The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean (16 page)

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 Of the four tenth-century protagonists in the region, two had now withdrawn: the Western Empire had shown no further interest since Otto II’s debacle, while the Saracens, though continuing their pirate raids from Sicily, seemed to have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,
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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 admiral
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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;
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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.