By the evening of 22 August everything was settled. On one point, however, the Count had remained adamant: he refused to allow the ceremony to take place on papal territory. It had therefore been agreed that he should meet Honorius outside the walls of Benevento, on the bridge spanning the Sabato river. There, soon after sunset, by the light of countless flaming torches and in the presence, according to Falco, of twenty thousand spectators, the Pope invested Roger with lance and gonfalon, just as Pope Nicholas had invested Robert Guiscard nearly seventy years before; while the Duke of Apulia, secure at last in his title, placed his hands within those of his suzerain and swore him fealty. Once again, as in Robert's day, Apulia, Calabria and Sicily were united under the same ruler. And he was still only thirty-two. Only one more step remained to be taken.
23
CORONATION
And so, when the Duke was led in royal state to the Cathedral, and was there anointed with the holy oil and invested with the dignity of kingship, the splendour of his majesty and the magnificence of his apparel were beyond the power of words to express or imagination to conceive. Truly it seemed to those who saw him as if all the riches and honours of the world were there assembled.
Alexander of Telese, ch. IV
BY granting Roger the investiture of all the territories previously held by Robert Guiscard, Pope Honorius had admitted himself beaten; but not all the southern barons were prepared to surrender so easily. The new Duke was clever—anyone could see that—and more cunning even than his uncle had been before him. His military reputation, on the other hand, was still extremely questionable. Ever since his first intrusion into mainland affairs he had displayed a suspicious reluctance to do any real fighting. His successive triumphs had all been won by bribery, diplomacy, speed of movement or slow attrition; it still remained for him to prove himself as a soldier against a determined enemy. Besides, even the Guiscard had failed to establish any permanent peace in his domains; and the Guiscard had not had Sicily to look after as well. With so large and so remote a dukedom under his direct control in addition to the mainland territories—and one, moreover, in which he apparently intended to retain his capital—the new Duke would find it still more difficult to impose his authority. Militarily his investiture was of little significance. Henceforth he might enjoy papal support, but recent events had shown just how little that was worth in terms of effective power. And though South Italy was full of fair-weather
friends who would bow before him as he passed, there was sdll not one town or village throughout the peninsula on whose loyalty he could wholly rely in time of crisis. And so, once again, the barons and the cities of Apulia rose up against their lord; and Roger's new dominions, on that historic evening when Pope Honorius entrusted them to his care, were already in a state of armed and open rebellion.
Roger was beginning to grow accustomed to this state of affairs. Characteristically, he looked upon his dukedom with the eye of an administrator rather than that of a soldier; and he had always known that Apulia, with its enormous fiefs and its traditional hatred of centralised authority, would present a far greater administrative problem than he would ever encounter in Sicily. His task would be to succeed where his uncle had failed and to set up, for the first time in centuries, a strong and enforceable government all through the South, firmly based on the rule of law. Such a task would not be accomplished overnight. But Roger also knew that the very same spirit of independence which had created the problem would also make possible its solution, since it would ensure that his enemies remained divided. Even under the leadership of the Pope they had been unable to act together; now that they were deprived of it they would be more ineffectual still. The few weeks of summer that remained he spent trying to consolidate his position in the north; then, as winter approached, he returned via Salerno to Sicily.
In the spring of 1129 he was back, with an army of three thousand knights and twice that number of infantry, including archers and his regiment of Saracens. The ensuing campaign went much as he had planned. Brindisi, admittedly, under the able command of his own cousin, young Geoffrey of Conversano,1 withstood his onslaught until the besiegers were forced by hunger to retire; but few other towns seemed disposed to offer much resistance. While Roger's army moved along the coast, mopping up the opposition as it went, sixty of his ships under George of Antioch blockaded Bari. Its self-styled prince, Grimoald, had been one of the most determined and
1 This Geoffrey, described by the Abbot of Telese simply as the 'son of Count Alexander', may possibly have been of the family of Clermont rather than that of Conversano; but the latter is more likely.
powerful of the rebels; but early in August he too had to give in. His surrender led to the capitulation of Alexander, Tancred and Geoffrey of Conversano; and the revolt was over.
