The Kingdom in the Sun (44 page)

Among the King's supporters only one casualty is recorded— Adenulf, the royal chamberlain, who was set upon and stabbed to death by one of Bonnellus's knights. The rebel side, however, was less fortunate; William's mood of clemency was past. Few of those who now fell into his hands escaped death or muldlation. And Matthew himself, blinded and hamstrung, was left to languish in his dungeon cell—in which, not long afterwards, he died.

13

THE END OF A REIGN

Civis
obit,
inquit,
multum
majoribus
impar

Nosse
modum
juris,
sed
in
hoc
tamen
utilis
aevo.

Gone is a citizen [he said] who though no peer

Of those who disciplined the state of yore . . .

Yet in this age irreverent of law

Has played a noble part.
                             

From Cato's funeral oration on Pompey, as given by Lucan,
Pbarsalia,
Book IX; quoted, according to Hugo Falcandus, by the Bishop-elect of Syracuse on the death of William I.

T
he
revolts in the Sicilian heartland and in Apulia were serious but short-lived. In the former, the danger lay not so much in any direct threat to the safety of the King as in the ominously confessional turn which events had taken. The two nobles primarily responsible, Tancred of Lecce and Roger Sclavo, had left Caccamo just in time and withdrawn to the south of the island, taking Piazza
¹
and Butera and deliberately stirring up the local Lombard
²
communities
¹
Now more generally known as Piazza Armerina—a name derived from the fortified camp—
castrum armorum
—built by the Great Count Roger I on the nearby Piano Armerino. As a town it is now best known for the ruins of a third-century imperial Roman villa, the so-called
Villa del Casale,
probably destroyed by William in 1161 and rediscovered only in quite recent years. The floor-mosaics of this palace have justly made it one of the most popular tourist attractions of all Sicily. Visitors to Piazza should not, however, overlook the lovely little priory of S. Andrea, a mile or two away to the north. It was built in 1096 by Simon, Count of Butera, cousin of Roger II through his mother Adelaide and probably—though Chalandon does not accept this—the natural father of Roger Sclavo.

¹
The past half-century had seen an enormous growth in the Lombard colonies originally introduced into Sicily by Roger I. Apart from Piazza and Butera, their principal centres were Randazzo, Nicosia, Capizzi, Aidone and Maniace. La Lumia, writing just a century ago, noted that the inhabitants of these areas still spoke a dialect more akin to those of North Italy than to normal Sicilian.

against the Muslim peasantry. The terror spread as far as Catania and Syracuse. In many areas the Saracens escaped massacre only by disguising themselves as Christians and taking flight; even when order had been re-established, few returned to their former homes.

On the mainland, too, the pot was back on the boil. Robert of Loritello, never inactive for long, had driven down into the Basili-cata—the instep of Italy—as far as Taranto and Oriolo; Andrew of Rupecanina was raising a similar revolt in Campania; Salerno, disloyal for the first time, had joined the insurgents; and now even Calabria, in the past the most reliable of all the King's dominions, had been aroused by the Countess Clementia—perhaps in revenge for William's treatment of her lover—and was taking up arms against him. Only a few barons in the entire peninsula had remained loyal— men like Bohemund of Manopello and the Queen's cousin Gilbert of Gravina who, despite their complicity in the plot against Maio, had recently been restored to favour.

But however desperate things might become on the mainland, Sicilian problems must be dealt with first; William could only appeal to Gilbert to hold the situation there as best he could with such forces as were already available, while he himself marched against Tancred and Roger Sclavo.
By
the end of April he was in the field. Piazza, after a few weeks' siege, was sacked and levelled to the ground. Butera, his next objective, presented a more formidable challenge. The rebels, hoping that the troubles beyond the straits might at any moment force the King to raise the siege, fought with determination—even consulting astrologers to determine the most favourable occasions for sorties and counter-attacks. Since William was able, through his own astrologers, to predict the precise moments they would choose and make his dispositions accordingly, this method seems to have done more harm than good; nevertheless, winter was already closing in before shortage of food, combined with growing discontent on the part of the civilian population, persuaded them to surrender the town in return for their own safe conduct into exile. William accepted their terms and let them go; but on the town that had betrayed him twice in five years he had no pity. By Christmas the proud pinnacle where once Butera had stood bore nothing but a heap of smouldering ruins.

After a pause in Palermo to keep the feast and to prepare for the coming campaign, the King crossed to the mainland early the follow-following March. As he pressed up through Calabria, the Countess Clementia and her family had retreated to their fortress of Taverna, up in the mountains due north of Catanzaro. They too fought hard, releasing quantitites of heavy barrels studded with spikes which trundled down the steep escarpments into the ranks of the besiegers, causing heavy and hideous casualties; but William's second assault was successful. The Countess's two uncles were executed; she and her mother were taken prisoner and sent back to an unknown fate in Palermo.

Henceforth, as on his previous campaign, the opposition seemed to disintegrate at William's approach. He himself showed no mercy. When his Great Chamberlain, the eunuch Johar, was caught in the act of absconding with the royal seals, he had him drowned on the spot. At Taranto, which capitulated after the shortest of struggles, he hanged all the supporters of Robert of Loritello that he could find— though Robert himself had already fled to join Frederick Barbarossa in Lombardy. Up through Apulia, across the mountains into Campania, everywhere it was the same story—quick surrenders followed by hangings, blindings and mutilations, occasionally commuted to the payment by a whole town or district of 'redemption money'—a compulsory imposition which, though it frequently ruined those upon whom it fell for many years to come, did much to replenish the King's own ransacked treasury.

Sometime in the summer he reached Salerno. Many of the elders of the city who had identified themselves with the revolt had disappeared; but the remainder came out to greet their King with every protestation of affection and loyalty. William would not listen; he refused point-blank even to enter the city. His betrayal by his own capital was the ultimate treason, and it demanded the ultimate penalty. And indeed Salerno would undoubtedly have suffered the same fate as Bari half a dozen years before had it not been for the intervention of two powerful protectors. The first was its patron saint, St Matthew, who according to Archbishop Romuald suddenly sent out of a clear and cloudless noonday sky a tempest of such fury as to uproot the tents of the entire army, including William's own, in their camp outside the walls. Thus, it seems, was the King persuaded of the divine displeasure that he would incur if any harm came to the city. The second advocate was the saint's namesake and a native son of Salerno, Matthew the Notary, who persuaded Sylvester of Marsico and Richard Palmer to intercede on behalf of his birthplace.

The combined efforts of the two Matthews had their effect. William contented himself with ordering a purge of all unreliable elements and hanging all those who were found guilty of conspiring against him. Salerno was saved.

But though the immediate danger was over, the damage done could never be entirely repaired. When, in the late summer of
1162,
William returned to Sicily, it was to find the island tormented and terrorised by confessional hatreds on a scale unprecedented in its history. He had left it in a hurry, knowing full well that many of those who had taken part in the Sicilian uprisings had not yet been brought to justice; and he had entrusted the task of tracking them down, together with the government of Palermo itself, to one of the palace Caids,
¹
a baptised eunuch called Martin. It had been a disastrous choice. Martin had narrowly escaped with his life when the rebels had stormed the palace in the previous year; his brother had been killed in the massacre that followed; and ever since that day he had nurtured a deep loathing for all Christians. Thus, on William's departure for the mainland the previous March, a veritable reign of terror had begun. Everywhere, those who had at any time plotted or even spoken against the King or his ministers were hunted down, and many an old score between Muslim and Christian must have been settled by a timely denunciation to the public investigators. Those on whom suspicion fell were subjected to various forms of trial by ordeal which, since survival was usually equated with guilt, could be relied upon to eUminate all undesirables, however tenuous the case against them. The local authorities, ordered to institute purges in all areas under their control, were too frightened to disobey. Redemption money was levied even in those towns and districts which had

¹
Cald, the Arabic word for master or leader, was the title given to the Muslim or originally Muslim administrative officials of the palace. In the Latin chronicles it usually takes the form of
gaitus
or
gaytus.

never wavered in their loyalty. Thus order was restored and the state coffers refilled—but at a heavy price. The respect which, despite every upheaval, the bulk of the local populations had felt for the central government was hereafter tinged with a new, unhealthy fear; and the harmony which the two Rogers had worked so hard to create between their Christian and their Muslim subjects was destroyed for ever.

Among the victims was Henry Aristippus. Falcandus claims that he had been party to the last plot and had forfeited any hope of a pardon
by
abducting certain ladies of the harem for his own delectation; considering Henry's age and record, it is hard to say which of the two charges is the more improbable. There is another, far simpler explanation for his downfall. He was a gentle scholar, suddenly swept up into a world of plot and counter-plot, of court intrigue at its most violent and vicious. His position in such a world was bound to make him enemies; and when it was time for those enemies to overthrow him they did so without a qualm, using weapons he did not understand and against which he had no defence. And so William's oldest friend and staunchest supporter shared the same fate as his bitterest and most unscrupulous adversary; like Matthew Bonnellus, Henry Aristippus ended his career in a dungeon cell, and never knew freedom again.

The crisis was past. In the space of a single year William had suffered the loss of his most trusted counsellor, murdered in a public street; of his own son and heir, shot by an insurgent's arrow before his very eyes; of much of his country's wealth and nearly all his personal possessions; and, not least, of his reputation and his self-respect. He had survived two major attempts to dethrone him— one of which had very nearly succeeded and had resulted in his being held a captive, with his family, in hourly expectation of death—only to find both his island and his mainland Kingdom in a state of open revolt. Here, surely, was the ultimate vindication of Maio's policies, however unpopular they may have been; one short year after the Emir's death, Sicily must have seemed on the point of disintegration. Yet only one more year had sufficed for William to restore his authority, together with a large part of his finances; and by the time