The Kingdom in the Sun (32 page)

Until every one of his people could be persuaded to see himself first and foremost as a subject of the King, these dangers would be very real. This task of persuasion and consolidation could only be a slow, delicate process, spread over several generations; but to it Roger had devoted his life. His father, during the first phase of the Norman-Sicilian state, had concentrated on the problem of reconciling the various elements, previously hostile, to a system of cooperation and interdependence; he himself had taken it a stage further, by giving his subjects a new pride—that of belonging to a great and prosperous nation. Of that nation's greatness, the monarchy must be the living, visible symbol. The very existence of so many laws and languages, of such a variety of religions and customs, called for a strong central authority elevated and remote enough to embrace them all. It was this consideration, quite as much as his

¹
'The Apulian, Calabrian, Sicilian and African all obey my will.' (Radulph de Diceto,
Opuscula,
vol. II, p. 276.)

innate love of magnificence and his oriental cast of mind, that led Roger to surround himself with an almost mystic splendour which far outshone that of any of his fellow-monarchs of the West.

For with him this splendour was never more than a means to an end. The gold and the jewels, the palaces and the parks, the glinting tesserae and the gorgeous brocades, the great silken canopies held above his head—a custom borrowed from the Fatimid caliphs—on ceremonial occasions, all served a specific purpose: to glorify not Roger himself, but his ideal of what a King should be. And though few sovereigns of his day spent more lavishly, none was more conscious of the value of money. Alexander of Telese notes how he would personally go through all his exchequer accounts, how he never spent anything without making a careful record of the sum involved, how he was as scrupulous in the paying of debts as in their collection. Luxury he loved, as much as any Eastern potentate —it is not for nothing that Michele Amari, greatest of Sicilian Arabists, calls him 'a baptised Sultan'—but his Norman blood saved him from the indolence it so often brings in its train. If he enjoyed—• as he had every right to enjoy—the pleasures of kingship, he never shirked its responsibilities; and such was his energy that his friend Edrisi could write in awe that 'he accomplished more in his sleep than others did in their waking day.'

He was only fifty-eight at the time of his death. Had he been granted another fifteen years, his country might have found that national identity which he had laboured so hard to create; had his new young queen borne him a son, the Hauteville dynasty might have survived the century and the whole history of South Europe would have been changed. But such speculations, though intriguing, are also pointless. For a few more years yet Norman Sicily, through a remarkable series of military and diplomatic triumphs, was to increase its influence and prestige from London to Constantinople. Two more Emperors were to be humbled, one more Pope brought to his knees. For a few more years yet the cultural brilliance of the Court of Palermo was to continue undimmed and unparalleled in Europe. But already the internal fabric of the state was showing signs of decay; and with the reign of William the Bad the Kingdom, though still golden in its splendour, embarks on its last, sad decline.

PART
THREE

THE LENGTHENING SHADOWS

9

THE NEW GENERATION

King William . . . was handsome of aspect and majestic of presence, corpulent of body, sublime of stature, haughty and greedy for honours; a conqueror on land and sea; in his Kingdom more feared than loved. Though he gave much thought to the acquisition of wealth, he dispensed it with some reluctance. Those who were faithful to him he raised up to riches and honours; those who betrayed him he would condemn to torture, or else banish from the Kingdom. Most punctilious in attending the Holy Office, he held all ecclesiastical persons in the highest respect.

Romuald, Archbishop of Salerno

The
practice of distinguishing reigning monarchs by some characteristic epithet as well as by a bare Roman numeral was never really popular in England. The Unready, the Confessor, the Conqueror and the Lion-Heart are the only four royal sobriquets in our history which will unmistakably identify their bearers. In Europe, however, throughout the Middle Ages and beyond, circlets sparkle round the heads of Drunkards, Stammerers and Devils, of Philosophers, Navigators and Fowlers; of the Handsome and the Bald, the Quarrelsome and the Cruel, the Debonair, the Simple and the Fat. Most intriguing of all, perhaps—though himself uncrowned—was the father of the Byzantine Emperor Romanus I, universally known to his contemporaries as Theophylact the Unbearable. And yet, in the whole limping, simpering, swaggering pageant, two men only have been called upon to carry through eternity the most starkly uncompromising label of them all—the Bad. One was King Charles II of Navarre; the other was King William I of Sicily.

The new King did not altogether deserve his nickname. It was not even given him till some two hundred years after his death— and was principally due to two misfortunes which he never managed to overcome. The first was his father, Roger II,
by
whom he was outshone; the second was the principal chronicler of his reign, who vilifies him at every opportunity. The true identity of the author of the
Historia de Regno Sicilie,
though it remains one of the most perplexing enigmas of the Norman Kingdom, lies beyond the scope of this book;
¹
we know him only as Hugo Falcandus, which was almost certainly not his name and was indeed only attached to him four centuries later. All we can say is that he was a writer of sophistication and polish, about whom no less an authority than Edward Gibbon could say that 'his narrative is rapid and perspicuous, his style bold and eloquent, his observation keen. He has studied mankind and feels like a man.' Alas, there were two virtues he did not possess.
As
a man he lacked charity; as a historian, accuracy. His pages are a grisly succession of plots and counterplots, of intrigues and assassinations and poisonings—a tale compared with which the chronicles of the house of Borgia read like an object-lesson in moral rectitude. He sees evil lurking everywhere. There is scarcely an action to which he does not ascribe some sinister motive, scarcely a character who does not emerge as a fiend incarnate. His most lethal venom of all, however, he keeps for the King.

