The Kingdom in the Sun (39 page)

Whether the Pope was deliberately intending to assert his feudal overlordship over the Emperor we shall never know. Unfortunately, however, the two words he used,
conferre
and
beneficia,
were both technical terms used in describing the grant of a fief by a suzerain to his vassal. This was more than Frederick could bear. If the letter implied, as it appeared to imply, that he held the Holy Roman Empire by courtesy of the Pope in the same way as any petty baron might hold a few fields in the Campagna, there could be no further dealings between them. The assembled German princes shared his indignation; and when Cardinal Roland, the papal chancellor, blandly replied by enquiring from whom Frederick did hold the Empire if not from the Pope, there was general uproar. Otto of Wittelsbach, Count Palatine of Bavaria, rushed forward, his hand on his sword; only the rapid intervention of the Emperor himself prevented an incident compared with which the misfortunes of the Archbishop of Lund would have seemed trivial indeed. When Adrian heard what had happened he wrote Frederick another letter, this time in rather more soothing terms, protesting that his words had been misinterpreted; and the Emperor accepted his explanation. It is unlikely that he really believed it, but he had no wish for an open breach with the Papacy at a moment when he was about to launch the greatest military operation he had yet undertaken—the subjugation of Lombardy.

The
bagarre
at Besancon, as anyone could have seen, was merely a symptom of a far deeper rift between Pope and Emperor—one which no amount of diplomatic drafting could ever hope to bridge. The days when it had been realistic to speak of the two swords of Christendom were gone—gone since Gregory VII and Henry IV had hurled depositions and anathemas at each other nearly a hundred years before. Never since that time had their respective successors been able to look upon themselves as two different sides of the same coin. Each must now claim the supremacy, and defend it as necessary against the other. When this involved the confrontation of characters as strong as those of Adrian and Frederick, flash-point could never be far off. Yet the root of the trouble lay less in their personalities than in the institutions they represented. While the two of them lived, relations between them—exacerbated by a host of petty slights both real and imagined—became even more strained; but it was only after their deaths that the conflict was to emerge into open war.

If, however, Frederick had put the doctrine of the two swords behind him, there was another eleventh-century concept of Empire which he still stubbornly refused to outgrow. During his first passage through North Italy on the way to his coronation he had been appalled by the spirit of independence and freedom among the Lombard towns, their blatant republicanism and their lack of any respect for his authority. Pressed for time and impatient for the imperial crown, he had delayed there only long enough to make his presence felt and to leave the smoking ruins of Tortona as a mark of his displeasure. Since then he had had plenty of opportunities, notably in Rome itself, to gauge the strength of Italian communal feeling; but he still could not—or would not—understand. For him the Lombards were insubordinate; that was all there was to it. In July
11
58,
accompanied by the King of Bohemia and a huge army, he crossed the Alps to teach them a lesson.

There is, fortunately, no need for us to follow in any detail the fortunes of Frederick Barbarossa in Lombardy. A few of the towns had remained loyal to him and showed it; a few seized the opportunity offered
by
the presence of the imperial forces to turn them against their enemies or commercial rivals; others bowed, reed-like, before the storm with every intention of springing up again the moment it was past; one or two even fought magnificently back. But for us the interest of the campaign lies not in the conduct of the individual towns so much as in its effect on that latest and most unexpected newcomer to the Italian scene—the Sicilian-Papal entente.

The Treaty of Benevento proved to be of immeasurably greater significance than either William or Adrian could have known at the time. For the Papacy it inaugurated a new political approach to European problems—one which it was to follow to its own considerable advantage for the next twenty years. Adrian himself, though for some time afterwards he remained strangely hesitant as if unable to adjust to the new pattern, was at last brought to accept what he must always have suspected—that the Emperor was not so much a friend with whom he might occasionally quarrel as an enemy with whom, somehow, he had to live. His concordat with William gave him a powerful new ally and enabled him to adopt a firmer attitude in his dealings with Frederick than could ever otherwise have been possible—as the Besancon letter bears witness. It was a tendency that Maio and William were quick to encourage.

In papal circles, so radical a change in policy was bound to meet with opposition at first. Many leading members of the Curia— those, presumably, whom Adrian sent away to Campania before beginning the negotiations—still clung to their imperialist, anti-Sicilian opinions; and the news of the terms agreed had apparently caused almost as much consternation in the Sacred College as in the imperial court. Gradually, however, in the months that followed, opinion swung round in William's favour. There were several reasons. Barbarossa's arrogance was one, as shown at Besancon and confirmed
by
several other incidents before and since. Besides, the Sicilian alliance was now a
fait accompli;
it was useless to oppose it any longer. William, for his part, seemed sincere enough. On the Pope's recommendation, he had made his peace with Constantinople. He was rich, he was powerful; and, as several of Their Eminences could—if they wished—have testified, he was also generous.

And now, as Frederick Barbarossa set out to sack and ravage the Lombard cities, a great wave of revulsion against the Empire swept down through Italy. With it, too, there was an element of terror. When the Emperor had finished with Lombardy, what was to prevent him from continuing to Tuscany, Umbria, even to Rome itself? Soon, too, Frederick's victims began to appear—the widows and fatherless children, the refugees from the burning towns and devastated villages, the exiled mayors and magistrates; and, inevitably, the conspirators. All were looking, in their separate ways, for a centre of resistance, for some strong power able to focus their aspirations and ideals; liberty against domination, republicanism against imperialism, Italian against Teuton. And in the alliance forged between an English Pope and a Norman King they found it.

