The Kingdom in the Sun (13 page)
But who would perform it? The moment the question arose, the old imperial-papal rivalry flared up again as fiercely as ever. It was no good Lothair protesting that the first Apulian investiture, that of Drogo de Hauteville, had been by the Emperor Henry III ninety years before; Innocent quietly pointed out that Robert Guiscard owed his title to Pope Nicholas II. At last a compromise was reached—a tripartite ceremony, at which Rainulf received his symbolic lance at the hands of Emperor and Pope together, Lothair holding the shaft and Innocent the point. Henry of Bavaria, who had long chafed at what he considered the spineless attitude of his father-in-law towards papal pretensions, was outraged; and many of the German knights agreed with him. But Lothair cared little. He had saved his honour; that was enough. He was old and tired, and he wanted to go home.
As August drew to its close, he started on his way. At Capua, disagreeable news awaited him: Abbot Rainald of Monte Cassino, scarcely a month after his oath at Lagopesole, had been in contact with the agents of the King of Sicily. Innocent, with St Bernard's support, had seized on the opportunity to demonstrate his authority over Monte Cassino and had at once appointed, on his own initiative, a commission of two cardinals and Bernard himself to enquire into the canonicity of the abbot's recent election. It was several days before yet another compromise was patched up. On
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September, before a joint tribunal consisting of both the Emperor and the papal representatives—including St Bernard who, as always, took it upon himself to be principal spokesman—Rainald's election was pronounced uncanonical. The unfortunate abbot had no choice but to lay down ring and staff on the grave of St Benedict; and Wibald, Abbot of Stavelot, a tough Lorrainer who had accompanied the expedition from the start, was 'elected' in his place. We are not told by what means the monks were induced to accept so obvious an imperial nominee; but with the German army encamped at the foot of the hill they probably had little choice in the matter.
Lothair's health was now failing fast; and to all those around him it was plain that his days were numbered. He himself knew it as well as anyone, but he refused to take to his bed; he was a German, and it was in Germany that he wished to die. Rainulf, Robert of Capua and the Campanian vassals accompanied him as far as Aquino, the border of Norman territory. From there, leaving eight hundred of his knights to help the rebels to maintain themselves after his departure, he took the road to Rome; but before reaching the city he turned off towards Palestrina. For him there could no longer be any question of returning the Pope to St Peter's. At the monastery of Farfa he bade him farewell. Henceforth Innocent would have to fight his own battles.
Though he marched with all the speed of which his dispirited, half-disbanded army was capable, it was mid-November before the Emperor reached the foothills of the Alps. His companions implored him to winter there. The sickness was daily increasing its hold on him; it would be folly, they pointed out, to attempt a crossing of the Brenner so late in the year. But the old man knew that he could not afford to wait. With all the determination of the dying he pressed on, and by the end of the month was descending towards the valley of the Inn. But now his last remaining strength deserted him. At the little village of Breitenwang in the Tyrol he stopped at last; he was carried to a poor peasant's hut; and there, on 3 December
1137,
at the age of seventy-two, he died.
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Passing recently through Breitenwang and enquiring whether there was any memorial to Lothair,
I
was directed to a fair-sized house on which was fixed a plaque. It read:
Hier starb am 3 December 1137
Lothar II Deutscher und Romischer Kaiser
in den Armen seines Schwiegersohnes
Heinrich des Stolzen.
In Ehrfurcht gewidmet von
Frederick R. Sims London und Holzgau.
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RECONCILIATION AND RECOGNITION
Thanks be to God who has given victory to the Church. . . . Our sorrow is turned into joy and our mourning into the music of the lute. . . . The useless branch, the rotten limb has been cut off. The wretch who led Israel into sin has been swallowed up by death and thrown down into the belly of hell. May all those like him suffer the same fate!
St Bernard, on the death of Anacletus (Letter to Abbot Peter of Cluny)
During
the twelve years since his accession, Lothair of Supplinburg had proved himself to his German subjects a worthy occupant of the imperial throne. Upright, brave and merciful according to the standards of his time, he had brought back peace to a land riven with civil war; jealous as he was of his imperial prerogatives, he was also a genuinely pious man who had worked hard to heal the schism within the Church; and he left his compatriots happier and more prosperous than he had found them. Once south of the Alps, however, he seemed to lose his touch. Italy to him was a strange and foreign land; its people he mistrusted and misunderstood. Ever unable to make up his mind whether his principal task was to restore the rightful Pope or to crush the King of Sicily, he failed in both; and the indecision produced in him a state of general insecurity which led him to veer between uncharacteristic excesses of cruelty on the one hand and dangerous errors of omission on the other.
Above all, he never realised till it was too late that his show of strength through the mainland dominions of the King of Sicily was nothing but a piece of empty shadow-boxing; and that the only way of bringing Roger under control was by exterminating him altogether. Had he thrown all his strength, at the very outset, into an amphibious attack on Palermo, he might—just possibly— have succeeded; but by the time he learnt this lesson his army was in a state of near mutiny, the Pope was becoming more of an antagonist than an ally, and he himself, worn out by his exertions, the South Italian climate and his own swiftly encroaching disease, was a dying man.
