The Kingdom in the Sun

by John Julius Norwich

  And so, the ill-starred Crusade safely in the past, the two monarchs met again at Thessalonica, and Manuel bore Conrad away for his second winter in Constantinople. Their friendship remained unaffected after the six months' separation, and Christmas was marked by a further union of the two imperial houses when, with the utmost pomp and the usual elaborate festivities, Manuel's niece Theodora was married to Conrad's brother Henry of Austria.1 This year, however, there were serious political problems to be discussed, the most pressing of which was Roger of Sicily. The Byzantines were already at war with him; their navy was at that very moment blockad­ing Corfu and their army was prepared to march just as soon as the melting of the snows made it possible to cross the Pindus. Conrad had not yet opened hostilities, but asked nothing better than to do so. Agreement was quickly reached, and in the first days of 1149 the two rulers undertook, by a treaty of formal alliance, to launch a joint attack on the King of Sicily during that year. Only if one of the parties were struck by grave illness or faced with the imminent danger of losing his throne could this commitment be set aside; even then it would not be cancelled but merely postponed. Sensibly in the circumstances, the treaty also enshrined an understanding about the future of Apulia and Calabria after they had been wrested from Roger's grasp. Both Empires had claimed these territories in the past, and both Manuel and Conrad were anxious to avoid a sub­sequent wrangle in their division of the spoils. The compromise that they reached did them both credit. Both regions would be made over

  1 A slight gloom may have been cast over the proceedings by the horror felt by many Byzantines at the fate of a Greek princess being delivered over to the mercy of Frankish barbarians; Sir Steven Runciman (History of the Crusades, vol. II) quotes a poem of condolence addressed to her mother in which she is described as being 'immolated to the beast of the West'.

  by Conrad to Byzantium as the belated dowry of his sister-in-law Bertha, now the Empress Irene.

  Once future plans had been settled, there was no reason for either of the new allies to linger in Constantinople. In early February they parted—Conrad to Germany and preparations for his new Italian offensive, Manuel back to his army and the siege of Corfu, whence recent reports had not been encouraging. The Sicilian-held citadel rose invulnerable on its high crest in the mountainous north of the island, towering almost perpendicularly above the sea and safely out of range of Byzantine projectiles. The Greeks, wrote Nicetas, seemed to be shooting at the very sky itself, while the defenders could release downpours of arrows and hailstorms of rocks on to those below. (People wondered, he adds rather disarmingly, how the Sicilians had taken possession of it so effortlessly the previous year.) During one of the attacks the Grand Duke Contostephanus was killed and his place taken by Axuch, who had by this time arrived with the land army; but the change of leadership had no effect on the progress of the siege. As the weeks went by it became clear that Corfu could never be taken by storm. The only hope—barring treachery from within—would be to starve out the garrison, who had had a full year in which to provision themselves; and even then the blockade might at any moment be broken by a Sicilian fleet arriving with reinforcements and supplies.

  It is a commonplace of warfare that a siege can impose just as great a strain on the morale of the attacking force as on that of the beleaguered garrison. The coming of spring saw the outbreak of serious quarrels between the Greek sailors and their Venetian allies. Axuch did what he could to smooth things over, but failed; and the climax came when the Venetians occupied a neighbouring islet and set fire to a number of Byzantine merchantmen anchored offshore. By some mischance they also managed to gain possession of the imperial flagship, on which they even went so far as to perform an elaborate charade, dressing up an Ethiopian slave in the imperial vestments—Manuel's dark complexion had not gone unnoticed— and staging a mock coronation on the deck, in full view of the Greeks. Whether Manuel was present to witness this monstrous insult against his imperial majesty is not clear; if not, he certainly arrived soon afterwards. He never forgave the Venetians their con­duct ; for the moment, however, he needed them. A combination of patience, tact and his celebrated charm soon restored a slightly uneasy harmony; the Venetian ships resumed their allotted stations; and the Emperor assumed direct personal command of the siege. There would be time enough, later, for revenge.

