The Normans: From Raiders to Kings

by Lars Brownworth

  William had been a laconic ruler, but the direct threat to his government finally roused him to action. Gathering the royal army he descended on the rebel camp with surprising speed, Maio prominently at his side. The rebel leaders were given an ultimatum, surrender and suffer exile or be killed. A few tried to protest that they had the king’s interests at heart, but Maio clearly still had William’s favor, and an assault on him was an assault on the king. Faced with such royal determination, the revolt crumbled and its leaders accepted exile.

  Now that he had been shaken out of his lethargy, William’s blood was up. In the spring campaigning season he crossed over to the mainland with his army and navy. His timing couldn’t have been better. The inspired Byzantine general Michael Palaeologus, architect of the overall imperial strategy, had just died, bringing the Byzantine advance to a halt. Now, at the sight of the entire armed might of Norman Sicily descending on their camp, the rebels deserted their imperial allies. The Byzantines didn’t stand a chance, and in just over an hour most of them were dead. Byzantium’s gains in the entire war were revealed as illusory, based on anti-Norman feeling rather than real strength. Byzantine power in Italy was broken permanently.

  William marched unopposed to Bari, determined to punish the city for its massacre of the garrison. The leading citizens met him outside the gates and begged him to show mercy. He granted most of them their lives but razed the city, sparing only the cathedral of St Nicholas and a few other churches.

  The rebel barons weren’t so lucky. They had by now realized the error of abandoning their Byzantine allies as each had to face the wrath of William on their own. One by one they were captured, tied with weights and thrown into the sea. By the summer it was over. The king’s final stop before returning to Palermo was Benevento where he signed a treaty with the pope recognizing the kingdom of Sicily’s right to exist and confirming all of William’s claims in Italy.

  It had been a remarkably successful campaign, and it had the added benefit of convincing the Byzantine emperor Manuel to make peace. The emperor had come to the conclusion that Barbarossa was a more pressing threat, and that he needed to pit the pope against the German monarch. If Pope Adrian had come to terms with William, then the Byzantines would as well. Manuel initiated peace talks while at the same time cleverly funding a fresh rebellion in Italy to sweeten the eventual deal. William got the point. Convinced that a generous agreement with Byzantium was the only way to avoid perpetual rebellions, he released all Byzantine prisoners and signed a thirty-year peace treaty.

  When William returned to Palermo, he again slipped into the pleasurable stupor of palace life. Administrative responsibilities were handed over to Maio who spent his time strengthening the Sicilian position in Italy to guard against the possibility of Barbarossa’s return.

  While the king was focused on frivolity, and his chief minister concentrated on the mainland, the rest of the empire started to decay. In 1155 a Muslim revolt started in North Africa, and the badly outnumbered Normans were unable to suppress it. Urgent requests to Palermo for aid were ignored and by 1159 all of Tripoli except the trading city of Mahdia had fallen. William sent a small fleet to aid the city, but it was destroyed by a storm and he didn’t bother himself further.

  The Normans in Mahdia bravely held out for over a year waiting vainly for the expected relieving army. Finally they struck a deal; they would send a delegation to Palermo and if it returned empty handed they would voluntarily surrender. A small group set out, but when they reached the capital they were bluntly told by Maio that the city wasn’t worth the expense it would take to preserve it. The stunned ambassadors returned, Mahdia surrendered, and the Norman empire in Africa ceased to exist.

  Maio may have been correct in his assessment of the situation; certainly his efforts in Italy were paying off. With Sicilian backing, the northern Italian cities had formed the great Lombard league and successfully held off a German invasion. After several years spent fruitlessly trying to cow the peninsula into submission, even the iron-willed Barbarossa was forced to admit that Italy was outside of his grasp.

  For all the international success of Maio’s policies, however, he remained deeply unpopular in Sicily. To the local Sicilians he represented the worst type of autocrat. Over-powerful, arrogant, and unresponsive to public moods, he had sat by and watched while North Africa burned, and his coreligionists suffered. Even worse, as far as the local nobility were concerned, was Maio’s habit of elevating Greeks or Arabs to positions of power over the heads of established aristocratic Normans. The fact that these appointees were qualified, capable individuals, or that the Sicilian Normans were all too often entitled, incompetent, and boorish, was irrelevant. Maio, a foreigner himself from Bari, was the fountainhead of everything that ailed Sicily.

