Or some of them were. Others proved less fortunate than they had supposed. Two or three years later, following further insurrections in Sicily and on the mainland, many of these prisoners were blinded by order of the Emperor—despite the fact that having been in captivity since 1194 they could have played no part in the more recent disturbances. By then, with the whole Kingdom trembling under a reign of terror more violent than anything known under the Normans, few of its subjects can have cherished any illusions about the disaster that had befallen them.
But the story of Sicily after the Hautevilles are gone has no part in this book. It remains only to record the fate, in so far as we know it, of the last pale representatives of that extraordinary clan that had burst forth so dazzlingly across three continents, only to peter out in less than two centuries with the spectacle of a sad, frightened woman and her children. Sibylla, after five years or so of tolerable captivity with her three daughters in the convent of Hohenburg in Alsace, was eventually released to live out her remaining days in the obscurity she should never have left. Her daughter-in-law Irene, on the other hand, had a very different future awaiting her. In May 1197 she married Henry's brother, Philip of Swabia, and the following year became in her turn Empress of the West.
As for William III himself, his end remains a mystery. According to one theory he too was blinded and castrated in a German prison by order of Henry VI; another story—which does not necessarily contradict the first—relates that he was set free and became a monk. The only fact of which we can be reasonably sure is that, captive or cloistered, he did not long survive. Before the turn of the century he was dead, still hardly out of his boyhood—but the time and place of his death are unrecorded.
And what, finally, of Constance ? We have heard nothing of her since her escape from the papal escort and her hasty return to Germany in 1191. She—through no fault of her own—was the cause of her country's suffering, the ultimate justification for her husband's seizure of the Sicilian throne. Theoretically, where Sicily was concerned, she was the true monarch; Henry was merely her consort. Many people must have wondered why, when he invaded the Kingdom for the second time in the summer of 1194, his wife was no longer at his side; or why, on Christmas Day in Palermo, it was Henry alone who knelt at the altar for his coronation.
But there was a reason, and a good one. At the age of forty, and after nearly nine years of marriage, Constance was expecting a child. She did not put off her journey to Sicily on that account; but she travelled more slowly and in her own time, starting out a month or two after her husband and moving by easy stages down the peninsula. Even so, for a woman of her age and in her condition, it was a dangerous undertaking. The days and weeks of being shaken and jolted over the rough tracks of Lombardy and the Marches took their toll; and when she reached the little town of Jesi, not far from Ancona, she felt the pains of childbirth upon her.
Ever since the beginning of her pregnancy, Constance had had one fixed idea. She knew that both her enemies and Henry's, on both sides of the Alps, would do everything they could to discredit the birth, citing her age and the long years of her barrenness to claim that the child she was to bear could not really be hers; and she was determined that on this question at least there should be no possible room for doubt. She therefore had a large tent erected in the market square of Jesi, to which free entrance was allowed to any matron of the town who wished to witness the birth; and on the feast of St Stephen, 26 December, the day after her husband had received the Sicilian crown in Palermo Cathedral, the Empress brought forth her only son. A day or two later she showed herself in public in the same square, proudly suckling the child at her breast. The Hauteville spirit was not quite dead after all.
In the following century it was to appear again, in a new guise but more refulgently than ever, when that son—Frederick—grew to manhood. Though history may remember him as Emperor of the West, he himself never forgot that he was also King of Sicily, the grandson not only of Barbarossa but of Roger II as well. He showed it in the splendour of his court, in his lions and his leopards and his peacocks, in the Italian and Arabic poets he loved, in his classicising architecture and his Apulian hunting-lodges, and above all in that insatiable artistic and intellectual curiosity that was to make him the first of Renaissance princes two hundred years before his time, earning him the appellation of Stupor Mundi, the Wonder of the World. He showed it too in 1215, when he brought to Palermo the two huge porphyry sarcophagi that his grandfather had installed seventy years before at Cefalù.
Two other sarcophagi, of similar material but vastly inferior quality, already stood in Walter of the Mill's cathedral. One was that of Roger II, specially prepared for him in the capital when he had been denied burial in his own foundation;1 the other was that which Constance had had made for her husband after his sudden death at Messina in 1197. This latter receptacle, however, was of poor
1 See pp. 160-1.
workmanship—closer inspection shows it to have been glued together from fourteen separate parts—and Frederick seems to have thought it unworthy of his father. He therefore transferred Henry's corpse, still overlaid by the long tresses of fair hair cut off by his widow in her grief, to one of those from Cefalù, replacing it with the body of Constance, who had survived her husband by little more than a year; the fourth sarcophagus—that which Roger had originally intended for his own remains—Frederick kept for himself.1 In it he was duly laid after his death in 12 5 o; but he was not long to retain sole occupancy. In the fourteenth century the tomb was opened to receive two more bodies—those of the feeble-minded Peter II of Aragon and an unknown woman.
Father, daughter, son-in-law, grandson—a natural enough group, one might think, for a family burial. And yet, in those massive sepulchres, silent under their canopies of marble and mosaic, the four lie uneasily together—the architect of the Norman Kingdom and its destroyer, the unwilling cause of the collapse and its ultimate beneficiary. Nor do any of them really belong. Henry, by the time he died at the age of thirty-two, was detested and feared throughout Sicily; Constance was seen—unfairly but understandably—as having betrayed her homeland. Roger, to be sure, was loved; but he belongs at Cefalù, where he had always wished to lie and where the setting is worthy of him. Even Frederick, who was only twenty when he ordered his tomb, would probably have later preferred a different resting-place—in Capua perhaps, or Jerusalem, or, best of all, on some lonely hilltop under the wide Apulian sky. But Frederick's story, superb and tragic as it is, belongs elsewhere; ours is done.
Sixty-four years is a short life for a kingdom; and indeed Sicily might have been saved had William II—his sobriquet is better forgotten—shown himself either sensible or fertile. Instead, to serve the interests of a vain, aggressive ambition, he made a present of it to its oldest and most persistent enemy—an enemy against whom every one of his predecessors from the days of Robert Guiscard onwards had successively fought to defend it. Thus, when the
1 Such, at least, are the conclusions drawn, after brillianr detective work, by J. Deer. {The Dynastic Porphyry Tombs of the Norman Period in Sicily.)
Kingdom fell, it was not even properly defeated; it was thrown away.
And yet, even if Henry VI had never marched to claim his inheritance, it could not have lasted for long. A monarchy so absolute, so centralised, as that created by the two Rogers must depend for its survival on the personality of the monarch; and the decline of the Kingdom only reflects the decline of the Hautevilles themselves. As each generation gave way to the next, it was as though the cold Norman steel were slowly softening, the rich Norman blood growing thinner and more sluggish under the Sicilian sun. At last, with Tancred, saved by his bastardy from the oriental effeteness of the court at Palermo, the old vigour returned. But it was too late. Sicily was lost.
Perhaps, from the start, it carried within itself the seeds of its own destruction. It was too heterogeneous, too eclectic, too cosmopolitan. It failed—indeed, it hardly tried—t
o develop any national traditions of its own. Patriotism is an overrated and potentially dangerous emotion, but it is indispensable to a nation righting for its life; and when the crisis came, there was not enough of it to carry the Kingdom through. Norman and Lombard, Greek and Saracen, Italian and Jew —Sicily had proved that for as long as they enjoyed an enlightened and impartial government, they could happily coexist; they could not coalesce.
Yet, if the Kingdom died the victim of its ideals, those ideals were surely worth dying for. Inevitably in the last years, with the slow sickening of the body politic, the status of the religious and racial minorities began to decline. But nations should be judged on their achievements rather than on their lapses, and to the very end Norman Sicily stood forth in Europe—and indeed in the whole bigoted mediaeval world—as an example of tolerance and enlightenment, a lesson in the respect that every man should feel for those whose blood and beliefs happen to differ from his own. Europe, alas, was ungrateful and the Kingdom perished; but not before it had been rewarded by a sunburst of brilliance and beauty that blazes undimmed down the centuries and still speaks its message as clearly as ever. That message is to be read in the Palatine Chapel, when the great Islamic roof seems itself to glow gold with the reflected radiance of Byzantium; in the swell of the five crimson cupolas above the little cloister of St John of the Hermits; in a little garden outside Castelvetrano, where SS. Trinita di Delia stands lonely and immaculate in the afternoon sun; in the all-embracing Pantocrators of Monreale and Cefalù; and in the swirling Arabic calligraphy of George of Antioch's childhood hymn to the Virgin as it twines mistily round the dome of the Martorana while, far below, Latin fuses with Greek in another, simpler inscription, proud and unadorned: rogerios rex.
