Whose life was pleasing
To God and to men.
Contemporary dirge quoted by Richard of S. Germano
Early in August 1185, while his still unvanquished army was battering on against the walls of Thessalonica, William of Sicily had escorted his aunt Constance across the sea to Salerno on the first stage of her bridal journey; and on the 28th of the same month, just four days after those walls had crumbled, Constance was delivered into the care of Frederick Barbarossa's special emissaries, waiting at Rieti. Thence, followed by a retinue of five hundred pack-horses and mules laden with a dowry appropriate to a future Empress who was also the wealthiest heiress in Europe, she travelled by easy stages to Milan.
The marriage was to take place in the ancient capital of Lombardy at the request of the Milanese themselves. To them the bride's name had a special significance; for it was at Constance, only two years previously, that Frederick had recognised the claims of the Lombard cides to self-government. What more fitting gesture could there be to mark the ending of their long struggle than to select the greatest of those cities for the marriage of his son ?
Twenty-three years before, the Emperor had sacked Milan and left it a pile of rubble. He now returned to find a proud new city already risen on the ruins of the old. Only the cathedral was not yet rebuilt; fortunately, however, the imperial soldiery had spared the loveliest and most venerable of the city's churches, the fourth-century basilica of S. Ambrogio.1 Long abandoned as a place of worship, S. Ambrogio had in recent years been doing service as a granary; it was now hastily refurbished and before its high altar, on 27 January 1186, Henry and Constance were declared man and wife. The ceremony was immediately followed by another, in which the couple were both crowned by the Patriarch of Aquileia with the iron crown of Lombardy.
Brides, by their very nature, have always provided a rich field for speculation and gossip—royal or imperial ones most of all. But few have ever caught the imagination of their subjects as Constance did. Not that there was anything particularly romantic about her: she was tall and fair-haired and, according to at least one source,2 beautiful; but at thirty-one she was also eleven years older than her husband— by the standards of her day, a middle-aged woman. What intrigued people was her power, her wealth, and above all the mysterious seclusion in which she was said to have passed her early life, a seclusion which quickly gave rise to the rumour that she had actually taken the veil in her youth and had left the cloister only when reasons of state gave her no alternative. This theory was to gain more and more credence as the years went by; little more than
1 S. Ambrogio is still there, and still the most beautiful building in Milan. It was founded by St Ambrose in a.d. 386, and despite a good deal of subsequent reconstruction—notably after the bombing of August 1943—still looks substantially the same as on the day of Constance's marriage. Visitors are implored not to miss the little fifth-century chapel of S. Vittore in Ciel d'Oro, refulgent with contemporary mosaic, tucked away in the south-east corner.
2 Godfrey of Viterbo.
a century later Dante was even to allow her a place in Paradise— though admittedly in the lowest heaven—on the strength of it.1
But whatever Constance's new subjects thought about the marriage, for the Papacy it spelt disaster. Ever since the days of Robert Guiscard, when the Normans in the South had first become a force to be reckoned with, the thought of any alliance—let alone a union— between its two mighty neighbours had been a recurrent papal nightmare. Now that the Lombard cities had gained their independence, the danger of encirclement might seem a little less fearsome than before; but the cities still acknowledged the Emperor as their suzerain, their relations with Rome were strained, and they might even serve to increase the potential pressure if they had a mind to do so. In such an event the Papacy—which even in the days of the Sicilian alliance had often been hard put to hold its own—would be cracked like a nut.
The aged Pope Lucius was dead.2 His successor, Urban III, seeing that there was nothing further to be done, had bowed gracefully to the inevitable and had even sent legates to Milan to represent him at the ceremony. He had not, however, been told about the
1 Sorella fu, e cost le fu tolta
Di capo I'ombra delle sacre bende.
Ma poi che pur al mondo fu rivolta
Contra suo grado e contra buona usanza,
Non fu dal vel del cor gia mai disciolta.
Quest' e la luce della gran Costanza
Che del secondo vento di Soave
Genero il terzo e l'ultima possanza.
She too a nun, her brows were forced to part
With the o'ershadowing coif she held so dear.
