The Kingdom in the Sun (62 page)

The same order had been simultaneously circulated to all the ports of Sicily—a security embargo on an unprecedented scale. Even within the island, few people seemed to know exactly what was happening. In Trapani, Ibn Jubair reports, everyone had their own idea about the fleet, its size, purpose and destination. Some said it was bound for Alexandria, to avenge the fiasco of 1174; others suspected an attempt on Majorca—a favourite target for Sicilian raiders in recent years. There were also, inevitably, many who maintained that the expedition would be against Constantinople. In the past year hardly a ship had arrived from the East without its quota of blood-curdling reports concerning Andronicus's latest atrocities; and it was now widely rumoured that among the increasing number of Byzantines taking refuge in Sicily was a mysterious youth claiming to be Alexius II, the rightful Emperor. If, as men said, this youth had actually been received by the King and had convinced him of the truth of his story, what was more natural than that William the Good should launch an expedition to re-establish him on his throne ?

These last years of William's reign are sadly undocumented. Archbishop Romuald of Salerno had died in 1181; and with his death we lose the last of the great chroniclers of Norman Sicily. We shall therefore never know whether such a claimant did in fact present himself at the court in Palermo. There is nothing inherently improbable in the idea.
Coups d'etat
of the kind Andronicus had achieved in Constantinople normally produce a pretender or two; Robert Guiscard had unearthed one to strengthen his hand before his own Byzantine adventure in 1081, and Metropolitan Eustathius of Thessalonica—of whom we shall be hearing more before long— assumes that a pseudo-Alexius was wandering through northern Greece shortly after the time of which Ibn Jubair was writing. But whether the rumour was true or false, we know for a fact that William did not lack encouragement for his enterprise: one of Manuel Comnenus's nephews—maddeningly, also called Alexius— had recently escaped to Sicily and had been received at the Court, since when he had been urgently pressing William to march to Constantinople and overthrow the usurper.

Throughout the winter of 1184-85 the King was at Messina. True to his normal practice, he had no intention of himself participating in the campaign, but he had taken personal charge of preparations. Though he naturally admitted it to no one, his ultimate objective was nothing less than to gain for himself the crown of Byzantium; and he was determined that the force he sent out to attain it should be worthy of such a prize—stronger, both on land and sea, than any other ever to have sailed from Sicilian shores. And so it was. By the time it was ready to start, the fleet—commanded once again by his cousin Tancred of Lecce—is said to have comprised between two and three hundred vessels and to have carried some eighty thousand men, mcluding five thousand knights and a special detachment of mounted archers. This huge land army was placed under the joint leadership of Tancred's brother-in-law Count Richard of Acerra and a certain Baldwin, of whom virtually nothing is known apart from an intriguing passage by Nicetas:

Although of mediocre birth, he was much beloved of the King and was appointed general of the army by virtue of his long experience of military affairs. He liked to compare himself with Alexander the Great, not only because his stomach was covered—as was Alexander's—with so much hair that it seemed to sprout wings, but because he had done even greater deeds and in an even shorter time —and moreover, without bloodshed.

The expedition sailed from Messina on 11 June 1185 and headed straight for Durazzo. Although William's attempt to seal all Sicilian ports had not been entirely successful—Ibn Jubair's Genoese captains had had little difficulty in bribing their way out of Trapani— his security precautions seem to have had some effect; it is hard to see how Andronicus could otherwise have been caught so unprepared. As we know, he had long mistrusted western intentions, and he must have been aware that Durazzo, as his Empire's largest Adriatic port and the starting point from which the main imperial road—the old Roman
Via Egnatia
—ran eastward across Macedonia and Thrace to Constantinople, was the obvious if not the only possible Sicilian bridgehead. Yet he had made little effort either to strengthen the city's fortifications or to provision it for a siege.

When he did at last receive reports of the impending attack he quickly sent one of his most experienced generals, John Branas, to take charge of the situation; but Branas arrived at Durazzo only a day or two before the Sicilian fleet, too late to accomplish anything of value.

When Durazzo had fallen to Norman arms a century before, it had been only after a long and glorious battle, fought heroically on both sides; a battle in which the Byzantine army had been led by the Emperor himself, the Norman by the two outstanding warriors of their age, Robert Guiscard and his son Bohemund; in which the Lombard Sichelgaita had proved herself the equal in courage of both her husband and her stepson; in which the stalwart axe-swinging Englishmen of the Varangian Guard had perished to the last man.
¹
This time it was a very different story. Branas, knowing that he had no chance, surrendered without a struggle. By 24 June, less than a fortnight after the fleet had sailed out of Messina, Durazzo had surrendered.

The subsequent march across the Balkan peninsula was swift and uneventful. Not a single attempt was made to block the invaders' progress. On
6
August the entire land force was encamped outside the walls of Thessalonica; on the fifteenth the fleet, having sailed round the Peloponnese, took up its position in the roadstead; and the siege began.

