The Kingdom in the Sun

by John Julius Norwich

  concerned. The governor protested, then—fearing Odo's influence in high places—reluctantly agreed; but no sooner did he appear on the scene and make his purpose known than he was met by a volley of stones and forced to retire. By nightfall Messina was under mob rule. Old rumours were reborn, new ones sprang up. Stephen du Perche, it was whispered, had already married the Regent; he had killed the young King; he planned to seize the throne; once he had done so, he would dispossess all Greeks, dividing their property among the French and Latins; the true purpose of Odo Quarrel's journey was to fetch the Chancellor's brother from Normandy, so that he could be married to Roger II's posthumous daughter Constance, now a child of fourteen.

  But by now Odo can have had little thought of returning to Sicily for any reason whatever—if indeed he ever managed to leave it alive. He barricaded himself into his house and waited, terrified, for developments. Meanwhile a crowd of Messinans hurried to the harbour, commandeered seven galleys and crossed the straits to Reggio where the Count of Montescaglioso was im­prisoned. Once there, they had no difficulty in persuading the local population to make common cause with them, march on the citadel and insist on the Count's immediate release. Their arrival took the local garrison by surprise; outnumbered many times over, it soon capitulated and handed over its prisoner.

  Henry of Montescaglioso had never been renowned for his intelligence, but he was quick to seize an opportunity. On his return to Messina, his first thought was to assure himself of Odo Quarrel— and in particular of the immense treasure which the canon was known to be taking back with him to France. A notary was called and instructed to make a complete inventory of all the gold and silver, jewels and silks in his house and have them stored in a place of safety; Henry then ordered Odo to be transferred from the royal palace, where he had hoped to find a safe refuge from the mob, to the old fortress overlooking the harbour. At this point, however, the Messinans objected. They still did not altogether trust their chosen leader—he was, after all, well known in certain sections of the town—and they suspected, probably with good reason, that he might at any moment start negotiating with Stephen du Perche, using his quivering captive as a bargaining counter. Their leaders went straight to Henry and demanded that Odo be surren­dered to them for punishment; the Count hesitated, but dared not refuse.

  Odo Quarrel was an unattractive character; he was also a stupid one, who by his stupidity brought about not just his own downfall but that of all his recently arrived compatriots in Sicily. But he did not deserve the fate that awaited him. Stripped naked and tied backwards on a donkey, he was led through the streets under a hail of stones. When he reached the gates some citizen, whether deputed for the task or acting on a sudden impulse we do not know, stepped forward and plunged a long Pisan knife into his neck, licking the blade afterwards as a final gesture of hatred and contempt. The mob then fell on its victim, stabbing the lifeless body again and again in its fury, cutting off the head, impaling it on a lance and parad­ing it through the city. Finally they flung it into the public sewer, from which it was later recovered and secretly buried.

  Odo's end was but a beginning. The following morning, when dawn broke over Messina, there was not a Frenchman left alive.

  Away in Palermo, Stephen du Perche began to see that he was faced no longer with a local uprising, but with a rapidly spreading rebellion. Messengers were now arriving daily at the capital, and the news they brought grew daily more ominous. The rebels had taken Rometta, an important vantage-point commanding the Palermo-Messina road; they had swept down the coast to Taormina, attack­ing the citadel and releasing Richard of Molise; the Bishop of Cefalù had declared openly in their favour, and where the bishop led, other ecclesiastics would be sure to follow. There were no reports as yet of any further incidents on the mainland, but the recent events at Reggio were a clear enough indication that the fire of revolt could jump the straits whenever necessary.

