The Kingdom in the Sun

by John Julius Norwich

  The treaty of Venice marks the culmination of Alexander's pontifi­cate. After all the sufferings and humiliations he had had to endure, through eighteen years of schism and ten of exile, and in the face of the unremitting hostility of one of the most redoubtable figures ever to wear the imperial crown, here at last was his reward. By now well over seventy, he had lived to see the Emperor's recognition not only of himself as legitimate Pope but of all the temporal rights of the Papacy over the city of Rome—those same rights that Frederick had so arrogantly claimed for the Empire at the time of his coronation. The fifteen-year peace that Barbarossa had signed with Sicily meant the end of those fears of imperial encirclement that had in the past

  1 Plate 19. In the atrium of St Mark's, immediately in front of the central door­way, a small lozenge of red and white marble still indicates the place of the Emperor's abasement. 'The Venetian legends say that the Emperor, facing Alexander on this very spot, agreed to apologise to St Peter but not to the Pope, and that Alexander replied sternly: "To Peter and the Pope." '(James Morris, Venice.) It is a nice story, but it hardly accords with Romuald's version; and Romuald, as a highly-placed eyewitness, should have known.

  so tormented the papal Curia; while the six-year truce concluded with the Lombard League was, it was agreed, only a preliminary to the formal acknowledgement by the Empire of the Lombard cities' independence. It was a triumph—greater far than that which Pope Gregory had scored over Henry IV exactly a century before; but to the faithful who rejoiced with the old Pope at Venice during those sweltering summer days it was also a tribute to the wisdom and firmness with which he had steered the Church through one of the most troubled times of her history.

  Even now the troubles were not quite over. It was a further year before first one anti-Pope and then another made their submission to him; even then, the Roman Senate remained so hostile that in the summer of 1179 Alexander left Rome for the last time. He had never liked the city, never trusted its people; to him, all through his life, it had been enemy country. And when, after his death at Civita Castellana on the last day of August 1181, his body was brought back to the Lateran, the Romans proved him right. Not four years before, they had welcomed him back from exile to the sound of trumpets and with hymns of thanksgiving; now, as his funeral cortege entered the city the senseless populace, not content with flinging curses on Alexander's name, threw mud and stones at the bier that carried his corpse, scarcely suffering it to be buried in the basilica.1

  The thing that struck people most about Alexander's successor, Lucius III, was his immense age. Such little evidence as we have suggests that he had been born in the previous century; if so, he would have already have been in his eighties when he ascended the throne of St Peter. ' Vir grandaevus' is how William of Tyre des­cribes him, adding—perhaps a trifle bitchily—'et modice litteratus'.2 The Treaty of Venice had absolved him, during his four-year pontificate, from the necessity of paying much attention to Sicilian affairs; and his principal contribution was a Bull, dated 5 February

  1 It was, all the same; but the original tomb has, alas, gone and has been replaced by a nasty baroque affair, erected in 1660 by his namesake and enthusias­tic admirer, Alexander VII

  2 'A very old man, and—up to a point—cultured'.

  1183, granting the status of an archbishopric to William II's new foundation—the abbey and cathedral of Monreale.1

  William had been working on this huge project for the past nine years. In 1174, so runs the legend, the Virgin Mary had appeared to him while he was resting from the hunt in his royal deer-park just outside Palermo, had revealed the location of a hoard of treasure secretly buried there by his father, and had commanded him to unearth it and devote it to some pious purpose. The story doubtless served to justify the astronomical sums of money that the King was to lavish on Monreale in the years to come—just as variants of it have done for so many other expensive foundations over the centuries. William's real motives, however, were more complex. Deeply religious by nature, he was unquestionably sincere in wishing to raise up some mighty edifice to the glory of God; and the hero-worship that he had always felt for his grandfather, the founder of Cefalù and S. Giovanni degli Eremiti and the builder of the Palatine Chapel, must have further strengthened his determination. If the church he was to build served also as a monument to himself, then so much the better.

