CHAPTER VI
Justinian’s war with the Goths had ushered in a dark age. His local governors–to whom he gave the title of exarch–did their best to restore prosperity, but they had little success. Italy was a desolation; Milan in the north and Rome in the south lay in ruins. And now, within a few years of the Goths’ departure, a new Germanic horde appeared on the scene: the Lombards, crossing the Alps in 568, spreading relentlessly over northern Italy and the great plain that still bears their name, finally establishing their capital at Pavia. Within five years they had captured Milan, Verona and Florence; Byzantine rule over North Italy, won at such a cost by Justinian, Belisarius and Narses, was ended almost as soon as it had begun. The Lombards’ line of advance was finally checked by Rome and the Exarchate of Ravenna, but two spearheads pressed through to set up the great southern duchies of Spoleto and Benevento. From here they might have gone on to conquer the rest of the south, but they never managed to unite quite firmly enough to do so. Apulia, Calabria and Sicily remained under Byzantine control–as, surprisingly, did much of the Italian coastline. Unlike the Vandals, the Lombards showed little interest in the sea; they never really became a Mediterranean people.
That Rome itself did not succumb to the Lombard tide was a miracle hardly less extraordinary than that which had saved her from Attila in the preceding century. Once again it was wrought by a Pope–this time one of Rome’s most outstanding medieval statesmen, Gregory the Great, who succeeded to the throne of St Peter in 590 and occupied it for the next fourteen years. Finding that the Exarch of Ravenna had insufficient forces to give him the support he needed, he assumed personal control of the militia, repaired the walls and aqueducts and fed the starving populace from the granaries of the Church. Having first bought off the Lombard King Agilulf, in 598 he concluded an independent peace with him; he was then able to set to work to make the Papacy a formidable political and social power. (It was he, incidentally, who sent Augustine, prior of the Benedictine abbey which he himself had founded on the Coelian hill in Rome, to convert the heathen English.) Gregory was no intellectual–like most churchmen of his day, he cherished a deep suspicion of secular learning–but he was autocratic and utterly fearless, and through these troubled times it was he alone who preserved the prestige of the city.
Yet even Gregory recognised the Emperor at Constantinople–where he had once served as papal ambassador–as his temporal overlord, and Rome under his successors became steadily more Byzantinized as the seventh century took its course. Greek refugees from the Middle East and Africa poured into Italy as first the Persians and then the Arabs overran their lands. In 663 there was an unusually distinguished Byzantine immigrant: the Emperor Constans II, determined to shift his capital back again to the west. Rome he found as uncongenial as Constantinople, but hellenistic Sicily proved more to his taste and he reigned for five years in Syracuse until one day a dissatisfied chamberlain, in an access of nostalgia, surprised him in his bath and felled him with the soapdish.
The court returned to the Bosphorus and Italy to her own problems. Of these the most serious remained the Lombards, who, as they increased in numbers and strength, were casting ever more covetous eyes over neighbouring territory. Their actual progress was slow, the Exarchate constituting a moderately effective bulwark, but pressure on the frontiers was never relaxed. This uneasy equilibrium lasted over the turn of the century; then, in 726, came crisis, when the Emperor Leo III55 ordered the destruction of all icons and holy images throughout his dominions on the grounds that they were idolatrous.
The Emperor was being puritanical, but in no sense revolutionary. Neither Judaism nor Islam permitted the use of pictures or images, and in more recent centuries England alone has seen two serious outbreaks of iconoclasm, under Edward VI in the sixteenth century and again during the Commonwealth. Nonetheless, the effect of his decree was immediate and shattering. Men rose everywhere in wrath; the monasteries, in particular, were outraged. In the eastern provinces, where the cult of icons had reached such proportions that they were worshipped in their own right and frequently served as godparents at baptisms, Leo found some measure of support; but in the more moderate west, which had done nothing to deserve them, the new laws could not be tolerated. Italy, under energetic papal leadership, refused absolutely to comply, Pope Gregory III going so far as to excommunicate all iconoclasts. Paul, Exarch of Ravenna, was assassinated, his provincial governors put to flight. Throughout the Exarchate the rebellious garrisons–all of which had been recruited locally–chose their own commanders and asserted their independence. In the communities gathered around the Venetian lagoon, their choice fell on a certain Ursus, or Orso, from Heraclea, who was given the title of dux.There was nothing especially remarkable about this; the same thing was happening almost simultaneously in many other insurgent towns. What distinguishes Venice from the rest is that Orso’s appointment inaugurated a tradition which was to continue unbroken for more than a thousand years; his title, transformed by the rough Venetian dialect into ‘doge’, was to pass down through 117 successors until the end of the Venetian Republic in 1797.
The main beneficiaries of the iconoclast dispute in Italy were the Lombards. Playing Rome and Byzantium off against each other, they steadily gained ground until at last, in 751, they captured Ravenna. It was the end of the Exarchate. Such Byzantine lands as remained in Italy were cut off by the Lombard duchies of the south and were thus powerless to help. Rome was left naked to her enemies.
Not, however, for long. Before the end of the year, beyond the Alps to the west, the Frankish leader Pepin the Short had obtained papal approval for the deposition of the Merovingian56 figurehead King Childeric III and his own coronation. He could not now ignore the Church’s appeal. In 754 Pope Stephen II travelled to St Denis, where he confirmed and anointed Pepin, with his two sons Charles and Carloman, as Kings of the Franks; two years later, in response to a letter said to have been miraculously penned by St Peter himself, Frankish troops swept into Italy and brought the Lombards to their knees. Pepin now established the Pope as the head of an independent state, snaking across central Italy to embrace Rome, Perugia and Ravenna–roughly the lands of the defunct Exarchate. He may have been basing his action on the so-called Donation of Constantine, by which Constantine the Great was supposed to have granted to the Papacy temporal rule over ‘Italy and all the western regions’; if so, he was seriously misled. The Donation was later shown to be a forgery, shamelessly concocted in the curia; but the Papal States which it brought into being, however shaky their legal foundations, were to last for over a thousand years, until 1870.
