The Age of Chivalry (9 page)

1112
Roger II starts to rule as count of Sicily. He invades Puglia (1126) following the death of its Norman duke, establishes his authority in southern Italy, and is crowned king (1130).

1184
Constance, the posthumously born daughter of Roger II, marries Henry VI, son and heir to Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa.

The Salerno principality had enjoyed a long period of splendor and riches under the Lombards. Its subjugation by Robert Guiscard in 1077, along with the conquest of neighboring Amalfi, gave the Normans their biggest victory so far. The city of Salerno was southern Italy's greatest city and it became a focal point for the exercise of their authority. However, control of Amalfi proved elusive, with revolts and local dissidence only dying out after the duchy's final subjugation by the Normans in 1131.

In the late 1050s, shortly after Robert Guiscard's accession, Puglia seemed securely Norman but the Greeks retained control of much of Calabria, a region where cultural Hellenism ran deep. By 1060 Robert, together with his youngest brother Roger, had taken most of the Calabrian Greek cities, and they agreed to share power in the region. But Byzantium refused to give up without a fight, and the end of the year saw the arrival in Puglia of a large Greek army that then besieged Melfi. In 1061 the two Norman leaders were able to expel this Byzantine force, but the Greek army based at Bari posed a major challenge despite repeated Norman attacks during the late 1060s. Bari was the last outpost of Greek power in Western Europe, and following its seizure in 1071 Norman ambitions seemed uncontainable.

The island of Sicily's mixed population of Greek Christians, Arabs and Jews were ruled by Arab conquerors who, however, were quarreling with each other in the mid-11th century. Once again, the Normans took advantage of dissension among a ruling élite. Roger and Robert crossed the straits of Messina in May 1061, with Robert Guiscard having been invested with the (very theoretical) title of “duke of Sicily” when he became a papal vassal. After conquering and fortifying Messina,
their swift progress through eastern Sicily was eased by an alliance with one of the local emirs. But the Norman army was defeated at Enna, the formidable fortress at the island's center, and evacuation followed. Subsequent campaigns witnessed a deepening of the Norman presence on the island, and in 1072 both the city of Palermo and its military citadel fell to the army commanded by Robert Guiscard. Roger became count of Sicily under his brother's overall suzerainty and was to rule most of the island with the exception of Palermo and half of Messina, where Robert retained authority. Arab occupation nonetheless remained widespread, and Roger's subsequent successes over the local emirs at Trapani in 1077 and at Taormina in 1079 had to be supplemented by a systematic campaign of conquest that started in 1085. Syracuse only capitulated in the spring of 1086 after a year-long siege, and Sicily could not be said to be securely Norman until the fall of Noto in the island's southeast in 1091.

B
ELOW
The 12th-century Norman Castello di Venere in Erice, Sicily, is built on a sheer cliff face, an ideal situation for a defensive fortification
.

While Roger was consolidating Norman Sicily, his brother had been pursuing his ambitions across the Adriatic in the Greek-controlled Balkans. Robert Guiscard's army left Brindisi in May 1081, and the battle fought in October at Dyrrhachium against the Greek army led by the emperor Alexius ended in one of the greatest of all Norman victories. The prospect of a Norman being enthroned in Constantinople now seemed realistic, but at this crucial juncture Robert returned to Rome to support Pope Gregory VII, who was being besieged by the German emperor Henry IV. Robert's son Mark Bohemond conquered Thessaly but failed to maintain authority over the Norman conquests of 1081–82. Robert himself died in 1084 while attempting to restore Norman control in Corfu and Cephalonia, and Bohemond returned to Italy where he and his half-brother Roger Borsa were disputing the succession to their father. The island of Sicily was the jewel in what became the Norman's Mediterranean crown, and Count Roger's son, who shared his name, succeeded to the title in boyhood before assuming the reins of
government in 1112. Roger II then sidelined his Guiscard cousins who were facing baronial rebellions in their south Italian domains. Having given them military support, he received in return control of their Sicilian territories. Roger had inherited Calabrian territories from his father, and in a dramatic move he invaded Puglia in 1126 following the death of its Norman duke. Southern Italy was now his, and Roger subsequently gained the authority unique to a king. In 1130 there was a disputed papal election and Roger supported the rebel pope Anacletus II, whose emissary duly crowned him that year in Palermo. After Anacletus died in 1138 Roger captured the rival pope Innocent II, who then obliged him by confirming the kingly title in 1139.

The papacy's Sicilian association had been unusually close ever since Urban II appointed Roger I an apostolic legate in 1098. This gave the count the right to appoint bishops and collect church revenues in the island but, far from being a concession of its authority, the papacy saw it as a mere expedient. Arab emirs had ruled the island for centuries, and even under Roger II western Sicily's population was heavily Arabic. The Church therefore could not enforce Latin Christianity on its own, and the Norman rulers oversaw the new episcopal administration established at Palermo, Syracuse and Agrigento. Nonetheless, the papacy insisted that kings of Sicily were its vassals and that the office of apostolic legate, claimed by Roger II as his father's successor, could not be inherited. Still, Roger now had his crown, and popes agreed that Roger was “king
of Sicily, of the duchy of Apulia, and the principality of Capua.” In 1131 he established military control over Amalfi which, although part of Norman Puglia since 1073, had tried to retain some autonomy. In 1139 the duchy of Naples was incorporated within Roger's kingdom, which by now was a major European power.

