The Kingdom in the Sun (71 page)

To Tancred the capture of the Empress must have seemed like a godsend. He had been much heartened by the news of Henry's departure, but he knew that the battle was still scarcely joined. Henry might have found the going harder than he had expected, but his army had not been routed—it had not even been opposed in the open field—and much of northern Campania, including Monte Cassino, remained under his control. The first round, though less disastrous than Tancred had feared, could at best be said to have ended in a draw; and prospects for the second were not particularly bright.

Not, at least, until Constance appeared. But now the situation was suddenly altered; the most valuable diplomatic hostage that Tancred could ever have hoped for had fallen into his lap. No longer was he obliged to wait in impotent suspense till Henry should choose to invade his territory again: he was in a position to negotiate. Meanwhile, as a further encouragement to him, Pope Celestine was showing unmistakable signs of friendship. Even while the siege of Naples was sdll in progress, the Pope had gone behind the Emperor's back and negotiated with Henry the Lion; and four months later, in December, he excommunicated the whole monastery of Monte Cassino as a punishment for having espoused the imperial cause. Monte Cassino still maintained its opposition to Tancred, but there could no longer be any question where the Pope's own sympathies lay.

Sympathy, however, did not mean endorsement. To any pope, too powerful a Sicily was every bit as dangerous as too powerful an Empire. Safety, as always, lay in holding the balance between them. What was required was mediation; and if in the course of that mediation the Pope were to incline towards the Sicilian point of view, he saw no reason why he should not extract concessions in return.

Tancred's popular support was reduced, in particular, by his still shaky legal position; a papal investiture confirming his right to the crown would be of immense value to his cause—if he were prepared to pay for it.

Which of the two took the initiative, and when, is no longer known; but discussions through intermediaries must have been going on during the spring and summer of 1192 for when Tancred, fresh from a successful punitive expedition against his rebellious vassals in the Abruzzi, met the papal envoys at Gravina in June, the main terms of a treaty had already been agreed. They were simple enough in their way, and they obtained for the King the investiture he wanted; but they involved the surrender of all those special rights over the ecclesiastical administration in the island of Sicily that had been secured with such difficulty by Roger I and II and renegotiated by William the Bad at Benevento in 11
5
6.
¹
Henceforth the Sicilian clergy would be entitled, in just the same way as their mainland brethren, to appeal to Rome in cases of supposed injustice. The Pope might send his special envoys to Sicily whenever he liked and not only when the King asked for them. Elections to the hierarchy would no longer be subject to royal approval.

Seeing the Latin Church in Sicily placed, for the first time in its history, under full papal control, Pope Celestine could justifiably congratulate himself on a diplomatic
coup
of some magnitude. It was not often that Popes had got the better of Normans in negotiations of that sort. Tancred, however, had not been disposed to argue. He had his back to the wall. The privileges he had surrendered seemed to belong to a happier and more spacious age; they were a small enough price to pay for legitimacy.

But, though he did not yet know it, he had also lost something else—something far more valuable to him at that moment than any number of ecclesiastical sanctions. Pope Celestine, undeterred by Henry's reception of his last proposals, still cherished the hope that one day, through his mediation, King and Emperor might be reconciled; and he had therefore pressed Tancred as a gesture of goodwill to deliver Constance into his care. Chalandon, with unaccustomed heat, condemns the Pope's advice as
detestable;
it was

¹
See pp.
197-9.

certainly ill-conceived, and its effect was disastrous. Tancred, not wishing to antagonise the Pope at such a time, reluctantly complied. The Empress was entrusted to a special escort that included several cardinals, and set off for Rome.

Had she gone by sea, all might have been well; but the land route passed through territory still under Henry's control, and the inevitable happened. When the party reached the frontier at Ceprano it ran into a group of imperial knights. Constance at once placed herself under their protection. The cardinals objected, but were ignored. They returned empty-handed to Rome while the Empress, carefully avoiding the city, hastened back over the Alps to her husband.

Tancred had been robbed of his trump card. He was not to be dealt another.

During the last weeks of 1192 Joanna Plantagenet called at Palermo on her way back from Palestine—accompanied by her sister-in-law Berengaria, now Queen of England since her marriage to Richard at Limassol in Cyprus some eighteen months before. The fact that she chose to do so suggests that, whatever her brother may have pretended, she had not been too badly treated by Tancred after her husband's death; she certainly bore him no grudge, and Tancred and his wife Sibylla gave the two young queens a suitably royal welcome. A week or two later they sailed on again, Berengaria to welcome widowhood in France, Joanna towards a second marriage.
¹

She seems to have been delighted with her reception, in a Palermo that must have appeared outwardly unchanged from the days when she and her godlike young husband had reigned over Norman Sicily at its loveliest and most peaceful. One hopes that she understood how fortunate she was to have known it at such a time—or even to have found, on her return, her old realm still in existence at all.

¹
She had had a narrow escape in Palestine when Richard, for reasons more diplomatic than humane, had tried to marry her off to Saladin's brother al-Adil. Her second husband was in fact to prove much more to her taste—Count Raymond VI of Toulouse, whom she was to marry as his fourth wife in n 96. They were happy together, but not for long. Three years later, when still not quite thirty-four, Joanna died in childbirth, having been received on her deathbed into the religious order of Fontevrault—where she lies buried, with her father, mother and brother.

For if, that summer, Henry VI had led a second expedition to the South as he had intended to do, better equipped than its predecessor and provided with adequate naval support, it is unlikely that Tancred, even with the help of Margaritus and his fleet, would have been able to hold out. The long peace that had marked the reign and made the reputation of William the Good was now over; after twenty-five years anarchy had returned; already the mainland had lapsed once again into chaos. Not a road was safe, scarcely a baron could be trusted; in such conditions organised resistance to an invader was well-nigh impossible. But Henry had not marched. The Welfs, transparently supported by Pope Celestine, were making too much trouble for him at home. The best he had been able to do was to send a relatively meagre force under Berthold of Kunsberg to hold the situation until conditions became more favourable to his purpose. Norman Sicily was granted a stay of execution.

But it was still fighting for its life. Though Tancred had spent nine months continuously on campaign up and down the peninsula, he had returned to Sicily in the autumn with little to show for his efforts and more convinced than ever that without active help from abroad the days of his Kingdom were numbered. Much of the winter he spent concluding negotiations with the Byzantine Emperor Isaac Angelus, as a result of which he was soon able to announce the betrothal of his elder son Roger—whom he had duly created Duke of Apulia some time before—to the Emperor's daughter Irene.

The wedding was celebrated the following spring, at Brindisi. It served little practical purpose. Isaac could provide the King of Sicily with a daughter-in-law, but he was too busy with his own troubles to furnish anything else. Duke Roger was dead by the end of the year; his young wife was left, disconsolate and alone, in Palermo. Meanwhile King Richard of England, who might otherwise have been ready to help, had been captured by one of Henry's vassals on his return journey from Palestine and was now languishing in a German castle. Sicily's only ally remained Pope Celestine; but the Pope was hamstrung by an openly imperialist Roman Senate, and had no army. He was also eighty-seven.

Tancred fought on alone. Still there was no sign of the Emperor, but even without him the situation was deteriorating; the royalist troops might recapture a few towns and castles here and there, but they could make no real headway. Monte Cassino in particular proved as impregnable as it always had, still shamelessly flying the imperial standard from its tower. Then, in the late summer, Tancred fell ill. He continued as long as he could, but the sickness increased until he was forced to return to Sicily. All winter long he lay in Palermo, growing steadily weaker; and on 20 February 11
94
he died.

Now there was no hope left. With Tancred of Lecce Sicily had lost her last effective champion. Of all the Norman kings, he was the most selfless and the most tragic. In happier times he would never have sought the crown; nor, when it was thrust upon him, did he ever have an opportunity to savour the delights of kingship. His four years on the throne were years of unremitting strife—against the Empire above all, but also against his fellow-Sicilians, Christian and Muslim, who were too egotistical or too blind to understand the enormity of the crisis that faced them. Seeing it himself with such terrible clarity, he strove to turn it aside by every means within his power, military and diplomatic, overt and clandestine. Had he lived, he might even have succeeded—though the odds were heavily against him. Dying as he did in early middle age, he is remembered in Sicily—when he is remembered at all—as a mediocrity and a failure, or even as the misshapen ogre of the imperial propagandists. It is an unfair judgment. Tancred lacked, perhaps, the greatness of his proudest forbears; but with his persistence, his courage and—most of all—his political vision, he surely proved himself a not unworthy successor.

To the ever-superstitious subjects of the crumbling Kingdom, the deaths of both King Tancred and his heir within a few weeks of each other seemed yet another sign from heaven that the Hautevilles had run their race and that Henry of Hohenstaufen must now prevail. The fact that Tancred's only other son, William, was still a child and that Sicily, at the time of her greatest trial, was once more to be entrusted to the care of a woman Regent appeared only additional, unnecessary confirmation of the divine will. The dark clouds of defeatism that had long been gathering over the
Regno
now spread to the capital itself as Queen Sibylla, still in the first paralysing numbness of her widowhood, took the reins of government into her tired, reluctant hands.

She had no illusions. To her as to her husband, the crown had never been anything but a burden, and she knew as well as anyone that the task before her was impossible. If Tancred with all his energy and courage had ultimately failed to unite his people against the oncoming menace, how could she and her little son hope to succeed ? She herself was without political ability or understanding; the one adviser on whom she might have relied, old Matthew of Ajello, had died the previous year. His two sons, Richard and Nicholas, the latter now Archbishop of Salerno, remained loyal and capable enough in their way; but neither could hope to match the experience or prestige of their father. Her third chief adviser was Archbishop Bartholomew of Palermo, brother and successor of Walter of the Mill. She did not trust him, and she was almost certainly right. All she could do was to wait for the blow to fall—and, meanwhile, to try to keep her head.

She did not have long to wait. Henry VI, his domestic problems settled, was now once again directing all his energies towards the conquest of Sicily. He was not in any particular hurry; time was on his side, and there was no point in risking any repetition of the Naples disaster of three years before. Then he had been let down by inadequate naval support; thanks to Margaritus, the Pisan fleet had been rendered useless and the Genoese, arriving only after the imperial retreat had begun, had narrowly escaped total destruction. This time he would be properly prepared. Margaritus would find himself faced not only by Pisans and Genoese, but by fifty fully-equipped galleys from the one source, perhaps, that he least expected —King Richard of England.