The Kingdom in the Sun (17 page)

PART TWO

THE NOONDAY KINGDOM

5

ROGER THE KING

Ma quando si acquista stati in una provincia disforme di lingua, di costumi e di ordini, qui sono le difficulta, e qui bisogna avere gran fortuna e grande industria a tenerli.

But when territories are acquired in regions where there are differences in language, customs and laws, then great good fortune and much hard work are required to hold them.

Machiavelli,
II 'Principe,
Book III

It
is not only to the historian, with all his advantages of hindsight and detachment, that the year
1140
appears as the watershed of Roger's reign. The King himself seems to have been fully aware that after ten years of bitter struggle—years which had brought him more than his share of disappointments, betrayals and defeats—his first great task was completed. At last his Kingdom was his own. Of those vassals who had resisted his authority, the most formidable were all dead, dispossessed or in exile. Fighting of a somewhat desultory nature would continue for a few more years yet, notably in the Abruzzi and Campania, where a clearly-defined border had yet to be established with the Papal State to the north. But this would be the primary responsibility of his sons, Roger of Apulia and Alfonso of Capua; they were old enough now to look after their own domains. And in any event the overall security of the Kingdom would no longer hang in the balance.

The way was clear, in fact, for the second stage of Roger's grand design. The country was united and pacified; now it must be given a constitution. Eleven years before, at Melfi, he had already imposed a great oath of fealty on the barons and leading churchmen of South Italy, setting out the broad outlines of both the political and penal systems by which he intended to govern. But
11
29 must have seemed a long time ago. Too much had happened since then—too many oaths broken, too many trusts betrayed. It was better to make a fresh start.

Roger spent much of the first six months of
1140
preparing his new legislation in Palermo. Since it was to apply with equal validity in all parts of the Kingdom, he might well have been content to promulgate it from his capital; but he did not do so. It was on the mainland that his vassals were the strongest, and there that they enjoyed the greatest freedom. On them above all he had to impress the binding force of his royal authority, and of the code of laws through which he meant to exert it. In July he took ship back to Salerno and at the end of the month, after a quick tour of his sons' recent acquisitions in the Abruzzi, rode in state through the mountains to Ariano,
¹
where his feudatories had been gathering from all parts of the South.

It is only just over a hundred years ago, in
1856,
that the two extant versions of the Assizes of Ariano were discovered—one in the archives of Monte Cassino and the other in the Vatican—and that their importance was first properly understood.
²
Infinitely more far-reaching, both in range and effect, than the oaths sworn at Melfi, they constitute a corpus of law which—though many are borrowed directly from Justinian—yet remains unique in the early Middle Ages, covering as it does every aspect of Roger's rule. Two particular features strike one from the outset. First, as befits so heterogeneous a nation, the King makes it clear that the existing laws of all his subject peoples shall continue in force. Except when there is a direct clash with the new royal ordinances, all the Greeks, Arabs, Jews, Lombards and Normans under his rule are to continue to live, as they have always lived, according to the customs of their fathers.

The second feature, which runs like a
Leitmotiv
throughout the

¹
Now Ariano Irpino.

²
Both texts are given in Brandileone,
II diritlo romano nelle kgi normanne e sueve del Regno di Sicilia.
The Vatican text is probably identical to that published by Roger at Ariano. That of Monte Cassino seems to be an abridgement, though it also contains certain later additions.

work, is the stress on the absolutism of the monarchy, stemming in its turn from the divinely-held power of the King. The law is the will of God; and the King—who alone may make and unmake it and stands alone as its ultimate interpreter—is therefore not only a judge but a priest. To question his decisions, or others taken in his name, is both a sin—sacrilege—and a crime—treason. And treason,
crimen majestatis,
is punishable by death. It extends over a wide and fearful range. It covers, for example, offences and conspiracies not only against the King's person but against any member of his Curia;
¹
it includes cowardice in battle, the arming of mobs, the withholding of support from the armies of the King or his allies. No other nation, no other legal code in mediaeval Europe conceived of it in such sweeping terms. But then no other European state, with one exception, cherished so exalted a theory of Kingship. That exception was Byzantium.