Roger II's strategies had one consistent aim: that his kingdom should be run as a single and independent territorial unit. He might delegate some powers to feudal lords, but military service was expected in return. Furthermore, since Roger controlled the rights of inheritance to fiefs, he could bar vassals he deemed unsuitable. Only the king's courts, rather than those of abbots and counts, could try capital cases. Justiciars—judges appointed by the Crown—traveled into the remote southern Italian countryside to dispense Roger's justice. Baronial power remained significant on most of the mainland, but things were different on the island of Sicily and in Calabria. Since most of the island consisted of royal demesne land under direct government control, the king was also its landlord. A Norman bureaucracy controlled the towns' administration, the activities of their merchants and the organization of supplies. The monarchy also had extensive rights over salt production, while iron and steel manufacture was an exclusive regalian right. This gave Roger an unusually concentrated degree of economic power regulated by a civil service built on Norman foundations and supplemented by Greek and Arab influences.

The emperor Justinian's heritage was a major intellectual resource for Roger, since his jurists showed how rebellion against a divinely instituted ruler was a form of sacrilege. The emperor's law codes—the basis of Roman law—were circulated widely in 11th-century southern Italy, and they heavily influenced Roger's own code promulgated at the Assizes of Ariano in 1140. Notions of lordship, by now common in Western Europe, could also be pressed into service. In 1129 Roger assembled his barons at Melfi in central southern Italy and proclaimed a land peace at this
parliamentum
or gathering of nobles. This was a very Norman baronial endorsement of a feudal overlord. And the mixture of influences deployed to confirm Roger's rule did not end there. If he seemed like a Greek
basileus
or king to his Greek subjects, his Arab ones looked on him as the latest emir set over them.

Sicily's agricultural fertility and buoyant trade produced the revenues that enabled Roger to reign over the Mediterranean's most sophisticated courtly milieu. His monarchy also bribed on a grand scale—especially in Lombardy where Sicily needed the local towns to maintain their resistance to the encroaching German emperors. If Lombardy fell, it was thought that Sicily would be next. The marriage in 1184 of Roger's posthumous daughter Constance to Henry VI, son and heir to the German emperor Frederick I
Barbarossa, changed the political and military landscape of the central Mediterranean. Sicily and the empire were reconciled by a personal union between the dynasty of Sicilian Normans and that of the Staufen, although Sicily's Crown retained its independence within the empire. The marriage produced the emperor Frederick II, who inherited the abilities of both his grandfathers as well as their defining ambitions: Barbarossa's southward thrust into Italy and Roger's exalted notion of a supreme kinship.

Sicily's unusually polyglot nature meant that Roger's government had to issue its documents in Greek, Latin and Arabic if the king's will was to be understood. The cultural variety of his kingdom was further reflected in its ruler's harem, Saracen bodyguard and Arab chef. Muslim poets benefited from royal patronage, and Sicily was an important 12th-century center for the translation of Greek texts into Latin. Roger's chief intellectual interest lay in science, and he commissioned the north African Muslim al-Idrisi to produce the
Kitab Rujar (Book of Roger),
which aimed to describe the known world's natural resources
.

This disc is the preface to Muhammad al-Idrisi's world atlas, the
Tabula Rogeriana,
which was produced in 1154
.

Royal policy was, nonetheless, directed toward making Sicily culturally more Latin at the expense of its earlier Arab and Greek components, and Roger's aims were hardly multicultural. The king's smattering of Arabic helped him to negotiate trade agreements with the Fatimid rulers of Egypt, and he promoted some Muslims at his court. That patronage was, however, Roger's method of keeping the local Greek and Norman nobility in their place, and Muslims promoted to the highest levels in his service were expected to convert to the Latin church. Palermo's Palatine Chapel shows the Sicilian cultural mix: a Latin church design, a typically Arabic stalactite roof, and Byzantine mosaics that portray Roger as a new David returned to rule on Earth. He claimed to rule as God's own deputy within the Sicilian kingdom, and when attending major church services Roger was both dressed as a king and robed as a priest. On these high festivals he wore a tunic and dalmatic made of Sicilian silk. The king's mantle, just like his silk shoes and stockings, was deep red—a color evoking the purple worn by the emperors of ancient Rome and Byzantium. The royal tombs he commissioned made the same insistent point, since they were made of porphyry, the purple marble used by Roman emperors. Roger's calculated fusion of temporal might with spiritual authority was intended to inspire awe, and the zest with which he developed the iconography of power showed a typically Norman blend of wiliness and aggression.