The Kingdom in the Sun (9 page)

Spring turned to summer, and still the Pisan and Genoese fleets failed to appear. Their presence now was vital, less for strategic reasons than because nothing else could hope to restore the insurgents' morale. Finally a desperate Prince Robert took ship to Pisa, ostensibly to make a last appeal for help but also, one suspects, to save his skin; and Rainulf was left alone to face the oncoming army. The Count of Alife, for all his faults, had never lacked courage. Seeing that a confrontation with his brother-in-law could no longer be avoided, he now mustered all his men in preparation for a final onslaught. But he was too late. The Sicilian agents that Roger had managed to infiltrate into the neighbourhood were open-handed and persuasive; such of the local knights and barons as had remained at his side now suddenly began to fall away. Rainulf was beaten and he knew it. He sent messengers to Roger announcing his unconditional surrender and flung himself on the King's mercy.

Towards the end of June the two met at the village of Lauro, near Avellino. As the Abbot of Telese describes it, it must have been an affecting scene:

Falling on his knees before the King, he [Rainulf] first tried to kiss his feet; but the King raised him up with his own hand and made as if to kiss him in his turn. The Count stopped him, begging him first to cast all anger from him. And the King replied with all his heart, It is cast. Further, said the Count, I ask that thou shouldst henceforth esteem me as I had been thy slave. And the King answered, This will I do. Then the Count spoke once more: Let God himself, he said, be witness of those things which have been spoken between thee and me. Amen, said the King. And at once the King kissed him, and the two were seen to stand for a long time embraced, so that certain of those that were present were seen to be shedding tears for very joy.

Roger was plainly in a very different mood from that in which he had dealt with Tancred of Conversano and the Apulian rebels the year before; and in token of reconciliation he restored to Rainulf his wife and son—the causes, willing or not, of so much of the trouble. They seem to have been happy enough to return home—an indication that Countess Matilda's erstwhile desertion of her husband may have been less straightforward than at first appeared. There were limits, however, to the King's forgiveness. Those lands which had been part of his sister's original dowry remained confiscate; and Rainulf was further required to surrender all the territory he had won since the outbreak of hostilities.

The last enemy was Robert of Capua. He was still, so far as anyone knew, remonstrating with the Pisans for having let him down; and it was at Pisa that a royal messenger now sped to him with Roger's terms: if the Prince returned to Capua before the middle of August and made his submission, he would be confirmed in his possessions, saving only those which the King had captured in the recent fighting. Alternatively, if he preferred to remain absent, his son could be installed on the Capuan throne, with Roger himself acting as Regent on his behalf until the boy became of age. If, however, Robert were to continue in rebellion, his lands would be seized; his principality itself would forfeit its separate identity and revert to the direct control of the Kingdom of Sicily. He could take his choice. Receiving no answer, the King made his formal entry into Capua.

It was, the Abbot of Telese tells us, a great and prosperous city, defended not only by its walls and towers but also by the broad Volturno winding around its base, with scores of little floating water-mills moored along the banks. Now, however, it offered no defence; the King was welcomed in the cathedral with honour and—if we can accept the Abbot's word for it—with rejoicing. Afterwards he received Duke Sergius of Naples, a faintly ambivalent character in this story, who had always resented Roger's South Italian claims and had made no secret of his sympathy for the insurgents, but who had yet somehow managed to hold himself and his city aloof from any actual fighting. With Capua in the King's hands, Sergius found that he too had no longer any alternative but to come to terms. He too knelt before Roger, and swore him fealty and homage.

The revolt, it seemed, was over. A week or two previously the citizens of Benevento, after yet another internal upheaval, had thrown out Pope Innocent's representatives and declared once again for Anacletus and the King; at last, for the first time in three years, all South Italy was quiet. In each of those three years the autumn had been well advanced before Roger had been able to return home to his family in Palermo; in
1134
he felt free to leave by the end of July.

But if Roger appeared to have solved his problems, for the historian there is still one that remains unanswered. What happened to the reinforcements promised to the rebels by the great maritime city-republics of the north? Negotiations had been completed, prices arranged, dates fixed. The final agreement had been signed at Pisa, in the presence of Pope Innocent himself, the previous February and had been ratified by the rebel barons a week or two later. The hundred ships contracted for, fully manned, were to have arrived in March. Had they done so, the course of events in the summer of
1134
would have taken a very different turn. But they never appeared. What prevented them ?

Two of St Bernard's letters, written in
1134
to the Pisans and Genoese respectively, provide us, perhaps, with a significant clue. To the Pisans,
¹
characteristically using the Almighty himself as his mouthpiece, Bernard wrote:

He has said to Innocent his anointed, Here let my dwelling be, and I shall bless it. . . . With my support the Pisans shall stand firm under the attacks of the Sicilian tyrant, not shaken by threats, enticed by bribes or hoodwinked by cunning.

