The Kingdom in the Sun (47 page)

¹
Although, as the above paragraphs make clear, pressure of affairs in Palermo normally prevented these clerics from paying any but the most fleeting visits to their dioceses, several seem to have tried to make amends by magnificent donations and endowments. Thus Romuald of Salerno is responsible for the superb marble and mosaic ambo in his cathedral (originally founded, it will be remembered, by Robert Guiscard) and Richard Palmer for the glass and mosaics—what is left of them—at Syracuse. The cathedral treasury of Agrigento possesses a very fine Byzantine portable altar, which is certainly of the twelfth century and may well have been a gift from Gentile. Despite his proclivities, however, we cannot alas connect him with the other pride of the Agrigento collection—a handwritten letter from the Devil which is preserved, very properly, in the archives.

One other candidate remained for the coveted archbishopric.
At
the time he must have seemed something of an outsider, since he could not even boast episcopal rank. He also was an Englishman, whose various orthographical disguises—Ophamilus or Offamiglio to name but two—represent nothing more than desperate Sicilian attempts to deal phonetically with his perfectly ordinary English name, Walter of the Mill. First brought to Sicily as tutor to the royal children, he had been successively appointed Archdeacon of Cefalù, then Dean of Agrigento. Now he was one of the canons of the Palatine Chapel, where he was proving himself even more unscrupulous and ambitious than the compatriot whose career he was working so hard to undermine. Only he, of all the rivals, was to attain his objective. For reasons which we shall presently see, he had to wait for it another three years; but for a quarter of a century after that he was destined to occupy the highest political and ecclesiastical posts in the realm, building the present cathedral and becoming almost certainly the only Englishman in history regularly to sign himself
Emir and Archbishop.
As such, he will play an important— and ultimately disastrous—part in the closing chapters of this story.

The aristocracy, then, was dangerous and of doubtful loyalty; the hierarchy self-seeking and—so far as the personalities of its principal members were concerned—distinctly unattractive. That left only one other significant group—the palace officials and civil servants, headed by the eunuch Caid Peter and the Grand Protonotary, Matthew of Ajello. Even by eunuch standards, Peter was an uninspiring character; but he too had proved his devotion to the King and his family in
1161,
and his administrative efficiency was beyond question. Matthew for his part was at least as able; he had recently completed the herculean task—which no one but he could possibly have accomplished—of recompiling, largely from memory, a comprehensive register of lands and fiefs to replace that which had been destroyed in the insurrection. Like Richard Palmer, however, he had one of those dominating characters that Queen Margaret instinctively mistrusted. He was furthermore obsessed with the idea of being appointed Emir of Emirs—a rank and title which had remained in abeyance since the death of Maio of Bari—and was consequently for ever immersed in intrigues of his own, besides giving himself the airs and graces of a
grand seigneur
and using his steadily increasing wealth to build a noble church in the city as George of Antioch and Maio had done before him.
¹
Of the pair, the Queen much preferred Peter. He was not the ideal solution—the nobles, in particular, hated and despised him—but he seemed relatively free of personal ambition and was less of an intriguer than most of his fellows. In any case he would be able to hold the Kingdom together while she found someone more suitable. To the fury of Matthew and of Richard Palmer, she promoted him over their heads—thus putting the effective direction of the Sicilian Kingdom, now one of the richest and most influential powers in Christian Europe, in the hands of a Muslim eunuch.

But she had also made another decision. To govern the realm as it needed to be governed and to preserve it for her son, she had to have someone who was not only firm and capable but disinterested and, above all, uncommitted. He must also be someone who spoke her language and whom she found personally sympathetic. In all Sicily, it appeared, no such paragon existed. Very well, she would look elsewhere. New situations called for new men to handle them. Secretly, she wrote a long letter to her cousin
²
Rothrud, Archbishop

¹
Though Matthew's church, known as the Magione, was badly damaged during the second world war, it had been sensitively restored and is well worth a visit. With its three apses, its blind and interlaced arcading and the lovely cloister that adjoins it, it provides an excellent example of later Norman-Sicilian architecture, shorn of all obvious Arabic influences. With the fall of the Norman Kingdom at the end of the century, the church and neighbouring convent were given over to the military order of the Teutonic Knights, traces of whose occupancy are still visible. Most guidebooks, incidentally, give the date of the original construction as
11
5
o; in fact it was almost certainly begun a good decade later, and finished during Queen Margaret's regency.

²
Not her uncle, as Chalandon maintains—see genealogical table on p.
395.

of Rouen, explaining her situation and suggesting that he might send some member of their family out to Palermo to help her. Two names she mentioned in particular: Rothrud's brother Robert of Newburgh or, failing him, another cousin—Stephen du Perche.

That the Queen's anxieties for the future were justified, the next few months were all too clearly to show. On the other hand her confidence, such as it was, in Caid Peter's abilities proved to have been misplaced. By the middle of the summer Sicily was in chaos. With all the various factions jockeying ever more frenziedly for position, the plots more plentiful, the intrigues still thicker than before, no proper government was possible; and Peter, a civil servant rather than a statesman, was incapable of imposing his will on an unruly and discontented people. To have done so at that time would have needed a man of infinitely greater stature—a Maio of Bari at the least. And even Maio had succumbed in the end.

