The Kingdom in the Sun (42 page)

Once the ground had been suitably prepared William could no longer put off the grant of his royal pardon. Immediately after the murder Matthew Bonnellus had fled with his friends to his castle of Caccamo;
¹
thither now arrived royal emissaries, to assure him that the King wished him well, and that he might return without danger to the capital. Though it is unlikely that Bonnellus ever trusted William an inch, recent events had left him in no doubt of his own personal popularity. He accepted the King's invitation. A few days before, he and his men had fled from Palermo at full gallop, under cover of darkness. Now they rode back in triumph. And so, reports Falcandus,

as Bonnellus entered the city, a great crowd swarmed out to greet him, numbering as many men as women; and they accompanied him with immense rejoicing to the gates of the palace. There he was welcomed graciously by the King, and once more received back fully into the royal favour. . . . Thus, by this celebrated deed, he won the love and admiration of the nobility and the common people
alike....
Meanwhile in Sicily, and especially in Palermo, all the people claimed with one accord that if any man should attempt to do him harm, he should be adjudged a public enemy; and that they would even take up arms against the King himself if he should ever try to exact a penalty for the Emir's death.

¹
This castle, rebuilt and restored but undeniably impressive, still stands on the western slopes of Mt Calogero some seven miles from Termini Imerese. Within, visitors are still shown the Salone della Congiura, in which Bonnellus and his fellow conspirators are said to have held their councils.

Even when we allow for Falcandus's exaggeration, it is clear that as
1161
opened Matthew Bonnellus had become one of the most powerful figures in the Kingdom. But that wave of popularity that had carried him so superbly forward on its crest was soon to break. William, increasingly irritated by the young man's arrogance and encouraged by the Queen to assert his strength and authority, began to recover his nerve. Dissimulation never came easily to him. His true feelings towards the murderer of his friend and counsellor grew daily more evident. Then, one day, he demanded of Bonnellus the payment of duty on his dead father's estate amounting to sixty thousand
taris
—a debt that Maio had deliberately overlooked for the sake of his prospective son-in-law.

The debt was paid: but the incident was a warning. Bonnellus did not underestimate the Queen's influence over her husband; nor that of the palace eunuchs, all creatures of Maio, whom he knew to be urging the King to avenge their old master. He had seen sinister figures loitering around the gates of his house in Palermo, he knew that palace agents were watching him and following his every movement; and he could not escape the conclusion that his life was in danger.

Ever since the Emir's death, Matthew had been under pressure from his associates to move against the King; but he had always held back. To deliver Sicily from a detested tyrant was one tiling; to lay hand's on the Lord's anointed was quite another, and he was far from certain of how William's subjects would react. Such a move might lose him all the popularity, and with it all the power, that he was now enjoying. Slowly, however, he began to see that his counsellors had been right. The King, too, must go.

Yet even now Matthew shrank from the idea of regicide. The important thing was to remove William from the seat of power. Once he were safely out of the way there would be plenty of time to decide what to do with him. And as long as he suffered no violence and his little son Roger were enthroned in his stead, royalist opinion should be manageable. Moreover there were at present in Palermo two men of undoubted Hauteville blood who had never concealed their dislike of the King and who could be relied upon to give open support to his removal. The first was his half-brother Simon, Roger IFs illegitimate son, who had borne him an understandable grudge ever since William had refused to allow him to keep the Principality of Taranto, with which Roger had invested him in
1148,
on the grounds that it was too important a fief to go to a bastard. The second was his nephew Count Tancred of Lecce, natural son of Duke Roger, who in consequence of the part he had played in the Apulian revolt, had spent the last five years in the palace dungeons.

It was perhaps the thought of Tancred that suggested to the conspirators the basic idea for their plot. To seize the person of the King was no easy task. He seldom appeared in public; of his two principal residences, the Favara was set in the middle of a lake, while the royal palace in Palermo was still in essence the Norman fortress that the two Rogers had made it. Furthermore its exterior was patrolled
by
a
special guard, three hundred strong, commanded by a castellan known for his absolute incorruptibility and loyalty to his sovereign. Beneath the south-west corner of that same building, however, was the political prison, which the upheavals of the recent years and the repressive policies of Maio of Bari had kept filled to capacity. If all its inmates could be simultaneously released they might, as it were, storm the building from within.

Fortunately for Bonnellus and his friends, the palace official directly responsible for the safety of the prisoners proved open to persuasion; sweetened by an enormous bribe and, doubtless, the promise of advancement to some position of higher authority under the new regime, he readily agreed not only to liberate them at a prearranged signal but also to supply them with arms. The prisoners were alerted, and their duties explained to them. When all had been arranged, Matthew rode off to another of his castles, at Mis-tretta, away in the Nebrodi mountains some miles to the southeast of Cefalù. Here, it seems, he proposed to hold William till the King's ultimate fate could be decided; he now set about preparing it for its royal prisoner and putting its defences in readiness to withstand an attack. He told his associates that he would be back in Palermo shortly, and in any case well before the day appointed for the
coup;
on no account were they to take any action until his return.

