The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean (91 page)

⁵¹
It was disgracefully vandalised in the early sixteenth century when a Christian chapel–now the cathedral–was erected in its centre. The Emperor Charles V, seeing it in 1526, made no secret of his feelings. ‘You have built here,’ he said to the assembled chapter, ‘what you or anyone might have built anywhere else, but you have destroyed what was unique in the world.’
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⁵²
It is often suggested that flamenco, the traditional music of Andalusia, is another legacy of the Muslim occupation. It may well contain Arabic elements, but it seems essentially to be the creation of the gypsies who began to settle in the area in the later fifteenth century.
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⁵³
Estoria del Cid
, trans. P. E. Russell.
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⁵⁴
His contemporary James I of Aragon had done the same at Valencia ten years before.
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⁵⁵
Not, of course, to be confused with the Pope of the same name.
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⁵⁶
The dynasty of Merovius, which ruled over the Franks from the sixth to the eighth century.
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⁵⁷
The word ‘Saracen’ was applied by medieval writers to all Arabs.
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⁵⁸
After the death of the last of the Carolingian line, Charles the Fat, in 888, the Empire of the West was dismembered and Berengar of Friuli was elected King of Italy; but he was in no sense a national ruler.
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⁵⁹
The statue was subsequently moved by Michelangelo to his newly-designed Campidoglio, and has more recently been transferred to the Capitoline Museum.
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⁶⁰
It is fascinating to speculate on how history would have been changed if he had survived, and if his expedition had been successful.
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⁶¹
The word ‘admiral’ is derived from the Arabic
emir al-bahr
, ‘lord of the sea’. It comes down to us directly from Norman Sicily, where the title was first used.
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⁶²
Sicily did not, however, keep her African conquests long; all were lost by 1160.
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⁶³
Alas, there are one or two more recent replacements, including an appalling representation of the Virgin in the centre of the apse that should be removed at once.
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⁶⁴
See above, Chapter VI
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⁶⁵
A small lozenge of black marble set in the pavement beneath the central doorway of the Basilica marks the precise place at which he did so.
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⁶⁶
Which is presumably why we see, among the mosaic saints depicted in the apse of Monreale cathedral, the somewhat surprising figure of St Thomas of Canterbury. He must have been included at the Queen’s specific request, as further atonement for his murder. As a child, she would have known him well; it seems likely, therefore, that she would have described him to the artist and that the portrait is a fairly accurate likeness.
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⁶⁷
He was actually the bastard son of Roger II’s eldest son, Duke Roger of Apulia, who had died before his father.
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⁶⁸
They left behind them in Cairo the ninth-century mosque of Ibn Tulun, perhaps the loveliest in the city.
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⁶⁹
It was to last a total of 176 years–until 1375, when Turks and Egyptian Mamelukes together drove out the last Armenian king, Leo VI, who ended his life an exile in Paris.
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⁷⁰
It is now possible to speak of France as a political entity. The breakdown of Charlemagne’s empire had led to the formation of a number of minor principalities, one of which, centred on the Paris–Orleans axis, was later known as the Ile-de-France. Here there arose the Capetian dynasty of kings, the first of whom, Hugues Capet, came to the throne in 987. This was the nucleus of the France we know today, though it was to be another 300 years before it covered even approximately the same amount of territory.
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⁷¹
A Turkoman dynasty whose founder, the Emir Danishmend, had appeared in Asia Minor some fifteen years before and ruled in Cappadocia and the regions round Sebasteia (now Sivas) and Melitene. Over the next century the Danishmends were to play a significant part in the history of the area, but after the Seljuk capture of Melitene in 1178 they vanished as suddenly as they had appeared.
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⁷²
Bohemund’s son, Prince Bohemund II of Antioch, had been killed in 1130, leaving his principality to his two-year-old daughter, Constance. She had been married off at the age of eight to Raymond of Poitiers, younger son of Duke William IX of Aquitaine.
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⁷³
He was effectively the Holy Roman Emperor, but since he was never crowned in Rome he could not claim the title.
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⁷⁴
Eleanor’s marriage to Louis VII had been duly annulled in 1152. Just two months later, she had married Henry Plantagenet, Count of Anjou and Duke of Normandy, the future Henry II. The relationship was stormy–she was released from prison only on her husband’s death–but she nevertheless bore him five sons and three daughters. Richard was her third son.
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⁷⁵
The castle, which now houses the Medieval Museum, was rebuilt by the Templars in the thirteenth century. There is, however, some reason to believe that the altar in the present east chapel may be the one used for the double ceremony.
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⁷⁶
See Chapter X.
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⁷⁷
See Chapter VII.
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⁷⁸
The descendants of the Lords of Boudonitza still survive in the distinguished Zorzi family of Venice. At Salona, the ruins of Thomas de Stromoncourt’s castle constitute the most majestic Frankish remains in the country.
