Seeing the Latin Church in Sicily placed, for the first time in its history, under full papal control, Pope Celestine could justifiably congratulate himself on a diplomatic coup of some magnitude. It was not often that Popes had got the better of Normans in negotiations of that sort. Tancred, however, had not been disposed to argue. He had his back to the wall. The privileges he had surrendered seemed to belong to a happier and more spacious age; they were a small enough price to pay for legitimacy.
But, though he did not yet know it, he had also lost something else—something far more valuable to him at that moment than any number of ecclesiastical sanctions. Pope Celestine, undeterred by Henry's reception of his last proposals, still cherished the hope that one day, through his mediation, King and Emperor might be reconciled; and he had therefore pressed Tancred as a gesture of goodwill to deliver Constance into his care. Chalandon, with unaccustomed heat, condemns the Pope's advice as detestable; it was
1 See pp. 197-9.
certainly ill-conceived, and its effect was disastrous. Tancred, not wishing to antagonise the Pope at such a time, reluctantly complied. The Empress was entrusted to a special escort that included several cardinals, and set off for Rome.
Had she gone by sea, all might have been well; but the land route passed through territory still under Henry's control, and the inevitable happened. When the party reached the frontier at Ceprano it ran into a group of imperial knights. Constance at once placed herself under their protection. The cardinals objected, but were ignored. They returned empty-handed to Rome while the Empress, carefully avoiding the city, hastened back over the Alps to her husband.
Tancred had been robbed of his trump card. He was not to be dealt another.
During the last weeks of 1192 Joanna Plantagenet called at Palermo on her way back from Palestine—accompanied by her sister-in-law Berengaria, now Queen of England since her marriage to Richard at Limassol in Cyprus some eighteen months before. The fact that she chose to do so suggests that, whatever her brother may have pretended, she had not been too badly treated by Tancred after her husband's death; she certainly bore him no grudge, and Tancred and his wife Sibylla gave the two young queens a suitably royal welcome. A week or two later they sailed on again, Berengaria to welcome widowhood in France, Joanna towards a second marriage.1
She seems to have been delighted with her reception, in a Palermo that must have appeared outwardly unchanged from the days when she and her godlike young husband had reigned over Norman Sicily at its loveliest and most peaceful. One hopes that she understood how fortunate she was to have known it at such a time—or even to have found, on her return, her old realm still in existence at all.
1 She had had a narrow escape in Palestine when Richard, for reasons more diplomatic than humane, had tried to marry her off to Saladin's brother al-Adil. Her second husband was in fact to prove much more to her taste—Count Raymond VI of Toulouse, whom she was to marry as his fourth wife in n 96. They were happy together, but not for long. Three years later, when still not quite thirty-four, Joanna died in childbirth, having been received on her deathbed into the religious order of Fontevrault—where she lies buried, with her father, mother and brother.
For if, that summer, Henry VI had led a second expedition to the South as he had intended to do, better equipped than its predecessor and provided with adequate naval support, it is unlikely that Tancred, even with the help of Margaritus and his fleet, would have been able to hold out. The long peace that had marked the reign and made the reputation of William the Good was now over; after twenty-five years anarchy had returned; already the mainland had lapsed once again into chaos. Not a road was safe, scarcely a baron could be trusted; in such conditions organised resistance to an invader was well-nigh impossible. But Henry had not marched. The Welfs, transparently supported by Pope Celestine, were making too much trouble for him at home. The best he had been able to do was to send a relatively meagre force under Berthold of Kunsberg to hold the situation until conditions became more favourable to his purpose. Norman Sicily was granted a stay of execution.
But it was still fighting for its life. Though Tancred had spent nine months continuously on campaign up and down the peninsula, he had returned to Sicily in the autumn with little to show for his efforts and more convinced than ever that without active help from abroad the days of his Kingdom were numbered. Much of the winter he spent concluding negotiations with the Byzantine Emperor Isaac Angelus, as a result of which he was soon able to announce the betrothal of his elder son Roger—whom he had duly created Duke of Apulia some time before—to the Emperor's daughter Irene.
