The Normans: From Raiders to Kings

by Lars Brownworth

  The kingdom’s trade boomed. The secret of silk production was smuggled out of Constantinople adding to the already diverse industries of iron, salt, and sulfur. Coral was harvested from the coastal waters, the Sicilian tunny fish was imported across the Mediterranean, and Sicilian farms produced wheat, oranges, lemons, melons, and almonds that were in demand across Europe and North Africa. Even Sicily’s forests played their part. Sicilian timber was well enough known for its quality that at least one pope used it exclusively to repair the Lateran’s roof.

  The turmoil of William the Bad’s reign had interfered with these industries, but it hadn’t affected Sicily’s reputation for luxury or power. When the young William II attained his majority, foreign offers of marriage rolled in. The first was from the Byzantine emperor Manuel Comnenus, offering his fifteen-year-old daughter Maria. This was especially intriguing because Manuel didn’t have a son, meaning that William’s grandchild would stand to inherit both Sicily and the Byzantine Empire. Not to be outdone, Frederick Barbarossa offered his daughter as well, and Henry II of England chimed in with the offer of his third daughter Joan, sister of Richard the Lionheart.

  With the Englishman, Walter of the Mill, advising him, William gravitated towards Joan. It was only natural, after all, that the two Norman kingdoms at opposite ends of Europe should be officially united. There were already cultural and family ties; each kingdom was a natural destination for the exiles of the other, and most of the nobility in Palermo had relatives in London.

  Just when William was on the point of accepting, however, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas à Becket, was murdered by four of Henry’s knights, and in the resulting firestorm the matter was tactfully dropped. The emperor Manuel again offered his daughter and this time it was accepted. On the day when the princess was due to arrive, however, there was no Byzantine ship on the horizon. Manuel had evidently decided that the Western Empire would be a more suitable match, and didn’t bother to inform Sicily of the change of plan. William processed down to the harbor in state and after a day of waiting was forced to return to the palace thoroughly – and quite publicly – humiliated. He wouldn’t forget the insult.

  For several years the marriage issue was allowed to lie fallow before Walter of the Mill again began to suggest that William should look towards England. He received surprising help in this direction from the pope who was terrified that William would marry into Barbarossa’s family and thereby unite the two great powers to the north and south of Rome. Enough time had passed for most of the furor over Becket’s murder to die down, and inquiries were quietly made. Henry and his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine accepted, and in 1177 the twenty-three-year-old William and the twelve-year-old Joan were married in Palermo.

  Politically, the match marked the highpoint of William’s reign. He was at the peak of his youth, beginning even to break free from the control of Walter of the Mill. Three years before he had started building a magnificent cathedral at Monreale, ostensibly to the glory of his grandfather Roger II, but in reality to weaken Walter’s power. When it was finished he appointed an archbishop, creating at once a rival of equal authority to his powerful advisor. Walter protested furiously, but there was little he could do.

  It was an extraordinary time. William was popular, fabulously wealthy, and young, and the international situation seemed to adjust itself for his benefit. In Italy the aging Frederick Barbarossa at last abandoned any hopes of outright conquest and decided to try diplomacy instead. He offered Sicily a permanent truce. It was too late for William to marry into the German royal family, but Frederick had another offer. His son and heir Henry was not yet married; if William could find a suitable bride, the two kingdoms would be united in peace.

  William eagerly agreed. His grandfather Roger II had a posthumous daughter named Constance who was a year younger than William himself. Since he didn’t yet have any children, his aunt Constance stood to inherit the Sicilian throne. This point was driven home by having all the nobles of the realm swear to accept her as his heir if he died without issue. He then escorted her to the harbor and sent her off to the crown prince of the German Empire.

  Even some of William’s usually adoring public recognized the sheer lunacy of what he had just done. Although there seemed to be plenty of time for heirs – he was just thirty and his wife was eighteen – it was a terrible risk to give Sicily’s great enemy a legitimate claim to the throne. If William or his wife were to die prematurely - and the medieval world was nothing if not uncertain - Sicily would fall into the lap of the ruler who had actively tried to destroy it for the last quarter of a century.