Or very nearly. One important city alone remained unsubdued. The people of Troia to whom, less than two years before, the Pope had granted a commune in return for their support, were reluctant to renounce so soon their newly-acquired privileges. Now that Honorius had betrayed them, they looked desperately round for other protectors. First they turned to Capua; but Prince Robert, as might have been expected, was unwilling to antagonise the new Duke of Apulia. Understandably most other barons felt much the same, and the Troians had given up hope of ever finding a champion when there suddenly appeared at their gates the one man who could never resist the chance of adding to his fiefs, whatever the attendant disadvantages—Roger's renegade brother-in-law, Rainulf of Alife. Eagerly they accepted his terms—protection in return for possession —and Rainulf moved in with his followers. But within a few days his new subjects saw how rash they had been. Roger was already on the march. He did not head straight for Troia—that was no longer necessary. An attack on one of the outlying castles was quite enough, as he knew it would be, to bring Rainulf hurrying to him with peace proposals, and a pact was quickly concluded. The Count of Alife might retain possession of Troia on condition that he held it in fief from his brother-in-law. It was an arrangement eminently satisfactory to both parties. Only the citizens of Troia, who now found themselves landed with two liege-lords instead of one, had any cause to complain. They had nobody but themselves to blame. Had they known Rainulf a little better they might have guessed that he never intended to hold out against the Duke, and that his one idea was to improve his own bargaining position. But it was too late now. Troia, twice betrayed, resisted a few days longer; then, inevitably, it too surrendered.
It may seem surprising that Roger should have allowed Rainulf to get away with so barefaced a coup—particularly after his record over the past two years. The truth is that the Count of Alife, slippery as he was, was no less trustworthy than most of his fellow-vassals— indeed, he may have been slightly more so, if family ties counted for anything—and those vassals had somehow to be persuaded to accept the ducal dominion. Roger's task was to win their support, not to antagonise them. His attitude towards his brother-in-law was, in fact, typical of that which he showed in his dealings with the defeated rebels. Outwardly at least—for no one ever knew what he was thinking—he bore them no malice. Once or twice, as at Brindisi or in the following year at Salerno, he manned the local citadel with a Sicilian garrison to prevent further outbreaks against his authority; but there as elsewhere the rebel lords were granted his full pardon and confirmed—even Grimoald of Bari—in their former possessions.
Only among deserters from his own ranks did the Duke show unyielding firmness. Some weeks previously another of his cousins, Robert of Grantmesnil,1 had withdrawn with his men from the siege of Montalto, ostensibly on the grounds that his fief was too small and he himself too poor to support a long campaign. The length of the obligatory period of a vassal's service to his lord was a common ground for complaint and often a genuine cause of hardship; but it was also one of the cornerstones of the feudal system and could not be modified. Roger was not unsympathetic; he even went so far as to promise to increase his cousin's holding as soon as the revolt wa
s crushed. But he was powerless to prevent Robert's defection. The moment peace was restored, he pursued him to his castle at Lagopesole and forced his submission. There, before the assembled knights, Robert was obliged to accept a public reprimand; Roger then granted his request for leave to return to Normandy, provided that he renounced all his southern fiefs. It took another year, and another campaign, before the troublesome count was finally banished from Italy; but he had served as a useful example to his fellows. A vassal, once he had sworn fealty to his lord, was bound to him by certain obligations. For as long as Roger II was Duke of Apulia, no refusal to acknowledge these obligations would be tolerated.