Yet, when against her will—and though to thwart
That will was sin—she found herself re-cast
Upon the world, she stayed still veiled in heart.
This light is the great Constance: from one blast,
The second Swabian, did she generate
The third imperial whirlwind, and the last.
(Tr. Bickersteth)
Paradiso, iii, 113-2
1 He died at Verona and was buried in the cathedral. In 1879 a great storm blew down part of the apse on to his tomb, smashing its sixteenth-century cover and revealing the original stone, bearing a portrait of the Pope in high relief and a neat but pointless inscription not worth transcribing here. It has now been built into the wall of the little chapel to St Agatha.
plans for the coronation, news of which threw him into a fury. To crown a son in his father's lifetime was always a dangerous precedent in papal eyes, since any strengthening of the hereditary principle in the imperial succession could only weaken the Pope's own influence; moreover, the coronation of the Lombard Kings was traditionally the privilege of the Archbishop of Milan—a post which Urban himself had held before his election to the Papacy and which he had never technically given up.
The Patriarch was excommunicated for his presumption; and from that moment, in the words of a contemporary, Arnold of Liibeck, 'the quarrel between the Emperor and the Pope became open, and great trouble arose in the Church of God'. After Frederick returned to Germany, leaving Italy at the mercy of his son, the situation grew even worse; Henry soon showed that he understood no argument save that of violence. Open warfare soon broke out, the King of Lombardy at one moment even going so far as to cut off the nose of a high-ranking papal official. Ten years after the Treaty of Venice, it seemed as if breaking-point had once again been reached; the Pope's patience was exhausted and the Roman Emperor once again faced the prospect of excommunication.
That he escaped it was due neither to himself nor to Urban, but to Saladin. In mid-October 1187, as the Bull of Excommunication lay on the Pope's table ready for signature, a Genoese mission arrived at the papal court with the news of the fall of Jerusalem. Urban was old and ill, and the shock was more than he could bear. On 20 October, at Ferrara, he died of a broken heart.
As usual, the West reacted to the sad tidings from Outremer with genuine emotion but too late. To most Europeans, the Crusader states of the Levant were remote to the point of unreality—exotic, privileged outposts of Christendom in which austerity alternated with sybaritic luxury, where douceur and danger walked hand in hand; magnificent in their way, but somehow more suited to the lays of troubadour romance than to the damp and unheroic struggle that was the common lot at home. Even to the well-informed, Levantine politics were hard to follow, the names largely unpronounceable, the news when it did arrive hopelessly distorted and out of date.
Only when disaster had actually struck did they spring, with exclamations of mingled rage and horror, to their swords.
So it had been forty years before, when news of the fall of Edessa and the fire of St Bernard's oratory had quickened the pulse of the continent and launched the ludicrous fiasco that was the Second Crusade. And so it was now. To any dispassionate observer, European or Levantine, who had followed the march of events for the past fifteen years,
the capture of Jerusalem must have seemed inevitable. On the Muslim side there had been the steady rise of Sala-din, a leader of genius who had vowed to recover the holy city for his faith; on the Christian, nothing but the sad spectacle of the three remaining Frankish states of Jerusalem, Tripoli and Antioch, all governed by mediocrities and torn apart by internal struggles for power. Jerusalem itself was further burdened, throughout the crucial period of Saladin's ascendancy, by the corresponding decline of its leper King, Baldwin IV. When he came to the throne in 1174 at the age of thirteen, the disease was already upon him; eleven years later he was dead. Not surprisingly, he left no issue. At the one moment when wise and resolute leadership was essential if the kingdom were to be saved, the crown of Jerusalem devolved upon his nephew, a child of eight.
The death of this new infant king, Baldwin V, in the following year might have been considered a blessing in disguise; but the opportunity of fading a true leader was thrown away and the throne passed to his stepfather, Guy of Lusignan, a weak, querulous figure with a record of incapacity which fully merited the scorn in which he was held by most of his compatriots. Jerusalem was thus in a state bordering on civil war when, in May 1187, Saladin declared his long-awaited jihad and crossed the Jordan into Frankish territory. Under the miserable Guy, the Christian defeat was assured. On 3 July, he led the largest army his kingdom had ever assembled across the Galilean mountains towards Tiberias, where Saladin was laying siege to the castle. After a long day's march in the most torrid season of the year, they were forced to camp on a waterless plateau; and the next day, exhausted by the heat and half-mad with thirst, beneath a little double-summited hill known as the Horns of Hattin, they were surrounded by the Muslim army and cut to pieces.
