The Kingdom in the Sun (29 page)

The little town of Ceprano, standing conveniently on the border between the Kingdom of Sicily and the Papal State, had seen respectability bestowed on Robert Guiscard by his investiture at the hands of Gregory VII seventy years before—a thought which may well have given Roger some encouragement when, in July
1150,
he rode there to meet Eugenius; for a similar investiture was now his first and most important objective. To obtain this, the formal recognition by the Pope of his legitimate sovereignty, he was prepared to concede much. Nothing else stood between himself and the leadership of western Europe. His right of appointment of Sicilian bishops, of refusing admission to papal envoys, even the hereditary privilege of the Apostolic Legation would have been reasonable prices to pay for such a reward.

But Ceprano had also witnessed failures. It was, after all, only six years since Roger and Pope Lucius had separated in disappointment and bitterness after the breakdown of other negotiations from which both had stood to gain; and the result of the coming talks with Lucius's successor was no foregone conclusion. The Pope had just been obliged once again to leave Rome; a renewed offer of Sicilian troops might prove a useful sweetener.
As
against this, Conrad was now back in Germany, collecting his forces, building up his strength, and rapidly living down his recent disgrace. If he were contemplating an early clash, then Eugenius would be unlikely to weaken his hand —and compromise the papal position—by confirming Roger's kingship.

And so it proved. The Pope may already have been under pressure from Conrad; he was certainly being bombarded with letters from Abbot Wibald of Corbie, a sworn enemy of Roger since the latter had expelled him from Monte Cassino and now Conrad's closest ecclesiastical adviser. John of Salisbury, who was probably present at Ceprano, tells us how Roger made every concession he could; 'but neither his prayers nor his gifts were of any avail'.

Although John is careful to note that King and Pontiff parted on relatively amicable terms, this new failure to achieve recognition must have come to Roger as a bitter blow. It could mean one thing only, that Eugenius had decided to throw in his lot with Conrad; and this, in its turn, meant that all his own plans for an offensive coalition against Manuel would have to be abandoned. From the moment the Ceprano talks ended, he gave up any further attempt to influence papal policy. Instead, he returned to Sicily to prepare for the coming storm.

He might almost have been relieved, as his ships sailed for Palermo, had he known that he would never set foot on the Italian mainland again.

His tents weep him, and his palaces; the swords and the lances are for him like women mourners. Hearts, no less than garments, are rent with grief. For the arms of the brave have fallen; valiant souls are filled with dread; and the eloquent seek for words in vain.

Thus had the Arab poet Abu ed-Daw lamented the death, on 2 May
1148,
of Duke Roger of Apulia, the King of Sicily's eldest son. How he died we do not know; most probably he fell in some skirmish on the northern frontiers of his dukedom, where he had been intermittently engaged for several years. It was a grievous loss. The young Duke—he was only just thirty when he died—had been a Hauteville in the old tradition, a brilliant fighter and capable administrator, fearless in battle and utterly loyal to his father. More and more in the past decade Roger had tended to leave the affairs of the mainland to him—with Robert of Selby holding, perhaps, a watching brief—and he had shown himself a worthy heir to the Sicilian Crown. And now he was dead, the fifth of Roger's and Queen Elvira's six children to die before his father. Tancred, Prince of Bari, had already been nearly ten years in his grave; Alfonso, Prince of Capua and Duke of Naples, had died in
1144
in his early twenties. Another boy, Henry, had not survived his infancy. One only remained, the King's fourth son, William; he inherited the dukedom on his brother's death, and on Easter Day,
1151,
Roger had him consecrated and crowned by the Archbishop of Palermo as co-ruler of the Sicilian Kingdom.

To crown a son in the lifetime of his father was no rare thing in the Middle Ages. The practice was regular in Byzantium, where it had been inherited from the earlier days of the Roman Empire; it was also to be followed in England, some twenty years after William's coronation, when King Henry II crowned his own first-born. Its purpose was to ensure the continuity of the royal line and to guard against the possibility of civil strife resulting from a disputed succession. Roger was still only fifty-five; his father had lived to be seventy. There is no suggestion among the contemporary chronicles that he was ill, though it is possible that he had already felt the onset of the disease that was to kill him three years later. Nor could there be any possible doubt about the claim to the throne of the King's only surviving legitimate son. Roger seems, however, to have been genuinely concerned about the succession; otherwise he would hardly have been likely, after fourteen years as a widower, to contract a second marriage in
11
49,
to a certain Sibyl of Burgundy; and a third, four years later when Sibyl had died in childbed.

Whatever his reasons, he cannot have thought that the news of William's coronation would be well received by the Pope. Technically speaking, he was within his rights; Archbishop Hugh of Palermo, recently promoted from the archbishopric of Capua, had been granted the
pallium
by the Pope, on the grounds that he was one of those 'who presided over the chief cities of certain nations and were therefore privileged by the Papacy to create princes for their own people'.
¹
Eugenius had never meant to imply that this grant included the right to perform royal coronations without prior reference to the Holy See, but the phrasing had been unfortunate; and the fact that he himself had given Roger the opportunity to take such a step can only have added to his irritation. It does not seem to have occurred to him that if the King of Sicily did have some good reason for wishing to ensure his son's succession he could hardly— in the light of Eugenius's refusal to grant the investiture himself— have acted otherwise. As far as he was concerned, Sicily and the
Regno
were papal fiefs, of which no disposition could be made without his authority. This authority had once again been flouted. As John of Salisbury confirms, 'he took the news ill, but oppressed as he was by the evils of the time he could offer no resistance'.