In September 1129 Duke Roger, his authority at last firmly
1 The son of William de Grantmesnil and the Guiscard's daughter Mabilla. He is not to be confused with his namesake, the guardian of Roger I’s first wife, Judith.
established, summoned all the bishops, abbots and counts of Apulia and Calabria to a solemn Court at Melfi. It was the first of a series of such Courts that would mark his reign; and its purpose was to lay the foundations of his future government in South Italy. Each of his vassals in turn was now required, in the presence of his assembled fellows, to swear a great oath not only confirming his feudal obligations but, in the interests of pacification, carrying them a stage further. The precise wording of this oath is, alas, lost to us, but it seems to have fallen into three main parts. It began with the normal swearing of fealty and obedience, first to the Duke himself and then to each of his two eldest sons who had accompanied him— young Roger, now about eleven years old, and Tancred, a year or two younger. There followed a specific undertaking to observe a ducal edict now promulgated forbidding all private war—that favourite pursuit among members of the knightly class, with which so much of their time and energy was normally occupied. Finally the counts were made to swear to uphold order and justice by withholding their aid from thieves, robbers and all who sought to despoil the land, by surrendering them to the Duke's Courts wherever they might be established, and by promising their protection to all feudal inferiors, clerical or lay, as well as to all pilgrims, travellers and merchants.
It was a compendious oath, and even more far-reaching than appears at first sight. The swearing of fealty was usual enough; though even here it is interesting that Roger should have specifically involved the two young princes, thereby strengthening their claims to the eventual succession—and, perhaps, giving a first hint of his future policy of setting up his sons as viceroys over the mainland. He also made it abundantly clear that what he was demanding of his vassals was something more than a formality. In the years to come we find him imposing this oath, time and time again, not only on the barons and knights but on all free classes of his subjects, as a constant reminder of their duty. Was he, by this continued insistence, already moving towards that exalted, semi-mystical concept of kingship on the Byzantine model, which so appealed to his oriental spirit and which, in his later years, he was so successfully to realise ? It is possible. What is certain is that he was, deliberately or not,
'preparing the way for the extended theory of treason which was peculiar, in the twelfth century, to the Sicilian monarchy'.1
But the real significance of the Court of Melfi is to be found not in the first but in the second section of the vassals' oath. It had occasionally happened in the past that the South Italian barons had sworn—usually for a strictly limited period—to respect the rights and property of the non-knightly classes; but they had always preserved the right of feud, by which they could—and did—make war on each other to their hearts' content. Only when a Pope promulgated the so-called Treuga Dei, the Truce of God, could they sometimes be persuaded to suspend these activities. In recent years at least three Popes—Urban, Paschal and Calixtus—had tried by this means to halt the decline of Apulia into anarchy; but none of them had been conspicuously successful, if only because the maintenance of such a truce depended entirely on voluntary oaths sworn by the various parties concerned. This time it was different. The right of feud was abolished from above, at one stroke and for ever —an achievement at that time unparalleled in Europe outside England and Normandy. The oath accepting this abolition was sworn to Roger personally; and thus was brought into being the Duke's Peace, for which he himself assumed the ultimate responsibility, both in its maintenance and in the punishment of those by whom it should be disturbed—for the third part of the oath, with its reference to the surrender of malefactors to the Duke's Courts, made it clear that Roger had no intention, even now, of relying solely on the honour of his feudatories. This was the beginning of his penal code, and he intended to give it teeth.
The first great assembly of Melfi, at which in 1043 the pioneer generation of Norman barons, with Roger's uncle William the Iron-Arm at their head and Gaimar of Salerno as their suzerain, had divided their conquered territories into the twelve counties of Apulia, had long since passed into history. There may, however, have been a few old men in the little hill-town who still dimly remembered that August day just seventy years before when Robert Guiscard, colossal in his prime, had received his three duchies from Pope Nicholas II. Both of these occasions had marked
1 Evelyn Jamison, "The Norman Administration of Apulia and Capua'.
new chapters in the epic of the Norman domination of South Italy. Here, now, was a third. This time there were no investitures, no allocations of fiefs; but there was, for every Norman knight and baron present, the same unmistakable intimation that one era was past and another just beginning. It cannot have been an altogether welcome sensation. The old ways, the chaotic legacy of Roger Borsa and his son, might have proved disastrous for the security and prosperity of the land as a whole, but for the privileged classes they had often been agreeable—and profitable—enough. Now, for the first time in forty-five years, the South found at its head a strong man, able and determined to rule. Things would be different in future.
