With Rainulf's death the rebellion was officially at an end. Apart from one or two isolated pockets of resistance which he could deal with at his leisure—notably Bari and the region round Troia and Ariano—only one problem remained. In late June Pope Innocent marched south from Rome with his old ally Robert of Capua. But Innocent could offer no real threat now. The papal army, by all accounts, was not particularly large—a thousand knights at the most— and this time there was every hope that the Pope would be ready to talk. Indeed, soon after the first reports of his approach, two cardinals arrived at the Sicilian camp. His Holiness, they reported, had now reached S. Germano;1 if Roger would wait upon him there, he would be received in peace.
Taking his son and his army with him, the King rode off over the mountains to S. Germano. For a week the negotiations dragged on. Innocent was apparently quite prepared to recognise the Sicilian crown, but he demanded in return the reinstatement of the Prince of Capua. Roger refused. Again and again over the past seven years he had given Robert the chance to make peace; now his patience was exhausted. When he saw that the Pope on his side was also adamant he resolved to waste no more time talking. Giving out that he had some unfinished business in the Sangro valley, he broke camp and headed away to the north.
As he must have known they would, Innocent and Robert soon reopened hostilities and began beating their way towards Capua, leaving a trail of burning villages and vineyards behind them. Then, at the little town of Galluccio, they suddenly halted. From a high position on their left, the Sicilian army was watching them. Innocent quickly saw the danger and ordered an immediate withdrawal; but he was too late. While his army was still collecting itself, young Duke Roger burst out of an ambush with a thousand knights and swept down into the centre of the papal troops. They broke in disorder. 1 The modern town of Cassino, just below the monastery.
Many were cut down as they fled; countless others were drowned as they tried to cross the Garigliano. Robert of Capua somehow managed to escape, but Pope Innocent was not so lucky. He tried to take refuge, so the legend has it, in the little frescoed chapel of S. Nicola which can still be seen in the church of the Annunziata at Galluccio; but he tried in vain. That evening, 22 July 1139, the Pope and his cardinals, his archives and his treasure, were all in the hands of the King.
Two months before, while Pope Innocent was still assembling his army in Rome, Mount Vesuvius, after nearly a century's quiescence, had burst out in magnificent and terrifying eruption. For a week it had raged, vomiting lava over the neighbouring villages and filling the air with a pervasive reddish dust that darkened the sky over Benevento, Salerno and Capua. No one had doubted that it was a portent, and now at last men knew what it had foretold. The Holy Father himself had been brought low. Here was the greatest humiliation suffered by the Papacy at the hands of the Normans since Duke Humphrey de Hauteville and his brother Robert Guiscard had annihilated the army of Pope Leo IX at Civitate, eighty-six years before.
It was always a mistake for Popes to meet Normans on the battlefield. Just as Leo had had to come to terms with his captors after Civitate, so now Innocent in his turn was forced to bow to the inevitable. At first he refused; the honour and respect with which Roger persisted in treating him seem to have deluded him into believing that he might still be able to impose his own conditions. Only after three days did he finally understand the reality of his situation—and the price of his ransom. On 25 July, at Mignano, Roger was formally confirmed in the Kingdom of Sicily, with the overlordship of all Italy south of the Garigliano. Next, his son Roger was invested with the Duchy of Apulia, and his third son Alfonso with the Principality of Capua. The Pope then said Mass, in the course of which he preached a sermon of enormous length on the subject of peace, and left the church a free man. In the ensuing charter he managed to save a few shreds of the papal honour by presenting the whole thing as being merely a renewal and an extension of Roger's earlier investiture by Honorius II; the King also undertook to pay an annual tribute of six hundred schifati.1 But nothing could disguise the fact that, for the Pope and his party, the treaty of Mignano spelt unconditional surrender.
Writing half a century after these events, the English historian Ralph Niger records in his Chronica Universalis that Innocent sealed the treaty by presenting Roger with his mitre; and that the King, having embellished it with gold and precious stones, made it into a crown for himself and his successors. Be that as it may, the two seem to have established a fairly cordial relationship. Together they rode to Benevento, where the Pope was received with such jubilation that, says Falco, it was as if St Peter himself were entering the city; and where, a day or two later in his camp outside the walls, the King received ambassadors from Naples to swear him fidelity and deliver to him the keys of their city.
This submission marked the end of an epoch. For four centuries and more the dukes of Naples had steered their perilous course through the straits and shoals of South Italian politics. Often they had nearly foundered; occasionally even, the Pisans or some other temporary allies had had to take them in tow. Though sailing technically under the Byzantine flag of convenience, they had also in recent years been increasingly obliged to run other colours to the masthead—those of the Western Empire, for example, or even those of the Normans themselves. And yet somehow their ship had always managed to stay afloat. Now it could do so no longer. Naples had suffered three sieges in nine years, and a disastrous famine to boot. Its last duke was dead, the quasi-republican government that had succeeded him an abject failure. The greatness and the glory were gone. When, a few days later, young Duke Roger entered the city to take formal possession in his father's name, he accepted it not as a loyal fief, but as an integral part of the Sicilian Kingdom. The ship had foundered at last.
Only two pockets of resistance remained to be mopped up: the Troia region, where the German rearguard left by Lothair was still
1 'The schifatus was a convex-shaped Byzantine coin worth, in 1269 at any rate, eight taris of gold, i.e. somewhat more than a quarter of an ounce of Sicilian gold; i.e. a schifatus had about the same value as an English sovereign.' (Mann, Lives of the Popes in the Early Middle Ages, vol. IX, p. 65.)
making trouble, and Bari, whither the last few of the rebel barons had retreated to make a final stand. In the first week of August the King appeared below Troia.1 The town surrendered on his arrival; since the papal capitulation there seemed no point in continuing the struggle and the citizens, encouraged by reports of the mercy that Roger had shown towards the coastal cities of Apulia, invited him to enter in peace. But now the King revealed, for the first time, how deeply he had felt his brother-in-law's treason. He sent back word that he would accept no surrender from the Troians for so long as Rainulf's body was buried within their walls. His message was received with horror in the city, but Troia's spirit was broken. It had no choice but to comply. Four knights, led by one of the most faithful of Rainulf's old supporters, were given the task of breaking open his tomb. The body was dug up in its shroud, dragged on the King's orders through the streets to the citadel and finally cast into an evil-smelling ditch outside the gates. Soon after this lapse Roger seems to have repented of his inhumanity and, at his son's instigation, to have allowed his old enemy a decent reburial; but although he took no further action against Troia he still refused to enter it. In the remaining fifteen years of his life he never went there again.
It was a still vengeful King who now passed grimly on through Trani—to which his son had accorded remarkably generous terms a few months before—to Bari. No city in Apulia had played him false so often, and its continued resistance, despite the surrender of all its neighbours and the generosity with which they had been treated, had destroyed the last remnants of his patience. After a two-month siege, with famine threatening, the defenders were forced to seek terms. Roger, anxious above all to have done with the rebellion and return to Sicily, agreed to their conditions: there was to be no pillage, and prisoners taken on both sides should be ret
urned unharmed. When he found himself within the walls, however, his vindictiveness again got the better of him. One of his knights, newly released from captivity, reported that he had had an eye put out while he was in prison. It was just the pretext Roger was looking
1 Plate 4.
for. Was this not a breach of the agreement that had been made? Judges were summoned from Troia and Trani to join those of Bari in proclaiming the treaty null and void. The rebel Prince, Jaquintus, was delivered up to the King, together with his principal counsellors. All were hanged. Ten other leading citizens were blinded, yet others imprisoned and dispossessed. 'And such was the fear and trembling in the city,' Falco reports, 'that not a single man or woman durst venture out into the streets and squares.'
Even on his return to Salerno the King's anger had not entirely abated. Certain of the Campanian vassals who had been congratulating themselves on having escaped lightly after their part in the uprising suddenly found their lands and property confiscated. Some of these too were imprisoned, the majority exiled 'beyond the mountains'. When, on 5 November, Roger took ship for Sicily, he left a cowed and chastened baronage behind him.
The year 1139 had been the most triumphant of his reign. It had seen the death of his arch-enemy Rainulf and the two petty dynasties of Naples and Bari; and the effective elimination of Robert of Capua who, though he was to pass the rest of his life intriguing against the King, was never again to constitute a serious menace to the Sicilian throne. It had seen the most significant mainland victory for nearly a century, one which effectively wiped out the shame of Rignano two years before. It had seen the pacification of the entire South Italian Kingdom, its utter submission to the King's will, and the disappearance of the last remnants of the German imperial invaders. Finally, it had seen the reconciliation between the Kingdom and the Papacy and the recognition, by the rightful, undisputed Pope, of the Sicilian monarchy. Roger himself had shown courage, diplomacy, statesmanship and—at least until just before the end—mercy; and if in this last virtue he ultimately fell short of his own high standards, his record remains a good deal better than that of most of his contemporaries.
'Thus,' concludes Archbishop Romuald of Salerno, 'Roger, most powerful of Kings, having crushed and destroyed his enemies and betrayers, returned in glory and triumph to Sicily, and held his Kingdom in perfect peace and tranquillity.' It sounds like the ending of a fairy story, and Roger certainly had every cause for satisfaction as he sailed for home. Yet he cannot have been happy. As his conduct at Troia and Bari had shown, he was sick to the heart. The past few years had left him with a legacy of bitterness and disillusion which he would never quite overcome. His generosity had been too often abused, his trust too often betrayed, the great plans he cherished for his Kingdom too often set at nought by the selfish ambitions of the Norman baronage. In Sicily, where there were no great fiefs, men of three religions and four races were living happily at peace and in steadily increasing prosperity; in South Italy he had achieved nothing; his vassals had thwarted him at every turn. He had begun to hate the peninsula. In future he would leave its affairs as far as possible to his sons and devote his attention, as he had never been allowed to devote it in the past, to his island realm.
When, in January 1072, Robert Guiscard and his brother had battered their way into Saracen Palermo, one of their first decisions had been to move the administrative centre of the capital. The Emirs had always ruled from their palace in the district of Al-Khalesa, down by the sea; but they had also maintained an old castle on the higher ground a mile and a half to the west, which had been built some two centuries before to protect the landward approaches. This castle was cooler, quieter, remoter from all the dirt and hubbub of the city; it was also more commandingly situated and more easily defensible in the event of trouble. To the new conquerors that last point was the vital one; no Norman ever felt truly at ease living somewhere that he could not adequately defend in an emergency. Thus the old Saracen fortress, repaired and strengthened, became the seat of the Norman government and, in due course, the palace of the Great Count of Sicily.
Over the years, Roger I and his son had put in hand various far-reaching structural alterations, until little of the original Saracen fabric was left. By 1140 the building was in essence a Norman palace; and though much has inevitably been added during the past eight centuries—cortiles and colonnades, loggias and baroque facades, to say nothing of all the ponderous trappings of the Sicilian parliament—much, too, still unmistakably proclaims its Norman origins. The Torre Pisana, in particular, at the north end—otherwise known as the Torre di Santa Ninfa after an early Palermitan virgin whose immoderate admiration of the Christian martyrs led her to follow their example—still stands much as Roger must have known it. Even the copper dome of the local observatory, perched somewhat insensitively on its roof, proves less offensive than one might expect. The crowning of a romanesque tower with a bulbously Islamic cupola is a characteristic tendency of Norman-Sicilian architecture, and the old Palermitan astronomers, whether they recognised the fact or not, were merely continuing the old tradition. It is somehow gratifying to learn that it was from this observatory, on the first evening of the nineteenth century, that they discovered the first and largest of the asteroids and named it Ceres, after the patron goddess of the island.
Yet the Palazzo Reale, as it is still called, ultimately captures neither the eye nor the imagination. As an ensemble, it is an architectural hotch-potch which fails to impose any overriding personality; even the Torre Pisana seems stilted and uninspired, so that the casual visitor might be forgiven for turning away with a shrug to the more immediately photogenic attractions of S. Giovanni degli Eremiti down the road. Forgiven, but pitied none the less; for in doing so he would unwittingly have deprived himself of one of the greatest excitements that Sicily, and perhaps Europe, has to offer him—his first, unsuspecting discovery of the Palatine Chapel.
As early as 1129, before he became King, Roger had begun to build his own personal chapel on the first floor of his palace, overlooking the inner courtyard. Work on it had been slow, largely because his problems on the mainland allowed him only a few months of each year in which to superintend building operations. But at last, in the spring of 1140, though still unfinished, the chapel was ready to enter service; and on Palm Sunday, 28 April, in the presence of the King and all his leading Sicilian clergy of both the Greek and Latin rites, it was consecrated, dedicated to St Peter, and formally granted the privileges appropriate to its palatine status.
Roger had no more love for Byzantium than had any other member of his family; but both the manner of his upbringing and the oriental atmosphere in which he lived inclined him towards the Byzantine concept of monarchy—a mystically-tinged absolutism in which the monarch, as God's viceroy, lived remote and elevated from his subjects, in a magnificence that reflected his intermediate position between earth and heaven. The art of Norman Sicily, now suddenly bursting into flower, was therefore above all a palace art; and it is fitting that its brightest jewel—le plus surprenant bijou religieux rive par la pensee humaine, as Maupassant was to describe it1 seven and a half centuries later—should be the Palatine Chapel at Palermo.2 It is in this building, with more stunning effect than anywhere else in Sicily, that we see the Siculo-Norman political miracle given visual expression—a seemingly effortless fusion of all that is most brilliant in the Latin, Byzantine and Islamic traditions into a single, harmonious masterpiece.
Its form is in essence that of a western basilica, with a central nave and two side aisles separated from it by rows of antique granite columns, all with richly gilded Corinthian capitals, drawing the eye along to the five steps that lead up to the choir. Western too, though whispering of the South, are the richly ornamented pavements and the coruscating Cosmatesque inlays of the steps, balustrades and lower walls—to say nothing of that immense ambo, proudest of pulpits, studded with gold and malachite and porphyry and flanked by a gigantic Paschal candlestick, a fiftee
n-foot high bestiary in white marble.3
But if we look up now to the mosaics with which the whole chapel glows gold, we are once again brought face to face with Byzantium. Some, alas, of these mosaics, notably those in the upper part of the north wall of the transept, have disappeared; others have been drastically—and in one or two cases disastrously—restored over the centuries. Occasionally, as in the lower half of the central apse and the two side apses, we are confronted with eighteenth-century
1 La Vie Errante, Paris, 1890. 2 Plate 5.
3 Plate 6. This candlestick was almost certainly presented to the chapel by Archbishop Hugh of Palermo when he crowned Roger's son William co-ruler with his father at Easter, 1151. Carved on it, among the angelic supporters of the crucified Christ and roughly at eye-level, a single human figure emerges rather improbably from a palm frond. This figure, wearing a mitre and showing a disturbing resemblance to Mr Punch, was long believed to be a portrait of Roger himself; but since it also bears the papal pallium, to which the King was not entitled, it is more likely to represent the donor. (Schramm, Herrschaftszeichen und Staatssymbolik, vol. I, p. 80.)
The Kingdom in the Sun Page 9