It only remained for the Saracens to mop up the isolated Christian fortresses one by one. Tiberias fell on the day after Hattin; Acre followed; Nablus, Jaffa, Sidon and Beirut capitulated in quick succession. Wheeling south, Saladin took Ascalon by storm and received the surrender of Gaza without a struggle. Now he was ready for Jerusalem. The defenders of the Holy City resisted heroically for twelve days; but on 2 October, with the walls already breached by Muslim sappers, they knew that the end was near. Their leader, Balian of Ibelin—King Guy having been taken prisoner after Hattin —went personally to Saladin to discuss terms for surrender.
Saladin, who knew and liked Balian, was neither bloodthirsty nor vindictive; and after some negotiation he agreed that every Christian in Jerusalem should be allowed to redeem himself by payment of the appropriate ransom. Of the twenty thousand poor who had no means of raising the money, seven thousand would be freed on payment of a lump sum by the various Christian authorities. That same day the conqueror led his army into the city; and for the first time in eighty-eight years, on the anniversary of the day on which Mohammed was carried in his sleep from Jerusalem to paradise, his green banners fluttered over the Temple area from which he had been gathered up, and the sacred imprint of his foot was once again exposed to the adoration of the Faithful.
Everywhere, order was preserved. There was no murder, no bloodshed, no looting. Thirteen thousand poor, for whom ransom money could not be raised, remained in the city; but Saladin's brother and lieutenant, al-Adil, asked for a thousand of them as a reward for his services and immediately set them free. Another seven hundred were given to the Patriarch, and five hundred to Balian of Ibelin; then Saladin himself spontaneously liberated all the old, all the husbands whose wives had been ransomed and finally all the widows and children. Few Christians ultimately found their way to slavery. This was not the first time that Saladin had shown that magnanimity for which he would soon be famous through East and West alike;1 but never before had he done so on
1 Four years before, when he laid siege to the castle of Kerak during the wedding celebrations of its heir, Humphrey of Toron, to Princess Isabella of Jerusalem, he had carefully enquired which tower contained the bridal chamber and had given orders that it was to be left undisturbed.
such a scale. His restraint was the more remarkable in that he had not forgotten the dreadful story of 1099, when the conquering Franks had marked their entry into the city by slaughtering every Muslim within its walls and burning all the Jews alive in the main synagogue. The Christians, for their part, had not forgotten it either; and they could not fail to be struck by the contrast. Saladin might be their arch-enemy; but he had set them an example of chivalry which was to have an effect on the whole of the Third Crusade—an example which was to remain ever before them in the months to come.
The new Pope, Gregory VIII, lost no time in calling upon Christendom to take the Cross; and of the princes of Europe, William of Sicily was the first to respond. The fall of Jerusalem had shocked and troubled him deeply; he dressed himself in sackcloth and went into retreat for four days. Then he despatched Margaritus to Palestine, himself settling down to compose careful letters to his fellow-rulers, pressing them to devote all their energies and resources to the coming Crusade, as he himself planned to do.
It would be naive to suppose that William's motives in this were purely idealistic. Pious he was, but not so pious that he could not scent another opportunity of realising his old dream of eastern expansion. After all, there were precedents enough in his own family. In the First Crusade the Guiscard's son Bohemund had carved out for himself the Principality of Antioch; in the Second, his own grandfather Roger had emerged with an enormously enhanced reputation—and incidentally, a good deal richer—without stirring from Palermo. Might he himself not now turn the Third to equally good account? The time had come to take Ms rightful place among the councils of the West. In his letters to the other kings he was careful to stress the advantages of the sea route to the Levant over the long land journey across the Balkans and the treacherous passes of Anatolia. Henry II in England, Philip Augustus in France and Frederick Barbarossa in Germany were all encouraged to break their journey in Sicily, with promises of additional reinforcements and supplies if they did so.
