what they described as 'restoring' former Apulian or Capuan lands, were pushing up as far as Ceprano in Campania and the Tronto in the northern Abruzzi and making frequent disturbing inroads into papal territories. But the two brothers, one feels, were only flexing their muscles, occupying their time as energetic young Norman knights had always done and were meant to do. They probably enjoyed irritating the Pope, but they showed no real hostility towards him. Their father meanwhile, though allowing his sons a fairly free rein, seems to have been genuinely anxious to improve relations with the Church and to eradicate as far as possible the unpleasant memories of the past decade.
Although Innocent, still smarting from his defeat at Galluccio, was not to be so easily placated, his principal ally had displayed a quite astonishing capacity for volte-face. Already at the Salerno tribunal St Bernard seems to have decided that Roger was not the ogre that he had always made him out to be, and set about revising his previous opinions. It comes as something of a surprise to find the man whose diatribes against the 'Sicilian tyrant' had long been famous through every corner of Europe, beginning in 1139 a letter to his old enemy with the words:
Far and wide the fame of your magnificence has spread over the earth; what limits are there untouched by the glory of your name?1
The King, though doubtless secretly amused at the suddenness of the change, was always ready to meet his enemies half-way. Soon after Mignano, when the last obstacle to good relations had been swept aside, he wrote to Bernard suggesting that he might pay a
1 Three years later, Bernard's friend and fellow-abbot Peter the Venerable of Cluny, like him an outspoken enemy of Anacletus—and therefore of Roger himself—throughout the years of schism, was to address to 'the glorious and magnificent King of Sicily' an even more impressive testimonial:
Sicily, Calabria and Apulia, regions which before your time were given over to the Saracens, or to dens of brigands and caves of robbers, have now— thanks to God, who aided you in your task—become the home of peace and the refuge of tranquillity, a peaceful and most happy Kingdom, ruled, as it were, by a second Solomon. Would that parts of poor miserable Tuscany might be joined, with their neighbouring provinces, to your Realm!
Book IV, letter 37
personal visit to Sicily to discuss, among other things, a new monastic foundation in the Kingdom. Bernard, still only fifty years old but worn out with exertion, ill-health and his own particular brand of hysterical asceticism, replied with apparently genuine regret that he could not accept Roger's invitation in person; but he at once sent two of his most trusted monks to Palermo to negotiate in his name. They travelled as part of the suite which accompanied Elizabeth, daughter of Count Theobald of Champagne, from France to marry Duke Roger of Apulia in 1140, and arrived in Sicily towards the end of the year. The result was the foundation a short time later of the first Cistercian monastery in the South— almost certainly that of S. Nicola of Filocastro in Calabria.
The site chosen for this monastery may be yet another indication of Roger's policy towards the Church at this time. Though the Cistercians always inclined towards remote and secluded locations for their abbeys, there seems little doubt that St Bernard would have preferred somewhere in Sicily itself—not too far from the capital, where his abbot could keep a watchful eye—and perhaps exert a positive influence—on the ecclesiastical policies of the King. Roger, with the same considerations in mind, would have resisted any such proposals. However sincerely held his religious views, he retained an instinctive mistrust for the large, powerful monasteries of the mainland. Now that he had established a firm control over the Latin Church in Sicily he had no intention of seeing that control weakened by subversion from within. It was typical of him that during his entire reign he should have allowed only one major Latin foundation in Palermo itself—the Benedictine monastery of S. Giovanni degli Eremiti—and that he should have populated it with monks not from obvious sources like Monte Cassino or the great abbey of La Cava outside Salerno but from a small, relatively obscure community of ascetics at Monte Vergine, near Avellino. In taking this step the King made a considerable sacrifice; to have given S. Giovanni, with its superb location next to the royal palace and its huge endowments, to Cistercians or Cluniacs might have seemed a small price to pay for their favour; at once he would have been hailed as one of the most devout and generous monarchs in Christendom. It was a temptation that few Hautevilles—certainly not Robert Guiscard—could have resisted. But Roger was more subtle in his statesmanship. He had suffered too much from the Church of Rome and from St Bernard in particular. This time he was taking no chances.