  In the autumn of 1160 the admiral got word that his prospective son-in-law was implicated in the latest attempt to kill him. For all his savvy, he succumbed to the conceit that someone so close couldn’t be involved, and a week later he was struck down in the streets of Palermo. The news electrified the city, and the assassin, a man named Matthew Bonnellus became an instant celebrity. Fearing reprisals from the king for killing his favorite, Bonnellus fled and serious rioting instantly broke out.

  With half of Palermo in flames, William finally stirred. The mob was suppressed with difficulty, and for the first time the king fully realized how hated Maio had been. Facing a wave of popular unrest, he was forced to pardon everyone involved in the murder of his most trusted lieutenant, even gallingly awarding Bonnellus the title ‘savior of the kingdom’ for his part in the brutal deed.

  His new status as beloved icon went straight to Bonnellus’ head. Stepping into Maio’s position wasn’t enough, he now schemed to get rid of William as well. While Bonnellus absented himself from Palermo to avoid the taint of regicide, a group of dissatisfied nobles had William seized in one of his palaces. The king desperately tried to jump out of a window to avoid his captors, but he was restrained, and the entire royal family was arrested. If they had appointed a new king at that moment, William’s reign would have been finished, but the conspirators couldn’t decide whether to kill William or simply have him abdicate in favor of his nine-year-old son Roger. While they argued about who would receive the crown, their followers began to systematically loot the main palace.

  As they squabbled, the mood in the city started to harden against them. William’s reign may have had its share of disasters, but he wasn’t directly blamed, only the men around him acting in his name. It was one thing to get rid of a hated minister, and quite another to so mistreat an anointed king. The looting of the palace and the arrest of the royal family was enough to convince the citizens of Palermo who the real villains were. The palace was stormed again, and the terrified rebels ran to the captive William and begged him to save them.

  William complied and the rebels were allowed to leave, but the ordeal broke him. During the fighting his eldest son and heir had been killed, and when the first of his guards reached him they found him huddled in a corner sobbing.

  The rest of his reign passed in peace. In his last decade he left the capital of Palermo only once; a triumphal procession through Italy to install his candidate for pope in Rome.51 Most of William’s time was spent in pleasurable pursuits, particularly the construction of a lavish new palace complex with fishponds, fountains, pools, and well-stocked hunting grounds. In the spring of 1166 he contracted a fever and, after a two-month illness, he died.

  History has not been kind to William. His main chronicler despised him, and is responsible for his epithet, ‘the Bad’. The king’s excessive lifestyle was the root of much of this displeasure. If his father was the baptized sultan, it was snidely put, William hardly bothered with the baptism.

  In 1166, however, William was genuinely mourned. Palermo hung itself with black for three days, and the king’s body was taken reverently to the cathedral where it was placed in a simple porphyry sarcophagus. His oldest surviving son, a thirteen-ye
ar-old boy also named William was crowned, and all of Sicily seemed to be at peace.

  He was not a great king, nor perhaps even a good one. The many rebellions, the loss of North Africa, and the general shirking of his responsibility as king, all rightfully stained his reputation. But he also had the impossible task of following a legendary father, without the benefit of guidance or preparation. In the circumstances, his defense of Norman Sicily against a determined pope and two of the greatest emperors to ever sit on their respective thrones was a remarkable feat. It was a fleeting glimpse of what could have been.

  Chapter 15

  William the Worse

  William I may have acquired the nickname ‘bad’, but at least he provided the kingdom with an heir. The great vitality of the Normans in southern Italy had been failing for some time. William’s father and grandfather had fathered at least thirty-two children between them while William managed only four, but at least the succession wasn’t in doubt. The young William II, just shy of his thirteenth birthday, was crowned in a sumptuous ceremony, and theoretically accepted the burden of caring for nearly two million subjects. He was by all accounts, a striking youth. Tall and dark-eyed, already showing the fair hair and height of his Norse heritage, he seemed a mixture of dynamism and gravity far beyond his years. According to several eye-witnesses, at the first glimpse of him in the streets of Palermo his subjects fell genuinely in love.