  But the considerations that led him to press on so hurriedly with the work were more political than personal. From the moment he had assumed power he had been aware—and Matthew of Ajello had constantly reminded him—of the growing influence of Walter of the Mill. As Archbishop of Palermo Walter had by now managed to unite nearly all the leading barons and prelates behind him in a reactionary, feudalist party that, if it were allowed to develop unchecked, boded ill for the Kingdom. Even in ecclesiastical affairs he was pursuing a dangerous course. The upheavals of the Regency had given the Sicilian Church the opportunity to assert itself inde­pendently not j ust of the Pope—there was nothing new in that—but of the King as well; and this tendency Walter was doing everything he could to encourage. His power in the land was already second only

  1 There can be no clearer indication of the change that had come about in Sicilian-Papal relations since the days of King Roger. He would never for a moment have tolerated such interference in what he would have considered the domestic affairs of his kingdom. A legend exists to the effect that Pope Lucius actually visited Monreale for its consecration; but this is certainly untrue.

  to William's own; and William knew that he must curb it while there was still time.

  But how could he do so ? Only by creating a new archbishopric as near as possible to Palermo, whose incumbent would be equal in rank to Walter himself and could serve as a direct link between Crown and Papacy. This in turn raised another problem: Arch­bishops were normally elected by the Church hierarchy, and the hierarchy was under Walter's control. Thus it was that William and his Vice-Chancellor decided on a further refinement to their plan. The new foundation must be a Benedictine abbey, run on strictly Cluniac lines, whose abbot would automatically receive archiepiscopal rank and could be consecrated by any other prelate he might choose, subject only to the King's approval.

  Such a scheme, it need hardly be said, could not fail to meet with furious and determined opposition from Walter of the Mill. William and Matthew seem to have managed to conceal their plan for the new archbishopric till 1175, but after that they had to fight every step of the way. They might indeed have failed altogether if it had not been for two factors. One was that by a fantastically lucky chance there still stood, in the grounds of the new abbey, the little chapel of Hagia Kyriaka1 which had been the official see of the Greek Metro­politan of Palermo during the Arab domination. This enabled the champions of Monreale to claim that in establishing the archbishop­ric there they were merely continuing a venerable tradidon. The second factor was the support given to the plan by Pope Alexander, who from 1174 onwards issued a series of Bulls emphasising the exceptional character of the proposed foundation. Against such artillery even Walter was powerless. He was forced to stand by while several churches and parishes were removed from his archdiocese and transferred to that of Monreale; and, in the spring of 1176, having grudgingly agreed to the exemption of its first abbot from his jurisdiction, he watched in impotent fury as a hundred monks from La Cava arrived in Palermo on their way to colonise the new monastery.

  1 'The name does not refer to a saint but characterises the church as the Sunday Church, in contrast to the former cathedral of Palermo which under the Arabs was the Friday Mosque of the town.' (O. Demus, The Mosaics of Norman Sicily.)

  It was therefore probably as much in the nature of a counter­attack as anything else that in 1179 Walter began his own building programme—a completely new cathedral for Palermo itself. But however rich he was himself, and however unscrupulous his methods of extracting money from others, he could not hope to rival Monreale; and when William announced that he wi
shed this latest royal foundation, rather than Cefalù or Palermo, to be the burial-place of the Hauteville dynasty, it can only have been a further blow to the Archbishop's hopes. Palermo Cathedral, by the time he finished it, must have been a credit to himself and to the city—very unlike the sad travesty we see today; but it could not begin, any more than it can now, to stand comparison with one of the most sumptuously magnificent religious buildings in the world.

  Sumptuous and magnificent, certainly; yet from the start it must be admitted that Monreale, considered as a whole, is more impressive than beautiful. It lacks the gem-like perfection of the Palatine Chapel, the Byzantine mystery of the Martorana, the sheer magic that streams down from the great Pantocrator at Cefalù. Its impact is principally due to its size and its splendour. But this impact, like the cathedral itself, is colossal.

