The Kingdom in the Sun

by John Julius Norwich

  It would be pleasant to be able to write a friendly word or two about a compatriot who played so prominent and prolonged a part in the history of his adopted country. The inescapable fact is, how­ever, that of all the Englishmen whose names have from time to time appeared in these pages, it was Walter of the Mill who exerted the most baleful influence on the Kingdom. He was not, so far as one can tell, a wicked man; but he was the very prototype of those prelates, vain and ambitious and worldly, who were such a feature of mediaeval Europe. It is impossible to like him. In his quarter of a century as Archbishop and chief minister to William II, there is no evidence of his having taken a single constructive step to improve the Sicilian position or to advance Sicilian fortunes. When the crisis arose over Constance's marriage his influence, allied with that of Matthew of Ajello, could almost certainly have secured William's rejection of the imperial proposals. Instead, he encouraged his master to give away the Kingdom. Time-server as he was, he did not hesitate soon afterwards to lay the crown on Tancred's head; but even this did not stop him from resuming his intrigues against the new King within weeks, if not days, of the coronation.

  Thus, in the absence of any more attractive achievement, Walter's chief memorial must be his cathedral of Palermo,2 where his tomb may still be seen in the crypt. Though the building is curiously appropriate to its founder—imposing in a messy sort of way, pompous, grandiloquent, yet vacuous and fundamentally hypocritical

  1 Plate 28. 2 Plate 30.

  —Walter cannot really be blamed for its present appearance; it has been reworked and restored so often that even the exterior allows us only a few glimpses of the original conception—the east end with its apse decorations uncomfortably reminiscent of Monreale, and the long range of windows along the south wall above the side aisles. Even here, nothing seems particularly distinguished; for the rnost part, the fourteenth-century work somehow contrives to look like a nineteenth-century pastiche. But the crowning desecration, literally and figuratively, on the outside and within, took place in the eighteenth century when the Florentine architect Fernando Fuga clapped on a ludicrous and totally unrelated dome, hacked away the side walls to make fourteen chapels, removed the wooden roof and replaced it with inferior vaulting, then whitewashed the whole thing—the apse mosaics had already been torn down two centuries earlier—and baroqued it up beyond recognition. Today, the kindest thing to do about Palermo Cathedral would be to ignore it—were it not for the royal tombs. But the time to speak of these has not yet come.

  Walter of the Mill left one other building in the capital, and a much more satisfying one it is. The church of Santo Spirito, built for the Cistercians a decade or so before the cathedral, has miraculously escaped the attentions of restorers and improvers and retains all the austere, uncluttered purity of Norman architecture at its best.1 Its fame rests, however, less on its beauty than on its historical associa­tions; for it was outside Santo Spirito, just before the evening service on 31 March 1282, that a sergeant of the Angevin army of occupation insulted a Sicilian woman, was stabbed to death by her husband and so, unwittingly, sparked off that triumphantly success­ful rebellion by the Sicilians against their overlord Charles of Anjou that was ever afterwards to be known as the Sicilian Vespers. Thus, of the two foundations of an English archbishop, one was destined to witness, with the coronation of Henry and Constance, the most abject betrayal of Sicily by her own people; and the other, a century later, the proudest upsurge of popular patriotism in all her history.

  King William's proposals to his fellow-monarchs that they should use Sicily as an assembly-point for their crusading forces had not

  1 Plate 31.

  passed altogether unheeded. Frederick Barbarossa, despite what must have been fairly painful recollections of his journey to Palestine more than forty years before, had resolved once again to take the land route—a decision that was shortly to cost him his life; but Philip Augustus had accepted the invitation, and so had the new King of England—Richard I, Coeur de Lion.

