the rigid canons of Byzantine icono­graphy suggest that William was employing native artists—presum­ably Italian pupils of the original Greek masters. Other Italians, in the later thirteenth century, were responsible for the enthroned Christ on the western wall over the royal dais2 and the two figures of St Gregory and St Sylvester inside the sanctuary arch, unpardonably introduced in the Angevin period to replace an earlier likeness of Roger himself.

  These almost antiphonal responses of Latin and Byzantine, set in so lavish a frame, would alone have earned for the Palatine Chapel a unique place among the religious buildings of the world. But for Roger they were still not enough. Two of the great cultural traditions of his country had been dazzlingly reflected in his new creation, but what of the third? What of the Saracens, the most populous group of all his island subjects, whose loyalty had been unwavering—in marked contrast to that of his Norman com­patriots—for more than half a century, whose administrative

  1 Seen from below she is inexplicably off-centre—for which the figure of John the Baptist to the upper left seems an awkward attempt to com­pensate. From the large window in the north wall, however, she appears in the dead centre of the visible wall space. From this it has been deduced that this window—which communicates with the interior of the palace—was used from about 1160 onwards as a royal box. (For this and much other fascinating detec­tive work on Sicilian mosaics, see Demus, The Mosaics of Norman Sicily, London, 1956.)

  2 According to an inscription on the wall of the north aisle, this was restored in the fourteenth century.

  efficiency was largely responsible for the prosperity of the Kingdom, and whose artisans and craftsmen were renowned through three continents? Should not their genius also be represented? And so the chapel was further embellished with what is, quite literally, its crowning glory, surely the most unexpected covering to any Christian church on earth—a stalactite ceiling of wood, in the classical Islamic style, as fine as anything to be found in Cairo or Damascus, intricately decorated with the earliest datable group of Arabic paintings in existence.

  And figurative paintings at that. By the middle of the twelfth century certain schools of Arabic art had been jockeyed—principally by the Persians, who had never shared their scruples—out of their old abhorrence of the human form, and the tolerant atmosphere of Palermo led them to experiment still further. The details of the paintings are difficult to make out from floor level, but a pair of pocket binoculars will reveal, amid a welter of animal and vegetable ornamentation and Kufic inscriptions in praise of the King, count­less delightful little scenes of oriental life and mythology. Some people are riding camels, others killing Hons, yet others enjoying picnics with their harems; everywhere, it seems, there is a great deal of eating and drinking going on. Dragons and monsters abound; one man—Sinbad perhaps ?—is being carried off on the back of a huge four-legged bird straight out of Hieronymus Bosch.

  Yet just as it is the ensemble, rather than the individual details, that makes the real impact on the beholder, so must the Palatine Chapel itself be considered not as the sum of its separate elements but as an integrated whole. It is also a work of profound devotion. No other place of worship radiates such incandescent splendour; no other proclaims with such assurance its origin and purpose. This is a chapel built by a king, for kings to worship in. Yet it is still, above all else, a house of God. The royal dais is raised to the level of the choir, but not to that of the sanctuary. Marble-balustraded, backed with inlays in opus Alexandrinum culminating in a huge octagon of porphyry to enhalo the head of the enthroned monarch, it stands at the western end, massive in its majesty. But immediately above it is another throne; this is backed not with marble but with gold; and on it is seated the risen Christ. All the brilliance, all the throbbing colour of this wonderful place, the interplay of verd-antique, ox-blood and cipollino, every inch of it burnished by the million glinting tesserae of the walls, create an atmosphere not of ostentation but of mystery, not of royal pride but of man's humility before his maker. Maupassant chose his metaphor well; entering the Palatine Chapel is like walking into a jewel. And, he might have added, it is a jewel from the crown of heaven.

  PART TWO

  THE NOONDAY KINGDOM

  5

  ROGER THE KING

  Ma quando si acquista stati in una provincia disforme di lingua, di costumi e di ordini, qui sono le difficulta, e qui bisogna avere gran fortuna e grande industria a tenerli.

  But when territories are acquired in regions where there are differences in language, customs and laws, then great good fortune and much hard work are required to hold them.

  Machiavelli, II 'Principe, Book III

  It is not only to the historian, with all his advantages of hindsight and detachment, that the year 1140 appears as the watershed of Roger's reign. The King himself seems to have been fully aware that after ten years of bitter struggle—years which had brought him more than his share of disappointments, betrayals and defeats—his first great task was completed. At last his Kingdom was his own. Of those vassals who had resisted his authority, the most formidable were all dead, dispossessed or in exile. Fighting of a somewhat desultory nature would continue for a few more years yet, notably in the Abruzzi and Campania, where a clearly-defined border had yet to be established with the Papal State to the north. But this would be the primary responsibility of his sons, Roger of Apulia and Alfonso of Capua; they were old enough now to look after their own domains. And in any event the overall security of the Kingdom would no longer hang in the balance.

