It was in the year 1073 that Duke Robert fell ill and unexpectedly recovered, and in order to carry on the story of the Normans it is necessary to return to Sicilian ground, following for a while Amari’s great history of the Moslems in Sicily. In the beginning of the year 1072, immediately after the fall of Palermo, Sicily was divided into three parallel zones from east to west. The most northerly of the three extended from Messina to Palermo, following the north side of the Sicilian range, and in the partition of the island had been taken by Robert himself; the second division followed the south side of the mountains, and was subject to Count Roger; the third and southernmost portion was still entirely in the hands of the Saracens, excepting the cities of Catania and Mazzara, which Roger held, and this domain of the Saracens was equal in extent to the other two. Moreover, Roger’s position was weakened by the fact that the Moslems held the fortresses of Taormina and Trapani, situated respectively at the eastern and western extremities of his territory, by the necessity of supporting garrisons in many different castles at the same time, by the unproductiveness of his lands as compared with the rest of the island, and by his obligation to fight on the mainland when required to do so by his brother Robert.
These circumstances made it clear from the first that the Moslems might resist a long time, and if they had been firmly united, the issue might have been doubtful; but they were divided among themselves, they made the mistake of opposing themselves separately to the conqueror, and he took their strong places, one by one. It has often been said that the history of the Arabs in Sicily is yet to be written, and their chief historian, the learned Amari, admits that in the whirlpool of their national and civil wars the distinctions between the successively dominating parties is extremely uncertain. The same writer points out that, if they had been unified, the fall of Palermo would have meant the conquest of the whole island, whereas it produced little or no impression upon the Saracens of the south. Furthermore, the fact that the Moslems of Noto, which comprises all the southeast region, had been in a sort of alliance with Roger, had contributed to increase their strength; and when at last revolutionary leader arose in the person of the Arab Ben Arwet, he found such materials ready as made him at once a most dangerous adversary. The man was the last Moslem patriot in Sicily, and his efforts to restore Mohammedan independence have justly been called heroic. Under his leadership the Saracens were soon in arms throughout the south; from the ramparts of numerous castles they defied the Norman cavalry, and when they sallied from their strongholds they skilfully led Roger’s troops into ambush. Almost wholly unprovided with siege engines, or with troops accustomed to such operations, the Normans were forced to fight when it pleased the Moslems to face them. Roger, indeed, strongly fortified the heights of Calascibetta over against Castrogiovanni, and he took one or two other strong places; but in the meantime the African Arabs made a wild raid upon the Italian coast at Nicotera, and returning landed at Mazzara and besieged that castle in that place until Roger arrived in person and drove them off. In those years Ben Arwet commanded the whole province, from Syracuse as a base, and his forces were continually increasing. Being obliged to return to Mileto, Roger appointed Hugh of Jersey his viceregent in Sicily, and placed his son Jourdain in command of the troops in the field, enjoining upon both to avoid a pitched battle with weight Moslems. But neither had the coolness to resist the temptation to an open fight, and when Ben Arwet sent a decoy party to forage under the very walls of Catania, the young Normans rode out and were drawn into an ambush where Hugh of Jersey was killed, and whence Jourdain barely escaped with his life.
At the news of this disaster Roger’s anger knew no bounds, and he arrived in Sicily soon afterwards with such an army as Ben Arwet dared not face. He now advanced directly into Noto, and as it was harvest time he so completely destroyed the crops as to produce a famine in the following year. He next assailed Trapani in the West, and the place was taken at a bold stroke by his son Jourdain.
