The Kingdom in the Sun

by John Julius Norwich

  The second report brought the news that the fleet of King Roger of Sicily was at that very moment sailing against his Empire.

  One of the perennial difficulties confronting any historian of the Middle Ages is that the chroniclers on whose works he must rely are so seldom of an analytical turn of mind. They usually give the facts —with varying degrees of accuracy—clearly enough. Questions of cause and motivation, however, they tend to ignore; and there is one such question in particular on which we might wish that they had been more explicit. How serious, in fact, was Roger's attack in 1147 on Byzantium ?

  Some authorities have maintained that it was very serious indeed —that the operation was timed to coincide with the arrival of the French at Constantinople, and that Roger's original plan was that the Sicilians and French together should then combine to overthrow the Emperor and seize his capital. They even suggest that Manuel had foreknowledge of this plan, which would explain his insistence on oaths of fealty before allowing the Franks to approach. It is an intriguing theory; but there seems to be little evidence for it apart from the conduct of the Bishop of Langres—and even he made no mention, so far as we can tell, of Sicilian help. Had Louis accepted Roger's original offer of transport for himself and his army, might he conceivably have been persuaded to join in a concerted attack on Constantinople before passing on to Palestine, just as the Venetians —to their lasting shame—were to persuade the Franks of the Fourth Crusade fifty-seven years later ? Surely not. Louis had no real quarrel with the Byzantines; he was vowed to the Crusade, and he would, one suspects, have vehemently resisted any attempt by the King of Sicily to deflect him from his goal.

  If Roger's action is to fit logically into the framework of preceding and following events, it must be looked at in a different fight. He was a statesman, not an adventurer. Had he still contemplated a combined operation with the French he would surely have taken far more trouble to ensure that they were sympathetic to his idea. In the cir­cumstances, he had no reason to believe that Louis would help him at all; his envoys had had a noticeably cool reception at Etampes the previous spring. If the Sicilian navy had appeared off Constantinople while the French were there, they might well have found the latter allied with the Greeks against them.

  In the event, they did not make for the capital at all. Under the command of George of Antioch, they sailed in the autumn of 1147 from Otranto and headed straight across the Adriatic to Corfu. The island fell without a struggle; Nicetas Choniates tells us that the inhabitants, oppressed by the weight of Byzantine taxation and charmed by the honeyed words of the Greek-Sicilian admiral, welcomed the Normans as deliverers and willingly accepted a garrison of a thousand men.1 Next, turning southward, the fleet rounded the Peloponnese, leaving further detachments at strategic positions, and sailed up the eastern coast to Euboea. At this point George seems to have decided that he had gone far enough. He turned about, made a quick stab at Athens2 and then, on reaching the Ionian islands, headed eastward again up the Gulf of Corinth, ravaging the coastal towns as he went. His progress, writes Niceras, was 'like a sea monster, swallowing everything in its path'.

  Of the raiding parties that George sent ashore, one penetrated the hinterland as far as Thebes, centre of the Byzantine silk manufacture. The spoils were considerable. Stocks of rich damasks and bale after bale of brocades were carted back to shore and loaded on to the Sici­lian vessels. But the admiral was still not satisfied. A large number of women workers—expert alike in the cultivation of the silkworm and

  1 Otto of Freising maintains that Corfu was taken by the old trick of a bogus funeral procession; but Otto knew little of Byzantine affairs, and variants of the funeral story are too frequent in mediaeval chronicles to encourage much belief. See p. 44.

  2 The fact that the Norman sack of Athens is mentioned by western chroniclers only has led to some doubt as to whether the city really was raided at this time. The recent American excavations in the Agora have, however, tended to confirm that it was. See K. M. Setton, 'The Archaeology of Mediaeval Athens', in Essays in Medieval Life and Thought, Presented in Honour of Austin Patterson Evans (New York, 1955), p. 251.

  its exploitation and almost certainly Jewish1— were herded to the ships. They too would be welcomed in Palermo. From Thebes the raiders moved on to Corinth, where—although the Corinthians had received advance warning of their arrival and had fled to the higher citadel of Acrocorinth with everything of value that they possessed— a short siege produced the desired result. The city was pillaged, the relics of St Theodore carried off, and George of Antioch sailed back in triumph, via Corfu, to Sicily.

