Above the thrones, on each side of the main eastern arch, stands
1 A curious little reliquary of Becket in the form of a gold pendant, now in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, bears the inscription istud regine
MARGARETE SICULORUM TRANSMITTIT PRESUX RAINAUDUS BATONIORUS, Surrounding the engraved figures of the Queen and a prelate in the act of benediction. Since Margaret died in 1183 this must very slightly antedate the mosaic. But is the prelate Rainaud or Thomas ? There is no means of knowing. (Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, vol. XXIII, pp. 78-9.)
2 Clement, according to tradition, was martyred under Trajan; Sylvester is credited with having baptised Constantine the Great and having received the legendary Donation.
William himself; on the left receiving his crown at the hands of Christ,1 on the right offering his church into those of the Virgin. Judged as mosaics they are not particularly good; they cannot be compared with the corresponding pair in the Martorana. But this time there can be no real doubt that the two portraits are as lifelike as the artist could make them. After all we have heard of William's beauty, that round face, fair scrubby beard and slightly vacant expression come as a faint disappointment; for a man only just into his thirties, one had hoped for something more impressive. But perhaps he has been done less than justice.
He was even unluckier in his tomb. Following his plan of making Monreale the St Denis of Sicily, William had interred Queen Margaret there after her death in 118 3, shortly afterwards transferring his father's remains from the Palatine Chapel and those of his two brothers Roger and Henry from Palermo Cathedral and the chapel of St Mary Magdalene. But when William himself died in 1189, Walter of the Mill quickly intervened and ordered the sarcophagus brought at once to his own new cathedral, now almost completed. After a long and acrimonious struggle between the two archbishops, the King's body was finally laid to rest in Monreale as he had wished; but the sarcophagus was retained in Palermo and has since disappeared. Its eventual replacement, carved in white marble and donated nearly four hundred years later, in 1575, by Archbishop Lodovico de Torres, is as unsuited to a Norman king as anything that could be imagined, and contrasts sadly with the great porphyry tomb of William the Bad, standing four-square and magnificent on its marble pedestal nearby.2
Staggering as Monreale is, there is something gloomy about its grandeur. Perhaps it is the lacklustre quality of the gold, which gives it none of the Martorana's glowing radiance, nor any of the joyous sparkle of the Palatine Chapel. It is too big, too impersonal. After half an hour or so one is grateful to emerge once again into the sunshine.
1 Plate 24.
2 The tombs of Margaret and her two sons, set against the north wall of the sanctuary, were refurbished in the last century and are worth only a cursory glance. Of greater interest is the altar of St Louis of France, who died of the plague while crusading in Tunisia in 1270 and whose heart and other internal organs are here preserved.
And, above all, into the cloister. Here at last is the splendour without the gloom. Here, too, is the only touch of Saracen influence to be found at Monreale—the slim, arabising arches, a hundred and four of them, supported by pairs of slender columns, some carved, some inlaid with that same glorious Cosmati-work in marble and mosaic that is such a feature of the interior. In the south-west corner they have been extended to make a fountain, Arabic again, but in a form unique to the cloisters of Norman Sicily.1 (There is a similar one at Cefalù.) The effect of the whole is that of radiant, yet tranquil beauty—more formal than the exquisite miniature at S. Giovanni degli Eremiti, but a place none the less where life seems good and the brethren of Monreale must have found serenity as well as shade. And this is not all; for the capitals of the columns, each one an individual triumph of design and invention, together constitute a tour de force of romanesque stone-carving unequalled in Sicily.2 Their variation is endless—biblical stories (including a marvellous Annunciation in the north-east corner), scenes of daily life, the harvest, the battlefield and the chase, subjects contemporary and antique, Christian and pagan; even—on the south wall, two pairs of columns along from the fountain—a sacrifice to Mithras. Finally, on the west, the eighth capital from the south end translates into stone what we have already seen in its mosaic form: William the Good, beardless now, presents his new cathedral to the Mother of God. The last and greatest religious foundation of Norman Sicily is offered and accepted.
1 Plate 25. 2 Plate 26.
18
AGAINST ANDRONICUS
The King's palaces are strung around the hills that encircle the city, like pearls around the throat of a woman. And in their gardens and courts he takes his ease. How many palaces and buildings, watch-towers and belvederes he has—may they soon be taken from him!—how many monasteries he has endowed with rich lands, how many churches with crosses of gold and silver! . . .
Now, as we hear, the King intends to send his fleet to Constantinople. . . . But Allah, who is glorious and all-powerful, will throw him back in confusion, showing him the iniquity of his way and sending tempests to destroy him. For as Allah wills, so can He perform.
Ibn Jubair
A kingdom in the sun, prosperous and peaceful; youth, good looks, and limitless wealth; the love of his subjects and of a beautiful young Queen; with such gifts as these, William II must have appeared to his contemporaries—even to his fellow-princes—as a man upon whom the gods had always smiled. And so, up to a point, they had. Three blessings only they withheld from him: first, a long life; second, a son and heir; third, a modicum of political wisdom. Had he been granted any one of these, his kingdom might have been spared the sadness that lay in store for it. As he lacked all three, Sicily was doomed. And it was William the Good, all unconscious of what he was doing and with the best will in the world, who wrought her destruction.
Frederick Barbarossa had long been turning over in his mind the possibility of a Sicilian marriage alliance. As long ago as 1173, when William was still looking for a suitable bride, the Emperor had proposed one of his daughters; he may not have been altogether surprised, in the circumstances prevailing at the time, when his offer was rejected out of hand. A decade later, however, the situation was very different. The Treaty of Venice had brought about a striking volte-face in imperial policy. Frederick, having at last understood that his North Italian enemies could never be overcome by force, had adopted new tactics of friendship, negotiation and compromise; and they had served him well. After the death of Alexander III, relations between the Lombard cities and the Papacy had once again become strained; and the Emperor had had no difficulty in concluding a treaty with the League, signed at Constance in 1183, allowing the cities full liberty to elect their own leaders and enact their own laws, in return for recognising his own overall sovereignty. As a result of these concessions the League lost its cohesion, and Frederick found his position in North Italy stronger than ever. With the Papacy correspondingly weaker, there seemed a possibility that a renewed approach to the Sicilians might have a better reception. Sometime during the winter of 1183-84, imperial ambassadors arrived in Palermo with his proposal—nothing less than the marriage of his son and heir, Henry, with Princess Constance of Sicily.
It seems, in retrospect, incredible that William and his advisers should have contemplated the idea for a moment. Constance, the posthumous daughter of Roger II—she was in fact a year younger than her nephew the King—was heiress-presumptive to the realm. If she were to marry Henry and William were to die childless, Sicily would fall into the Emperor's lap, its separate existence at an end. Admittedly, there was plenty of time yet for Joanna to bear children; in 1184 she was still only eighteen, her husband thirty. But life in the twelfth century was even more uncertain than it is today, infant mortality was high, and to take such a risk before the succession was properly assured would be, by any standards, an act of almost criminal folly.1
1 A contemporary chronicler, Robert of Torigni, writes of how he has heard from certain peopl
e that Joanna did indeed bear a son, Bohemund, in 1182, and that his father invested him immediately after his baptism with the Duchy of Apulia. If this were true, it might go some way towards explaining William's agreement to the imperial marriage, particularly if the child were still alive at the time. But in that case why is Robert—who, as Abbot of Mont St Michel, was hardly well placed to report on Sicilian affairs—the only chronicler who thought the event worth mentioning? Richard of S. Germano, our best source for this last period of the Kingdom and one of William's own subjects, laments Joanna's barrenness in his very first paragraph.
In Palermo there were plenty of counsellors to suggest as much. Matthew of Ajello in particular, who like most South Italians of his time had been brought up on ghoulish tales of the havoc wrought by-successive imperial invasions and who looked upon all Germans as potential despoilers of his homeland, spoke out violently against the proposal; and few Sicilians relished the prospect of surrendering their independence to a distant and in their eyes barbarous Empire that had always been the traditional enemy of their country. Walter of the Mill, however, took the opposite view. His reasons are not altogether clear. One authority, Richard of S. Germano, asserts that he did so purely to spite Matthew—an unworthy motive, perhaps, but one which, knowing the bitterness that existed between them, we cannot quite discount. Chalandon, more charitably mclined, suggests that as an Englishman Walter saw the situation more dispassionately than his fellows and considered imperial domination a lesser evil than the civil war which in his eyes may have been the only alternative.
But was it ? Could not Constance have married any other husband, reigned in her own right, then passed the crown in the fullness of time to a legitimate son ? Possibly. But whatever may have been the Archbishop's motives, there was a further consideration in William's own mind when he came to make his decision—a single, overriding reason why, for the next few years, he needed to be sure of the goodwill of the Western Empire; and why, in the summer of 1184, to the horrified dismay of the large majority of his subjects, he gave his consent to the betrothal.
He was preparing to march, as Robert Guiscard had marched just a hundred years before, against Byzantium.
On 24 September 1180 Manuel Comnenus had died in Constantinople after a long illness. He was buried in the church of the Pantocrator; next to his tomb was placed the red stone slab on which Christ's body had been embalmed, and which Manuel himself had carried on his shoulders from the harbour when it had arrived from Ephesus some years before. He had not been a good Emperor. Over-ambitious abroad, over-prodigal at home, in his thirty-eight years on the throne he had managed to drain his Empire of almost all its resources, leaving it in a state of economic near-collapse from which it never properly recovered. During his lifetime, by the brilliance of his personality, the splendour of his court and the lavishness of his entertainments, the world had been deceived into thinking that Byzantium was still the force it had always been; after his death, disillusion was swift and cruel.
The successor to the throne was Manuel's only legitimate son Alexius, now eleven years old. He was an unimpressive, unattractive child. According to Nicetas Choniates, who was imperial secretary under Manuel and who has left us one of the most reliable and—with that of Psellus—the most entertaining histories of mediaeval Byzantium, 'this young prince was so puffed up with vanity and pride, so destitute of inner light and ability as to be incapable of the simplest task. . . . He passed his entire life at play or the chase, and contracted several habits of pronounced viciousness.' Meanwhile his mother, Mary of Andoch, governed as Regent in his stead. As the first Latin ever to rule in Constantinople, she started off at a serious disadvantage. Her husband's love of the West and his introduction of western institutions into Byzantine life had always been resented by his subjects; in particular, they had hated seeing the greater part of the Empire's trade falling into the hands of the Italian and Frankish merchants who thronged the business centre of the city. They now feared—and with good reason—still further extensions to these merchants of their trading rights and privileges; and they were more worried still when Mary took as her principal adviser another character of extreme pro-western sympathies— Manuel's nephew, the protosebastos Alexius, uncle of the Queen of Jerusalem. Before long it was generally believed that her adviser was also her lover, though from Nicetas's description it is not easy to see what the Empress—whose beauty was famous throughout Christendom—saw in him:
He was accustomed to spend the greater part of the day in bed, keeping the curtains drawn lest he should ever see the sunlight. . . . Whenever the sun appeared he would seek the darkness, just as wild beasts do; also he took much pleasure in rubbing his decaying teeth, putting new ones in the place of those that had fallen out through old age.
As the dissatisfaction grew, various conspiracies began to take shape for Mary's overthrow; notably one by her step-daughter Maria—that same princess whose hand her father had twice offered to William of Sicily. The plot was discovered; with her husband Rainier of Montferrat and her other associates, Maria barely had time to flee to St Sophia and barricade herself in. But the Empress-Regent was not prepared to respect any rights of sanctuary; the imperial guard was despatched with orders to seize the conspirators; and the great church was saved from desecration only through the mediation of the Patriarch himself. This incident deeply shocked the Byzantines, and the subsequent exile of the Patriarch to a monastery for his part in the affair made the regime more unpopular than ever— unnecessarily too, since such was the state of public indignation against her that Mary never dared to punish her step-daughter. Nor, later, did she lift a finger when the people of Constantinople marched en masse to the Patriarch's monastery and led him back in triumph to the capital. The whole matter, in fact, could scarcely have been handled worse.
This first coup had, none the less, failed; but there followed a threat from another of the Emperor's relatives—a man this time, and one of a very different calibre. Andronicus Comnenus was a unique phenomenon. Nowhere else in the pages of Byzantine history do we find so extraordinary a character; perhaps his cousin Manuel comes closest; but next to him, even Manuel is outshone. And nowhere else, certainly, do we find such a career. The story of Andronicus Comnenus does not read like history at all; it reads like a historical novel that has gone too far.
In 1182, when Andronicus first enters this story, he was already sixty-four years old, but looking nearer forty. Over six feet tall and in magnificent physical condition, he had preserved the good looks, the intellect, the conversational charm and wit, the elegance and the sheer panache that, together with the fame of his almost legendary exploits in bed and battlefield, had won him an unrivalled reputation as a Don Juan. The list of his conquests was endless, that of the scandals in which he had been involved very little shorter. Three in particular had roused the Emperor to fury. The first was when Andronicus carried on a flagrant affair with his cousin—and Manuel's niece—the Princess Eudoxia Comnena, effectively answering criticism by pointing out that 'subjects should always follow their master's example, and two pieces from the same factory normally prove equally acceptable'—a clear allusion to the Emperor's relationship with another niece, Eudoxia's sister Theodora, for whom he was well known to cherish an affection that went well beyond the avuncular. Some years later, Andronicus had deserted his military command in Cilicia with the deliberate intention of seducing the lovely Philippa of Antioch. Once again he must have known there would be serious repercussions; Philippa was the sister not only of the reigning prince, Bohemund III, but of Manuel's own wife, the Empress Mary. But this, as far as Andronicus was concerned, merely lent additional spice to the game. Though he was then forty-eight and his quarry just twenty, his serenades beneath her window proved irresistible. Within a few days she had capitulated.
His conquest once made, Andronicus did not remain long to enjoy it. Manuel, outraged, ordered his immediate recall; Prince Bohemund also made it clear that he had no
intention of tolerating such a scandal. Possibly, too, the young princess's charms may have proved disappointing. In any case Andronicus left hurriedly for Palestine to put himself at the disposal of King Amalric; and there, at Acre, he met for the first time another of his cousins—Queen Theodora, the twenty-one-year-old widow of Amalric's predecessor on the throne of Jerusalem, Baldwin III. She became the love of his life. Soon afterwards, when Andronicus moved to his new fief of Beirut—recently given him by Amalric as a reward for his services— Theodora joined him. Consanguinity forbade their marriage, but the two lived there together in open sin until Beirut in its turn grew too hot for them.
After a long spell of wandering through the Muslim East they finally settled down at Colonea, just beyond the eastern frontier of the Empire, subsisting happily on such money as they had been able to bring with them, supplemented by the proceeds of a certain amount of mild brigandage; and their idyll was only brought to an end when Theodora and their two small sons were captured by the Duke of Trebizond and sent back to Constantinople. Andronicus, agonised by their loss, hurried back to the capital and immediately gave himself up, flinging himself histrionically at the Emperor's feet and promising anything if only his mistress and his children could be returned to him. Manuel showed his usual generosity. Clearly a menage at once so irregular and so prominent could not be allowed in Constantinople; but Andronicus and Theodora were given a pleasant castle on the Black Sea coast where they might live in honourable exile—and, it was hoped, peaceful retirement.
The Kingdom in the Sun Page 38
