The Kingdom in the Sun (18 page)

Before leaving Ariano the King announced one further innovation—the introduction, for the first time, of a standard coinage for the whole Kingdom. The unit he had selected was to be called the ducat, named after his Duchy of Apulia, the first of that glinting stream of gold and silver by which, for the next seven centuries, so much of the world's wealth was to be measured. The prototypes, struck in Brindisi, seem to have been of disappointing quality—
magis aereas quam argenteas,
Falco cattily remarks;
¹
but they provided a further effective illustration of Roger's theory of Kingship. Typically Byzantine in form, they bear on one side a likeness of the King, enthroned, crowned and robed in full Byzantine regalia, holding in one hand an orb and in the other a long cross with double traverse. Beside him, his hand also on the cross, stands his son Duke Roger of Apulia, in military dress. The reverse of the coin is more significant still. Early Apulian money, minted in the reign of Duke William, invariably bore on the reverse a portrait of St Peter, to denote William's vassalage to the Holy See. Now those days were gone. The new ducats showed not St Peter but Christ Pantocrator. King Roger, they seemed to say, had no need of an intermediary.
²

Some time in the spring of
1140,
King Roger sent his friend the Pope a present of some beams for the roof of St John Lateran— which, like so much else in twelfth-century Rome, was sadly in need of repair. If Innocent took this gesture to mean that he would have no more trouble with the Hautevilles, he was mistaken; it was only a matter of months before the King's two sons, in the course of

¹
'More copper than silver.' The first golden ducats do not appear till 1284— in Venice, where silver ones had been current since 1202.

²
The contention, doggedly maintained in the eleventh edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
—the most recent edition has dropped the entry altogether—that the ducat owed its name to the inscription on it
Sit tibi, Christe, datus, quern tu regis, iste ducatus
(To thee, O Christ, who rulest this Duchy, be it given) is without foundation. On a small coin there would have been no room for such a legend, even in an abbreviated form. The only inscription on these earliest ducats, apart from the letters identifying the two portraits, consists of the letters AN.R.X.—
anno regni decimo,
i.e. struck in the tenth year of Roger's reign. They constituted a further challenge to the Pope, who naturally counted the years of the Sicilian Kingdom from his own recognition of it at Mignano in 1139. Another coin, worth a third of a ducat, was simultaneously minted at the
zecca in
Palermo. A particularly happy example of Sicilian enlightenment, it bears on the obverse a Latin inscription surrounding a Greek cross, and on the reverse an Arabic one reading 'struck in the city of Sicily
[sic]
in the year 535'—of the Hegira, i.e. 1140 A.D,

what they described as 'restoring' former Apulian or Capuan lands, were pushing up as far as Ceprano in Campania and the Tronto in the northern Abruzzi and making frequent disturbing inroads into papal territories. But the two brothers, one feels, were only flexing their muscles, occupying their time as energetic young Norman knights had always done and were meant to do. They probably enjoyed irritating the Pope, but they showed no real hostility towards him. Their father meanwhile, though allowing his sons a fairly free rein, seems to have been genuinely anxious to improve relations with the Church and to eradicate as far as possible the unpleasant memories of the past decade.

Although Innocent, still smarting from his defeat at Galluccio, was not to be so easily placated, his principal ally had displayed a quite astonishing capacity for
volte-face.
Already at the Salerno tribunal St Bernard seems to have decided that Roger was not the ogre that he had always made him out to be, and set about revising his previous opinions. It comes as something of a surprise to find the man whose diatribes against the 'Sicilian tyrant' had long been famous through every corner of Europe, beginning in
1139
a letter to his old enemy with the words:

Far and wide the fame of your magnificence has spread over the earth; what limits are there untouched by the glory of your name?
¹

The King, though doubtless secretly amused at the suddenness of the change, was always ready to meet his enemies half-way. Soon after Mignano, when the last obstacle to good relations had been swept aside, he wrote to Bernard suggesting that he might pay a

¹
Three years later, Bernard's friend and fellow-abbot Peter the Venerable of Cluny, like him an outspoken enemy of Anacletus—and therefore of Roger himself—throughout the years of schism, was to address to 'the glorious and magnificent King of Sicily' an even more impressive testimonial:

Sicily, Calabria and Apulia, regions which before your time were given over to the Saracens, or to dens of brigands and caves of robbers, have now— thanks to God, who aided you in your task—become the home of peace and the refuge of tranquillity, a peaceful and most happy Kingdom, ruled, as it were, by a second Solomon. Would that parts of poor miserable Tuscany might be joined, with their neighbouring provinces, to your Realm!

Book IV, letter
37

personal visit to Sicily to discuss, among other things, a new monastic foundation in the Kingdom. Bernard, still only fifty years old but worn out with exertion, ill-health and his own particular brand of hysterical asceticism, replied with apparently genuine regret that he could not accept Roger's invitation in person; but he at once sent two of his most trusted monks to Palermo to negotiate in his name. They travelled as part of the suite which accompanied Elizabeth, daughter of Count Theobald of Champagne, from France to marry Duke Roger of Apulia in
1140,
and arrived in Sicily towards the end of the year. The result was the foundation a short time later of the first Cistercian monastery in the South— almost certainly that of S. Nicola of Filocastro in Calabria.

