There was another difference too; whereas the Guiscard had had the advantage of papal support, towards Roger Pope Eugenius's attitude remained ambivalent. Naturally he could never forget that Roger was his immediate neighbour to the south, a perennial thorn in the papal flesh, always difficult and on occasion dangerous. On the other hand the King of Sicily now appeared undeniably well-disposed. At the beginning of 1149 he had offered Eugenius both military and financial assistance in his struggle against the Roman commune; and the Pope, seeing the situation in Rome steadily deteriorating and knowing that he could expect no help from Conrad who was still away in the East, had accepted. Thus, thanks to a body of Sicilian troops under Robert of Selby, he had managed to return to the Lateran by the end of the year. Since then, while he still mistrusted Roger's motives, he saw him as a useful ally whom it would be foolish to antagonise without good cause.
And so the Pope wavered; and he was still wavering when in the early summer of 1150 he recived a letter from the King of Sicily with proposals for a meeting. Roger's purpose is clear. An armed conflict between himself and the Empires could not, as it seemed to him, be long delayed. It might be offensive—a new 'Crusade' in which he would lead the forces of the West against the Infidel, represented in the first instance by Manuel Comnenus. For this he would find allies in plenty, though not unless he could first obtain the Pope's blessing. Alternatively there might be a defensive operation. The delaying tactics that he was at present employing to keep his two enemies occupied on home ground could not last for ever. Already Conrad could claim one major victory over Welf, and Manuel was well on the way to restoring the situation in the Balkans. Within a year— perhaps even less—the pair of them might be in a position to launch their two-pronged invasion of his realm. In such an event he would have far fewer allies on whom to rely; and papal support would be still more necessary.
The little town of Ceprano, standing conveniently on the border between the Kingdom of Sicily and the Papal State, had seen respectability bestowed on Robert Guiscard by his investiture at the hands of Gregory VII seventy years before—a thought which may well have given Roger some encouragement when, in July 1150, he rode there to meet Eugenius; for a similar investiture was now his first and most important objective. To obtain this, the formal recognition by the Pope of his legitimate sovereignty, he was prepared to concede much. Nothing else stood between himself and the leadership of western Europe. His right of appointment of Sicilian bishops, of refusing admission to papal envoys, even the hereditary privilege of the Apostolic Legation would have been reasonable prices to pay for such a reward.
But Ceprano had also witnessed failures. It was, after all, only six years since Roger and Pope Lucius had separated in disappointment and bitterness after the breakdown of other negotiations from which both had stood to gain; and the result of the coming talks with Lucius's successor was no foregone conclusion. The Pope had just been obliged once again to leave Rome; a renewed offer of Sicilian troops might prove a useful sweetener. As against this, Conrad was now back in Germany, collecting his forces, building up his strength, and rapidly living down his recent disgrace. If he were contemplating an early clash, then Eugenius would be unlikely to weaken his hand —and compromise the papal position—by confirming Roger's kingship.
And so it proved. The Pope may already have been under pressure from Conrad; he was certainly being bombarded with letters from Abbot Wibald of Corbie, a sworn enemy of Roger since the latter had expelled him from Monte Cassino and now Conrad's closest ecclesiastical adviser. John of Salisbury, who was probably present at Ceprano, tells us how Roger made every concession he could; 'but neither his prayers nor his gifts were of any avail'.
Although John is careful to note that King and Pontiff parted on relatively amicable terms, this new failure to achieve recognition must have come to Roger as a bitter blow. It could mean one thing only, that Eugenius had decided to throw in his lot with Conrad; and this, in its turn, meant that all his own plans for an offensive coalition against Manuel would have to be abandoned. From the moment the Ceprano talks ended, he gave up any further attempt to influence papal policy. Instead, he returned to Sicily to prepare for the coming storm.
He might almost have been relieved, as his ships sailed for Palermo, had he known that he would never set foot on the Italian mainland again.
His tents weep him, and his palaces; the swords and the lances are for him like women mourners. Hearts, no less than garments, are rent with grief. For the arms of the brave have fallen; valiant souls are filled with dread; and the eloquent seek for words in vain.
