The Kingdom in the Sun (28 page)

After three days their host left them to return to Sicily, and Louis and Eleanor moved on to Tusculum, the nearest town to Rome in which the Pope could safely install himself. Eugenius gave them a suitably royal welcome; politically, for reasons we shall shortly see, he was not particularly encouraging, but for the moment he was less concerned with future military alignments in Europe than with the immediate domestic problems of his guests. A gentle, kind-hearted man, he hated to see people unhappy; and the sight of Louis and Eleanor, oppressed by the double failure of the Crusade and of their marriage, seems to have caused him genuine personal distress. John of Salisbury, who was employed in the Curia at the time, has left us a curiously touching account of the Pope's attempts at a reconciliation:

He commanded, under pain of anathema, that no word should be spoken against their marriage and that it should not be dissolved under any pretext whatever. This ruling plainly delighted the King, for he loved the Queen passionately, in an almost childish way. The Pope made them sleep in the same bed, which he had decked with priceless hangings of his own; and daily during their brief visit he strove by friendly converse to restore the love between them. He heaped gifts upon them; and when the time for their departure came he could not hold back his tears.

¹
Later, in an attempt to bolster Roger's claim to legitimate kingship, the story was put about that Louis had personally re-crowned him during their time together at Potenza. Sheer fabrication though it undoubtedly is, it was to find its way into one of the several interpolations of Romuald of Salerno's chronicle.

Those tears were perhaps made all the more copious by the knowledge that his efforts had been in vain. Had Eugenius known Eleanor better, he would have seen from the start that her mind was made up and that neither he nor anyone else could change it. For the time being, however, she was prepared to keep up appearances, accompanying her husband to Rome where they were cordially received by the Senate and where Louis prostrated himself as usual at all the principal shrines; and so back across the Alps to Paris. It was to be another two and a half years before her marriage was finally dissolved —St Bernard having persuaded Eugenius to withdraw his early strictures—on grounds of consanguinity; but she was still young and only on the threshold of that astonishing career in which, as wife of one of England's greatest Kings and mother of two of its worst, she was to influence the course of European history for over half a century.

The people of Paris received Louis and Eleanor with rejoicing, and even went so far as to strike medals 'to our unconquered King', one portraying him in a triumphal chariot with a winged Victory soaring above, the other illustrating the theme of dead and fugitive Turks on the banks of the Meander. But they deceived no one. Elsewhere, men were readier to look facts in the face—though even then they usually sought to explain or to justify them. Pope Eugenius, for example, saw in the Crusade a calamity sent by God as an object-lesson in the transience of terrestrial things. Otto of Freising points out philosophically that it provided easy opportunities for the acquisition of a martyr's crown. It was left to
St
Bernard who, if he did not actually initiate the Crusade, at least gave it its impetus and its inspiration, to say honestly what he thought. For him, it was not simply a calamity or even a lesson, but a divine judgment—one that represented 'so deep an abyss that anyone must be accounted blessed who is not scandalised thereby'.
¹
In passing this judgment the Almighty had acted, as always, with perfect justice; but this time, for once, he had left his mercy aside.

In the frantic search for a scapegoat that followed, it was perhaps inevitable that all fingers save one—Conrad's—should have pointed to Manuel Comnenus; it was also unfair. The blame for the failure of

1 De Consideratione,
II, i.

any military operation can attach only to those directly concerned— those who plan it and those who carry it out. In the Second Crusade, both planning and performance were atrocious. From the start the idea was a bad one. The lasting presence in strength of an alien power in a distant land is possible only when it is acceptable locally; when it is not, its days are numbered. If it cannot maintain itself by its own efforts any attempt at propping it up artificially, especially by military means, is bound to fail. Having decided to mount the attack, the leaders of the West made one mistake after another. They coordinated neither their preparations nor their timing; by a mixture of disingenuousness and sheer political ineptitude they antagonised their most important ally; they arrived too few in numbers and too late; initially indecisive, they eventually settled on a misguided line of action and then lacked the courage to carry it through. They hesitated, retreated, and collapsed.
¹

¹
It is irrelevant, but irresistible, to compare the planning of the Second Crusade with that of the Suez affair eight centuries later.

8

CLMACTERIC

Our hearts and the hearts of almost all Frenchmen are burning with devotion for you, and love of your peace; all this we feel particularly in view of the base, lamentable and unheard-of treachery to our pilgrims of the Greeks and their detestable King. . . . Rise, and help the people of God to take their vengeance!

Letter to Roger
II
from Abbot Peter of Cluny

The
Crusade had been bad for reputations. Conrad of Hohenstaufen and Louis Capet had been discredited, Manuel Comnenus had been blamed, Pope Eugenius and
St
Bernard together had had to bear the spiritual responsibility. Among the great princes of Europe in the first rank of power and importance, only Roger of Sicily had emerged unscathed. And it was Roger who now became the focal point for all those dissatisfied spirits who called for an immediate and victorious Third Crusade to wipe out the humiliations of the Second.

The irony of the situation must have amused him. A Crusader neither
by
temperament nor by conviction, he had not scrupled to take full political advantage of western woolly-mindedness on the last occasion, and he was quite ready to do so again. For the fate of the Christians of Outremer he cared not a rap; they deserved all they got. He himself preferred the Arabs every time. On the other hand, the Levant tempted him. Was he not the legitimate Prince of Antioch, perhaps even the rightful King of Jerusalem? More important still, he had to defend himself against Byzantine attack, and in such an eventuality opposition would be the best defence. While Manuel's present unpopularity lasted it would be an easy matter to turn the weight of any fresh Crusade against him.

Roger therefore willingly accepted his role—improbable as it was —of avenger of the West, and set to work building up his new image. That, above all, was why he had travelled to meet the King of France at Potenza, where he had been assured of Louis's support. His major difficulty, as always, was with Conrad. To the several excellent reasons that the King of the Romans already had for hating him another, perhaps the strongest of all, had now been added— jealousy. Conrad knew that his reputation had been dealt a severe blow by the failure of the Crusade; Roger's-—unaccountably and quite unjustifiably—had never been higher. It was the German Emperor, crowned or not, who remained historically and by divine right the sword and shield of western Christendom; and Conrad resented this new usurpation of his imperial prerogatives, as unpardonable in its way as the seizure of South Italy itself.

St Bernard tried hard to change his attitude, but to no avail. Bernard was a Frenchman, and the French, as far as Conrad was concerned, were almost as bad as the Sicilians; besides, he had painful recollections of the last time he had taken Bernard's advice against his better judgment. Neither was he any more amenable to the arguments of Peter of Cluny or Cardinal Theodwine of Porto, one of the most influential voices in the Curia. All these ecclesiastical persuaders, he knew, were rabidly anti-Byzantine—particularly the Abbot of Clairvaux, who clearly felt responsible for the Crusade and was only too anxious to shuffle as much of the blame as possible off his own shoulders and on to those of the Eastern Emperor. Conrad saw through them all. But Manuel was his friend, and he trusted him. The two were in any case bound by a solemn alliance, which he for his part did not intend to break.

It was not as if Roger had showed the faintest sign of wanting a reconciliation. On the contrary, he had begun a new intrigue with Count Welf of Bavaria, brother of Henry the Proud and Conrad's still-determined rival for the imperial throne. Welf had called in at Palermo on his way home from the Crusade, and Roger had offered him still bigger subsidies than before to organise a confederation of German princes against the Hohenstaufen. This new league threatened to be a formidable one, a menace which might well keep Conrad occupied in Germany for some time to come. Once again his plans for a punitive Italian expedition would have to be postponed—but his determination sooner or later to settle scores with the King of Sicily remained stronger than ever.

For Manuel too the year
1149
ended less auspiciously than it had begun. Some time in the late summer Corfu had fallen to him— probably through treachery, since Nicetas tells us that the garrison commander subsequently entered the imperial service; but before the Emperor could follow up his advantage and cross to Italy news was brought to him of a Serbian insurrection, to which the neighbouring Kingdom of Hungary was giving active military support. At about this time too he must also have heard—with particular irritation—of the most recent exploit of George of Antioch who, after the incident with Louis and Eleanor, had taken a fleet of forty ships right up the Hellespont and over the Marmara to the very walls of Constantinople. Thence, after an unsuccessful attempt at a landing, the Sicilians had sailed some distance up the Bosphorus, pillaging several rich villas along the Asiatic shore, and before departing had even fired a few impudent arrows into the grounds of the Imperial Palace.

Roger's capture of Corfu, temporary as it was, had proved a useful holding operation; and the Balkan rising that followed so conveniently after it meant a further postponement of Manuel's own invasion plans. Looking back, one feels that the sequence of events was almost too convenient; could it be, one wonders, that the King of Sicily had indirectly engineered this as well? The chroniclers preserve a discreet silence—perhaps they were not too sure themselves—but it seems probable enough. Roger, whose cousin Busilla had married King Coloman, had always maintained close ties of friendship with the Hungarian throne. If our suspicions are right, then the year
1149
must mark the highest point of his diplomatic virtuosity. Facing the most formidable military alliance that could be conceived in the Middle Ages, that of the Eastern and the Western Empires acting—as they rarely acted in the six and a half centuries of their joint history—in complete concert one with the other, he succeeded in the space of a few months in immobilising both of them. It was a feat comparable to that of his uncle, who in
1084
had actually had the armies of both Empires retreating before him in different directions. But Robert Guiscard had had a force of thirty thousand of his own behind him; Roger had achieved his objective without calling a single Sicilian soldier to arms.

There was another difference too; whereas the Guiscard had had the advantage of papal support, towards Roger Pope Eugenius's attitude remained ambivalent. Naturally he could never forget that Roger was his immediate neighbour to the south, a perennial thorn in the papal flesh, always difficult and on occasion dangerous. On the other hand the King of Sicily now appeared undeniably well-disposed. At the beginning of
1149
he had offered Eugenius both military and financial assistance in his struggle against the Roman commune; and the Pope, seeing the situation in Rome steadily deteriorating and knowing that he could expect no help from Conrad who was still away in the East, had accepted. Thus, thanks to a body of Sicilian troops under Robert of Selby, he had managed to return to the Lateran by the end of the year. Since then, while he still mistrusted Roger's motives, he saw him as a useful ally whom it would be foolish to antagonise without good cause.

And so the Pope wavered; and he was still wavering when in the early summer of
1150
he recived a letter from the King of Sicily with proposals for a meeting. Roger's purpose is clear. An armed conflict between himself and the Empires could not, as it seemed to him, be long delayed. It might be offensive—a new 'Crusade' in which he would lead the forces of the West against the Infidel, represented in the first instance by Manuel Comnenus. For this he would find allies in plenty, though not unless he could first obtain the Pope's blessing. Alternatively there might be a defensive operation. The delaying tactics that he was at present employing to keep his two enemies occupied on home ground could not last for ever. Already Conrad could claim one major victory over Welf, and Manuel was well on the way to restoring the situation in the Balkans. Within a year— perhaps even less—the pair of them might be in a position to launch their two-pronged invasion of his realm. In such an event he would have far fewer allies on whom to rely; and papal support would be still more necessary.