  As so often in the churches of Norman Sicily, the exterior is un­promising. Except for the eastern apses and the north-west view from the cloister,1 it has been radically changed since William's day. The long north colonnade was clamped on by the Gagini family in the sixteenth century, the west porch by someone else in the eighteenth. This latter addition in particular need not cause us much distress, since it screens some of that original decoration of interlaced blind arches in reddish lava (Gothic now and ornate, with none of the rounded purity of Cefalù), the full unpleasantness of which can still be experienced by anyone walking along to the east end. This vacuous doodling, especially when contrasted with the simple statement of the south-west tower, illustrates better than any words just how great was the loss to European architecture when Roman­esque began to decline.

  Before entering the building, it is worth taking a close look at its

  1 Plate 20.

  two sets of bronze doors. Those in the north porch are the work of Barisanus of Trani and date from 1179, while the main doors at the west end were made by Bonannus of Pisa in 1186.1 Apart from their considerable intrinsic beauty, these doors are interesting for two reasons. First, they are Italian. Throughout the eleventh and early twelfth centuries, such craftsmanship was virtually a monopoly of Byzantium; to mention only those shrines which have a place in our story, the cathedrals of Amalfi and Salerno and the cave at Monte S. Angelo all possess Byzantine doors of outstanding quality,2 in all of which the Greek masters have followed their usual practice of engraving their designs on the metal and then picking them out with silver thread—or, occasionally, enamel. By the latter half of the twelfth century, however, the Italians had not only adopted Byzantine techniques but were rapidly improving on them and trying their hand at real bas-reliefs; and the second point of interest about the Monreale doors is in the opportunity they give us to compare the progress of the two leading bronze-workers of their day towards the evolution of that specifically Italian style that was to reach its apogee with Ghiberti two centuries later. As is only to be expected, Barisanus, whose life had been spent in southern Italy where Greek influence was strongest—and who had already been responsible for the cathe­dral doors at Ravello as well as those of his home town of Trani—is the less evolved of the two; his techniques may be western, but his designs—the hieratic saints, the oriental archers, the descent into Hell and the deposition from the Cross—are still the designs of Byzantium. Bonannus, by contrast, though possibly less fine an artist, is a westerner through and through; his biblical scenes are as earthy and naturalistic as any twelfth-century religious art can be.

  Unlike the outer facade, the interior of the cathedral remains essentially as it always was—apart from the roof over the nave, which had to be replaced after a fire in 1811. Most of the obvious features of the Palatine Chapel are there—the polychrome marble inlays of the floor and lower walls, the antique cipollino columns, the superb

  1 Plate 21.

  2 Those of Monte S. Angelo were the cause of angry demonstrations as recently as March 1964, when the local inhabitants refused to allow them to be removed to Athens for the Byzantine Exhibition held later that year. (The Times, 4 and 6 March 1964.)

  Cosmati work fringing the dado with its line of palmettes, the ambo, the altar-rail, the thrones. And yet the atmosphere is utterly different. It is not simply the difference between a chapel and a cathedral; rather does it stem from the fact that the architecture of Monreale is fundamentally undistinguished. West of the apse, the vast expanses of wall are flat and unarticulated; one longs in vain for a niche or a buttress—anything to break this relentless uniformity. Thus, while the Palatine Chapel throbs, about Monreale there is always some­thing dry and a little lifeless.

  It is redeemed by its mosaics; for this building is above all a picture-gallery, and to this function every architectural feature has been subordinated. There they glitter in all their vastness, covering the better part of two acres of wall space. Perhaps by reason of their very quantity, it has been the fashion in recent years to decry these mosaics, to suggest that they are somehow a little crude in com­parison with those in the other churches of Norman Sicily. They are nothing of the kind. The gigantic Christ Pantocrator in the central apse—his arms outstretched as if to embrace the entire congregation, his right hand alone more than six feet high—cannot admittedly be classed with his counterpart at Cefalù; few works of art can. He is none the less superb. For the rest, although so immense a work must inevitably show some variations in quality, the general standard both of design and of execution remains astonishingly high.