The year 1129, already an annus mirabilis for Roger, was to end with a further triumph. The position of Capua had been ambiguous ever since the death of its prince, Richard II, in 1106. Now Richard had, eight years before, recognised the suzerainty of the Duke of Apulia in return for help in his reinstatement; but his successors do not seem to have followed his example, and neither Roger Borsa nor Duke William was of the calibre to assert their claims. Thus, by default, Capua had once again become an independent state—the sovereignty of which Roger, by the terms of his Benevento investiture, had bound himself to respect. How long he would in fact have done so is an open question; Capua, though now but a poor shadow of its former self and constituting no conceivable military threat, remained an irritation and an obstacle to the complete unification of the South which sooner or later he would surely have found intolerable. Fortunately the matter was decided for him. The gutless young Robert, finding himself now entirely bereft of allies, decided to come to terms with his neighbour before it was too late, and voluntarily recognised the Duke as his lawful suzerain.
This unsolicited submission, which effectively reunited Capua with the Duchy of Apulia and so left Roger the undisputed master of the Norman South, marked the final frustration of all Honorius IPs efforts to maintain the tenuous balance of power; and it might well have been expected to provoke angry reactions from Rome. But by the time the news of Prince Robert's capitulation reached the Lateran, Honorius was lying desperately ill; and in the months that followed—months that would bring the Duke of Apulia the greatest prize of his career—the Papal Curia would find itself saddled with other more urgent preoccupations.
The Jewish colony has existed in Rome uninterruptedly since the days of Pompey. Having first settled in Trastevere, by the Middle Ages it had already crossed the river and now occupied that same quarter on the left bank, just opposite the island, which Pope Paul IV was later to enclose as a ghetto and in which its synagogue still stands. Nowadays, as it slowly recovers from its recent sufferings, it presents little enough evidence of prosperity; but in the earl
y twelfth century Roman Jewry enjoyed, by reason of its enormous wealth, both influence and prestige within the papal city. Pre-eminent among its leading families was that of the Pierleoni, whose close connexions with succeeding Popes had led them, the better part of a century before, to embrace the Christian faith; and since that time the continuance of the papal favour, assisted by the panoply and splendour with which they surrounded themselves, had raised them to a social and financial position at which they admitted no superiors among the most illustrious princely houses of Rome.
One distincdon only was still lacking—but that the most important distinction of all. The Pierleonis had not yet themselves produced a Pope. The omission was understandable in the circumstances, but it would have to be rectified. For some years, therefore, their eyes had been hopefully fixed on the most brilliant of their scions, a certain Peter di Pierleoni who was rising rapidly in the hierarchy. His qualifications were excellent. His father had been a trusted lieutenant of Gregory VII, and he himself, after a period of study in Paris under the great Abelard himself, had become a monk at Cluny. Recalled to Rome in 1120, he had been appointed Cardinal by Paschal II at his father's request and had subsequently served as Papal Legate first in France and then in England, where he had appeared with a particularly splendid retinue at the Court of King Henry I. Henry seems to have been impressed: if we are to believe William of Malmesbury, the Cardinal returned to Rome so laden with rich presents as to cause raised eyebrows at the Curia. There is in fact no evidence to suggest that Pierleoni was more venal or corrupt than any other of the contemporary princes of the Church; on the contrary, his genuine piety and irreproachable Cluniac background had made him a staunch upholder of many aspects of Reform.1 But he was capable, strong-willed and intensely ambitious; and, like every potential candidate for the throne of St Peter, he had enemies. Of these the most dangerous were the Hildebrandine party—what might be called the left wing of the Curia—who feared that a Pierleoni Pope would lead the Papacy back into its bad old ways until it became once again the tool—or even the plaything—of the Roman aristocracy; and his family's most implacable rivals, that other formidable brood of fellow-upstarts—the Frangipani.
The Normans In The South Page 38