  The Chancellor's first reaction was to mobilise an army and march against Messina. Many of the regular detachments, he knew, might be of doubtful loyalty; but the Lombard colonies round Etna— who had no special love for the Greeks—had offered on their own initiative to put twenty thousand men into the field against them, and with such a nucleus it should be possible to build up a reason­ably effective striking force. But there were delays. The fifteen-year-old King, in his first recorded political intervention, counselled postponement of the campaign until the stars should be in a more favourable conjunction—a poor augury for his future statecraft. And now Stephen himself, in the gravest crisis of his short career, hesitated. Should he, as his French friends advocated, remain with the King and the Regent in Palermo where, in an atmosphere now more highly charged than ever, his life was once again in peril ? Or should he follow the advice of Ansald, the palace castellan, leave the capital and organise resistance from some distant stronghold, where William and Margaret could later join him ?

  Had Stephen known that Matthew of Ajello in his prison cell had already arranged for his assassination, it might have helped him to make up his mind. Using Constantine, Ansald's deputy, as his intermediary, Matthew had had no difficulty in making contact with his friends among the domestics of the palace and persuading them to do the deed. His plan, like its two predecessors, was simple; Stephen was to be struck down on a given morning as he entered the building, at a point between the first and second gates where he would have little room to defend himself.

  The Chancellor, alerted in time, remained in his house. His non­appearance, however, was an unmistakable sign that the alarm had been given, and warned his enemies that they must act again quickly if they wished to save their own lives. Fortunately for them, Ansald the castellan was ill; confined to his room on an upper floor of the palace, he had left his deputy Constantine in command. The latter at once" summoned the sergeants-at-arms and ordered them to go through the city, calling on the whole population to unite in prevent­ing the Chancellor from making a getaway with the royal treasure. Whether Constantine really believed in this last possibility is open to doubt; but his appeal had the desired effect. Ever since the first re­ports from Messina, excitement in Palermo had been growing; Matthew's agents had fanned it yet higher; Christian and Saracen alike were now avid for the chance of avenging themselves on the foreigners they loathed, while in the stews and alleys of the town bands of ruffians were already preparing for the looting that would surely follow. Now, as the sergeants spread their message, men everywhere snatched up their swords and streamed into the streets. Within the hour the Chancellor's house was under siege.

  At the first sign of disturbance Stephen had been joined by a num­ber of his followers. They put up a brave defence, but their task was hopeless. Outside, the crowd was growing larger and more menacing every moment; its numbers had now been swelled, as the defenders saw to their horror, by the archers of the royal guard. Such troops as had remained faithful, fewer in number than the aggressors and probably no better armed, were unable to force their way through to the beleaguered building—which itself, being the official residence of the Archbishop of Palermo, was ill equipped to withstand a siege. It had, however, one advantage—a narrow corridor linking it directly with the cathedral. To Stephen and his companions, desperate now, this corridor represented their one slender chance of escape. Down it they sped, leaving a few knights behind to cover their retreat, thence through the great church to the bell-tower. Here at last was some­thing they could defend; here, at any rate, they would be safe for a little longer.

  In the general tumult that had spread through the city it had been an easy matter for Matthew of Ajello and Caid Richard to escape and to place themselves once more at the head of the rebellion. Now, calling out the royal trumpeters, they had them blow a fanfare out­side the archbishop's palace where the mob, unaware of Stephen's flight, was still hammering at the doors. It was a brilliant move. To all who heard it, the sound could mean one thing only—that the King was behind the insurgents. Those who were already in
the streets found new enthusiasm and redoubled their efforts; many who had remained in their homes—often through uncertainty as to where their duty lay—hurried out to join them. Meanwhile someone, probably Matthew himself, had remembered the little corridor— seeing it not so much as an escape route for the besieged but as a means of infiltrating the palace from the rear. At once there was a rush to the cathedral. Stephen's men had locked and bolted every entrance, but faggots were brought up and soon the great wooden doors themselves were aflame. The crowd burst in, over­whelmed the few brave swordsmen who tried to turn them back, and, without giving a thought to the bell-tower, poured down the corridor into the palace.