The city of Trapani was, and still is, built upon the landward end of the low sickle-shaped promontory, whence it first took its name; and during the siege the people used to drive out a herd of cattle to pasture in the outer extremity, for, as Roger had no ships with him, the point was completely protected by the sea, and the gate of the city that looked towards it was only closed at night. Saying nothing to his father, Jourdain took a hundred men with him, and under cover of darkness reached the point by means of small boats, and hid his party among the rocks near the city. At dawn the gate was opened for the herd to pass out as usual, and the Normans sprang from their hiding-place and rushed towards it. In a moment the Moslems were in arms, and the odds against the assailants were ten to one; yet in the short and furious struggle the Normans had the better, and without attempting to enter the city they returned by water, taking with them the captured cattle. The assault had shown the inhabitants what might happen if Roger landed a larger force on that side, and rather than risk the consequences of further resistance, they made terms and submitted. Of the two strong places at the opposite ends of his dominions, Roger now held the one, but Taormina still remained to be taken. Roger soon afterwards began the siege and completely surrounded the strong place with works in order to reduce it by starvation. Here he almost lost his life, for in going the rounds with a handful of men he was suddenly caught in a narrow way by a party of the enemy. It was clear that he must retrace his steps or be killed; the path was narrow and could be held for a few moments by one man, and a devoted follower, named Evisand, sacrificed his life to save the count. He fell pierced with innumerable wounds at the very moment when the Normans came up to the rescue, and Roger buried the friend who had saved him with royal honours, and founded a church, or a convent, in memory of his preservation, and for the soul of his preserver.
After a siege of five months, Taormina yielded to starvation and surrendered. But the war was far from ended yet, and nine years after the fall of Palermo, Ben Arwet regained possession of Catania, apparently having bribed the governor of the place to admit him, and it was not till after a battle and a short siege that Ben Arwet fled to Syracuse by night, and the Normans took back the city. And now that same Jourdain, trusting in his own strength and courage, rebelled against his father, and began to occupy certain castles on his own account; and Roger, affecting to attribute his doings to the heat and folly of youth, bade him come with his friends and be reconciled before he had done worse. But when he held them fast he made a strict inquiry, and he put out the eyes of twelve of his sons’s chief associates, and sent Jourdain away free, but disgraced.
The war, says Amari, proceeded slowly, because at that time a great part of the Norman forces were with Duke Robert in Greece. For during those years the duke had grown great. Raymond, the Count of Provence, had taken his daughter in marriage, and on the strength of such a great alliance, Robert extended his dominions more and more, and invading Romagna and afterwards Durazzo beyond the Adriatic, of which doings there are elaborate accounts in the monkish chronicles, in the year 1082 he carried war into Bulgaria and won much glory and some spoil, but little else. In the following year, when Henry the Fourth attempted to set up an antipope against Gregory the Seventh, and came to Rome with an army, Duke Robert went up from the south like a whirlwind and burnt half Rome; and the emperor fled before him. After that he returned into Apulia and began to make great preparations for an expedition to the East; and sailing away with a fair wind, and with a vast number of ships, he reached Durazzo, but there he suddenly fell ill, and died in the month of July, in the year 1084. We know little of the manner of his death, for the chronicle merely says that he died, and that his wife Sigelgaita, and his son Roger Bursa, and all the barons, performed the funeral rites with due honours; that his body was brought back to Italy and laid to rest in Venosa; and finally, that in the dispute that arose between Bohemund and Roger Bursa for the succession, Count Roger of Sicily took his namesake’s part, in return for which service he received, or appropriated, the other half of Calabr
ia which he had not previously received from his brother.
It was during the dispute about Duke Robert’s succession, that Ben Arwet took advantage of the disturbed state of Southern Italy to make a sudden attack upon Calabria. In August or September of the year 1085, he landed by night at Nicotera, •not twenty miles from Roger’s favourite city of Mileto, and carried off most of the population captive. Falling upon Reggio next, he sacked the churches of Saint Nicholas and of Saint George, destroying the statues and images; and breaking into the convent of Our Lady at Rocca d’ Asino, near by, he took the nuns with him to Syracuse and distributed them among the harems of the chief Moslems. Roger’s wrath rose at the outrage, and while he did not fail to propitiate heaven by lavish charity to the poor of Messina, and by walking barefoot from church to church with monks who chanted the litanies, he gathered his forces for a great effort. On the twenty-fifth of May, 1086, he fought Ben Arwet in the harbour of Syracuse; and there, says the monk, the devil entered into the Moslem’s heart to drive him to destruction, for when he went against Roger’s ship with his own, he was wounded by a dart, and the Great Count attacked him, sword in hand, and he tried to leap to another vessel but fell into the sea, and the weight of his armour bore him down, and he was drowned.
From May to October the Moslems bravely defended their city; then the chief men took Ben Arwet’s widow and his son, and fled to Noto, and Syracuse surrendered. After this Roger took Girgenti, and not much later impregnable Castrogiovanni fell into his hands by the treachery, or conversion, of the Governor Hamud. He, being hard pressed, secretly agreed to embrace Christianity, led his best forces into a preconcerted ambush, where they were taken unhurt, and he was received with open arms. He was rewarded with broad lands in Calabria, where he lived out a long and happy life. Butera, on the south coast, was the last city in Sicily that stood a siege, and Noto was the last to capitulate, in the month of February, 1091, the date that marks the final conquest of the island.
After reducing a rebellious baron on the mainland, Roger now set sail for Malta, and in spite of his sixty years, was the first to land, with only thirteen knights. After a skirmish with a few Moslems, he slept upon the beach, awaiting the arrival of his other ships, and on the morrow he attacked the Città Vecchia, which yielded almost at once; and thus, says Amari, he crowned the conquest of Sicily, taking Malta himself, as he had taken Messina in person thirty years earlier.
I cannot but think that the comparative peace in which the Great Count ruled Sicily during the last ten years of his life is to be attributed to the inborn fatalism of the Moslems. It is certain that they never made any serious attempt to regain independence, but that, on the contrary, they served bravely and loyally in Roger’s armies. Thousands of Saracens fought under his standard when he helped his nephew, Duke Roger, to reduce Cosenza, and in 1094 when he assisted him in repressing the dangerous rebellion of William of Grantmesnil in Castrovillari. Roger not only protected them, left them full liberty in their religion, and allowed them tribunals of their own, but, according to the biographers of Anselm of Canterbury, he discouraged their conversion, and punished Saracens who embraced Christianity, fearing perhaps that in the great movement of the first Crusade, his Moslem soldiers would imitate the example of the many Christians who followed his nephew Bohemund to the Holy Land. As is well known, the cautious Norman declined to take part in that great movement, preferring to consolidate his power at home, while princes and kings and people went out to fight in Palestine for an ideal so composite that its pursuit promised gain to the greedy, renown to the fighting man, and a martyr’s crown to the ecstatic Christian.
Much confusion exists with regard to Roger’s marriages; I have adhered to Delarc’s view, and those who prefer to suppose that Roger was thrice married may consult the elaborate and conclusive notes written by the learned French historian, as well as a note of Amari’s, which goes to prove that Judith took the name of Eremberga on leaving the convent of Saint Evrault. Be that as it may, this Judith-Eremberga, the faithful companion of so much hardship and of so much glory, died in 1089, and the Great Count soon afterwards married Adelasia or Adelaide, the daughter of one of the great nobles of Northern Italy, and became by her the father of King Roger the First of Sicily, and of another son, who was older, but died in infancy. Judith-Eremberga’s only son, Godfrey, is rarely spoken of, is supposed to have been of feeble constitution, and either died young or ended his life in a monastery. Jourdain was illegitimate. Roger had a number of daughters, one of whom he married to the king of Hungary, another, Constance, to Conrad, king of Rome, the emperor’s son, a third to Raymond of Provence, and a fourth to Count Robert of Clermont, though Philip the First of France had asked her in marriage for the sake of her dowry.
We know nothing of the illness that ended the great fighter’s life. He died at nearly seventy years of age in his favourite Mileto, and there he was laid in the cathedral he had built; but centuries later an earthquake overthrew the city and the sanctuary, and the Great Count’s sarcophagus is preserved in the national museum in Naples.
It is manifestly impossible to continue a detailed account of the Norman domination after the final success of Roger’s enterprise. The feudal system had now taken root in Europe, and the enormous development which it gave to individualities in the persons of the semi-independent imperial and royal vassals, so multiplies the threads of history that every reign is enveloped in a web of crossing and recrossing lines. The Empire contained kingdoms, the kingdoms principalities, the principalities comprised counties, and there was not a count who had not half a dozen or most small barons and knights who held land under him by feudal tenure. It is possible to give a brief and clear idea of a reign, and the historian may sometimes succeed in describing the condition of the people under this sovereign or that; but a work that should contain a full and accurate account of the doings and dissensions of the great vassals, and of the efforts made by king or emperor to control the latter, would fill many volumes, and could only be produced by the industry of a lifetime. In the minds of most readers of ordinary culture, the end of the eleventh century is filled with the romance of the first Crusade, and disturbed chiefly by the quarrels of the Emperor Henry the Fourth with the Papacy. So far as the Crusade is concerned, its story, from a Christian point of view, is too well known to need telling here; but it is interesting to find that Arabic writers of early times, such as Ibn‑el‑Athir, regarded the general attack upon the Holy Land, not in the light of a religious war, but as the culmination of a great race struggle, retracing its causes to the Norman conquest of Sicily, to the Castilian occupation of Toledo, and to the raids made by Italians upon the African coast. Mohammedans could indeed have understood that they themselves might fight a holy war for the recovery of Mecca and of their own places of pilgrimage; but their contempt for ‘men who worship crosses’ was then, as it is now, profound and ineradicable, and they found it hard to believe that Christians could be really in earnest, or ready to face danger disinterestedly, for an idea which appeared absurdly unreasonable to the mind of a cultivated Moslem. The worst of it is, that bravely as the Christians fought in the East, they gave their enemies plentiful reason for the supposition that the idea of worldly conquest was intimately connected in the minds of most Crusaders with that of future salvation. Centuries had passed since the Moslems had set out from Arabia to convert the world to Islam, and to keep possession of it when converted, and they did not see the close resemblance that existed between their own religious wars and those which the Christians now began to wage in Asia Minor; but they had not forgotten how they had driven the Western people before them, even to the shores of the Atlantic, and they felt that in the tide of nations the wave of the West was rolling back upon them. In a sense, therefore, it was true that the Crusades resulted more from the opposition of two races than from an antagonism of two religions; and, from an historical point of view, the struggle which began when Peter the Hermit roused Europe with his war‑cry, resulted in the victo
ry of the East, and came to its inevitable conclusion when Mohammed the Second stormed Constantinople in 1453.
It is characteristic of the times that while the war for the holy places created a certain type of chivalry with which the proudest families in Europe now delight to claim alliance, an amalgamation of Christians and Moslems in Sicily and the south of Italy produced a civilization and an art not only noble in themselves, but unlike anything of which there is record before or since. It may, indeed, be compared to the civilization of the Augustan period, when the victorious Roman suffered himself to laugh and be amused by the conquered Greek, when the Greek language became fashionable in Roman society, and when Greek art, such as it had survived, was the canon of good taste. But that was rather an imitation than an amalgamation; in letters, Horace may stand for the type of those times, and in architecture any temple or monument of the same period represents the condition of art; yet Horace is to the Greek poets as the remains of the temple of Saturn are to the Parthenon or the temples of Paestum, whereas Monreale, the Palatine Chapel, and the Church of the Martorana, built by Mohammedans for Christian masters, are all beautiful in themselves, and in a manner that did not exist before them, and which rapidly changed, or degenerated, in the following centuries. Saracen-Norman art has a place by itself in the history of architecture; and at a later period, when it blended in turn with the dominating art of the Renascence, the result was something still beautiful and never seen elsewhere. In Trapani, for instance, and in San Giuliano, there are remains of doors and windows that exhibit this mixture of styles in which neither the Arab nor his Norman conqueror is forgotten, but in which the artistic spirit of the early sixteenth century finds expression also. The south received strength from the north, and the north was completed and polished by the profound learning and minute civilization of the south; and neither lost its identity in the other, as Greece lost hers in Rome, and both continued to live for centuries in an indissoluble union.
Complete Works of F Marion Crawford Page 1445
