The Kingdom in the Sun (12 page)

Unfortunately there were papal interests also at stake; and Pope Innocent was interested in one thing only—the removal, immediately and for ever, of Anacletus from Rome. This was the crucial issue, and Roger's apparent silence on it poses an intriguing problem. Did he really believe that he could draw Lothair into a separate

¹
The Normans in the South,
p.
74.

peace, and so persuade him to march back to Germany without taking any direct action against the and-Pope ? Or, for the sake of such a peace, was he by now prepared to leave Anacletus to his fate, and awaiting only some later stage in negotiations before overtly saying so ? Neither of these possibilities seems likely. Roger was too realistic a statesman to have made the former mistake, too clearheaded an ally to have contemplated the second. But there is a third explanation, which accords far more closely with what we know of his character and with subsequent events. It is that he had no real intention of coming to terms with the Emperor at all—that his purpose was simply to beguile Lothair with as tempting an offer as could safely be made and which only considerations of the papacy would prevent his accepting, thus putting the greatest possible strain on relations between him and the Pope.

And these relations were deteriorating fast. Innocent was not normally a difficult man. Though he came from an ancient and noble family of Rome—the Papareschi—contemporaries like Bishop Arnulf of Lisieux speak of his robust simplicity and the quiet modesty of his manner. He never raised his voice which, we are told, was gentle and pleasant. His private life was without blemish. Before he became Pope he had no enemies, and even afterwards no one was ever able to level any serious accusations against him. Yet behind this rather colourless exterior lay a fundamental stubbornness which, particularly when he had St Bernard at his elbow, made him incapable of compromise. He was determined to be reinstated in Rome before he died, but he was already nearly seventy and time was growing short. Meanwhile the imperial army, during the best part of a year in Italy, had consistently ignored or overridden him. While it wore itself out on cheap triumphs in the remotest corners of the peninsula, he was as far from the throne of St Peter as ever.

We can imagine the Pope speaking, quietly but forcibly, on these lines to Lothair when they met at Bari; and his words doubtless lent additional colour to the stories the Emperor had already heard from his son-in-law about Innocent's attitude at Viterbo, Monte Cassino and elsewhere. But these political and personal differences were themselves only reflections of a more ominous discontent, now making itself felt throughout the camp. The coolness which had long existed between the German army and the papal retinue was developing into open hostility. To some extent this may have been due to a natural antipathy between Teuton and Latin, or between men of the sword and men of the spirit; but there were other, more immediate causes. The climate of Bari is damp and enervating, its summers merciless; malaria was a constant scourge; and the month that the imperial troops were forced to spend besieging the citadel— the longest period that they had stayed in one place since the previous winter—had lost them both their momentum and their morale. Suddenly they seem to have woken up to the pointlessness and inconclusiveness of a campaign against an enemy who refused to come out and fight. If they were ever to force Roger into battle it would mean marching another several hundred miles in almost the opposite direction, passing through barbarous and increasingly hostile country and undertaking a sea crossing which, though short, would in the circumstances be both complicated and dangerous. It would also mean at least another year—and they had been away ten months already—separated from their homes and families. And for what? Just so that a bunch of haughty, endlessly complaining Italians could install themselves in Rome, another two hundred miles away and once again in a different direction, where it was quite obvious that they were not wanted and where there was a perfectly acceptable Pope already.

If Lothair ever in fact intended to march on through Calabria to Sicily—and it is far from certain that he did—this new mood in his army soon dissuaded him. Feudal law laid down precise time limits for the military service due from a vassal to his liege-lord, and not even the Emperor could force his men to go far beyond these limits against their will. After the capitulation of the Bari garrison— whose tenacity he punished by hanging a number of them from gibbets all round the city and flinging the rest into the sea—he decided against any further advance down the coast. Retracing his steps as far as Trani, he turned sharply inland. Perhaps the air of the Apennines would cool his army's temper.

It did nothing of the sort. Nor even, a few days later, did the satisfaction of capturing Melfi, the earliest Hauteville stronghold in Italy, and massacring three hundred of its defenders. By now the imperial camp had been thoroughly permeated by Roger's agents, who were working on the growing disaffection and backing up their arguments with liberal dispensations of Sicilian gold; and they actually succeeded, while the army was still at Melfi, in provoking some of the soldiers to take up arms against the Pope and his Cardinals with the intention of murdering them in cold blood. Lothair heard of the attack just in time; he called for his horse, galloped to the papal tents and somehow managed to restore order before any serious harm had been done. But it was an angry and resentful cavalcade that trailed off once more through the mountains.

At Lagopesole the Emperor called a halt. For a fortnight his army rested while, in the presence of Abbot Rainald and a delegation from Monte Cassino, the whole status of the abbey, including its relations with both Empire and Papacy, was subjected to exhaustive investigation. A full account of what took place—even if we were able to sift truth from falsehood in the distressingly unreliable chronicle of the monastic librarian, Peter the Deacon—need not detain us here; but the conclusions were clear enough. Rainald and his brethren were made to promise 'obedience to Pope Innocent and all his successors canonically elected', and to 'renounce and anathematise all schism and heresy', with particular condemnation for 'the son of Peter Leone, and Roger of Sicily, and all who follow them'. Only then were they received, barefoot, by Innocent and accepted back, with the kiss of peace, into the Church's bosom.