  'By this time,' writes Nicetas, 'the Sicilian vessels were so low in the water with the weight of their plunder that they seemed more like merchantmen than the pirate ships they really were.'2 He spoke no more than the truth. Thebes, Athens and Corinth were the wealthiest cities in Greece. If this were not piracy, then the word had no meaning. But piracy was not all. Just as George's raids along the North African coast were undertaken less for their own sake than to secure control of the Mediterranean narrows, so his first Greek expedition was a calculated thrust against the western extremities of the Byzantine Empire, launched by Roger as a deliberate act of policy and for impeccable strategic reasons. The Second Crusade, he knew, had not permanently saved Sicily from attack by either Empire; it had merely postponed the day, affording him a year or two of grace in which to prepare his defences. By occupying Corfu and other carefully chosen strongpoints on the Greek mainland, he had deprived Byzantium of the principal bridgehead from which to launch an offensive against South Italy.

  That, surely, was the real purpose of the expedition. But if it could provide certain additional benefits, so much the better. The silk-workers proved just such a bonus. It has sometimes been claimed that they were the nucleus around which the celebrated royal silk-mills of Palermo were built up. This theory does them too much honour—though they may well have introduced certain new tech­niques. Ever since the time of the Omayyads it had been the practice,

  1 The Hebrew traveller Benjamin of Tudela, who visited Thebes about twenty years after George's raid, reported two thousand Jews in the city. 'They are,' he wrote, 'the most skilled artificers in silk and purple cloth throughout Greece.'

  2 Another report, to the effect that the ships were so weighed down with plunder as to be submerged up to the third bank of oars, indicates the degree of caution necessary when dealing with certain imaginative chroniclers.

  in all the principal Islamic kingdoms of the East and the West as well as in Constantinople itself, to maintain a silk workshop in or near the palace for the manufacture of robes and vestments for ceremonial court occasions. Sicily was no exception, and the Palermitan silk industry had thus been a thriving concern since the days of the Arabs—from whose language the Tiraz, or royal workshop, took its name.1 Another long-established Muslim custom, however, required the ladies of the Tiraz, when not at their looms, to render other more intimate services to the gentlemen of the Court. This tradition too the Normans, eclectic as ever, had appropriated with enthusiasm; and it was not long before the Tiraz became a useful, if slightly transparent, cover for the royal harem. As we read of George of Antioch's seizure of the luckless Thebans it is difficult not to wonder which of their two possible functions he had more in mind.

  The news of the Sicilian depredations in Greece stung Manuel to a fury. Whatever he himself might have thought about the Crusade, the fact that a so-called Christian country should have taken deliber­ate advantage of it to launch an attack on his Empire disgusted him; and the knowledge that the admiral concerned was a renegade Greek can hardly have assuaged his wrath. A hundred years before, Apulia had been a rich province of the Byzantine Empire; now it had become nothing but a nest of pirates, a springboard for unprovoked aggression by his enemy. Here was a situation that could not be tolerated. Roger, 'that dragon, threatening to shoot the flames of his anger higher than the crater of Etna . . . that common enemy of all Chr
istians and illegal occupier of the land of Sicily',2 must be eliminated from the Mediterranean for ever. The West had tried to do so, and had failed miserably. Now it was the turn of Byzantium. Given adequate help and freedom from other military commitments, Manuel believed that he could succeed. Fortunately the crusading armies had passed on. He himself had already concluded a truce with

  1 The best Norman-Sicilian example still extant is Roger II's superb mantle which is now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum at Vienna. It is of red silk, embroidered in gold with a tremendous design of tigers savaging camels. The Arabic inscription around the border identifies it as a product of the Tiraz of Palermo, dating from the 528th year of the Hegira—a.d. 1133.

