The Kingdom in the Sun (45 page)

he returned to Palermo his grip on his country was firmer and more assured than ever it had been. A few months later, the prisoners in the palace dungeons made one more attempt at a mass escape as in
1161;
they failed, and the King closed down the palace prison for ever. With that single exception, his reign was never again troubled with sedition or revolt.

William was still young—a little over forty. He had shown himself to be a man of courage and strength, when these qualities were indispensable. But now that he could afford to relax he once more cut himself off from all the cares of kingship, leaving the government in the hands of a new triumvirate in which Henry Aristippus was replaced by the notary Matthew of Ajello, and old Count Sylvester—who died at about this time—by Cai'd Peter, that same slightly colourless eunuch who had made such an indifferent showing at Mahdia but who had now been promoted to the rank of Great Chamberlain of the Palace. Only one member remained unchanged—Richard Palmer, the still unconsecrated Bishop of Syracuse. Together, the three represented a wide cross-section of the King's subjects: the Italian-Lombard bourgeoisie, the Muslim bureaucracy and the Latin Church. Only two groups were pointedly omitted—the Greeks and the Norman aristocracy, who had if anything even less say in the government than before. But the importance of the Greeks was declining fast; and as for the Norman aristocracy, it had only itself to blame.

And so William, 'having given strict orders to his ministers to tell him nothing that might disturb his peace of mind'—as the reader may suspect, we have to rely largely on Falcandus for such knowledge as we have of this period—relapsed once again into his private world of ease and pleasure. But not altogether into idleness; 'for,' writes Romuald of Salerno, 'in those days, King William built near Palermo a palace of considerable height, constructed with superb artifice, which he called the Zisa;
¹
and he surrounded it with beautiful fruit-bearing trees and pleasant gardens, and with divers watercourses and fish-pools he rendered it delectable.'

The neighbourhood of the Zisa—out beyond the Porta Nuova to

¹
The word comes from
the Arabic
aziz
or magnificent. The earliest versions of Romuald's chronicle wrongly transcribe it as
Lisa.

the north-west of the city—is now a good deal less salubrious than it was eight centuries ago; and those centuries have also taken their toll of the building itself. Recently, however, it has been carefully restored and it remains, after the Royal Palace, the most splendid of all the Norman secular buildings left to us. The exterior is, undeniably, somewhat forbidding; in the twelfth century palaces were still designed to do duty as fortresses should the occasion require, and William's experiences over the past few years were not such as to encourage him to make an exception. Though the little square towers at each end and the gently recessed blind arches do something to lighten the structure, the general effect at first sight is more awesome than attractive; and the crenellations along the roof, cut into the original entablature during the fifteenth or sixteenth century and making nonsense of the great Arabic inscription that formerly ran the length of the facade, hardly improve matters.

But step now into the central hall of the palace. At once you are in a different world.
¹
Nowhere does Norman Sicily speak more persuasively of the Orient; nowhere else on all the island is that specifically Islamic talent for creating quiet havens of shade and coolness in the summer heat so dazzlingly displayed. The ceiling is high and honeycombed, the three inner walls set with deep niches, roofed in their turn with those tumbling stalactites so dear to Saracen architects. All around, zig-zagging in and out of the niches, runs a frieze of marble and multi-coloured mosaic, broadening out in the centre of the back wall into three medallions in which, against a background of exquisite decorative arabesques, confronted archers are busy shooting birds out of a tree, while two pairs of peacocks peck dates, with studied unconcern, from conveniently stunted palms. It takes no great effort of the imagination to picture the King in this lovely room, taking his ease with his wise men or his concubines, and gazing out into his sunlit garden, while from a fountain in the wall comes the soothing plash of water, trickling down a marble incline into an ornamental channel and thence to the vivarium outside.

But William never saw the Zisa completed. The finishing touches were left to his son; and it was William II who was to sum up what the building meant to him in the second magnificent

¹
Plate 17.

Arabic inscription, raised in white stucco round the entrance arch.
¹

Here, as oft as thou shaft wish, shaft thou see the loveliest possession of this Kingdom,

the most splendid of the world and of the seas.

The mountains, their peaks flushed with the colour of narcissus
...

Thou shalt see the great King of his century in his beautiful dwelling-place,

a house of joy and splendour which suits him well.

This is the earthly paradise that opens to the view;

this King is the
Musta'iz;
²
this palace the
Aziz.

Despite the restoration much remains to be done, both to the Zisa itself and to its surroundings, before it can once again live up to this description. The neglect of centuries cannot be repaired overnight, and an air of desolation still lingers over the bleak expanse where once the songbirds sang and the fish leaped lazily in the pools.