  For William it was worth the risk, simply because it freed him up to concentrate on his dream of foreign conquest. He had grown up on stories of his grandfather’s triumphs, and had been appalled by his father’s abandonment of Africa. Now he intended to revive Sicily’s overseas empire.

  His first probing attack was a disaster. North Africa was united under the powerful Almohads, and they easily repulsed the Norman invasion. Next, he sent thirty thousand troops to invade Alexandria, hoping to curb the power of the new Muslim strongman, Saladin, who was threatening Jerusalem. The Normans had barely disembarked when Saladin’s army showed up, easily routing the disorganized Sicilians. Most reached the ships in safety, but they had to retreat with nothing accomplished. William, however, was nothing if not determined, and the situation in the eastern Mediterranean was suddenly very encouraging in the most surprising of places – Constantinople.

  1180 saw a great changing of the guard across the Mediterranean world. Manuel Comnenus died after thirty-six years on the throne, leaving an eleven-year-old named Alexius, and a deeply unpopular regent. For two years the government held on, but in 1182 Manuel’s cousin, Andronicus, raised a revolt.

  Andronicus was a curious figure, possessing all of the brilliance of his family with none of its restraint. In 1182 he was already in his sixties but looked two decades younger, and his exploits, both on the battlefield and in the bedroom were legendary. By the time he marched on Constantinople he had already seduced three cousins, been banished twice, and had acquired a reputation as an innovative – if slightly eccentric - general. His effect on the population was magnetic. Wherever he went he was greeted with open arms. Armies sent against him defected, and when he arrived at the walls of Constantinople, he was escorted through the Golden Gate by ecstatic crowds.

  The cheering didn’t last long. Within a month he had murdered the entire royal family. The young emperor Alexius was made to sign his own mother’s death warrant, before being strangled himself. Andronicus then married the twelve-year-old widow and started to systematically eliminate anyone who showed sympathy for the previous regime.

  In Sicily, William saw a chance to avenge the public humiliation he had suffered at Constantinople’s hands. Affairs at home were carefully put in order. A treaty with North Africa ensured that there would be no threat from that quarter, and the German Empire had already been neutralized by the marriage to Constance. A Sicilian Greek was found and put forward as the murdered Alexius II, and William piously announced that he would restore the youth to his rightful throne. The largest force the kingdom had ever mustered was prepared, and in the spring of 1185 two hundred and fifty ships carrying eighty thousand men set sail from Palermo.

  They reached the port city of Durrës on the Dalmatian coast in June, and thirteen days later it was in their hands. They now had access to the Via Egnatia, the old Roman road that ran across the Balkans to the city of Thessalonica and then to Constantinople itself.

  Thanks to an effective news blockade before they set out, the Norman army had managed to take Durrës by surprise, but Thessalonica promised to be a much more formidable obstacle. It was the second largest city of the Byzantine Empire, and its military governor had over a month’s warning to prepare his defenses.

  Fortunately for the Normans he failed to make even rudimentary plans beyond shutting the doors. Within a few days his archers had run out of
arrows and his catapults had run out of stones. Even worse, he hadn’t bothered to check the water supply and several of the half-filled cisterns were found to be leaking badly. Instead of trying to address the situation he decided to profit from it, rationing off his personal supply for enormous sums. Morale plummeted steadily and it wasn’t long before a desperate defender opened a gate.

  The destruction was terrible. The Normans entered in the early morning and by noon more than five thousand citizens were dead. By the end of the first day, the generals had managed to reassert control of the situation, but Thessalonica was in ruins. The Norman army in any case had to keep moving. Food and water were by now scarce, and even at the best of times no city was capable of handling an influx of eighty thousand new people. The Sicilians left a small garrison behind and quickly resumed their march towards Constantinople. With any luck they would be eating Christmas dinner in the imperial palace.