  Much as he longed to forget his disastrous Crusade, King Louis— unlike Conrad—found himself in no hurry to leave Outremer. The prospect of Easter in Jerusalem doubtless appealed to his piety; and, like so many travellers before and since, he may have been reluctant to exchange the gentle sunshine of a Palestinian winter for the stormy seas and snowbound roads which lay between himself and his own kingdom. He knew, too, that his marriage to Eleanor was past redemption. Once back in Paris he would have to face all the un­pleasantness of a divorce and the political repercussions that could not but follow. On and on he stayed, touring the shrines of the Holy Land and reflecting on the perfidy of the Greeks, and in particular of Manuel Comnenus himself, whom he still held responsible for the calamities of his outward journey. Now he understood. A Christian in name only, the Emperor was in reality the foremost enemy and betrayer of Christendom; a secret ally of the infidel, he had opposed the Crusade from its inception and done everything in his power to ensure its failure. Its first task should have been to eliminate him—as Roger of Sicily was very properly attempting to do.

  In the spring of 1149, Louis set his face reluctantly for home. This time he and Eleanor had resolved to travel by sea, but had been unwise enough to entrust themselves to Sicilian transport—dangerous craft in which to brave Byzantine waters. Somewhere in the southern Aegean they encountered a Greek fleet—presumably on its way to or from Corfu—which turned at once to attack. Louis managed to escape by hastily running up the French flag; but one of his escort vessels, containing several followers and nearly all his baggage, was captured by the Greeks and borne off in triumph to Constantinople. Queen Eleanor, whose relations with her husband were now such that she was travelling on a separate vessel, narrowly avoided a similar fate; she was rescued by Sicilian warships just in time.

  Finally, on 29 July 1149, Louis landed in Calabria. There Eleanor joined him, and the pair rode together to Potenza, where Roger was waiting to greet them and where they were to stay as his guests.1 The two Kings, meeting for the first time, took to each other at once. In the past, as we have seen, their approaches had been inhibited by the dispute of Roger and Raymond of Poitiers, Eleanor's uncle, over the question of Antioch; but since then a new rivalry had arisen—that of Louis and Raymond over the question of Eleanor—and Louis no longer felt constrained. Neither, for that matter, had his recent maritime adventure softened his feelings towards Byzantium; he and Roger may have discovered, during those August days at Potenza, that they had more in common than either had imagined.

  After three days their host left them to return to Sicily, and Louis and Eleanor moved on to Tusculum, the nearest town to Rome in which the Pope could safely install himself. Eugenius gave them a suitably royal welcome; politically, for reasons we shall shortly see, he was not particularly encouraging, but for the moment he was less concerned with future military alignments in Europe than with the immediate domestic problems of his guests. A gentle, kind-hearted man, he hated to see people unhappy; and the sight of Louis and Eleanor, oppressed by the double failure of the Crusade and of their marriage, seems to have caused him genuine personal distress. John of Salisbury, who was employed in the Curia at the time, has left us a curiously touching account of the Pope's attempts at a reconciliation:

  He commanded, under pain of anathema, that no word should be spoken against their marriage and that it should not be dissolved under any pretext whatever. This ruling plainly delighted the King, for he loved the Queen passionately, in an almost childish way. The Pope made them sleep in the same bed, which he had decked with priceless hangings of his own; and daily during their brief visit he strove by friendly converse to resto
re the love between them. He heaped gifts upon them; and when the time for their departure came he could not hold back his tears.

  1 Later, in an attempt to bolster Roger's claim to legitimate kingship, the story was put about that Louis had personally re-crowned him during their time together at Potenza. Sheer fabrication though it undoubtedly is, it was to find its way into one of the several interpolations of Romuald of Salerno's chronicle.