Thus had the Arab poet Abu ed-Daw lamented the death, on 2 May 1148, of Duke Roger of Apulia, the King of Sicily's eldest son. How he died we do not know; most probably he fell in some skirmish on the northern frontiers of his dukedom, where he had been intermittently engaged for several years. It was a grievous loss. The young Duke—he was only just thirty when he died—had been a Hauteville in the old tradition, a brilliant fighter and capable administrator, fearless in battle and utterly loyal to his father. More and more in the past decade Roger had tended to leave the affairs of the mainland to him—with Robert of Selby holding, perhaps, a watching brief—and he had shown himself a worthy heir to the Sicilian Crown. And now he was dead, the fifth of Roger's and Queen Elvira's six children to die before his father. Tancred, Prince of Bari, had already been nearly ten years in his grave; Alfonso, Prince of Capua and Duke of Naples, had died in 1144 in his early twenties. Another boy, Henry, had not survived his infancy. One only remained, the King's fourth son, William; he inherited the dukedom on his brother's death, and on Easter Day, 1151, Roger had him consecrated and crowned by the Archbishop of Palermo as co-ruler of the Sicilian Kingdom.
To crown a son in the lifetime of his father was no rare thing in the Middle Ages. The practice was regular in Byzantium, where it had been inherited from the earlier days of the Roman Empire; it was also to be followed in England, some twenty years after William's coronation, when King Henry II crowned his own first-born. Its purpose was to ensure the continuity of the royal line and to guard against the possibility of civil strife resulting from a disputed succession. Roger was still only fifty-five; his father had lived to be seventy. There is no suggestion among the contemporary chronicles that he was ill, though it is possible that he had already felt the onset of the disease that was to kill him three years later. Nor could there be any possible doubt about the claim to the throne of the King's only surviving legitimate son. Roger seems, however, to have been genuinely concerned about the succession; otherwise he would hardly have been likely, after fourteen years as a widower, to contract a second marriage in 1149, to a certain Sibyl of Burgundy; and a third, four years later when Sibyl had died in childbed.
Whatever his reasons, he cannot have thought that the news of William's coronation would be well received by the Pope. Technically speaking, he was within his rights; Archbishop Hugh of Palermo, recently promoted from the archbishopric of Capua, had been granted the pallium by the Pope, on the grounds that he was one of those 'who presided over the chief cities of certain nations and were therefore privileged by the Papacy to create princes for their own people'.1 Eugenius had never meant to imply that this grant included the right to perform royal coronations without prior reference to the Holy See, but the phrasing had been unfortunate; and the fact that he himself had given Roger the opportunity to take such a step can only have added to his irritation. It does not seem to have occurred to him that if the King of Sicily did have some good reason for wishing to ensure his son's succession he could hardly— in the light of Eugenius's refusal to grant the investiture himself— have acted otherwise. As far as he was concerned, Sicily and the Regno were papal fiefs, of which no disposition could be made without his authority. This authority had once again been flouted. As John of Salisbury confirms, 'he took the news ill, but oppressed as he was by the evils of the time he could offer no resistance'.
If the Pope had
ever been in any doubt as to where his best interests lay, he was in doubt no longer. The two special legates
1 John of Salisbury, Historia Pontificalis, chs. 33-4. The pallium is a circular band of white wool, shorn from two lambs blessed on St Agnes' Day in the church of S. Agnese fuori le Mura, and marked with six black crosses. It is worn by the Pope across his shoulders and granted by him to Archbishops and Metropolitans, at their petition, to enable them to perform their special functions.
he now sent to Conrad soon showed themselves to be little more than figures of fun;1 but one point they made abundantly clear. The Emperor-to-be was awaited with impatience in Italy. When he came, for whatever his purpose, he would have the See of St Peter wholeheartedly behind him.
