The Kingdom in the Sun (70 page)

¹
Le
ray
Richard
saunz
plus
a
ly
a
redonez

La
meyllur
espeye
ke
unkes
fu
forgez.

Ca fu
Kaliburne,
dount
Arthur
le
senez

Set
solait
guyer
en
gueres
et
en
mellex.

So writes Peter of Langtoft in his curious brand of Yorkshire French, echoing Roger of Hoveden a century earlier. But since the so-called grave of Arthur was discovered only at the beginning of
1191,
Excalibur would have needed all its magic properties to reach Sicily by early March.

chaperon for her. Once everything was settled, Eleanor saw no reason to delay any longer. After only three days in Messina, with that energy for which she was famous all over Europe—she was now sixty-nine and had been travelling uninterruptedly for over three months—she left again for England.

The day after bidding her mother goodbye for the last time, Joanna herself set off with Berengaria for the Holy Land. Richard had put at their disposal one of his heavy
dromons;
it was slower than a galley but a good deal more comfortable, and it had plenty of room for the ladies' attendants and their enormous quantities of baggage. He himself remained another week, organising the embarkation of his army and the demolition of Mategrifon. Finally, on 10 April, he too sailed away. The Messinans cannot have been sorry to see the last of him.

But their King did not share their relief. Certainly Sicily might be a happier and more peaceful place without Richard's turbulent presence—but only for as long as Henry of Hohenstaufen delayed his invasion. Had Richard been able to stay a little longer, his help would have been invaluable, perhaps even decisive. He could not be blamed for leaving when he did; his presence was urgently needed in Palestine—where, four years after Hattin, the situation was now desperate—and his crusading oath took precedence over all other commitments. None the less, his departure shattered Tancred's greatest single hope of saving his country from the imperial clutches. Now, when the crisis came, he would have to face it alone. He could not know that that crisis was less than three weeks away.

21

NIGHTFALL

O Singer of Persephone!

In the dim meadows desolate

Dost thou remember Sicily ?

Wilde,
Theocritus

If
Henry of Hohenstaufen had been able to follow his original plan of campaign, he would have left Germany in November
1190
and almost certainly arrived in Sicily before the departure of the English troops. His failure to do so was principally due to a report that reached him just as he was setting out. On
10
June his father, Frederick Barbarossa, after a long and arduous journey across Anatolia, had led his army out of the last of the Taurus valleys and on to the flat coastal plain. The heat was sweltering and the little river Calycadnus
¹
that ran past the town of Seleucia to the sea must have been a welcome sight. Frederick spurred his horse towards it, leaving his men to follow. He was never seen alive again. Whether he dismounted to drink and was swept off his feet by the current, whether his horse slipped in the mud and threw him, whether the shock of falling into the icy mountain water was too much for his tired old body—he was nearing seventy—remains unknown. He was rescued, but too late. The bulk of his army reached the river to find their Emperor lying dead on the bank.

His son Henry, with two crowns to claim instead of one, was still more anxious to leave for the South as soon as possible. Internal problems following his father's death kept him occupied for some weeks; fortunately the winter was mild, the Alpine passes still open.

¹
In modern Turkish Seleucia has become Silifke, while the Calycadnus is now less euphoniously known as the Goksu.

By January he and his army were safely across. Then, after a month spent strengthening his position in Lombardy and securing the assistance of a fleet from Pisa, he headed towards Rome where Pope Clement III was expecting him.

But before Henry could reach the city Pope Clement was dead. Hurriedly—for the imperial troops were fast approaching—the Sacred College met in conclave and selected as his successor the Cardinal-deacon of S. Maria in Cosmedin, Hyacinthus Bobo. It seemed, in the circumstances, a curious choice. The new Pope was of illustrious birth—his brother Ursus was founder of the Orsini family—and could boast a long and distinguished ecclesiastical record, having stoutly defended Peter Abelard against St Bernard at Sens more than fifty years before. But he was now eighty-five— hardly, one might have thought, the man to handle the overbearing young Henry during a crisis that threatened the position of the Church almost as much as it did that of the Kingdom of Sicily. There is every indication that he shared this view himself; only the proximity of the German army, together with widespread fears of another schism if there were any delay in the election, at length persuaded him to accept the tiara. A cardinal since 1144, it was only on Holy Saturday, 13 April 1191,that he was ordained priest; on the following day, Easter Sunday, he was enthroned at St Peter's as Pope Celestine
111;
and on the 15th, as the first formal action of his pontificate, he crowned Henry and Constance Emperor and Empress of the West.

