The Kingdom in the Sun (66 page)

The new Pope, Gregory VIII, lost no time in calling upon Christendom to take the Cross; and of the princes of Europe, William of Sicily was the first to respond. The fall of Jerusalem had shocked and troubled him deeply; he dressed himself in sackcloth and went into retreat for four days. Then he despatched Margaritus to Palestine, himself settling down to compose careful letters to his fellow-rulers, pressing them to devote all their energies and resources to the coming Crusade, as he himself planned to do.

It would be naive to suppose that William's motives in this were purely idealistic. Pious he was, but not so pious that he could not scent another opportunity of realising his old dream of eastern expansion. After all, there were precedents enough in his own family. In the First Crusade the Guiscard's son Bohemund had carved out for himself the Principality of Antioch; in the Second, his own grandfather Roger had emerged with an enormously enhanced reputation—and incidentally, a good deal richer—without stirring from Palermo. Might he himself not now turn the Third to equally good account? The time had come to take Ms rightful place among the councils of the West. In his letters to the other kings he was careful to stress the advantages of the sea route to the Levant over the long land journey across the Balkans and the treacherous passes of Anatolia. Henry II in England, Philip Augustus in France and Frederick Barbarossa in Germany were all encouraged to break their journey in Sicily, with promises of additional reinforcements and supplies if they did so.

Diplomatically William was in a strong position. Alone of European monarchs, he had a contingent already in the field. His admiral Margaritus commanded a fleet of only sixty ships and some two hundred knights, but all through 1188 and 1189, when for most of the dme he represented virtually the only organised resistance to the Saracens, he kept up a steady patrol of the coast which, thanks largely to his admirable intelligence system, proved effective out of all proportion to its strength. Time and again when Saladin's forces arrived at a port that was still in Christian hands, they found that Margaritus had forestalled them. In July 1188 news of the Admiral's arrival off Tripoli caused Saladin to raise the siege of Krak des Chevaliers and decided him against any attack on the city itself. The Saracens were similarly deflected at Marqab and Latakia, and again at Tyre. It was small wonder that during those two years the dashing young admiral, now popularly known as 'the new Neptune', acquired a legendary reputation throughout Christendom. His renown might have been yet greater and his command infinitely further extended had the Sicilians ever been able to raise the mighty army of which their King had dreamed; but suddenly his hopes of crusading glory were dashed. On 18 November 1189 William II died, aged thirty-six, at Palermo.

Of all the Hauteville rulers of Sicily, William the Good is the most nebulous and the most elusive. We know nothing of the circumstances of his death except that it seems to have been non-violent —Peter of Eboli's manuscript contains a picture of the King, surrounded by his doctors and attendants, dying peacefully in his bed
¹
—and about his life, short as it was, we are scarcely better informed. Hardly ever in his thirty-six years do we see him clearly face to face. There is a moment on the day of his coronation, when Falcandus gives us a brief glimpse of him riding through the streets of Palermo in the bright morning of his youth and beauty; another, even more fleeting, at the time of his marriage. For the rest we are thrown back on legend, or inference, or hearsay. It is sometimes hard to remember that he ruled over Sicily for eighteen years and occupied the throne for almost a quarter of a century; we are conscious only of a dim, if faintly resplendent, shadow that passes fleetingly over a few pages of history and is gone.

¹
Plate
27.
352

Yet William was regretted as few European princes have ever been, and far beyond the confines of his kingdom. Among the Franks of Outremer he had already gained, thanks to Margaritus, the renown he had always longed for, and his death was seen as a further disaster to the Christian cause. In Sicily and South Italy, the grief of his subjects was universal and profound. It was not so much that they feared the future—though many of them did so, and with good reason; the overriding feeling was regret for the past, for the peace and tranquillity that had marked his reign but might not survive it. As the Archbishop of Reggio recalled in his memorial address:

In this land a man might lay down his head under the trees, or under the open sky, knowing himself to be as safe as if he were in his own bed at home; here the forests and the rivers and the sunlit meadows were no less hospitable than the walled cities; and the royal bounty extended over all, ever-generous and inexhaustible.

But he spoke, let it be noted, in the past tense.

The orations and encomiums, the threnodies and the laments, to say nothing of the whole labyrinth of legend that grew up around the name of William the Good and still keeps it fresh eight centuries later in Sicilian folklore, would have been more appropriate to a Charlemagne or an Alfred than to the last and weakest of Roger's legitimate line. If few rulers have achieved so enviable a reputation none, surely, have deserved it less. True, the reorganisation of the government machine after the departure of Stephen du Perche may have allowed rather more scope to the feudal nobility than they had formerly enjoyed; certain of them, men like Robert of Loritello or Tancred of Lecce, were able to find an outlet for their ambitions in the King's service rather than in battling vainly against him. But be that as it may, what really kept the Kingdom's internal peace through William's majority was neither his wisdom nor his statesmanship ; rather was it a general revulsion on the part of the potential discontents against the unceasing violence of former years. The history of their land from its beginnings had been an almost uninterrupted saga of rebellion and revolt; and what, men suddenly asked themselves, had any of the rebels ever gained by their activities ? How many had escaped death, or mutilation, or a prison cell? Was it not better to accept the Hauteville domination as the political reality it was, and to concentrate instead on amassing the largest possible share of the ever-increasing national wealth? Suddenly, rebellion was no longer in the air; and for this William can take little enough of the credit.

Meanwhile, on the debit side, he has a lot to answer for. His reign did nothing to strengthen his country; instead it marked a return to the most dangerous and irresponsible foreign policy that any state can pursue—that of land-grabbing for its own sake, without consideration for political consequences. The fact that all William's attempts in this direction were ignominious failures, that time and again he emptied the national coffers on enterprises that brought him nothing but defeat and humiliation, can hardly serve as an excuse; nor can it be claimed that he was merely reverting to the policies of Robert Guiscard. Robert was an adventurer whose achievement was to create a dominion out of chaos; William was an anointed sovereign of an influential and prosperous kingdom, with moral duties to his subjects and to his fellow-rulers. One might, perhaps, have had a little more sympathy for him if, like the Guiscard, he had led his troops in person on these escapades; but he never ventured beyond the point of departure. To others would be left the ungrateful task of trying to satisfy their master's ambitions; he himself would withdraw once again to his harem and his pleasure-domes, and await results.
¹

On such a record alone William II must stand condemned; but that is not all. He must also bear the blame for the most disastrous decision of the whole Sicilian epic—his agreement to Constance's marriage. He knew that if he died childless the throne would be hers; and he had been married long enough to understand that

¹
Two of these pleasure-domes have lasted to the present day and are—just— worth a visit. The first and more important is the Cuba. Once set in an ornamental lake within the royal park—its main entrance is half-way up the wall—it later became a cavalry stable for the Neapolitan army and now stands in the middle of a gloomy barracks at No.
94,
Corso Calatafimi. Noble but now sadly neglected, its walls defaced with painted goalposts, one finds it hard to believe that this pavilion in its heyday provided the setting for one of Boccaccio's stories (Day
5,
No.
6).
Not far off, in the garden of Cav. di Napoli at No.
375,
stands another, smaller kiosk, the Cubula; and on the east front of the Villa Napoli a line of arcading marks the remnants of yet a third, the Cuba Soprana.

Joanna might well fail to bear him a son. True, he could always put her away and take another wife; but who was to say that his second marriage would be any more fruitful than the first? Meanwhile Constance was the Kingdom; and by giving her to Henry of Hohenstaufen he sealed the death warrant of Norman Sicily.

Handsome is—for monarchs even more than for their subjects—as handsome does. Youth, beauty and piety are not enough, and the record of the last legitimate Hauteville king is not an edifying one. Apart from Monreale—a monument to himself as much as to his God—he can be credited with only one real achievement: the fact that by his promptness in sending help to the Levant at the very start of the Third Crusade he was able, through the brilliance of Margaritus of Brindisi, to save Tripoli and Tyre, temporarily, for the Christian cause. As to the rest, he is revealed as irresponsible, vainglorious and grasping, lacking even the rudiments of statesmanship and quite possibly a coward into the bargain. His sobriquet is thus more misleading even than his father's before him. William the Bad was not so bad; William the Good was far, far worse. And for those who like to see a connection between sanctity in life and incorruptibility in death, this judgment was given a macabre confirmation when, in
1811,
their two sarcophagi were opened. In contrast to the body of William the Bad, almost perfectly preserved, of William the Good there remained only a skull, a collection of bones covered with a silken shroud, and a lock of reddish hair.

20

THE THREE KINGS

Behold, an ape is crowned!

Peter of Eboli

Shortly
before the Princess Constance left the territory of her future kingdom, her nephew had called a great assembly of his chief vassals at Troia and made them swear fealty to her as his heir and eventual successor. But not even William can have been foolish enough to imagine that her succession would be unopposed. Whatever his own feelings on the subject, the fact remained that to the immense majority of his people the Western Empire had always been the most persistent and dangerous of enemies. In South Italy, to which it had never renounced its claim, few could remember how often in the past two centuries one Emperor after another had descended into the peninsula to claim his due; but every town and village had its stories of the atrocities wrought by the imperial soldiery. In Sicily, where there had been no such invasions, the prevailing emotion was not so much fear as contempt—the contempt of a highly cultivated and intellectually arrogant society for the one European culture of which it had no experience or understanding. This attitude seems to have been already prevalent in the days of King Roger;
¹
and forty years later we find Hugo Falcandus writing to Peter, church treasurer of Palermo, of the terror felt by Sicilian children at the sound of 'the harsh stridencies of that barbarian tongue'.

This is not to say that Constance was left entirely without supporters. Walter of the Mill, for one, had backed her marriage from