  In the high summer of 1190 these two Kings and their armies met together at Vezelay—a choice of meeting place that might have seemed to some people another ominous precedent. They were to set off on the journey together less for reasons of companionship than because neither trusted the other an inch; and indeed no pair could have been more unlike. The King of France was still only twenty-five; but he was already a widower and apart from a shock of wild, uncontrollable hair there was nothing youthful about him. His ten years on the throne of France had given him unusual wisdom and experience for one so young, making him permanently suspicious, and teaching him to conceal his thoughts and emotions behind a veil of taciturn moroseness. Never handsome, he had now lost the sight of one eye so that his face looked somehow asymmetrical. He lacked courage on the battlefield and charm in society; he was, in a word, a thoroughly unattractive man and he knew it. But beneath his drab exterior there lay a searching intelligence, coupled with a strong sense of both the moral and political responsibilities of kingship. It was easy to underestimate him. It was also unwise.

  Yet whatever his hidden qualities, Philip Augustus cannot have looked upon his fellow-ruler without envy. Richard had succeeded his father Henry II in July 1189, just a year before. At thirty-three, he was now in his prime. Though his health was often poor, his superb physique and volcanic energy gave the impression of a man to whom illness was unknown. His good looks were famous, his powers of leadership no less so, his personal bravery already a legend through two continents. From his mother Eleanor he had inherited the Poitevin love of literature and poetry, and to many people he himself must have seemed like some glittering figure from the troubadour romances he loved so much. Only one element was lacking to complete the picture: however sweetly Richard might sing of the joys and pains of love, he had left no trail of betrayed or broken-hearted damozels behind him. But if his tastes ran in other directions they never appreciably affected that shining reputation, burnished as his breastplate, that remained with him till the day of his death.

  Those who knew Richard better, on the other hand, soon became aware of other, less admirable sides to his character. Even more impetuous and hot-tempered than the father he had so hated, he altogether lacked that capacity for sustained administrative effort that had enabled Henry II, for all his faults, to weld England almost single-handed into a nation. His ambition was boundless and, nearly always, destructive. Himself incapable of love, he could be faithless, disloyal, even treacherous, in the pursuit of his ends. No English king had fought harder or more unscrupulously for the throne; none was readier to ignore the responsibilities of kingship for the sake of personal glory. In the nine years of life left to him, the total time he was to spend in England was just two months.

  The hills round Vezelay, wrote an eyewitness, were so spread with tents and pavilions that the fields looked like a great and multi­coloured city. The two Kings solemnly reaffirmed their crusading vows and sealed a further treaty of alliance; then, followed by their respective armies and a huge multitude of pilgrims, they moved off together to the south. It was only at Lyons, where the collapse of the bridge across the Rhone under the weight of the crowds was inter­preted as a bad augury for the future, that French and English parted company; Philip turned south-east towards Genoa, where his navy was awaiting him, while Richard continued down the Rhone valley to meet the English fleet at Marseilles. They had agreed to join forces again at Messina, whence their combined army would sail for the Holy Land.

  Philip arrived first, on 14 September, and Richard nine days later. Nothing was more typical of the two men than the manner of their disembarkation:

  When the King of France was known to be entering the port of Messina, the natives of every age and sex rushed forth to see so famous a King; but he, content with a single ship, entered the port of the citadel privately, so that those who awaited him along the shore saw this as a proof of his weakness; such a man, they said, was not likely to be the performer of any great matter, shri
nking in such fashion from the eye of his fellows. . . .

  But when Richard was about to land, the people rushed down in crowds towards the beach; and behold, from a distance the sea seemed cleft with innumerable oars, and the loud voices of the trumpets and the horns sounded clear and shrill over the water. Approaching nearer, the galleys could be seen rowing in order, emblazoned with divers coats of arms, and with pennons and banners innumerable floating from the points of the spears. The beaks of the vessels were painted with the devices of the knights they bore, and glittered with the rays reflected from the shields. The sea was boiling with the multitude of oars, the air trembling with the blasts of the trumpets and the tumultuous shouts of the delighted crowds. The magnificent King, loftier and more splendid than all his train, stood erect on the prow, as one expecting alike to see and be seen. . . . And as the trumpets rang out with discordant yet harmonious sounds, the people whispered together: 'He is indeed worthy of empire; he is rightly made King over peoples and kingdoms; what we heard of him at a distance falls far short of what we now see.'1