Appendix
THE NORMAN MONUMENTS OF SICILY
A complete list of all the Norman buildings still extant in Sicily is not easy to draw up. Hardly any of them has escaped the attention of restorers or rebuilders at some time or another, often to the point where—as in the outside of the Martorana or the inside of Palermo Cathedral—the original character has been completely lost. I have also ruefully to admit that there remain a few places on the list which I have not visited myself. Usually the invaluable guidebook of the Touring Club d'ltalia has been able to help me out, but in one or two cases I have had to rely on sketchier and less authoritative accounts. For the sake of completeness, too, I have added four items —identified with a question mark—which may be wholly or partly of Norman origin but can only be classified as doubtful. For the remainder I have adopted the following categories:
***The loveliest and best. Worth going to Sicily to see.
**Memorable.
*Buildings which have on the whole retained their original appearance and character. Unstarred—Buildings which have been largely restored or rebuilt. They may be beautiful, but are no longer essentially Norman in feeling.
? Paidone S. Maria la Cava. Paidone Torre di S. Michele. altarello See Palermo.
*altavilla MiLiciA S. Michele, known as the Chiesazza. The ruins of a small church built by Robert Guiscard in 1077, about 25 km from Palermo, just off the main coast road to Cefalù. Below it the little Ponte Saraceno may go back to the Arab occupation.
*altofonte Formerly the Parco (see p. 157). The royal palace has gone, but the little chapel behind the Cbiesa Madre is still standing, though restored.
*burgio S. Maria di Rifesi.
*caltabellotta The Chiesa Madre and the castle tower. (See p. 385n.)
*caltanissetta The Badia di S. Spirito was consecrated in 115 3; the frescoes are of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
**castelvetrano The little twelfth-century church of the SS. Trinita di Delia is a gem—the perfect fusion of Arab and Byzantine. About two miles outside the town to the west.
catania Of the basically baroque cathedral, only the Norman apses of black lava withstood the earthquakes of 1169 and 1693. The best view of them is from the courtyard of the seminary behind the cathedral (Via Vittorio Emmanuele). Inside, the two Norman chapels, the Cappella della Vergine and the Cappella del Crocifisso, are barely recognisable. ***Cefalù cathedral Though much of the inside is now distressingly baroque, the outside is exquisite and the great apse mosaic the most sublime masterpiece Sicily has to offer. (See pp. 13-15.)
Cefalù The Osterio Magno; a few remains of Roger II's palace, on the corner of the Corso Ruggero and the Via G. Amendola.
?erice S. Ippolito.
**forza d'agro A few kilometres outside the town, SS. Pietro e Paolo is one of the most important Basilian churches on the island. The inscription over the west door dates it to 1171-72.
*frazzano The Basilian abbey of S. Filippo di Fragala was built by Count Roger I in the late eleventh century.
*gratteri S. Giorgio. itala S. Pietro.
*maniace S. Maria di Maniace. (See p. 300.)
*mazara Ruins of Roger I's castle, 1073.
*mazara S. Nicolo Regale, or S. Nicolicchio, twelfth century.
*mazara Just outside the town to the east is the church of the Madonna dell' Alto or S. Maria delle Giummare, built in 1103 by a daughter of Roger I.
mazara In the cathedral, begun by Roger I in 1073, traces of Norman work can still be seen in the apse.
*messlna The church of the Annunziata dei Catalani is beautiful, though now so restored as to be virtually rebuilt. Parts of the apse are original.
*messina The Cathedral is aptly described by Christopher Kinin-month as 'a post-war reconstruction of the post-earthquake reconstruction of the Norman original'. Little, if" any, of the original work remains; but it merits inclusion in this list since it is a purely Norman church and a very beautiful one, and tells the visitor as much about Norman-Sicilian architecture as anything on the island. The sculptured slab from Richard Palmer's tomb has, unaccountably, survived almost intact. Pmessina La Badiazza.
*mili s. pietro The little church of S. Maria was founded for Basilian monks by Roger I in 1082. Here, too, Roger's bastard son Jordan was buried in 1091. (See The Normans in the South, p. 281 n.)
***monreale Cathedral and Cloister. (See pp. 316-22.)
*monreale The twelfth-century Castellaccio stands on the summit of Monte Caputo and commands a sensational view of the Conca d'Oro.
*monreale Remains of William IPs palace can be seen in the courtyard of the seminary at No. 1, Via Arcivescovado. ***palermo In the Royal Palace (the exterior of which, gloomy as it is, merits two stars on its own account) are to be found two of the most stunningly beautiful things in Sicily; the Palatine Chapel and the so-called Sala di Wuggero. (See pp. 72-7 and 241-2 respectively.)
***palermo S. Maria dell' Ammiraglio, popularly known as the Martorana. (See pp. 93-5).) **palermo S. Giovanni degli Eremiti. (See pp. 88-90.)
**palermo S. Spirito, the church of the Vespers. (See p. 363.) **palermo The Royal tombs of Roger II, Henry VI, Constance and Frederick II in the cathedral. (See pp. 389-90.) *palermo S. Giovanni dei Lebbrosi, one of the earliest Norman churches on the island. (See The Normans in the South, p. 178 n.)
*palermo S. Cataldo. (See p. 2i6n.) *palmero The Cathedral. (See pp. 362~3-) *palermo SS. Trinita(La Magione). (See p. 254x1.) *palermo The Zisa. (See pp. 239-41.)
*palermo The Cuba, Cubula and Cuba Soprana. (See p. 354n-)
*palermo The Ponte del Ammiraglio. (See pp. x5 5—6.)
*palermo S. Cristina, another foundation of Walter of the Mill.
*palermo La Maddalena, a twelfth-century church in the courtyard of the Carabinieri barracks next to the Porta Nuova. *Palermo S. Maria della Speranza.
*palermo The Castello della Favara, otherwise known as Mare-dolce. (See pp. 156-7.)
Palermo The Cappella dell' Incoronata behind the Cathedral.
Palermo In the suburb of Altarello, the Palazzo dell' Uscibene was formerly the royal hunting-lodge of Mimnermo. (See p. 169.)
Palermo For the sake of completeness, a brief mention should be made of the remains of some Norman work i
n the tower of the Palazzo Conte Federico. Pedants might also include a house known as the Casa Martorana and one in the Via Protonotaro; but both of these were badly damaged during the last war and hardly anything remains of the mediaeval structure.
*paterno The Castello was built by Roger I in 1073. It has been much restored but is still worth a visit. Ask at the Municipio for the keys.
patti The cathedral is of Norman origin, though there is little enough to show for it now—except the tomb of Roger II’s mother Queen Adelaide. (See The Normans in the South, p. 289 n.)
*piazza armerina The priory of S. Andrea, a few kilometres outside the town, was founded in 1096 by Simon, Count of Butera, cousin of Roger II. The frescoes are of the fifteenth century. (See p. 234m)
*s. fratello S. AlflO.
*s. marco d'alunzio The church in the Badia Grande di SS. Salvatore was founded in 1176 by Queen Margaret, wife of William I.
*sciacca S. Nicolo.
sciacca Of the Cathedral, the three apses of the east end are Norman.
sciacca S. Maria della Giummare, though today no more than an agreeable hotch-potch, still retains traces of its Norman origins.
Syracuse The extraordinary cathedral contains a little Norman work, just as it contains a little of everything else. troina The bell-tower of the Chiesa Matrice.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
NOTES ON THE PRINCIPAL SOURCES
Falco of Betievento
The Kingdom in the Sun Page 46