The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean (18 page)

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.
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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.

CHAPTER VII

The Christian Counter-Attack

After the Muslims had conquered Spain in the eighth century and the greater part of Sicily in the ninth, they made no further permanent territorial acquisitions. To the Christian lands surrounding the Mediterranean, however, they seemed a more horrible threat than ever. Their unofficial colonies in the south of Italy and in southern France were the terror of their Christian neighbours; no area of the Middle Sea was safe from the danger of their pirate fleets, and there were few coastal towns or cities that did not live in fear of a surprise onslaught. Venice almost alone, secure in her shallow lagoon, had no need for vigilance. Rome itself, as we have seen, had been sacked in 846, and in the following century Genoa and Pisa suffered similar fates.

Nor was the Muslim menace confined to piracy. Egypt was also becoming increasingly dangerous. A Turkish soldier of fortune, Ahmed ibn Tulun, became governor in 868 and extended his authority through much of the Levant as far as Cilicia, in the southeastern corner of the coast of Asia Minor. Finally, in the last years of the century, the Abbasid Caliph sent a punitive fleet to Egypt and Tulunid rule ended in 905.
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Three decades of confusion followed, after which another considerably more distinguished and longer-lasting dynasty took the stage–the Fatimids, Shias of the Ismaili sect, who traced their descent to the Prophet’s daughter Fatima. First coming into prominence in Tunisia, they conquered Egypt in 969 and built themselves a new capital which they named al-Qahira, ‘the Victorious’, known to us today as Cairo. By this time the Abbasid Caliphate was on its last legs, and unable to prevent the Fatimid conquest not only of Palestine and Syria but also of the Arabian heartland, the Hejaz.

In theory, from the ninth century onward, it was the Western Emperor who bore the ultimate responsibility for defending his empire from infidel attack; but the Emperor was powerless. Aachen, the imperial capital, was several weeks’ march from the Mediterranean: even when an army ventured south it was perforce confined to the land, since the few vessels that constituted the imperial navy normally found themselves in the Baltic. Poor Otto II was a case in point: in December 980 he had decided to free south Italy once and for all from the Saracen scourge. To begin with, his campaign had gone well enough, but in the summer of 982, as he was advancing into Calabria, he had been surprised by an Arab force near Stilo. His army had been cut to pieces, and he himself had escaped only by swimming to a passing ship, concealing his identity and later, as the vessel approached Rossano, jumping overboard again and striking out for the shore. His defeat was the clearest possible illustration of imperial powerlessness in the face of Islamic pressure.

Yet even then–though still almost imperceptibly–the pendulum had begun its backward swing. From the late tenth century onward we see a slow increase in Christian resistance. The Muslim settlers in the south of France were expelled by 975. Genoa and Pisa were building up navies of their own; already by 1016 these enabled them to band together to drive the Saracens from the island of Sardinia, which since 721 had suffered at least nine major raids–often accompanied by massacres of the local population. Not many years later the Arabs of North Africa were given a taste of their own medicine, as Italian ships began in their turn to threaten the coastal towns. By the end of the fifty-year rule of the Byzantine Emperor Basil II the Bulgar-Slayer in 1025, his empire had regained control of virtually the entire Balkan peninsula, all Asia Minor, Apulia, Crete and Cyprus. The grand climacteric came in 1087, when Genoa and Pisa made another joint expedition, this time against Mahdia–the Arab capital, in what is now Tunisia–capturing the town, burning the ships in its harbour and imposing peace terms on its ruler. Four years later the Great Count Roger I completed his conquest of Sicily, and in 1092 and 1093 further expeditions from Italy and southern France joined a substantial force of Normans to reconquer much of northern Spain. On every side the Muslim world was breaking up. Politically, the Mediterranean was once again becoming a Christian sea.

But there was bad news too. In 1055 the first wave of Turkish invaders, the Seljuks, had captured Baghdad; in 1071 they had burst into Asia Minor. The Byzantine Emperor Romanus IV Diogenes had personally led an army against them, but on 26 August he had been soundly defeated and taken prisoner at the battle of Manzikert. The Seljuk leader, Alp Arslan–whose moustaches, we are told, were so long that he had to have them tied behind his back when hunting–had treated the Emperor handsomely and sent him back with an escort to Constantinople, but the damage was done. In the years that followed the Turks spread all over central Anatolia, leaving only parts of the coast in Byzantine hands. Fourteen years after the battle, in 1085, they captured Antioch, the third of the five patriarchates of the Eastern Church–after Alexandria and Jerusalem–to fall to the Muslims. Only Rome and Constantinople remained.

The story of this first wave of Turkish expansion in Anatolia had one important and quite unexpected consequence. The Seljuk conquest of Armenia–far to the northeast, centred on Mount Ararat–led to a huge southward exodus on the part of its people, and in 1080 a certain Roupen, a relative of the last King of Ani, founded a small principality in the heart of the Taurus in Cilicia. Gradually–though it was the best part of a thousand miles from the Armenian heartland–this grew in strength and importance until in 1199 it was to become the Kingdom of Lesser Armenia. The Armenians have always prided themselves on being the first nation in the world to adopt Christianity, which they did in about 300 AD; here, suddenly, was a Christian kingdom, virtually surrounded by Muslim states, hostile to Byzantium but shortly to give invaluable support to the Crusaders–above all those of the First Crusade–on their way through Cilicia to the Holy Land.
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In the immediate aftermath of Manzikert it was all the more to be expected that Western Christendom should turn its attention to the Muslim east. The Italian coastal cities were attracted by the obvious commercial possibilities; the Normans were as always impelled by their deep-seated urge for conquest and adventure; but militant Christians, wherever they might be, were determined somehow to stem the Muslim tide. Thus, when Pope Urban II addressed the Council of Clermont on 27 November 1095 and concluded his speech with an impassioned appeal for a Crusade, he was preaching to the already half-converted, providing religious justification for an enterprise which might well have been launched without him. The continued occupation of the Holy Places–and above all of Jerusalem itself–by the infidel was, he declared, an affront to Christendom; Christian pilgrims were now being subjected to every kind of humiliation and indignity. It was the duty of all good Christians to take up arms against those who had desecrated the ground upon which Christ had trod and to recover it for their own true faith.

In the months that followed, Urban’s words were carried by the Pope himself through France and Italy and by a whole army of preachers to every corner of western Europe. The response was tremendous; from as far afield as Scotland, men hastened to take the Cross. Neither the Emperor Henry IV nor King Philip I of France
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–who had recently been excommunicated for adultery–were on sufficiently good terms with Rome to join the Crusade, but this was perhaps just as well; Urban was determined that the great enterprise should be under ecclesiastical control, and nominated as leader and his official legate one of the relatively few churchmen to have already made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, Bishop Adhemar of Le Puy. The bishop was to be accompanied, however, by several powerful magnates: Raymond of Saint-Gilles, Count of Toulouse, the oldest, richest and most distinguished of them all; the French king’s brother Count Hugh of Vermandois, who arrived severely shaken after a disastrous shipwreck in the Adriatic; Count Robert II of Flanders; Duke Robert of Normandy (son of William the Conqueror) and his cousin Count Stephen of Blois, and Godfrey of Bouillon, Duke of Lower Lorraine. With Godfrey came his brother Baldwin of Boulogne–who, as a younger son without a patrimony, had brought along his wife and children and was determined to carve out a kingdom for himself in the east. From south Italy came Bohemund, Prince of Taranto, son of Robert Guiscard, who cherished similar ambitions. True Norman that he was, he cared little for the Holy Places but looked on the Crusade as the greatest adventure of his life.

One of the most popular leaders, however, was not a nobleman at all but an elderly itinerant monk called Peter, nicknamed ‘the Hermit’ for the hermit’s cape that, so far as could be seen, he never removed. He stank to high heaven and was said to look almost exactly like the donkey that he always rode, but his personal magnetism was undeniable. According to the historian Guibert of Nogent, ‘whatever he said or did seemed like something half-divine’. He had preached the Crusade all over France and in much of Germany, and by the time his particular expedition set out he may have had a following of over 40,000. Many of these, doubtless, were sincere, God-fearing men eager to fight for the sacred cause, but there were also large numbers of sick and lame–including women and children–who hoped for miraculous cures, while the vast majority seem to have been footloose riffraff attracted only by the possibility of plunder and by the promise, to all who completed the journey, of a place in paradise.

Inevitably, considering the numbers involved and their many different points of departure, the Crusaders left at various times and took various routes to their first gathering point, Constantinople. Urban seems to have genuinely believed that they would receive a warm welcome from the Byzantine Emperor Alexius I Comnenus; had Alexius not himself appealed to the West for military assistance against the Turks? What the Pope failed to understand was that there is a vast difference between a regiment or two of trained mercenaries coming to swell a defence force and putting themselves unconditionally under its commanders, and a number of full-scale armies, many of them totally undisciplined, expecting to be fed and lodged but unprepared to take orders from anyone except themselves. In the short time at his disposal, Alexius coped magnificently; he organised huge supplies of provisions in all the cities through which the Crusaders were to pass, with military detachments to meet each army as it crossed the imperial frontier and to escort it to the capital. Once there, the rank and file were provided with lodgings outside the walls; visitors were allowed into the capital only in small and manageable groups of perhaps half a dozen at a time, to see the sights and worship at the principal shrines.

The Crusading armies arrived in Constantinople between October 1096 and May 1097. Before they could continue on their way, however, there was serious diplomatic work to be done. First of all, Alexius insisted that each leader should swear to him an oath of allegiance, with an acknowledgement–almost certainly in writing–of imperial claims in Asia Minor and Syria. These were given, with varying degrees of reluctance, by all but one: Raymond of Toulouse. Raymond had arrived in the middle of April, and was still intriguing to get himself recognised as commander-in-chief. If, he declared, the Emperor were to put himself at the head of the Crusade, he would be his loyal follower; if not, he would accept no suzerain other than God. His fellow-princes, fearing that his attitude might imperil the success of the whole expedition, begged him to relent, and he finally agreed to a compromise, swearing–by a form of oath common in his native Languedoc–to respect the life and honour of the Emperor and to see that nothing would be done to his detriment. Alexius, realising that this was the best he could hope for, very sensibly accepted. He made his displeasure felt only by witholding from Raymond those magnificent presents–of food, horses and sumptuous silken robes–that he showered on all the other leaders.

The Emperor’s relief, as he watched the last of the Crusaders board the vessels that were to carry them over to Asia, may well be imagined. Even he can have had no clear idea of how many men, women and children had crossed his territory in the previous nine months: the total, ranging from the rabble of Peter the Hermit–which had been predictably massacred by the Turks the previous October, having got no further than Nicaea–to the great feudal lords, cannot have been far short of 100,000. Thanks to his meticulous preparations and precautions, the Crusading armies had caused less trouble than he had feared, and all the commanders except one had sworn him their allegiance; but he had no delusions about them. Foreign armies, however friendly they might be in theory, were never welcome guests, and these dirty and ill-mannered barbarians were surely worse than most. They had ravaged the land, ravished the women, plundered the towns and villages, and yet they still seemed to take all this as their right, expecting to be treated as heroes and deliverers rather than as the ruffians they were. Their departure occasioned much rejoicing, and it was a further consolation to know that, if and when they returned, they would be considerably fewer in number than on the outward journey.

Contrary to the expectations of many, the First Crusade turned out to be a resounding, if undeserved, success. On 1 July 1097 the Seljuk army was smashed at Dorylaeum (now Eskisehir) in Anatolia; on 3 June 1098 the Crusaders recovered Antioch; and finally, on Friday, 15 July 1099, amid scenes of hideous carnage, the soldiers of Christ battered their way into Jerusalem, where they celebrated their victory by slaughtering all the Muslims in the city and burning all the Jews alive in the main synagogue. Two of their former leaders were not, however, by then among them: Baldwin of Boulogne had made himself Count of Edessa (now Urfa) on the middle Euphrates, while Bohemund of Taranto–after a bitter quarrel with Raymond of Toulouse–had established himself as Prince of Antioch.