The Kingdom in the Sun (73 page)

In the following century it was to appear again, in a new guise but more refulgently than ever, when that son—Frederick—grew to manhood. Though history may remember him as Emperor of the West, he himself never forgot that he was also King of Sicily, the grandson not only of Barbarossa but of Roger II as well. He showed it in the splendour of his court, in his lions and his leopards and his peacocks, in the Italian and Arabic poets he loved, in his classicising architecture and his Apulian hunting-lodges, and above all in that insatiable artistic and intellectual curiosity that was to make him the first of Renaissance princes two hundred years before his time, earning him the appellation of
Stupor Mundi,
the Wonder of the World. He showed it too in 1215, when he brought to Palermo the two huge porphyry sarcophagi that his grandfather had installed seventy years before at Cefalù.

Two other sarcophagi, of similar material but vastly inferior quality, already stood in Walter of the Mill's cathedral. One was that of Roger II, specially prepared for him in the capital when he had been denied burial in his own foundation;
¹
the other was that which Constance had had made for her husband after his sudden death at Messina in 1197. This latter receptacle, however, was of poor

1 See pp.
160-1.

workmanship—closer inspection shows it to have been glued together from fourteen separate parts—and Frederick seems to have thought it unworthy of his father. He therefore transferred Henry's corpse, still overlaid by the long tresses of fair hair cut off by his widow in her grief, to one of those from Cefalù, replacing it with the body of Constance, who had survived her husband by little more than a year; the fourth sarcophagus—that which Roger had originally intended for his own remains—Frederick kept for himself.
¹
In it he was duly laid after his death in 12
5
o; but he was not long to retain sole occupancy. In the fourteenth century the tomb was opened to receive two more bodies—those of the feeble-minded Peter II of Aragon and an unknown woman.

Father, daughter, son-in-law, grandson—a natural enough group, one might think, for a family burial. And yet, in those massive sepulchres, silent under their canopies of marble and mosaic, the four lie uneasily together—the architect of the Norman Kingdom and its destroyer, the unwilling cause of the collapse and its ultimate beneficiary. Nor do any of them really belong. Henry, by the time he died at the age of thirty-two, was detested and feared throughout Sicily; Constance was seen—unfairly but understandably—as having betrayed her homeland. Roger, to be sure, was loved; but he belongs at Cefalù, where he had always wished to lie and where the setting is worthy of him. Even Frederick, who was only twenty when he ordered his tomb, would probably have later preferred a different resting-place—in Capua perhaps, or Jerusalem, or, best of all, on some lonely hilltop under the wide Apulian sky. But Frederick's story, superb and tragic as it is, belongs elsewhere; ours is done.

Sixty-four years is a short life for a kingdom; and indeed Sicily might have been saved had William II—his sobriquet is better forgotten—shown himself either sensible or fertile. Instead, to serve the interests of a vain, aggressive ambition, he made a present of it to its oldest and most persistent enemy—an enemy against whom every one of his predecessors from the days of Robert Guiscard onwards had successively fought to defend it. Thus, when the

¹
Such, at least, are the conclusions drawn, after brillianr detective work, by J. Deer.
{The
Dynastic
Porphyry
Tombs
of
the
Norman
Period
in
Sicily.)

Kingdom fell, it was not even properly defeated; it was thrown away.

And yet, even if Henry VI had never marched to claim his inheritance, it could not have lasted for long. A monarchy so absolute, so centralised, as that created by the two Rogers must depend for its survival on the personality of the monarch; and the decline of the Kingdom only reflects the decline of the Hautevilles themselves. As each generation gave way to the next, it was as though the cold Norman steel were slowly softening, the rich Norman blood growing thinner and more sluggish under the Sicilian sun. At last, with Tancred, saved by his bastardy from the oriental effeteness of the court at Palermo, the old vigour returned. But it was too late. Sicily was lost.

Perhaps, from the start, it carried within itself the seeds of its own destruction. It was too heterogeneous, too eclectic, too cosmopolitan. It failed—indeed, it hardly tried—to develop any national traditions of its own. Patriotism is an overrated and potentially dangerous emotion, but it is indispensable to a nation righting for its life; and when the crisis came, there was not enough of it to carry the Kingdom through. Norman and Lombard, Greek and Saracen, Italian and Jew —Sicily had proved that for as long as they enjoyed an enlightened and impartial government, they could happily coexist; they could not coalesce.

Yet, if the Kingdom died the victim of its ideals, those ideals were surely worth dying for. Inevitably in the last years, with the slow sickening of the body politic, the status of the religious and racial minorities began to decline. But nations should be judged on their achievements rather than on their lapses, and to the very end Norman Sicily stood forth in Europe—and indeed in the whole bigoted mediaeval world—as an example of tolerance and enlightenment, a lesson in the respect that every man should feel for those whose blood and beliefs happen to differ from his own. Europe, alas, was ungrateful and the Kingdom perished; but not before it had been rewarded by a sunburst of brilliance and beauty that blazes undimmed down the centuries and still speaks its message as clearly as ever. That message is to be read in the Palatine Chapel, when the great Islamic roof seems itself to glow gold with the reflected radiance of Byzantium; in the swell of the five crimson cupolas above the little cloister of St John of the Hermits; in a little garden outside Castelvetrano, where SS. Trinita di Delia stands lonely and immaculate in the afternoon sun; in the all-embracing Pantocrators of Monreale and Cefalù; and in the swirling Arabic calligraphy of George of Antioch's childhood hymn to the Virgin as it twines mistily round the dome of the Martorana while, far below, Latin fuses with Greek in another, simpler inscription, proud and unadorned:
rogerios
rex.

THE NORMAN MONUMENTS OF SICILY

A complete list of all the Norman buildings still extant in Sicily is not easy to draw up. Hardly any of them has escaped the attention of restorers or rebuilders at some time or another, often to the point where—as in the outside of the Martorana or the inside of Palermo Cathedral—the original character has been completely lost. I have also ruefully to admit that there remain a few places on the list which I have not visited myself. Usually the invaluable guidebook of the
Touring Club d'ltalia
has been able to help me out, but in one or two cases I have had to rely on sketchier and less authoritative accounts. For the sake of completeness, too, I have added four items —identified with a question mark—which may be wholly or partly of Norman origin but can only be classified as doubtful. For the remainder I have adopted the following categories:

***The loveliest and best. Worth going to Sicily to see.

**Memorable.

*
Buildings which have on the whole retained their original appearance and character. Unstarred—Buildings which have been largely restored or rebuilt. They may be beautiful, but are no longer essentially Norman in feeling.

? Paidone
S. Maria la Cava.
Paidone
Torre di S. Michele.
altarello
See Palermo.

*altavilla
MiLiciA
S. Michele, known as the Chiesazza. The ruins of a small church built by Robert Guiscard in 1077, about 25 km from Palermo, just off the main coast road to Cefalù. Below it the little
Ponte Saraceno
may go back to the Arab occupation.

*altofonte
Formerly the Parco (see p. 157). The royal palace has gone, but the little chapel behind the
Cbiesa Madre
is still standing, though restored.

*burgio
S. Maria di Rifesi.

*caltabellotta
The
Chiesa Madre
and the castle tower. (See p. 385n.)

*caltanissetta
The Badia di S. Spirito was consecrated in 115 3; the frescoes are of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

**castelvetrano
The little twelfth-century church of the SS. Trinita di Delia is a gem—the perfect fusion of Arab and Byzantine. About two miles outside the town to the west.

catania
Of the basically baroque cathedral, only the Norman apses of black lava withstood the earthquakes of 1169 and 1693. The best view of them is from the courtyard of the seminary behind the cathedral (Via Vittorio Emmanuele). Inside, the two Norman chapels, the Cappella della Vergine and the Cappella del Crocifisso, are barely recognisable.
***Cefalù
cathedral
Though much of the inside is now distressingly baroque, the outside is exquisite and the great apse mosaic the most sublime masterpiece Sicily has to offer. (See pp. 13-15.)

Cefalù
The Osterio Magno; a few remains of Roger II's palace, on the corner of the Corso Ruggero and the Via G. Amendola.

?erice
S. Ippolito.

**forza
d'agro
A few kilometres  outside the town,  SS. Pietro e Paolo is one of the most important Basilian churches on the island. The inscription over the west door dates it to 1171-72.

*frazzano
The Basilian abbey of S. Filippo di Fragala was built by Count Roger I in the late eleventh century.

*gratteri
S. Giorgio.
itala
S. Pietro.

*maniace
S. Maria di Maniace. (See p. 300.)

*mazara
Ruins of Roger I's castle, 1073.

*mazara
S. Nicolo Regale, or S. Nicolicchio, twelfth century.

*mazara
Just outside the town to the east is the church of the Madonna dell' Alto or S. Maria delle Giummare, built in 1103 by a daughter of Roger I.

mazara
In the cathedral, begun by Roger I in 1073, traces of Norman work can still be seen in the apse.