The Kingdom in the Sun

by John Julius Norwich

  Meanwhile, on the debit side, he has a lot to answer for. His reign did nothing to strengthen his country; instead it marked a return to the most dangerous and irresponsible foreign policy that any state can pursue—that of land-grabbing for its own sake, without consideration for political consequences. The fact that all William's attempts in this direction were ignominious failures, that time and again he emptied the national coffers on enterprises that brought him nothing but defeat and humiliation, can hardly serve as an excuse; nor can it be claimed that he was merely reverting to the policies of Robert Guiscard. Robert was an adventurer whose achievement was to create a dominion out of chaos; William was an anointed sovereign of an influential and prosperous kingdom, with moral duties to his subjects and to his fellow-rulers. One might, perhaps, have had a little more sympathy for him if, like the Guiscard, he had led his troops in person on these escapades; but he never ventured beyond the point of departure. To others would be left the ungrateful task of trying to satisfy their master's ambitions; he himself would withdraw once again to his harem and his pleasure-domes, and await results.1

  On such a record alone William II must stand condemned; but that is not all. He must also bear the blame for the most disastrous decision of the whole Sicilian epic—his agreement to Constance's marriage. He knew that if he died childless the throne would be hers; and he had been married long enough to understand that

  1 Two of these pleasure-domes have lasted to the present day and are—just— worth a visit. The first and more important is the Cuba. Once set in an orna­mental lake within the royal park—its main entrance is half-way up the wall—it later became a cavalry stable for the Neapolitan army and now stands in the middle of a gloomy barracks at No. 94, Corso Calatafimi. Noble but now sadly neglected, its walls defaced with painted goalposts, one finds it hard to believe that this pavilion in its heyday provided the setting for one of Boccaccio's stories (Day 5, No. 6). Not far off, in the garden of Cav. di Napoli at No. 375, stands another, smaller kiosk, the Cubula; and on the east front of the Villa Napoli a line of arcading marks the remnants of yet a third, the Cuba Soprana.

  Joanna might well fail to bear him a son. True, he could always put her away and take another wife; but who was to say that his second marriage would be any more fruitful than the first? Meanwhile Constance was the Kingdom; and by giving her to Henry of Hohenstaufen he sealed the death warrant of Norman Sicily.

  Handsome is—for monarchs even more than for their subjects—as handsome does. Youth, beauty and piety are not enough, and the record of the last legitimate Hauteville king is not an edifying one. Apart from Monreale—a monument to himself as much as to his God—he can be credited with only one real achievement: the fact that by his promptness in sending help to the Levant at the very start of the Third Crusade he was able, through the brilliance of Margaritus of Brindisi, to save Tripoli and Tyre, temporarily, for the Christian cause. As to the rest, he is revealed as irresponsible, vainglorious and grasping, lacking even the rudiments of states­manship and quite possibly a coward into the bargain. His sobriquet is thus more misleading even than his father's before him. William the Bad was not so bad; William the Good was far, far worse. And for those who like to see a connection between sanctity in life and incorruptibility in death, this judgment was given a macabre con­firmation when, in 1811, their two sarcophagi were opened. In contrast to the body of William the Bad, almost perfectly preserved, of William the Good there remained only a skull, a collection of bones covered with a silken shroud, and a lock of reddish hair.

  20

  THE THREE KINGS

  Behold, an ape is crowned!

  Peter of Eboli

  Shortly before the Princess Constance left the territory of her future kingdom, her nephew had called a great assembly of his chief vassals at Troia and made them swear fealty to her as his heir and eventual successor. But not even William can have been foolish enough to imagine that her succession would be unopposed. What­ever his own feelings on the subject, the fact remained that to the immense majority of his people the Western Empire had always been the most persistent and dangerous of enemies. In South Italy, to which it had never renounced its claim, few could remember how often in the past two centuries one Emperor after another had descended into the peninsula to claim his due; but every town and village had its stories of the atrocities wrought by the imperial soldiery. In Sicily, where there had been no such invasions, the prevailing emotion was not so much fear as contempt—the contempt of a highly cultivated and intellectually arrogant society for the one European culture of which it had no experience or understanding. This attitude seems to have been already prevalent in the days of King Roger;1 and forty years later we find Hugo Falcandus writing to Peter, church treasurer of Palermo, of the terror felt by Sicilian children at the sound of 'the harsh stridencies of that barbarian tongue'.