  Not all of Richard's admirers on that memorable day may have been aware that that superb figure had preferred, through fear of seasickness, to take the land route down the peninsula; and that this mighty landfall was in fact the culmination of a sea journey that had brought him only a mile or two across the straits. Fewer still could have guessed that, for all the golden splendour of his arrival, Richard was in a black and dangerous mood. It was not the fact that a few days previously, passing through Mileto, he had been caught in the act of appropriating a hawk from a peasant's cottage and narrowly escaped death at the hands of the owner and his friends; it was not even the discovery, on landing at Messina, that the royal palace in the centre of the city had already been placed at the disposal of the King of France and that he himself had been allotted more modest quarters outside the walls. Neither of these misfortunes can have improved his temper, but this time there was more at stake than a simple matter of amour-propre.

  The truth was that he bore a deep grudge against Tancred. Though William the Good had died intestate, he seems at some stage to have

  1 Itinerary of Richard I.

  promised his father-in-law Henry an important legacy that included a twelve-foot golden table, a silken tent big enough to hold two hundred men, a quantity of gold plate and several additional ships, fully provisioned, for the Crusade. Now, with both William and Henry dead, Tancred was refusing to honour the promise. Then there was Joanna. As he rode south through Italy, Richard had heard unpleasant stories of how his sister was being treated by the new King of Sicily; it seemed that Tancred, knowing her to be a partisan of Constance and fearing her influence in the Kingdom, was keeping the young Queen under distraint and wrongfully with­holding the revenues of the County of Monte S. Angelo which she had received as part of her marriage settlement. From Salerno her brother had already sent word to Tancred calling for satisfaction on both these points and adding, for good measure, a demand that Joanna should also be presented with the golden throne that was, he claimed, her traditional right as a Norman queen. The tone of his letter was threatening, and clearly implied that once in Sicily with his army and navy he had no intention of continuing his journey until he had received satisfaction.

  How far these complaints were justified it is not easy to say. Richard's subsequent behaviour suggests that he saw Sicily as a potential new jewel in his own crown and that he was already on the lookout for any excuse to make trouble. On the other hand he was genuinely fond of Joanna, and there seems little doubt that her freedom had been in some degree restricted. Tancred, in any case, was seriously alarmed. He had too much on his plate to risk hostilities in yet another quarter, and his first reaction was to get his unwelcome guest away from the island as soon as possible. If this meant making concessions, then concessions there would have to be.

  Richard did not have to wait long for results. Only five days after his arrival at Messina he was joined there by Joanna herself, now once more at complete liberty and the richer by one million tarts, given her by Tancred in compensation for her other losses. It was a generous offer; but Richard was not to be bought off so easily. Coldly rejecting Philip Augustus's well-intended attempts at media­tion, on 30 September he set off furiously across the straits to occupy the inoffensive little town of Bagnara on the Calabrian coast. There, in an abbey founded by Count Roger a century before, he settled Joanna under the protection of a strong garrison. Returning to Messina he then fell on the city's own most venerable religious foundation, the Basilian monastery of the Saviour, magnificendy sited on the long promontory across the harbour from the town. The monks were forcibly and unceremoniously evicted; and Richard's army moved into its new barracks.

  By this time the 'long-tailed Englishmen,' as the Messinans called them, had made themselves thoroughly unpopular. It was many years since any Sicilian city had been called upon to accommodate a foreign army, and the predominantly Greek population of Messina had already been scandalised by their barbarous conduct. Their free and easy ways with the local women, in particular, were not what might have been expected of men who called themselves pilgrims and bore the Cross of Christ on their shoulders. The occupation of the monastery of the Saviour came as the final outrage, and on 3 October serious rioting broke out. Fearing—with good reason— that the King of England might seize the opportunity of taking possession of their city and even, as many maintained, of the whole island, the Messinans rushed to the gates and bolted them; others barred the harbour entrance. Preliminary attempts by the English to force an entry failed; but no one believed that they could be held in check for long. The sun set that evening on an anxious city.

