The History of the Renaissance World (24 page)

This system of trial by jury was not new to England, but it had never before been the law of the land, ordered by the king and enforced by his officials. The Assize of Clarendon changed the nature of criminal acts; it transformed them from local, personal insults into offenses against the king’s peace and even the king himself. Crime was no longer a parochial affair: “If any sheriff shall send word to another sheriff that men have fled from his county into another county on account of robbery or murder or theft,” the assize says, “. . . the sheriff who is informed shall capture them . . . and keep them in custody.”
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The Assize of Clarendon became the foundation of English criminal law, and the notion at its center is the core of modern Western legislation: the peace of a realm is, in itself, an entity that can be offended; crime is not a personal, but a national, problem. It was a brilliant and nation-changing piece of legislation, pushed through by a man whose restless energy gave him flashes of insight far beyond his century.

But Henry’s insight failed him when it came to his archbishop. Increasingly, Becket’s principled refusals seemed, in the king’s eyes, like personal insults.

In 1170, after years of complicated negotiations between the two men, Henry and Becket traveled to a meadow outside the French town of Freteval, to make a final effort at compromise. This time, both men had trump cards to play. The pope had given Becket the authority to place all of England under an interdict, should Henry not allow him to return. And Becket wanted to take part in the coronation ceremony of Henry’s fifteen-year-old son, once his beloved pupil, as Henry’s co-ruler and heir.
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The two men met in the center of the meadow and talked, alone, for a long time. No one overheard their conversation, but when the conversation was finished, Henry declared that Becket could return safely to England and take up his authority again; Becket, for his part, would carry out the coronation ceremony, guaranteeing the younger Henry’s claim to the throne.

Nothing was said about the Constitutions of Clarendon. Nor was the question of ultimate authority ever raised. It was an agreement that left all of the major issues not only unresolved but apparently undiscussed. And, like most unresolved conflicts, it ended in disaster.

Becket did not return to England immediately. In his absence, his Canterbury estates had been handed over to his archdeacon, one Ranulf de Broc. Becket refused to come home until they had been restored to his ownership: “It is not in our mind to return to him as long as he has taken away a single yard of the church’s land,” he wrote to the pope.

In the meantime, Henry spoke unguardedly in front of his courtiers, leaving them in no doubt of his opinions: the agreement reached at Freteval was unsatisfactory, he still believed that the Constitutions of Clarendon should enter into English law, and Becket was still his antagonist. Reading his king accurately, Ranulf de Broc made no effort to return Becket’s Canterbury estate; instead, he sent his men to strip the lands of everything useful before Becket could return. “Before the archbishop’s men could get [possession] of the manor,” one of Becket’s biographers records, “there was nothing left on them—not an ox nor a cow, capon or hen, horse, pig, sheep or full bin of corn.”
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Finally Becket decided that he’d better take back the lands himself. He set sail for England, arriving on December 1. And almost at the moment he arrived in England, he pronounced excommunication on two of the king’s chief officials, as well as on the Archbishop of York.

This was a declaration of war. Excommunication of royal officials was expressly forbidden in the Constitutions of Clarendon; Becket was sending an unambiguous message that he was ready to take up the battle once more. When the news of the excommunications was carried to Henry II—just then, in Normandy, preparing to celebrate Christmas—he flew into one of his notorious tempers. “Such fury, bitterness, and passion took possession of the king,” wrote the contemporary chronicler William Fitz Stephen, “as his disordered look and gesture expressed, that it was immediately understood what he wanted.”
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What Henry wanted was never made explicit; no contemporary chronicler seems to have heard the famous rhetorical question “Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?” But four of the most prominent men in England—“barons of his household,” writes Herbert of Bosham, who was there, “magnates of substance, notable even amongst his great friends”—left Normandy at once and headed for England. They traveled to the estates of Ranulf de Broc, the archdeacon who had ransacked Becket’s Canterbury lands (Becket had excommunicated him too), borrowed a band of armed men from him, and went to Becket’s residence at Canterbury.
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The events of the next hour were witnessed by a score of men: Becket’s household, his clerks, and the monks who were singing in the cathedral at the time. The four barons confronted Becket in his rooms and demanded that the archbishop withdraw his excommunications, acknowledge the king’s authority, and leave the country. He refused and made his way into the church to lead the service of vespers, taking up his place next to a pillar that stood between altars dedicated to the Virgin Mary and Saint Benedict.

A Cambridge clerk named Edward Grim was in the cathedral, waiting for the service to begin. He wrote, later,

Then they laid sacrilegious hands on him, pulling and dragging him that they might kill him outside the church, or carry him away a prisoner, as they afterwards confessed. But . . . he would not be forced away from the pillar. . . . Joining his hands, [he] lifted them up and commended his cause and that of the church to God. . . . Scarce had he said the words when the wicked knight [Reginald Fitz Urse, a royal relation], fearing lest the archbishop should be rescued by the people and escape alive, leapt upon him suddenly and wounded [him]. . . . Then he received a second blow on the head, but still stood firm. At the third blow he fell on his knees and elbows, offering himself a living victim, and saying in a low voice, “For the name of Jesus and the protection of the church I am ready to embrace death.” Then the third knight inflicted a terrible wound as he lay, by which the sword was broken against the pavement, and the crown, which was large, was separated from the head; so that the blood white with the brain, and the brain red with blood, dyed the surface of the virgin mother church. . . . In order that a fifth blow might not be wanting to the martyr who was in other things like to Christ, the fifth (no knight, but that clerk who had entered with the knights) put his foot on the neck of the holy priest and precious martyr, and, horrible to say, scattered his brains and blood over the pavement, calling out to the others, “Let us away, knights; he will rise no more.”
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When news of the murder was brought to the king, he shut himself in his rooms for three days, refusing to eat or speak.
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The four assassins were never punished, even though their crime was clearly condemned by Henry’s own Assize of Clarendon; and there seems to be little doubt that Henry knew of the plan and gave it his tacit approval.

Yet his involvement does not mean that his grief was false.

In the struggle between divine authority and secular power, it was not yet clear which would prove the stronger. But it was no longer possible for both to rule, side by side. The murder of Henry’s old friend was the inevitable result of the course he himself had set. Necessary though it might have been, he could grieve over the forces that made it inevitable—and over the end of a world where God and the king could coexist in peace.

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Henry II had already given the Archbishop of York permission to coronate young Henry, and the ceremony had taken place in June; Becket was offered the chance to take part in a second coronation that would supersede the first (and make very clear that Becket was still the senior churchman in the land).

Chapter Nineteen

Foreign Relations

Between 1157 and 1168,
the emperor of Byzantium expands his borders
and inadvertently sets Serbia free

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1157, the Great Seljuk of the Turks died, broken.

Ahmed Sanjar had begun his reign as supreme Turkish sultan with a huge realm under his hands, the largest a Muslim ruler had held since the days of the old Abbasid caliphate.
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By the end of his life, he had lost the Ghurids, who were busy plundering the eastern reaches of the lands he had once ruled; he had been driven out of his lands Transoxania (east of the Oxus river) by nomadic Chinese tribes called the Western Liao; Nur ad-Din, theoretically owing him allegiance, was doing as he pleased in the Mediterranean lands. At the very end of his life, Sanjar had tried to put down a native revolt in Khorasan itself and had failed so badly that the rebels had actually taken him captive and pillaged his capital city of Merv. His greatest achievement had been to build himself a gorgeous mausoleum in the city of Merv, where he was now laid to rest.
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He was the last Great Seljuk. No one else even tried to claim that the Turkish lands were a unity. Khorasan became a no-man’s-land, and from the Oxus to the Mediterranean shore, each Turkish sultan looked out for his own interests.
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This changed the landscape for the Byzantine emperor. The First Crusade had been sparked by Constantinople’s fear of a united Turkish front. Now Manuel I was looking at a fractured landscape filled with separate powers.

Almost all of them were threats; and the most dangerous enemies were no longer Turkish.

At its height under the emperor Justinian, six hundred years earlier, Byzantium had stretched from the tip of the Spanish peninsula, across North Africa and Egypt, up the Mediterranean coast, across Asia Minor, Greece, and all of Italy. Since Justinian, it had been shrinking. At his coronation in 1143, Manuel had been crowned emperor over Greece, half of Asia Minor, and the western and southern coasts of the Black Sea. And this was an improvement; his grandfather Alexius had inherited an empire that included little more than Greece, and only ceaseless campaigning by Alexius and his son John had recovered the lands that Manuel now ruled.

In the first decade and a half of his reign, Manuel had not managed to improve his position much. He had attacked the Sultan of Rum, who lay just east of his Asia Minor lands, but had taken no land away; he had forced the princes of Antioch and Jerusalem to swear allegiance to him, but he did not control their kingdoms. And in 1156, his yearlong campaign to take southern Italy (the “Dukedom of Apulia and Calabria”) away from the Normans had ended in complete embarrassment. His general John Ducas, attempting to force the surrender of the coastal city of Brindisi, had been trapped by the Norman navy and captured, along with what remained of the Byzantine fleet.

Encouraged by the Byzantine defeat in Italy, the Prince of Antioch decided to try his own fortunes against the bruised Byzantine troops. After the troublesome Raymond of Antioch had been decapitated by Nur ad-Din, the rule of Antioch had passed to his young wife, Constance, granddaughter of the original Prince of Antioch, Bohemund the rogue. Now the mother of four, Constance was still only twenty-one years old. She held the rule of Antioch by blood right, but her cousin the king of Jerusalem, the Patriarch of Antioch (the senior clergyman in the city), and her overlord Manuel himself all insisted that she marry and proposed useful (and pliable) prospects.

Constance rejected them all and instead married the French crusader Raynald of Chatillon, a young opportunist only two years her senior who had lingered in the east after the disastrous end of the Second Crusade. It was probably the first adult choice she’d ever had the opportunity of making, and it turned out to be a poor one. Raynald, handsome and dashing, was also reckless, spoiled, and a very bad judge of a fight. He decided to free Antioch from Manuel’s control, and proposed to start by attacking the island of Cyprus, a peaceful and well-to-do Byzantine possession.
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To prepare for the fight, he first ordered the Patriarch of Antioch, a wealthy and worldly Frankish nobleman named Aimery of Limoges, to lend him the necessary funds. Aimery, who hadn’t approved of the marriage in the first place, refused; so Raynald had his henchmen waylay the patriarch and beat him up. Then, says William of Tyre, Raynald “forced the aged priest . . . although an almost helpless invalid, to sit in the blazing sun throughout a summer’s day, his bare head smeared with honey.” After a few hours on top of the Antioch citadel, battling the insects, the patriarch handed over the funds.
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