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⁷⁹
Mysterious because of its unique geographical character. At its narrowest only some thirty yards across, its currents change direction six or seven times a day, sometimes more. The cause is still not fully understood; Aristotle is said to have been so frustrated at his failure to solve the problem that he flung himself in.
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⁸⁰
This medieval word for the Peloponnese is unknown before the early twelfth century. It is thought to have derived from the Greek word for a mulberry tree, either because of its shape or because of the number of mulberry trees that grow there.
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⁸¹
Essentially, the northwestern Peloponnese.
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⁸²
The various fates of all the individual islands of the Aegean would be, for the general reader, hard going indeed. Those seeking further information should refer to W. Miller,
The Latins in the Levant
, pp. 40–45.
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⁸³
See Chapter VI.
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⁸⁴
On the Art of Hunting with Birds.
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⁸⁵
The political factions of Guelf and Ghibelline, which were to dominate Italian politics for almost two centuries, derived their names from those of the two great German clans, the house of Welf and that of Waiblingen (or Staufen). As time went on they came to be associated with the papal and imperial houses respectively.
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⁸⁶
See Chapter VI.
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⁸⁷
The Albigensian Crusade (Chapter VII.)
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⁸⁸
She is also known as Isabella; in this book, however, she will be Yolande, if only to prevent confusion with Frederick’s third wife, Isabella of England.
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⁸⁹
Even then, however, his career was not over. In 1224, when he was in his middle seventies, he became regent once again–in the Latin Empire of Constantinople, where the child Emperor Baldwin II had married John’s four-year-old daughter Maria. This time the old ruffian assumed the title of emperor rather than king–a title which he was to retain until his death in 1237.
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⁹⁰
This was already an ominous sign: it was Gregory VII–the formidable Cardinal Hildebrand–who had brought Frederick’s great-great-great-uncle Henry IV to his knees at Canossa exactly 150 years before.
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⁹¹
See Chapter VII.
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⁹²
Of the three great military orders–Templars, Hospitallers and Teutonic Knights–the last was the most recent, having been instituted only at the time of the Third Crusade. It too began with a hospital in the Holy Land, but from about 1230 onwards it was involved principally with the conquest of Prussia and the Baltic territories.
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⁹³
It has been plausibly suggested that its octagonal shape may have been the model for Frederick’s magnificent hunting lodge, Castel del Monte in Apulia.
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⁹⁴
Most probably by the Sicilian Giacomo da Lentini, at least twenty-five of whose sonnets have come down to us.
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⁹⁵
She was the granddaughter of Henry II of England, whose daughter Eleanor had married Alfonso IX of Castile. She had already acted as regent during her son’s minority, when she had given ample proof of her statesmanship.
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⁹⁶
Her sister Eleanor was married to the English King Henry III.
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⁹⁷
The coinage struck at Tours, which in the thirteenth century was preferred to that struck in Paris.
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⁹⁸
It continued to exist until the end of the century, but as little more than a Mongol puppet.
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⁹⁹
The Nestorians held that Christ had two separate persons, the human and the divine. (The Orthodox view is that He was a single person, at once God and man.) A relatively small number survives today, mostly in Iraq, where they are known as Assyrian Christians.
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¹⁰⁰
The famous story of Edward’s life being saved by his wife, Eleanor of Castile, who is said to have sucked out the poison from the wound, derives only from a single obscure Dominican chronicler, Ptolomaeus Lucensis. According to the old
Dictionary of National Biography
, it is ‘utterly unworthy of credit’; the new (Oxford)
DNB
is equally dismissive. Eleanor, in fact, had not even accompanied him on the Crusade.
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¹⁰¹
He had bought the title in 1277 from Princess Maria of Antioch, granddaughter of King Amalric II of Jerusalem, and had immediately sent out to Acre a certain Roger of San Severino as his viceroy.
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¹⁰²
At this time the English kings still ruled over a considerable part of what is now France.
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¹⁰³
By this time the titular Kings of Jerusalem were also Kings of Cyprus, where they understandably preferred to live.
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¹⁰⁴
The best is that of Sir Steven Runciman in
A History of the Crusades
, vol. III, pp. 412–23.
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¹⁰⁵
‘The land of the three promontories’–a reference to Sicily’s triangular shape. The Greeks identified it with Homer’s
Thrinacia
, where Helios, the sun god, kept his sheep and cattle (
Odyssey
, XI, 121).
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¹⁰⁶
See Chapter XII.
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¹⁰⁷
This is believed to be the origin of the grim reputation of the date.
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¹⁰⁸
The French writer Maurice Druon, in his brilliant series of novels
Les Rois Maudits
, suggests that de Molay also cursed King Philip from the stake, and with some effect: Philip and his five immediate predecessors had reigned a total of 177 years, while the next six kings of France covered only sixty-six.
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¹⁰⁹
Contrary to popular belief, they do not absolutely forbid it; the Persians never felt inhibited, nor very often did the Ottoman Turks. But in North Africa and Muslim Spain such productions by a Muslim artist would have been unthinkable.
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