The Kingdom in the Sun (72 page)

It was not really Richard's fault; he had had little choice. On 4 February 1194—less than two and a half weeks before Tancred's death—he had at last obtained his release from captivity; but Henry had made him pay dearly for his freedom. To the original ransom figure of a hundred thousand silver marks he had added another fifty thousand, to be used specifically for the Sicilian expedition, together with the fifty galleys and the services of two hundred knights for not less than a year. As a final piece of gratuitous humiliation, the Emperor had forced his prisoner to do homage to him for the Kingdom of England itself.

For the moment, however, it was the ships that mattered. Henry expected little serious opposition from Tancred's army—and none at all in Campania where his garrisons, aided by the reinforcements brought in by Berthold of Kunsberg, had been steadily extending their authority since Tancred's death. Everything depended on his power at sea. Towards the end of May he crossed the Splugen pass into Italy and spent Whitsun in Milan. A week or two later he was in Genoa and then in Pisa, making sure of his ships and planning every detail of the coming campaign. The dates were fixed; and on 23 August the combined fleets under the overall command of the Steward of the Empire, Markward of Anweiler, appeared in the bay of Naples. They found the city open to them. The Neapolitans, who only three years before had defied the imperial army to do its worst and had soon afterwards triumphantly watched it go limping back to Germany, had this time capitulated even before the enemy had arrived. With Tancred's death, the last remaining shreds of South Italian morale were gone.

Henry did not even bother to stop at Naples. He went straight on to Salerno, where he had an old score to settle. Three years before, the Salernitans had betrayed him. They had made their submission, had offered bis wife their hospitality and then, at the first reports of an imperial retreat, had turned against her and delivered her up to her enemies. The Emperor was not the man to let such treachery go unpunished. Fear of his vengeance, rather than courage or feelings of loyalty towards their King, at first led the Salernitans to resist, but they could not do so for long. Their city was taken by storm and given over to merciless pillage. Such of the population as escaped massacre had their property confiscated and were sent into exile. The walls were reduced to rubble; by then there was little left for them to enclose.

If any example was necessary of the treatment to be expected by towns that sought to resist the German advance, Salerno provided it. With two heroic exceptions—Spinazzola and Policoro—which suffered a similar fate, Henry's authority was accepted everywhere without question. His ensuing march through the South was less of a campaign than a triumphal progress; even the cities of Apulia, long the focus of anti-imperial feeling, accepted the inevitable; Siponto, Trani, Barletta, Bari, Giovinazzo and Molfetta, each in turn opened its gates to the conqueror. In Calabria it was the same story. At the end of October Henry VI, now master of the mainland, crossed the straits of Messina. For the first time in well over a century, a hostile invading army was encamped on Sicilian soil.

The navy had arrived several weeks earlier, and the Emperor disembarked to find Messina already an occupied city. So too—despite serious differences between the Pisans and Genoese which were resolved only after a full-scale naval battle fought by their respective fleets—were Catania and Syracuse. Everywhere, the central administration was breaking down; the island was in a state of growing confusion. Once Henry had established his bridgeheads, it was clear that no real opposition could be organised against him. Queen Sibylla did her best; whatever her other faults, she did not lack courage. The boy King and his three small sisters she sent off to comparative safety in the fortress of Caltabellotta,
¹
near Sciacca on the south-west coast; then she attempted to rally a last-ditch resistance. It was no use. The citadel overlooking the port was commanded by Margaritus; he too was eager to hold out till the end. But the fatalism that had paralysed the capital had now spread to the garrison. They laid down their arms. Margaritus could not continue the struggle single-handed. While the Queen Regent, seeing that her cause was lost, fled with the Archbishop of Palermo and his brother to join her children at Caltabellotta, he remained to negotiate the final surrender.

Henry, meanwhile, advanced on Palermo. A few miles outside the walls, at Favara, he was received by a group of leading citizens to assure him of the city's submission and future fidelity.
²
In return he issued strict orders, immediately relayed throughout the army, that there should be no pillage or licentiousness. Palermo was his kingdom's

¹
A single tower of this castle—where, incidentally, the peace was signed in
1502
that brought to an end the war of the Sicilian Vespers—still rises from a pinnacle above the town, commanding one of the most stunning views in all Sicily. Below, the Chiesa Madre is also worth a visit; it was erected by Count Roger I when he captured Caltabellotta in
1090.

²
Plate
32
.

capital, and was to be treated as such; at all times the strictest discipline was to be maintained. His promise given, he rode through the gates and made his solemn entry into the city.

Thus, on 20 November 11
94,
the rule of the Hautevilles in Palermo was brought to an end. It had begun nearly a century and a quarter before, when Robert Guiscard, with his brother Roger and his magnificent wife Sichelgaita riding behind him, had led an exhausted but exultant army into the city. They had fought with tenacity and courage—qualities that had been matched in full measure by the defenders; and in the soldierly admiration felt by each side for a worthy adversary was born the mutual respect and understanding that lay at the root of the Norman-Sicilian miracle. The result had been the happiest and most glorious chapter of the island's history. Now that chapter was closed—with the surrender of a demoralised people to an invader whom they feared too much to fight and who felt for them, in return, a contempt which he made little effort to conceal.