Byzantium—here was the key to Roger's whole political philosophy. The feudal system which prevailed in his mainland dominions belonged to Western Europe; the civil service that he had inherited from his father in Palermo and the Sicilian provinces was based largely on Arabic institutions; but the monarchy itself, as he conceived of it and personally embodied it, was Byzantine through and through. The King of Sicily was not, in the manner of his lesser brethren to the north and west, merely the apex of a feudal pyramid. Before his coronation, like the Emperors of ancient Rome and their successors at Constantinople, he had been careful to secure the agreement and the acclamation of his people; but by the ceremony itself he was imbued with a mysterious, charismatic essence which set him above and apart from common humankind. This remoteness Roger was deliberately to foster throughout his life. His biographer Alexander of Telese writes of how, despite the quickness and brilliance of his conversation, 'he would never, in public or in private, allow himself to become too affable or jovial or intimate, lest people should cease to fear him'. And when, three or four years later, we find him, in the course of diplomatic negotiations with

¹
The
Curia Regis,
from the reign of Roger II onwards, was the principal organ of central government. Its powers were considerably wider than those of a modern cabinet, since it had important judicial responsibilities, especially in matters of civil law.

Constantinople, demanding recognition as an equal of the Emperor of Byzantium—God's Vice-Regent on earth, Equal of the Apostles-it comes as no surprise.
¹

If this theory, though it is unmistakably and repeatedly implied in the legislation, diplomacy and iconography of the Sicilian Kingdom, is never quite set out in so many words it is probably because of the one overriding practical difficulty which it raised. Just where, in all this, did the Pope fit in? The question was never satisfactorily answered—a failure which does much to explain the curious duality which appears in all Roger's dealings with the Holy See. As a papal vassal he was prepared to do homage to the Pope as his lawful suzerain; as a Christian he was ready to show him all the respect that he considered due; but as King of Sicily, in matters affecting the Church within his own frontiers, he would brook no interference. His hand was admittedly strengthened by the hereditary right of the Apostolic Legation which his father had wrested from Urban II forty-two years before;
²
but, as we shall see, he showed in ecclesiastical affairs a stubbornness and self-will which went far beyond anything that Pope Urban or his successors were ever prepared to contemplate.

Those of the Ariano Assizes which deal specifically with such affairs tend to stress the King's role as protector of the Christian Church and of the individual rights and privileges of its representatives. Heretics and apostates—from, not to, Christianity—are to be punished by the loss of civil rights, and there are heavy penalties for simony. At the same time bishops are excused attendance in the public courts, and the lower orders of clergy are granted lesser exemptions according to their rank. All such measures would have found favour in Rome, but—and this point doubtless provoked a very different reaction—all could be countermanded by the King, against whose judgment or decisions there could be no appeal. And so far as Roger was concerned this power—let the Pope make no mistake about it—was derived not through any historic grant of

¹
 
The fact that Roger styled himself
Rex
rather than
Imperator
in no way weakened this claim.
Rex
was the accepted translation of the Greek
Basileus;
it is also, incidentally, used to describe the Emperor Nero on a mosaic in the Palatine Chapel.

²
The Normans in the South,
pp. 273
-4.

legatine authority; together with the right to the high canonical insignia—mitre and dalmatic, staff and pastoral ring—which the King wore on appropriate religious occasions, it stemmed directly from God Himself.

Similarly strict control was to be exerted over the feudatories. After ten years of defiance and insurrection they were at last quiescent, but they could not be relied upon to remain so indefinitely. What is interesting about Roger's legislative policy towards them, both at Ariano and later, is his attempt to accommodate an essentially western institution into a predominantly Byzantine political scheme. This meant, in the first place, establishing the maximum degree of separation between Throne and vassalage—a task which was further complicated by the fact that many of the Norman baronial families of Apulia had been in Italy for as long or longer than the Hautevilles and still saw no reason why the grandson of an obscure and impoverished knight of the Cotentin should arrogate to himself powers over them which seemed to exceed those of any other western monarch.

Here was another difficulty that was never entirely overcome, though Roger did his best in the years that followed to lessen its effects
by
renewing the grant of most of the existing fiefs. Thenceforth his vassals would hold their lands not by virtue of capture or early enfeoffment at the time of the first Norman conquest of Italy in the previous century, but by the King's grace and from the date of their new royal charter. Meanwhile the number, and therefore the power, of the knightly caste was further limited by turning it into what amounted to a closed order, almost like a separate civil service. Assize No. XIX, for example,
De Nova Militia,
lays down categorically that no man can be made a knight or retain his existing knighthood unless he comes of an established knightly family. Other ordinances warn all feudal lords and others—including churchmen— who have authority over townsfolk and villagers to treat them with humanity, and never to demand from them more than what is reasonable and just.