If the Pope had ever been in any doubt as to where his best interests lay, he was in doubt no longer. The two special legates

¹
John of Salisbury,
Historia Pontificalis,
chs.
33-4.
The
pallium
is a circular band of white wool, shorn from two lambs blessed on St Agnes' Day in the church of S. Agnese fuori le Mura, and marked with six black crosses. It is worn by the Pope across his shoulders and granted by him to Archbishops and Metropolitans, at their petition, to enable them to perform their special functions.

he now sent to Conrad soon showed themselves to be little more than figures of
fun;
¹
but one point they made abundantly clear. The Emperor-to-be was awaited with impatience in Italy. When he came, for whatever his purpose, he would have the See of St Peter wholeheartedly behind him.

The future of the Kingdom of Sicily had never looked blacker than it did at the start of the year
115
2. Conrad of Hohenstaufen was ready to march; Manuel Comnenus, having restored order within his own Empire, was ready to join him. The Venetians had once again pledged their support. The Pope, after long hesitation, had allied himself on their side. And meanwhile the great anti-imperial coalition by which Roger had set so much store had melted away. Louis of France was still in theory an ally; but the death of Abbot Suger the previous year had robbed him of his confidence and, in a large measure, of his freedom of action. Besides, his divorce from Eleanor, now imminent, was occupying his mind to the virtual exclusion of all else. Two years before, at Flochberg, Welf and his friends had sustained a defeat from which they had never recovered. Hungary and Serbia had, for the moment, no more fight left in them.

But just as a few years earlier Roger had been saved from a similar situation by the Second Crusade, so now fate intervened once more to deliver him. On Friday
15
February
115
2 King Conrad died at Bamberg. He was the first Emperor-elect in the two centuries since the restoration of the Empire by Otto the Great not to have been crowned at Rome—a failure which somehow seems to symbolise his whole reign. 'A Seneca in council, a Paris in appearance, a Hector in

¹
John of Salisbury's description of the papal legates is worth a quotation. 'Jordan [of S. Susanna] used his Carthusian Order as a pretext for his meanness. Ever parsimonious, he wore filthy garments and was austere in speech and demeanour; since like will ever attract like, he had been made chamberlain to the Lord Pope. Octavian [of S. Cecilia, the future Anti-Pope Victor IV], though nobler, easier in manner and more generous, was proud and pompous, a sycophant of the Germans and a seeker after Roman favour—which he never won. And although the Pope had charged them to act in concert, no sooner had they started out than they began to argue as to which was the greater. . . . Quarrelling over everything, they soon made the Church a laughing-stock. . . . Thus it was that complainants converged in swarms upon the papal court, for these two disturbed the churches just as men disturb beehives when they seek to extract the honey from the bees.'

battle',
¹
great things had been expected of him; but he died with his promise unfulfilled and his country as divided as always; never an Emperor—just a sad, unlucky King. He was buried in Bamberg Cathedral next to the recently-canonised Emperor Henry II—a distant predecessor who had also, long ago, found the Normans too strong for him.

Otto of Freising, Conrad's half-brother, tells us that the presence at his bedside of certain Italian doctors—probably from the medical school of Salerno—gave rise to inevitable mutterings about Sicilian poison; but though Roger must have welcomed this timely removal of his most dangerous enemy there is no reason to suspect that he was in any way involved. Conrad was fifty-nine and had had a hard life; and mediaeval chroniclers are notoriously reluctant to ascribe to natural causes more deaths than are absolutely necessary. Conrad's mind remained unclouded to the end, and his last injunctions to his nephew and successor, Duke Frederick of Swabia, were to continue the struggle which he had begun until the so-called King of Sicily was finally brought to book. Frederick asked nothing better. Encouraged by the Apulian exiles at the court, he even hoped at one moment to keep to Conrad's original schedule and to march against Roger immediately, picking up his imperial crown on the way. As always, however, the succession brought its own problems, and he soon had to accept a further indefinite postponement. Where foreign adventures were concerned, Conrad's death had left him hamstrung just as Suger's had crippled Louis VII a year before. Sicily had been granted another reprieve.

And these deaths were only the beginning. During the next two years Conrad and Suger were to be followed to their graves
by
nearly all the great figures who had dominated the European stage over the previous decade. On 8 July
1153
Pope Eugenius died suddenly at Tivoli, and was buried in
St
Peter's. Though never a great Pope, he had during his papacy revealed a firmness of character which few had suspected at the time of his election. Like so many of his predecessors, he had been forced to spend money freely to buy support

¹
This description, by the poet-chronicler Godfrey of Viterbo, is possibly more apt that its author realised. Seneca's position as adviser and confidant of Nero resulted in his suicide; Paris was the lover who ultimately lost; Hector the hero who fled.