S. Giovanni degli Eremiti—St John of the Hermits—stands today as little more than an empty shell. Nothing now remains there to suggest that during the most brilliant years of the Norman Kingdom it was the wealthiest and most privileged monastery in all Sicily. It was founded in 1142, and by the charter he granted it six years later Roger decreed that its abbot should serve ex officio as chaplain and confessor to the King, with the rank of bishop, and should personally celebrate Mass on all feastdays in the Palatine Chapel. He further laid down that in its cemetery—which still exists in the open court to the south of the church—should be buried all members of the royal family except the Kings themselves and all the senior officials of the court.1
The church itself, now deconsecrated, is surprisingly small.2 It was built on the site of a much earlier mosque, part of which remains to form an extension of the southern transept. But the inside, despite the traces of tile and mosaic and fresco—and even of the stalactite ceiling of the original mosque—holds little interest for the non-expert. The fascination of S. Giovanni is in its exterior. Of all the Norman churches in Sicily it is the most characteristic and the most striking, its five vermilion domes—each standing on a cylindrical drum to give it greater height—bursting out from the surrounding greenery like gigantic pomegranates, in almost audible testimony of the Arab craftsmen who built them. They are not beautiful; but they burn themselves into the memory and remain there, stark and vivid, long after many true masterpieces are forgotten.
A few yards to the north-west there stands a little open cloister,
1 This last decree was never generally observed. Nearly all the royal family were in fact buried in the chapel of St Mary Magdalen next to the old cathedral. When, forty years later, the cathedral was rebuilt the tombs—which included those of Queens Elvira and Beatrice and of four of Roger's sons, Roger, Tancred, Alfonso and Henry—were transferred to another chapel similarly named. This chapel still stands in the courtyard of the carabinieri barracks of S. Giacomo. Of the graves themselves, however, there is no longer any trace. (Deer, The Dynastic Porphyry Tombs of the Norman Period in Sicily. Cambridge, Mass., 1959.)
2 Plate 8.
with gently poised arcading supported on pairs of slender columns, built half a century later than the church and in perfect contrast to it. Sitting there on a hot afternoon, looking up now at the soaring austerity of the royal palace, now at the aggressively baroque campanile of S. Giorgio in Kemonia, yet always aware of those bulbous oriental cupolas half-hidden behind the palm-trees, one is reminded for the hundredth time that in Sicily Islam is never far away. And it is, perhaps, in the church and cloister of what was once the leading Christian monastery of the Kingdom that its presence is most keenly felt.
The confrontation at S. Giovanni degli Eremiti between Muslim East and Latin West is so striking that the visitor tends to forget the third essential strand of civilisation that made Norman Sicily what it was. In all Palermo there is no longer a single building whose exterior recalls Byzantium. Despite the number of senior Greek officials in the Curia, despite all the Greek scholars and sages whom Roger attracted to the court in the later years of his reign, the capital itself had never boasted an indigenous Greek population of any size. It was, first and foremost, an Arab city, scarcely touched by Byzantine influences in comparison with those regions in which Greek peoples had lived since the days
of antiquity—regions such as the Val Demone in eastern Sicily or parts of Calabria, where to this day a Greek dialect is spoken in some of the remoter villages.
And yet, from the time of the Sicilian conquest up to the point we have now reached in this story, the Greeks had played a vital part in the building of the new nation. First, they had kept the balance between Christian and Muslim on which the whole future of Norman Sicily depended. Roger's father the Great Count had encouraged Latin immigration, both ecclesiastical and secular, as far as he dared, but he could not allow too much too quickly for fear of frightening the Greek and Arab communities and turning them against him. Besides, such immigration brought its own dangers. If it had not been kept under rigid control there would have been nothing to stop swarms of swaggering Norman barons from the mainland pouring into Sicily, demanding to be given fiefs in keeping with their rank and station and gradually reducing the island to that chaos which always seemed to follow in their wake.
Without the Greeks, then, the Christian element during those early days might have been swamped altogether. But they also performed another invaluable function. They neatly counterbalanced the claims of the Latin Church, and provided both Count Roger and his son with a powerful bargaining—if not actually blackmailing —counter in their dealings with Rome. It seems in the highest degree improbable that there was any foundation for the rumours, current at the end of the 1090s, that the Great Count was seriously contemplating a conversion to Orthodoxy; but it is a good deal likelier that Roger II, at various moments in his long quarrel with Pope Innocent, may have considered renouncing the pontifical authority altogether in favour of some kind of loose caesaropapism on the Byzantine model. What is certain is that in 1143 the Greek Archimandrite Nilus Doxopatrius of Palermo dedicated to Roger—with the King's full consent—a 'Treatise on the Patriarchal Thrones', arguing that with the transfer of the imperial capital in a.d. 330 and the recognition of Constantinople as the 'New Rome' by the Council of Chalcedon in 451, the Pope had lost his ecclesiastical primacy, which now properly belonged to the Byzantine Patriarch.
But now, as the twelfth century nears its half-way mark, the situation can be seen to have changed. Sicily, first of all, has grown steadily richer; and as her prosperity has increased, so too has her political stability. In contrast to the endemic confusion of the Italian peninsula, the island has become a paragon of just and enlightened government, peaceable and law-abiding, an amalgam of races and languages which seems to give strength rather than weakness ; and, a6 its reputation grows, more and more churchmen and administrators, scholars and merchants and unashamed adventurers are drawn across the sea from England, France and Italy to settle in what must have seemed to many of them a veritable Eldorado, a Kingdom in the sun. Meanwhile the importance of the Greek community has begun to decline. It is inevitable that it should. With no comparable immigration from abroad to sustain it, it is increasingly outnumbered by the Latin. In the prevailing atmosphere of religious toleration and easy coexistence, its value as a bulwark against Islam is negligible. Finally, Roger has now established so firm a control over his Latin Church that he has no longer any need for a counterbalance.
Not that there was any discrimination against the Greeks. In view of the mixed feelings with which the Hautevilles had always regarded the Byzantine Empire—admiration for its institutions and its art, distrust laced with more than a tinge of jealousy in every other field—they might have been excused for treating as second-class citizens a foreign minority whose political and confessional loyalties were openly divided. But they never did so. Roger and his successors continued to support their Greek subjects whenever their support was necessary; they never lost their concern for the welfare of the Greeks, or of their Church. The great and distinguished line of Greek admirals continued throughout the century; at least until the end of Roger's reign the whole fiscal system of Norman Sicily remained in Greek and Arab hands.1 It was just that the emphasis had shifted. Though from the outset subordinated to the Latin hierarchy, large numbers of Basilian monasteries had sprung up over the past fifty years, notably S. Maria del Patirion near Rossano in Calabria2—founded by the Regent Adelaide at the beginning of the century—and its daughter-house, the monastery of the Saviour at Messina, established some thirty years later. But the Saviour, soon to be the chief of all the Greek monasteries in Sicily, was also the last. Henceforth the royal favours would be lavished on the new Latin houses—S. Giovanni degli Eremiti and, later, Maniace and Monreale.
Fortunately the way was still wide open for private patronage; and it is fitting that the sublimest legacy of the Greek Church in all Sicily, the only one that still possesses a beauty comparable to that of the Palatine Chapel and the cathedral of Cefalù, should have been
1 It is noteworthy that, as Miss Evelyn Jamison points out (Admiral Eugenius of Sicily, p. 40), 'No men of Latin culture seem up to this time to have been employed in positions high or low by the central offices of finance'.
2 Visitors to Rossano are usually content to inspect the Byzantine church of S. Marco and the Archbishop's Palace, home of the justly-famed sixth-century purple codex. They would be well advised to make the short detour to S. Maria, lying up in the hills on the way to the neighbouring town of Corigliano. The monastery buildings are in ruins, but the church itself is still there, with a superb mosaic pavement which alone is worth the visit.
founded, built and endowed by the most brilliant of all the Greeks in the Kingdom's history.
Though the original and rightful name of his church, S. Maria del Ammiraglio, stands as a perpetual monument to its founder, George of Antioch had no need of such memorials to ensure himself a place in history. We first meet him as the gifted young Levantine who, after early service with the Zirid Sultans of Mahdia, transferred his loyalties to Sicily and in 1123 used his perfect Arabic and unrivalled knowledge of the Tunisian coast to score the only victory in Roger's first, ill-fated African expedition.1 Since then, as commander of the Sicilian navy, he had served his King with distinction on both land and sea, becoming in 1132 the first holder of the proudest title his adopted country had to offer—Emir of Emirs, the high admiral and chief minister of the realm.2 Despite so distinguished a career, however, his work on the church must not be thought of as the occupation of his declining years, still less of his retirement. In 1143, the year it was endowed, he must have been in his early fifties; within weeks of the endowment he and his fleet were off on another North African adventure, more successful this time; while before he died he was to carry the Sicilian flag to the banks of the Bosphorus itself, returning to Palermo with all the secrets—and many of the leading craftsmen—of the Byzantine silk industry.
But however secure the great admiral may be in his immortality, it still seems a little unfair that the shorter and more usual name for his church should commemorate not him but an infinitely dimmer figure—one Geoffrey de Marturanu, the founder in 1146 of a nearby Benedictine nunnery with which, some three centuries later, George's church was amalgamated. Nor, alas, have the changes been confined to its name. The Martorana—for so, under protest, it must be called from now on—no longer displays any outward sign of its origins. Once, its exterior too was beautiful. On Christmas Day,
1 The Normans in the South, pp. 299-302.
2 It is perhaps worth recalling in this second volume a point already made in the first, namely that the word Admiral, current with minor variations in so many European languages, is derived through Norman Sicily from the Arabic word Emir; and in particular from its compound Emir-al-Bahr, Ruler of the Sea.
1184, it was visited by the Arab traveller Ibn Jubair on his way back from a pilgrimage to Mecca. He wrote:
We noted a most remarkable facade, which we could not possibly describe and on which we would fain keep silent, since it is the most beautiful work in the world. ... It has a bell-tower supported on columns of marble, surmounted by a dome resting on further columns. It is one of the most marvellous constructions ever to
be seen. May Allah in his mercy and goodness soon honour this building with the sound of the muezzin's call!
Looking at the outside of the Martorana today, one almost wishes that Ibn Jubair's pious supplication had been granted. His coreligionists could hardly have done worse with it than the Christians. The facade itself he would no longer recognise; in sad contrast to that of the adjoining church of S. Cataldo, whose three heavy cupolas unmistakably if somewhat congestedly proclaim it as a Norman building of the mid-twelfth century, this jewel of all Sicilian churches—as opposed to cathedrals or chapels—has been decked out in lugubrious baroque. Only the romanesque bell-tower, domeless since an earthquake in 1726 but still beautifully proportioned, remains to beckon the traveller within.
There, too, all is not as it was. To accommodate the increasing numbers of nuns, a programme of reconstruction and enlargement was undertaken towards the end of the sixteenth century, and all through the seventeenth the grim work went on. The west wall was knocked down, the former atrium and narthex incorporated into the main body of the church. More unforgivable still, the main apse was demolished in 1683 with all its mosaics, to be replaced by a frescoed capellone, the hideousness of which all the efforts of nineteenth-century restorers have been powerless to diminish.
The Kingdom in the Sun Page 11