The future of the Kingdom of Sicily had never looked blacker than it did at the start of the year 1152. Conrad of Hohenstaufen was ready to march; Manuel Comnenus, having restored order within his own Empire, was ready to join him. The Venetians had once again pledged their support. The Pope, after long hesitation, had allied himself on their side. And meanwhile the great anti-imperial coalition by which Roger had set so much store had melted away. Louis of France was still in theory an ally; but the death of Abbot Suger the previous year had robbed him of his confidence and, in a large measure, of his freedom of action. Besides, his divorce from Eleanor, now imminent, was occupying his mind to the virtual exclusion of all else. Two years before, at Flochberg, Welf and his friends had sustained a defeat from which they had never recovered. Hungary and Serbia had, for the moment, no more fight left in them.
But just as a few years earlier Roger had been saved from a similar situation by the Second Crusade, so now fate intervened once more to deliver him. On Friday 15 February 115 2 King Conrad died at Bamberg. He was the first Emperor-elect in the two centuries since the restoration of the Empire by Otto the Great not to have been crowned at Rome—a failure which somehow seems to symbolise his whole reign. 'A Seneca in council, a Paris in appearance, a Hector in
1 John of Salisbury's description of the papal legates is worth a quotation. 'Jordan [of S. Susanna] used his Carthusian Order as a pretext for his meanness. Ever parsimonious, he wore filthy garments and was austere in speech and demeanour; since like will ever attract like, he had been made chamberlain to the Lord Pope. Octavian [of S. Cecilia, the future Anti-Pope Victor IV], though nobler, easier in manner and more generous, was proud and pompous, a sycophant of the Germans and a seeker after Roman favour—which he never won. And although the Pope had charged them to act in concert, no sooner had they started out than they began to argue as to which was the greater. . . . Quarrelling over everything, they soon made the Church a laughing-stock. . . . Thus it was that complainants converged in swarms upon the papal court, for these two disturbed the churches just as men disturb beehives when they seek to extract the honey from the bees.'
battle',1 great things had been expected of him; but he died with his promise unfulfilled and his country as divided as always; never an Emperor—just a sad, unlucky King. He was buried in Bamberg Cathedral next to the recently-canonised Emperor Henry II—a distant predecessor who had also, long ago, found the Normans too strong for him.
Otto of Freising, Conrad's half-brother, tells us that the presence at his bedside of certain Italian doctors—probably from the medical school of Salerno—gave rise to inevitable mutterings about Sicilian poison; but though Roger must have welcomed this timely removal of his most dangerous enemy there is no reason to suspect that he was in any way involved. Conrad was fifty-nine and had had a hard life; and mediaeval chroniclers are notoriously reluctant to ascribe to natural causes more deaths than are absolutely necessary. Conrad's mind remained unclouded to the end, and his last injunctions to his nephew and successor, Duke Frederick of Swabia, were to continue the struggle which he had begun until the so-called King of Sicily was finally brought to book. Frederick asked nothing better. Encouraged by the Apulian exiles at the court, he even hoped at one moment to keep to Conrad's original schedule and to march against Roger immediately, picking up his imperial crown on the way. As always, however, the succession brought its own problems, and he soon had to accept a further indefinite postponement. Where foreign adventures were concerned, Conrad's death had left him hamstrung just as Suger's had crippled Louis VII a year before. Sicily had been granted another reprieve.
And these deaths were only the beginning. During the next two years Conrad and Suger were to be followed to their graves by nearly all the great figures who had dominated the European stage over the previous decade. On 8 July 1153 Pope Eugenius died suddenly at Tivoli, and was buried in St Peter's. Though never a great Pope, he had during his papacy revealed a firmness of character which few had suspected at the time of his election. Like so many of his predecessors, he had been forced to spend money freely to buy support
1 This description, by the poet-chronicler Godfrey of Viterbo, is possibly more apt that its author realised. Seneca's position as adviser and confidant of Nero resulted in his suicide; Paris was the lover who ultimately lost; Hector the hero who fled.