  The Byzantines didn’t seem capable of stopping them. Andronicus was showing signs of mental instability, and his reign was descending into a bloodbath. As one chronicler put it, ‘he considered a day without killing someone as a day wasted’. One moment he would show remorse, seemingly tormented by the blood on his hands, and the next he would be rising to new extremes of killing. Terrified of assassination, he barricaded himself inside the palace, spending his time rooting out real or imagined conspiracies. When news of the Norman army reached him, he dispatched a force to intercept it, but since he was incapable of trusting anyone, he split it into five parts, each commanded by a minor general of equal rank. They immediately started quarreling about the best course of action, some wandering in the general direction of the Sicilians, and others taking defensive positions along the way.

  When the citizens of Constantinople woke a few weeks later to see the Norman fleet drawn up in the imperial harbor, a mob stormed the palace, and Andronicus the Terrible met a grisly end. With his fall, the empire’s luck abruptly changed. The new emperor Isaac II consolidated the splintered imperial army under its most gifted general Alexius Branas and he immediately marched two hundred miles to confront the Normans. William’s overconfident army had dropped its guard, and Branas successfully ambushed it as the Sicilians were attempting to cross a river.

  The casualties were relatively light, but the effect on morale was devastating. The Normans had expected an easy victory, but it was clear that the approach to Constantinople, to say nothing of the eventual siege that would be needed, was going to be long and difficult. Branas cleverly waited a few months for morale to dip further before offering to discuss terms. When the Sicilians hesitated, Branas suddenly attacked. The Normans were taken off guard, and since their fleet was in Constantinople, there was nowhere to run. Much of the army was destroyed. Those that survived tried to take refuge in Thessalonica, but were gleefully attacked by the citizens as payback for the sacking of the city. Only a few thousand of the grand army managed to hike over the mountain passes in winter, and return to Italy.

  The debacle was a serious blow to William’s prestige, but the silver lining was that his navy was still undefeated; they had easily conquered several islands and had brushed aside the Byzantine fleet. The campaign had even revealed an admiral of genius named Margaritus. In 1187 the entire Christian world had need of his services.

  In the late fall of that year, a Genoese trading vessel sailed up the Tiber and put in at the port of Trastevere. Not bothering to wait for a formal invitation, the two ambassadors it carried hurried straight to the Lateran Palace and demanded an interview with Pope Urban III. They brought word that the unthinkable had happened. Jerusalem had fallen to the Saracens and the True Cross – Christendom’s holiest relic – had been captured. It was too much for the aged pontiff to bear. Urban withdrew to his private quarters in shock and died a few days later.

  It didn’t take long for the horrified West to react. The day after Urban III was buried, his successor issued a papal bull calling for a crusade. When the dispatch reached Sicily it found the Norman kingdom already in motion. Word of the terrible events had already arrived in Palermo, and William II had lost no time in his preparations. Dressing in a rough shirt of camel hair and smearing ashes over his head, he ordered four days of mourning and pledged his immediate support for the crusade. It would take time to gather his army, but as a sign of his intentions he dispatched his gifted admiral, Margaritus, to Palestine with orders to harass the Saracens.

  The pope would have been hard pressed to find a more ideal spokesman for the crusade. Mild-mannered and deeply religious, William was immensely popular at home, and well-connected abroad. Like his father and grandfather before him, he was fluent in all three major languages of his kingdom, and was willing to accommodate his Muslim, Orthodox, and Jewish subjects. As befitted the main actor of a great movement, he was famous for his beauty – more than one observer had compared him to an angel at his coronation – and now in his early thirties he clearly showed his Hauteville blood, towering over his contemporaries. Perhaps most important from the pope’s perspective, however, was the fact that he had fully inherited his family’s taste for battle. If he had yet to display its corresponding traits of charisma or strategic sense, it was only because he was still young and relatively untested. Such concerns in any case could be left to subordinates; the king’s main function would be as a dashing figurehead.