With his experience of half a century in the papal service, no one knew better than Celestine the dangers of allowing the Empire to annex the Kingdom of Sicily. In the circumstances, however, he could hardly insist on an undertaking from the new Emperor to advance no further to the south; and such attempts as he did make to dissuade Henry from pursuing his plans were, as might have been expected, poorly received. On 29 April, just a fortnight after his coronation—
papa prohibente et contradicente
as Richard of S. Germano puts it—Barbarossa's son led his army across the Garigliano and into Sicilian territory.

Within the limits of his possibilities, Tancred was ready for him. The defection of so many of his mainland vassals had prevented him from raising an army capable of defeating the imperial forces in the field; he therefore wisely concentrated on building up his defences in those areas on whose support he could rely—in Sicily itself, in his own territory around the heel of Apulia and, above all, in the larger towns on both sides of the peninsula where the bourgeoisie, republican as they might be, far preferred a King to an Emperor and readily accepted the privileges, charters and indemnities he promised them. Meanwhile he sent Richard of Acerra north, at the head of as large a force as he could muster, to stiffen local resistance.

At first Richard made little progress. He probably knew that any attempt to secure the loyalties of the lands along the northern frontier would be doomed to failure and, like Tancred, focused his energies where he felt they would be most effective. Thus, in the first weeks of the invasion, Henry carried all before him. One town after another opened its gates; more and more of the local barons joined the imperial ranks. From Monte Cassino to Venafro, thence to Teano—nowhere was there a sign of opposition. Even Capua, once the most jealously independent of the cities of Campania, now welcomed the Germans as they approached, its archbishop giving orders for the Hohenstaufen standard to be hoisted on the ramparts. At Aversa, the first Norman fief in all Italy, it was the same story; Salerno, King Roger's mainland capital, did not even await the arrival of the imperial troops before writing to assure Henry of its loyalty—simultaneously inviting Constance to spend the hot summer months in her father's old palace. Only when the Emperor reached Naples was he brought to a halt.

In the half-century during which it had formed part of the Norman Kingdom, Naples had grown and prospered. It was now a rich trading port numbering some forty thousand inhabitants, including an important Jewish community and commercial colonies from Pisa, Amalfi and Ravello. Recently, to encourage their loyalist sympathies, Tancred had accorded to the Neapolitans a whole series of grants and privileges. Richard of Acerra had therefore wisely selected the city as his headquarters. Its defences were in good order—Tancred had had them repaired the year before at his own expense—its granaries and storehouses full. When the Emperor appeared with his army beneath its walls, the citizens were ready for him.

The ensuing siege was not, from their point of view, a particularly arduous one. Thanks to the incessant harrying of the Pisan ships by the Sicilian fleet under Margaritus, Henry never managed properly to control the harbour approaches, and the defenders continued to receive reinforcements and supplies. On the landward side the walls took a heavy battering; the Count of Acerra was wounded and temporarily replaced as commander by Matthew of Ajello's second son Nicholas, now Archbishop of Salerno, who had deliberately left his flock a few weeks previously in protest at their disloyalty. But the defences held firm; and it became clear, as the summer dragged on, that it was the besiegers rather than the besieged who were beginning to feel the strain.

Looking back—as we can now do, for the end is near—over the whole chequered history of the Normans in the South, we might well be forgiven for seeing it as an almost unrelieved saga of treachery and betrayal. Only one of their allies had never let them down: the heat of the southern summer. Again and again it had saved them from successive waves of imperial invaders, from that distant day in 1022 when Henry the Holy had withdrawn in despair from the siege of Troia to now, the best part of two centuries later, when his namesake, seeing his forces decimated by malaria, dysentery and wholesale defections and eventually himself falling seriously ill, recognised that he too must turn his army homeward while there was still time.

It was on 24 August that Henry gave the order to raise the siege of Naples, and within a day or two the imperial host, still impressive but now noticeably smaller and slower than it had been a few weeks before, had trailed off northward over the hills. The Neapolitans watched them go with satisfaction. They knew, however, that to Henry this withdrawal was nothing more than an irritating reverse; it meant delay, but not defeat. He had posted imperial garrisons in all the most important towns and cities and, in order that there should be no possible doubts about his future intentions, had arranged to leave Constance in Salerno till his return.

Here, however, he made a serious mistake. He did not understand the temper of the South, and it obviously never struck him that news of his retreat, combined with fears of Tancred's vengeance at their disloyalty, would, within days of his own departure, reduce the Salernitans to panic. In their frantic search for a scapegoat, a Salernitan mob attacked the palace in which Constance was staying and would probably have killed her had not Tancred's nephew, a certain Elias of Gesualdo, appeared on the scene just in time and taken her into protective custody, sending her on at the earliest opportunity to the King in Messina.