Diplomatically William was in a strong position. Alone of European monarchs, he had a contingent already in the field. His admiral Margaritus commanded a fleet of only sixty ships and some two hundred knights, but all through 1188 and 1189, when for most of the dme he represented virtually the only organised resistance to the Saracens, he kept up a steady patrol of the coast which, thanks largely to his admirable intelligence system, proved effective out of all proportion to its strength. Time and again when Saladin's forces arrived at a port that was still in Christian hands, they found that Margaritus had forestalled them. In July 1188 news of the Admiral's arrival off Tripoli caused Saladin to raise the siege of Krak des Chevaliers and decided him against any attack on the city itself. The Saracens were similarly deflected at Marqab and Latakia, and again at Tyre. It was small wonder that during those two years the dashing young admiral, now popularly known as 'the new Neptune', acquired a legendary reputation throughout Christendom. His renown might have been yet greater and his command infinitely further extended had the Sicilians ever been able to raise the mighty army of which their King had dreamed; but suddenly his hopes of crusading glory were dashed. On 18 November 1189 William II died, aged thirty-six, at Palermo.
Of all the Hauteville rulers of Sicily, William the Good is the most nebulous and the most elusive. We know nothing of the circumstances of his death except that it seems to have been non-violent —Peter of Eboli's manuscript contains a picture of the King, surrounded by his doctors and attendants, dying peacefully in his bed1 —and about his life, short as it was, we are scarcely better informed. Hardly ever in his thirty-six years do we see him clearly face to face. There is a moment on the day of his coronation, when Falcandus gives us a brief glimpse of him riding through the streets of Palermo in the bright morning of his youth and beauty; another, even more fleeting, at the time of his marriage. For the rest we are thrown back on legend, or inference, or hearsay. It is sometimes hard to remember that he ruled over Sicily for eighteen years and occu
pied the throne for almost a quarter of a century; we are conscious only of a dim, if faintly resplendent, shadow that passes fleetingly over a few pages of history and is gone.
1 Plate 27. 352
Yet William was regretted as few European princes have ever been, and far beyond the confines of his kingdom. Among the Franks of Outremer he had already gained, thanks to Margaritus, the renown he had always longed for, and his death was seen as a further disaster to the Christian cause. In Sicily and South Italy, the grief of his subjects was universal and profound. It was not so much that they feared the future—though many of them did so, and with good reason; the overriding feeling was regret for the past, for the peace and tranquillity that had marked his reign but might not survive it. As the Archbishop of Reggio recalled in his memorial address:
In this land a man might lay down his head under the trees, or under the open sky, knowing himself to be as safe as if he were in his own bed at home; here the forests and the rivers and the sunlit meadows were no less hospitable than the walled cities; and the royal bounty extended over all, ever-generous and inexhaustible.
But he spoke, let it be noted, in the past tense.
The orations and encomiums, the threnodies and the laments, to say nothing of the whole labyrinth of legend that grew up around the name of William the Good and still keeps it fresh eight centuries later in Sicilian folklore, would have been more appropriate to a Charlemagne or an Alfred than to the last and weakest of Roger's legitimate line. If few rulers have achieved so enviable a reputation none, surely, have deserved it less. True, the reorganisation of the government machine after the departure of Stephen du Perche may have allowed rather more scope to the feudal nobility than they had formerly enjoyed; certain of them, men like Robert of Loritello or Tancred of Lecce, were able to find an outlet for their ambitions in the King's service rather than in battling vainly against him. But be that as it may, what really kept the Kingdom's internal peace through William's majority was neither his wisdom nor his statesmanship ; rather was it a general revulsion on the part of the potential discontents against the unceasing violence of former years. The history of their land from its beginnings had been an almost uninterrupted saga of rebellion and revolt; and what, men suddenly asked themselves, had any of the rebels ever gained by their activities ? How many had escaped death, or mutilation, or a prison cell? Was it not better to accept the Hauteville domination as the political reality it was, and to concentrate instead on amassing the largest possible share of the ever-increasing national wealth? Suddenly, rebellion was no longer in the air; and for this William can take little enough of the credit.
The Kingdom in the Sun Page 41