  Only when the entire building had been ransacked—and, we may imagine, stripped bare by looters—did it dawn on the mob leaders where Stephen must have gone. Back to the bell-tower they ran; but its winding stair was narrow, its defenders fighting for their lives. The few hot-heads who ventured up soon reappeared, streaming with blood. There was a pause. Some were for burning the whole tower down; others held that a stone building would be better attacked by a siege engine; yet others proposed undermining the foundations. They were still arguing when darkness fell. Enough had happened for one day; it was agreed that, however the tower was to be attacked, the operation was better left till the morrow.

  But Matthew of Ajello was growing anxious. The building, he knew, was strong—stronger than most of its would-be assailants seemed to think. Stephen and his friends would have carried pro­visions with them from the palace; once settled in, they might easily be able to hold out for a week or more—a good deal longer, probably, than the mob's enthusiasm. The King, also, presented a problem. He was showing signs of unexpected spirit. Already he had demanded to be allowed to ride out and face his subjects, calling upon them to lay down their arms and return to their homes; and Matthew, strong as his position was, had had a hard time restraining him. The boy's popularity in the city was as great as ever; once he managed to make his true sympathies known, support for the rebellion would dwindle rapidly.

  And so Matthew and his associates decided to offer the Chancellor terms. Emissaries were sent to the tower with their offer. Stephen and all those of his compatriots who wished to accompany him would be taken in Sicilian galleys to Palestine; the rest would be given free passage back to France. As for those Sicilians who had supported him, there would be no reprisals taken against either their persons or their property. Such mercenaries as he had employed would be allowed to continue in service with the King if they so wished; otherwise they might leave the country unhindered. The agreement would be guaranteed by Richard Palmer, Bishop John of Malta, Romuald of Salerno and Matthew himself. In the circumstances, they could hardly have been more generous. Stephen accepted.

  It remained only to get the Chancellor and his friends out of Sicily as soon as possible. A suitable vessel was found, and all that night the loading and provisioning went on until, by the following morning, it was ready to sail. To avoid incident, the party was embarked a little distance from the capital, near the modern suburb of Mondello; but just as the ship was about to weigh anchor, a commotion broke out on the quay. The canons of the cathedral had suddenly remembered that they had failed to obtain from Stephen an instrument of resignation from his archbishopric; without such a document they would be unable to elect his successor. At first Stephen—whose mood by now cannot have been of the best— refused to give it; only when he heard the mutterings of those present and saw their hands tightening on their swords did he understand how they had interpreted his refusal—as a sign that he secretly intended to return to Sicily and seize power once more. Then he relented—probably in genuine horror that anyone should think him willing, in any circumstances, to set foot again in a land which he had sincerely tried to serve and by which he had been so shame­fully repaid.

  Poor Stephen: he was to do so sooner than he knew. Hardly was his galley out of the harbour than it proved totally unseaworthy. Whether it had been sabotaged or not we shall never know; but by the time it reached Licata, half-way along the south-west coast of the island, it could go no further. The local population was openly hostile; it was only with the utmost reluctance that Stephen was allowed to land at all, and then for a period not exceeding three days. In so short a time repairs were out of the question; it was in another vessel, bought at his own expense from some Genoese merchants he found in the harbour, that he finally reached the Holy Land.

  Into the two years since he had left France, Stephen du Perche had packed a lifetime of experience. He had attained the highest ranks, both civil and ecclesiastical, in one of the three greatest kingdoms of Europe, he had risen from layman to metropolitan archbishop, he had won the respect of some, the detestation of many—and, pro­bably, the love of a queen. He had learned much—about power and the abuses of power, about the art of government; about loyalty, friendship and fear. But about Sicily he had learned nothing. He never understood that the nation's strength, if not its very survival, depended upon the maintenance of its unity; and that since it was by nature heterogeneous and fissile, that unity must be imposed from above. Because of this incomprehension, he failed; and the fact that in the end he accidentally and involuntarily united his enemies against him in no way diminishes his failure.

