The Kingdom in the Sun (30 page)

among the Romans, yet he personally had always remained incorruptible; his gentleness and unassuming ways had earned him much genuine love and respect of a kind that cannot be bought for gold. Till the day of his death he continued to wear, under his pontifical robes, the coarse white habit of a Cistercian monk; and at his funeral the popular grief was such that, in the words of Bishop Hugh of Ostia, 'one would have believed that he who in death was so honoured on earth was already reigning in Heaven'.
¹

When the news of his death reached Clairvaux, the Abbot himself was failing fast. We have it on Bernard's own authority that by this time he was in constant pain and unable to touch solid food. His hands and feet were swollen with dropsy. Sleep had become impossible. He too seems to have kept his faculties to the end; but on Thursday 20 August, at nine o'clock in the morning, he died at the age of sixty-three. His is a hard character to assess. Modern biographers seem no less susceptible to his magnetism than were his contemporaries; one after another they rhapsodise over his humility, his charity and his general saintliness. For as long as they confine themselves to his spiritual attributes, their encomiums are possibly justified. It is in the political sphere that St Bernard's record becomes, to say the least, questionable. History is full of instances in which ecclesiastics have played valuable and constructive parts in affairs of state; but these men of the Church have nearly always been men of the world as well, realists who have been able to view the great issues of their time with a cool, objective eye. The Abbot of Clairvaux provides a perfect example of what
is
apt to occur when this condition is not fulfilled. He was that fortunately rare phenomenon, the genuine mystic and ascetic with a compulsion to interfere in politics. His reputation and the sheer force of his personality ensured that he was listened to; his formidable rhetorical gifts and powers of persuasion did the rest.

His weakness was that he was all emotion. He saw the world with the eye of a fanatic, in black and white—the black to be stamped out by any means available, the white to be upheld whatever the price. Scarcely ever in his letters or other writings do we find a trace of

¹
Just over seven centuries later, in 1872, he was to be beatified by Pope Pius IX.

logical argument, still less of political understanding. Such a man, raised to a position of virtually limitless influence and prestige, could only cause havoc; and St Bernard's major interventions in the world political scene were, all too often, disastrous. His incitement of Lothair II against Roger of Sicily ended—as it could only have ended—in debacle and was arguably the cause of the old Emperor's death; his launching of the Second Crusade led to the most shameful Christian humiliation of the Middle Ages. Had he lived it would have surprised no one to find him advocating, as his cousin the Bishop of Langres had already advocated, a punitive expedition against Constantinople of the kind which, when it occurred half a century later, was to deal Eastern Christendom so shattering a blow.

Suger, Conrad, Bernard—one by one, the giants were disappearing from the scene. About this time, too, death robbed Sicily of her High Admiral, George of Antioch. The Emir of Emirs has played, it must be admitted, a somewhat shadowy role in this story. We have seen him as a young adventurer, as a patron of the arts who has left as his memorial one of his country's loveliest churches, and finally as an elderly buccaneer of courage and
panache.
As
an admiral, however, as the man who was for well over a quarter of a century responsible more than any other for the rise of Roger's naval power throughout the Mediterranean, we have done him less than justice. For this the Sicilian records of the time are partly to blame. There exists only one reliable contemporary chronicle covering the second half of George's lifetime—that of Romuald of Salerno; but the Archbishop, not surprisingly, is more concerned with mainland politics than with naval affairs. We are thus obliged to fall back on Arab writers; and while they have left us splendidly detailed reports of the Admiral's seafaring exploits, even they are able to tell us little enough about the man himself.

Yet George of Antioch was the sole architect of Roger II's North African Empire. His capture of Tripoli in
1146
—itself the culmination of some ten or fifteen years of regular raids and minor conquests along the coast—had given his master control of the entire littoral as far as Tunis and had consequently marked a turning-point in Roger's African policy. Before it, Sicilian incursions on African soil had all been more or less piratical; henceforth we see authority established on a permanent basis. This authority was not aimed at political domination : Roger was too much of a realist to see such an objective as either possible or even desirable. He was interested only in the economic and strategic advantages to be gained from a North African Empire. Both were immense. By occupying the chief commercial centres of the coast, he could eliminate middlemen; the King's agents, operating at the head of the great caravan routes to the south, with a virtual monopoly of grain and many other commodities as well, were soon able to control a large proportion of the internal trade of the continent. Strategically the position was simpler still: command of the narrow seas between Sicily and Tunis meant mastery of the central Mediterranean.

Only one local ruler of importance continued in power, Prince Hassan of Mahdia. Twenty-three years earlier, at the age of fourteen, after a crushing defeat of the Sicilian navy at the fortress of ad-Dimas,
¹
Hassan had been hailed through the length and breadth of the Arab world as a hero of Islam; since then, however, he had voluntarily recognised Roger as his suzerain and had entered into a treaty of alliance which appeared to be to the mutual benefit of both rulers. This happy state of affairs might well have been allowed to continue indefinitely had not the local governor of Gabes in
1147
rebelled against Hassan and offered the city to Roger on condition that he himself were appointed governor. Roger accepted the offer; Hassan, understandably, objected; and the consequent rupture led, in the summer of
1148,
to the despatch of two hundred and fifty Sicilian ships under George of Antioch against the port of Mahdia.