among the Romans, yet he personally had always remained incorruptible; his gentleness and unassuming ways had earned him much genuine love and respect of a kind that cannot be bought for gold. Till the day of his death he continued to wear, under his pontifical robes, the coarse white habit of a Cistercian monk; and at his funeral the popular grief was such that, in the words of Bishop Hugh of Ostia, 'one would have believed that he who in death was so honoured on earth was already reigning in Heaven'.1
When the news of his death reached Clairvaux, the Abbot himself was failing fast. We have it on Bernard's own authority that by this time he was in constant pain and unable to touch solid food. His hands and feet were swollen with dropsy. Sleep had become impossible. He too seems to have kept his faculties to the end; but on Thursday 20 August, at nine o'clock in the morning, he died at the age of sixty-three. His is a hard character to assess. Modern biographers seem no less susceptible to his magnetism than were his contemporaries; one after another they rhapsodise over his humility, his charity and his general saintliness. For as long as they confine themselves to his spiritual attributes, their encomiums are possibly justified. It is in the political sphere that St Bernard's record becomes, to say the least, questionable. History is full of instances in which ecclesiastics have played valuable and constructive parts in affairs of state; but these men of the Church have nearly always been men of the world as well, realists who have been able to view the great issues of their time with a cool, objective eye. The Abbot of Clairvaux provides a perfect example of what is apt to occur when this condition is not fulfilled. He was that fortunately rare phenomenon, the genuine mystic and ascetic with a compulsion to interfere in politics. His reputation and the sheer force of his personality ensured that he was listened to; his formidable rhetorical gifts and powers of persuasion did the rest.
His weakness was that he was all emotion. He saw the world with the eye of a fanatic, in black and white—the black to be stamped out by any means available, the white to be upheld whatever the price. Scarcely ever in his letters or other writings do we find a trace of
1 Just over seven centuries later, in 1872, he was to be beatified by Pope Pius IX.
logical argument, still less of political understanding. Such a man, raised to a position of virtually limitless influence and prestige, could only cause havoc; and St Bernard's major interventions in the world political scene were, all too often, disastrous. His incitement of Lothair II against Roger of Sicily ended—as it could only have ended—in debacle and was arguably the cause of the old Emperor's death; his launching of the Second Crusade led to the most shameful Christian humiliation of the Middle Ages. Had he lived it would have surprised no one to find him advocating, as his cousin the Bishop of Langres had already advocated, a punitive expedition against Constantinople of the kind which, when it occurred half a century later, was to deal Eastern Christendom so shatte
ring a blow.
Suger, Conrad, Bernard—one by one, the giants were disappearing from the scene. About this time, too, death robbed Sicily of her High Admiral, George of Antioch. The Emir of Emirs has played, it must be admitted, a somewhat shadowy role in this story. We have seen him as a young adventurer, as a patron of the arts who has left as his memorial one of his country's loveliest churches, and finally as an elderly buccaneer of courage and panache. As an admiral, however, as the man who was for well over a quarter of a century responsible more than any other for the rise of Roger's naval power throughout the Mediterranean, we have done him less than justice. For this the Sicilian records of the time are partly to blame. There exists only one reliable contemporary chronicle covering the second half of George's lifetime—that of Romuald of Salerno; but the Archbishop, not surprisingly, is more concerned with mainland politics than with naval affairs. We are thus obliged to fall back on Arab writers; and while they have left us splendidly detailed reports of the Admiral's seafaring exploits, even they are able to tell us little enough about the man himself.
Yet George of Antioch was the sole architect of Roger II's North African Empire. His capture of Tripoli in 1146—itself the culmination of some ten or fifteen years of regular raids and minor conquests along the coast—had given his master control of the entire littoral as far as Tunis and had consequently marked a turning-point in Roger's African policy. Before it, Sicilian incursions on African soil had all been more or less piratical; henceforth we see authority established on a permanent basis. This authority was not aimed at political domination : Roger was too much of a realist to see such an objective as either possible or even desirable. He was interested only in the economic and strategic advantages to be gained from a North African Empire. Both were immense. By occupying the chief commercial centres of the coast, he could eliminate middlemen; the King's agents, operating at the head of the great caravan routes to the south, with a virtual monopoly of grain and many other commodities as well, were soon able to control a large proportion of the internal trade of the continent. Strategically the position was simpler still: command of the narrow seas between Sicily and Tunis meant mastery of the central Mediterranean.
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