The wedding was celebrated the following spring, at Brindisi. It served little practical purpose. Isaac could provide the King of Sicily with a daughter-in-law, but he was too busy with his own troubles to furnish anything else. Duke Roger was dead by the end of the year; his young wife was left, disconsolate and alone, in Palermo. Meanwhile King Richard of England, who might otherwise have been ready to help, had been captured by one of Henry's vassals on his return journey from Palestine and was now languishing in a German castle. Sicily's only ally remained Pope Celestine; but the Pope was hamstrung by an openly imperialist Roman Senate, and had no army. He was also eighty-seven.
Tancred fought on alone. Still there was no sign of the Emperor, but even without him the situation was deteriorating; the royalist troops might recapture a few towns and castles here and there, but they could make no real headway. Monte Cassino in particular proved as impregnable as it always had, still shamelessly flying the imperial standard from its tower. Then, in the late summer, Tancred fell ill. He continued as long as he could, but the sickness increased until he was forced to return to Sicily. All winter long he lay in Palermo, growing steadily weaker; and on 20 February 1194 he died.
Now there was no hope left. With Tancred of Lecce Sicily had lost her last effective champion. Of all the Norman kings, he was the most selfless and the most tragic. In happier times he would never have sought the crown; nor, when it was thrust upon him, did he ever have an opportunity to savour the delights of kingship. His four years on the throne were years of unremitting strife—against the Empire above all, but also against his fellow-Sicilians, Christian and Muslim, who were too egotistical or too blind to understand the enormity of the crisis that faced them. Seeing it himself with such terrible clarity, he strove to turn it aside by every means within his power, military and diplomatic, overt and clandestine. Had he lived, he might even have succeeded—though the odds were heavily against him. Dying as he did in early middle age, he is remembered in Sicily—when he is remembered at all—as a mediocrity and a failure, or even as the misshapen ogre of the imperial propagandists. It is an unfair judgment. Tancred lacked, perhaps, the greatness of his proudest forbears; but with his persistence, his courage and—most of all—his political vision, he surely proved himself a not unworthy successor.
To the ever-superstitious subjects of the crumbling Kingdom, the deaths of both King Tancred and his heir within a few weeks of each other seemed yet another sign from heaven that the Hautevilles had run their race and that Henry of Hohenstaufen must now prevail. The fact that Tancred's only other son, William, was still a child and that Sicily, at the time of her greatest trial, was once more to be entrusted to the care of a woman Regent appeared only additional, unnecessary confirmation of the divine will. The dark clouds of defeatism that had long been gathering over the Regno now spread to the capital itself as Queen Sibylla, still in the first paralysing numbness of her widowhood, took the reins of government into her tired, reluctant hands.
She had no illusions. To her as to her husband, the crown had never been anything but a burden, and she knew as well as anyone that the task before her was impossible. If Tancred with all his energy and courage had ultimately failed to unite his people against the oncoming menace, how could she and her little son hope to succeed ? She herself was without political ability or understanding; the one adviser on whom she mig
ht have relied, old Matthew of Ajello, had died the previous year. His two sons, Richard and Nicholas, the latter now Archbishop of Salerno, remained loyal and capable enough in their way; but neither could hope to match the experience or prestige of their father. Her third chief adviser was Archbishop Bartholomew of Palermo, brother and successor of Walter of the Mill. She did not trust him, and she was almost certainly right. All she could do was to wait for the blow to fall—and, meanwhile, to try to keep her head.
She did not have long to wait. Henry VI, his domestic problems settled, was now once again directing all his energies towards the conquest of Sicily. He was not in any particular hurry; time was on his side, and there was no point in risking any repetition of the Naples disaster of three years before. Then he had been let down by inadequate naval support; thanks to Margaritus, the Pisan fleet had been rendered useless and the Genoese, arriving only after the imperial retreat had begun, had narrowly escaped total destruction. This time he would be properly prepared. Margaritus would find himself faced not only by Pisans and Genoese, but by fifty fully-equipped galleys from the one source, perhaps, that he least expected —King Richard of England.
It was not really Richard's fault; he had had little choice. On 4 February 1194—less than two and a half weeks before Tancred's death—he had at last obtained his release from captivity; but Henry had made him pay dearly for his freedom. To the original ransom figure of a hundred thousand silver marks he had added another fifty thousand, to be used specifically for the Sicilian expedition, together with the fifty galleys and the services of two hundred knights for not less than a year. As a final piece of gratuitous humiliation, the Emperor had forced his prisoner to do homage to him for the Kingdom of England itself.
For the moment, however, it was the ships that mattered. Henry expected little serious opposition from Tancred's army—and none at all in Campania where his garrisons, aided by the reinforcements brought in by Berthold of Kunsberg, had been steadily extending their authority since Tancred's death. Everything depended on his power at sea. Towards the end of May he crossed the Splugen pass into Italy and spent Whitsun in Milan. A week or two later he was in Genoa and then in Pisa, making sure of his ships and planning every detail of the coming campaign. The dates were fixed; and on 23 August the combined fleets under the overall command of the Steward of the Empire, Markward of Anweiler, appeared in the bay of Naples. They found the city open to them. The Neapolitans, who only three years before had defied the imperial army to do its worst and had soon afterwards triumphantly watched it go limping back to Germany, had this time capitulated even before the enemy had arrived. With Tancred's death, the last remaining shreds of South Italian morale were gone.
Henry did not even bother to stop at Naples. He went straight on to Salerno, where he had an old score to settle. Three years before, the Salernitans had betrayed him. They had made their submission, had offered bis wife their hospitality and then, at the first reports of an imperial retreat, had turned against her and delivered her up to her enemies. The Emperor was not the man to let such treachery go unpunished. Fear of his vengeance, rather than courage or feelings of loyalty towards their King, at first led the Salernitans to resist, but they could not do so for long. Their city was taken by storm and given over to merciless pillage. Such of the population as escaped massacre had their property confiscated and were sent into exile. The walls were reduced to rubble; by then there was little left for them to enclose.
If any example was necessary of the treatment to be expected by towns that sought to resist the German advance, Salerno provided it. With two heroic exceptions—Spinazzola and Policoro—which suffered a similar fate, Henry's authority was accepted everywhere without question. His ensuing march through the South was less of a campaign than a triumphal progress; even the cities of Apulia, long the focus of anti-imperial feeling, accepted the inevitable; Siponto, Trani, Barletta, Bari, Giovinazzo and Molfetta, each in turn opened its gates to the conqueror. In Calabria it was the same story. At the end of October Henry VI, now master of the mainland, crossed the straits of Messina. For the first time in well over a century, a hostile invading army was encamped on Sicilian soil.
The navy had arrived several weeks earlier, and the Emperor disembarked to find Messina already an occupied city. So too—despite serious differences between the Pisans and Genoese which were resolved only after a full-scale naval battle fought by their respective fleets—were Catania and Syracuse. Everywhere, the central administration was breaking down; the island was in a state of growing confusion. Once Henry had established his bridgeheads, it was clear that no real opposition could be organised against him. Queen Sibylla did her best; whatever her other faults, she did not lack courage. The boy King and his three small sisters she sent off to comparative safety in the fortress of Caltabellotta,1 near Sciacca on the south-west coast; then she attempted to rally a last-ditch resistance. It was no use. The citadel overlooking the port was commanded by Margaritus; he too was eager to hold out till the end. But the fatalism that had paralysed the capital had now spread to the garrison. They laid down their arms. Margaritus could not continue the struggle single-handed. While the Queen Regent, seeing that her cause was lost, fled with the Archbishop of Palermo and his brother to join her children at Caltabellotta, he remained to negotiate the final surrender.
