The Kingdom in the Sun (10 page)

It was not just the renewed threat to the tranquillity of his mainland dominions that had roused Roger from the torpor into which his wife's death had sunk him; it was anger. He had never been a choleric man by nature, and even now he seems to have felt no deep resentment against the Prince of Capua. Although by ignoring his call for surrender the previous year Robert had remained a declared rebel, although as a sworn vassal of the King he had violated his oath of fealty, at least he had not compounded his offence by swearing a new oath only a few months before taking up arms again. But with the Count of Alife and the Duke of Naples it was different. Within the past year these two had knelt before Roger, placed their hands in his and pledged their allegiance. Rainulf indeed had gone even further, taking advantage of his kinship with a display of mawkish sentimentality which it must have been nauseating to recall. This was treason at its blackest and most shameless; and it would not be forgiven.

We should remember, in fairness to the Count of Alife, that he may have genuinely believed the stories of the King's death. Brother-in-law or not, however, he knew that he could expect no further mercy. He must play for time. Pope Innocent from his Pisan exile was maintaining the pressure on the northern sea-republics— especially on Genoa, whose men and ships, also promised for
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34, had still not arrived; while beyond the Alps the Abbot of Clairvaux was thundering from every pulpit against the schismatic Pope in Rome and his creature-King, vowing that he would never rest until he had launched a new Crusade against them. Even now, if the rebels could hold out long enough, they might still be saved. With his four hundred remaining followers, Rainulf hurried to Naples. Robert of Capua, ignoring the King's offers of a separate peace, accompanied him; and Duke Sergius, more fearful than either, received them with alacrity and began to prepare his city for a siege.

To the average observer of the South Italian scene in
1135,
possibly even to King Roger himself, the events of that summer must have seemed merely a continuation of the struggle for power which had been continuing almost uninterruptedly for the past eight years. In fact, from the moment that the King's three principal Campanian adversaries barricaded themselves in Naples, the whole complexion of that struggle was changed. Hitherto it had been fundamentally an internal, domestic issue, a trial of strength between a King and his vassals. The fact that that King was largely responsible for the continued existence of an Anti-Pope in Rome, and thus for a schism which threw the whole foundation of European political and religious stability into jeopardy, was incidental. No foreign state had actually taken up arms against Roger—unless we count a body of unpunctual and remarkably ineffective Pisan mercenaries—and when Lothair himself had made his long-awaited descent into Italy he had been able to see no further than his own coronation.

The retreat to Naples marks the point at which the leadership of the opposition to Roger passes out of the hands of his vassals and on to the international plane. Pope Innocent and Bernard had long since accepted that Anacletus could never be dislodged from Rome while the King of Sicily remained able to protect him. Clearly, Roger must be eliminated; equally clearly, the Emperor was the man for the job. And St Bernard made sure that Lothair knew it. Towards the end of
113
5 we find him writing to the Emperor:

It ill becomes me to exhort men to battle; yet I say to you in all conscience that it is the duty of the champion of the Church to protect her against the madness of schismatics. It is for Caesar to uphold his rightful crown against the machinations of the Sicilian tyrant. For just as it is to the injury of Christ that the offspring of a Jew should have seized for himself the throne of St Peter, so does any man who sets himself up as King in Sicily offend against the Emperor.

At about the same time a similar exhortation, though made for very different reasons, reached Lothair from a less expected quarter.

In Constantinople the Emperor John II Comnenus had been watching developments in South Italy with concern. The Apulian seaports—themselves until less than a century earlier part of the Byzantine theme of Langobardia, to which the Eastern Empire had never renounced its claim—were only some sixty or seventy miles from the imperial territories across the Adriatic; and the rich cities of Dalmatia constituted a temptation to a little gentle freebooting which, in recent years, Sicilian sea-captains had not always been able to resist. Other raids, on the North African coast, had indicated that the King of Sicily would not long be content to remain within his present frontiers and, if not checked, might soon be in a position to close the central Mediterranean at will. There was also some uncertainty about the Principality of Antioch, founded by Roger's cousin Bohemund during the First Crusade. Bohemund's son, Bohemund II, had been killed in battle early in
1130
leaving no male heir, and the King of Sicily had made formal claim to the succession. His South Italian responsibilities had so far prevented him from pursuing it actively; but he could be counted on to revert to the matter as soon as he had the chance, and the last thing the Emperor wanted was to find a Sicilian army digging itself in along his southern frontier. It looked, in short, as if Roger might soon prove himself a thorn in Byzantine flesh every bit as sharp as Robert Guiscard had been half a century before, and John was determined to stop him. In
113
5 he sent ambassadors to Lothair with promises of generous financial backing for a campaign to crush the King of Sicily once and for all.

On its way to Germany the Byzantine mission appears to have stopped in Venice to enlist the support of the Republic. Venetian merchants had also been suffering at the hands of Sicilian privateers; already they estimated their losses at forty thousand talents. The Doge was therefore only too glad to help, and promised a Venetian fleet whenever necessary. Meanwhile Venetian envoys joined the Byzantines to give additional strength to the Greek appeal.

They found that Lothair needed little persuading. The situation in Germany had improved over the past two years—thanks largely to the new prestige conferred upon him by the imperial crown—and his Hohenstaufen enemies had been forced into submission. This time he would have no difficulty in raising a respectable army. With it he would be able to reassert his authority in Lombardy and then, entering his South Italian dominions for the first time, mete out to the Hauteville upstart the punishment he deserved. After that he foresaw little trouble from Anacletus. The anti-Pope's last remaining northern stronghold, Milan, had gone over to Innocent in June, and the schism was now confined to the Sicilian Kingdom and to Rome itself. Once Roger were out of the way Anacletus would be left without a single ally and would be obliged to yield. It would be a fitting climax to Lothair's reign. He sent the Bishop of Havelberg off to Constantinople to carry his compliments to John and to inform him that he intended to march against Roger the following year. Then, with something akin to relish, the old Emperor declared a special tax on all Church property—to defray his own share of the costs of the expedition—and began to prepare his army.

For Roger,
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3 5 had been a bad year. His own illness, his wife's death, the resurgence of trouble in Italy just when law and order seemed to have been re-established—it was enough to make any man want to turn his face to the wall. But the year had at least ended more satisfactorily than it had begun; and the three ringleaders of the revolt, Robert, Rainulf and Sergius, by taking refuge with such unseemly haste behind the walls of Naples, had virtually admitted their inability to carry on the struggle without assistance from outside.

And yet, while there was still hope of this assistance, they refused to surrender. By now Robert of Capua too had lost his last chance of reconciliation. The King's patience was exhausted. A short time before, he had created his eldest son, Roger, Duke of Apulia and his second, Tancred, Prince of Bari, thus dispossessing the rebellious Prince Grimoald. That autumn he invested his third son, Alfonso, with the Principality of Capua in Robert's stead—a ceremony which was shortly afterwards followed by Alfonso's solemn enthronement in Capua Cathedral. The boys were still mere fledglings, Duke Roger only seventeen and Tancred a year or two younger, while Alfonso was barely adolescent. But all three were old enough to play their part in their father's grand design, and in this design there was no longer a place for powerful vassals outside his own family. At the end of
113
5, for the first time, every principal South Italian fief was in Hauteville hands.

All through that winter Naples held out. By the spring of
1136
there was serious famine. Falco records that many of the inhabitants, young and old alike, men and women, collapsed and died in the streets. And yet, he adds proudly, the Duke and his followers remained firm, 'preferring to die of hunger than to bare their necks to the power of an evil King'. Fortunately for them, Roger's blockade was never entirely effective; though the besiegers had cut off all access by land, the Sicilian navy never managed to achieve similar success in the sea approaches, with the result that both Robert and Sergius were able on separate occasions to slip away to Pisa for essential supplies. Even so, it is unlikely that Naples could have maintained its morale much longer had not Robert also made a hurried journey to Lothair's court at Speyer and returned, laden with imperial honours, to reveal that the Emperor was already well advanced with his preparations for the relief expedition.

Similar reports had already reached Roger, whose agents had left him with no delusions as to just how strong the imperial army would be. And so he too began to make his preparations, basing them on the assumption that the enemy force would be vastly superior in numbers to anything that he himself could muster. A Sicilian victory through force of arms would be out of the question; he would have to put his faith in guile.

It was high summer before Lothair's army was finally gathered at Würzburg. We have been left no very clear indications of its size, but a fist of all the great imperial vassals who were present shows that it must have been on a very different scale from the sad littie company that had set off with Lothair to Rome in
1132.
In the forefront were Duke Henry the Proud of Bavaria, the Emperor's son-in-law, and Conrad of Hohenstaufen, the old enemy and rival who had now made his submission and whom Lothair had confirmed in the possession of all his lands and honours in return for a promise to participate in the coming campaign. There followed an imposing array of lesser nobles and their retinues, of
Markgrafen
and
Pfalzgrafen, Landgrafen
and
Burggrafen
from all over the Empire, together with an ecclesiastical contingent which included no less than five archbishops, fourteen bishops and an abbot. By the third week of August they were ready to start; and on about the 21st, with Lothair and his Empress at its head, the huge army lumbered off southward towards the Brenner.

The Emperor was no more popular with the Lombard towns than he had been four years earlier, but this time the size of his following commanded respect. Inevitably there were occasions when his men had to draw their swords; but nowhere was progress seriously delayed. Near Cremona his army was swelled by a Milanese detachment ; there too he found Robert of Capua waiting for him. Early in February
1137
he reached Bologna, where he split the army into two. He himself proposed to continue through Ravenna to Ancona, and thence to follow the Adriatic coast into Apulia; meanwhile the Duke of Bavaria, with three thousand knights and perhaps twelve thousand infantry, was to press down through Tuscany and the Papal State, if possible re-establishing Innocent in Rome and assuring himself of the monastery of Monte Cassino, before meeting his father-in-law at Bari for Whitsun.

When, in the year 529, St Benedict had chosen a high hill-crest commanding the road between Rome and Naples as the site for the first and greatest of his foundations, he had inadvertently endowed the abbey with a strategic importance which its occupants, over the next fifteen centuries, would more than once have cause to regret. Later, as Monte Cassino grew in power and prestige, its geographical eminence took second place to its political; but for the Normans, ever since their earliest days in the peninsula, the monastery had always represented, both politically and militarily, one of the principal keys to the South. For Roger II, indeed, it was something more—a vital fortress, almost a buffer-state of its own, guarding the frontier which separated his kingdom from papal territory.

The monastery, for its part, had never found its position as a frontier fortress a particularly easy one. When in doubt, however, it had learnt to cast in its lot with the Normans. Thus it had been careful to remain on good terms with Roger's mainland viceroys, and though there had been a brief crisis a few months before when its loyalty had fallen—probably unjustifiably—under suspicion, the new abbot, Rainald, whom it had then been forced to elect was a staunch supporter of the King. When Henry of Bavaria arrived at the foot of the hill towards the middle of April, it was to find the surrounding countryside deliberately laid waste and the gates of the monastery barred against him. Henry had already had a rough passage through Tuscany. Pisa and certain other towns which had always remained loyal to Innocent gave him what help they could; but Florence and Lucca had been subdued only after a stout resistance, and Henry was still occupied with Grosseto when, at the beginning of March, Innocent—probably accompanied by St Bernard—rode out from Pisa to join him.