  In this respect at least he performed magnificently. Firing off letters to Henry II of England, Philip Augustus of France, and Frederick Barbarossa of Germany, he managed to convince all of them to personally lead armies to recapture Jerusalem. There was more than simple Christian piety driving William to take pen in hand, however. If the Crusaders could be diverted through Sicily it would be a huge financial windfall for his merchants. Each letter contained not only an appeal to religious duty but also a nice bit of propaganda stressing the pleasant Sicilian climate and highlighting the numerous advantages of a sea-route to Palestine.

  These appeals were bolstered by the brilliant performance of William’s admiral in the Holy Land. With a tiny fleet of sixty ships, Margaritus was managing to keep the main Crusader sea-lanes open, building up a steady pressure on the coast, and thwarting every Saracen attempt to capture a Latin port. By the summer of 1188 he was being called the ‘new Neptune’ and was justly feared throughout the eastern Mediterranean. News of his approach off the coast of Tripoli forced the Muslims to raise the siege of the nearby Krak des Chevaliers,52 and his appearance in Tyre the next year caused an immediate Saracen retreat. The only thing preventing him from capturing new territory was a lack of knights – he had less than two hundred with him – but the arrival of the main Crusading armies would change that. Then in mid-November came terrible news that threw everything into chaos. William II, last of the Hauteville kings was dead.

  The cause of his death is unknown. It was only reported to have been swift and relatively peaceful. His reign was remembered as a golden age of internal peace and prosperity, and he was mourned more than any king in Sicily before or after. Several centuries later Dante even put him in paradise as the ideal king. This reputation, however, is thoroughly undeserved. William II was less ‘good’ than he was fortunate; his reign was bookmarked by periods of severe instability that made his own rule seem ideal by comparison. There were incessant revolts during his father’s reign and civil war after his death. If there was peace and prosperity in between it was not due to any wise stewardship on his part. He was remarkably irresponsible. Not only did he constantly commit Sicily’s resources to ill-advised and uniformly disastrous foreign wars, but he signed away his kingdom’s future to its greatest enemy for the short-term gain of a temporary peace. His predecessors, even William the Bad, had defended Sicily against the German Empire with everything they had, and he gave it away of his own free will. Then, like all irresponsible leaders, he left his successors to pay the price.

  Chapter 16

  The Monkey King

  William II’s great failure – uncharacterist
ically for a Hauteville – was that he didn’t produce a son. When he died suddenly at age thirty-six the kingdom was thrown into a succession crisis. Thankfully, the absence of a king didn’t initially disrupt day-to-day affairs since Roger II’s magnificent civil service kept things temporarily running. No state, however, could afford to be headless for too long, and while there were no shortage of ambitious pretenders, there were only three serious claimants. The official heir was the late king’s aunt, Constance. A few objected because of her gender, but what made her unsuitable to most Sicilians was the fact that she was currently married to Henry VI, crown prince of Sicily’s mortal enemy the German Empire.

  The opposition party crystallized around two noblemen, Tancred of Lecce and Roger of Andria. On the surface they seemed evenly matched. Both were decorated war heroes with plenty of titles and awards, and could boast long careers of service to the state. Roger drew support from the nobility while Tancred was popular with the minor barons and the masses. The real distinguishing feature, however, was one of blood. Roger could only muster a distant link to the throne; he was a great-grandson of Drogo de Hauteville, while Tancred was the illegitimate grandson of Roger II. Proximity to the loved Roger – no mater how tenuous the legitimacy – was a stronger claim. The pope, desperate to prevent a German take-over of Sicily, threw his support behind Tancred, and in January of 1190 he was crowned king of Sicily.

  The new king was short, swarthy, and unusually ugly. A contemporary historian nicknamed him ‘Tancredulous’ and snidely remarked that he resembled a monkey. “Behold,” he wrote at Tancred’s coronation, “an ape is crowned!” If physically lacking, however, Tancred was also energetic, smart, and ambitious. He had been involved in the coup of 1161, personally storming the palace and taking William the Bad prisoner. When the rebellion collapsed he had accepted exile in exchange for official pardon and, given the king’s less than sterling reputation, emerged from the whole ordeal with his name unscathed.