Had he been a little older and wiser, he would have known that in any military or paramilitary operation one of the first duties of a leader, particularly during the crucial period immediately before the action, is to keep contact at all times with his men. Away at Mistretta there was no means of reaching him in an emergency; and now, suddenly, an emergency arose. The scheme was indiscreetly revealed to a local knight who proved loyal to the King; from that moment on, the plotters were no longer safe. There was no time to be lost waiting for Bonnellus; the only hope lay in putting their plan into operation at once, before they were themselves arrested.

On the morning of 9 March 1161, at about the third hour after sunrise, the signal was given. The dungeons were flung open, the prisoners snatched the weapons that had been laid out ready for them and hurried to let in the conspirators by the side door where they were waiting. Then, led by the princes Simon and Tancred who knew the palace well, they ran to the large room in the Pisan Tower where they knew the King would be holding his regular morning conference with Henry Aristippus. William was taken utterly by surprise. Seeing that flight was impossible, he dived for the window and began shouting for help; but hardly had the first cry left his lips when he was seized bodily and dragged away. Two of the plotters, William of Lesina and Robert of Bova, the first described by Falcandus as 'a most atrocious man'—
vir atrocissimus
—the second 'famous for his cruelty', now advanced threateningly upon him with drawn swords; only the intervention of a third, Richard of Mandra, saved his life. Meanwhile another group made straight for the Queen's apartments and arrested Margaret and her two sons.

As soon as the royal family had been safely secured, the pillage began. The palace was a veritable treasure-house, and the intruders went through it like locusts. The collections of gold and jewels so lovingly amassed by Roger and William over the past forty years were ransacked. Nothing portable was left behind. The precious pots and vases, with everything else that could do duty as a container, were filled with coins from the coffers and carried off, as were all the royal and ecclesiastical vestments from the
Tiraz.
Saddest of all perhaps, Edrisi's great silver planisphere, despite its immense weight, disappeared never to be seen again. A fire was lit in the courtyard, and nearly all the government records, including the entire registry of fiefs and the services due for them, were hurled on to the flames. Meanwhile all those eunuchs who could not make good their escape were put to the sword; the harem—left undefended—was broken into, its inmates dragged screaming away or violated on the spot.

The massacre of the eunuchs introduced a new and sinister element into the situation. The aristocratic party had long objected to what it considered the disproportionate influence of Muslims at the court, and the initial success of the
coup
seems to have released a pent-up hatred of the whole Islamic community. Suddenly, no Saracen was safe. Even those working innocently in the
diwan,
the mint and other public offices had to flee for their lives; several of the Muslim artists and sages whom William, like his father, accommodated permanently in the palace—among them one of the most distinguished Arabic poets of his day, Yahya ibn at-Tifashi— were hunted down and killed; while down in the lower part of the city a Christian mob descended on the bazaar, forcing all the Arab merchants and shopkeepers, who since the African defeats of
115
9—
60 had been forbidden by law to carry arms, to retreat to the specifically Muslim quarter of the town where the narrow streets gave them the protection they needed.

By now a still larger crowd had gathered in the great square before the palace. Swept by conflicting and contradictory rumours, its prevailing mood was still one of bewilderment. The King was dead; he was alive; he was a prisoner; he was free; it was a Saracen plot to seize power; it was a Christian one to purge the government of Muslim influence. Within the building, however, the ringleaders knew that this atmosphere of uncertainty could not last. Sooner or later, popular feeling must crystallise; and on the form it eventually took the success of the entire
coup
would depend. It was not enough to curry the favour of the mob by flinging an occasional handful of coins out of the palace windows. The time had come for a public declaration of policy and intent. It was therefore announced that William's eldest son Roger had formally succeeded his father on the Sicilian throne, and that he would be crowned in the Cathedral within a very few days—just as soon, in fact, as Matthew Bonnellus returned to Palermo. Meanwhile the little boy, now nine years old, was mounted on a horse and solemnly paraded through the streets of the capital, and the people were invited to acclaim their new King.

Their reaction does not seem to have been enthusiastic; and when the procession was repeated on the following morning, an acute observer might have noticed that even those accompanying the young prince were looking a trifle uncomfortable. Before long the whole city knew why. The conspirators, their ranks now swollen by a number of senior government and church officials who had since pledged their support, were themselves in open conflict. A growing body of opinion was now turning against the idea of a child king, and was favouring instead the succession of Simon, Roger's bastard son.

For the moment there was deadlock, and the leaders of the revolt decided to leave the issue open until the return of Bonnellus. It was a fatal mistake. Any political
coup,
if it is to succeed, must be swift and certain. Momentum is everything. The people must be presented with a
fait accompli;
there can be no half-way pauses and changes of direction. Thus a second vital rule was broken, and King William's throne was saved. The royalists seized the opportunity to regroup themselves; their agents went to work in the streets and taverns, spreading rumours unfavourable to Bonnellus and his party and everywhere finding ready listeners. The conduct of the insurgents and in particular the sack of the palace had had a deplorable effect. All respectable citizens had been revolted by the bloodshed and the violence, and shocked by the indiscriminate looting of riches which might one day be needed for the defence of the Kingdom. Little by little public opinion began to harden; sympathy grew for the captive King; and the conspirators suddenly awoke to find all Sicily united against them.