The Kingdom in the Sun

SUMMARY:
In 1016, a rebel Lombard lord appealed to a group of pilgrims for help -- and unwittingly set in motion "the other Norman Conquest". The Normans in the South is the epic story of the House of Hauteville: of Robert Guiscard, perhaps the most extraordinary European adventurer between Caesar and Napoleon; his brother Roger, who helped him win Sicily from the Saracens; and his nephew Roger II, crowned at Palermo in 1130. The Kingdom in the Sun vividly evokes this "sad, superb, half-forgotten kingdom, cultivated, cosmopolitan, and tolerant", which lasted a mere 64 years. It concludes with the poignant defeat of the bastard King Tancred in 1194, bringing to a close this extraordinary chapter in Italian history. With a comprehensive listing of all of Sicily's surviving Norman monuments, the result is a superb traveler's companion and a masterpiece of the historian's art.

THE KINGDOM IN THE SUN

1130-1194

JOHN JULIUS NORWICH

Faber and faber

This edition first published in 2010 by Faber and Faber Ltd Bloomsbury House, 74-77 Great Russell Street London

Printed by CPI Antony Rowe, Eastbourne

All rights reserved © John Julius Norwich, 1970

The right of John Julius Norwich to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

isbn
978-0-571-26044-7

For my mother

CONTENTS

Introduction

Acknowledgements

part one:

morning storms

1
    
The Cost of the Crown

2
   
Revolt in the Regno

3
   
The Imperial Invasion

4
   
Reconciliation and Recognition

part two: 

the noonday  kingdom

5
   
Roger the King

6
   
Enemies of the Realm

7
   
The Second Crusade

8
   
Climacteric

part three:

the lengthening shadows

9
 
The New Generation

10
 
The Greek Offensive

11
  
Realignments

12
  
Murder

13
  
The End of a Reign

part four: 

sunset

14
 
The Counsellors of Unwisdom

15
  
The Second Schism

16
 
The Favourite's Fall

17
  
The English Marriage

18
 
Against Andronicus

19
  
The Resplendent Shadow

20
   
The Three Kings

21
  
Nightfall

Appendix:

The Norman Monuments of Sicily

Bibliography

In
Sicily one might find, all within a few miles of each other, the castle of some newly-created baron, an Arab village, an ancient Greek or Roman city and a recent Lombard colony; in one and the same town, together with the native population, there might be one quarter of Saracens or Jews, another of Franks, Amalfitans or Pisans; and among all these various peoples, there would reign that peaceful tranquillity which is born of mutual respect. . . . The bells of a new church, the chanting of the monks in a new abbey, would mingle with the cry of the
muezzin
from the minaret, calling the faithful to prayer. Here was the Latin Mass, modified according to the Gallican liturgy; here, the rites and ceremonies of the Greeks; here, the rules and disciplines of the Mosaic Law. The streets, squares and markets revealed a marvellous variety of costume; the turbans of the orientals, the white robes of the Arabs, the iron mail of the Norman knights; differences of habits, inclinations, celebrations, practices, appearances: infinite and continuous contrasts, which yet came together in harmony.

I.
       
la
lumia,

History of Sicily under William the Good,
1867

Just
over sixty years ago, in the preface to his own history of the Norman Kingdom of Sicily, M. Ferdinand Chalandon—a writer, heaven knows, not normally given to excessive dramatisation— noted that an unhappy fate seemed to hang over all would-be historians who tackled the subject; naming no less than three who, as he delicately put it, had 'prematurely disappeared' before their work was completed. In
1963,
to a writer embarking on his first full-scale literary venture with an already distinct sensation of having bitten off more than he could chew, it was hardly an encouraging reminder; and there have been many moments in the past seven years when the end of my labours did indeed seem impossibly remote. It is therefore with more surprise than anything else that I now find that I have come to the end of my story.

This second volume of the Hauteville saga is self-contained, in the sense that it presumes the reader either not to have read its predecessor or, if he has, to have forgotten it. It does, however, take up the tale where
The Normans in the South
left off—at King Roger's coronation on Christmas Day
1130
in Palermo Cathedral—and carries it through to that other, blacker Christmas when the most coruscating crown of Europe was laid, by an English archbishop, on the head of one of the most loathsome of German Emperors. The sixty-four short years that separated those two events—less of a span than we have the right to expect for ourselves—constituted the whole lifetime of the Kingdom; they also provided the island with its golden age when, for the first and only time in history, the three great racial and religious traditions of the Mediterranean littoral fused under the southern sun and crystallised into that flashing, endlessly-faceted jewel that was the culture of Norman Sicily.

It is—or at least it should be—above all else the surviving monuments of this culture that draw us to Sicily today; monuments which miraculously translate the Hautevilles' political achievement into visual terms and in which Western European, Byzantine and Islamic styles and techniques effortlessly coalesce in settings of such magical opulence that the beholder is left dazzled and incredulous. I have therefore done my best to make this book not only an account of people and events but also a guide to these monuments. The most important of them I have described in detail, not in a separate and indigestible chapter but at suitable points in the course of the narrative, so as to relate them as directly as possible to their founders or to the circumstances surrounding their construction. The rest, graded according to the time-honoured star system and furnished with page references where appropriate, I have relegated to a list in the appendix. This, I like to think, records every item of Norman work worthy of the name still surviving in Sicily; it is certainly the most comprehensive one yet to appear in this country.

But the history of Roger's Kingdom is something more than a background to its works of art, however memorable they may be. It is also one of the tragedies of Europe. Had it lasted, had it succeeded in preserving those principles of toleration and understanding to which it owed its existence, had it continued to serve as a focus of intellectual enlightenment in a blinkered and bigoted age and as the cultural and scientific clearing-house of three continents, then ours at least might have been spared much of the suffering that awaited it in the centuries to come, and Sicily might have been the happiest, rather than the most ill-starred, of Mediterranean islands. But it did not last; and this book has had to tell not only of how it flourished, but also of its failure and its fall.