  The way was clear, in fact, for the second stage of Roger's grand design. The country was united and pacified; now it must be given a constitution. Eleven years before, at Melfi, he had already imposed a great oath of fealty on the barons and leading churchmen of South Italy, setting out the broad outlines of both the political and penal systems by which he intended to govern. But 1129 must have seemed a long time ago. Too much had happened since then—too many oaths broken, too many trusts betrayed. It was better to make a fresh start.

  Roger spent much of the first six months of 1140 preparing his new legislation in Palermo. Since it was to apply with equal validity in all parts of the Kingdom, he might well have been content to promulgate it from his capital; but he did not do so. It was on the mainland that his vassals were the strongest, and there that they enjoyed the greatest freedom. On them above all he had to impress the binding force of his royal authority, and of the code of laws through which he meant to exert it. In July he took ship back to Salerno and at the end of the month, after a quick tour of his sons' recent acquisitions in the Abruzzi, rode in state through the moun­tains to Ariano,1 where his feudatories had been gathering from all parts of the South.

  It is only just over a hundred years ago, in 1856, that the two extant versions of the Assizes of Ariano were discovered—one in the archives of Monte Cassino and the other in the Vatican—and that their importance was first properly understood.2 Infinitely more far-reaching, both in range and effect, than the oaths sworn at Melfi, they constitute a corpus of law which—though many are borrowed directly from Justinian—yet remains unique in the early Middle Ages, covering as it does every aspect of Roger's rule. Two particular features strike one from the outset
. First, as befits so heterogeneous a nation, the King makes it clear that the existing laws of all his subject peoples shall continue in force. Except when there is a direct clash with the new royal ordinances, all the Greeks, Arabs, Jews, Lombards and Normans under his rule are to continue to live, as they have always lived, according to the customs of their fathers.

  The second feature, which runs like a Leitmotiv throughout the

  1 Now Ariano Irpino.

  2 Both texts are given in Brandileone, II diritlo romano nelle kgi normanne e sueve del Regno di Sicilia. The Vatican text is probably identical to that published by Roger at Ariano. That of Monte Cassino seems to be an abridgement, though it also contains certain later additions.

  work, is the stress on the absolutism of the monarchy, stemming in its turn from the divinely-held power of the King. The law is the will of God; and the King—who alone may make and unmake it and stands alone as its ultimate interpreter—is therefore not only a judge but a priest. To question his decisions, or others taken in his name, is both a sin—sacrilege—and a crime—treason. And treason, crimen majestatis, is punishable by death. It extends over a wide and fearful range. It covers, for example, offences and conspiracies not only against the King's person but against any member of his Curia;1 it includes cowardice in battle, the arming of mobs, the withholding of support from the armies of the King or his allies. No other nation, no other legal code in mediaeval Europe conceived of it in such sweeping terms. But then no other European state, with one exception, cherished so exalted a theory of Kingship. That exception was Byzantium.

  Byzantium—here was the key to Roger's whole political philo­sophy. The feudal system which prevailed in his mainland dominions belonged to Western Europe; the civil service that he had inherited from his father in Palermo and the Sicilian provinces was based largely on Arabic institutions; but the monarchy itself, as he con­ceived of it and personally embodied it, was Byzantine through and through. The King of Sicily was not, in the manner of his lesser brethren to the north and west, merely the apex of a feudal pyramid. Before his coronation, like the Emperors of ancient Rome and their successors at Constantinople, he had been careful to secure the agreement and the acclamation of his people; but by the ceremony itself he was imbued with a mysterious, charismatic essence which set him above and apart from common humankind. This remoteness Roger was deliberately to foster throughout his life. His biographer Alexander of Telese writes of how, despite the quickness and brilliance of his conversation, 'he would never, in public or in private, allow himself to become too affable or jovial or intimate, lest people should cease to fear him'. And when, three or four years later, we find him, in the course of diplomatic negotiations with

  1The Curia Regis, from the reign of Roger II onwards, was the principal organ of central government. Its powers were considerably wider than those of a modern cabinet, since it had important judicial responsibilities, especially in matters of civil law.

  Constantinople, demanding recognition as an equal of the Emperor of Byzantium—God's Vice-Regent on earth, Equal of the Apostles-it comes as no surprise.1

  If this theory, though it is unmistakably and repeatedly implied in the legislation, diplomacy and iconography of the Sicilian King­dom, is never quite set out in so many words it is probably because of the one overriding practical difficulty which it raised. Just where, in all this, did the Pope fit in? The question was never satisfactorily answered—a failure which does much to explain the curious duality which appears in all Roger's dealings with the Holy See. As a papal vassal he was prepared to do homage to the Pope as his lawful suzerain; as a Christian he was ready to show him all the respect that he considered due; but as King of Sicily, in matters affecting the Church within his own frontiers, he would brook no inter­ference. His hand was admittedly strengthened by the hereditary right of the Apostolic Legation which his father had wrested from Urban II forty-two years before;2 but, as we shall see, he showed in ecclesiastical affairs a stubbornness and self-will which went far beyond anything that Pope Urban or his successors were ever prepared to contemplate.

