The Kingdom in the Sun (33 page)

¹
It is a sign of Thomas's importance—and illustrative too of the polyglot Sicilian administration—that he should figure in the Latin, Greek and Arabic archives. Thus in
11
37
we find Roger II granting a charter to the monks of Monte Vergine
per manum magistri Thome capellani regis;
six years later, he is named as one of the adjudicators of a boundary dispute; while in
1149
he appears in the disguise of
 
Caid Brun, a member of the royal Diwan with a secretary called Othman.

²
Dialogus de Scaccario,
Stubbs,
Select Charters,
Oxford, 1870.

of the court. He was moreover a discerning patron of the arts and sciences and he has even left us with one work of his own, an 'Exposition of the Lord's Prayer', which, if not an achievement of any outstanding individuality, shows that he was admirably grounded in scholastic philosophy as well as in the works of the early Fathers of the Church. But above all Maio was a statesman; and it was he, rather than his master, who was to shape Sicilian policy for the first six years of the new reign. Stern, pitiless, unswerving in the pursuit of policies which he believed to be justified, he never feared unpopularity—indeed, there were occasions when he seemed deliberately to be courting it. In consequence, though he has been harshly dealt with
by
Hugo Falcandus and others, there can be no doubt of his political acumen. But for him, William would have been lucky to keep his throne more than a matter of months.

For ten years now the country had enjoyed internal peace, but many of the barons, especially in Apulia, were still unreconciled to the Kingdom; and memories of Roger's savage repression were beginning to fade. Others, who had decided to throw in their lot with the King, had gravitated to the capital in the hopes of obtaining power or preferment but had been disappointed. Roger's mistrust of his compatriots had lasted to the end of his life. These semi-literate Norman barons, arrogant, self-seeking, talking no language but their own, were hopelessly unqualified for positions of responsibility in a highly centralised state; and their record as vassals was not such as to encourage the granting to them of any large fiefs on the island. They had therefore been obliged to watch while Greeks, Italians and Saracens—men often of humble birth, and of races which they considered vastly inferior to their own—rose to eminence and distinction; and, as they watched, so their dissatisfaction grew. Roger, after years of struggle, had ultimately earned their grudging respect; but now that his iron hand had gone, the threat of further trouble could not be far distant; and both William and Maio knew it.

To know it, however, was not to yield to pressure. Maio had been trained by Roger; no one saw more clearly the danger of allowing any part of the Sicilian government to fall into the hands of the feudal aristocracy. He excluded them as mercilessly as ever, drawing his staff from men of his own class and background, the prosperous professional bourgeoisie, both Italian and Arab. Greeks he seems to have been less ready to employ in positions of high authority. Being himself an Italian from the largely Greek city of Bari, he may have been prejudiced against them from childhood; but in Sicily, as we have seen, their influence was now on the wane—Maio's own elevation to an office which had hitherto been a Greek preserve is a case in point, and cannot have increased his popularity among the Greeks of Palermo. Besides, relations with Byzantium were steadily worsening; and it is hardly to be wondered at that, in the circumstances, the Chancellor should have given preference elsewhere.

Meanwhile the immigration of able men from western Europe continued to increase, and with it the power of the Latin Church. Even more than the Norman aristocracy, its hierarchy had yielded to the magnetic pull of Palermo; by the time of William's accession, most of the Sicilian bishops and a good many of the incumbents of mainland sees were in semi-permanent residence at court. This absenteeism was later to reach such scandalous proportions as to require papal intervention; but at the time it aroused little comment and Maio, who saw the Church as one of his principal supports against the baronage, seems if anything to have encouraged it. It also brought to the capital a number of highly capable clerics, among them two more Englishmen destined to play vital parts in Sicilian affairs —Richard Palmer, Bishop-elect of Syracuse, and Walter of the Mill, formerly Archdeacon of Cefalù and later Archbishop of Palermo. But it led to the growth in the Sicilian body politic of an increasingly influential ecclesiastical party which could not fail to do the country harm. By its very nature this party was bound to be intolerant alike of Orthodoxy and Islam, impatient of the whole permissive structure on which the Kingdom was based. Already, in its hounding of Philip of Mahdia, it had dealt that structure its first damaging blow; in succeeding years further blows would follow until Norman Sicily itself, its political and philosophical foundations shattered, collapsed in ruins to the ground.

Thus, when William the Bad received his second coronation at the hands of Archbishop Hugh of Palermo on Easter Sunday,
4
April
11
54,
the formal acclamation of his assembled vassals might have struck a sensitive ear with a slightly hollow ring. But for the moment the vassals, discontented as they might be, could be kept at least partially under control. The immediate danger to the Kingdom came not from them but from its three old enemies: the Western Empire, Byzantium and the Papacy. It was William's misfortune that his reign should have coincided with the reigns of two Emperors of outstanding ability and the pontificates of the two greatest Popes of the twelfth century. It was his good luck that his enemies—who, united, would have been invincible—mistrusted each other even more than they feared and hated him.