Typical of those who sought to fish in these troubled waters was the Queen's cousin, Gilbert.
¹
Some clue to his character may be seen in the haste with which, on his arrival in Sicily a few years before, he had been placated with the County of Gravina and packed off to Apulia—where, as we have seen, he had later become involved in the conspiracy against Maio. On the late King's death and his cousin's assumption of the Regency he had hurried back to the capital and, with the covert support of Richard Palmer, had soon become the focus of the opposition to Caid Peter, complaining publicly that Sicily was being run by slaves and eunuchs and constantly pressing Margaret to appoint him her chief minister in Peter's stead. The Queen, with understandable reluctance, had at last offered him a seat on the council, but Gilbert had indignantly refused—in the course of a hideous scene in which, if Falcandus is to be believed, he berated Margaret for having put him on the same level as a slave,

¹
I have not been able to trace Gilbert's relationship with the Queen. Chalan-don says that he had arrived from Spain, but gives no references to support this theory; from his name and from subsequent events it seems to me far likelier that he was one of the French side of the family—possibly a son or grandson of a sibling of Margaret of Laigle, the Queen's mother. (See genealogical table, p.
395
.)
La Lumia accepts him as a Frenchman and even on one occasion refers to him as Stephen's nephew—surely most improbable.

threatened her with a nadon-wide revolution, and left her in tears.

But the aristocratic faction had found in the Count of Gravina the mouthpiece they had long been seeking, and as they grew daily more threatening the Queen and Peter recognised that some voice in the council chamber could no longer be denied them. With Gilbert still persisting in his refusal, they therefore nominated one of the army leaders, that same Richard of Mandra who had protected William I with his own body during the
1161
insurrection—whom, in order to give him equal rank with her odious cousin, Margaret now created Count of Molise. This appointment was more than Gilbert could stand. He did his best to conceal his anger; but henceforth he began to plot seriously against the eunuch's life.

It was not long before Peter's agents brought him word of what was going on. At first he merely strengthened his bodyguard; but finally, with Maio's fate constantly at the back of his mind, his nerve failed him. A ship was secretly fitted out in the harbour; and one dark night, taking with him a few fellow-eunuchs and a large quantity of money, Peter slipped back to those shores whence, long ago, he had come. On his return to Tunis he resumed his former name of Ahmed, the religion of his fathers and, ultimately, his original profession; for we later find him commander of Caliph Yusuf's Moroccan fleet, in which capacity he is said to have fought with great distinction against the Christians.
¹
After what he had suffered from them in Palermo, this should cause us no surprise; perhaps, as Falcandus maintained, he was ever a Saracen at heart.

Peter's defection came as a blow to Margaret, and also as a severe embarrassment. She vigorously denied allegations that he had absconded with any of the royal treasure, but she could not muffle the triumphant crowings of Gilbert of Gravina. What other conduct could ever have been expected of a Muslim slave, he demanded; had not Peter already once betrayed bis country—at Mahdia seven years before ? The only wonder was that he had not long ago introduced

his Almohad friends into the palace, to make off with the rest of the treasure and, in all probability, with the King as well. Richard of

¹
These details of Peter's subsequent career are given us by Ibn Khaldun
(B.A.S.,
II, pp. 166 and 238). He refers to him as Ahmed es-Sikeli; from the chronological and other details he gives of the flight from Sicily there can be no doubt that Ahmed and Peter are one and the same. (See p. 306.)

Molise, who chanced to be present, could restrain himself no longer and sprang to the defence of his former patron, pointing out that Peter was no slave—he had been formally enfranchised by William I —and that his departure was solely due to the Count of Gravina's notorious intrigues against him. If any man called him traitor, then he—Richard—would be prepared to settle the matter once and for all by single combat.

Somehow the two were separated before any violence was done, but the incident was enough to convince the Queen that her cousin could no longer be permitted to remain in the capital. On the pretext that Frederick Barbarossa was said to be preparing another expedition to the south, she confirmed Gilbert as Catapan of Apulia and Campania and invited him forthwith to return to the mainland and prepare the army for war. The Count had no delusions as to the real reason for his departure; seeing, however, that in the present state of affairs there was no future for him in Palermo he accepted the charge and, still fuming, took his leave.

With Gilbert of Gravina out of the way, Margaret must have felt some measure of relief; but in other respects the situation was little easier than before. Fortunately she still had one counsellor whom she liked and could trust—Richard of Molise, who had now taken Peter's place as chief minister in the Council. Though Richard had little political experience and was inclined to be intemperate and headstrong, he was completely loyal and, says Falcandus, was greatly feared by all—a useful attribute at such a time. But, he too was powerless to stop the decline. Perhaps because he was held in greater respect than Peter he also failed to draw as much popular criticism on himself, with the result that Margaret found herself increasingly blamed for the state of the realm. Already her popularity—based largely on the amnesty she had declared and by the remission of redemption money, but tinged also with the admiration due to the mother of so beautiful a son—had vanished away. Nowadays, in the street, men were openly grumbling and gossiping about 'the Spanish woman',
¹
and even looking nostalgically back to the bad old days of her husband's reign.