It was less than three months after the imperial part} left Monte Cassino that the Empress Richenza closed her husband's eyes in death; yet already by that time Roger had regained control of a large part of his territory. There could be no more conclusive justification of his policy over the past year. He was welcomed at Salerno when he arrived there at the beginning of October; and as he swept up through Campania scarcely a hand was lifted against him—though his newly-arrived Saracen regiments left a trail of death and destruction in their wake. Capua suffered worst. Prince Robert was away in Apulia but his city, if we are to believe Falco, was seized as if by a furious tempest and depopulated by fire and the sword. 'The King,' he goes on, 'commanded that the city should he totally despoiled . . . the churches plundered and stripped of their ornaments, the women and even the nuns brought to dishonour.' Falco, as we know, could not have written objectively if he had tried; but even after allowance is made for his hatred of the Normans it seems clear that Roger was bent once again on making an example of the rebel towns, just as he had after the earlier Apulian insurrection. Benevento he spared out of respect for its papal status; Naples too escaped lightly after Duke Sergius, for the second time in three years, had flung himself at Roger's feet and pledged his allegiance. Few adversaries would have forgiven a twofold treason such as this, but Roger was by nature a merciful man; he may have decided that after so long and arduous a siege the Neapolitans had suffered enough.
Had Sergius learnt his lesson? Would he have proved, in the long run, a faithful vassal at last ? There is no telling, for within a month he was dead. In the third week of October he accompanied the King to Apulia where Rainulf, determined to defend his new Dukedom, was busy forging an army. With the eight hundred German knights left him by Lothair, almost as many again culled from various local militias and with infantry in proportion, this amounted to quite a formidable force; Roger might have been better advised to avoid a head-on confrontation. Perhaps his successes in Campania had made him headstrong; possibly his anxiety to have done with this interminable rebellion may have clouded his judgment. His, however, and not Rainulf 's, was the decision to do battle —just outside the village of Rignano, at the south-western edge of Monte Gargano where it drops away two thousand feet to the Apulian plain.
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His, too, was the responsibility for the defeat that followed. His young son Roger, whom he had invested with the Duchy of Apulia two years previously and who was now fighting his first major action in an effort to regain it, showed himself a worthy scion of the Hautevilles, charging fearlessly into his adversaries and driving one section right back along the road to Siponto. The King, however, had meanwhile decided to lead a second charge. Just what happened we shall never know, but he was utterly routed. Falco gleefully records—though his account is nowhere corroborated —that King Roger himself was the first to flee. He made straight for Salerno, leaving Sergius, thirty-ninth and last Duke of Naples, dead on the battlefield.
At the time of the disaster of Rignano—-30 October
1137
—the Emperor Lothair had still five weeks to live. We must hope that news of it reached him before he died; it would have given him comfort. And yet, surprisingly, even Rignano did Roger little lasting harm. A few cities of Campania took advantage of his defeat to claim certain concessions which they might not otherwise have been granted, but all stayed loyal; and a day or two after the King's return to Salerno news was brought to him that Abbot Wibald of Monte Cassino, after just a month and a day in office, had fled in
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The view from Rignano southward over Apulia long ago earned the village its title of
Balcone delle Puglie.
The mediaeval castle into whose ruins many of the houses have been built is more or less contemporary with the events here described.
terror across the Alps. He had paused, it appeared, only long enough to emphasise to his monks that he was leaving for their sake rather than his own—a protestation which they might have been readier to believe had it not been for the King's well-publicised threats to hang him if he remained. From the safety of Corbie, his next abbacy, Wibald was to keep up a steady flow of invective against Roger for the rest of his life; but he never ventured into Italy again. In his place the monks wisely elected one of their own number, a man of staunch pro-Sicilian and Anacletan sympathies; and thenceforth the great abbey, while preserving its technical independence, became to all intents and purposes a part of the Kingdom.
Back once again in Salerno, Roger was able to take stock of the situation. All in all, he was not dissatisfied. His policy of non-involvement, of allowing the German momentum to burn itself out, had been triumphantly vindicated. The Emperor had come and gone; on his arrival he had seemed to carry all before him, but within two months of his departure there was little left to show for his efforts but an Apulian insurrection—of that old, dreary, endemic kind which Roger, his father and his uncles had all had to deal with countless times over the past century and which could, doubtless, be dealt with again. The Kingdom itself was no longer in peril. The toll in money and lives—apar: from the losses at Rignano, which need never have happened—had been minimal. Pope Anacletus was still lording it at St Peter's. Yet again, peaceful statesmanship had carried the day over brute force.
On the debit side, however, there was no denying that Roger's prestige had suffered a grave setback. Many of his less far-sighted adherents had been shocked by his passivity, which they had taken for cowardice; and his showing at Rignano, where he had probably hoped to redeem his reputation, had served only to confirm their suspicions. Moreover, though immediate danger had been averted, the undeniable fact remained that none of Roger's basic problems had been solved. The Sicilian crown was still recognised by no one but Anacletus; Robert and Rainulf, those two inveterate rebels, were still at large; while down at the very bed-rock of all the trouble, the Papacy remained divided.