Henry, meanwhile, advanced on Palermo. A few miles outside the walls, at Favara, he was received by a group of leading citizens to assure him of the city's submission and future fidelity.2 In return he issued strict orders, immediately relayed throughout the army, that there should be no pillage or licentiousness. Palermo was his kingdom's
1 A single tower of this castle—where, incidentally, the peace was signed in 1502 that brought to an end the war of the Sicilian Vespers—still rises from a pinnacle above the town, commanding one of the most stunning views in all Sicily. Below, the Chiesa Madre is also worth a visit; it was erected by Count Roger I when he captured Caltabellotta in 1090.
2 Plate 32.
capital, and was to be treated as such; at all times the strictest discipline was to be maintained. His promise given, he rode through the gates and made his solemn entry into the city.
Thus, on 20 November 1194, the rule of the Hautevilles in Palermo was brought to an end. It had begun nearly a century and a quarter before, when Robert Guiscard, with his brother Roger and his magnificent wife Sichelgaita riding behind him, had led an exhausted but exultant army into the city. They had fought with tenacity and courage—qualities that had been matched in full measure by the defenders; and in the soldierly admiration felt by each side for a worthy adversary was born the mutual respect and understanding that lay at the root of the Norman-Sicilian miracle. The result had been the happiest and most glorious chapter of the island's history. Now that chapter was closed—with the surrender of a demoralised people to an invader whom they feared too much to fight and who felt for them, in return, a contempt which he made little effort to conceal.
On Christmas Day, 1194, the Emperor Henry VI of Hohenstaufen was crowned King of Sicily in Palermo Cathedral. In places of honour before him, to witness his triumph and their own humiliation, sat Sibylla and her children, among them the sad little William III, who after a ten-month reign, was now King no longer. So far, they had been treated well. Instead of attacking Caltabellotta— which he could have quickly subdued—Henry had offered them reasonable, even generous, terms, under which William was to receive not only his father's county of Lecce but also the principality of Taranto. Sibylla had accepted, and had returned with her family to the capital. Now, as she watched the crown of Sicily—that crown that had brought so much misery to her husband, her son and herself during the past five years—slowly lowered on to Henry's head, it is hard to imagine her feeling any emotion but that of profound relief.
If so, however, it was premature—and short-lived. Four days later, the atmosphere suddenly changed. A conspiracy to assassinate the Emperor had, it was claimed
, been uncovered in the nick of time. Sibylla, her children and a large number of leading Sicilians who had been summoned to Palermo for the coronation—among them Margaritus of Brindisi, Archbishop Nicholas of Salerno and his brother Richard, Counts Roger of Avellino and Richard of Acerra, even Princess Irene, the bewildered Byzantine widow of the last Duke of Apulia—were accused of complicity in the plot, and sent off under close guard to captivity in Germany.
How much truth, if any, was there in these charges? Several chroniclers, particularly those writing in Italy such as Richard of S. Germano, categorically deny that there was ever a plot at all; for them the whole story was merely a pretext by which Henry could rid his new kingdom of all undesirable and potentially subversive elements. The idea is not impossible; no one who has followed the course of the Emperor's stormy career can doubt that he would have been fully capable of such conduct had it suited him. But if not out of character with Henry himself, it still runs contrary to the whole policy which we find him pursuing towards his new kingdom. Everywhere except in Salerno—where he had good reason for resentment —we find him in a merciful and conciliatory mood, a phenomenon rare enough, where he was concerned, to be in itself remarkable; and it is unlikely that he would have switched overnight from conciliation to repression without good reason. What is in the highest degree improbable is that, given the unpopularity of the Germans and the Sicilian penchant for intrigue, the possibility of a coup d'etat was never at this time considered. If one was actually planned, several of those arrested would certainly have been involved, or at any rate aware of what was going on. They were lucky in that case to escape a more unpleasant punishment.
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