  It might be said that he was unlucky, and perhaps he was; unlucky in that he came to Sicily at a moment when the island was more demoralised than it had been at any time since the Normans first landed on its soil; unlucky in his companions, for whose arrogance and boorishness he was inevitably blamed; unlucky, even, in his age and inexperience—for it is all too easy to forget that at the time of his inglorious departure he was still in his early or middle twenties. Yet even at the end Fortune had cast on him one thin, watery smile; if the ship's captain had elected, on setting sail, to head east instead of west, taking the more direct route through the straits rather than the longer one via Trapani, his vessel might have been forced to put in not at Licata but at Messina instead. Had it done so, the Sicilian adventure of Stephen du Perche might have had a different and still unhappier end.

  Of the thirty-seven Frenchmen who had accompanied Stephen to Sicily, two only were still alive when the time came to depart. One was a certain Roger, 'learned, industrious and modest', who now makes his first and last appearance in our story. The other was Peter of Blois, one of the foremost scholars of his day. Peter had studied the humanities at Tours, theology at Paris, and law at Bologna; soon after his return to France, he had been selected by Rothrud of Rouen to go to Sicily as tutor—with Walter of the Mill—to the young King. It was a position that was bound to excite the envy of the court, and his enemies had never stopped trying to get rid of him, twice offering him the see of Rossano and once even the archbishop­ric of Naples; but he had always refused. Despite a highly-developed sense of his own importance, he was neither grasping nor ambitious; and though intellectuals no longer enjoyed the same pre-eminence as in the two previous reigns, learning was still respected in Palermo more than in any other contemporary court of Europe. He had had no desire to leave.

  But the events of the summer of 1168 changed all that. When the crisis came, Peter was lucky enough to be ill in bed, under the expert care of Romuald of Salerno; but when, on his recovery, the King explained that the expulsion of all Frenchmen did not apply to him and pleaded with him to remain, Peter showed himself as firmly determined to depart as he had previously been to stay. As he wrote later to his brother, he 'would not be persuaded by gifts, or promises, or rewards'. A Genoese ship was about to leave for France with the last forty of Stephen's friends on board; Peter insisted on taking it; and before long he was congratulating himself on having exchanged the bitter wines of Sicily for the rich and mellow vintages of his native Loire. Three or four years later his old friend Richard Palmer wrote to him suggesting that he might like to revisit his old friends. Peter's reply speaks for itself:

  Sicily drags us down by her very air; she drags us down too by the malice of her pe
ople, so that to me she seems odious and scarcely habitable. The distempers of her climate render her abominable to me, as does the frequent and poisonous dissemination by whose immense power our people in their heedless simplicity are constantly endangered. Who, I ask, can live in safety in a place where, leaving aside all other afflictions, the very mountains continually vomit infernal flame and fetid sulphur ? For there beyond doubt is the gate of hell . . . where men are taken from the earth and descend living into the regions of Satan.

  Your people err in the meagreness of their diets; for they live on so much celery and fennel that it constitutes almost all their susten­ance; and this generates a humour which putrefies the body and brings it to the extremes of sickness and even death.

  To this I would add that, just as it is written in books of science that all island peoples are in general unworthy of trust, so the inhabit­ants of Sicily are false friends and, in secret, the most abandoned betrayers. . . .

  To you in Sicily, most beloved father, I shall not return. England shall cherish me, an old man, as she cherished you, a child.1 Rather

  1 She did so rather well, and for some forty years. Peter became Archdeacon, first of Bath and then of London, before he died early in the following century.

  is it for you to leave that mountainous, monstrous land and return to the sweetness of your native air. . . . Flee, father, from those flammivomitous mountains, and look on the land of Etna with suspicion, lest the infernal regions greet you on your death.

  As the ships disappeared over the horizon, bearing first Stephen du Perche and his reluctant fellow-pilgrims and then Peter of Blois with his home-bound compatriots, Queen Margaret must have been near despair. She had staked everything on these Frenchmen, and she had lost. With her son William still only fifteen, her own regency had another three years to run; but her reputation, both political and moral, was ruined. The last sad champion of the departed order, the 'Spanish woman' was now neither feared nor resented; she was simply ignored.