  Those tears were perhaps made all the more copious by the know­ledge that his efforts had been in vain. Had Eugenius known Eleanor better, he would have seen from the start that her mind was made up and that neither he nor anyone else could change it. For the time being, however, she was prepared to keep up appearances, accom­panying her husband to Rome where they were cordially received by the Senate and where Louis prostrated himself as usual at all the principal shrines; and so back across the Alps to Paris. It was to be another two and a half years before her marriage was finally dissolved —St Bernard having persuaded Eugenius to withdraw his early strictures—on grounds of consanguinity; but she was still young and only on the threshold of that astonishing career in which, as wife of one of England's greatest Kings and mother of two of its worst, she was to influence the course of European history for over half a century.

  The people of Paris received Louis and Eleanor with rejoicing, and even went so far as to strike medals 'to our unconquered King', one portraying him in a triumphal chariot with a winged Victory soaring above, the other illustrating the theme of dead and fugitive Turks on the banks of the Meander. But they deceived no one. Elsewhere, men were readier to look facts in the face—though even then they usually sought to explain or to justify them. Pope Eugenius, for example, saw in the Crusade a calamity sent by God as an object-lesson in the transience of terrestrial things. Otto of Freising points out philosophically that it provided easy opportuni­ties for the acquisition of a martyr's crown. It was left to St Bernard who, if he did not actually initiate the Crusade, at least gave it its impetus and its inspiration, to say honestly what he thought. For him, it was not simply a calamity or even a lesson, but a divine judgment—one that represented 'so deep an abyss that anyone must be accounted blessed who is not scandalised thereby'.1 In passing this judgment the Almighty had acted, as always, with perfect justice; but this time, for once, he had left his mercy aside.

  In the frantic search for a scapegoat that followed, it was perhaps inevitable that all fingers save one—Conrad's—should have pointed to Manuel Comnenus; it was also unfair. The blame for the failure of

  1 De Consideratione, II, i.

  any military operation can attach only to those directly concerned— those who plan it and those who carry it out. In the Second Crusade, both planning and performance were atrocious. From the start the idea was a bad one. The lasting presence in strength of an alien power in a distant land is possible only when it is acceptable locally; when it is not, its days are numbered. If it cannot maintain itself by its own efforts any attempt at propping it up artificially, especially by military means, is bound to fail. Having decided to mount the attack, the leaders of the West made one mistake after another. They co­ordinated neither their preparations nor their timing; by a mixture of disingenuousness and sheer political ineptitude they antagonised their most important ally; they arrived too few in numbers and too late; initially indecisive, they eventually settled on a misguided line of action and then lacked the courage to carry it through. They hesitated, retreated, and collapsed.1

  1 It is irrelevant, but irresistible, to compare the planning of the Second Crusade with that of the Suez affair eight centuries later.

  8

  CLMACTERIC

  Our hearts and the hearts of almost all Frenchmen are burning with devotion for you, and love of your peace; all this we feel particularly in view of the base, lamentable and unheard-of treachery to our pilgrims of the Greeks and their detestable King. . . . Rise, and help the people of God to take their vengeance!

  Letter to Roger II from Abbot Peter of Cluny

  The Crusade had been bad for reputations. Conrad of Hohenstaufen and Louis Capet had been discredited, Manuel Comnenus had been blamed, Pope Eugenius and St Bernard together had had to bear the spiritual responsibility. Among the great princes of Europe in the first rank of power and importance, only Roger of Sicily had emerged unscathed. And it was Roger who now became the focal point for all those dissatisfied spirits who called for an immediate and victorious Third Crusade to wipe out the humiliations of the Second.

  The irony of the situation must have amused him. A Crusader neither by temperament nor by conviction, he had not scrupled to take full political advantage of western woolly-mindedness on the last occasion, and he was quite ready to do so again. For the fate of the Christians of Outremer he cared not a rap; they deserved all they got. He himself preferred the Arabs every time. On the other hand, the Levant tempted him. Was he not the legitimate Prince of Antioch, perhaps even the rightful King of Jerusalem? More important still, he had to defend himself against Byzantine attack, and in such an eventuality opposition would be the best defence. While Manuel's present unpopularity lasted it would be an easy matter to turn the weight of any fresh Crusade against him.