From this gentle afternoon of William's reign only one more monument remains—though it too may have been completed after his death. It is a room on the second floor of the royal palace, nowadays irritatingly and misleadingly known as the
Sala
di
Rugger
o;
¹
a small room that could almost have been described as unassuming were it not for the mosaics with which its vault and upper walls are so sumptuously encrusted. Like those of the Zisa—the only other secular mosaics that have come down to us from Norman days
⁴
— they are decorative rather than devotional; and the emotions they evoke are those of sheer pleasure. Here are scenes of the country-

¹
 
The central part of this inscription was destroyed when the original high arch was removed and replaced by the lower one which appears, surmounted by a French window, in so many of the older photographs. Now the original proportions have been restored; but the missing words are lost for ever.

²
The Glorious One.
The title was used only by William II, hence the dating of the inscription.

³
Plate 18.

⁴
I do not count the few odd traces still clinging to the walls of the
Sala degli Armigeri
in another section of the palace. This hall, forty-five feet high and topped by a stalactite ceiling of considerably greater interest than the mosaic, forms part of the Torre Pisana, and probably served as a guardroom for the Tesoro nearby. It is not normally open to the public, but enthusiasts should have no difficulty in obtaining permission to visit it from the office of the Soprintendenza ai Monumenti on the first floor.

side and the chase, Byzantine in their formal symmetry but Sicilian in their joyful portrayal of palms and orange-trees, and all radiant with a liveliness and humour that is wholly of the west. Here once more are the date-gobbling peacocks and the myopic archers, but now they have been joined by a pair of centaurs and a host of other fauna both probable and improbable, many of them with expressions on their faces that seem almost human—leopards consumed with guilt and suspicion, other peacocks frankly shocked, lions self-conscious, and two burly stags, affronted in both senses of the word, glowering at each other in innocent unawareness of the horrid fate that awaits them in the rear.

We have no documentary evidence to tell us about these mosaics, nothing but their style—and in particular their affinity with those of the Zisa—to help us to date them. No matter. What really counts in this enchanting room, this gorgeous bestiary in blue and green and gold, is the way it speaks to us, like the Zisa but far more loudly and clearly, of the happier and more carefree side of Norman Sicilian life; reminding us how, despite all the intrigues and conspiracies and rebellions that fill so many of these pages, the sun still shone through the forest and men still looked on the world around them, and laughed, and were grateful.

William the Bad ended his reign as he had begun it, leaving all the responsibilities of state to others while he enjoyed all the privileges himself. There is no suggestion that his conscience ever troubled him; not even the appalling earthquake of 4 February
1163
which shook all eastern Sicily, virtually destroying Catania and causing a large section of Messina to crumble into the sea, seems to have worried him unduly. After all, the western end of the island where he lived remained unaffected. In Palermo, the walls of the Palatine Chapel were still further enriched with mosaic and marble;
¹
the Zisa rose ever higher; the harem, the library and the game parks were constantly enriched for his pleasure. For him it should have been a happy time.

But it did not last. In March
11
66 the King was stricken with a violent dysentery, accompanied by fever. Doctors were summoned,

¹
See p.
75.

among them Archbishop Romuald, who had probably attended the famous medical school at Salerno during his youth and who certainly enjoyed a high reputation as a physician. Later, to explain his lack of success, Romuald was to claim that his royal patient refused to accept many of the medicaments prescribed for him. In any event, after languishing for two months, rallying and relapsing by turns, William died on 7 May
1166,
at about three o'clock in the afternoon. He was forty-six years old.

Even Hugo Falcandus, who loathed the late King and who, as we know, never hesitated to adjust historical truth to his own purposes, has to admit that William the Bad was genuinely mourned. The citizens of Palermo, he writes,

dressed themselves in black garments, and remained in this sombre apparel for three days. And throughout that time all the ladies, the noble matrons and especially the Saracen women—to whom the King's death had caused unimaginable grief—paraded day and night in sackcloth about the streets, their hair all undone, while before them went a great multitude of handmaidens, singing sad threnodies to the sound of tambourines till the whole city rang with their lamentations.

Despite energetic demands by the canons of Cefalù—where Roger's two great porphyry sarcophagi still awaited worthy occupants—it was agreed that William should be buried in Palermo; not even with his father in the cathedral, but more privately in the Palatine Chapel. No preparations had been made for an elaborate tomb; the body was laid in a relatively modest receptacle and consigned to the Chapel crypt.
¹
Twice since then it has been disturbed. The first time was barely twenty years after the King's death, when it was transferred to its existing sarcophagus—of porphyry, like his father's—and its present position in the sanctuary of Monreale Cathedral. The second was in
1811
when, after a serious fire in the building, the sarcophagus was opened. William's corpse was found to be in a remarkable state of preservation, the pale face still covered with that thick beard that had struck such terror into the hearts of his more timorous subjects.