The site chosen for this monastery may be yet another indication of Roger's policy towards the Church at this time. Though the Cistercians always inclined towards remote and secluded locations for their abbeys, there seems little doubt that St Bernard would have preferred somewhere in Sicily itself—not too far from the capital, where his abbot could keep a watchful eye—and perhaps exert a positive influence—on the ecclesiastical policies of the King. Roger, with the same considerations in mind, would have resisted any such proposals. However sincerely held his religious views, he retained an instinctive mistrust for the large, powerful monasteries of the mainland. Now that he had established a firm control over the Latin Church in Sicily he had no intention of seeing that control weakened by subversion from within. It was typical of him that during his entire reign he should have allowed only one major Latin foundation in Palermo itself—the Benedictine monastery of S. Giovanni degli Eremiti—and that he should have populated it with monks not from obvious sources like Monte Cassino or the great abbey of La Cava outside Salerno but from a small, relatively obscure community of ascetics at Monte Vergine, near Avellino. In taking this step the King made a considerable sacrifice; to have given S. Giovanni, with its superb location next to the royal palace and its huge endowments, to Cistercians or Cluniacs might have seemed a small price to pay for their favour; at once he would have been hailed as one of the most devout and generous monarchs in Christendom. It was a temptation that few Hautevilles—certainly not Robert Guiscard—could have resisted. But Roger was more subtle in his statesmanship. He had suffered too much from the Church of Rome and from St Bernard in particular. This time he was taking no chances.

S.
Giovanni degli Eremiti—
St
John of the Hermits—stands today as little more than an empty shell. Nothing now remains there to suggest that during the most brilliant years of the Norman Kingdom it was the wealthiest and most privileged monastery in all Sicily. It was founded in
1142,
and by the charter he granted it six years later Roger decreed that its abbot should serve
ex officio
as chaplain and confessor to the King, with the rank of bishop, and should personally celebrate Mass on all feastdays in the Palatine Chapel. He further laid down that in its cemetery—which still exists in the open court to the south of the church—should be buried all members of the royal family except the Kings themselves and all the senior officials of the court.
¹

The church itself, now deconsecrated, is surprisingly small.
²
It was built on the site of a much earlier mosque, part of which remains to form an extension of the southern transept. But the inside, despite the traces of tile and mosaic and fresco—and even of the stalactite ceiling of the original mosque—holds little interest for the non-expert. The fascination of S. Giovanni is in its exterior. Of all the Norman churches in Sicily it is the most characteristic and the most striking, its five vermilion domes—each standing on a cylindrical drum to give it greater height—bursting out from the surrounding greenery like gigantic pomegranates, in almost audible testimony of the Arab craftsmen who built them. They are not beautiful; but they burn themselves into the memory and remain there, stark and vivid, long after many true masterpieces are forgotten.

A few yards to the north-west there stands a little open cloister,

¹
This last decree was never generally observed. Nearly all the royal family were in fact buried in the chapel of St Mary Magdalen next to the old cathedral. When, forty years later, the cathedral was rebuilt the tombs—which included those of Queens Elvira and Beatrice and of four of Roger's sons, Roger, Tancred, Alfonso and Henry—were transferred to another chapel similarly named. This chapel still stands in the courtyard of the
carabinieri
barracks of S. Giacomo. Of the graves themselves, however, there is no longer any trace. (Deer,
The Dynastic Porphyry Tombs of the Norman Period in Sicily.
Cambridge, Mass., 1959.)

²
Plate 8.

with gently poised arcading supported on pairs of slender columns, built half a century later than the church and in perfect contrast to it. Sitting there on a hot afternoon, looking up now at the soaring austerity of the royal palace, now at the aggressively baroque campanile of S. Giorgio in Kemonia, yet always aware of those bulbous oriental cupolas half-hidden behind the palm-trees, one is reminded for the hundredth time that in Sicily Islam is never far away. And it is, perhaps, in the church and cloister of what was once the leading Christian monastery of the Kingdom that its presence is most keenly felt.

The confrontation at S. Giovanni degli Eremiti between Muslim East and Latin West is so striking that the visitor tends to forget the third essential strand of civilisation that made Norman Sicily what it was. In all Palermo there is no longer a single building whose exterior recalls Byzantium. Despite the number of senior Greek officials in the Curia, despite all the Greek scholars and sages whom Roger attracted to the court in the later years of his reign, the capital itself had never boasted an indigenous Greek population of any size. It was, first and foremost, an Arab city, scarcely touched by Byzantine influences in comparison with those regions in which Greek peoples had lived since the days of antiquity—regions such as the Val Demone in eastern Sicily or parts of Calabria, where to this day a Greek dialect is spoken in some of the remoter villages.