  Roger therefore willingly accepted his role—improbable as it was —of avenger of the West, and set to work building up his new image. That, above all, was why he had travelled to meet the King of France at Potenza, where he had been assured of Louis's support. His major difficulty, as always, was with Conrad. To the several excellent reasons that the King of the Romans already had for hating him another, perhaps the strongest of all, had now been added— jealousy. Conrad knew that his reputation had been dealt a severe blow by the failure of the Crusade; Roger's-—unaccountably and quite unjustifiably—had never been higher. It was the German Emperor, crowned or not, who remained historically and by divine right the sword and shield of western Christendom; and Conrad resented this new usurpation of his imperial prerogatives, as un­pardonable in its way as the seizure of South Italy itself.

  St Bernard tried hard to change his attitude, but to no avail. Bernard was a Frenchman, and the French, as far as Conrad was concerned, were almost as bad as the Sicilians; besides, he had painful recollections of the last time he had taken Bernard's advice against his better judgment. Neither was he any more amenable to the argu­ments of Peter of Cluny or Cardinal Theodwine of Porto, one of the most influential voices in the Curia. All these ecclesiastical per­suaders, he knew, were rabidly anti-Byzantine—particularly the Abbot of Clairvaux, who clearly felt responsible for the Crusade and was only too anxious to shuffle as much of the blame as possible off his own shoulders and on to those of the Eastern Emperor. Conrad saw through them all. But Manuel was his friend, and he trusted him. The two were in any case bound by a solemn alliance, which he for his part did not intend to break.

  It was not as if Roger had showed the faintest sign of wanting a reconciliation. On the contrary, he had begun a new intrigue with Count Welf of Bavaria, brother of Henry the Proud and Conrad's still-determined rival for the imperial throne. Welf had called in at Palermo on his way home from the Crusade, and Roger had offered him still bigger subsidies than before to organise a confederation of German princes against the Hohenstaufen. This new league threat­ened to be a formidable one, a menace which might well keep Conrad occupied in Germany for some time to come. Once again his plans for a punitive Italian expedition would have to be postponed—but his determination sooner or later to settle scores with the King of Sicily remained stronger than ever.

  For Manuel too the year 1149 ended less auspiciously than it had begun. Some time in the late summer Corfu had fallen to him— probably through treachery, since Nicetas tells us that the garrison commander subsequently entered the imperial service; but before the Emperor could follow up his advantage and cross to Italy news was brought to him of a Serbian insurrection, to which the neigh­bouring Kingdom of Hungary was giving active military support. At about this tim
e too he must also have heard—with particular irritation—of the most recent exploit of George of Antioch who, after the incident with Louis and Eleanor, had taken a fleet of forty ships right up the Hellespont and over the Marmara to the very walls of Constantinople. Thence, after an unsuccessful attempt at a landing, the Sicilians had sailed some distance up the Bosphorus, pillaging several rich villas along the Asiatic shore, and before departing had even fired a few impudent arrows into the grounds of the Imperial Palace.

  Roger's capture of Corfu, temporary as it was, had proved a useful holding operation; and the Balkan rising that followed so conveni­ently after it meant a further postponement of Manuel's own invasion plans. Looking back, one feels that the sequence of events was almost too convenient; could it be, one wonders, that the King of Sicily had indirectly engineered this as well? The chroniclers preserve a discreet silence—perhaps they were not too sure them­selves—but it seems probable enough. Roger, whose cousin Busilla had married King Coloman, had always maintained close ties of friendship with the Hungarian throne. If our suspicions are right, then the year 1149 must mark the highest point of his diplomatic virtuosity. Facing the most formidable military alliance that could be conceived in the Middle Ages, that of the Eastern and the Western Empires acting—as they rarely acted in the six and a half centuries of their joint history—in complete concert one with the other, he succeeded in the space of a few months in immobilising both of them. It was a feat comparable to that of his uncle, who in 1084 had actually had the armies of both Empires retreating before him in different directions. But Robert Guiscard had had a force of thirty thousand of his own behind him; Roger had achieved his objective without calling a single Sicilian soldier to arms.