  This fact becomes all the more remarkable when we remember that the entire group was completed in the space of five or six years, and quite possibly less—between 1183 and the end of the decade. The leading authority on the subject, Professor Demus, therefore deduces that the artists were Greeks, since 'only at Byzantium could [William] find an organised workshop able to finish the enormous task in so short a time';1 and indeed the upper half of the apse, with its Greek inscriptions and the hieratic formalisation of the figures, is Byzantine in its very essence. But where the anecdotal mosaics are concerned the attribution is surprising; for they show a fluidity of expression and invention which is hard to reconcile with the stylised rigidity that still characterised most Greek art of the twelfth century. Look, for example, at the south wall of the transept, and in particular at the

  1 The Mosaics of Norman Sicily, p. 148.

  three pictures that form the lowest row—the Washing of the Feet, the Agony in the Garden, the Betrayal. The iconography is im­peccably Byzantine; but the relaxed attitudes, the swirling draperies, the movement and the rhythm of the drawing have developed as far beyond the styles of the Palatine Chapel or the Martorana as have Bonannus's doors from those of Barisanus. And this development is surely Italian. Christian art as we know it was born on the banks of the Bosphorus, and for nearly a thousand years Constantinople continued to point the way forward—evolving in the process the only idiom that has completely succeeded in translating Christian spiritual values into plastic terms. Then, with the end of the twelfth century, Italy began to take the lead. It is another hundred and fifty years before we find, in the church of the Chora in Con­stantinople,1 purely Greek mosaics executed with the dynamism and panache of those at Monreale.

  Wandering slowly through the cathedral, one might be forgiven for supposing that these endless mosaics tell every Bible story, from Genesis to the Acts of the Apostles, in strip cartoon. So indeed they very nearly do; and the visitor, once he has gazed his fill at the Pantocrator, might easily pass over the figures of the saints below and turn at once to more narrative material. But this would be a pity, for he would be missing one of the few real iconographical surprises Monreale has to offer—the second figure to the right of the central window. There is no problem of identification; in conformity with the usual canons of the time, the name runs down each side of the halo for all to read: scs. thomas cantur. Whether or not it bears any physical resemblance to the martyred archbishop we cannot tell; mosaic portraits of saints are seldom known for their fidelity to the originals.2 It remains, however, the earlies
t certain representation of

  1 Nowadays better known by its Turkish name of Kariye Cami.

  2 Plate 23. It certainly gives no hint of the only one of Thomas's distinguishing characteristics of which we can be absolutely sure—his remarkable height. This was first mentioned by his own chaplain, William Fitzstephen, and again in a fifteenth-century manuscript at Lambeth Palace (306 f. 203) where, under the general heading 'The Longitude of Men Folowynge', Thomas is described as being 'vij fote save a ynche'. The most telling evidence of all, however, is provided by the saint's own vestments, still displayed in the cathedral treasury at Sens. 'On the feast of St Thomas till very recently, they were worn for that one day by the officiating priest. The tallest priest was always selected—and, even then, it was necessary to pin them up.' (Dean Stanley, Memorials of Canter­bury, 1855.)

  Thomas Becket known to us, dating from less than a generation after his death.1

  At first sight, this seemingly gratuitous distinction accorded to a saint by the son-in-law of his arch-enemy strikes one as a little strange—and even in rather doubtful taste. We know from other sources, however, that Queen Joanna always held Thomas in par­ticular veneration, and it may well be that she encouraged her hus­band to commemorate him in this way. What better means, after all, could she have had of making her own personal atonement for her father's conduct ? A closer look at Thomas's fellow-saints around the apse lends still more weight to this theory. The first pair, imme­diately to the left and right of the window, are two early Popes, Clement I and Sylvester, both long-time exiles and defenders of the temporal and spiritual primacy of Rome.2 Next, opposite Thomas, comes St Peter of Alexandria, another prelate who fought for the Church against temporal encroachment and returned from exile to face martyrdom. Beyond them stand the protomartyrs Stephen and Lawrence, who died for the same cause. Finally, facing the nave, we find two other canonised archbishops—Martin, always a favourite among the Benedictines, and Nicholas of Bari, one of the chief patrons of the Norman Kingdom. The conclusion seems inescap­able; the choice of figures for the apse not only symbolises the principles for which Monreale stood from the moment of its founda­tion; it is also a deliberate tribute to one of those depicted: England's most recent—and already most beloved—saint and martyr.