The Kingdom in the Sun (5 page)

There remained the problem of the Empire. Lothair of Supplinburg, King of Germany, was in a difficult position. A strong, proud, stubborn man of sixty, he had begun life as a comparatively inconsequential noble; his election to the monarchy in
1125
had been largely due to the influence of the papal party working closely with Cardinal Aimeri. He should therefore have been favourably disposed towards Innocent. On the other hand Anacletus had recently sent extremely civil letters to himself, his queen, and to the clergy and laity of Germany and Saxony, informing them of how his brother cardinals 'with a wonderful and stupendous unanimity' had raised him to the supreme dignity of the pontificate; and he had followed up the letters by excommunicating Lothair's arch-enemy, Conrad of Hohenstaufen, who was also laying claim to the German throne. Lothair knew that his victory over Conrad could never be assured till he had had himself crowned Emperor in Rome; whatever the claims of the rival Popes he was unwilling to antagonise the one who actually had control of the Holy City. He decided to defer a decision as long as possible, and left Anacletus's letters unanswered.

But he soon found that he could not sit on the fence for long; the situation was developing too fast. Throughout western Europe the Innocentian faction was gathering momentum, and at Etampes it had received yet further impetus. Already by the autumn of 1130 it was strong enough to force Lothair's hand; a council of sixteen German bishops met at Wiirzburg in October and declared for Innocent; and at the end of March
11
31 the latter appeared with full retinue at Liege to receive the King's homage.

Lothair could not go against his bishops; besides, it was plain that Innocent was now the generally accepted Pope. Among all the European princes, there remained to Anacletus only one adherent—Roger of Sicily. This fact alone would have been enough to lose him any imperial support that he might otherwise have enjoyed; for by what right could any Pope, legitimate or otherwise, crown some Norman upstart King over territories which properly belonged to the Empire ? Since Roger's coronation there could have been no more serious doubts in Lothair's mind: Innocent it would have to be. And yet—perhaps as much to save his face as for any other reason—he still tried to impose one condition: that the right of investiture of bishops with ring and crozier, lost to the Empire nine years previously, were now restored to himself and his successors.

He had reckoned without the Abbot of Clairvaux. Bernard had accompanied Innocent to Liege; this was just the sort of crisis in which he excelled. Leaping from his seat, he subjected the King to a merciless castigation before the entire assembly, calling upon him then and there to renounce his pretensions and pay unconditional homage to his rightful Pope. As always, his words—or, more probably, the force of his personality behind them—had their effect. This was Lothair's first encounter with Bernard; it is unlikely that he had ever been spoken to in such a way before. He was not lacking in moral fibre, but this time he seems instinctively to have realised that his position was no longer tenable. He gave in. Before the Council broke up he had made his formal submission to Innocent, and had reinforced it with an undertaking that the Pope probably found even more valuable—to lead him, at the head of an imperial German army, to Rome.

Already at the time of his coronation Roger must have been aware of the pressures that were building up against Anacletus and—since he had now irrevocably thrown in his lot with the anti-Pope— against himself. He had taken a gamble and he knew it. His crown might indeed have been a political necessity, but he had paid for it by bringing down upon himself the wrath of half a continent. To some extent this was unavoidable; the appearance of a new power, strong and ambitious, is rarely welcome on the international scene, and Roger had after all set himself up over a land still claimed by both the Western and the Byzantine Empires. It was unfortunate, nevertheless, that at this of all moments he should have had to antagonise not just the temporal forces of Europe but the spiritual as well— particularly when they were represented by such men as Bernard of Clairvaux and Abbot Peter of Cluny. In those first months after the election he would surely have been able to strike a similar bargain with either of the two papal pretenders; how much brighter the future would have looked if it had been Innocent, rather than Anacletus, who had appealed to him for help. As matters stood, Roger must have had an uncomfortable feeling that he had backed the wrong horse.

But Empire and Church, threatening as they might appear, were not the only enemies of the new king. Others, just as dangerous, were considerably nearer to hand. There were the barons, who had already constituted the principal obstacle to order and unity in the peninsula for over a hundred years—since before the Hautevilles were even thought of—and there were the towns. Only in Calabria, where no urban conglomerations of any size or importance existed, were the townsfolk content to accept royal domination. In Campania, the main centres may have been politically less evolved than their northern counterparts where the revival of trade, the loosening of the imperial grip and the beginnings of organised industry had already led to the establishment of those independent mercantile city-states, democratically governed, that were to be so characteristic a feature of later mediaeval Italy; but they too had been ruffled by the breeze of communal self-government, and the variety of forms which this had taken was a significant reflection of the prevailing disunity. In Apulia it was much the same. Bari had become a 'signory', ruled by the nobles of the city under a constitutional prince; Troia had a similar system under its bishop; Molfetta and Trani were communes. None had any wish, if they could avoid it, to be swept up into a disciplined and highly centralised monarchy. It was not long before they were able to make their attitude clear. During his whirlwind progress through the mainland duchies three years before, Roger had occasionally allowed the towns through which he passed, in return for their quick submission, to retain control of their walls and citadels. At the time the arrangement had served its purpose; but he could no longer afford such concessions. From now on his authority, if it were to survive at all, would have to be absolute. In February
11
31, he formally requested the citizens of Amalfi to relinquish the command of their own defences and hand over to him the keys of their castle.

And they refused. Their argument that the King was riding roughshod over the terms on which they had surrendered in
11
27 was true but, so far as Roger was concerned, irrelevant. To him this was an act of outright defiance, and one which could not be tolerated. George of Antioch, the young Levantine Greek now on the threshold of his career as the most brilliant of Sicilian admirals, was despatched with the fleet to blockade the city from the sea and seize all Amalfitan ships in the roadstead; simultaneously another Greek, the Emir John, approached with an army from the mountains behind. Against such might the beleaguered citizens were powerless. They held out for a time, but when they saw Capri and all the neighbouring strong-points in Sicilian hands they could only surrender.

Twenty-five miles away in Naples, Duke Sergius VII had followed these developments with an anxiety which rapidly gave place to alarm. At one moment he had considered sending help to Amalfi; but when he heard the size of the Sicilian force he hastily changed his mind. And so, as the Abbot of Telese smugly records, the city 'which, since Roman times, had hardly ever been conquered by the sword now submitted to Roger on the strength of a mere report'.
¹
At last all the territories bestowed on him by Anacletus the previous September were safely in the hands of the King.

Sailing back to Palermo that summer with three Neapolitan ships as his escort, Roger was suddenly overtaken by a violent tempest. After two days, during which it seemed that he and his crews must perish, he made a vow; if they were spared, then at whatever point they should be brought safely to shore he would build a cathedral to Christ the Saviour. The next day—it was the feast of the

¹
Alex. Telese, II, xii.

Transfiguration—the wind dropped, and the vessels glided to a quiet anchorage in the bay of Cefalù, under the huge rock that still dominates much of the sea-coast east of Palermo. At one time this rock had sheltered a prosperous litde town, the seat of a Greek bishop in Byzantine days; but it had declined in importance during the Saracen occupation and in 1063 it had been sacked and largely destroyed by the Great Count. Now it was for his son to make amends. Stepping ashore, he ordered a chapel to be built near the landing-place in honour of St George, whom he claimed to have seen in a vision during the height of the storm;
¹
then he called for measuring-rods and set to work at once to survey a site for his cathedral.

So, at least, runs the legend. Its veracity has been argued by local scholars for a century and more. The sceptics point out that it is attested by none of the local chroniclers—not even by the Abbot of Telese who, besides being Roger's most adulatory biographer, had a particular
penchant
for stories of this kind. The romantics, on the other hand, adduce a contemporary document discovered in the 1880s among the Aragonese archives in Barcelona which, they claim, leaves no further room for doubt.
²
Their case is strong, but not conclusive. All we can know for certain is that on
14
September
1131
Cefalù was once more given a bishop of its own—a Latin one this time—and that already, by that date, the building had begun.

The face of Sicily is changing fast. She is, alas, no more immune than anywhere else in Europe to the attentions of land speculators and property developers, and many are the Arcadian landscapes now ruined by cement-factory or motel. But the island possesses two architectural masterpieces which, viewed from afar as well as in close-up, still have power to catch the breath. The first is the Greek temple of Segesta—the distant prospect of which, however, owes much of its impact to the beauty of the site; one is struck above all by the placing of the building on its eminence, the relation of that

¹
It was not the first time that St George had given moral support to the Normans in moments of crisis; readers of
The Normans in the South
may remember his appearance with Roger's father at the battle of Cerami in 1063.

²
Rosario Salvo di Pietraganzili, 'La leggenda della tempesta e il voto del Re Ruggiero per la costruzione del Duomo di Cefalù'. In
La Sicilia Artistica ed Archeoiogica,
vol. II, Palermo, June-July 1888.

eminence to the surrounding hills, the grandeur, the isolation and the silence. This is not to detract from the temple itself; it is superb. But then so are nearly all Greek temples, and one—the fact must be faced—is apt to be very like another.

The second is Cefalù; and Cefalù is unique. Seen first, as it should be, from the coast road to the west,
¹
its setting yields nothing to that of Segesta. A gently curving beach fringed with pine and prickly pear leads the eye along to a confusion of roofs, clustered at the far corner of the bay. Above and behind, but still very much a part of the town, rises Roger's cathedral, dominating the houses below as effortlessly as its sisters at Lincoln or Durham. Beyond the cathedral again is the rock that gave the place its name. The ancient Greek inhabitants seem to have seen it as a gigantic head, but it is really more like a pair of great, broad shoulders, four-square and massive, giving the town protection and reassurance. Not so imminent as to be menacing, not so distant as to be incidental, rock merges with town until the two become parts of a single grand design, each complementing the other. And the cathedral forms the link between them.

Such is the first impression. But it is only on arrival in the central piazza that the full splendour of Cefalù is revealed.
²
Now for the second time, but for different reasons, one is astonished by the perfection of its placing. The slope of the rock on which it is built sets it, a little obliquely, on a higher level than the square; it must thus be approached, like the Parthenon, at a slight angle and from below. And, as one approaches, so the realisation grows that here is not just the loveliest Norman exterior in Sicily, but one of the loveliest cathedrals in the world. The facade as we see it, with its twin towers—fraternal rather than identical—and the blind interlaced arcading that runs between them, dates from 1240—a century after Roger's time. By then, that fusion of eastern and western styles so typical of earlier Norman-Sicilian architecture had disappeared; and we are left with a perfect, sunny, southern romanesque, uncluttered but never austere.