Thessalonica was a thriving and properous city, with fifteen hundred years of history already behind it and a Christian tradition going back to St Paul. As a naval base it dominated the Aegean; as a commercial centre it vied with Constantinople itself, even surpassing it during the annual trade fair in October, when merchants from all over Europe gathered there to do business with their Arab, Jewish and Armenian colleagues from Africa and the Levant.
²
Thanks to this fair the city also boasted a permanent European mercantile community living in its own quarter just inside the walls.

¹
See
The
Normans
in
the
South,
pp. 231-3.

²
The fair has continued, intermittently, until the present day. Thessalonica maintained its predominantly Jewish character throughout Ottoman times and up to the second world war, when its entire Sephardic population of some fifty thousand was deported to Poland, never to return.

Largely composed of Italians, it was to prove of more than a little value to the besiegers during the days that followed.

Yet the principal blame for the disaster that overtook Thessalonica in the summer of 11
8 5
must lie not with any foreigner but with its own military governor, David Comnenus. Although he had strict instructions from the Emperor to attack the enemy at every opportunity and with all his strength,
¹
and although—unlike Branas at Durazzo—he had had plenty of time to prepare his defences and lay in provisions, he had done neither. Within days of the beginning of the siege his archers had run out of arrows; soon there were not even any more stones for the catapults. Worse still, it soon became clear that he had failed to check the water cisterns, several of which were found—too late—to be leaking. Yet at no time did David Comnenus betray the slightest sign of shame or discomfiture. Nicetas Choniates, who probably knew him personally, writes:

Weaker than a woman, more timid than a deer, he was content just to look at the enemy, rather than to make any effort to repulse him. If ever the garrison showed itself eager to make a sortie he would forbid it, like a hunter who holds back his hounds. He was never seen to carry arms, or to wear a helmet or cuirass. . . . And while the enemy battering-rams made the walls tremble so that the masonry was crashing everywhere to the ground, he would laugh at the noise and, seeking out the safest corner available, would say to those around him, 'Just listen to the old lady—how noisy she is!' Thus he would refer to the largest of their siege-machines.

Nicetas was not himself at Thessalonica during those dreadful days; his account of them, however, is based on the best possible authority—that of the city's Metropolitan Archbishop, Eustathius. Though a Homeric scholar of repute, Eustathius was no stylist;
²
neither, as a good Greek patriot, did he ever try to conceal his own hatred of the Latins, whom—with good reason in his case—he

¹
Andronicus's orders were 'to see that the city was preserved and, far from being afraid of the Italians, to leap on them, bite them and prick them. Those were his own exact words, though I believe that only he knew precisely what he meant. Those who liked to joke about such things gave them a most unseemly interpretation—which I have no intention of repeating here.' (Nicetas.)

²
Unless, perhaps, he was too much of one. Even Chalandon, whose own prose style can hardly be described as compulsive, speaks with feeling of what he calls
'l'ennui
que
cause
sa
rhetorique
ampoulee'.

considered no better than savages. But his
History of the Latin Capture of Thessalonica,
turgid and tendentious as it is, remains the only eye-witness account we have of the siege and its aftermath. The story it tells is not a pretty one.

Even had it been adequately prepared and defended, it is unlikely that Thessalonica could have held out very long against so furious and many-sided an attack as that which the Sicilians now launched upon it. The garrison resisted as bravely as its commander permitted, but before long the eastern bastions began to crumble. Meanwhile, on the western side, a group of German mercenaries within the city was being bribed to open the gates. On 24 August, from both sides simultaneously, the Sicilian troops poured into the second city of the Byzantine Empire.

So huge an army must have contained hundreds of soldiers of Greek extraction; hundreds more, from Apulia and Calabria as well as from the island of Sicily itself, must have grown up near Greek communities, been familiar with their customs and religious traditions, even spoken a few words of their language. It would have been pleasant to record that these men had exerted a moderating influence on their less enlightened comrades; but they did nothing of the kind—or, if they tried, they failed. The Sicilian soldiery gave itself up to an orgy of savagery and violence unparalleled in Thessalonica since Theodosius the Great had massacred seven thousand of its citizens in the Hippodrome eight centuries before. It is perhaps more than coincidental that Eustathius puts the number of Greek civilian dead on this present occasion at the same figure; but even the Norman commanders estimated it at five thousand, so he may not be very far out. And murder was not all; women and children were seized and violated, houses fired and pillaged, churches desecrated and destroyed. This last series of outrages was surprising. In the history of Norman Sicily we find very few cases of sacrilege and profanation, none on such a scale as this. Even the Greeks, for all their poor opinion of Latin behaviour, were as astonished as they were horrified. Nicetas admits as much:

These barbarians carried their violence to the very foot of the altars, in the presence of the holy images.
...
It was thought strange that they should wish to destroy our icons, using them as fuel for the fires on which they cooked. More criminal still, they would dance upon the altars, before which the angels themselves trembled, and sing profane songs. Then they would piss all over the church, flooding the floors with urine.