Download PDF | Graham Loud - Roger II and the Creation of the Kingdom of Sicily-Manchester University Press (2012)
406 Pages
PREFACE
The Norman kingdom of Sicily is one of the most fascinating and unusual areas of interest within the discipline of medieval history, but until a few years ago those in the anglophone world who wished to study it in any depth were hamstrung by the lack of appropriate literature in English. For many years the only professional historian writing in English on Norman Italy was Evelyn Jamison (1877–1972), to whose pioneering researches on the royal administration and the south Italian nobility we are still indebted.
She, however, ploughed a lonely furrow. That lamentable situation has begun to change thanks to the sterling efforts of a number of contemporary scholars, notably David Abulafia, Joanna Drell, John Howe, Jeremy Johns, Donald Matthew, Alex Metcalfe, Paul Oldfield, Chuck Stanton, Valerie Ramseyer and Patricia Skinner, to all of whom I am most grateful, both for their work and for their friendship and collaboration over many years. But to understand and appreciate the topic, one also needs to read the primary sources, which are often bristling with technical difficulties (and not just linguistic ones).
Until recently, none of these had appeared in English translation. In an attempt to remedy this situation I published in this series, twelve years ago, in collaboration with the late Thomas Wiedemann, The History of the Tyrants of Sicily by ‘Hugo Falcandus’, 1154–69. This present book is a companion volume to Falcandus, covering the immediately preceding period that saw the foundation of the kingdom of Sicily. It is a substantial volume, for which I must beg the forgiveness both of my readers and of my publisher, but I hope the interest and completeness of the subject matter justifies this. I have always believed that where possible it is better to read, and try to understand, the whole of a text rather than extracts chosen at an editor’s whim. One must, obviously, compromise to some extent, especially when dealing with lengthy chronicles only a little of which are about the reign of King Roger, but I make no apology for presenting the complete texts of Alexander of Telese and Falco of Benevento, the principal historians contemporary with the king’s reign.
It is, for example, impossible to understand the way Falco wrote his chronicle, or his concern with the well-being of his native city, if one omits his account of events before 1127. These texts were the first two that I translated for my undergraduate special subject on the Norman Kingdom of Sicily, and I must begin by thanking all the students who have studied and discussed them at the University of Leeds since 1989. I am also most grateful to the staff of the Brotherton Library at Leeds, and especially to Neil Plummer and Jane Saunders for their careful stewardship of the History shelves, and to my colleagues in the School of History for allowing me a semester’s study leave to complete this book.
In preparing it I have received help from many people, but especially Dione Clementi and Edoardo d’Angelo who presented me with copies of the modern editions of Alexander and Falco; the latter also patiently answered innumerable queries over the years, about Falco and many other matters too. My debt to the late Dr Clementi’s commentary on Alexander will be apparent from the footnotes, and it was her contacts that first introduced me to the pleasures of archival work in Italy, for which, I fear, I never properly thanked her in her lifetime. I am also grateful to Dott. Marino Zabbia for advice regarding the chronicle of Romuald, the new edition of which he is preparing. My work at Montecassino was made possible by don Faustino Avagliano, at Cava by the late don Simeone Leone, don Leone Morinelli and Signor Enzo Cioffe, and at Benevento by Prof. Elio Galasso. Prof. Vittorio de Donato allowed me to consult his unpublished thesis while I was working at the British School in Rome in 1990, during which time and on earlier visits too I was much helped by the kindness of the then Director, Richard Hodges, and the Librarian, Valerie Scott.
My colleague Ian Moxon has been, as ever, invaluable in assisting me with translation problems, and has saved me from many egregious mistakes. My former research student Paul Oldfield, now a considerable scholar in his own right, and my current PhD students Isabella Bolognese and Benjamin Pohl have all been a great help and even greater encouragement – Isabella not least in meticulously proof-reading the translation of Falco’s Chronicle. Hubert Houben, Alex Metcalfe and Paul Oldfield have all read and commented upon the introduction, and Alex has also checked my translation of the selections from al-Idrîsî. To all of them I am most grateful – needless to say, the faults that remain are entirely my own responsibility. And, as ever, Kate has been the prop and mainstay of this work, as well as the ever resourceful solver of computing problems. G.A. Loud Leeds and Lyme Regis August 2010
INTRODUCTION
Count Roger II of Sicily was crowned as the first king of the new kingdom of Sicily in Palermo cathedral on Christmas Day 1130. The consequences of that action were profound. The unification of the island of Sicily with the southern Italian mainland in the years after 1127 altered the balance of power in the Mediterranean and had a major impact on the power politics of Europe in the central Middle Ages. Furthermore, the kingdom thus created lasted, despite terrible and prolonged internal conflicts in the later Middle Ages, for more than seven hundred years, until its incorporation into the Risorgimento kingdom of Italy by Giuseppe Garibaldi in 1860. One could therefore hardly deny that the process by which this new political entity was erected and consolidated was one of great importance and interest for the history of medieval Europe.
Furthermore, the contemporary sources which describe the creation of the kingdom (here translated into English for the first time) are of unusual interest, not least in that the two principal narrative texts, the ‘History of King Roger’ of Abbot Alexander of Telese and the Chronicle of Falco of Benevento, reveal diametrically opposing views of King Roger and his state-building. The reputation of King Roger King Roger was a controversial figure, in his lifetime and afterwards. Most contemporary commentators had a high opinion of his character and abilities, but not necessarily of his rule. In part, this was a product of the circumstances in which the kingdom was created, and of the endorsement of that creation by a schismatic pope whose pontificate was deemed illegitimate.
German writers were hostile because in their eyes the erection of the kingdom, in territory which they considered to be subject to their empire and without the sanction of the emperor, was illegitimate under any circumstances. Bernard of Clairvaux seized on this issue when he wrote to Emperor Lothar during the papal schism. It is the duty of Caesar to uphold his own crown against the machinations of that Sicilian usurper. Just as it is to the injury of Christ that a man of Jewish race has seized for himself the See of Peter, so it is against the interests of Caesar that anyone should make himself the king of Sicily.1 Others were critical of how Roger ruled. Even in an age of stern, centralising monarchs anxious to strengthen their rule and consolidate their kingdoms, his harshness seemed to many to stray beyond the bounds that were generally acceptable. Orderic Vitalis, writing in Normandy in the early 1140s, encapsulated this view. He [Roger] took possession of the duchy of Apulia against the wishes of the inhabitants.
Later he fought against all who attempted to resist him and cruelly suppressed them with great forces; he spared no man, but struck down kinsmen and strangers alike and, stripping them of their wealth, crushed and humbled them. ... So with passionate violence he destroyed men near and far and, by cruelly causing much bloodshed and mourning, grew to greatness.2 Otto of Freising – half-brother of King Conrad III and thus virtually official spokesman of the German crown, a man of deep learning and historical sensibility – went further still, comparing his ‘works of cruelty’ to those of ancient Sicilian tyrants. Another contemporary German historian wrote that Emperor Lothar in 1137 refused Roger’s offers to negotiate a settlement whereby he or one of his sons might hold Apulia from the emperor: ‘he flatly refused to hand over that province to a semi-pagan tyrant’. (Quite what gave rise to this accusation is uncertain: was it Roger’s support for the anti-pope, or his toleration of non-Christians, or his employment of Muslim soldiers?) Falco of Benevento, who saw his actions from much closer to hand than these writers north of the Alps, waxed lyrical and wrathful over the cruelties inflicted by the king and his troops, exclaiming at one point ‘not even Nero, the cruellest emperor among the pagans, had inflicted such slaughter among Christians’.3 And yet there was another side to the coin, for shrewder and less biased commentators recognised that Roger’s actions were a product of the circumstances of his time. To his credit, much as he disliked Roger and his kingdom, Otto of Freising did admit that there were divergent views about the king.
There are, however, those who say that he acts rather out of a concern for justice rather than from tyranny, for they say that he loves peace more than all other princes, and it is for the preservation of this that they wish him to repress rebels with such severity. Still others say he is moved by love of money, in which indeed he exceeds all other western kings, rather than peace and justice.4 Yet to churchmen, such as Otto, the bringing of peace was the justification for secular government in an imperfect world. As we shall see, that was good enough reason for Alexander of Telese to support King Roger. Perhaps most interesting was the verdict of a historian writing some years later, probably in the time of Roger’s grandson William II (king 1166–89), whose moral outlook appears to have been formed less by conventional Christian ideas than by his reading of classical texts, the so-called ‘Hugo Falcandus’. We do not know who this writer may have been, and while he was probably a native of southern Italy not all modern scholars concur in this opinion.5 He was, however, a wellinformed insider at the Sicilian court, and no admirer of the later Sicilian kings and their rule. However, his opinion of King Roger was notably balanced. Some writers categorise many of his actions as tyrannical and call him inhuman because he imposed on many men penalties that were severe, and not prescribed by the laws. It is my opinion that as a prudent man who was circumspect in all things, he intentionally behaved in this way when his monarchy was recently established so that wicked men should not be able to wheedle any impunity for their crimes; and that while those who deserved well (to whom he showed himself mild) should not be discouraged by excessive severity, there should nevertheless be no place for contempt as a result of excessive mildness. And if perhaps he acted somewhat harshly against some, I suppose that he was forced to it by some necessity. For there was no other way in which the savagery of a rebellious people could have been suppressed, or the daring of traitors restrained.
Alexander of Telese suggested that Roger deliberately cultivated an image of restraint and remoteness, that he might be feared by evildoers (which in this context meant above all potential rebels and political opponents), and the chronicle attributed to Archbishop Romuald of Salerno said that he was more feared than loved by his subjects. But ‘Romuald’ added, echoing Alexander and Falcandus, that he was ‘in private kindly, generous with honours and rewards to those faithful to him’.7 Therefore, insofar as we can approach the king’s character and behaviour, the picture given by contemporaries is surprisingly consistent – and one should stress that there is no indication of interdependence between these various sources. That his rule was often harsh was a product of the circumstances in which the kingdom of Sicily was created, and the long struggle that King Roger waged against those who opposed him. For, though crowned in 1130, he was only securely in control of his kingdom from 1139 onwards. Even then, the external relations of the new kingdom remained difficult: the German Empire remained consistently, and the Byzantine Empire intermittently, hostile, and this hostility was kept simmering by political exiles. It was not in fact until some way into the reign of William II that the kingdom of Sicily was absolutely secure against its external enemies. While, to begin with, Roger was prepared to be flexible and to conciliate his opponents, he found, as did other contemporary rulers, that mildness could too easily be interpreted as weakness. Harsh measures, however regrettable, therefore became necessary if the new kingdom created in 1130 was to survive.8
The historical background The new kingdom that emerged was a polyglot one, embodying a mixture of different peoples, cultures and even religions. Mainland southern Italy was divided between a majority who called themselves ‘Lombards’, thus literally descendants of the Germanic invaders of the peninsula in the later sixth century, but who in our terms may be considered native Italians, and a minority of Greek-speakers, especially in the Salento peninsula of southern Apulia and in Calabria. The longobardi of southern Italy – few of whom were really derived from the Lombards of late Antiquity, since the latter, like the other ‘barbarian’ invaders of the Roman Empire were only a relatively small élite (and themselves an amalgam of different peoples) – had developed a strong sense of their own identity, sustained by the traditional law codes of the early medieval Lombard kings, but separate from the lombardi or inhabitants of northern Italy. They were, however, like the northerners Latin Christians, loyal to the Church of Rome. On the island of Sicily, conquered by the Arabs in the ninth century, much of the population had in the next two centuries converted to Islam, but there remained a substantial Christian minority, especially in the north-east of the island, which was for the most part graecophone, who observed the rites of the Orthodox Church of Constantinople, as did their Greek compatriots on the mainland. In addition, there were a few – we do not know how many – Arabic-speaking Christians on Sicily, and indeed many of the Christian inhabitants of the island may in practice have been bilingual in Arabic and Greek.9 At the end of the twelfthcentury a poet, writing in Latin, could still celebrate the kingdom’s capital, Palermo, as being ‘endowed with people of three languages’,10 even if by this time the Latin element was becoming dominant. Indeed, the society of southern Italy was, if anything, even more complex than the above summary may suggest. There were on the mainland coastal cities, Amalfi, Naples and Gaeta, that had never been conquered by the Lombards, the inhabitants of which still considered themselves to be distinct from the rest of southern Italy, not least in the observance of Roman (i.e. Byzantine) law, but who were also Latin Christians and who were economically, and to a considerable extent culturally, increasingly interwoven with the general ‘Latin’ population of the south.11 Politically, the region had been chronically divided, the mainland between Lombard princes, independent duchies and provinces of the Byzantine Empire, the island from the early eleventh century between rival Muslim rulers. Into this maelstrom of contending parties a new element had begun to intrude itself from about the year 1000 onwards. Over the course of the eleventh century almost the entire region, with the exception of a few larger towns, was step by step conquered by warriors from France, most of whom described themselves and were known to their contemporaries as ‘Normans’ (normanni in the Latin texts). Many of these were indeed from the duchy of Normandy, even though there were others, perhaps as many as a quarter or even a third of the invaders, who came from other parts of France (mainly from the north).12 The first of these Normans had arrived in the south as pilgrims. They had soon been employed as mercenaries by the various warring princes, and even by the Byzantine governors. Their establishment in the south was undoubtedly assisted by the fragmentation of authority there and the number of rival political leaders who sought their services. From the early 1040s onwards the Normans began to take over the southern mainland. By 1059, even though some of Apulia still remained in Byzantine hands, most of the mainland lay under Norman rule – something that was recognised by Pope Nicholas II when in August of that year he formally and publically invested the Norman leader Robert Guiscard as Duke of Apulia and Calabria, to be held as fiefs from the pope as his overlord. At the same time, or perhaps a few months earlier, the other principal Norman leader of the south, Count Richard of Aversa, had been recognised by the pope as Prince of Capua, which city and much of its dependent principality Richard had captured in the previous summer. The two Norman leaders were, it should be noted, closely linked, since Richard was married to Robert Guiscard’s sister, and the later Norman princes of Capua were descended from this union. Furthermore, when Pope Nicholas invested Robert as duke at Melfi in August 1059, he not only confirmed him as ruler of the former Byzantine provinces of the mainland, but in addition as ‘Duke of Sicily, when it shall be conquered’. Clearly the prospect of recovering Sicily for Christianity was a powerful reason for the pope to ally himself with the new Norman ruler, although this was only one reason among several – the need for political and military support at Rome was at this time an even more compelling one.13 However, this wish to recover former Christian territory no doubt coincided with the intentions of the Norman leaders, Robert Guiscard and his younger brother Roger, who launched the invasion of Sicily in 1061. Although Messina and the north-east of the island were soon captured, and Palermo fell in January 1072, the conquest of Sicily was a lengthy process. The last few towns remaining in Muslim hands, in the southeast of the island, were taken only in 1091. While Robert Guiscard, as duke, had been nominally in charge of this conquest, in practice he could rarely spare time and resources for military operations on the island. After the capture of Palermo, he never returned to Sicily. His brother Roger was thus left in de facto control of the island, although the duke retained a half share of Palermo and Messina, the two principal towns, under his direct rule.14 In the late 1080s, at which time most of the island was in Christian hands, Roger I began to enfeof his principal supporters with lands in Sicily, a process that was greatly extended after 1091.15 Similarly, once the island had been completely conquered, Count Roger established new bishoprics, entrusted to Latin Christian prelates. He also founded, or encouraged the foundation of, monasteries; several were Latin, but the majority of these new houses were Greek, reflecting the overwhelming preponderance of those observing the Greek rite among Christians on the island. By the time of his death in 1101 Count Roger had himself founded three Latin monasteries and one nunnery, but he had also either personally founded or been involved in the foundation of over twenty Greek houses.16 By 1101 the balance of power within Norman Italy had been considerably altered. Robert Guiscard had progressively extended and consolidated his power within his dominions, as well as conquering the hithertoindependent Lombard principality of Salerno, the capital city of which fell to him in December 1076. In his last years he had, in addition, led two major expeditions into the Balkans against the Byzantine Empire. However, after his death in the course of the second of these expeditions in 1085, the authority of his successors as dukes of Apulia had progressively diminished. Admittedly, his son Roger Borsa (‘the Purse’) was by no means as ineffectual as an obituary notice, included by the compiler of the ‘Romuald’ chronicle, suggested.17 However, it should be remembered that his father had faced repeated revolts, largely from his own relations and his Norman vassals. While these had been successfully overcome, and towns and lands confiscated from the rebels had increased the duke’s resources, Guiscard’s rule in Apulia had always been problematic. In addition, Roger Borsa faced the challenge of his elder half-brother Bohemond, the son of Guiscard’s first wife, whom the latter had repudiated on grounds of consanguinity.18 Despite the support of his uncle, Count Roger of Sicily, Duke Roger was forced to make a series of territorial concessions to Bohemond in the years 1088–90, granting him a number of towns in southern and central Apulia, including the important ports of Taranto and Bari. Although Bohemond was largely an absentee after 1096, when he joined the First Crusade, the creation of his lordship began a process whereby the most important seigneurs of that region largely escaped from ducal control. While Duke Roger continued to rule effectively over the principality of Salerno and most of inland Apulia – the towns of Melfi and Troia remained as foci of ducal rule in that region – much of the rest of Apulia (the Salento peninsula in the south, the central coastal region and the northern frontier of the Capitanata) became effectively independent. When Duke Roger and Bohemond both died within a fortnight of each other early in 1111, the former leaving as his heir a boy of 13 or 14, and the latter a small child, the decline of central authority and the growth of noble independence in Apulia accelerated. Furthermore, a similar process of fragmentation had been under way in the principality of Capua since the death of Prince Jordan I in 1090. The maintenance of princely authority was here also hampered by a revolt, or perhaps series of insurrections, by the townspeople of Capua, the resistance of whom was only eventually overcome with the help of Duke Roger Borsa and Count Roger of Sicily in 1098. But, despite recovering their capital, the later princes of Capua only effectively controlled the southern part of their principality, in the plain around the city of Capua; the nobles of more peripheral regions, like their counterparts in Apulia, became more and more autonomous.19 What the Norman Conquest had therefore not done was to unite southern Italy, and whereas up to c.1085/90 the region was divided into three principal spheres of influence, each controlled by a relatively powerful local ruler, thereafter authority became more and more fragmented. Local territorial lords such as the counts of Conversano and Loritello in Apulia, and the counts of Caiazzo and Carinola in the principality of Capua, even though in all these four cases they were cousins of the ruler, were to all intents and purposes independent. Conflicts emerged between regional potentates – notably Bohemond, and after his death his widow Constance – and the counts of Conversano in southern Apulia. Some of the larger towns sought to assert their independence also. Gaeta as well as Capua revolted against the prince in 1091/2, while Amalfi proved increasingly restive under ducal rule, and in 1096 withstood a full-scale siege from Roger Borsa, whose rule over that city was only restored c.1102.20 Bari threw off the rule of Bohemond II in 1113; five to six years later, after considerable factional dispute, a local patrician named Grimoald Alfaranites emerged as ‘Prince of Bari’, apparently as leader of a local civic regime.21 Furthermore, incidents such as the murder of Archbishop Riso of Bari in 1117, the capture of Constance by treachery at Giovinazzo in August 1119,22 and the conflict between counts Rainulf of Caiazzo and Jordan of Ariano for dominance in the region around Benevento in the years 1119–21, suggest that this diminution of regional authority had led to a significant breakdown in law and order.23 While one should be careful not to exaggerate the extent of this, as Alexander of Telese did when describing the situation after the death of Duke William of Apulia in the first chapter of his History – for some parts of southern Italy, notably the principality of Salerno, seem to have remained peaceful and untroubled – the decline of authority in the southern part of the peninsula during this period was marked. One symptom of this was the proclamation by successive popes of the Truce of God at a series of councils (at Melfi in 1089, and at Troia in 1093, 1115 and 1120). The Church sought to enforce peace through spiritual sanctions, precisely because lay authority was weak; the duke was present at all four of these councils, which were held in towns that were part of his fisc, so the proclamation of the Truce was certainly not part of an attempt to undermine his authority, but rather meant to support it. The popes, as nominal overlords of southern Italy, clearly recognised the weakness of temporal authority there. Hence Gelasius II in 1118 and Calixtus II in 1120 received fealty (and in 1120 also homage) not just from the duke and the prince of Capua but also directly from some of the other leading nobles in the region: in 1120 from counts Rainulf (II) of Caiazzo, Jordan of Ariano and Robert (II) of Loritello, as well as ‘innumerable others’, or so the papal biographer Pandulf claimed.24 The exception to this picture of fragmenting authority was in the dominions of the Count of Sicily. Admittedly, there are hints in the (for this period exiguous) sources that even here there were problems after the death of Roger I in 1101. His successors, his eldest legitimate son Simon (1101–5) and his second son Roger, both succeeded as children25 with their mother, Adelaide, as regent, and minorities were almost inevitably problematic in the Middle Ages. A later document from 1141 mentioned ‘a rebellion in Calabria and Sicily’ during this regency, in which the village of Focerò in north-east Sicily was destroyed twice, or perhaps three times. Furthermore, a Greek abbot from the same part of Sicily petitioned the young Roger II in 1109 requesting that his church’s land be surveyed afresh, since the document recording their boundaries had been lost in the troubles that had recently affected the island.26 But while his minority may have had its problems, once he attained his majority and took personal control in 1112 Roger II appears to have been firmly in command of his dominions. Furthermore, both Roger I and his son were able to extend their power in return for the military assistance they rendered to the dukes of Apulia. Robert Guiscard had granted his younger brother the southern half of Calabria in 1062. A number of strongholds in Calabria were apparently held by duke and count together. In return for the count’s support for his accession as duke, Roger Borsa granted these in full possession to his uncle. He subsequently added a half share in the confiscated lordship of the Falloc family around Catanzaro in 1088/9, and a half share in Cosenza in 1091, thus extending the count’s territory into central Calabria.27
In 1121/2 Roger II was able to make much more significant gains at Duke William’s expense. He apparently sought to achieve this first by conflict – several sources refer to a war between the count and the duke that was brought to an end through the arbitration of Calixtus II, who made a lengthy visit to Calabria that winter. Later Duke William sought military aid from his cousin against Count Jordan of Ariano, who according to Falco of Benevento was openly defying his authority. In return for military and financial assistance, William transferred to the Count of Sicily rule over the northern half of Calabria, and the half shares that up until then the dukes had retained in Palermo and Messina. The ‘Romuald’ chronicler also claimed that William, who was childless, recognised Roger as his heir, in return for a large sum of money.28 In the years immediately after this, Count Roger consolidated his control over Calabria and advanced his power northwards into Lucania, notably in claiming the lordship of Montescaglioso, which had been held by his widowed sister Emma.29 Underpinning these political advances was the wealth of the island of Sicily, which its ruler was able to exploit to his own benefit; hence the substantial sums of cash with which Count Roger could (in effect) purchase land from his cousin the duke. Some sixty years later a Muslim traveller who visited Sicily wrote that the prosperity of the island surpasses description. It is enough to say that it is a daughter of Spain [his native land] in the extent of its cultivation, the luxuriance of its harvests, and in its well-being, having an abundance of varied produce, and fruits of every kind and species.30 The Arab geographer al-Idrîsî, whose description of the known world, written at Roger’s behest, was completed shortly before the king’s death, again and again praised the fertility and prosperity of different places in Sicily. Even if there may have been an element of flattery in such descriptions, they were unlikely to be entirely fictional. The territory of Syracuse, for example, ‘is vast, covered with farming estates and villages, it is fertile and its fields are perfectly cultivated. Boats loaded with wheat and other products set off [from there] for the rest of the world’.31
Sicily was a source of wheat and other foodstuffs, not least for the Muslim towns of Tunisia, and of other commodities, such as silk and cotton textiles, wood and even cheese, which were exported to Egypt. It was also a market for spices from the east.32 The count was able to profit directly from this prosperity, not least because while Roger I had endowed his principal supporters with lordships after the conquest, he had retained a substantial part of the island, including much of the centre (the main wheat-growing area) and the west, in his own hands. Thus he profited not just through tolls and levies on trade, but as the main proprietor of the agricultural surpluses that were exported.33 Other valuable commodities, notably the tuna fisheries around the coast, were reserved for the ruler to exploit as a monopolist, even though a few favoured churches might occasionally be granted a share in these. These fisheries were not simply a useful source of foodstuffs – they were increasingly large-scale commercial operations.34 Sicily was also already an entrepôt and exchange point for trans-Mediterranean trade from Byzantium and the Islamic countries through to northern Italy. Jewish merchants in Egypt sent and received cargoes to and from Sicily, both before and after the Norman conquest. Sicily was, indeed, a principal hub of Mediterranean trade routes, for Jewish, Muslim and (increasingly) Christian merchants.35 The first reference to Genoese traders on the island comes from 1116, and since this mentions the rebuilding of a merchants’ hostel at Messina it is clear that this was not by any means the first such contact. In 1127–8 Roger concluded a treaty, or more properly a series of agreements, with Savona, a Ligurian port allied to Genoa, which suggests that there was already considerable commercial contact between this town and Sicily.36 Idrîsî noted that many men from Ifrîqiyya (Tunisia) were accustomed to come to Marsala in western Sicily, and presumably these were traders for the geographer also noted the number of markets at Marsala and the abundant tax renders from the town. Similarly, he recorded of Sciacca, on the south coast, that ‘its port is frequented by numerous ships arriving without cease from Tripoli and Ifrîqiyya’, while at Scicli in the south-east people came by sea from ‘Calabria, Ifrîqiyya, Malta and elsewhere’.37 The Count of Sicily possessed the administration to exploit this burgeoning wealth, largely staffed by Greek officials. Registers of lands and boundaries, and lists of serfs, were compiled for Sicily and in Calabria. Commercial tolls were levied on shipping at the ports.38 To begin with, many of the officials may have come from Calabria, but after Countess Adelaide moved the centre of government from Mileto in Calabria, first to Messina and then to Palermo during Roger’s minority, they were recruited both from the island and further afield. These Greek officials were clearly very close to the count, notably George of Antioch, an Arabic-speaking Greek, previously an official of the rulers of Mahdia in North Africa, who fled to Sicily c.1109.39 When in the autumn of 1124 Roger II moved to establish his foothold in Lucania at Montescaglioso, he was accompanied by his principal minister Christodoulos (who can be attested from 1105 onwards) and by George of Antioch, who a couple of years later succeeded Christodoulos.40 The expertise of such administrators enabled the count to build up his financial resources, and to develop a fleet and army (including Muslim soldiers from Sicily) that would enable him to extend his rule to the mainland.41 Thus, when Duke William died childless on 28 July 1127, Roger II was the wealthiest and most powerful figure in southern Italy, and in an excellent position to claim the succession to the duchy.
The takeover of the mainland According to Alexander of Telese, Duke William’s death was unex - pected, and – though he had promised formally to designate Roger as his heir, and thus as successor to the duchy, in the event of his not having a son – he had not actually done this, and thus ‘he did not on his death leave any heir lawfully to succeed him’.42 Since William was only 30 when he died, it seems possible he had not yet despaired of having a male heir, although he had been married as far back as 1116 to a daughter of Count Robert of Caiazzo, and after eleven years of wedlock the prospect of having a son must have been unlikely.43 ‘Romuald’, by contrast, claimed that William had, from the account clearly at some point after 1122, appointed Roger as his heir. The question here may well be when this latter version was written: whether it was a contemporary notice incorporated into the later chronicle, or whether, as Houben has suggested, merely an assumption by the later writer, perhaps Archbishop Romuald himself, that because Roger in the end succeeded he therefore must have been the designated heir.44 Moreover, Fulcher of Chartres, writing in Jerusalem very soon after the events in question (probably c.1127/8) noted that the duke had made an agreement with his first cousin Bohemond II, Prince of Antioch, that whichever of them should survive the other would be his heir. This had taken place, Fulcher said, ‘in the presence of the leading men on both sides, who acted as witnesses’, immediately before Bohemond left southern Italy to become the ruler of Antioch in the summer of 1126.45 On the other hand, another contemporary writer, Walter, Archdeacon of Thérouanne, who was in Rome during the summer of 1128, claimed to have heard from Pope Honorius II himself that Duke William on his deathbed had left his dominions to the papacy.46 And in the event, Pope Honorius refused to accept Count Roger as the new duke and would not grant him investiture despite, so Falco claimed, the considerable bribes, or presents, which the count offered him. It was only a year later, after a military campaign and when his local allies had failed him, that Honorius, very reluctantly, invested the Count of Sicily as the new duke in August 1128. How do we make sense of all this? The deathbed designation is perfectly feasible, since we know that as he lay dying Duke William made an extensive donation for the good of his soul to the abbey of Cava, although the document that attests this – which records the sworn testimony of several witnesses, including two of the duke’s doctors – says nothing of any other bequest, let alone of one so momentous as that of the duchy itself.47 On the other hand it could have been no more than papal propaganda. Certainly, if William had made such a bequest, it is odd that there was no other later mention of this, when it surely would have strengthened later papal claims over southern Italy.48 One might suspect, however, that Duke William had at various times offered the possible succession to the duchy of Apulia, or dangled the possibility of the succession, to more than one possible claimant, while still hoping that he might himself have a son. (There are parallels to this in the careers of other childless medieval rulers, not least Edward the Confessor of England). If at the end William did leave the duchy, or the arrangement of the succession to the duchy, to his papal overlord, that does not necessarily disprove one or more earlier promises. But from the point of view of Count Roger, his claim could only ultimately be based on his alleged hereditary right, as enunciated by his partisan Alexander of Telese. And while Bohemond II arguably had a better hereditary claim, he was far away in Antioch, and in no position therefore to intervene. However, if we leave these somewhat speculative considerations, a more significant question is why Count Roger’s claim to the duchy faced such opposition. Some scholars have argued that the pope’s refusal to countenance his succession was essentially based upon legal considerations: either that with the death of the childless duke his fief reverted to his overlord, the pope, to allocate as he saw fit, or that the papal investiture of the south Italian Norman leaders had always been conditional, and it was up to the pope whether or not he chose to grant the duchy as a fief to any new claimant.49 Neither interpretation is particularly convincing. The stress on the ‘legal’ aspects of relations between the popes and the Norman rulers is misplaced, and misunderstands the essential dynamic of the relationship since the original investiture of 1059. The bond between the two had always been an alliance rather than a relationship between overlord and dependant, and the overriding priority for the papacy had been the military and political assistance that could be secured from the south Italian princes. There is no evidence that under normal circumstances either popes or Norman rulers had considered papal approval a necessary concomitant for the ducal succession – or that of the princes of Capua. Indeed, while rulers swore fealty to each new pope and received investiture with their lands, that investiture was often delayed for several years after the new prince succeeded. (Duke William succeeded his father in February 1111; he received investiture from the incumbent pope, Paschal II, only in October 1114).50 Admittedly, the balance in the relationship had shifted in the years immediately before 1127, as the authority of the Norman rulers in their dominions had weakened, while with the end of the Investiture Contest, with the popes securely establishing themselves in Rome after 1120 and then consolidating control of their (until now nominal) territory around Rome, Honorius II was in a stronger position than his predecessors had been.51 Roger certainly had a claim to succeed his cousin, especially if some sort of promise or designation had been made – although the fact that Alexander of Telese more or less admitted that any promised designation had not been formally proclaimed is significant, given that this author sought throughout his work to bolster the legitimacy of Roger’s rule. Indeed, he even said in his first chapter that William had died without an heir. One might also note that in some twelfth-century enfeoffments in the papal states, succession was limited to the direct heirs of a fief holder.52 But had Roger been otherwise acceptable, it is unlikely that the pope would have hesitated to recognise him as duke purely because he was a collateral, and not a direct, heir. To Honorius II, however, his succession as duke must have seemed a potentially unwelcome development. First, as ruler of Sicily, Calabria and Apulia he would have had control of the majority of southern Italy – hardly something desirable at a time when the pope was taking a closer interest than hitherto in the affairs of the south of the peninsula.53 Secondly, Roger had already on several occasions shown that he intended to exercise close control over the Church in his dominions and that he was not necessarily amenable to papal instructions. In 1117 Paschal II had sternly rebuked his interference in Church affairs and his control over the bishops of his dominions, which in that pope’s view clearly went well beyond any special powers that might have been granted by his predecessor Urban II to Count Roger I [see the chapter here on ‘Roger II and the Papacy’, document 1]; and in 1121/2 Roger had treated papal attempts to mediate between him and Duke William with scant respect. The pope and several of his entourage had fallen ill (indeed several cardinals had died while Calixtus II was in the south that winter), and according to his biographer ‘with the pope half-dead, Count Roger had done as he liked’.54 The latter cannot therefore have seemed an ideal candidate to receive papal investiture with the duchy, but the denial of his claim was a pragmatic rather than a ‘legal’ decision. It is a good question, which the surviving sources do not clearly answer, what Honorius II’s intentions were for the government of southern Italy in 1127. He may have envisaged a loose federation of towns and nobles under papal suzerainty – certainly Falco suggests that he sought to receive oaths of fealty not just from the Prince of Capua but also from other leading nobles,55 perhaps extending the precedent established in 1118 and 1120. This reminds us that the pope’s opposition to Roger’s succession was only feasible because there was considerable opposition to the count in southern Italy – from the principality of Capua, led by the new prince, Robert II, and his cousin Count Rainulf of Caiazzo (despite Rainulf being married to Count Roger’s sister), from a number of leading nobles in Apulia and from some important towns of the mainland. All three groups feared that, if Roger became duke, backed by the financial and military resources of Sicily, he would substantially limit the independence they had hitherto enjoyed or (in the case of some towns) would have liked to enjoy. Alexander’s account suggests that even the citizens of Salerno, hitherto the ducal capital, were reluctant to accept Roger as their ruler, and delicate negotiations and concessions were required before they did. Pope Honorius encouraged this opposition, by repeated excommunications of the count, by playing upon the fears of those who were apprehensive that his rule would be much more forceful and effective than that to which they had been accustomed (as in the speech he made at the inauguration of Prince Robert II of Capua, as reported by Falco), and by offering remission of sins to those who fought against him, drawing here on the holy war ethos of the so-called First Crusade. By 1127 this had been extended to include campaigns against the Muslims in Spain, but the offer reported by Falco is the earliest known example of spiritual rewards being expressly offered for warfare against Christians. Honorius also offered tangible benefits, notably in his privilege of December 1127 confirming and extending the rights and liberties of the citizens of Troia, effectively offering the town selfgovernment under papal overlordship.56 The terms of this document indicate the aspirations of burgesses of one of the more important towns of the region. One notes their aversion to a citadel held by troops of an outside ruler – a key issue in earlier negotiations between Roger and the Salernitans, and later in relations between the king and the citizens of Bari in 1132 – and the dislike of military service being exacted from the town, equally unpopular in Bari and Benevento in 1132.57 However, the weakness of the opposition to the count was that it was a coalition of divergent interests. When Count Roger confronted the pope in the summer of 1128, the latter’s army melted away. Falco’s account blamed the lack of enthusiasm or staying power of the nobles, and particularly Count Rainulf and the Prince of Capua, the former making excuses, the latter ‘unable to sustain hard work’, even going so far as to blame ‘the deceitfulness of the prince and the other barons’. It was the royal partisan Alexander of Telese who ascribed the collapse of the allied army to its arrears of wages and supply problems.58 (This brief mention of the stipendii paid to troops has important implications for military organisation in the south, an issue which requires fuller investigation than there is space for here). In the end, the pope had no option but to grant Roger investiture as duke. While what the chroniclers tell us suggests that the investiture and the oath of fealty followed the pattern that was by now traditional, Falco added another element – that Roger swore to respect the integrity of Benevento and the independence of the principality of Capua. While the former detail might have been something added by the chronicler, always anxious to stress the freedom of his native city, neither of these provisos is intrinsically unlikely, as Honorius sought to maintain some sort of counterweight to Roger’s power. The maintenance of Capuan independence, and the continued presence of a papal enclave within the south, were the best means of securing this.
In the event, however, neither attempt was wholly successful. Soon after Roger’s investiture, and (so Falco tells us) even before the pope had returned to Rome, the papal rector of Benevento perished in a popular uprising and a commune was formed in the city, which thereafter fell victim to renewed factional dispute. Meanwhile the new duke set about consolidating his rule on the mainland. During the course of the campaigning seasons of 1129 and 1130 he forced those nobles who were still recalcitrant to surrender ‒ sometimes they had to buy their way back into his grace by territorial concessions, as did the Count of Ariano. One by one he reduced the towns that held out against him – Troia proving the most obstinate – and in the autumn of 1129 at Melfi he issued an edict forbidding private warfare and forced the assembled nobles to swear to maintain general peace, restrain their vassals, respect the Church and hand over criminals to ducal justice. What Roger did here was to enforce the provisions of the Truce of God through his own authority, and proclaim the superiority of that authority over local judicial rights. We have no other record of this edict than Alexander’s, but its provisions were reflected in one of Roger’s later laws, where he stated: Our royal majesty’s providence refuses in any way to permit one of our barons to invade the castrum of another within the bounds of our kingdom, or to plunder it, to make an armed attack on it or to take anything from it by fraud.59 Duke Roger had thus made unequivocally clear that the government of southern Italy was to be very different from what had gone before. The assembly at Melfi in September/October 1129 was an important step in the creation of the new kingdom. Early in 1130, too, Robert II of Capua formally submitted to him. This was not the first time that a prince had become a vassal of the duke; Prince Richard II had done so in 1098 in return for Roger Borsa’s assistance in recovering his rebel capital. But whereas the submission of 1098 had no lasting consequences – the stress in some of the older scholarly literature on its long-term effects is misplaced60 – that of 1130 was to have enduring results, as almost the final piece in the jigsaw of south Italian unification.