Hassan knew that prolonged resistance was impossible. The country was in the grip of a famine and totally dependent on Sicilian corn; Mahdia could not hope to hold out for more than a month at the outside. Calling his people together, he laid the facts before them. Those who preferred to stay and take their chance with the Sicilians might do so; the remainder, with their wives and children and what possessions they could carry, could follow him into voluntary exile.

¹
The Normans in the South,
pp. 298-302.
154

It was not till the late afternoon that the Sicilian fleet entered harbour. The few inhabitants who had elected to stay offered no opposition; and the admiral, according to the late twelfth-century historian Ibn al-Athir, found the palace in its normal state. Hassan had taken his crown jewels but had left whole rooms full of other treasures—together, it appears, with a large number of his concubines. 'George put the treasure-rooms under seal; the ladies were all collected in the castle'—after which their fate is unknown.

George's conduct was, as usual, exemplary. After only two hours of pillage—probably the minimum necessary if he were not to find a mutiny on his hands—order in Mahdia was restored. Local citizens were appointed as governors and magistrates; care was taken that no religious susceptibilities were offended; all the fugitives were invited back to the city—beasts of burden were even sent out to help them with their belongings—and offered food and money on their return. The usual
geziah
or poll-tax was insisted upon, but was deliberately kept low. Only poor Hassan seems to have suffered, though not at Sicilian hands; he was ill-advised enough to seek refuge with his cousin, who promptly confined him to an island off the coast where he languished for the next four years. His subjects, however, including the populations of Sfax and Soussa which hastily surrendered in their turn, soon settled down under their new masters; so that five and a half centuries later the North African historian Ibn Abi-Dinar was able to write:

This enemy of Allah restored both the cities of Zawila
¹
and Mahdia; he advanced capital for the merchants, did good to the poor, confided the administration of justice to a
qadi
acceptable to the people, and ordered well the government of those cities .... Roger consolidated his dominion over the greater part of that region; levied taxes with gentleness and temperance; reconciled the hearts of the people; and governed with justice and humanity.

When George of Antioch died in the year 546 of the Hegira—that is in 1151 or 115 2—'beset', so Ibn al-Athir informs us, 'with many diseases, among them piles and the stone', he left three memorials: the church of the Martorana, his beautiful seven-arched bridge over

¹
The principal commercial suburb of Mahdia.
155

the Oreto, and the African Empire. The first two still remain;
¹
the third was to last little more than a decade. It was with George that it reached its apogee; perishable as it proved, he left it one of the brightest jewels in the crown of Sicily.

The old admiral's work was completed; yet he died too soon. Had he been spared for another three years he would have survived his master; and the King's subsequent reputation would have escaped its saddest, most baffling and—almost certainly—its most undeserved stain.

The life of King Roger of Sicily ends, as it began, in obscurity. Of his death we know little, save the day it occurred—
26
February
11
54.
As to its cause, Ibn al-Athir speaks of an angina; while from Hugo Falcandus—perhaps the greatest of all the chroniclers of Norman Sicily—who begins his history with the new reign, we have only a single sentence intriguingly ascribing the King's death to 'exhaustion from his immense labours, and the onset of a premature senility through his addiction to the pleasures of the flesh, which he pursued to a point beyond that which physical health requires'. His last two years seem to have been tranquil enough. From both the Eastern and the Western Empires the immediate danger to the Kingdom had been averted, at least temporarily; his son William, already crowned, had assumed some, if not all, of the burdens of state; and Archbishop Romuald of Salerno finds so little to report between the deaths of Conrad and Eugenius and that of Roger himself, that he falls back on a description of the King's country palaces.

In order that none of the joys of land or water should be lacking to him, he caused a great sanctuary for birds and beasts to be built at a place called Favara,
²
which was full of caves and dells; its waters he

¹
The Oreto has now been diverted, and George's bridge now spans nothing but mountains of refuse from a nearby gypsy encampment; but it is still known as the Ponte dell' Ammiraglio. On 27 May 1860 it was the scene of the first clash between the Neapolitan forces and Garibaldi's Thousand.

²
The word comes from the Arabic
Buheira,
meaning a lake. The Favara—also called Maredolce—is a sad place today. The great lake that used to encompass it has dried up, and there are only traces left of the wide courtyard, surrounded with arcades in the oriental style, which was the chief feature of the palace. Just one small wing remains, containing what is left of the chapel, crumbling among the lemon-groves.

stocked with every kind of fish from divers regions; nearby he built a beautiful palace. And certain hills and forests around Palermo he likewise enclosed with walls, and there he made the Parco—a pleasant and delightful spot, shaded with various trees and abounding with deer and goats and wild boar. And here also he raised a palace, to which the water was led in underground pipes from springs whence it flowed ever sweet and clear. And thus the King, being a wise and prudent man, took his pleasure from these places according to the season. In the winter and in Lent he would reside at the Favara, by reason of the great quantity of fish that were to be had there; while in the heat of the summer he would find solace at the Parco where, with a little hunting, he would relieve his mind from the cares and worries of state.