To be sure, they had good reason to do so. The young Frederick Barbarossa, now about thirty-two years old, seemed to his German contemporaries the very nonpareil of Teutonic chivalry. Tall and broad-shouldered, attractive rather than handsome, he had eyes that twinkled so brightly under his thick mop of reddish-brown hair that, according to one chronicler who knew him well,
¹
he always seemed on the point of laughter. But beneath this easy-going exterior there lurked a will of steel, an utter dedication to a single objective. 'My wish,' he wrote succinctly to the Pope, 'is to restore to the Roman Empire its ancient greatness and splendour.' It was a conception that left no room for compromise, and, in particular, it ruled out the possibility of any real alliance with Constantinople. Since
1148
Manuel Comnenus had made no secret of the fact that he considered South Italy to be Byzantine territory. Conrad, who knew how much he needed Manuel's friendship, had been prepared to agree to a partition, and on his deathbed he had implored his nephew to pursue the same policy; but to the young Barbarossa such an idea was unthinkable. Barely a year after his accession he had signed a treaty with the Pope at Constance, by the terms of which it was agreed that Byzantium would be allowed no concessions on Italian territory; if its Emperor were to attempt to seize any by force, he would be expelled. The brief honeymoon between the two Empires was at an end.

To Manuel, Conrad's death therefore meant a good deal more than the loss of a friend and ally. Occurring as it did on the eve of the

¹
Acerbus Morena,
podesta
of Lodi, who with his father Otto was one of the first lay historians of North Italy.

great campaign that was to restore to Constantinople its long-lost Italian provinces, it also spelt a serious political reverse—just how serious, Frederick's behaviour was soon to show. But though Manuel quickly saw that he could no longer expect any help from the Western Empire, he was unaware of the precise terms of the Treaty of Constance and still believed in the possibility of some sort of Italian partition. One thing only was clear—that whatever he was to regain he would have to fight for. If, as seemed likely, the Germans marched against William of Sicily, it was essential that a strong Byzantine force should be present, ready to protect the legitimate rights of the Eastern Empire. If they did not, then he proposed to take the initiative on his own. When, therefore, in the early summer of
11
54,
he received ambassadors from Sicily offering, in return for a peace treaty, the restitution of all Greek prisoners and all the spoils from George of Antioch's Theban expedition, he refused outright. Such an offer could only mean that the new King was afraid of an imperial invasion; if he was afraid, he was weak; if he was weak, he would be defeated.

The mutual suspicions that divided the two Empires, together with their common hatred for the Sicilian Kingdom, were fully shared by the Papacy. Eugenius's successor, Anastasius IV, was old and ineffectual, concerned chiefly with his own self-glorification; but he did not last long, and when, in the last days of
11
54,
his body was laid to rest in the gigantic porphyry sarcophagus that had previously held the remains of the Empress Helena—transferred, on his own orders, to a modest urn in the Ara Coeli a few months previously
¹
— he was succeeded by a man of very different calibre: Adrian IV, the only Englishman ever to occupy the Throne of St Peter.

Nicholas Breakspear was born around
111
5
at Abbot's Langley in Hertfordshire, at that time a dependency of the monastery of St Albans. While still a student he had moved to France, and later— after a short and not particularly successful period as prior of
St
Rufus, near Aries—to Rome. There, thanks to his eloquence, ability and outstanding good looks, he had soon caught the attention of Pope Eugenius. Fortunately for him, the Pope was a convinced

¹
The sarcophagus is now in the Sala a Croce Greca of the Vatican Museum. Helena's remains, however, have disappeared without trace.

Anglophile; he once told John of Salisbury that he found the English admirably fitted to perform any task they turned their hand to, and thus to be preferred to all other races—except, he added, when frivolity got the better of them. Frivolity, however, does not seem to have been one of Nicholas's failings. Early in
11
5
2 he was sent as Papal Legate to Norway, there to reorganise the Church throughout Scandinavia. Two years later he was back again in Rome, his mission accomplished with such distinction that, on Anastasius's death the following December, the forceful, energetic Englishman was unanimously elected to succeed him.

It was a wise choice, for energy and force were desperately needed. At the time of Adrian's accession Frederick Barbarossa had already crossed the Alps to his first Italian campaign. On his arrival in Rome he would be sure to demand his imperial coronation; but even if he were to receive it, there was little likelihood that the Pope would ever be able to trust him as an ally. Indeed, with his known absolutist views, Frederick was unlikely to prove anything but a constant anxiety to the Holy See. Another, separate invasion was threatened from the Byzantine East. In the South, William I's Sicily might be going through a critical stage, but was still outwardly as strong and prosperous as ever. Worst of all was the situation in Rome itself. Encouraged by the tractability of Eugenius and Anastasius, the Senate had grown still more arrogant; meanwhile its position had been further reinforced, and the Pope's own spiritual authority dangerously weakened, by the teachings of a monk from Lombardy whose influence, skilfully built up over the past decade, had by now made him the virtual master of Rome.

His name was Arnold of Brescia. In his youth he had studied in the Schools of Paris—probably under Abelard at Notre Dame—where he had been thoroughly imbued with the principles of the new scholasticism, essentially a movement away from the old mystical approach to spiritual matters, and towards a spirit of logical, rationalistic enquiry. To the mediaeval Papacy, radical ideas of this sort would have seemed quite subversive enough; but Arnold combined with them a still more unwelcome feature—a passionate hatred for the temporal power of the Church. For him the State was, and must always be, supreme; the civil law, based on the laws of Ancient Rome, must prevail over the canon; the Pope, for his part, should divest himself of all worldly pomp, renounce his powers and privileges, and revert to the poverty and simplicity of the early Fathers. Only thus could the Church re-establish contact with the humble masses among its flock. As John of Salisbury wrote: