The Kingdom in the Sun (58 page)

so tormented the papal Curia; while the six-year truce concluded with the Lombard League was, it was agreed, only a preliminary to the formal acknowledgement by the Empire of the Lombard cities' independence. It was a triumph—greater far than that which Pope Gregory had scored over Henry IV exactly a century before; but to the faithful who rejoiced with the old Pope at Venice during those sweltering summer days it was also a tribute to the wisdom and firmness with which he had steered the Church through one of the most troubled times of her history.

Even now the troubles were not quite over. It was a further year before first one anti-Pope and then another made their submission to him; even then, the Roman Senate remained so hostile that in the summer of
1179
Alexander left Rome for the last time. He had never liked the city, never trusted its people; to him, all through his life, it had been enemy country. And when, after his death at Civita Castellana on the last day of August
1181,
his body was brought back to the Lateran, the Romans proved him right. Not four years before, they had welcomed him back from exile to the sound of trumpets and with hymns of thanksgiving; now, as his funeral cortege entered the city the senseless populace, not content with flinging curses on Alexander's name, threw mud and stones at the bier that carried his corpse, scarcely suffering it to be buried in the basilica.
¹

The thing that struck people most about Alexander's successor, Lucius III, was his immense age. Such little evidence as we have suggests that he had been born in the previous century; if so, he would have already have been in his eighties when he ascended the throne of St Peter. '
Vir grandaevus'
is how William of Tyre describes him, adding—perhaps a trifle bitchily—
'et modice litteratus'.
²
The Treaty of Venice had absolved him, during his four-year pontificate, from the necessity of paying much attention to Sicilian affairs; and his principal contribution was a Bull, dated
5
February

¹
It was, all the same; but the original tomb has, alas, gone and has been replaced by a nasty baroque affair, erected in 1660 by his namesake and enthusiastic admirer, Alexander VII

²
'A very old man, and—up to a point—cultured'.

1183,
granting the status of an archbishopric to William II's new foundation—the abbey and cathedral of Monreale.
¹

William had been working on this huge project for the past nine years. In
1174,
so runs the legend, the Virgin Mary had appeared to him while he was resting from the hunt in his royal deer-park just outside Palermo, had revealed the location of a hoard of treasure secretly buried there by his father, and had commanded him to unearth it and devote it to some pious purpose. The story doubtless served to justify the astronomical sums of money that the King was to lavish on Monreale in the years to come—just as variants of it have done for so many other expensive foundations over the centuries. William's real motives, however, were more complex. Deeply religious by nature, he was unquestionably sincere in wishing to raise up some mighty edifice to the glory of God; and the hero-worship that he had always felt for his grandfather, the founder of Cefalù and
S.
Giovanni degli Eremiti and the builder of the Palatine Chapel, must have further strengthened his determination. If the church he was to build served also as a monument to himself, then so much the better.

But the considerations that led him to press on so hurriedly with the work were more political than personal. From the moment he had assumed power he had been aware—and Matthew of Ajello had constantly reminded him—of the growing influence of Walter of the Mill. As Archbishop of Palermo Walter had by now managed to unite nearly all the leading barons and prelates behind him in a reactionary, feudalist party that, if it were allowed to develop unchecked, boded ill for the Kingdom. Even in ecclesiastical affairs he was pursuing a dangerous course. The upheavals of the Regency had given the Sicilian Church the opportunity to assert itself independently not j ust of the Pope—there was nothing new in that—but of the King as well; and this tendency Walter was doing everything he could to encourage. His power in the land was already second only

¹
There can be no clearer indication of the change that had come about in Sicilian-Papal relations since the days of King Roger. He would never for
a
moment have tolerated such interference in what he would have considered the domestic affairs of his kingdom. A legend exists to the effect that Pope Lucius actually visited Monreale for its consecration; but this is certainly untrue.

to William's own; and William knew that he must curb it while there was still time.

But how could he do so ? Only by creating a new archbishopric as near as possible to Palermo, whose incumbent would be equal in rank to Walter himself and could serve as a direct link between Crown and Papacy. This in turn raised another problem: Archbishops were normally elected by the Church hierarchy, and the hierarchy was under Walter's control. Thus it was that William and his Vice-Chancellor decided on a further refinement to their plan. The new foundation must be a Benedictine abbey, run on strictly Cluniac lines, whose abbot would automatically receive archiepiscopal rank and could be consecrated by any other prelate he might choose, subject only to the King's approval.