Rome was saved; but warfare continued, and for the next forty years Pepin and his son Charles found themselves the chief protectors of the Papacy against all its foes. Although Charles–better known to us as Charlemagne–has already made one appearance in these pages, he cannot conceivably be considered a Mediterranean figure. His impact, however, was felt all the way across Christian Europe. He became sole ruler of the Franks in 771; three years later, he captured Pavia and proclaimed himself King of the Lombards. This was effectively the end of Lombard power north of Rome. To the south, however, the great Lombard duchy of Benevento, while technically now under Frankish suzerainty, remained effectively an independent state with its capital at Salerno.
Returning to Germany, Charles next subdued the heathen Saxons and converted them en masse to Christianity before going on to annex the already Christian Bavaria. His invasion of Spain was, as we know, less successful, but his subsequent campaign against the Avars in Hungary and Upper Austria resulted in the destruction of their kingdom as an independent state and its incorporation within his own dominions. Thus, in little more than a single generation, he raised the Kingdom of the Franks from being just one of the many semi-tribal European states to a single political unit of vast extent, unparalleled since the days of imperial Rome.
When Charles returned to Italy a quarter of a century later–towards the end of the year 800–there was serious business to be done. Pope Leo III, ever since his accession four years before, had been the victim of incessant intrigue on the part of a body of young Roman noblemen who were determined to remove him. On 25 April he had actually been set upon in the street and beaten unconscious; only by the greatest good fortune had he been rescued by friends and removed for safety to Charles’s court at Paderborn. Under the protection of Frankish agents he had ventured back to Rome a few months later, only to find himself facing a number of serious charges fabricated by his enemies, including simony, perjury and adultery.
By whom, however, could he be tried? Who was qualified to pass judgement on the Vicar of Christ? In normal circumstances, the only possible answer to that question would have been the Emperor at Constantinople, but the imperial throne at that time was occupied by a woman, the Empress Irene. The fact that she was notorious for having blinded and murdered her own son was, in the minds of both Leo and Charles, almost immaterial; it was enough that she was female. By the old Salic Law, women were debarred from ruling; thus, as far as western Europe was concerned, the throne of the Emperors was vacant. Now Charles was fully aware, when he arrived in Rome, that he had no more authority than Irene to sit in judgement at St Peter’s; but he also knew that while the accusations remained unrefuted Christendom lacked not only an Emperor but effectively a Pope as well, and he was determined to do all he could to clear Leo’s name. As to the precise nature of his testimony we can only guess, but on 23 December, at the high altar, the Pope swore a solemn oath on the Gospels that he was innocent of all the charges levelled against him–and the assembled synod accepted his word. Two days later, as Charles rose from his knees at the conclusion of the Christmas Mass, Leo laid the imperial crown upon his head while the congregation cheered him to the echo. He had received, as his enemies were quick to point out, only a title; the crown brought with it not a single new subject or soldier, nor an acre of new territory. But that title was of more lasting significance than any number of conquests; it meant that the Holy Roman Empire was born and, after more than three hundred years, there was once again an Emperor in western Europe.
If Leo conferred a great honour on Charles that Christmas morning, he bestowed a still greater one on himself: the right to appoint, and to invest with crown and sceptre, the Emperor of the Romans. Here was something new, perhaps even revolutionary. No pontiff had ever before claimed for himself such a privilege: not only establishing the imperial crown as his own personal gift but simultaneously granting himself implicit superiority over the Emperor whom he had created. Meanwhile, the reaction in Constantinople to the news of Charles’s coronation can easily be imagined. To any right-thinking Byzantine, it was an act not only of quite breathtaking arrogance, but also of sacrilege. The Empire, as everyone knew, was built on a dual foundation: on the one hand the Roman power, on the other the Christian faith. The two had first come together in the person of Constantine the Great, Emperor of Rome and Equal of the Apostles, and this mystical union had continued through all his legitimate successors. It followed inevitably that, just as there was only one God in heaven, so there could be but one supreme ruler on earth; all other claimants to such a title were impostors, and blasphemers as well.
Despite Irene’s reputation, it was not perhaps altogether surprising that Charles’s thoughts should have turned to the possibility of marriage. Here, after all, was an opportunity that would never be repeated: if he could persuade the Empress to become his wife, all the imperial territories of east and west would be reunited under a single crown–his own. When, in 802, his ambassadors arrived in Constantinople with their proposal, they found Irene disposed to accept. Loathed and despised by her subjects, her exchequer exhausted, she was well aware that a coup would not be long in coming, in which event her life would be in danger. It mattered little to her that her suitor was a rival Emperor, an adventurer and effectively a heretic, nor that he was to all intents and purposes illiterate. (Charles could in fact read a bit, but made no secret of his inability to write.) Her chief consideration was that by marrying him she would preserve the unity of the Empire and–far more important–save her own skin.
But it was not to be. Her subjects had no intention of allowing the throne to be taken over by this boorish Frank, with his outlandish linen tunic and his ridiculously cross-gartered scarlet leggings, speaking an incomprehensible language and unable even to sign his own name. On the last day of October 802 a group of high-ranking officials summoned an assembly in the Hippodrome and declared their empress deposed. She escaped, however, the fate that she had so greatly feared. She was sent into exile, first to the Princes’ Islands in the Marmara and afterwards–not very appropriately–to Lesbos. A year later she was dead.
Charlemagne always maintained, probably truthfully, that his imperial coronation had taken him by surprise; according to his friend and first biographer, Einhard, he was so angry that he left St Peter’s at once. Not only did he deeply resent the suggestion that as Emperor he was the creation of the Pope; he knew that Leo’s action was devoid of any legal basis. On the other hand, the old order was becoming more and more of a contradiction. Constantinople may have been the theoretical repository of Roman law, civilisation and imperial traditions, but in spirit it was now entirely Greek. Rome, shattered by the barbarians, demoralised by centuries of near-anarchy, was still the focal point of Latin culture, and it was Charlemagne, not his Byzantine counterparts, who upheld the Pax Romana in the west. For the chaotic Europe of the middle ages, one Emperor was no longer enough. Perhaps, subconsciously, the Byzantines suspected as much, for it took Charlemagne only twelve years to obtain their official recognition. The price he paid was Venice.