On Christmas Day, 11
94,
the Emperor Henry VI of Hohenstaufen was crowned King of Sicily in Palermo Cathedral. In places of honour before him, to witness his triumph and their own humiliation, sat Sibylla and her children, among them the sad little William III, who after a ten-month reign, was now King no longer. So far, they had been treated well. Instead of attacking Caltabellotta— which he could have quickly subdued—Henry had offered them reasonable, even generous, terms, under which William was to receive not only his father's county of Lecce but also the principality of Taranto. Sibylla had accepted, and had returned with her family to the capital. Now, as she watched the crown of Sicily—that crown that had brought so much misery to her husband, her son and herself during the past five years—slowly lowered on to Henry's head, it is hard to imagine her feeling any emotion but that of profound relief.

If so, however, it was premature—and short-lived. Four days later, the atmosphere suddenly changed. A conspiracy to assassinate the Emperor had, it was claimed, been uncovered in the nick of time. Sibylla, her children and a large number of leading Sicilians who had been summoned to Palermo for the coronation—among them Margaritus of Brindisi, Archbishop Nicholas of Salerno and his brother Richard, Counts Roger of Avellino and Richard of Acerra, even Princess Irene, the bewildered Byzantine widow of the last Duke of Apulia—were accused of complicity in the plot, and sent off under close guard to captivity in Germany.

How much truth, if any, was there in these charges? Several chroniclers, particularly those writing in Italy such as Richard of S. Germano, categorically deny that there was ever a plot at all; for them the whole story was merely a pretext by which Henry could rid his new kingdom of all undesirable and potentially subversive elements. The idea is not impossible; no one who has followed the course of the Emperor's stormy career can doubt that he would have been fully capable of such conduct had it suited him. But if not out of character with Henry himself, it still runs contrary to the whole policy which we find him pursuing towards his new kingdom. Everywhere except in Salerno—where he had good reason for resentment —we find him in a merciful and conciliatory mood, a phenomenon rare enough, where he was concerned, to be in itself remarkable; and it is unlikely that he would have switched overnight from conciliation to repression without good reason. What is in the highest degree improbable is that, given the unpopularity of the Germans and the Sicilian
penchant
for intrigue, the possibility of a
coup d'etat
was never at this time considered. If one was actually planned, several of those arrested would certainly have been involved, or at any rate aware of what was going on. They were lucky in that case to escape a more unpleasant punishment.

Or some of them were. Others proved less fortunate than they had supposed. Two or three years later, following further insurrections in Sicily and on the mainland, many of these prisoners were blinded by order of the Emperor—despite the fact that having been in captivity since 1194 they could have played no part in the more recent disturbances. By then, with the whole Kingdom trembling under a reign of terror more violent than anything known under the Normans, few of its subjects can have cherished any illusions about the disaster that had befallen them.

But the story of Sicily after the Hautevilles are gone has no part in this book. It remains only to record the fate, in so far as we know it, of the last pale representatives of that extraordinary clan that had burst forth so dazzlingly across three continents, only to peter out in less than two centuries with the spectacle of a sad, frightened woman and her children. Sibylla, after five years or so of tolerable captivity with her three daughters in the convent of Hohenburg in Alsace, was eventually released to live out her remaining days in the obscurity she should never have left. Her daughter-in-law Irene, on the other hand, had a very different future awaiting her. In May 1197 she married Henry's brother, Philip of Swabia, and the following year became in her turn Empress of the West.

As for William III himself, his end remains a mystery. According to one theory he too was blinded and castrated in a German prison by order of Henry VI; another story—which does not necessarily contradict the first—relates that he was set free and became a monk. The only fact of which we can be reasonably sure is that, captive or cloistered, he did not long survive. Before the turn of the century he was dead, still hardly out of his boyhood—but the time and place of his death are unrecorded.

And what, finally, of Constance ? We have heard nothing of her since her escape from the papal escort and her hasty return to Germany in 1191. She—through no fault of her own—was the cause of her country's suffering, the ultimate justification for her husband's seizure of the Sicilian throne. Theoretically, where Sicily was concerned, she was the true monarch; Henry was merely her consort. Many people must have wondered why, when he invaded the Kingdom for the second time in the summer of 1194, his wife was no longer at his side; or why, on Christmas Day in Palermo, it was Henry alone who knelt at the altar for his coronation.

But there was a reason, and a good one. At the age of forty, and after nearly nine years of marriage, Constance was expecting a child. She did not put off her journey to Sicily on that account; but she travelled more slowly and in her own time, starting out a month or two after her husband and moving by easy stages down the peninsula. Even so, for a woman of her age and in her condition, it was a dangerous undertaking. The days and weeks of being shaken and jolted over the rough tracks of Lombardy and the Marches took their toll; and when she reached the little town of Jesi, not far from Ancona, she felt the pains of childbirth upon her.

Ever since the beginning of her pregnancy, Constance had had one fixed idea. She knew that both her enemies and Henry's, on both sides of the Alps, would do everything they could to discredit the birth, citing her age and the long years of her barrenness to claim that the child she was to bear could not really be hers; and she was determined that on this question at least there should be no possible room for doubt. She therefore had a large tent erected in the market square of Jesi, to which free entrance was allowed to any matron of the town who wished to witness the birth; and on the feast of St Stephen, 26 December, the day after her husband had received the Sicilian crown in Palermo Cathedral, the Empress brought forth her only son. A day or two later she showed herself in public in the same square, proudly suckling the child at her breast. The Hauteville spirit was not quite dead after all.