Such a scheme, it need hardly be said, could not fail to meet with furious and determined opposition from Walter of the Mill. William and Matthew seem to have managed to conceal their plan for the new archbishopric till
1175,
but after that they had to fight every step of the way. They might indeed have failed altogether if it had not been for two factors. One was that by a fantastically lucky chance there still stood, in the grounds of the new abbey, the little chapel of Hagia Kyriaka
¹
which had been the official see of the Greek Metropolitan of Palermo during the Arab domination. This enabled the champions of Monreale to claim that in establishing the archbishopric there they were merely continuing a venerable tradidon. The second factor was the support given to the plan by Pope Alexander, who from
1174
onwards issued a series of Bulls emphasising the exceptional character of the proposed foundation. Against such artillery even Walter was powerless. He was forced to stand by while several churches and parishes were removed from his archdiocese and transferred to that of Monreale; and, in the spring of
1176,
having grudgingly agreed to the exemption of its first abbot from his jurisdiction, he watched in impotent fury as a hundred monks from La Cava arrived in Palermo on their way to colonise the new monastery.

¹
'The name does not refer to a saint but characterises the church as the Sunday Church, in contrast to the former cathedral of Palermo which under the Arabs was the Friday Mosque of the town.' (O. Demus,
The Mosaics of Norman Sicily.)

It was therefore probably as much in the nature of a counterattack as anything else that in
1179
Walter began his own building programme—a completely new cathedral for Palermo itself. But however rich he was himself, and however unscrupulous his methods of extracting money from others, he could not hope to rival Monreale; and when William announced that he wished this latest royal foundation, rather than Cefalù or Palermo, to be the burial-place of the Hauteville dynasty, it can only have been a further blow to the Archbishop's hopes. Palermo Cathedral, by the time he finished it, must have been a credit to himself and to the city—very unlike the sad travesty we see today; but it could not begin, any more than it can now, to stand comparison with one of the most sumptuously magnificent religious buildings in the world.

Sumptuous and magnificent, certainly; yet from the start it must be admitted that Monreale, considered as a whole, is more impressive than beautiful. It lacks the gem-like perfection of the Palatine Chapel, the Byzantine mystery of the Martorana, the sheer magic that streams down from the great Pantocrator at Cefalù. Its impact is principally due to its size and its splendour. But this impact, like the cathedral itself, is colossal.

As so often in the churches of Norman Sicily, the exterior is unpromising. Except for the eastern apses and the north-west view from the cloister,
¹
it has been radically changed since William's day. The long north colonnade was clamped on by the Gagini family in the sixteenth century, the west porch by someone else in the eighteenth. This latter addition in particular need not cause us much distress, since it screens some of that original decoration of interlaced blind arches in reddish lava (Gothic now and ornate, with none of the rounded purity of Cefalù), the full unpleasantness of which can still be experienced by anyone walking along to the east end. This vacuous doodling, especially when contrasted with the simple statement of the south-west tower, illustrates better than any words just how great was the loss to European architecture when Romanesque began to decline.

Before entering the building, it is worth taking a close look at its

¹
Plate 20.

two sets of bronze doors. Those in the north porch are the work of Barisanus of Trani and date from
1179,
while the main doors at the west end were made by Bonannus of Pisa in
11
86.
¹
Apart from their considerable intrinsic beauty, these doors are interesting for two reasons. First, they are Italian. Throughout the eleventh and early twelfth centuries, such craftsmanship was virtually a monopoly of Byzantium; to mention only those shrines which have a place in our story, the cathedrals of Amalfi and Salerno and the cave at Monte S. Angelo all possess Byzantine doors of outstanding quality,
²
in all of which the Greek masters have followed their usual practice of engraving their designs on the metal and then picking them out with silver thread—or, occasionally, enamel. By the latter half of the twelfth century, however, the Italians had not only adopted Byzantine techniques but were rapidly improving on them and trying their hand at real bas-reliefs; and the second point of interest about the Monreale doors is in the opportunity they give us to compare the progress of the two leading bronze-workers of their day towards the evolution of that specifically Italian style that was to reach its apogee with Ghiberti two centuries later. As is only to be expected, Barisanus, whose life had been spent in southern Italy where Greek influence was strongest—and who had already been responsible for the cathedral doors at Ravello as well as those of his home town of Trani—is the less evolved of the two; his techniques may be western, but his designs—the hieratic saints, the oriental archers, the descent into Hell and the deposition from the Cross—are still the designs of Byzantium. Bonannus, by contrast, though possibly less fine an artist, is a westerner through and through; his biblical scenes are as earthy and naturalistic as any twelfth-century religious art can be.

Unlike the outer facade, the interior of the cathedral remains essentially as it always was—apart from the roof over the nave, which had to be replaced after a fire in 18
11
. Most of the obvious features of the Palatine Chapel are there—the polychrome marble inlays of the floor and lower walls, the antique cipollino columns, the superb

¹
 
Plate
21.

²
Those of Monte S. Angelo were the cause of angry demonstrations as recently as March 1964, when the local inhabitants refused to allow them to be removed to Athens for the Byzantine Exhibition held later that year.
(The Times,
4 and 6 March 1964.)