The Kingdom in the Sun

by John Julius Norwich

  There was only one thing to be done. Maio must be removed. And if his removal should also entail the removal of William him­self, then so much the better. The King was already ill; perhaps, with a little help from the right quarter, he might never recover— in which case it would be a relatively easy matter to put the blame on the Emir, the only one of his ministers with unrestricted access to the royal bedchamber. William had already showed himself unfit to govern; how much more satisfactory it would be if the crown were to pass to his three-year-old son. The rightful ruling class could then come into its own, and the Norman barons would regain the power—and the perquisites—to which their birth entitled them.

  But the Emir of Emirs kept his nerve. Not even Falcandus, who detested him, can hold back a word of grudging admiration for the way in which, whatever the crisis, he remained cool and unruffled, his face never betraying any sign of his real emotions. This steady refusal to panic—merely to remain, thanks to his spies, always a jump ahead of any plots that might be hatched against him—saved him more than once during that winter. In the twilight world of intrigue and conspiracy, he seems to have been still quietly confident of being able to hold his own. And, before long, his enemies began to agree with him. By the first weeks of 115 6 they abandoned their earlier tactics, and adopted instead those which had proved so successful to their fellow-vassals in Apulia. Withdrawing to Butera in the far south of the island, a group of barons under a certain Bartholomew of Garsiliato came out in open rebellion.

  At first sight it did not seem a very serious uprising. The insurgents were few in number, their stronghold remote. Nevertheless, this was the first time since the original conquest nearly a century before that a group of Christian vassals on the island of Sicily itself had declared themselves publicly against their ruler; and Maio saw that the time had come for action. Experience on the mainland had shown just how rapidly such revolts could spread. The local population around Butera was largely Arab, and Muslim loyalties must be preserved at all costs. Moreover it looked as if the King, now almost recovered, would have some hard campaigning to do in Italy during the months to come. If so, it was essential that he should have his hands free.

  William was still tired after his illness; and he had inherited in full measure his father's preference for diplomatic negotiation over armed force. Remaining himself in Palermo, he therefore sent an emissary to Butera in the person of Everard, Count of Squillace, to treat with the rebels and to ask them why they had taken so drastic a step. Within a few days Everard returned with the answer. They had acted, they claimed, not in defiance of their King but only against the Emir, who with his henchman the Archbishop was plotting to assassinate William and seize the throne for himself. All they asked was that the King should recognise the dangers that threatened him and rid himself of his evil counsellors before it was too late. They themselves would then lay down their arms and come to Palermo to implore his pardon.

  William may have been lethargic, but he was not a fool; and he trusted Maio a great deal more than any Norman baron. He took no action, sent no acknowledgement to the rebels' message, and waited for their next move. He did not have to wait long. Towards the end of March, riots broke out in Palermo itself. That they were inspired and financed by the rebels was beyond a doubt; though the anger of the rioters was principally directed against Maio and Archbishop Hugh, there were also loud calls for the release from prison of Simon of Policastro, a young Count who had until recently been Asclettin's right-hand man in Campania but who had since been incarcerated by Maio without trial, on charges of suspected treason.

  The appearance of the mob outside his royal palace roused William from his apathy. It was at last borne in on him that there could be no more peace, no more privacy, till the problem was settled. Now that his mind was made up, he moved quickly. To assuage the rioters, he gave orders for the immediate release of Simon of Policastro; then, with Maio at his side but accompanied also by Simon himself as mediator—for he still hoped to avoid bloodshed if possible—he led his army at top speed to Butera.

  Perched on a high pinnacle of rock between two steep valleys, Butera was a perfect natural stronghold; and the insurgents were initially resolved to fight hard in its defence. That they did not do so was largely due to the generosity of William's terms and the per­suasiveness of Count Simon. He convinced them that the King had no intention of dismissing his counsellors, in whom he had implicit trust, and one of whom was accompanying him at that moment; nevertheless he was disposed, in the circumstances, to show leniency to those who had taken up arms against him. Let them surrender at once; their lives and property would be spared, their liberty pre­served; their only punishment would be exile from the Kingdom at the King's pleasure. The rebels accepted the offer. Butera was surrendered, and Sicily was at peace again.

  'King William was a man,' wrote Hugo Falcandus, 'who found it hard ever to leave his palace; but once he was obliged to go forth, then—however disinclined to action he had been in the past—he would fling himself, not so much with courage as in a headstrong, even foolhardy spirit, in the face of all dangers.' As ever, Hugo's malice shows through; but it is still possible to detect some faint tinge of admiration in his words, as well as their underlying truth. Now that William had finally embarked on campaign and could look back on one victory already behind him, he had no intention of calling a halt. His health was restored, his blood was up. Spring had come, and spring was the season for campaigning. He was ready to tackle the mainland.

  Army and navy met at Messina; this was to be a combined opera­tion, in which the Greeks and their allies were to be attacked simultaneously from land and sea. To Messina also was summoned Asclettin, to explain his lamentable showing over the past months. Asclettin seems to have been an uninspired and somewhat colourless commander (not surprisingly, his previous post having been that of Archdeacon of Catania) and it may well be that other, more serious, charges had been laid against him. Certainly, at Messina, not a single voice was raised in his defence—not even that of Maio, whose creature he was and who had raised him to the Chancellorship in defiance of the King's own wishes. But whether traitor, coward or scapegoat, his goods were confiscated and he himself was cast into prison—where, several years later, he died.

  William's treatment of Asclettin epitomised his whole attitude to the coming campaign. This would be in no sense a continuation, how­ever intensified, of last year's pathetic performance. It would be a new operation, offensive rather than defensive, freshly conceived and planned; a blow struck by the combined military and naval power of the Sicilian Kingdom at the enemy's weakest point—the heel of Apulia. In the last days of April, the army crossed to the main­land and set off through Calabria, while the fleet sailed down through the straits and then turned north-east towards Brindisi.

  For three weeks already Brindisi had been under siege. The Byzantines, relying as always on bribes and treachery, had managed to gain entrance to the outer town; but the royalist garrison in the citadel was putting up a determined resistance to them and their progress in Apulia had come, at least temporarily, to a stop. It was only the last of several reverses they had suffered in recent months. First, thanks to the increasing arrogance of Michael Palaeologus, they had gradually lost the confidence and goodwill of the Norman rebels until Robert of Loritello had ridden off in disgust. Then Palaeologus himself had died, after a short illness, in Bari. For all his over­bearing ways he had been a brilliant leader in the field, and his death had been another blow to his countrymen. His successor John Ducas had eventually got the army moving again and had even achieved a reconciliation with the Count of Loritello; but the old confidence between the allies was never quite restored, the momen­tum of 1155 never quite regained.

  And now news was brought to the Byzantine headquarters that the Sicilians were advancing in formidable numbers and strength, led by King William himself. Once again, the Greeks saw their fellow-fighters begin to fall away. The mercenaries chose, as mer­cenaries will, the
moment of supreme crisis to demand impossible increases in their pay; meeting with a refusal, they disappeared en masse. Robert of Loritello deserted for the second time, followed by his own men and most of his compatriots. Ducas, left only with the few troops that he and Palaeologus had brought with them, plus those which had trickled over the Adriatic at various times during the past eight or nine months, found himself impossibly out­numbered.

  It was the Sicilian fleet that arrived first, and for another day or two he was able to hold his own. The entrance to Brindisi harbour is by a narrow channel, barely a hundred yards across. Twelve centuries before, Julius Caesar had blocked it to Pompey's ships; and now Ducas, by placing the four vessels at his command in line abreast across its mouth and stationing well-armed detachments of foot-soldiers along each bank, followed similar tactics. But when a day or two later William's army appeared to the west, Byzantine hopes were at an end. Attacked simultaneously from the land, the sea and the inner citadel, Ducas could not hope to hold the walls; he and his men were caught, in Cinnamus's words, as in a net.

  The battle that followed was short and bloody; the Greek defeat was total. The Sicilian navy had occupied the little islands that circled the harbour entrance and effectively prevented any possibility of escape by sea. Ducas and the other Greek survivors were taken captive. On that one day, 28 May 1156, all that the Byzantines had achieved in Italy over the past year was wiped out as completely as if they had never come.

  William treated his Greek prisoners according to the recognised canons of war; but to his own rebellious subjects he was pitiless. This was another lesson he had learnt from his father. Treason, particularly in Apulia where it was endemic, remained the one crime that could not be forgiven. Of those erstwhile insurgents who fell into his hands, only the luckiest were imprisoned. The rest were hanged, blinded or tied about with heavy weights and cast into the sea. It was the first time since his accession that the King had shown himself in Apulia, and he was resolved that the Apulians should not forget it. From Brindisi he moved to Bari. Less than a year before, the Bariots had readily thrown in their lot with the Byzantines; now they too were to pay the price for their disloyalty. Slowly they filed from their homes, to prostrate themselves at the feet of their ruler and to implore his mercy; but their prayers were unavailing. William merely pointed to the pile of rubble where until recently the citadel had stood. 'Just as you had no pity on my house,' he said, 'so now I shall have no pity on yours.' He gave them two clear days in which to salvage their belongings; on the third day Bari was destroyed. Only the Cathedral, the great church of St Nicholas and a few smaller religious buildings were left standing.

  'And so it came about that of the mighty capital of Apulia, cele­brated for its glory, powerful in its wealth, proud of the nobility of its citizens and admired for the beauty of its architecture by all who saw it, there now lies nothing but a heap of stones.' Thus Hugo Falcandus salutes, a trifle pompously, the city that was a city no more. The Jewish traveller Benjamin of Tudela, writing of it a year or two later, was more succinct: 'From Trani it is a day's journey to Bari, that great city which King William of Sicily destroyed. In consequence of its destruction, neither Jews nor Christians now dwell therein.'

  It was the same old lesson—a lesson that the history of South Italy alone should have made self-evident, yet one that the princes of mediaeval Europe seemed to find impossible to absorb: that in distant lands, wherever there existed an organised native opposition, a temporary force could never achieve permanent conquest. Whirl­wind campaigns were easy, especially when backed by bribes and generous subsidies to the local malcontents; the difficulties arose when it became necessary to consolidate and maintain the advantage gained. For such a purpose no amount of gold was of any avail. The Normans had succeeded in establishing themselves only because they had arrived as mercenaries, and remained as settlers; even then, the task had taken them the best part of a century. When they embarked on foreign adventures—such as the two invasions of the Byzantine Empire by Robert Guiscard and Bohemund—even they were doomed to failure. In North Africa, admittedly, they fared a little better—though the days of the North African Empire were numbered. But where South Italy was concerned there was no exception to the old rule. Its truth had been demonstrated, un­pleasantly, to five of the eight men who had occupied the imperial throne of the West during the past century and a half—most recently to Lothair and Frederick Barbarossa himself. Now it was the turn of the Eastern Empire, and Manuel Comnenus.

  But the Greeks and the Bariots were not the only sufferers. As William marched his exultant army westward across the Apennines, his approach caused a general panic among those vassals who had recently returned, in the wake of Pope Adrian, from exile. Some fled back precipitately to the papal court; others like the Count of Lori­tello escaped to the Abruzzi, where they might be able to carry on a sporadic guerrilla warfare for some time to come. Their leader, however, Prince Robert of Capua, was less fortunate. He too fled, hoping to reach the Papal State; but just as he was crossing the Garigliano into safety he was seized by Count Richard of Aquila and delivered up to the King. By this treachery—for he was one of the Prince of Capua's own vassals and had long been his companion in exile—Count Richard managed to save his own skin. Robert, on the other hand, was sent in chains to Palermo, where his eyes were put out by command of the King.

  He was lucky to have escaped with his life—a life which for thirty years he had devoted to subversion and revolt. The chief vassal of the Kingdom, who, in one of his rare bursts of loyalty, had laid the royal crown on the head of Roger II more than a quarter of a cen­tury before, the richest and most powerful prince in the Regno after the King himself, he might have been the mainstay of the monarchy. He, if anyone, could have brought to the peninsula the stability and peace it so badly needed. But he chose the other course. Twice he had been forced to capitulate; twice he had been offered the King's pardon. It was enough. If the days of the last Prince of Capua ended in darkness, he had only himself to blame.

  One lonely figure remained to face the coming storm. All Pope Adrian's allies were gone. Frederick Barbarossa was back in Ger­many; Michael Palaeologus was dead and his army annihilated; the Norman barons were either in prison or in hiding. Adrian himself, unable to return to Rome since Frederick's coronation, had spent the winter with his court at Benevento. Now, as the Sicilian army drew near, he sent most of his Cardinals away to Campania—mainly for their greater safety but also, perhaps, for another reason. He knew now that he would have to come to terms with William. Die-hard cardinals had wrecked too many potential agreements in the past; if he were to save anything from the disaster, he would need the utmost freedom to negotiate.

  As soon as the vanguard of the Sicilian army appeared over the hills, the Pope sent forth his Chancellor, Roland of Siena, with two other cardinals who had remained at Benevento, to greet the King and bid him, in the name of St Peter, to cease from further hostilities.1 They were received with due courtesy, and formal talks began. The going was not easy. The Sicilian negotiators, led

  1 William of Tyre suggests—and Chalandon, surprisingly, accepts his word without question—that the Sicilians were forced to lay siege to Benevento and starve the Pope out before he would have any dealings with them. For Adrian, anxious now to obtain the best terms he could, such a course would have been ridiculous; and William of Tyre is in any case contradicted by Boso, who was in the city at the time.

  by Maio, Archbishop Hugh and Romuald of Salerno, were in a position of strength and drove a hard bargain, but the papal side fought every inch of the way. It was not until 18 June that agree­ment was finally reached.

  The original manuscript of the Treaty of Benevento still exists in the Vatican Secret Archive. It was drawn up by one of Maio's proteges, a bright young notary called Matthew of Ajello,1 and the prevailing mood of victorious exaltation, bordering even on truculence, shows through every line of his neat, crabbed handwriting. The King, we read, 'having defeat
ed and put to flight those enemies, Greek and barbarian, who had infiltrated, not by strength but by treachery, into his Kingdom', had consented to abase himself before the Pope merely in order not to appear ungrateful before the Almighty, from whom he expected continued cooperation in the future. The political terms of the agreement are then set out in detail. William had obtained from the Pope everything he wanted—more than had ever been granted to his father or grandfather. His kingship was recognised not only over Sicily, Apulia, Calabria and the former Principality of Capua, together with Naples, Salerno, Amalfi and all that pertained to them; it was also now formally extended, for the first time, to that whole region of the northern Abruzzi and the Marches which King Roger's elder sons had claimed and fought for during the previous decade. An annual tribute was agreed for all these lands, amounting to the six hundred scbifati in respect of Apulia and Calabria which had already been settled by Roger and Pope Innocent at Mignano seventeen years before, plus another four hundred for the new territories to the north.

  In mainland ecclesiastical affairs William was prepared to be rather more accommodating. Henceforth all disputes within the Church might be submitted to Rome for arbitration; the Pope's consent would be sought for all transfers; he would have free right of consecra­tion and might send legates at will into the Regno so long as they did not impose too heavy a burden on the local churches. But where Sicily was concerned, nearly all the King's traditional privileges were preserved. Adrian was obliged to confirm the Apostolic