The Kingdom in the Sun (15 page)

But the end of Roger's nine-year calvary was fast approaching; indeed, it was nearer than any of the protagonists knew. The inconclusiveness of the
1138
campaign had suggested that Rainulf would be able to maintain his position indefinitely in Apulia, and the aggressiveness of the Lateran Council indicated that this confidence was shared in Rome. It was misplaced. Within three weeks of the Council he had fallen sick of a fever at Troia; he was bled unsuccessfully; and on
30
April he died. They buried him in Troia Cathedral.

Falco of Benevento has left us a poignant account of the consternation that spread through all rebel-held Apulia at the news of Rainulf's death: of the wailing of virgins and widows, of old men and children, of the tearing of hair, the lacerations of breasts and cheeks. It all sounds rather exaggerated; and yet we cannot avoid the impression that Rainulf was genuinely loved. For all his faithlessness he was an attractive, quixotic figure, with a charm that neither his friends nor his enemies were ever quite able to resist; in his short rule as Duke he seems to have governed wisely and well. He was a brilliant soldier and a brave one—a good deal braver than Roger, whom he twice defeated on the battlefield. A Norman through and through, in the popular imagination of his compatriots he embodied the knightly ideal in a way that his oriental, devious-minded brother-in-law could never hope to emulate. His weakness lay in his statesmanship; he simply did not see that Roger could never be beaten without long-term support, both political and military, from abroad. It was this blindness that led him—in defiance of his solemn oath, and after the King had shown him a rare degree of mercy—into an enterprise that brought misery and suffering to the South and laid it open to acts of cruelty by Roger of the kind which he never committed except when desperate. In short, the harm that Rainulf did his country was incalculable, and the sorrow that attended his death was greater than he deserved.

With Rainulf's death the rebellion was officially
at
an end. Apart from one or two isolated pockets of resistance which he could deal with at his leisure—notably Bari and the region round Troia and Ariano—only one problem remained. In late June Pope Innocent marched south from Rome with his old ally Robert of Capua. But Innocent could offer no real threat now. The papal army, by all accounts, was not particularly large—a thousand knights at the most— and this time there was every hope that the Pope would be ready to talk. Indeed, soon after the first reports of his approach, two cardinals arrived at the Sicilian camp. His Holiness, they reported, had now reached
S.
Germano;
¹
if Roger would wait upon him there, he would be received in peace.

Taking his son and his army with him, the King rode off over the mountains to S. Germano. For a week the negotiations dragged on. Innocent was apparently quite prepared to recognise the Sicilian crown, but he demanded in return the reinstatement of the Prince of Capua. Roger refused. Again and again over the past seven years he had given Robert the chance to make peace; now his patience was exhausted. When he saw that the Pope on his side was also adamant he resolved to waste no more time talking. Giving out that he had some unfinished business in the Sangro valley, he broke camp and headed away to the north.

As he must have known they would, Innocent and Robert soon reopened hostilities and began beating their way towards Capua, leaving a trail of burning villages and vineyards behind them. Then, at the little town of Galluccio, they suddenly halted. From a high position on their left, the Sicilian army was watching them. Innocent quickly saw the danger and ordered an immediate withdrawal; but he was too late. While his army was still collecting itself, young Duke Roger burst out of an ambush with a thousand knights and swept down into the centre of the papal troops. They broke in disorder.
¹
The modern town of Cassino, just below the monastery.

Many were cut down as they fled; countless others were drowned as they tried to cross the Garigliano. Robert of Capua somehow managed to escape, but Pope Innocent was not so lucky. He tried to take refuge, so the legend has it, in the little frescoed chapel of S. Nicola which can still be seen in the church of the Annunziata at Galluccio; but he tried in vain. That evening,
22
July 1
139,
the Pope and his cardinals, his archives and his treasure, were all in the hands of the King.

Two months before, while Pope Innocent was still assembling his army in Rome, Mount Vesuvius, after nearly a century's quiescence, had burst out in magnificent and terrifying eruption. For a week it had raged, vomiting lava over the neighbouring villages and filling the air with a pervasive reddish dust that darkened the
sky
over Benevento, Salerno and Capua. No one had doubted that it was a portent, and now at last men knew what it had foretold. The Holy Father himself had been brought low. Here was the greatest humiliation suffered by the Papacy at the hands of the Normans since Duke Humphrey de Hauteville and his brother Robert Guiscard had annihilated the army of Pope Leo IX at Civitate, eighty-six years before.

It was always a mistake for Popes to meet Normans on the battlefield. Just as Leo had had to come to terms with his captors after Civitate, so now Innocent in his turn was forced to bow to the inevitable. At first he refused; the honour and respect with which Roger persisted in treating him seem to have deluded him into believing that he might still be able to impose his own conditions. Only after three days did he finally understand the reality of his situation—and the price of his ransom. On
25
July, at Mignano, Roger was formally confirmed in the Kingdom of Sicily, with the overlordship of all Italy south of the Garigliano. Next, his son Roger was invested with the Duchy of Apulia, and his third son Alfonso with the Principality of Capua. The Pope then said Mass, in the course of which he preached a sermon of enormous length on the subject of peace, and left the church a free man. In the ensuing charter he managed to save a few shreds of the papal honour by presenting the whole thing as being merely a renewal and an extension of Roger's earlier investiture by Honorius II; the King also undertook to pay an annual tribute of six hundred
schifati.
¹
But nothing could disguise the fact that, for the Pope and his party, the treaty of Mignano spelt unconditional surrender.

Writing half a century after these events, the English historian Ralph Niger records in his
Chronica Universalis
that Innocent sealed the treaty by presenting Roger with his mitre; and that the King, having embellished it with gold and precious stones, made it into a crown for himself and his successors. Be that as it may, the two seem to have established a fairly cordial relationship. Together they rode to Benevento, where the Pope was received with such jubilation that, says Falco, it was as if St Peter himself were entering the city; and where, a day or two later in his camp outside the walls, the King received ambassadors from Naples to swear him fidelity and deliver to him the keys of their city.

This submission marked the end of an epoch. For four centuries and more the dukes of Naples had steered their perilous course through the straits and shoals of South Italian politics. Often they had nearly foundered; occasionally even, the Pisans or some other temporary allies had had to take them in tow. Though sailing technically under the Byzantine flag of convenience, they had also in recent years been increasingly obliged to run other colours to the masthead—those of the Western Empire, for example, or even those of the Normans themselves. And yet somehow their ship had always managed to stay afloat. Now it could do so no longer. Naples had suffered three sieges in nine years, and a disastrous famine to boot. Its last duke was dead, the quasi-republican government that had succeeded him an abject failure. The greatness and the glory were gone. When, a few days later, young Duke Roger entered the city to take formal possession in his father's name, he accepted it not as a loyal fief, but as an integral part of the Sicilian Kingdom. The ship had foundered at last.

Only two pockets of resistance remained to be mopped up: the Troia region, where the German rearguard left by Lothair was still

¹
'The
schifatus
was a convex-shaped Byzantine coin worth, in 1269 at any rate, eight
taris
of gold, i.e. somewhat more than a quarter of an ounce of Sicilian gold; i.e. a
schifatus
had about the same value as an English sovereign.' (Mann,
Lives of the Popes in the Early Middle Ages,
vol. IX, p. 65.)

 making trouble, and Bari, whither the last few of the rebel barons had retreated to make a final stand. In the first week of August the King appeared below Troia.
¹
The town surrendered on his arrival; since the papal capitulation there seemed no point in continuing the struggle and the citizens, encouraged by reports of the mercy that Roger had shown towards the coastal cities of Apulia, invited him to enter in peace. But now the King revealed, for the first time, how deeply he had felt his brother-in-law's treason. He sent back word that he would accept no surrender from the Troians for so long as Rainulf's body was buried within their walls. His message was received with horror in the city, but Troia's spirit was broken. It had no choice but to comply. Four knights, led
by
one of the most faithful of Rainulf's old supporters, were given the task of breaking open his tomb. The body was dug up in its shroud, dragged on the King's orders through the streets to the citadel and finally cast into an evil-smelling ditch outside the gates. Soon after this lapse Roger seems to have repented of his inhumanity and, at his son's instigation, to have allowed his old enemy a decent reburial; but although he took no further action against Troia he still refused to enter it. In the remaining fifteen years of his life he never went there again.

It was a still vengeful King who now passed grimly on through Trani—to which his son had accorded remarkably generous terms a few months before—to Bari. No city in Apulia had played him false so often, and its continued resistance, despite the surrender of all its neighbours and the generosity with which they had been treated, had destroyed the last remnants of his patience. After a two-month siege, with famine threatening, the defenders were forced to seek terms. Roger, anxious above all to have done with the rebellion and return to Sicily, agreed to their conditions: there was to be no pillage, and prisoners taken on both sides should be returned unharmed. When he found himself within the walls, however, his vindictiveness again got the better of him. One of his knights, newly released from captivity, reported that he had had an eye put out while he was in prison. It was just the pretext Roger was looking

¹
Plate
4.

for. Was this not a breach of the agreement that had been made? Judges were summoned from Troia and Trani to join those of Bari in proclaiming the treaty null and void. The rebel Prince, Jaquintus, was delivered up to the King, together with his principal counsellors. All were hanged. Ten other leading citizens were blinded, yet others imprisoned and dispossessed. 'And such was the fear and trembling in the city,' Falco reports, 'that not a single man or woman durst venture out into the streets and squares.'

Even on his return to Salerno the King's anger had not entirely abated. Certain of the Campanian vassals who had been congratulating themselves on having escaped lightly after their part in the uprising suddenly found their lands and property confiscated. Some of these too were imprisoned, the majority exiled 'beyond the mountains'. When, on 5 November, Roger took ship for Sicily, he left a cowed and chastened baronage behind him.

The year
1139
had been the most triumphant of his reign. It had seen the death of his arch-enemy Rainulf and the two petty dynasties of Naples and Bari; and the effective elimination of Robert of Capua who, though he was to pass the rest of his life intriguing against the King, was never again to constitute a serious menace to the Sicilian throne. It had seen the most significant mainland victory for nearly a century, one which effectively wiped out the shame of Rignano two years before. It had seen the pacification of the entire South Italian Kingdom, its utter submission to the King's will, and the disappearance of the last remnants of the German imperial invaders. Finally, it had seen the reconciliation between the Kingdom and the Papacy and the recognition, by the rightful, undisputed Pope, of the Sicilian monarchy. Roger himself had shown courage, diplomacy, statesmanship and—at least until just before the end—mercy; and if in this last virtue he ultimately fell short of his own high standards, his record remains a good deal better than that of most of his contemporaries.