It had been four hundred years since the first refugees from Attila had sought shelter in the northwestern corner of the Adriatic, among that cluster of little islands which lay protected by sandbanks and shoals, inaccessible to all but their own native boatmen. Successive barbarian invasions had overrun the rest of Italy, but here the natural defences had always held; and thus Venice, alone among the north Italian towns, had managed to escape Teutonic contamination. She had been a largely autonomous republic ever since the election of her first Doge in 726, and after the fall of the Exarchate found herself the only power left in north Italy which still remained loyal to Byzantium. She was already rich, her trade was fast developing, her navy was by now the best in the Mediterranean. Charlemagne immediately saw both her strategic importance and her value as a diplomatic pawn. His first attempt at conquest was repelled by a Venetian–Byzantine fleet. A second, by his son Pepin in 810, partially succeeded, but though most outlying districts fell into Frankish hands the islands of the Rialto continued their resistance until Pepin, dying of fever, was forced to withdraw. Venetian national pride later transformed his retreat into a historic victory, but the Byzantines, less starry-eyed, were ready to negotiate. Thus Charles received the recognition he needed, and Constantinople retained its old links with Venice while allowing her, in gratitude for her loyalty, still more privileges than before.
It might have been thought that Charlemagne, whether possessed of the Byzantine Empire or not, would continue to see himself as the natural champion of Christendom against the rising tide of Islam. In fact, after that one brief and ineffectual foray into Spain in his youth–which was anyway conducted for political rather than religious reasons–he never again rode against a Muslim army. The Anglo-Saxon churchman Alcuin, who was director of the palace school in Aachen before becoming Abbot of Tours, might well aver that it was the Emperor’s duty ‘to defend the Church of Christ in all places from the incursions of pagans and the ravages of infidels, and to secure inward recognition of the Catholic faith’, but Charles was no Crusader. He even maintained excellent relations–so far as the state of communications allowed in those days–with the Abbasid Caliph Haroun al-Rashid in Baghdad.
In achievement as in physical stature, Charlemagne was well over life-size; but that achievement was short-lived. This extraordinary figure–illiterate, immoral, more than half barbarian–kept his newly forged empire together by the strength of his personality alone; after his death in 814 its story is one of steady decline, with virtual disintegration following the extinction of his family in 888. North Italy became once again a battleground of faceless princelings, squabbling over a meaningless crown, dragging their land ever deeper into chaos. In the south, also, new dangers arose. First Corsica, then in 826 Crete fell into Muslim hands, this latter conquest radically transforming the entire strategic situation in the area: for 130-odd years, until it was reconquered by the Byzantine Emperor Nicephorus II Phocas, Crete was to be both a nest of pirates and the centre of the Mediterranean slave trade. Then, in 827, the Arabs of North Africa invaded Sicily in strength at the invitation of the Byzantine governor Euthymius, who was rebelling against Constantinople in an effort to avoid the consequences of having eloped with a local nun. Four years later they took Palermo. Henceforth the Italian peninsula was in constant danger. Brindisi fell, then Taranto and Bari–which for thirty years was the seat of an emirate–and in 846 it was the turn of Rome itself. A Saracen57 fleet sailed up the Tiber, sacked the Borgo and plundered St Peter’s, even wrenching the silver plate from the doors of the basilica. Again the city was saved by its Pope. In 849, summoning the combined navies of his three maritime neighbours–Naples, Gaeta and Amalfi–and himself assuming the supreme command, Leo IV destroyed the fleet off Ostia. The hundreds of captives were set to work building an immense rampart around the Vatican and down as far as the Castel Sant’ Angelo: the Leonine Wall, considerable sections of which remain today. Fortunately, as the century entered its last quarter, Muslim pressure relaxed. In 871 Bari fell to the Western Emperor Lewis II, and on his death the city passed to Byzantium, becoming the capital of Byzantine Italy for the next two hundred years.
At this time too there was a constant threat to the south coast of France. Around 890 a band of Andalusian corsairs landed at Saint-Tropez and dug themselves in on a nearby hilltop nowadays known as La Garde Freinet. From there they raided west to Marseille, north to Vienne and even to the abbey of St Gall in Switzerland. Not until 972 were they finally expelled. The number of wrecks of tenth-century Muslim ships found off the coast of Provence suggests considerable traffic with the rest of the Muslim world.
Leo IV and his second successor, Nicholas I, were the last two outstanding Popes to occupy the throne for a century and a half–unless we include the Englishwoman Pope Joan, who apparently managed to conceal her sex throughout her three-year pontificate until, by some unhappy miscalculation, she gave birth to a baby on the steps of the Lateran. Joan belongs, alas, to legend, but her story is symptomatic of the decadence and chaos of a period in which many of the historical Popes seems scarcely less fantastic: John VIII for example, hammered to death by his jealous relations; Formosus, whose dead body was exhumed, brought to trial before a synod of bishops, stripped, mutilated and cast into the Tiber, then miraculously recovered, rehabilitated and reinterred in its former tomb; John X, strangled in the Castel Sant’ Angelo by his mistress’s daughter so that she could instal her own bastard son by Pope Sergius III on the papal throne; or John XII, during whose reign, according to Gibbon, ‘we learn with some surprise…that the Lateran palace was turned into a school for prostitution; and that his rapes of virgins and widows had deterred the female pilgrims from visiting the tomb of St Peter, lest, in the devout act, they should be violated by his successor.’
But if John XII marked the nadir of the papal pornocracy, he was also responsible for Italy’s deliverance. In 962, powerless against the Italian ‘King’ Berengar II,58 he appealed for help to Otto, Duke of Saxony, who had recently married the widow of Berengar’s predecessor and was by now the strongest power in north Italy. Otto hurried to Rome, where John hastily crowned him Emperor. (This act was the Pope’s undoing. His debauchery was bad enough, but when two years later he also proved insubordinate to the Emperor he had created, Otto summoned a synod and had him deposed, obtaining a promise from the bishops that they should henceforth obtain prior imperial approval for any Pope they elected.) Berengar soon surrendered, leaving Otto supreme, and the Empire of the West was reborn, to continue virtually uninterrupted until the age of Napoleon.