  2 Imperial Edict of February 1148.

  the Turks in the spring of 1147, and this he now confirmed and extended. It was essential that every soldier and sailor in the Empire should be free for the grand design that he was planning, a design that might well prove to be the crowning achievement of his life: the restoration of all South Italy and Sicily to the Byzantine fold.

  The next problem was to find suitable allies. With France and Germany out of the running, Manuel's thoughts turned to Venice. The Venetians, as he well knew, had long been worried about the growth of Sicilian sea power; they had voluntarily joined the delega­tion which his father had sent to Lothair to discuss an anti-Sicilian alliance twelve years before. Since then their alarm had increased, and with good reason. No longer could they control the Mediterranean as once they had done; and while the bazaars of Palermo, Catania and Syracuse grew ever busier, so affairs on the Rialto had begun, gently but ominously, to slacken. If now Roger were to consolidate his hold on Corfu and the coast of Epirus, he would be in a position to seal off the Adriatic; and the Venetians might at any moment find them­selves under Sicilian blockade.

  They bargained a little, of course; no Venetian ever gave anything for nothing. But in March 1148, in return for increased trading privileges in Cyprus, Rhodes and Constantinople, Manuel got what he wanted—the full support of the Venetian fleet for the six months following. The Emperor meanwhile was working feverishly to bring his own navy to readiness; his secretary, John Cinnamus, estimated its strength at five hundred galleys and a thousand trans­ports—a worthy complement to an army of perhaps twenty or thirty thousand men. As its admiral the Emperor appointed his brother-in-law, the Grand Duke Stephen Contostephanus; the army he placed under the Grand Domestic, a Turk named Axuch who had been taken prisoner as a boy fifty years before and had grown up in the imperial palace. Manuel himself would be in overall command.

  By April the huge expeditionary force was ready to leave. The ships, refitted and provisioned, lay at anchor in the Marmara; the army waited for the order to march. Then, suddenly, everything went wrong. A South Russian tribe, the Polovtsi or Kumans, swept over the Danube into Byzantine territory; the Venetian fleet was held up by the sudden death of the Doge; a succession of freak summer storms disrupted shipping in the eastern Mediterranean. It was autumn before the two navies met in the southern Adriatic and the joint sea blockade of Corfu began. The land attack, meanwhile, was still further delayed. By the time he had dealt with the Polovtsi it was plain to Manuel that the Pindus mountains would be blocked by snow long before he could get his army across them. Settling it in winter quarters in Macedonia he himself rode on to Thessalonica, where an important guest was awaiting him. Conrad of Hohenstaufen had just returned from the Holy Land.

  The Second Crusade had been an ignominious fiasco. Conrad, with such of his Germans as remained after the slaughter at Dorylaeum, had marched on with the French as far as Ephesus, where the army had stopped to celebrate Christmas. There he had fallen gravely ill. Leaving his compatriots to continue the journey without him, he had returned to Constantinople to recover, and there he had stayed as a guest in the imperial palace till March 1148, when the Emperor had put Greek ships at his disposal to carry him to Palestine. The French, meanwhile, though they had fared rather better than the Germans, had had an agonising passage through Anatolia, during which they in their turn had suffered heavily at Turkish hands. Although it was largely the fault of Louis himself, who had ignored Manuel's warnings to keep to the coast, he persisted in attributing almost every encounter with the enemy to Byzantine carelessness or treachery or both, and rapidly built up an almost psychopathic resentment against the Greeks. At last in despair he, his household and as much of his cavalry as could be accommodated had taken ship from Attalia, leaving the rest of the army and pilgrims to struggle on by land as best they might. It had been late in the spring before the remnant of the great host that had set out so confidently the previous year dragged itself miserably into Antioch.

  And that was only the beginning of the trouble. The mighty Zengi was dead, but his mantle had passed to his still greater son Nur ed-Din, whose stronghold at Aleppo had now become the focus of Muslim opposition to the Franks. Aleppo should thus have been the Crusaders' first objective, and within days of his arrival in Antioch Louis found himself under considerable pressure from Prince Raymond to mount an immediate attack on the city. He had refused on the grounds that he must first pray at the Holy Sepulchre; whereat Queen Eleanor, whose affection for her husband had not been increased by the dangers and discomforts of the journey from France and whose relations with Raymond were already suspected of going somewhat beyond those normally recommended for a niece and her uncle, had announced her intention of remaining at Antioch and suing for divorce. She and her husband were distant cousins; the question of consanguinity had been con­veniently overlooked at the time of their marriage, but if resurrected could still prove embarrassing—and Eleanor knew it.

  Louis, who for all his moroseness was not without spirit in moments of crisis, had ignored his wife's protests and dragged her forcibly off to Jerusalem—though not before he had succeeded in so antagonising Raymond that the latter henceforth refused to play any further part in the Crusade. No one doubted that he had carried off the situation with what dignity he could, but the effect on his reputation, particularly at such a moment, had been unfortunate. He and the tight-lipped Eleanor arrived at the Holy City in May, soon after Conrad; they were welcomed with due ceremony by Queen Melisende and her son Baldwin III, now eighteen; and there they remained until, on 24 June, all the Crusaders were invited to a huge assembly at Acre to discuss their plan of action. It did not take them long to reach a decision: every man and beast available must be immediately mobilised for a concerted attack on Damascus.

  Why Damascus was chosen as the first objective we shall never understand. It was now the only important Arab state in all the Levant to continue hostile to Nur ed-Din; as such it could, and should, have been an invaluable ally to the Franks. By attacking it, they drove it against its will into Nur ed-Din's Muslim confedera­tion and, in doing so, made their own destruction sure. They arrived to find the walls of Damascus strong, the defenders determined. On the second day the besieging army, by yet another of those disastrous decisions which characterised the whole Crusade, moved its camp to an area along the eastern section of the walls, devoid alike of shade and water. The Palestinian barons, already at loggerheads over the future of the city when captured, suddenly lost their nerve and began to urge retreat. There were dark rumours of bribery and treason. Louis and Conrad were shocked and disgusted, but soon they too were made to understand the facts of the situation. To con­tinue the siege would mean not only the passing of Damascus into the hands of Nur ed-Din but also, given the universal breakdown of morale, the almost certain annihilation of their whole army. On 28 July, just five days after the opening of the campaign, they ordered withdrawal.

  There is no part of the Syrian desert more shattering to the spirit than that dark-grey, featureless expanse of sand and basalt that lies between Damascus and Tiberias. Retreating across it in the height of the Arabian summer, the remorseless sun and scorching desert wind full in their faces, harried incessantly by mounted Arab archers and leaving a stinking trail of dead
men and horses in their wake, the Crusaders must have felt despair heavy upon them. This was the end. Their losses, both in material and in human life, had been immense. They had neither the will nor the wherewithal to continue. Worst of all was the shame. Having travelled for the best part of a year, often in conditions of mortal danger, having suffered agonies of thirst, hunger and sickness and the bitterest extremes of heat and cold, this once-glorious army that had purported to enshrine all the ideals of the Christian West had given up the whole thing after just four days' fighting, having regained not one inch of Muslim territory. Here was the ultimate of humiliations—which neither they nor their enemies would forget.

  But for Conrad personally there had emerged from the shambles of the Second Crusade one remarkable result, as happy as it was unexpected. He had formed a deep regard and affection for Manuel Comnenus. When he had fallen ill at Ephesus the previous Christmas the Emperor and his wife had themselves sailed down from Con­stantinople, picked him up and brought him safely back to the capital; and for the next two months Manuel, who prided himself on his medical skill, had tended him with his own hands and nursed him back to health. Conrad's first passage through Constantinople with his army had not left him with the pleasantest of memories; he was all the more touched at the consideration that he was now being shown. The Emperor, with his intelligence, his charm and his German wife—a sister of Conrad's own—was a perfect host; when his patient was cured he had seized the opportunity to arrange a magnificent series of horse-races and entertainments in his honour, and had finally sent him on his way to Palestine in a Byzantine squadron, together with two thousand horses, all fully equipped, from the imperial stable. Conrad, not surprisingly, had been sorry to leave, and had promised to visit Manuel again on his homeward journey.