  This is not to say that Constance was left entirely without sup­porters. Walter of the Mill, for one, had backed her marriage from

  1 'All foreigners were more or less welcome in his domain, except men of the Kingdom of Germany, whom he was unwilling to have among his subjects; for he distrusted that people and could not endure their barbarous ways.' John of Salisbury, Historic Pontifical!, ch. XXXII. Tr. Chibnall.

  the outset, and apart from the anarchy-loving barons on the main­land there were plenty of fatalists who, even if they had originally deplored the idea, now accepted it as an accomplished fact. Nothing, such men reasoned, could now prevent Henry from coming to Sicily to claim his wife's throne; better surely that he should come in peace and friendship than in power and wrath. But in these early days the legitimist party was small; its leader, Walter of the Mill, had only a few months to live; and it was in any case almost immediately overshadowed by two other factions, bitterly opposed to Constance, which had sprung up even before William's death was announced. One of these called for the succession to the throne of Roger, Count of Andria; the other favoured Tancred of Lecce. Both candidates had important qualities to recommend them. Separately and together—they had fought side by side against the imperial forces in 1176 and gained an impressive if ultimately insignificant victory—they could boast outstanding military records. Tancred had commanded the Sicilian fleet in William's two principal foreign expeditions; though both of these had ended in disaster, no blame had attached to him personally. Roger had for his part also won diplomatic distinction as one of the leading negotiators of the Treaty of Venice. He was now Great Chamberlain of the Kingdom, a widely admired and respected figure.

  But whereas the Count of Andria's claim to the blood royal was tenuous to say the least,1 Tancred's was undeniable: he was the illegitimate son of Duke Roger of Apulia by Emma, daughter of Count Achard of Lecce. He was small, and villainously ugly. That arch-polemicist Peter of Eboli, who hated him, hexametrically describes him as an embrion infelix, et detestabile monstrum and depicts him, both in verse and in his accompanying illustrations, as a monkey.2 But like so many small men, Tancred was energetic, able and determined; his youthful disloyalty to William I had been forgotten; and he had recently been appointed Grand Constable and Master Justiciar of Apulia. Above all, he had as his champion Matthew of Ajello. Matthew was by now an old

  1 La Lumia, p. 344, refers to him as the great-grandson of Drogo de Hauteville and thus second cousin to the dead King; but I can find no corroboration and the lineage looks distinctly uncertain.

  2 Plate 28.

  man, tormented by gout,1 who had long contemplated retire­ment and had even, a dozen years before enrolled himself as a lay brother in the Basilian monastery of the Saviour at Messina. But his love of power had proved too strong for him; and he and Walter of the Mill together, despite their mutual loathing, had continued to stand as what Richard of S. Germano was later to describe as 'the two firmest columns of the Kingdom'. Now one of those col­umns was showing signs of collapse; but Matthew remained as firm as ever. A genuine Sicilian patriot, he never disguised his revulsion at the
Hohenstaufen marriage; and before King William's body was cold he had flung all his energies, his political expertise and his considerable financial resources into the campaign to secure Tancred's succession.

  The struggle was hard and bitter. The nobility and their hangers-on were overwhelmingly in favour of Roger of Andria; the bour­geoisie and populace preferred Tancred. Neither side pulled its punches and on at least one occasion the rival factions fought it out in the streets of Palermo. But Matthew knew of certain irregularities in the Count of Andria's private life, and used his knowledge to disastrous effect. He also had no difficulty in obtaining support from Pope Clement III—who, he rightly guessed, would jump at any chance of preventing the union of his two formidable neighbours.

  Thus it was that sometime in the first weeks of 1190 Tancred of Lecce received the crown of Sicily, at the hands of Archbishop Walter of the Mill who appears to have resigned himself, if only temporarily, to the inevitable. Tancred's first act was to appoint Matthew of Ajello Chancellor of the Kingdom—an office that had lain vacant since the departure of Stephen du Perche. Nothing, he knew, would give the old man greater pleasure or bind him more closely to the throne; besides, his support would be still more necessary in the future. There was desperate fighting ahead for them all if the Kingdom were to survive.

  Strangely enough, the first challenge to the new King's authority came from neither of the two factions he had just defeated. It revealed,

  1 Which Peter of Eboli, in a masterpiece of sustained invective, claims that he sought to alleviate by bathing his feet in the blood of slaughtered children (Plate 29).

  however, another still more ominous rift in the structure of the state —a growing antagonism between the Christian and the Muslim sectors of the population. Hardly had Tancred assumed power when inter-confessional strife broke out in the capital. The trouble seems to have been started by the Christians, who took advantage of the disorder following William's death to attack the Arab quarter of Palermo. In the ensuing affray several Muslims lost their lives; many others, fearing a general massacre, fled to the hills where they managed to take possession of several castles, and where they were gradually joined by increasing numbers of their co-religionists. Before long Tancred saw that he had a full-scale insurrection on his hands.

  Tension between the two communities had naturally been height­ened by the news of the fall of Jerusalem and the subsequent preparations for the Crusade; but the true causes of the revolt lay deeper in the Sicilian past. For half a century and more the steady immigration of Christians from northern and western Europe, un­matched by any corresponding movements of Greeks or Muslims, had led to the dangerous strengthening of the Latin element at the expense of the others. Intolerance was bound to follow. Ever since the anti-Muslim riots that followed the coup against William the Bad in 1161 the situation seems to have been progressively deterio­rating. Here is Ibn Jubair, reporting from Palermo at the end of 1184:

  The Muslims of this city preserve the remaining evidence of their faith. They keep in repair the greater number of their mosques, and come to prayers at the call of the muezzin. . . . They do not congre­gate for the Friday service, since the khutbah1 is forbidden. On feast-days only may they recite it with intercessions for the Abbasid Caliphs. They have a qadi to whom they refer their law-suits, and a cathedral mosque where, in this holy month [of Ramadan] they assemble under its lamps. . . . But in general these Muslims do not mix with their brethren under infidel patronage, and enjoy no security for their goods, their women, or their children.

  In the royal palace itself, although it was almost entirely staffed by Muslims, the actual practice of Islam seems to have been tolerated

  1 The sermon delivered on Fridays at the time of the midday prayer.

  only when it was conducted in private. Ibn Jubair tells of an inter­view in Messina with one of the leading eunuchs of the court:

  He had first looked about his audience-room, and then, in self-protection, dismissed those servants about him whom he suspected. . . . 'You can boldly display your faith in Islam,' he said,'. . . but we must conceal our faith and, fearful of our lives, must adhere to the worship of God and the discharge of our religious duties in secret. We are bound in the possession of an infidel who has placed on our necks the noose of bondage.'

  Apart from the specifically religious issue, the prevailing attitude of the Sicilian Christians towards their Muslim fellow-subjects by the end of the century is inescapably reminiscent of that shown by the British sahibs towards the people of India in the heyday of the Raj:

  Their King, William,. . . has much confidence in Muslims—who all, or nearly all, concealing their faith, yet hold firm to the Muslim divine law. He relies on them for his affairs, and the most important matters, even the supervisor of his kitchen being a Muslim; and he keeps a band of black Muslim slaves commanded by a leader chosen from amongst them. His ministers and chamberlains he appoints from his pages, of whom he has a great number and who are his public officials and are described as his courtiers. In them shines the splendour of his realm for the magnificent clothing and fiery horses they display; and there is none of them but has his retinue, his servants, and his followers.

  Thus, in scarcely more than a generation, the status of the Mus­lims of Sicily had declined from that of a universally respected, learned and immensely able sector of the population to the level at the worst of menials and at the best of privileged purveyors of local colour. Their women might set the fashions which Christian women were happy to follow; Ibn Jubair notes with wonder how on Christ­mas Day 1184 the latter 'all went forth in robes of gold-embroidered silk, wrapped in elegant cloaks, concealed by coloured veils and shod with gilt slippers . . . bearing all the adornments of Muslim women, including jewellery, henna on the fingers and perfumes.' The King himself might read and write Arabic, and murmur oriental endearments to his Muslim handmaidens and concubines.1 Yet it was all a far cry from the ideals of the two Rogers. The betrayal of those ideals by their successors was probably unwitting, possibly inevitable, certainly catastrophic. And it was, perhaps, more than fortuitous that the final breakdown of the confessional interdependence on which Norman Sicily had been founded should have coincided with the extinction of the Kingdom itself.

  The first year of his reign was a particularly hard one for King Tancred. The Muslim insurrection grew—one chronicler puts the numbers involved as high as a hundred thousand—and though he managed to confine it to the west of the island it was not till the end of 1190 that order was restored. Meanwhile, on the mainland, his enemies were gathering fast. The adherents of Roger of Andria, who included nearly all the principal barons of Apulia and Campania, had been outraged by Tancred's election, and had no intention of recognising him as their lawful sovereign. In this they were joined by the legitimists, who genuinely championed Constance and Henry, and by the fatalists—this last group by now increasing rapidly as the news spread of Henry's preparations to march. By spring much of the peninsula was in open revolt. Roger of Andria had gathered all the malcontents under his banner; and in May a small German army under Henry of Kalden crossed the frontier near Rieti and descended the Adriatic coast into Apulia.

  But Tancred too had acted fast. The Muslim insurrection and his own shaky political position made it unwise for him to leave Sicily, or even to despatch any substantial body of troops; but he had sent his wife's brother, Count Richard of Acerra, a large sum of money with which to raise an army locally and, if need be, abroad. Richard had risen splendidly to the occasion. That summer he successfully pre­vented the forces of the Count of Andria and Henry of Kalden from joining up with the rebels of Campania—where Capua and Aversa had already declared against Tancred—and held the position until September when, for reasons unknown, the German army withdrew

  ' 'One of the strangest things told us by Yahya ibn Fityan, the embroiderer, who embroidered in gold the King's clothes, was that the Frankish Christian women who came to his palace became Muslims, converted by
these hand­maidens. All this they kept secret from their King.' (Ibn Jubair.) once again into imperial territory. He then pursued the demoralised rebels back into Apulia where, during a swift and triumphant cam­paign, he ambushed the Count of Andria and took him prisoner.1

  As 1190 ended it was clear that, thanks in a large measure to his brother-in-law, Tancred had won the first round. An imperial expedition sent against him had proved abortive, the rebels both in Sicily and on the mainland had been forced into submission. His two principal enemies within the Kingdom were both in their graves— Roger of Andria, whom he had had executed for his part in the rebellion, and Walter of the Mill who had died of natural causes earlier in the year, to be succeeded by his brother Bartholomew as Archbishop of Palermo.