Throughout
11
58,
Maio had been working to strengthen support for Sicily within the papal Curia—with the invaluable help of Cardinal Roland, Adrian's Chancellor and most trusted associate, who had been the chief architect and was now one of the principal protagonists of the Norman alliance. Together they did their work well. In the spring of
1159
there occurred the first great counter-thrust against Frederick that can be directly ascribed to papal-Sicilian instigation. Milan suddenly threw off the imperial authority, and for the next three years the Milanese stoutly defied all the Emperor's efforts to bring them to heel. The following August, representatives of Milan, Crema, Piacenza and Brescia met the Pope at Anagni, a little town situated conveniently near the frontier of the
Regno.
And there, in the presence of envoys from King William— Maio may easily have been there himself—was sworn the initial pact that was to become the nucleus of the great Lombard League. The towns promised that they would have no dealings with the common enemy without papal consent, while the Pope undertook to excommunicate the Emperor after the usual period of forty days. Finally it was agreed by the assembled cardinals that on Adrian's death his successor should be elected only from those present at the conference.

Perhaps it was obvious already that the Pope had not long to live. While still at Anagni he was stricken by a sudden angina, from which he never recovered. He died in the evening of 1 September
1159.
His body was taken to Rome, and was laid in the undistinguished third-century sarcophagus in which it still rests and which can still be seen in the crypt of St Peter's. During the course of the demolition of the old basilica in 1607 it was opened; the body of the only English Pope was found entire, dressed in a chasuble of dark-coloured silk. It was described by the archaeologist Grimaldi as being that of 'an undersized man, wearing Turkish slippers on his feet and, on his hand, a ring with a large emerald'.

Adrian's pontificate is hard to assess. To hail him as the greatest Pope since Urban II is not to say very much; he certainly towers above the string of mediocrities who occupied the throne of St Peter during the first half of the century, just as he himself is overshadowed by his magnificent successor. Yet it remains difficult to see how Gregorovius could have written that his nature was always 'as firm and as unyielding as the granite of his tomb'. In the early days it certainly seemed so; but his complete
volte-face
after Benevento, however ultimately beneficial to papal interests, was imposed upon him by force of circumstances, and from that time on he seems to have lost much of the incisiveness that marked his early career. He left the Papacy stronger and more generally respected than he found it, but much of this success was due to its identification with the Lombard League—for which, in turn, he had the diplomacy of Maio of Bari and the wise statesmanship of Cardinal Roland to thank. And he failed utterly to subdue the Roman Senate.

He was Pope for less than five years; but those years were hard and vital for the Papacy, and the strain told on him. Before long his health had begun to fail, and with it his morale. He confided to his compatriot John of Salisbury, who knew him well, that the burden of the Papacy had now become greater than he could bear, and that he often wished that he had never left England. He died, as many Popes had died before him, an embittered exile; and when death came to him, he welcomed it as a friend.

Thus, in the three years separating the Treaty of Benevento from the death of Pope Adrian IV, a curious change occurs in the relative position of King William of Sicily on the European stage. The King himself remains at the still centre of this change. His Sicilian policies, framed and executed by Maio of Bari, continued constant, based as they were on the twin principles of friendship with the Papacy and opposition to the Western Empire. Never did he have any quarrel with the city-states or towns of North Italy, except when they had been bribed or otherwise cajoled into collaboration with his enemies. But, all around him, alignments were shifting. The Papacy, brought to its knees at Benevento, rediscovered a fact that its history over the past hundred years should have made self-evident—that its only hope of survival as a potent political force lay in close alliance with Norman Sicily; Frederick Barbarossa, impressed despite himself by the speed and completeness of William's victories over the Byzantines in Apulia and looking on him with undiminished hatred but new respect, decided on the indefinite postponement of his own punitive expedition into the
Regno
; and, as the supreme paradox, the Lombard towns began to see in the Sicilian monarchy—entrenched in feudalism and more absolutist by far than the Western Empire or any other state of Western Europe— the stalwart defender of their republican ideals, hailing its King as a champion of civic liberty almost before the dust had settled on the ruins of Bari.

But while William and Maio worked for the downfall of one Empire, they were themselves in the process of losing another. North Africa was rapidly slipping away. The rot had begun in the winter of
1155-56,
when Sicilian fortunes were at their lowest. At that time the Greeks were sweeping unchecked through Apulia. The Prince of Capua and his followers were seizing back their old patrimonies in Campania and elsewhere. In Sicily itself another band of insurgents was defying the central government from the heights of Butera. Meanwhile there was, living quietly in the capital, an old Sheikh from North Africa named Abu al-Hassan al-Furriani. Some years before, he had been appointed by King Roger as governor of his own city of Sfax, but being already advanced in years he had soon retired in favour of his son, Omar, in pledge of whose good conduct he had himself gone as a voluntary hostage to Palermo. Now, seeing the Kingdom menaced on three fronts and rightly surmising that it could not possibly fight back on a fourth, he wrote secretly to his son proposing an immediate uprising against the Sicilians. He was fully aware, he said, that he himself would probably pay for it with his life, but that was of no great moment; he was an old man, and for such a cause he would be happy to die.