  Until he came of age, however, they would be denied the pleasure of being governed by him. In the meantime a Regency Council was set up headed by his mother Margaret and a trio of the leading notables of the kingdom. It would have been difficult to pick a more unsuitable group of people to run a government. The three advisors, a eunuch named Peter, a notary named Matthew, and the English archbishop Richard Palmer, spent most of their time trying to assassinate each other. Margaret soon realized that she had to get rid of them before they got rid of her, so she promoted the least threatening one – Peter – above the other two, momentarily putting one of the most wealthy and influential Christian kingdoms in the hands of a Muslim eunuch.

  Peter was an intriguer, a civil servant who knew the intricacies of the bureaucracy, and who was most comfortable behind the scenes. Pushed to the center, he quickly lost control. Within a few months Sicily was in chaos, and fearing assassination, Peter fled to North Africa. To restore the situation, Margaret invited her cousin Stephen du Perche from France, who, if not wise, was at least strong.

  The choice was instantly controversial. It was bad enough that the best jobs were being awarded to foreigners, but the salary of the office of chancellor, vacant since Peter had fled, had been divided among the nobility who now angrily resented Margaret. Stephen’s appointment was both a loss of prestige and income.

  Just as tensions reached a boiling pitch, however, news came of a fresh disaster that made everything else irrelevant. The terrible German emperor Barbarossa had crossed the Alps and descended on Italy. The very survival of the kingdom was in doubt.

  Sicily had been a thorn in the German side since its founding. Norman kings had offered aid and protection to the pope and the cities of northern Italy, which had time and again defied the emperor. Army after army had been sent to pacify Italy, only to have it flare up again in revolt the moment they left, aided by Sicilian gold and papal blessing. The solution, obviously, in Barbarossa’s eyes was twofold. Install a tame pontiff in Rome, and smash Sicily.

  There were many in Palermo who blamed their late king for the bad news. Barbarossa had started out the following spring and had made it explicitly clear that he was coming to stop William the Bad’s meddling and shatter the Norman kingdom once and for all. The fact that William had died in the meantime, and that his successor was a mere boy, was irrelevant.

  What had finally goaded the German monarch to action was the part the late William had played in one of the most bizarre elections in papal history seven years prior, exacerbating the rift between Aachen and Palermo. When a papal vacancy had appeared, Frederick made it clear that he supported a pliable cardinal by the name of Octavian. The assembled clergy, however, tired of imperial interference and confident of Norman support, voted unanimously for a man named Alexander. This should have settled the matter, but Octavian, thoroughly convinced that he should have been pope, wasn’t about to let an election stand in his way. On coronation day, when pope-elect Alexander bowed his head to receive the mantle, Octavian leapt forward and wrenched it from the hands of the startled cardinals. In the uproar that followed, the flailing Octavian lost control of the garment. He then produced an identical one brought for just such a turn of events, and managed to get it on backwards before bolting to the papal throne with the howling clerics at his heels.

  Octavian reached the throne just before his pursuers, managing to declare himself Pope Victor IV. With the timely arrival of some hired thugs, the newly-minted pope ordered everyone to acclaim him. His rival, the Norman-supported pope Alexander was taken to a nearby fortress and imprisoned, and Octavian settled back to enjoy his tenure.

  Despite hefty bribes by the imperial ambassadors, Octavian’s reputation plummeted as news of his shocking behavior spread throughout Rome. Appearances in public were greeted with catcalls or worse, and mobs gathered outside of his palace to taunt him. After two weeks of abuse he could take no more and slipped out of Rome.

  Barbarossa’s failure to impose his pope on Rome was galling enough, but his creature’s behaviour after being evicted had made things worse. Denied Rome, Octavian had settled in the hills surrounding the city of Lucca, and there the self-proclaimed spiritual head of Christendom became a bandit, waylaying pilgrims traveling through Tuscany.

  A bit of tact from Sicily might still have prevented a war with the humiliated German monarch, but William the Bad chose instead to send an honour guard to escort the Norman-supported Alexander back to Rome, publicly broadcasting the fact that Frederick was powerless to enforce his will in Italy. William the Bad had then, with his usual timing, expired, leaving his successors to deal with the consequences of offending Barbarossa.

  A combined Norman and Italian army was sent to slow the German advance, but this only enraged the emperor further. After annihilating this meager force, Barbarossa razed several towns, driving their populations into the surrounding countryside. The road to Rome was choked with refugees, all hoping that the magic of its name would somehow ward off the invaders. Its fate, however, was sealed. On July 29, 1167 the imperial forces battered their way into Rome, giving full vent to their pent-up emotions. Statues were pulled down, marble slabs were hacked from their fittings, and tombs were smashed open to get at the jewels inside. Not even the basilica of Saint Peter’s was spared. Bands of soldiers managed to force their way past the doors and slaughtered the horrified clerics as they clung vainly to the high altar.

  The very next day, before the stench of blood and corpses was cleared, Barbarossa had yet another tame antipope crowned, grimly promising that all who resisted him would experience the same fate. In Palermo his words reduced the city to panic. The defense was virtually abandoned, as nobles began to flee with what treasure they could carry. Sicily appeared doomed. It was in chaos, governed by an unpopular woman and an inexperienced foreigner. There wasn’t even a real army assembled to oppose the Germans. Only an Act of God could save the Normans now.

  Fortunately for Sicily, God obliged. Two days after Barbarossa crowned his pope, the plague struck the imperial army, devastating it. The swampy climate of Rome and the unseasonable heat only made it worse, but when Barbarossa ordered an evacuation of the city the plague followed him. By the time he reached the Alps his great army was ruined. The emperor was no longer feared, but actively mocked. Northern Italy didn’t even bother to wait until he was gone to formally declare its independence, and, as if that weren’t enough, they blocked all of the passes through the mountains. Only by dressing as a servant did the humiliated emperor manage to sneak past into Germany.

  In Sicily, news of the mirac
ulous delivery led to a surge in popularity for Margaret and Stephen du Perche. The French escort that Stephen had brought continued to be resented by the population, but Stephen himself was proving to be a competent administrator. His reforms, however, mostly at the expense of the nobility, were intensely hated by the latter and led to numerous assassination plots. For her part, Margaret supported him completely, and it became clear that none of the nobility would ever share power while he was present. For two years things continued relatively smoothly, with Stephen nimbly evading assassination and managing the growing resentment of the population.

  All would have been well if Margaret had maintained the status quo, but she antagonized the populace by appointing Stephen archbishop of Palermo. A mob stormed the palace, forcing Stephen and his French companions to flee to the cathedral and barricade themselves inside. Bloodshed was avoided only when Stephen agreed to leave Sicily and never return. He and his companions were allowed to walk down to the harbor and board a ship destined for the Holy Land.

  The fall of her favorite finished Margaret. Although William still had three years before he reached his majority, ‘that Spanish woman’, as she was called, had no energy to continue. She remained the regent, but real power devolved to her son’s tutor, an ambitious and unscrupulous Englishman by the name of Walter of the Mill. Raised to the rank of archbishop, Walter would have a virtual monopoly of power over domestic affairs for the next decade.

  In 1171, William turned eighteen, and officially took control over Sicily. Although he had lived his life in seclusion in the palace, he already had grandiose ambitions. Sicily had once been the leading power in the Mediterranean and William intended to return it to that state. To his subjects at least, he seemed uniquely suited to the task. Tall and good looking, with a round face, dark eyes, and a closely cropped beard, he was studious, fluent in at least five languages, and deeply religious. He was also, remarkably fortunate. The upheaval of Stephen du Perche’s fall turned out to be the last serious disturbance of his reign. Sicily entered a remarkable period of domestic peace and prosperity.