William's appearance, too, was against him. No contemporary portraits survive, apart from those on coins; but a monkish chronicle
²
of the time writes that he was a huge man, 'whose thick black beard lent him a savage and terrible aspect and filled many people with fear'. His physical strength was herculean. He could separate two linked horseshoes with his bare hands; once, we are told, when a fully-laden pack horse stumbled and fell when crossing a bridge, he picked it up unaided and set it on its feet again. Such characteristics must have served him in good stead on the battlefield, where he showed unfailing courage and, to use a cliche of the time, was always to be found where the fighting was thickest; but they can hardly have added to his popularity.

¹
 
See Notes on the Principal Sources, p. 404.

²
The
Chronica S. Mariae de Ferraria,
another enigmatic work which, it has been suggested, may be indirectly attributable to the author of Falcandus's history. See Evelyn Jamison,
Admiral Eugenius of Sicily,
pp. 278-97.

If, however, William outstripped his father in physique and military aptitude, he fell far short of him in political ability. Like all the Hautevilles before him, Roger II had always had an immense appetite for work. There was no governmental task to which he could not—and, at one time or another, did not—turn his hand. His son was the reverse. Born with three elder brothers between him and the throne, William had received little of that early training in politics and statecraft that had given Duke Roger, Tancred and Alfonso positions of high responsibility while still in their teens. He had never been groomed for greatness, and when their premature deaths thrust greatness upon him at the age of thirty, it caught him unprepared. Lazy and pleasure-loving, he was to devote the greater part of his time to those occupations with which Roger had only employed his rare hours of relaxation—discussing art and science with the intellectuals whom he kept at the court, or dallying with his women in the palaces which, in the words of one traveller, ringed Palermo like a necklace—the Favara, the Parco, possibly a summer pavilion at Mimnermo,
¹
and, later, in his own new and splendid palace of the Zisa. Even more than his father, he was an oriental; the East had entered into his very soul. Married in early youth to Margaret, daughter of King Garcia IV Ramirez of Navarre, he appeared after his succession to take little interest in her or in the four sons she bore him. His life was more like a sultan's than a king's, and his character embodied that same combination of sensuality and fatalism that has stamped
so
many eastern rulers. He never took a decision if he could avoid it, never tackled a problem if there was the faintest chance that, given long enough, it might solve itself. Once goaded into action, however, he would pursue his objectives with ferocious energy—if only, notes Chalandon a little unkindly, in order to return as quickly as possible to more congenial pursuits.

Unlike his father, then, William tended to leave the day-to-day business of the Kingdom to his ministers, nearly all of them professional

¹
So, at least, the name appears in the early editions of Falcandus; this, however, is probably a corruption of Minenium, from the original Arabic name of
Al-Menani.
The building—what remains of it—is now known as the Palazzo delP Uscibene, in the modern village of Altarello. The original structure probably dates back to Saracen times, but the present decoration of sea-shells in stucco is, it need hardly be said, a comparatively recent addition.

clerks and civil servants of the middle class who owed their position and advancement to the King alone and whose loyalty was consequently beyond question. Even in their selection he seems to have given himself the minimum of trouble; with only two exceptions that
we
know of, he simply confirmed the chief functionaries of his father's reign in their existing ranks and offices.

Of these two exceptions one was an Englishman, Thomas Brown. The son or nephew of a certain William Brown, or Le Brun, a clerk in the service of King Henry I, he had come to Sicily in about
1130
when still little more than a boy—probably in the company and as the
protege
of Robert of Selby. We first hear of him in
1137,
and from that time on his name appears regularly in the official documents that have come down to
us.
¹
Throughout Roger's reign Thomas seems to have enjoyed his confidence and favour; there is even reason to believe that he personally drafted the foundation charter for the Palatine Chapel in
1140.
But on William's accession, for reasons unhappily obscure, he lost his high office and returned to England, where he became King's Almoner under Henry II.
²

Though we cannot be sure, it seems more than probable that Thomas's abrupt departure from Sicily was in fact occasioned not by the King himself but by his new Emir of Emirs, Maio of Bari— whose elevation, besides being the only other important change effected by William in the ranks of his advisers, proved to be one of the most fateful acts of his entire reign. It came as no surprise. Maio had been at least ten years in the royal service and had already reached the rank of Chancellor when William singled him out to succeed the ill-fated Philip of Mahdia in the Kingdom's supreme administrative post. Son of a prosperous oil merchant and judge in Bari, he had received a thorough classical education in his youth and was well able to hold his own in the rarefied intellectual society