The papacy and the creation of the kingdom The creation of the Sicilian kingship followed swiftly on from the unification of the south; indeed, if one were simply to read the account of Alexander of Telese, the former would seem to be the logical corollary of the latter. Roger’s power was now such as to merit a royal title. Alexander also referred to what was a convenient piece of historical fiction: that Sicily had once ‘in ancient times’ had kings who ruled from Palermo, and therefore what was taking place in 1130 was the restoration of a former monarchy rather than a de novo creation. (None of the Greek kings on Sicily in the pre-Roman period had, in fact, ruled over the island as a whole). According to Alexander, the new kingship was also validated by election, or perhaps one should rather say by acclamation. At an assembly at Salerno in the summer of 1130 the churchmen and barons of the land had ‘unanimously’ agreed that Roger should become a king; ‘strengthened by their sincere approval’ (veridicis assertionibus roboratus) he set about organising his royal coronation.61 Alexander’s account was, to say the least, disingenuous, not in the sense that such careful domestic preparations and (in modern parlance) management of public opinion among the politically powerful classes did not take place, but in what he did not say. For what Alexander entirely omitted was the role of the papacy. Some modern commentators have suggested that this reflected the king’s own wish that his authority should not be beholden to an external power, or in any sense be subject to papal approval, but rather held directly from God; or as later jurists rendered this, he wished to be ‘king in his own kingdom’ (rex in regno suo).62 One would not deny that the sense of divine empowerment was significant for the new Sicilian monarchy – as expressed, for example in the famous mosaic of Roger being crowned by Christ in the church of the Martorana in Palermo, and in his law code, if that is what the collection in Cod. Vat. Lat. 8782 is (discussed below). Thus the king described himself in the preface to this code as ‘we who through His grace possess the authority of justice and law’. But while it is clear that Alexander saw Roger’s kingship as divinely ordained, he did not entirely eliminate the papacy from his account. While he was critical of the refusal of Honorius II to invest Roger as duke, he was careful not to accord Roger the ducal title in his account until he had received investiture. Roger may have claimed to be the legitimate heir to the duchy, and by implication Alexander accepted that, but until the ceremony of August 1128 he remained in his eyes only ‘count’.63 So Alexander did recognise the papal role. The problem he faced was rather the equivocal status of Pope Anacletus II. The creation of the kingdom of Sicily was a product not just of the unification of southern Italy but also of the papal schism of February 1130. On the death of Honorius II, splits within the college of cardinals led to a disputed election, in which two rival popes were chosen: Cardinal Gregory of Sant’Angelo (as Innocent II) by some of the younger or more recently-appointed cardinals led by the papal chancellor Haimeric (a group which included nearly all of the non-Italian cardinals), and Cardinal Peter Pierleone (Anacletus II) by those who resented Haimeric’s attempts to hijack the election, including most of the older and more experienced members of the college as well as those from Lazio and southern Italy.64 Roger’s kingship was formally recognised by a bull from Anacletus II, issued on 27 September 1130, according to Falco after king and pope had met at Avellino, and presumably there agreed on the terms of the creation [see ‘Roger II and the Papacy’, document no. 2]. The bull in several ways reflected what Alexander said about the creation of the kingdom, notably about the extent of Roger’s authority justifying his promotion to royal status, and recognising Palermo as the capital of the new kingdom. While harking back to the earlier investitures of Robert Guiscard and his successors as dukes of Apulia, and as in the investitures of Guiscard (for which documentary evidence survives) specifying that an annual census be paid in recognition of papal overlordship, now to be in Byzantine nomisma rather than in silver pennies of Pavia, in several other respects the alliance (for this is what this was) seems to have been more favourable to the ruler than to the pope. Admittedly, while the bull refers to homage and fealty to be sworn by the kings, no such oath to Anacletus survives – if Roger did do this, then his oath might have repeated the clauses in earlier such texts pledging the ruler to bring help to his papal lord – a key feature of the surviving oaths of Robert Guiscard from 1059 and 1080.65 But Anacletus also said that he and his successors would not necessarily exact such an oath or homage, and that the royal status of the kingdom was not dependent on this ceremony. Indeed, he expressly recognised the hereditary nature of the new kingdom. In addition, he granted Roger authority over Naples, which up to then had been independent, and the help in time of war of the men of Benevento. (This last grant was to prove less than popular with these papal citizens). He also took steps to begin the organisation of a proper ecclesiastical structure on the island of Sicily, something which he continued in other bulls in September 1131 [for one of which, see ‘Roger II and the Papacy’, no. 3, below]. Since Anacletus faced the challenge of a rival pope, recognition by the ruler of southern Italy was undoubtedly in his interest, and the bull creating the kingdom was the price he paid for Roger’s support. But from Roger’s perspective, receiving the bull in 1130 was of great value, legitimising his royal status just as, seventy years earlier, Nicholas II had legitimised the seizure of southern Italy by Robert Guiscard. When the bull was promulgated Anacletus could fairly be seen as the legitimate pope. While neither his election nor that of his rival was strictly canonical, and the college of cardinals had been genuinely divided, arguably his election had been more proper than that of Innocent, which was the product of a surreptitious intrigue by a small group of cardinals within a few hours of the death of Honorius II (there was no precedent for the so-called electoral commission that named Innocent as pope). Although the figures given by modern historians may vary slightly, there is no doubt that Anacletus had more cardinals on his side than Innocent.66 Above all, he was the pope who was in control of Rome and the papal lands round the city, while Innocent had fled first to Pisa and eventually to France. In previous schisms, both during the Investiture Contest and before, it had invariably been the pope who held Rome who had won the contest. Neither was Anacletus without support elsewhere, notably in northern Italy and western and south-west France, and he expected to secure the loyalty of Spain. Although the King of France and his bishops were certainly sympathetic to Innocent, none of the north European monarchs had yet openly taken sides, and Anacletus still hoped, and was actively working, for their support.67 But by 1135/6, when Alexander of Telese was writing, the cause of Anacletus was clearly lost. The north European rulers and their churchmen had all recognised Innocent, who had the vociferous support of spokesmen of the new monastic orders, and benefited from a vigorous, often highly unscrupulous propaganda campaign on his behalf. Many of those who had begun by supporting the Roman pope had now changed sides, as the Milanese did in 1135. Far from ensuring his defeat, Innocent’s flight to France in August 1130 had been the first step towards securing him recognition from the Church as a whole. In St Bernard’s famous phrase, ‘driven from the City, he has been received by the world’ (pulsus ab urbe, ab orbe suscipitur).68 While Anacletus lingered on in Rome, still claiming to be pope until his death in February 1138, the schism had effectively been decided several years earlier. In these circumstances, the bull of Anacletus was an embarrassment, and his role in the creation of the kingdom is best ignored. A generation later, Romuald of Salerno, or his amanuensis, did mention Roger’s recognition of Anacletus as pope, but like Alexander he suggested that the creation of the kingdom was the product of an internal consensus, without external authorisation, claiming that the king, ‘a wise and astute man’, had refused to meet Anacletus or to do homage.69
The chroniclers thus ignored or down played what may in fact have been quite close links between the new king and Pope Anacletus and his family. It is notable that when the latter issued his bull formally creating the kingdom, that the witnesses included only one cardinal, but several members of the Pierleone family, including two of Anacletus’s brothers [see ‘Roger II and the Papacy’, no. 2, below]. It is, indeed, possible that the coronation ordo used in December 1130, which followed the Romano-German Pontifical, was derived from Rome, perhaps sent with the cardinal who was present at the ceremony.70 In May–June 1131 Roger despatched Prince Robert of Capua and Count Rainulf of Caiazzo to Rome with two hundred knights, something mentioned by Falco (who would appear to have misdated the episode), but not by Alexander, although the latter let slip that it was while Rainulf was at Rome that his wife left him.71 The despatch of this force to Rome was surely intended to strengthen the position of Anacletus within the city. In the autumn of 1131 Anacletus, undoubtedly at Roger’s behest, restructured the Church on the island of Sicily, promoting Messina to be an archbishopric [‘Roger II and the Papacy’, no. 3], and creating two new bishoprics, Cefalù and Lipari, to be its suffragans, thus dividing the island into two metropolitan provinces.72 Roger was also allied with, or made use of, Cardinal Crescentius, whom Anacletus had appointed as his rector in Benevento. While we should be cautious in accepting all the chronicler Falco’s rhetorical claims that Crescentius wanted to ‘place the city of Benevento under the king’s power’ – the city was after all papal territory, and there is no evidence that Roger sought to annex it – the king was clearly concerned to have the military aid of Benevento, as he was entitled to by the terms of the bull of 1130. So Falco informs us, in summer 1132, that Roger sought that: for love of him and their obligation of fealty to Anacletus, they should bind themselves by an oath of alliance and make war against the Prince of Capua and Count Rainulf.73 But the clearest indication of the close links between king and pope was the former’s privilege to the Pierleone family in January 1134 [‘Roger II and the Papacy’, no. 4], in which the king promised the Pierleone an annual pension of 240 pounds of gold, in return for which they became his vassals. This was a much larger annual payment that that stipulated for the papacy itself in the bull of 1130, and should surely be interpreted as a subsidy to maintain the position of the Pierleone and of Anacletus himself in Rome. Furthermore the particular significance of this document was shown by its physical form: one of only two surviving diplomata of King Roger to be written in golden ink on purple parchment, the other being his foundation charter for his palace chapel, in April 1140.74 Anacletus also spent quite a lot of time at Benevento, both in the autumn of 1134, after Roger’s control of the mainland seemed assured, not least through the renewed submission of Count Rainulf, and for a considerable period in 1136, when Roger once again appeared to be victorious in the south. Neither of these stays would have been possible without Roger’s support, and during both of them Anacletus issued privileges to several south Italian churches. He was still, therefore, very much functioning as ‘the pope’ for south Italian churchmen during the mid-1130s, even if by this stage for very few others.75 While Roger was prepared, in October or November 1137 to host talks between representatives of the two rival popes, and to provide at least the appearance of an open-minded desire to end the schism, it is striking that even at this late stage he did not abandon Anacletus, asking that the cardinals on each side give him written details of the original election in 1130 for him to consider on his return to Sicily, and that both send one of their number to accompany him. (This was at a time when the supporters of Innocent had long since abandoned arguing about the rights and wrongs of the election, preferring simply to claim that their pope had the overwhelming support of the Christian world and was indubitably the worthier of the two candidates).76 One cannot help but suspect that the king’s procrastination was intentional. With his fortunes on the mainland once again in the balance after the German invasion of 1137, it would have suited Roger to appear to be wavering in his support for ‘his’ by-now discredited pontiff, if only to calm the churchmen supporting Innocent while he once again took control of the mainland provinces. Not least among these was Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux (Pope Innocent’s principal propagandist), at whose initiative these talks took place.77 But whether the king seriously intended to abandon Anacletus, even then, must be open to doubt: in the event he did not, and (at least according to Falco) was even prepared to recognise a successor to Anacletus. We do not know enough of what went on during these diplomatic exchanges to make a definitive judgement, but from the king’s point of view the sticking point must surely have been whether Pope Innocent would recognise the legitimacy of the new kingdom – which he only did when forced to do so in July 1139.
The civil war of the 1130s Although the legacy of his alliance with Anacletus continued to make relations with the papacy problematic for King Roger years after the schism was concluded, the problem of the two popes was not at first a significant issue in southern Italy. Indeed during the first year of the schism Anacletus spent over six months in the south (September 1130– March 1131), travelling through the principality of Capua and Apulia, issuing privileges to quite a few churches, especially the archbishoprics, which he wished to confirm in obedience to him, and holding a council at Canosa in November.78 And, as described above, the Prince of Capua and his cousin Count Rainulf, later the leaders of the struggle against the king, were prepared to go to Rome to support Anacletus in 1131. The papal city of Benevento also, at this stage, recognised Anacletus as the legitimate pope. The schism therefore only became an issue in southern Italy after large-scale revolt against Roger broke out there in 1132. Neither the schism nor the new kingdom’s external enemies created this opposition, which stemmed from the same forces, and generally the same people, as Roger had defeated in 1128/9, though, once what was effectively a south Italian civil war broke out in 1132, naturally the king’s opponents sought help wherever they could, including the pope that Roger opposed. The necessity to enforce his authority over the reluctant mainland provinces meant that King Roger’s actions followed more or less the same pattern every year (but one) from 1127 until 1140. Each spring he arrived on the mainland with an army to wage a summer campaign, and each autumn he would retire to Sicily, leaving garrisons in the main towns and selected strongpoints to maintain his rule. In the early years he crossed the Straits of Messina and marched north through Calabria, probably utilising the old Roman Via Popilia. Subsequently, apart from in 1133, he travelled by sea to Salerno; from which port he almost invariably departed back to Sicily in the autumn. Usually he would arrive about May, finish the campaign and withdraw by October; in 1132 he was somewhat later, only returning to Sicily in early December – this was necessary in that Roger had then to remain on the mainland to retrieve the situation after his defeat in a pitched battle at Nocera on 25 July 1132, although even a relatively short voyage so late in the year was very unusual. These summer campaigns were explicable both because of the difficulty and expense of keeping large forces of troops mobilised for longer periods, and because of the problems of both marching, and even more important sailing, during the winter months. So, for example, in 1133 ‘before the inclement winter should prevent it, he took ship and returned to Sicily’. (Falco dated this journey to 21 October, although we have a charter which suggests that this must have been on or after 24 October, when the king was still at Salerno, but the difference of a few days is hardly significant).79 Sailors hardly ever sailed in the Mediterranean during the period from November until the end of March.80 The only year when Roger may not have campaigned on the mainland was 1136, when he was, seemingly, victorious and only the blockade of Naples disturbed the peace of the mainland. The maintenance of this blockade and the governance of the mainland could for this year be left in the hands of the king’s lieutenants.81 Then, in 1137, with the invasion of the regno by the German emperor, Lothar, the pattern varied, in that Roger then did not seek to meet the (very large) imperial army in battle, relying on his garrisons to hold it up and frustrate it, and he only came to the mainland in September, once the imperial army was withdrawing, to recover what had been lost, returning to Sicily right at the end of the year. Thereafter the traditional timing reappeared. In 1139, for example, so Falco tells us, the king arrived at Salerno on 25 May and embarked from there for Sicily on 5 November. To begin with, Roger’s attitude towards those who opposed him was quite moderate. His aim was above all to be recognised as the legitimate ruler of southern Italy, first as duke and then as king. To that end he sought the surrender of those who opposed him and their fealty, but rarely exacted other penalties. When, for example, Tancred of Conversano surrendered in August 1129, the king returned his lands to him, and even though Alexander of Telese said that Roger particularly disliked Count Roger of Ariano, and the latter was one of the last mainland nobles to submit to him, nevertheless he was allowed to keep most of his extensive lands, even if he had to surrender two castra as the price of recovering the king’s grace.82 Before Roger became king the only disobedient noble subject to exemplary punishment was his cousin Robert de Grandmesnil, a baron from Calabria – that is, someone who was already one of Roger’s vassals – who lost his lordship and was forced into exile, after deserting Roger’s army at the start of the 1129 campaign, before it had even entered Apulia. Even then, Alexander’s account (our only one for this incident) not only says that Roger first tried to persuade him to stay with the army by promises of future reward, but seems to imply that it was Robert’s truculence and his threats to return to Normandy that exhausted the duke’s patience. Furthermore, while Robert’s subsequent revolt did not save his lands, and Alexander writes of the duke’s ‘fury’ at this behaviour, he does not mention any other punishment apart from Robert’s loss of his lordship, which had already been decided.83 But if Roger was unwilling to tolerate any disobedience from someone already under his authority, he was more flexible when faced with those from Apulia who had opposed his takeover, and even recognised the pretensions of Grimoald to be hereditary Prince of Bari.84 Roger was equally flexible, or merciful, in gaining the obedience of mainland towns. Not only was he prepared to make concessions to the Salernitans in 1127, a very necessary step to secure what was to become his principal base on the mainland, but even towns that opposed him, like Troia in 1128–9 and Amalfi in 1131, seem to have escaped unscathed provided that they surrendered and recognised his authority – and even if, as in both these cases, he had been forced to undertake a major siege to subdue them. One or two places were not so lucky, notably Nardò which was sacked by Roger’s army in 1129, but although the author of a brief set of Lucanian/south Apulian annals that were appended as marginal notes to Romuald’s chronicle complained about the excesses of the Muslim troops in Roger’s army, what occurred was hardly unusual when a town was taken by storm.85 By contrast those towns which agreed to surrender came off lightly. The most striking example of this came in 1132, when Bari fell to the king after a short siege – according to Falco, surrendered by its citizens who abandoned their prince. Grimoald and his family were sent as prisoners to Sicily – Alexander says he went in chains. However, in return for their surrender, the king made generous concessions to the citizens. He, or rather his representatives on his behalf, swore to a lengthy list of terms guaranteeing the rights and privileges of the town: promising to respect the rights of the city’s churches, not to appoint outsiders as archbishop, as head of any principal monastery of the city or as a city judge; to allow the citizens their own laws and customs, especially on inheritance; not to levy taxes on them; not to exact military service without their consent; not to install a royal citadel in the town; and, perhaps most important from their point of view, not to punish anyone for the recent insurrection apart from six named persons. A final clause said that, if the king installed one of his sons as prince, the son would swear to observe these terms.86 The similarity of many of these terms to those granted by Honorius II to Troia in 1127 is striking. Roger appears to have offered similar, if less generous, terms to the citizens of Trani in 1133 – by then his policy was changing, but one should note that Trani does not appear actively to have opposed the king, so he was still prepared to offer concessions, though he had the town’s defences demolished. Urban customs were already well-established in many towns of southern Italy, and the king was prepared to tolerate them if his rule was accepted.87 By 1132, he was less forgiving to nobles who opposed him, hence the arrest and dispossession of Grimoald of Bari and Count Godfrey of Andria, both of whom had joined the coalition formed against him in the spring of that year. Yet there are some apparently puzzling features of the rebellion that broke out then. Most notable of these is the series of incidents that led to the revolt of Count Rainulf of Caiazzo, the king’s brother-in-law, who soon became the real leader of the king’s enemies.88 Both Alexander and Falco attributed the breach with the king to a quarrel between the count and his wife Matilda, the king’s sister, though the two chroniclers differed about the reason for this: Falco attributed it somewhat vaguely to the ‘many insults and injuries’ (convicia multa et afflictiones) the count had inflicted on his wife, while Alexander referred specifically to his seizure of her dower lands. The thirteenth-century Ferraria chronicle claimed that Matilda complained to her brother that her husband had taken a mistress – but, though this author used the chronicle of Falco, this piece of information was not from Falco. Alexander also referred to attempts by the count’s brother to claim the town of Avellino and the nearby castrum of Mercogliano for himself. Alexander implied that this was a blatant act of aggression and it seems he was correct, for there is nothing in the quite abundant charter evidence for these two places to suggest he had ever held them. It would appear that Matilda’s desertion of her husband took place during, and took advantage of, his absence in Rome during the summer of 1131.89 What is more puzzling is Roger’s refusal to return his sister to her outraged husband, even though the consequence was to drive him into rebellion. Was this simply love for his sister, as Alexander suggested? Or did he hope to use her and her children as hostages, or bargaining chips, to ensure the count’s good behaviour? For Rainulf had already opposed Roger not once but twice, and showed clear signs of his ambitions first in seeking overlordship over Count Roger of Ariano, his major local rival in the Benevento region, and then in trying to gain lordship over the ducal town of Troia. If so, the king appears to have miscalculated spectacularly. However, one should add that Falco, by postdating the origins of the quarrel, implies that it blew up very quickly, while in fact it appears to have taken the best part of a year before hostilities arose, which suggests that it might at first have seemed as though the king’s ploy was effective, and perhaps also that there were some quite lengthy negotiations before the revolt began in earnest. The quarrel with Count Rainulf embroiled his cousin and nominal overlord Prince Robert of Capua. Alexander stressed this role of the prince – saying that the latter described Rainulf as his homo – although one should note that both Rainulf and his father had in reality been largely independent for many years, and in their documents tended to exalt their own God-given authority, while omitting the regnal years of the prince.90 But once the prince became involved, then increasingly the conflict became a battle for Capuan independence. Whether, and how far, the rebellion of the prince and Count Rainulf was co-ordinated with that in Apulia by the counts of Conversano, the Count of Andria and the Prince of Bari is uncertain, nor indeed do the chroniclers’ accounts make clear whether these Apulian nobles had actually rebelled, or whether the king was working off old scores (or eliminating potentially dangerous figures) by taking pre-emptive action against them. So, in Alexander’s account, Count Godfrey of Andria met the king at Taranto (in May 1132) and was then arraigned before the royal court and forced to hand over most of his lands.91 In at least one other case the chroniclers’ account is clearly deficient. For while Falco said that Tancred of Conversano had rebelled, and Alexander had joined with Godfrey and Grimoald of Bari against the king, Tancred and his brother Alexander were two of the four noblemen who swore in the king’s name to uphold the rights and privileges of Bari on 22 June 1132 (the other two being Count Geoffrey of Catanzaro, a cousin of the king, and Robert, lord of Gravina). So at that point, presumably, Tancred was either still in favour, or hoped for forgiveness from the king. It must have been within a few days of this that the king made him a substantial payment in return for his renouncing his lands and agreeing to go on pilgrimage to Jerusalem.92 And why was he not simply sent a prisoner to Sicily as was Grimoald? Was this because he was, as yet, not so fully compromised or committed to opposing the king, or because while Brindisi was in the king’s hands, others of his and his brother’s territories were not, and drastic measures would have encouraged rather than quelled resistance? Here it is difficult to do more than speculate. However, Alexander said somewhat later in his account that after Roger’s defeat at Nocera in late July, Tancred, Alexander and Godfrey of Andria ‘now openly betrayed the king’ and made a sworn alliance with the Prince of Capua and Count Rainulf.93 One might well interpret this to mean that earlier the king had been taking action against men whom he distrusted, but who had not yet risen in open and avowed rebellion. What is clear is that from 1133 the nature of the campaign changed. Thereafter the king took increasingly brutal reprisals against those who opposed him. Towns were sacked and some, like Troia in 1133 and Aversa in 1135, laid waste and their surviving inhabitants driven out to settle elsewhere. Captured opponents were sent in chains to Sicily or sometimes executed, undoubtedly as a salutary example to others. Such reprisals, as with the hanging of five of the leading men of Troia when that city was captured in August 1133, were clearly designed to intimidate others to surrender without resistance, and during that same campaign the king had the walls and towers of other towns demolished, even if they had not openly opposed him, to ensure that resistance in the future would be futile. It is notable that, while Falco was always an opponent of the king, his criticism remained relatively measured until 1133 – from then onwards it became strident, comparing Roger to Nero, the quintessential ‘bad’ Roman emperor, whose name was a byword for wickedness in the Middle Ages, and accusing him of ‘such cruelty towards Christian people as has scarcely or ever been heard of in our century’.94
Cruel as such tactics may have been, they appear to have worked. From 1133 onwards, until the German invasion four years later, Apulia remained securely in the hands of the king. The campaigns of 1134–5 were conducted in the principality of Capua. Twice it appeared that King Roger had defeated his opponents: in the autumn of 1134 when Count Rainulf surrendered to him while the prince of Capua was in exile, and again in autumn 1135 when the king decided formally to annex the principality and appoint one of his sons as prince in place of the existing dynasty. By that stage only Naples was holding out against him, and it must have seemed as though its surrender was only a matter of time. It was during this latter period, probably over the winter of 1135/6, that Alexander of Telese wrote his account of the king’s campaigns, concluding with a series of prophetic dreams showing that the king’s triumph was divinely ordained, and referring in the concluding address to the king to ‘the story of your most famous victory’. That this was not, in fact, the end of the civil war, and that Roger was unable completely to subjugate southern Italy in the mid-1130s, was due to three factors. First, the death of the king’s wife early in 1135, and what would appear (reading between the lines) to have been his consequent breakdown, sparked rumours of his death and a renewed revolt on the mainland. This not only encouraged Prince Robert of Capua and Duke Sergius of Naples, neither of whom had submitted to the king, but led Count Rainulf to a renewed bid for independence. Admittedly, the 1135 revolt was speedily defeated, and the ringleaders took refuge in Naples. But it appears to have been this renewed revolt that led the king to seek a more permanent solution to the problems on the mainland, redistributing confiscated lands to new holders, replacing the Prince of Capua with one of his sons, and starting to create an administrative structure for the mainland by appointing justiciars and a chamberlain in the principality of Capua and in Lucania.95 By doing so, he also created irreconcilable enemies, who could no longer hope for pardon and re-integration into the new kingdom. Secondly, Naples, which the king had been unable to take, remained as a base for these men. And the invasion by the German emperor, encouraged by Innocent II and his supporters, cost the king much of his hard-won gains of the preceding years. Roger wisely did not seek directly to oppose Lothar’s invasion. Given the size of the German army and the hazards of pitched battle, this would have been risky indeed. The king preferred to rely on his garrisons to hold up the invading forces. The attempt over the winter of 1136/7 by the chancellor Guarin and other royal officials to take over the abbey of Montecassino, described by the contemporary account of Peter the Deacon [below, 281–5], was clearly so that the monastery on its mountain top could act as one such fortress to obstruct the invasion. (Whether they were already aware that the imperial army was to be split into two, with Henry of Bavaria leading one part along the Via Latina, while Lothar led the other along the Adriatic coastal route to join the Via Traiana in Apulia, we do not know.) In the event, the emperor spent five months in southern Italy – much longer than the imperial expeditions a century earlier – but his time in the region was inevitably finite, not least because his army would wish to return home, particularly so since he had actually entered northern Italy in September 1136, and thus the whole expedition took some fifteen months. While the imperial army penetrated as far south as Melfi and Lagopesole on the border between southern Apulia and Lucania, and secured the surrender of almost all the towns of coastal Apulia, it never threatened Roger’s original dominions of Calabria and Sicily. But by removing the royal garrisons in Apulia, re-installing Prince Robert in his principality and appointing Rainulf as Duke of Apulia, and thus the titular as well as the de facto leader of the opposition, Lothar’s expedition had reinvigorated the king’s opponents in the south. It seems that some nobles who had hitherto supported the king or perhaps stayed neutral, notably counts Roger of Ariano and William of Loritello, had now joined the rebels.96 Though Roger recovered the southern part of the principality of Capua relatively quickly once the German army had withdrawn, apart from Count Rainulf ’s own lands, and the rest of the principality in a rapid attack in the summer of 1138, most of the campaigning over the next two years took place in the region around Benevento and in northern Apulia, areas which before 1137 had been in the king’s hands. And in October 1137, soon after the German withdrawal, Roger suffered a second defeat in a pitched battle, at Rignano near Monte Gargano, where according to Falco three thousand men were killed. What is notable about all this is how little damage even such a bloody check as Rignano did to the king’s cause. Indeed, in one respect it may have made King Roger’s task easier, since the death in this battle of Duke Sergius of Naples, apparently without leaving an heir, facilitated his subsequent takeover of that city. In the months after the battle something revealed not by the chroniclers but in a letter describing the battle.100 He appears still to have been on the king’s side in 1135, but then Count Roger joined the rebels once more – probably during the German invasion of 1137, although Falco makes no mention of this. He was sent as a prisoner to Sicily in 1139 and his county taken into the king’s hands. Similarly Duke Sergius of Naples, who opposed the king in the early 1130s and rebelled again in 1135, when Roger allegedly considered him ‘absolutely unworthy of pardon’,101 then died fighting on his side in October 1137. Falco once again says nothing of when and why he rejoined the king’s side – we only know from ‘Romuald’ that it was when the German army withdrew late in the summer of 1137. Valuable as the accounts of our narrative sources are, we need to be aware of their limitations too. However, the account in Falco’s Chronicle, in the imperfect form in which it survives, ceases abruptly at the end of 1140; thereafter we have to rely on the brief (and probably much later) account of the ‘Romuald’ chronicle, whose author concentrated on external affairs, the fragments of the last parts of Falco’s work preserved by the later Ferraria Chronicle, a few pages of the late twelfth-century Casauria Chronicle, devoted exclusively to the affairs of that monastery, and the relatively few and decidedly problematic royal charters from this time. In that light, one realises how significant the accounts of Alexander and Falco are, for all their faults. But before we turn to examine the sources translated in this book in more detail, some brief discussion is needed of the later years of the king’s rule, from the time when he was fully in command of his kingdom in 1139 onwards.
The consolidation of the kingdom Despite the death of Anacletus and the capitulation of his short-lived successor, the legacy of the papal schism still caused problems for the new kingdom. Innocent II excommunicated Roger again at the Second Lateran Council of April 1139; although Falco’s account suggests he was prepared to negotiate with the king, at first the pope’s insistence on recovering the inheritance of his ally Robert of Capua, with whom he had worked closely for some years, prevented agreement. It was only after the pope’s disastrous invasion of the kingdom had come to grief that he was forced formally to recognise it, at Mignano in July 1139. The bull Innocent issued purported to create the kingdom of Sicily de novo, for of course the actions of the ‘antipope’ Anacletus could not be recognised. Nevertheless, the terms of the 1139 bull [‘Roger II and the Papacy’, document no. 6] were not dissimilar to those issued by his rival nine years earlier. The bull of Innocent offered a somewhat more elaborate rationale for the creation of the kingdom, recalling the services of Roger’s father and uncle, Duke Robert, to the Church and the Faith, citing the precedent of Roger’s investiture as duke by Pope Honorius, and repeating the legend, to which Alexander had made reference, that Sicily had once long ago been a kingdom. This last element reflected, one suspects, the influence of the king and his advisers – as indeed may the praise of Robert Guiscard and Count Roger as a justification for the kingship, for the same sentiments were expressed less than a year later in the foundation charter for the king’s palace chapel, a document which was (as described above) redacted in luxury format as a symbol of the prestige of the new monarchy.102 Although, in contrast to the 1130 bull, no mention was made of Naples or of military service from Benevento (which both pope and king must have been aware was highly unpopular in that city), otherwise almost all the king wanted was granted: possession of the principality of Capua, the hereditary status of his title and possession of the kingdom that was not expressly linked to fealty or homage, though they were required. The same, very light, census as in 1130 was stipulated. The royal title, king of ‘the kingdom of Sicily, the duchy of Apulia and the principality of Capua’, was the same as that already employed by the royal chancery.103 Yet while the bull of investiture of 1139 might have been thought to legitimise the new kingdom and its ruler, and to place Roger’s relations with the victorious party in the papal schism on a secure footing, this was far from being the case. Relations with the papacy remained fraught until William I’s treaty with Pope Adrian IV at Benevento in 1156, and the kingdom remained under threat, for several reasons. The bitterness engendered by the schism, shown by the summary deposition of the former Anacletan cardinals in 1139, even those who had transferred to Innocent while the schism was still under way, continued. Several south Italian archbishops consecrated by or closely associated with Anacletus were also deposed.104 The way Innocent had been forced to bless the kingdom’s creation, in return for his freedom from captivity, particularly rankled. ‘Romuald’ claimed that when Innocent II died in 1143 his successor refused to recognise the peace treaty with King Roger, and as late as 1154 Adrian IV caused grave offence when he addressed William I as ‘lord of Sicily’ rather than ‘king’. It was even alleged that the papal ban on the consecration of new bishops in the kingdom in the later 1140s (which appears to have really occurred) was ‘as a penalty for the captivity of Pope Innocent’. This last may be questionable, but the fact that the charge could be made at all, by a well-informed source writing as late as the 1160s, shows how deep the memory of this event was.105 Nor were the popes enamoured of what they considered King Roger’s high-handed control of the Church within the kingdom: the Ferraria Chronicle, here almost certainly based on the now-lost concluding pages of Falco, said that Innocent II complained about royal appointment of bishops in 1142, and received no satisfaction from the king.106 In addition, the reorganisation of the Sicilian Church by Anacletus was left in limbo after 1139, and the status of the two new bishoprics founded in 1131 in doubt – which was of considerable concern to the king since he intended one of these, Cefalù, to be his burial church. The king’s expansion of his power into the Abruzzi in 1140 was seen as the annexation of papal territory, even if the popes had never in practice exercised effective rule in this region – which was anyway traditionally part of the kingdom of Italy, and thus imperial territory. Finally, the papacy had since the conclusion of the Investiture Contest in 1122 enjoyed good relations with the German emperors; the popes wished this state of affairs to continue, not least since they hoped for imperial assistance to quell the increasingly strident claims of the citizens of Rome for self-government, and the rulers of Germany remained implacably opposed to the new kingdom of Sicily.107 This is not to say that relations between the Curia and King Roger were uniformly hostile. There were periods of détente – ‘Romuald’ claimed that the king welcomed the election of Cardinal Gerard of S. Croce as Lucius II in 1144, but (significantly) the two found difficulty in concluding a treaty because of the hostility of the cardinals. Lucius eventually concluded a seven-year truce with the king while complaining about his ‘violence’, clearly referring to the invasion of the papal Campagna by the king’s son [‘Roger II and the Papacy’, document no. 7]. In 1150 Eugenius III concluded a treaty with the king, which went some way to solve the outstanding issues, although the pope refused to accept the king’s homage and the status of the Sicilian bishoprics remained in doubt, an issue which was in fact to remain unsolved until 1166. Furthermore any goodwill thus created was rapidly dissipated by the coronation of the king’s only surviving son as monarch in his father’s lifetime at Easter 1151, an action which taken without papal permission or knowledge was deemed to infringe the pope’s rights – and suggests that lingering resentment at the very existence of the kingdom was still present at the Curia.108 The papacy remained committed to its alliance with Germany, re-asserted at the Treaty of Konstanz in 1153, although one should note that this alliance was as much directed against the Roman Commune as it was against the kingdom of Sicily [‘Roger II and the Papacy’, document no. 8]. But it was only after the German nobles had made clear that they would not take part in another invasion of the Sicilian kingdom, at the imperial coronation of Frederick Barbarossa in 1155, and the new king, William, had demonstrated the strength of the kingdom by defeating the combined attack of internal rebels and a Byzantine expedition, that the papacy finally concluded a lasting peace with the King of Sicily in 1156.109 The rebellion of 1155 occurred after King Roger’s death, and from 1139 onwards the kingdom enjoyed internal peace. In the words of ‘Romuald’, the king established peace and good order in his kingdom, and to preserve that peace instituted chamberlains and justiciars throughout the land, promulgated good laws which he had newly drafted and removed evil customs.110 Here the chronicler encapsulated the internal reforms undertaken by the king to consolidate his authority and the continuance of his kingdom. Nevertheless, this succinct summary was a considerable simplification of a complex process. Whereas ‘Romuald’, for example, implied that the establishment of a provincial administration on the mainland, staffed by chamberlains and justiciars, came only after peace had been established in 1139/40, the process had begun while the conflict was still under way, although this may not have been the case in every region. Some of the personnel employed had been officials of the previous rulers; thus Joscelin, the chamberlain appointed in the principality of Capua in 1135 had previously served Prince Robert, and John Mansellus, chamberlain in the Valle Caudina in 1139, was a former chamberlain of Duke William of Apulia.111 These officials were invariably drawn from the local nobility – the justiciars, responsible for the maintenance of law and order, judgement in serious criminal cases and in disputes between landholders, were generally men of greater social importance than chamberlains, who administered the crown lands, collected revenues and presided over minor civil cases. Thus the son of Henry de Ollia, justiciar in the Monte Gargano region in the 1140s, was promoted to comital rank by William I c.1156/7,112 as was the nephew of Gilbert de Balbano, justiciar in southern Apulia and constable in the principality of Salerno,113 while by contrast the royal chamberlains included men like Leo of Foggia, recorded as offering the service of a single knight to the king’s army. But not all the justiciars were particularly powerful: for example Lampus of Fasanella, a justiciar in the principality of Salerno, from an aristocratic Lombard family, held only five knights’ fees.114 Nor was the overall structure of the royal administration on the mainland fully established under King Roger. The king’s sons may have been nominal rulers of the various provinces to which they held title, but it would appear that the royal chancellors, successively Guarin (d.1137) and Robert of Selby (d.1151) played an administrative role on the mainland, and the latter in particular may have had overall charge of the provincial administration, given that after 1140 the king’s visits to the mainland became increasingly rare. But it was only under William I that institutional provision was made for a mainland viceroy, with the creation of the office of Master Captain of Apulia and Terra di Lavoro. Nor is it clear that there were fixed territorial jurisdictions for justiciars and chamberlains until the reign of William II.115 The central royal administration at Palermo was also reformed and developed. Prior to 1127 most of the functionaries of this nascent administration had been Greek, and the counts’ documents had been almost all written in Greek. Once the king had extended his rule to the duchy of Apulia, it became necessary to issue charters in Latin, although for some years only one full-time Latin notary was employed by the royal chancery – from 1132 to 1136 this was a man called Wido. However, in the last decade of the reign, when the chancery was under the day-today direction of Maio of Bari (later William I’s chief minister) there seem to have been at least three chancery notaries writing in Latin, and after 1144/5, when there was a flurry of activity as previous privileges were confirmed or revoked, the number of Greek documents became markedly fewer.116 At about the same time, and quite possibly connected with the revocation of privileges, George of Antioch re-organised the royal court on the model of the Fatimid caliphate of Egypt, with which the Sicilian court had for some time enjoyed friendly contact. His principal innovation was to create the Dīwān al-Tahqīq al-Ma’mūr, the office of land administration, which kept registers of boundaries, fiefs and serfs, and generally oversaw property matters on the island of Sicily, and perhaps also Calabria. The officials who staffed this organisation, and played an increasing role in overseeing the crown’s finances, were mainly Arabic-speaking Christians – most of whom were probably converts from Islam. These Arab officers might also undertake other duties, as for example Philip of Mahdia, who commanded the fleet which captured Bône in 1153.117 The evidence for these changes to the central administration at Palermo comes in only a handful of documents in Greek and Arabic, especially the latter, the interpretation of which has until recent years proved very difficult. ‘Romuald’ said nothing of these developments; although, if the archbishop himself was the author of this section of the chronicle, he must with his close connections to the court have had knowledge of them – he was indeed briefly one of the royal familiares, the governing council of ministers, in 1168.118 The chronicler did, however, refer to ‘the promulgation of laws’; for which we have more evidence, though early in 1168, made explicit reference to the law about judgments of the crown (assize xvii in the Vatican collection, assize 11 in the Montecassino one).123 The presumption therefore is that the laws found in these two manuscripts represent genuine legislation of King Roger, and it seems probable from its format that the Vatican collection [translated below, pp. 314–28] was indeed a set of laws issued by the king at some stage in the 1140s, albeit not at Ariano in 1140. But it is also possible that we are dealing with not an original version of such a code but a copy of such a version. Some textual variations between the Vatican and Montecassino MSS would be explicable if each collection was derived at second hand from another manuscript. Whatever the case, these were laws issued by the king. However, relatively little of this legislation was original. The majority of Roger’s laws, about two thirds of those found in both manuscripts, were reworked versions of the Roman Law of Justinian.124 Since all these citations came from only three sections of the Corpus Iuris Civilis – Codex books I and IX and Digest book XLVIII – it might at first sight seem as though these were derived not from full use of the Codex and Digest, but from a collection of extracts. However, it has been suggested that these laws were drawn up by one or more Bologna-trained jurists, who would undoubtedly know the entire Corpus, and some of this wider knowledge is reflected in the laws. This in turn suggests that the king was at pains to secure the services of outstanding legal experts,125 though it may be noted that three of the laws here also appeared in the Prochiron Legum, a tenth-century south Italian compilation of Roman Law; so these at least were apparently already known in the Byzantine provinces of southern Italy. The scope of this legislation of King Roger is limited: it concerns only the powers of the Crown, the rights of the Church, treason, some criminal activities and marriage – seen here, following Byzantine precedent, as a matter where the state should legislate rather than the Church. This has led some commentators to suggest that this ‘code’ (if it is a code at all) must be incomplete;126 but few if any medieval law codes were comprehensive. Furthermore, we should note that the first assize expressly confirms ‘the usages, customs and laws’ already existing among the different peoples of the kingdom, provided these did not contravene this new royal law. So we should view this royal legislation as being intended as a supplement to the law already present: that of the Lombard kings, French customary law, the Roman Law already observed in the former Byzantine provinces (and, for example, at Amalfi) and Islamic law administered locally, at least on minor issues, by the headmen of Arabic communities in Sicily under the supervision of a royally-appointed qādī. 127 What this legal ‘code’ does show, though, is both the commitment to law and equity that ‘Romuald’ praised and a stress, derived from Byzantium, on the prerogatives and authority of the Crown. It is no coincidence that in the surviving ceremonial portraits of Roger, notably the mosaic in the church of S. Maria dell’Ammiraglio in Palermo, a church founded by George of Antioch, on the one surviving golden seal appended to a document and on his new coinage of 1140, the king was shown wearing the ceremonial regalia of a Byzantine basileus. 128 And it was his use of this title that led the peace negotiations with the Byzantine Empire to break down c.1143/4, for the Emperor Manuel Komnenos refused to tolerate another ruler using the title which, in his eyes, pertained to him alone.129 Byzantium was thus a powerful influence on the ethos of the new Sicilian kingship. Another mark of this influence was that the king took advantage of the brief period of détente with the emperor at Constantinople in the early 1140s to obtain skilled craftsmen to make mosaics for his new cathedral at Cefalù and his palace chapel.130 But while the assizes that laid such stress on the powers of the crown were derived from Roman Law, one might suggest that it was the continued opposition on the mainland, which had taken so long to overcome, that made such an autocratic ethos seem necessary to the monarch.
The struggle in the 1130s, and the continued external threat thereafter, had further administrative consequences. Even while the conflict was going on, the lands of rebels were being confiscated, and in some cases re-granted to men loyal to the Crown. Thus the county of Conversano was given, if we are to believe Alexander of Telese, to the king’s brotherin-law Adam, in 1134, and then, as the charter evidence makes clear, to another brother-in-law, Robert de Bassonville, although the lands of the post-1134 county were less extensive and more scattered than those held by the original comital family.131 Similarly, in 1135 the title of Count of Boiano was transferred from Count Hugh, a former royal supporter who had joined the rebels, to Robert son of Richard, who had already been granted some of Hugh’s lands.132 After 1139 there were further and more extensive changes among the higher nobility. Three of the largest and most powerful mainland counties were suppressed, those of Ariano, