The Kingdom in the Sun

by John Julius Norwich

  We have no documentary evidence to tell us about these mosaics, nothing but their style—and in particular their affinity with those of the Zisa—to help us to date them. No matter. What really counts in this enchanting room, this gorgeous bestiary in blue and green and gold, is the way it speaks to us, like the Zisa but far more loudly and clearly, of the happier and more carefree side of Norman Sicilian life; reminding us how, despite all the intrigues and conspiracies and rebellions that fill so many of these pages, the sun still shone through the forest and men still looked on the world around them, and laughed, and were grateful.

  William the Bad ended his reign as he had begun it, leaving all the responsibilities of state to others while he enjoyed all the privi­leges himself. There is no suggestion that his conscience ever troub­led him; not even the appalling earthquake of 4 February 1163 which shook all eastern Sicily, virtually destroying Catania and causing a large section of Messina to crumble into the sea, seems to have worried him unduly. After all, the western end of the island where he lived remained unaffected. In Palermo, the walls of the Palatine Chapel were still further enriched with mosaic and marble;1 the Zisa rose ever higher; the harem, the library and the game parks were constantly enriched for his pleasure. For him it should have been a happy time.

  But it did not last. In March 1166 the King was stricken with a violent dysentery, accompanied by fever. Doctors were summoned,

  1 See p. 75.

  among them Archbishop Romuald, who had probably attended the famous medical school at Salerno during his youth and who cer­tainly enjoyed a high reputation as a physician. Later, to explain his lack of success, Romuald was to claim that his royal patient refused to accept many of the medicaments prescribed for him. In any event, after languishing for two months, rallying and relapsing by turns, William died on 7 May 1166, at about three o'clock in the afternoon. He was forty-six years old.

  Even Hugo Falcandus, who loathed the late King and who, as we know, never hesitated to adjust historical truth to his own purposes, has to admit that William the Bad was genuinely mourned. The citizens of Palermo, he writes,

  dressed themselves in black garments, and remained in this sombre apparel for three days. And throughout that time all the ladies, the noble matrons and especially the Saracen women—to whom the King's death had caused unimaginable grief—paraded day and night in sackcloth about the streets, their hair all undone, while before them went a great multitude of handmaidens, singing sad threnodies to the sound of tambourines till the whole city rang with their lamentations.

  Despite energetic demands by the canons of Cefalù—where Roger's two great porphyry sarcophagi still awaited worthy occu­pants—it was agreed that William should be buried in Palermo; not even with his father in the cathedral, but more privately in the Palatine Chapel. No preparations had been made for an elaborate tomb; the body was laid in a relatively modest receptacle and con­signed to the Chapel crypt.1 Twice since then it has been disturbed. The first time was barely twenty years after the King's death, when it was transferred to its existing sarcophagus—of porphyry, like his father's—and its present position in the sanctuary of Monreale Cathedral. The second was in 1811 when, after a serious fire in the building, the sarcophagus was opened. William's corpse was found to be in a remarkable state of preservation, the pale face still covered with that thick beard that had struck such terror into the hearts of his more timorous subjects.

  1 The place where it rested was rediscovered during the restorations of 1921 and can still be seen today.

  He had not been a good king. Despite his formidable appearance, he seems to have had little real confidence in himself. To some extent this was natural. To follow Roger II on the throne of Sicily would have been a daunting enough prospect for anyone; William had received no training for kingship until he was thirty, and if Roger had had a low opinion of his fourth son's capabilities—as there is good reason to believe that he did—he is unlikely to have concealed the fact. It is hardly surprising, then, that William should have tried to conceal his insecurity behind that fearsome exterior, and to pass off his shortcomings as an administrator with elaborate demonstra­tions of indifference. It may also be more than coincidental that he tended to shy away from those very aspects of statecraft—finance, diplomacy and legislation—that had so fascinated his father. Only where he felt that he could compete with Roger on equal terms could he prove to the world that he too was a Hauteville. Thus he too could build magnificently; and, above all, he could fight. He was a better soldier than his father had ever been, and he knew it. When he was besieged in his own palace, bereft of friends or counsellors, he had revealed himself as what he so often was—a hesitant, frightened man; but once he was in the field, his army behind him, he was transformed. And when the final crisis came, it was his courage and military skill that saved the Kingdom.

  This very contrast, however, is typical of him. Throughout his life he remained unsteady and mercurial—a consequence, perhaps, of that same lack of self-reliance that was his most fatal weakness. Long periods of the profoundest lethargy would be interrupted with bursts of frantic, almost hysterical activity. He could be cruel to the point of savagery at one moment, almost unbelievably merciful the next. His attitude to Matthew Bonnellus, hostile and welcoming by turns —to say nothing of his shameful treatment of Henry Aristippus— shows how pathetically easily he could be swayed by his changing moods, or by the counsels of those around him. Lacking any real equilibrium himself, he proved incapable of maintaining all those delicate political balances on which the safety of his realm depended —between himself and his subjects, nobility and bourgeoisie, Christian and Muslim.

  And yet—William the Bad ? The epithet still rings false. There was nothing evil about him. In no sense was he a wicked man;1 and, if the above analysis is correct, it would suggest that his reluctance to face up to so many of his political responsibilities was due not only to his natural indolence but also to a genuine conviction that there were others around him better qualified for the task. It might also mean that William, far from being the careless hedonist that Falcandus depicts, was in fact a profoundly unhappy man who saw in every new palace and pleasure merely another temporary refuge for his troubled spirit. Perhaps William the Sad might have been a more accurate description. We shall never know. Of the only two impor­tant contemporary chroniclers of his reign, one is accurate but maddeningly sketchy, the other brilliant but hopelessly unreliable. In the absence of any further evidence we can only return a verdict of Not Proven, and leave one of the most enigmatic characters in the history of Norman Sicily to his rest.

  1 There is still a Sicilian popular tradition to the effect that William called in all the gold and silver coinage of the kingdom and replaced it with copper, keeping the proceeds for himself. No contemporary records suggest anything of the kind. Certain measures may well have been taken to restore the economy after 1161, but not even Falcandus accuses the King of deliberately impoverishing his subjects for his own profit.

  PART FOUR

  SUNSET

  14

  THE COUNSELLORS OF UNWISDOM

  For although both peoples, Apulians and Sicilians, are faithless, unreli­able and given to every kind of villainy, yet are the Sicilians more cunning in dissimulation and in the concealment of their true motives, beguiling those whom they hate with honeyed words and gentle flattery in order to do them greater hurt by taking them unawares.

  Hugo Falcandus

  Legally, there was no problem over the succession. The dying King had made it clear that he wished the crown to pass to his elder surviving son, William; and that the younger, Henry, must be content with the principality of Capua. Since William was still only twelve years old, his mother Queen Margaret was to act as Regent, with the continued help of Richard Palmer, Caid Peter and Matthew of Ajello. It all seemed straightforward enough.

  The three advisers, however, were not so sure. Long minorities under a woman regent were always dangerous; the prest
ige of the Crown had not altogether recovered from the events of 1161; there might easily be a movement by the aristocracy in favour of the dead King's illegitimate brother Simon. Young William, after all, had never been associated with the throne during his father's lifetime; he had not even been created Duke of Apulia, the traditional title for the heir apparent. Such were their misgivings that they had even persuaded Margaret to delay the announcement of her husband's death while preparations were made for the coronation, and to proceed with the ceremony as soon as the three-day period of mourning was over.

  They need not have bothered. On the day appointed for his coronation—which was also the day of his first public appearance— young William immediately won all hearts. Unlike his father, the boy started off with one supreme advantage: he was quite out­standingly good-looking. When, in Palermo Cathedral, Romuald of Salerno anointed him with the holy oil and laid the Crown of Sicily on his head, and when, later, he rode in state through the city to the Royal Palace, the golden circlet still gleaming on the long fair hair inherited from his Viking forbears, his subjects—whatever their race, creed or political affiliation—could not contain their joy. Fresh-faced but solemn—he was still a few weeks short of his thir­teenth birthday—he seemed to combine the innocence of a child with a gravity beyond his years. Loyalty was suddenly in the air. Even Hugo Falcandus, describing the scene, permits himself one of his rare bursts of charity:

  Though always of surpassing beauty, on that day he appeared—by what means I cannot tell—more beautiful than ever before. . . . And so he gained the love and favour of all, to the point where even those whose hatred of his father had been bitter and who had resolved never more to owe any allegiance to his heirs and successors were claiming that the first man to harbour evil designs against him would have passed beyond the bounds of all common humanity. It was enough, they said, that he who was responsible for their ills should have been taken from their midst; an innocent boy should not be blamed for the tyrannies of his father. For truly the child was of such beauty that it would be impossible to allow of an equal, far less of a superior.

  On the same day, as a further indication that this was indeed the beginning of a new era for the Kingdom, Queen Margaret declared a general amnesty, opened all the prisons and restored all confiscated lands to their former owners. More significant still, she also abolished redemption money, the most unpopular of all her late husband's impositions, by means of which many cities and towns of the main­land were still being bled white for having dared, five years before, to rise up against him.

  It was an auspicious start; but Margaret knew that she would be hard put to maintain her advantage. For one thing, she had grave doubts about her present triumvirate of advisers. She was a strong-willed woman, at thirty-eight still in the prime of life, and they were probably inclined to be overbearing in their attitude towards her, insufficiently mindful of her superior authority; but what made them in the last resort unacceptable was the fact that as former counsellors and nominees of William I they were all irremediably identified with the previous regime. Clearly they would have to go; but who was to take their place ?

  Among the aristocracy there were countless barons only too eager —and, doubtless, in several cases confidently expecting—to assume the positions of power they had so long coveted; Margaret, however, recoiled at the prospect. Again and again these nobles had shown how shallow their real loyalties were. It was they, and they alone, who had taken up arms against her husband and had held her and her children prisoner; to admit them now to the inner councils of government would lead to a proliferation of feudal estates in Sicily until the island became as unmanageable as Apulia and Campania had always been. This in turn would be bound to sharpen the already smouldering confessional animosities; and the result, sooner or later, would be a coup against herself and her son, against which they would have little if any defence. Fortunately since the fall of Matthew Bonnellus the aristocratic party had been without an effective leader and seemed to have lost much of its cohesion. For the time being it constituted no real threat. Margaret could afford to look elsewhere.

  There was always the Church—but what a Church it had become. Like so many high ecclesiastics of the Middle Ages, the bishops and archbishops of the Sicilian Kingdom were a worldly lot, more politicians than prelates, many of them never going near their dioceses1 but remaining permanently at the court in Palermo, endlessly meddling, bickering, squabbling and intriguing against each other. Of them all, by far the ablest and most influential was Richard Palmer—whose absenteeism was such that he was not consecrated Bishop of Syracuse till 1169, fourteen years after his election to the see. He had been largely responsible for the bishops' initiative that had saved William I in 1161 from the hands of the

  1 This practice soon became such a scandal that Pope Alexander III had to pass a decree in 1176 requiring Sicilian bishops who had spent seven years or more at court to return to their posts.

  insurgents, as a result of which he had become the late King's closest adviser. He was, however, universally disliked for his arrogance and haughtiness; and his rapid advancement had not endeared him to his colleagues, particularly since he made no secret of the fact that he had his eye firmly fixed on the greatest of all prizes for a Sicilian church­man—the vacant archbishopric of Palermo.

  But Richard Palmer was not the only contender. Romuald of Salerno, the present primate, was another obvious possibility; so too was Bishop Tristan of Mazara. Then there was Roger, Archbishop of Reggio, in the description of whom Falcandus finds the top of his form:

  Already on the brink of old age, he was tall and so excessively thin that he appeared to be eaten away from the inside. His voice was weak as a whistle. His face—and indeed his whole body—was pale and yet somehow tinged with blackness, making him look more like a corpse than a man; and his external aspect well indicated the charac­ter within. He counted no labour difficult if there were hope of gain therefrom; and he would willingly endure hunger and thirst beyond the limits of human tolerance in order to save money. Never happy at his own table, he was never sad at those of others, and would frequently spend whole days without food, waiting to be invited to dinner.

  One of the Archbishop's most frequent hosts was Gentile, the Bishop of Agrigento, felicitously described by Chalandon as a prilat aventureux et vagabond, who had originally come to Sicily as an ambassador from King Geza of Hungary and then decided to stay on. Gentile, as Falcandus informs us with some relish, made no secret of his penchant for debauchery, and profited by his sumptuous and vaguely orgiastic banquets to start a serious whispering campaign against Palmer with the intention of blocking his candidature. His complaints about the Bishop-elect's foreign origins must have sounded a little strange in the circumstances, but he had rather more success when he persuaded Matthew of Ajello that Palmer was plotting his assassination; Matthew was with difficulty restrained from getting his own knife in first.1

  1 Although, as the above paragraphs make clear, pressure of affairs in Palermo normally prevented these clerics from paying any but the most fleeting visits to their dioceses, several seem to have tried to make amends by magnificent dona­tions and endowments. Thus Romuald of Salerno is responsible for the superb marble and mosaic ambo in his cathedral (originally founded, it will be remem­bered, by Robert Guiscard) and Richard Palmer for the glass and mosaics—what is left of them—at Syracuse. The cathedral treasury of Agrigento possesses a very fine Byzantine portable altar, which is certainly of the twelfth century and may well have been a gift from Gentile. Despite his proclivities, however, we cannot alas connect him with the other pride of the Agrigento collection—a handwritten letter from the Devil which is preserved, very properly, in the archives.

  One other candidate remained for the coveted archbishopric. At the time he must have seemed something of an outsider, since he could not even boast episcopal rank. He also was an Englishman, whose various orthographical disguises—Ophamilus or Offamiglio to name but two—re
present nothing more than desperate Sicilian attempts to deal phonetically with his perfectly ordinary English name, Walter of the Mill. First brought to Sicily as tutor to the royal children, he had been successively appointed Archdeacon of Cefalù, then Dean of Agrigento. Now he was one of the canons of the Palatine Chapel, where he was proving himself even more unscrupu­lous and ambitious than the compatriot whose career he was working so hard to undermine. Only he, of all the rivals, was to attain his objective. For reasons which we shall presently see, he had to wait for it another three years; but for a quarter of a century after that he was destined to occupy the highest political and ecclesiastical posts in the realm, building the present cathedral and becoming almost certainly the only Englishman in history regularly to sign himself Emir and Archbishop. As such, he will play an important— and ultimately disastrous—part in the closing chapters of this story.

  The aristocracy, then, was dangerous and of doubtful loyalty; the hierarchy self-seeking and—so far as the personalities of its principal members were concerned—distinctly unattractive. That left only one other significant group—the palace officials and civil servants, headed by the eunuch Caid Peter and the Grand Protonotary, Matthew of Ajello. Even by eunuch standards, Peter was an uninspiring character; but he too had proved his devotion to the King and his family in 1161, and his administrative efficiency was beyond question. Matthew for his part was at least as able; he had recently completed the herculean task—which no one but he could possibly have accomplished—of recompiling, largely from memory, a compre­hensive register of lands and fiefs to replace that which had been destroyed in the insurrection. Like Richard Palmer, however, he had one of those dominating characters that Queen Margaret instinctively mistrusted. He was furthermore obsessed with the idea of being appointed Emir of Emirs—a rank and title which had re­mained in abeyance since the death of Maio of Bari—and was consequently for ever immersed in intrigues of his own, besides giving himself the airs and graces of a grand seigneur and using his steadily increasing wealth to build a noble church in the city as George of Antioch and Maio had done before him.1 Of the pair, the Queen much preferred Peter. He was not the ideal solution—the nobles, in particular, hated and despised him—but he seemed relatively free of personal ambition and was less of an intriguer than most of his fellows. In any case he would be able to hold the King­dom together while she found someone more suitable. To the fury of Matthew and of Richard Palmer, she promoted him over their heads—thus putting the effective direction of the Sicilian Kingdom, now one of the richest and most influential powers in Christian Europe, in the hands of a Muslim eunuch.