Lothair himself, who had strong feelings about the monastery's imperial status, may have been rather less satisfied than Innocent over the outcome of the Monte Cassino affair. But he could not risk an open breach with the Pope and probably wanted to make some amends for the incident at Melfi. Besides, news had just reached him of far more immediate interest. A Pisan fleet a hundred strong had appeared off the Campanian coast; Ischia, Sorrento and Amalfi had all made their submission. ThePisans had then tried to relieve Naples but,
finding
the Sicilian blockade too strong for them, had headed south and were now attacking Salerno, Roger's mainland capital.

Eager to give the Pisans every support—and also, one suspects, to be properly represented on the spot in the event of any further quick victories—the Emperor hurriedly despatched Duke Henry, with Rainulf of Alife and a thousand knights, to Salerno. They arrived to find the city already under siege by Robert of Capua, with whose help they had no difficulty in sealing it off completely from the landward side. Meanwhile the Pisans, having commandeered the whole Amalfitan fleet of some three hundred vessels, had been joined by a further eighty from Genoa. Their Sicilian opponents, with only some forty ships in the harbour of Salerno, were hopelessly outnumbered. The siege of Naples, which had now been dragging on for two years, was lifted in order to liberate all available fighting men and ships for the defence of the capital; but against a combined force of such proportions the defenders had little hope and they knew it.

Even now, with his Italian kingdom overrun and its very capital threatened, Roger himself made no move. His attitude, craven as it must have appeared, was in fact the only one possible. To have sailed out from Palermo at the head of a new army of Saracens would have been the action of a hero, but hardly that of a statesman; it would have invited a defeat from which, even if he had survived, he could never have recovered. And so he stayed in Sicily, leaving the defence of Salerno to his local governor—an Englishman, Robert of Selby.

This Robert was the first of a long line of his compatriots who, as the century wore on, were to travel south to take service with the Kings of Sicily. We know nothing of his early life; but in the years since his arrival he had clearly gone a long way towards earning the reputation he was to enjoy ten years later, when a contemporary English historian, John of Hexham, was to describe him as 'the most influential of the King's friends, a man of great wealth and loaded with honours'. He had been appointed governor in Campania only a few months before, and he now proved himself worthy of the King's trust. Salerno, throughout that disastrous summer, had remained unflinchingly loyal to its sovereign. Its garrison of four hundred knights was strong and in good heart; soldiers and citizens together were ready to defend themselves, and for three weeks they fought fiercely and with courage.

Then, on 8 August, the rest of the imperial army appeared over the mountains to the east, the Emperor himself riding at its head. Lothair had originally intended to leave the siege to his son-in-law; but the summer was creeping on, and the unexpected force of the city's resistance had caused him to change his mind. Events proved him right. To the Salernitans, his arrival meant two things; first, that in the face of such reinforcements they themselves could no longer hope to hold out until the winter, when they had counted on the Germans to withdraw; and second, that by a quick surrender to Lothair and a simultaneous request for imperial protection they might yet escape being sacked and pillaged by the Pisans. These views, eminently sensible as they were, were fully shared by Robert of Selby. Summoning the elders of the city, he told them so. He himself, representing the King over the entire province, could of course have no part in any capitulation; it would be a matter for Salerno only. Nevertheless, his advice to them was to lose no time in sending a deputation to the imperial camp to seek peace and protection.

The next day it was all over. Lothair, surprised, delighted and doubdess gratified by this new proof of his prestige, imposed unusually mild terms. In return for a war indemnity, the lives and property of all Salernitans were guaranteed; even the four hundred knights of the garrison were given their freedom. Meanwhile Robert of Selby, with a small picked force, had withdrawn to the high citadel above the city—that same so-called
castello normanno
that had witnessed the stand of Salerno's last independent prince against Robert Guiscard sixty years before and whose ruins can still be seen—where he intended to keep the Sicilian banners flying until the King himself should relieve him. When that moment came, he would at least find his mainland capital still standing.

The arrangement, in fact, was welcomed by all the parties concerned—except one. The Pisans were furious. Not only had they looked forward to rich plunder from a captured Salerno; they had also been relying on this opportunity to annihilate one of their principal trading competitors for years, perhaps decades, to come. To the Emperor they had been an indispensable ally, without whom the city would never have been won; to the Pope they had provided a refuge for much of the past seven years; and in return they had received nothing. If that was all imperial alliances meant, they would have no more of them. If the Emperor could make a separate peace with his enemies, so could they. One of their ships sped off to Sicily to make terms with Roger; the others turned sulkily home.

Pope Innocent was later to have some moderate success in calming the Pisans down; but to Lothair their defection was of no importance. His campaign was over. He was probably none too sure himself just how much lasting good he had achieved. He had certainly failed to crush the King of Sicily as completely as he had hoped; on the other hand he had equally certainly dealt him a blow from which he must have seemed unlikely to recover. Everything now depended on the arrangements that could be made to govern South Italy and fill the vacuum of power once the imperial army had gone. There were three possible candidates for the Dukedom of Apulia—Sergius of Naples, Robert of Capua and Rainulf of Alife. Sergius and Robert were already powerful princes, and he had no wish to strengthen them still further. The Count of Alife, on the other hand, despite—or perhaps because of—his kinship with Roger, had more reason to fear him than either of the others. Two-faced and slippery as he had shown himself to be on occasions, wherever his own interests were concerned he was brave and determined. Furthermore—though Lothair may not have been consciously aware of the fact—he possessed an insidious, persuasive charm which had in the past won over even Roger himself and to which, more recently, the gruff old Emperor had fallen an easy victim. And so Lothair had made up his mind. Only Rainulf, he had decided, could be trusted to hold the dukedom safe for the Empire. His investiture would be the last official ceremony of the Italian expedition, and would set the seal on the campaign.