  Those of the Ariano Assizes which deal specifically with such affairs tend to stress the King's role as protector of the Christian Church and of the individual rights and privileges of its representa­tives. Heretics and apostates—from, not to, Christianity—are to be punished by the loss of civil rights, and there are heavy penalties for simony. At the same time bishops are excused attendance in the public courts, and the lower orders of clergy are granted lesser exemptions according to their rank. All such measures would have found favour in Rome, but—and this point doubtless provoked a very different reaction—all could be countermanded by the King, against whose judgment or decisions there could be no appeal. And so far as Roger was concerned this power—let the Pope make no mistake about it—was derived not through any historic grant of

  1 The fact that Roger styled himself Rex rather than Imperator in no way weakened this claim. Rex was the accepted translation of the Greek Basileus; it is also, incidentally, used to describe the Emperor Nero on a mosaic in the Palatine Chapel.

  2 The Normans in the South, pp. 273-4.

  legatine authority; together with the right to the high canonical insignia—mitre and dalmatic, staff and pastoral ring—which the King wore on appropriate religious occasions, it stemmed directly from God Himself.

  Similarly strict control was to be exerted over the feudatories. After ten years of defiance and insurrection they were at last quiescent, but they could not be relied upon to remain so indefin­itely. What is interesting about Roger's legislative policy towards them, both at Ariano and later, is his attempt to accommodate an essentially western institution into a predominantly Byzantine political scheme. This meant, in the first place, establishing the maximum degree of separation between Throne and vassalage—a task which was further complicated by the fact that many of the Norman baronial families of Apulia had been in Italy for as long or longer than the Hautevilles and still saw no reason why the grandson of an obscure and impoverished knight of the Cotentin should arrogate to himself powers over them which seemed to exceed those of any other western monarch.

  Here was another difficulty that was never entirely overcome, though Roger did his best in the years that followed to lessen its effects by renewing the grant of most of the existing fiefs. Thence­forth his vassals would hold their lands not by virtue of capture or early enfeoffment at the time of the first Norman conquest of Italy in the previous century, but by the King's grace and from the date of their new royal charter. Meanwhile the number, and therefore the power, of the knightly caste was further limited by turning it into what amounted to a closed order, almost like a separate civil service. Assize No. XIX, for example, De Nova Militia, lays down categorically that no man can be made a knight or retain his existing knighthood unless he comes of an established knightly family. Other ordinances warn all feudal lords and others—including churchmen— who have authority over townsfolk and villagers to treat them with humanity, and never to demand from them more than what is reasonable and just.

  Before leaving Ariano the King announced one further innova­tion—the introduction, for the first time, of a standard coinage for the whole Kingdom. The unit he had selected was to be called the ducat, named after his Duchy of Apulia, the first of that glinting stream of gold and silver by which, for the next seven centuries, so much of the world's wealth was to be measured. The prototypes, struck in Brindisi, seem to have been of disappointing quality— magis aereas quam argenteas, Falco cattily remarks;1 but they provided a further effective illustration of Roger's theory of Kingship. Typically Byzantine in form, they bear on one side a likeness of the King, enthroned, crowned and robed in full Byzantine regalia, holding in one hand an orb and in the other a long cross with double traverse. Beside him, his hand also on the cross, stands his son Duke Roger of Apulia, in military dress. The reverse of the coin is more significant still. Early Apulian money, minted in the reign of Duke
William, invariably bore on the reverse a portrait of St Peter, to denote William's vassalage to the Holy See. Now those days were gone. The new ducats showed not St Peter but Christ Pantocrator. King Roger, they seemed to say, had no need of an intermediary.2

  Some time in the spring of 1140, King Roger sent his friend the Pope a present of some beams for the roof of St John Lateran— which, like so much else in twelfth-century Rome, was sadly in need of repair. If Innocent took this gesture to mean that he would have no more trouble with the Hautevilles, he was mistaken; it was only a matter of months before the King's two sons, in the course of

  1 'More copper than silver.' The first golden ducats do not appear till 1284— in Venice, where silver ones had been current since 1202.

  2 The contention, doggedly maintained in the eleventh edition of the Encyclo­paedia Britannica—the most recent edition has dropped the entry altogether—that the ducat owed its name to the inscription on it Sit tibi, Christe, datus, quern tu regis, iste ducatus (To thee, O Christ, who rulest this Duchy, be it given) is without foundation. On a small coin there would have been no room for such a legend, even in an abbreviated form. The only inscription on these earliest ducats, apart from the letters identifying the two portraits, consists of the letters AN.R.X.— anno regni decimo, i.e. struck in the tenth year of Roger's reign. They constituted a further challenge to the Pope, who naturally counted the years of the Sicilian Kingdom from his own recognition of it at Mignano in 1139. Another coin, worth a third of a ducat, was simultaneously minted at the zecca in Palermo. A particularly happy example of Sicilian enlightenment, it bears on the obverse a Latin inscription surrounding a Greek cross, and on the reverse an Arabic one reading 'struck in the city of Sicily [sic] in the year 535'—of the Hegira, i.e. 1140 A.D,