Otto’s title of ‘the Great’ was not undeserved. He had but one ambition–to restore his empire to the power and prosperity it had enjoyed under Charlemagne–and he came close to achieving it. In the eleven years of his reign, spent largely in Italy, he brought to the north a measure of peace unparalleled in living memory. Rome was more of a problem. In the heat generated by constant papal intrigue flashpoint was never very far off, and in 966 the Emperor was faced with serious riots, which he was able to quell only after he had hanged the prefect of the city by his hair from the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius in front of the Lateran.59 It was in the south, however, that Otto found himself in real difficulties. He knew that he could never control the peninsula while Apulia and Calabria remained in Byzantine hands, but the Greeks’ hold on their Italian provinces was too strong for him. When war failed he tried diplomacy, marrying his son and heir to the lovely Byzantine princess Theophano; her dowry was generous, but it did not include south Italy. Otto died a disappointed man. His former allies, the Lombard duchies, were left more powerful than ever, while Apulia and Calabria remained as Greek as ever they had been.
Like his hero Charlemagne, Otto the Great was unfortunate in his successors. His son Otto II did his best, but after a hair’s-breadth escape from a Saracen expeditionary force which had trounced his army in Calabria he was struck down in 983, at the age of twenty-eight, after an overdose of aloes following a fever. (He is the only Roman Emperor to be buried in St Peter’s.) His son by Theophano, Otto III, proved a strange contrast to his forebears, combining the ambitions of his line with a romantic mysticism clearly derived from his mother and forever dreaming of a great Byzantinesque theocracy that would embrace Germans, Italians, Greeks and Slavs, with God at its head and Pope and Emperor His twin viceroys. This extraordinary youth had hardly left Rome after his imperial coronation when the city rose once again in revolt, but two years later he returned in strength, re-established order, restored the young German visionary Gregory V to the Papacy and built himself a magnificent palace on the Aventine. Here he passed the remaining years of his life in a curious combination of splendour and asceticism, surrounded by a court stiff with Byzantine ceremonial, eating in solitude off gold plate, occasionally shedding his purple dalmatic in favour of a pilgrim’s cloak and trudging barefoot to some distant shrine. In 999 he elevated his old tutor Gerbert of Aurillac to the Papacy under the name of Sylvester II. Gerbert was not only a distinguished theologian; he was also the most learned scientist and mathematician of his time, and is generally credited with having popularised Arabic numerals and the use of the astrolabe in the Christian west. For a Pope of such calibre the Romans should have been grateful to their Emperor, but Otto tried their patience too hard and in 1001 they expelled him from the city. He died the following year, leaving, as might have been expected, no issue. He was twenty-two.
In Italy at the end of the first millennium, we find certain patterns already formed, others slowly taking shape. First and most important is the interrelationship of Italy, the Papacy and the Empire of the West. Italy was once again an integral part of the Empire, united with Germany under a single ruler, but subordinate in that she had no say in his election. That ruler was thus always a German prince, never an Italian. On the other hand, though titular King of the Romans, he could assume the dignity of Emperor only after his coronation by the Pope in Rome; and the imperial claim to the right of papal appointment was not generally accepted in Italy–least of all by the curia and the Roman aristocracy. Even the journey to Rome through Lombardy, Tuscany and the Papal States could be made difficult for an unpopular candidate.
Meanwhile, the free towns of north Italy were growing steadily stronger and more self-willed. The chaos of the ninth and early tenth centuries had given them a taste for independence, and the peace which they had known under the Ottos had favoured their commercial development and already made many of them rich–particularly Milan, the first great crossroads south of the Alpine passes, and the swelling sea republics of Genoa, Pisa and Venice. This was a characteristically Italian phenomenon. All over western Europe, the revival of trade and the beginnings of organised industry had set in motion that slow drift from the country to the towns which still continues today; but in Italy, where there was no embryonic concept of nationhood to override that of municipal solidarity, the process was quicker and more self-conscious than elsewhere. For most of the north Italian towns the Emperor was too remote, his local representative too weak or irresponsible, to constitute a serious brake on their independent development. The result was that the towns continued to take advantage of the growing discord between Empire and Papacy, some using papal support to sever their allegiance to the Emperor, others pledging him, in return for an imperial charter, their constant steadfastness against papal blandishments. Thus during the eleventh and twelfth centuries were born the city-states of Italy, self-governing according to a communal system often consciously based on the Roman model, strong enough both to defend their independence against all comers–including each other–and to exert an increasing gravitational pull on the local landed aristocracy. And thus, simultaneously, were sown the seeds of that grim conflict, later associated with the names of the papalist Guelf and the imperialist Ghibelline, which was to lacerate northern and central Italy for centuries to come.
In Rome and the Papal States the old mixture of turbulence and turpitude still prevailed, as the great rival families–the Crescenti, the Counts of Tusculum and the rest–circled ceaselessly round the throne of St Peter. Yet even here and within the curia itself a new spirit was beginning to appear, an awakening consciousness of the Church’s need, if she were to survive, to shake off the shame of the past century and somehow to regain her intellectual and moral ascendancy. This was the spirit of Cluny, the great French mother abbey of reform. A Cluniac dependency had existed in Rome for the past fifty years; at the outset it had had little influence, but now at last its example and teachings were beginning to take effect.
Thus, so far as north and central Italy were concerned, the overriding tendency which was to shape the course of events in the eleventh century–the quickening of the struggle between an arrogant Empire and a resurgent Papacy, with the increasingly self-reliant Lombard and Tuscan cities playing off one against the other–was already discernible as the century opened. In the south, on the other hand, the situation in 1000 AD gave no clue to the momentous developments which lay in store. Of the four tenth-century protagonists in the region, two had now withdrawn: the Western Empire had shown no further interest since Otto II’s debacle, while the Saracens, though continuing their pirate raids from Sicily, seemed to have renounced the idea of establishing permanent settlements on the mainland. This led to a polarisation between the two remaining parties, Lombard and Byzantine, whose desultory fighting might have been expected to drag on interminably had they been left to themselves. In the event, however, they were now joined by a race of newcomers from the north, superior alike in courage, energy and intelligence, by whom they were outclassed and, in little more than fifty years, overthrown.
The story of the Normans in south Italy begins around 1015 with a group of about forty young Norman pilgrims at the shrine of the Archangel Michael on Monte Gargano, that curious rocky excrescence which juts out from what might be called the calf of Italy into the Adriatic. Seeing in this underpopulated, unruly land both an opportunity and a challenge, they were easily persuaded by certain Lombard leaders to remain in Italy as mercenaries with the object of driving the Byzantines from the peninsula. Word soon got back to Normandy, and the initial trickle of adventurous, footloose younger sons swelled into a steady immigration. Fighting indiscriminately for the highest bidder, they soon began to exact payment in land for their services. In 1030 Duke Sergius of Naples, grateful for their support, invested their leader, Rainulf, with the County of Aversa. Thenceforth their progress was fast, and in 1053, when Pope Leo IX raised a vastly superior army and led it personally against them, they defeated him on the field of Civitate and took him prisoner.
By this time the supremacy among the Norman chiefs had been assumed by the family of Tancred de Hauteville, an obscure Norman knight from the Cotentin peninsula, of whose twelve sons eight had settled in Italy and five were to become leaders of the first rank. After Civitate papal policy changed; and in 1059 Robert de Hauteville, nicknamed Guiscard–the Crafty–was invested by Pope Nicholas II with the dukedoms of Apulia, Calabria and Sicily. Of these territories much of Apulia and most of Calabria remained Greek, while Sicily was largely in Saracen hands; but Robert, fortified by his new legitimacy, could not be checked for long. Two years later he and his youngest brother Roger crossed the Straits of Messina, and for the next decade were able to maintain constant pressure on the Saracens, both in Sicily and on the mainland. Bari fell in 1071, and with it the last remnants of Byzantine power in Italy. Early the next year Palermo followed, and the Muslim hold on Sicily was broken for ever. In 1075 came the collapse of Salerno, the last Lombard principality. By the end of the century the Normans had annihilated foreign opposition. In all Italy south of the Garigliano river they reigned supreme, while in Sicily they were well on their way to establishing the most brilliant and cultivated court of the Middle Ages.
The Western Emperors of the eleventh century were less preoccupied with Italy than the Ottos had been. Neither Henry II ‘the Holy’ nor Conrad II left an appreciable imprint on the peninsula; nor, in all probability, would Conrad’s successor, Henry III, have done so had not the situation in Rome deteriorated to such a point that in 1045 no less than three rival Popes were squabbling over the papal crown. Henry hurried to Rome and firmly deposed all three, but his two successive nominees lasted less than a year between them–the second, Damasus II, expiring after only twenty-three days in circumstances that strongly suggested poison–and it was not until December 1048 that a great council of Bishops assembled at Worms voted unanimously for the Emperor’s second cousin, Bishop Bruno of Toul.
With Bruno, who took the name of Leo IX, the Church recovered its self-respect. The dreadful spell that had so long degraded Rome was broken, and though the Pope died after only six years–it was he whom the Normans captured at Civitate, and he never really recovered from the humiliation–he had already laid the foundations for a reformed and revitalised Papacy. In this task, however, he had the whole-hearted support of his Emperor–an advantage which his own successors were never to enjoy for, with his death in 1054 and Henry’s two years later, the fleeting era of harmonious cooperation between Emperor and Pope was at an end. It was the irony of Henry’s life that, in striving to build the Papacy into an ally, he succeeded only in creating a rival. The Church, having regained her virtue, now began to seek power as well–a quest that was bound to bring her into conflict with imperial interests, especially when pursued with the inflexible determination of prelates such as Archdeacon Hildebrand.
For nearly thirty years before his election as Pope Gregory VII in 1073, Hildebrand had played a leading part in ecclesiastical affairs. Throughout his career, he had but one object in view: to impose upon all Christendom, from the Emperor down, an unwavering obedience to the Church. Sooner or later, therefore, a clash was inevitable; it came, unexpectedly, in Milan. In 1073, during a dispute over the vacant archbishopric, Henry’s son Henry IV had aggravated matters by giving formal investiture to one candidate while fully aware that Pope Gregory’s predecessor, Alexander II, had already approved the canonical appointment of another. Here was an act of open defiance which the Church could not ignore and in 1075 Gregory categorically condemned all ecclesiastical investiture by laymen, on pain of anathema, whereupon the furious Henry immediately invested two more German bishops with Italian sees, adding for good measure a further Archbishop of Milan, although his former nominee was still alive. Refusing a papal summons to Rome to account for his actions, he then called a general council of all German bishops and, on 24 January 1076, formally deposed Gregory from the Papacy.
He had badly overplayed his hand. The Pope’s answering deposition, accompanied by Henry’s excommunication and the release of all his subjects from their allegiance, led to revolts throughout Germany which brought the Emperor literally to his knees. Crossing the Alps in midwinter with his wife and baby son, he found Gregory in January 1077 at the castle of Canossa and there, after three days of abject humiliation, he at length received the absolution he needed.
The story of Canossa, often enlivened by an illustration of the Emperor, barefoot and in sackcloth, shivering in the snow before the locked doors of the castle, has been a perennial favourite with German writers of children’s history books, in which it is apt to appear as an improving object lesson in the vanity of temporal ambitions. In fact, Gregory’s triumph was empty and ephemeral, and Henry knew it. He had no intention of keeping his promises of submission, and in 1081 he crossed into Italy once again–this time at the head of an army. At first Rome held firm, but after two years Henry managed to break through its defences. A few half-hearted attempts at negotiation were soon abandoned, and on Easter Day 1084 he had himself crowned Emperor by his own nominee, the antipope Clement III.
Even now Gregory, entrenched in the Castel Sant’ Angelo, refused to surrender. He had one more card to play. The Normans, to whom he had always appealed when in trouble, had this time been slow to respond, Robert Guiscard being fully occupied with a Balkan campaign against the Eastern Empire; but in May 1084 Robert suddenly appeared with an army of 36,000 at the walls of Rome. Henry, hopelessly outnumbered, withdrew just in time. The Normans broke through the Porta Flaminia, and for three days the city was given over to an orgy of pillage and slaughter. When at last peace was restored, the whole district between the Colosseum and the Lateran had been burned to the ground. Rome had suffered more from the champions of the Pope than she had ever had to endure from Goth or Vandal. Robert, not daring to leave the unhappy Gregory to the mercy of the populace, escorted him south to Salerno, where he died the following year. The Pope’s last words, ironical and self-pitying, have come down to us: ‘I have loved righteousness and hated iniquity, therefore I die in exile.’
It was a bitter valediction, but Gregory’s achievement had been greater than he knew. He had finally established papal supremacy over the church hierarchy–the practice of lay investitures, already losing ground, was to die out altogether early in the following century–and even if he had not won a similar victory over the Empire, he had at least asserted his claims in such a way that they could never again be ignored. The Church had shown her teeth; future Emperors would defy her at their peril.
The events of the eleventh century, and in particular the weakening of the imperial hold on Italy as the investiture struggle gained momentum, provided the perfect climate for the development of the Lombard and Tuscan city-states; but while these fissile and republican tendencies were shaping the destinies of north Italy, the south was developing on opposite lines. Here too there existed trading cities such as Naples, Salerno and Amalfi, with long histories of independence. Outside these, however, the energy of the Normans had welded the land together for the first time in five centuries, imposing on it an autocratic feudalism stricter than anything the north had ever known. Robert Guiscard died in 1085 on an expedition against Constantinople,60 leaving his mainland dominion to his son but effective control in Sicily to his brother–now the Great Count Roger–who had been largely responsible for its conquest. It was a fortunate decision, since it enabled Roger to consolidate the Norman hold on the island, where in certain areas Saracen resistance was still strong. In the sixteen years that he was to survive his brother, he laid the foundations of a secure and brilliantly organised state–foundations on which his son was triumphantly to build.
In Roger II Europe saw one of the greatest and most colourful rulers of the Middle Ages. Born of an Italian mother, raised in Sicily where–thanks to his father’s principles of total religious toleration–Greek and Saracen mingled on equal footing with Norman and Latin, in appearance a southerner, in temperament an oriental, he had yet inherited all the ambition and energy of his Norman forebears and combined them with a gift for civil administration entirely his own. In 1127 he acquired the Norman mainland from an incapable and feckless cousin, thus becoming in his own right one of the leading rulers of Europe. Only one qualification was lacking before he could compete as an equal with his fellow princes: he desperately needed a crown.
His opportunity came in February 1130, in the all too familiar guise of a dispute over the papal succession. Pope Honorius II was dying. His obvious successor was Cardinal Pietro Pierleoni, former papal legate to Henry I of England, a cleric of outstanding ability and irreproachable Cluniac background–who, however, being a member of a rich and influential family of Jewish origins, was unacceptable to the extreme reformist section of the curia. While the majority acclaimed Pierleoni as Pope Anacletus II, this group elected its own candidate, who took the name of Innocent II. Within a few days, Innocent’s position became so dangerous that he was forced to leave Rome–but his departure proved his salvation. Once over the Alps, his cause championed by one of the most disastrous and most disruptive political influences of the age, St Bernard of Clairvaux, he rapidly gathered support from all Christian Europe. Anacletus was left with only Rome–and Roger. Roger’s terms were simple: Norman support in return for a crown. Instantly the Pope agreed, and so it was that on Christmas Day 1130, in conditions of unprecedented splendour, Roger was crowned King of Sicily and Italy in the cathedral of Palermo.
His troubles, however, were not over. Anacletus died in 1138 and in the following year Innocent, at last secure on his throne, himself led an army against the new kingdom. It was always a mistake for Popes to meet Normans on the battlefield; Innocent was captured at the Garigliano river just as Leo IX had been at Civitate, and received his liberty only on formally recognising Roger’s title to the crown. But the King was too dangerous a threat to the southern frontier of the Papal States to allow of any real reconciliation. Neither were his relations with the two empires any happier. Both saw him as a challenge to their own sovereignty, and in 1146 even Roger’s superbly tortuous diplomacy failed to prevent an entente of all three powers against him. He was saved only by the Second Crusade, that humilating fiasco which was the price the princes of Europe paid for allowing St Bernard to meddle in their affairs.
And yet, with all his problems, foreign and domestic–for the powerful vassals in Apulia maintained a state of almost constant insurrection during much of his reign–Roger’s power continued to grow, as did the magnificence of his court. The navy that he created under his brilliant admiral61 George of Antioch soon became, despite the hostility of the Italian sea republics, paramount in the Mediterranean. Malta he conquered, and the North African coast from Tripoli to Tunis;62 Constantinople itself was raided; so were Corinth and Thebes, the latter the centre of the Byzantine silk-weaving industry, whence captive artisans were brought back to staff the royal workshops in Palermo. Here, in his palaces and pavilions among the orange groves, Roger spent the last ten years of his life, working with his polyglot chancery–Latin, Greek and Arabic were all official languages of the kingdom–discussing science and philosophy with the foremost international scholars of the time (for Sicily was now the main channel through which both Greek and Arabic learning passed into Europe), or taking his ease like any oriental potentate in his splendidly stocked harem.
His supreme monument is the Palatine Chapel, which he built during the 1130s and 1140s on the first floor of the royal palace of Palermo. In plan it is on the traditional Latin model, with a central nave flanked by two aisles, and steps leading up into an apsed sanctuary. The floor and lower walls are Latin too, though of astonishing opulence and sumptuousness, their creamy white marble inlaid with gold leaf and polychrome opus alexandrinum. Every square inch of the upper walls, on the other hand, is completely covered with Byzantine mosaics, nearly all of the same date and of superb quality,63 clearly the work of Greek mosaicists expressly imported from Constantinople. These alone would be enough to mark the chapel as a jewel, rare and utterly unique, but they are not alone. Soaring above them is a painted stalactite roof of purest Arabic workmanship–a roof that would do credit to Cordoba or Damascus. Roger’s most astonishing political achievement was to weld together the three great civilisations of the Mediterranean–Latin, Greek and Arab–so that they worked together in peace and harmony, and to do so in a century in which they were everywhere else at each other’s throats: the century of the Crusades, and less than a hundred years after the Great Schism between the Eastern and Western Churches. Here, in this one small building, we find that same achievement expressed quite spectacularly in visual terms. We see it too in the King’s other great foundation at Cefalù. There the Arabic influence may be rather less evident, but the wholly Byzantine mosaic of Christ Pantocrator–the Ruler of All–in the high eastern apse is surely the greatest portrait of the Redeemer in all Christian art.