To the Genoese,
²
he made himself clearer:

¹
Letter 130.
               
²
Letter 129.

I have heard that you have received messengers from Count
[sic]
Roger of Sicily, but I do not know what they brought or with what they returned. To tell the truth, in the words of the poet,
Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.
¹
If you should find that anyone amongst you has been so depraved as to have held out his hand for filthy lucre, take prompt cognisance of the matter and judge him as an enemy of your good name and as a traitor.

Did the King of Sicily, in the early spring of
11
34, bribe the Pisans and the Genoese—and possibly the Venetians as well—to break their commitments and deliberately to delay the help they had promised to Robert of Capua ? We shall never be certain. We do know, however, that Sicily, with her unrivalled trading position and financial efficiency, was rich—richer for her size than any other state on the Mediterranean with the possible exception of Venice; and we know too that Roger was a consummate if tortuous diplomatist who always preferred buying off his enemies to fighting them and had long experience in the arts of corruption. St Bernard's suspicions of him may not have been charitable; but it is to be doubted whether they were very far wrong.

¹
1
fear the Greeks when they come with gifts. Virgil,
Aeneid,
II,
49.

3

THE IMPERIAL INVASION

So they embarked on a journey Into the land of Apulia.

This was the Prince's will.

The Prince's name was Roger

Whom King Lothair pursued To Sicily.

Lothair's
Kaiserchronik,
II,
17084-89

The
King who sailed back to Palermo in the high summer of
1134
must have been a happy man. Peace and order had been restored to South Italy, and now reigned throughout his kingdom. Though he had not yet managed to prove himself a general worthy of his Hauteville forbears, his courage on the battlefield was no longer in doubt. He was respected in Italy, by friend and foe alike, as he had never been before. The Emperor of Germany had returned across the Alps rather than take up arms against him; the Pope whom he, alone of all the princes of Europe, continued to uphold was still firmly established in Rome. He had done his work well.

But Roger's troubles were not yet over. Soon after his return to Sicily he fell dangerously ill. He recovered, but only to see his wife in her turn struck down, probably by the same infection. The Greek and Arab doctors of Palermo were among the best in the world, and at Salerno the King had at his disposal the foremost medical school of Europe; but their efforts were in vain. Some time during the first week of February
11
3 5, Queen Elvira died. She remains a shadowy figure, this Spanish princess who married Roger—in circumstances unknown to us—when he was twenty-two and shared his life for the next eighteen years. Unlike his mother Adelaide, she seems never to have involved herself in affairs of state; and she certainly never accompanied her husband on his campaigns in the manner of his aunt, the redoubtable and unforgettable Sichelgaita of Salerno. Alexander of Telese notes that she was renowned for her piety and charitable works, but there is no record of any monastic foundations or churches endowed by her; the abbot's words should probably be taken as being little more than the perfunctory tribute expected from friendly chroniclers on the death of a royal personage. The most moving testimony to her remains her husband's reaction to her death. He was broken-hearted. Now he retired with his grief, seeing no one but a few members of his court and
curia
until, as Alexander puts it, not only his subjects far away but even those who lived close to him believed that he had followed his wife to the grave.

Knowledge of his recent illness lent additional strength to this belief, and word of Roger's death spread quickly to the mainland. There could, at such a time, have been no more dangerous rumour. The King's eldest son was barely seventeen, untried in war or statecraft. In the hearts of Rainulf of Alife and of all the erstwhile rebels hope surged anew; they resolved to strike at once. The Pisans, after months of browbeating from Innocent, Bernard and Robert of Capua, no longer malingered, and on 24 April—thirteen months late—their promised fleet, carrying eight thousand men led by Robert himself, dropped anchor in the port of Naples, where Duke Sergius, effortlessly changing sides once again, gave it a warm welcome. News of its arrival decided the waverers. Within days Campania had reverted to its old chaos.

The history of Italy during the Middle Ages—and indeed beyond—is shot through with accounts of inconclusive wars; of tides of battle ebbing and flowing, up the peninsula and then down again, of cities besieged and captured, relieved and recovered, in a dreary struggle that never seems to end. To the historian they are tedious enough; to others they can be insufferable. Readers of this book will therefore be spared the minutiae of the campaigns that were necessary before Roger succeeded once again in establishing his authority.
¹
Suffice it here to say that the insurgents soon had

¹
Any who yearn for further information can find it, in relentless detail down to the last beleaguered citadel, in the pages of Chalandon.

cause to regret their precipitate action. For the first six weeks, assisted by continuing rumours of the King's death and the absence of any counter-indications from Palermo, they were able to make some minor advances; but Roger's mainland governors and the various garrisons under their command kept a firm grip on the country and blocked any real progress. Then, on 5 June, the Sicilian fleet appeared off Salerno.