  Early the following day Philip Augustus appeared at Richard's headquarters outside the walls. He was accompanied by Hugh, Duke of Burgundy, the Count of Poitiers and the other leaders of the French army, together with a similarly high-ranking Sicilian delegation—the military governor, Jordan du Pin, several notables of the city includ­ing Admiral Margaritus, and the archbishops of Monreale, Reggio and of Messina itself; this last none other than Richard Palmer, transferred from Syracuse some years before. It is unlikely that Palmer's words carried any special weight with the King—who, except in the technical sense, was no more English than any other of those present and scarcely even spoke the language—but the ensuing discussions went surprisingly well. The parties seemed on the point of agreement when suddenly the noise of further tumult was heard.

  A crowd, of Messinans, gathered outside the building, were shouting imprecations against the English and their King.

  Richard seized his sword and ran from the hall; summoning his troops, he gave the order for an immediate attack. This time the Messinans were taken by surprise. The English soldiers burst into the city, ravaging and plundering it as they went. Within hours, 'in less time than it took a priest to say matins,'1 Messina was in flames; only the area around the royal palace, where Philip was quartered, was left undamaged. Margaritus and his fellow-notables narrowly escaped with their lives, leaving their houses in ruins behind them.

  All the gold and silver, and whatsoever precious thing was found, became the property of the victors. They set fire to the enemy's galleys and burnt them to ashes, lest any citizens should escape and recover strength to resist. The victors also carried off their noblest women. And lo! when it was done, the French suddenly beheld the ensigns and standards of King Richard floating above the walls of the city; at which the King of France was so mortified that he con­ceived that hatred against King Richard that lasted all his life.

  The author of the Itinerary of Richard I goes on to explain how Philip insisted, and Richard finally agreed, that the French banners should be flown alongside the English; he does not mention how the citizens of Messina felt about this new insult to their pride. And there were further humiliations in store for them. Not only did Richard demand hostages as a guarantee of their future good conduct; he also caused to be built, on a hill just outs
ide the city, an immense castle of wood—to which, with typical arrogance, he gave the name Mategrifon, 'curb on the Greeks'. Just whom, the Messinans must have asked themselves, was the King of England supposed to be fighting? Did he intend to remain indefinitely in Sicily? It seemed a curious way to conduct a Crusade.

  To Philip Augustus, the incident over the flags seemed to confirm his worst suspicions. Within a fortnight of his arrival as an honoured guest, Richard was in undisputed control of the second city of the

  1 Plus tost eurent it pris Meschines

  C'uns prestres n'ad dit ses matines.

  Estoire de la Guerre Sainte

  island; and the King of Sicily, though not far distant at Catania, had made not the slightest effort to oppose him. To Catania therefore Philip now despatched his cousin the Duke of Burgundy, charging him to warn Tancred of the gravity of the situation and to offer the support of the French army if Richard were to press his claims any further.

  Tancred needed no warning—from the French King or from any­one else. He was well aware of the danger of leaving Messina in Richard's hands. But a new idea was now taking shape in his brain. He had the long-term future to consider, and he knew that in the final reckoning Henry of Hohenstaufen was a greater menace than Richard would ever be. Sooner or later Henry would invade, and when he did he would find plenty of support in Apulia and elsewhere. If Tancred were to resist him successfully he too would need allies; and for this purpose the English would be preferable to the French. Crude and uncivilised they might be—and their King, for all his glamorous reputation, was as bad as any of them; but Richard with his Welf connections—his sister Matilda had married Henry the Lion of Saxony—had no love for the Hohenstaufen. Philip, on the other hand, had been on excellent terms with Frederick Barbarossa; if the Germans were to invade now, while the Crusaders were still in Sicily, French sympathies would be to say the least uncertain. Tancred therefore returned the Duke of Burgundy to his master with suitably lavish presents but not much else, and sent his own most trusted envoy—Richard, the elder son of old Matthew of Ajello— to negotiate direct with the King of England at Messina.