Meanwhile, the wind of change, having already swept through northern Italy, was moving slowly south to Rome. In 1143 a civil insurrection broke out in the city and a Senate was once again established. The Papacy fought back–in 1145 Pope Lucius II actually died of wounds sustained while storming the Capitol–but the communal movement steadily gained ground, particularly after the arrival of a certain Arnold of Brescia, a fiery young monk in whom an extreme asceticism was buttressed by a new approach to religious thinking: scholastic philosophy. This had grown up during the past century in France, under theologians such as Arnold’s old master Peter Abelard, and it was now taking root in Italy. Essentially a trend away from the old mysticism towards a spirit of logical, rationalistic enquiry in spiritual matters, it was one of the two dominant influences in Arnold’s life. The other was the revived interest in Roman law now being expounded at the University of Bologna. From these two influences he had developed his theory, which he preached tirelessly through the streets and piazzas of Rome, that the Church should subject itself entirely in all things temporal to the civil authority of the state, renouncing all worldly power and reverting to the pure and uncompromising poverty of the early fathers. Here was dangerous stuff; to St Bernard, who preached diametrically opposite views with equal force and who had already condemned Abelard and Arnold together at the great Council of Sens in 1140, it was anathema. But not even Bernard could loosen Arnold’s hold on Rome. This was to be the joint achievement of two other towering figures of their century, the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa and Nicholas Breakspear who, as Pope Adrian (or Hadrian) IV, was the only Englishman ever to occupy the throne of St Peter.
Adrian made it clear from the outset that he intended to take orders from no one. When, therefore, he found that the Roman commune, supported by Arnold, was barring him access to the Lateran, his reply was swift. Early in 1155 all Rome was placed under an interdict, to continue until Arnold had been expelled from the city. No Pope had ever dared to take such a step before, but it proved triumphantly successful. Holy Week was approaching; a godless Easter was unthinkable; and popular feeling rose sharply against the commune. Suddenly Arnold disappeared, and Adrian at last found himself free once more. On Easter Day he presided, as planned, at High Mass in the Lateran.
Frederick of Hohenstaufen, King of the Romans and thus Emperor-elect64 since 1152, kept the feast at Pavia. He had recently received the iron crown of Lombardy–in a ceremony even more symbolic than usual since several of the Lombard towns, led by Milan, were now in open opposition to the Empire–and was heading south to his imperial coronation in Rome. Near Siena he was met by papal legates with an urgent request: his assistance in capturing Arnold of Brescia, who had taken refuge in a neighbouring castle. For Frederick’s army this presented no difficulty. Arnold soon gave himself up and was returned to Rome. Condemned by the prefect of the city, he was first hanged, then burned; finally his ashes were cast into the Tiber.
Still, the prospect of Frederick’s imminent arrival in Rome was beginning to cause concern in the curia. Not without difficulty–for neither party trusted the other an inch–a meeting was arranged between King and Pope near Sutri. It nearly ended in fiasco when for two days Barbarossa refused to perform the symbolic act of holding Adrian’s bridle and stirrup as he dismounted, but at last agreement was reached and the two rode on to Rome together. They were soon intercepted by some tight-lipped envoys from the commune; if Frederick wished to enter the city he would have to pay tribute and guarantee all the citizens their civic liberties. The King refused point-blank and the envoys sullenly returned; but Adrian, scenting trouble, quickly despatched a heavy advance force to take over the Leonine City. The next morning at first light he and Frederick secretly slipped into Rome, and a few hours later the new Emperor had been crowned. The news reached the commune while it was meeting to discuss how best to prevent the coronation. Furious at having been tricked, mob and militia together attacked the Vatican. All day the fighting went on, with heavy slaughter on both sides, but by evening the imperial forces had prevailed and the remaining attackers withdrew across the river.
Frederick, having got what he wanted, now returned to Germany. For Adrian, however, it had been an empty victory. Without the Emperor’s troops to protect him he could not remain in Rome, and he had failed utterly to mobilise Frederick’s support against King William I ‘the Bad’ of Sicily, Roger II’s son and successor, whom he still refused to recognise. His best hope of achieving the downfall of the Sicilian kingdom now lay with the Apulian barons, once again in revolt and this time supported by a Byzantine army. But his luck had deserted him. William did not deserve his nickname, which seems to have been due more to his swarthy and sinister appearance and his Herculean physical strength than to any serious defects of character. True, he was lazier and still more pleasure-loving than his father, but he had retained the Hauteville gift of galvanising himself and all those around him when faced with a crisis. He now swept up from Sicily at the head of his Saracen shock-troops, smashed the Greeks and the Apulian insurgents at Brindisi and then went on to besiege Adrian at Benevento. For the third time the Normans had a great Pope at their mercy. In June 1156, forced to capitulate, Adrian confirmed William in his Sicilian kingdom.
Humiliating as it was, the Pope soon had cause to be glad of his action, for Barbarossa was proving more of a menace to the Papacy than William had ever been. During the summer of 1158 he returned to Italy in strength, and at the Diet of Roncaglia left the Italian cities in no doubt as to his own concept of imperial sovereignty, as four celebrated savants from Bologna–a university to which he had always shown especial favour–demolished all their beloved ideals of municipal independence, showing them to be totally devoid of legal foundation. Henceforth, he declared, every city would be subjected, through a foreign governor (podestà), to complete imperial control. Throughout Lombardy the effect was electric; but Frederick had come prepared for trouble. In 1159, at Crema, he tied fifty hostages, including children, to his siege engines to prevent the defenders from counter-attacking; in 1162 he at last brought the Milanese to their knees and destroyed their city so completely that for the next five years it lay deserted and in ruins. But he only stiffened the cities’ resistance. Past rivalries now forgotten, they formed the great Lombard League to defend their liberties.
Pope Adrian had died in 1159. Clearly, from Frederick’s point of view, much depended on the choice of his successor, and he was well aware that by far the most likely candidate was Cardinal Roland Bandinelli, who was, like Adrian, strongly opposed to his claims. To what degree he was responsible for what followed is uncertain; it can only be said that the investiture which was held two days after Roland’s election in St Peter’s on 7 September was the most grotesquely undignified in papal history. The scarlet mantle of the Papacy was produced and the new Pope, after the customary display of reluctance, bent his head to receive it. At that moment Cardinal Octavian of S. Cecilia suddenly dived at him, snatched the mantle and tried to don it himself. A scuffle ensued, during which he lost it again, but his chaplain instantly brought forward another–having presumably foreseen just such an eventuality–which Octavian this time managed to put on, unfortunately back to front, before anyone could stop him.
There followed a scene of scarcely believable confusion. Wrenching himself free from the furious supporters of Roland who were trying to tear the mantle forcibly from his back, Octavian–whose frantic efforts to turn it right way round had succeeded only in getting the fringes tangled round his neck–made a dash for the papal throne, sat on it and proclaimed himself Pope Victor IV. He then charged off through the basilica until he found a group of minor clergy, whom he ordered to give him their acclamation–which, seeing the doors burst open and a band of armed cut-throats swarming into the church, they obediently did. For the moment at least, the opposition was silenced; Roland and his adherents slipped out while they could and took refuge in the fortified tower of St Peter’s. Meanwhile, with the cut-throats looking on, Octavian was enthroned a little more formally than on the previous occasion and escorted in triumph into the Lateran–having, we are told, been at some pains to adjust his dress before leaving.
However undignified its execution, the coup could now be seen to have been meticulously planned in advance, and on a scale that left no doubt that the Empire must have been actively implicated. Octavian had long been known as an imperial sympathiser, and his ‘election’ was immediately recognised by Frederick’s two ambassadors in Rome, who at the same time launched a vigorous campaign against Roland. This proved unsuccessful; before long public opinion in Rome swung firmly behind the rightful Pope, who, on 20 September at the little town of Ninfa, at last received his formal consecration as Pope Alexander III. The Church remained effectively in schism, but gradually Octavian lost his support. He died in 1164 in Lucca, where he had been keeping alive on the proceeds of not very successful brigandage and where the local hierarchy would not even allow him burial within the walls.
Venice, Sicily and–as soon as he was able–Pope Alexander lent their active support to the Lombard League, and soon Frederick began to feel, for the first time, the full weight of Italian opposition. Soon, too, his luck began to turn. In 1167 a march on Rome was brought to nothing when plague broke out in the imperial army; the Emperor was obliged to retreat, almost defenceless, through hostile Lombardy, and barely managed to drag his pale survivors back over the Alps. In 1174 he returned, but the momentum had gone; on 29 May 1176 his German knights were routed at Legnano by the forces of the League. It was the end of Frederick’s ambitions in Lombardy. At the Congress of Venice in the following year he publicly kissed Pope Alexander’s foot at the entrance to St Mark’s65and in 1183, at Constance, the Venetian truce became a treaty. Though imperial suzerainty was technically preserved, the cities of Lombardy (and to some extent Tuscany also) were henceforth free to manage their own affairs. It was hardly the solution Frederick had foreseen at Roncaglia, but consolation was soon at hand. The Empire, which had fought so vainly and so long for control over Lombardy, was now to acquire Sicily with hardly a struggle.
Roger II, who died in 1154, was unfortunate in his descendants. His son, William the Bad, despite his triumph over the Pope, had a basically undistinguished reign of only twelve years, after which he was succeeded in turn by his son, William II. Genetically, the new king was a throwback; unlike his father, who was described as a huge ogre of a man, ‘whose thick black beard lent him a savage and terrible aspect which filled many people with fear’, the younger William was fair-haired and outstandingly handsome. It was somehow inevitable that he should be called William the Good, though in fact as a ruler he turned out to be rather worse than his father: weak and ineffectual, always striving after effect but hardly ever achieving it. His only true inheritance from Roger was a passion for building, and his immense cathedral of Monreale in the hills above Palermo, the vast expanse of its interior walls a blaze of dazzling mosaic, stands as an unforgettable monument to Sicily’s last legitimate Norman king.
For when William the Good died, aged thirty-six, on 18 November 1189, the Hauteville line died out. His wife, Joanna–she was the daughter of Henry II of England66–had borne him no children, and the throne passed to, of all people, his aunt: Constance, the posthumous daughter of Roger II–she was in fact a year younger than her nephew the King–who, nearly four years before, had been given in marriage to Henry, son and heir of Frederick Barbarossa. Why William and his advisers had ever contemplated such an idea for a moment will never be understood, since it meant that were the King to die childless Sicily would fall into the Emperor’s lap, its separate existence at an end. Admittedly, there was plenty of time yet for Joanna to conceive; in 1186 she was still only twenty, her husband thirty-two. But life in the twelfth century was a good deal more uncertain than it is today, infant mortality was high, and to take such a risk before the succession was properly assured was, by any standards, an act of almost criminal folly.
There were, it need hardly be said, many Norman barons bitterly opposed to Constance and determined to fight, if necessary, for the kingdom’s continued independence. Early in 1190, with the encouragement of Pope Clement III, the Archbishop of Palermo laid the crown of Sicily on the head of Roger II’s illegitimate grandson, Tancred, Count of Lecce.67 Tancred was small and villainously ugly, and his illegitimacy should technically have debarred him from the throne; but he was able and energetic, and had he lived a normal lifespan and managed to find just one strong ally apart from the Pope there is just a chance that he might have saved his country from extinction. Sadly, he had half the Norman barons against him and was faced from the start with widespread rebellion. Moreover, he was to die in early middle age. His son and successor, still a child, was powerless when Henry–now the Emperor Henry VI–arrived in 1194 to claim his crown; he too was to die in mysterious circumstances soon afterwards. Henry’s coronation took place in Palermo on Christmas Day 1194, and brought the most dazzling realm of the middle ages all too prematurely to its end.
Sixty-four years is a short life for a kingdom, and indeed Sicily might have survived had William II–his sobriquet is better forgotten–shown himself either sensible or fertile. Instead, he made a present of it to its oldest and most persistent enemy–who, on the pretext of a suspected conspiracy, was to massacre virtually all the Sicilian and south Italian noblemen who had opposed him just four days after his coronation, instituting a reign of terror that was to last for the rest of his life. The Norman Kingdom of Sicily was never defeated; it was thrown away.
For one more generation, however, its spirit lived on. Queen Constance had not been present when her husband was crowned in Palermo. Pregnant for the first time at the age of forty, she was determined on two things: first, that her child should be born safely; second, that it should be seen to be unquestionably hers. She did not put off her journey to Sicily, but travelled more slowly and in her own time; she had got no further than the little town of Jesi, some twenty miles west of Ancona, when she felt the pains of childbirth upon her. There, on the day after the coronation, in a tent erected in the main square to which free entry was allowed to any matron of the town who cared to witness the birth, she brought forth her only son–whom, a day or two later, she presented in that same square to the assembled inhabitants, proudly suckling the baby at her breast. Of that son, Frederick–later to be nicknamed Stupor Mundi, ‘the Astonishment of the World’–we shall hear more, much more, as our story continues.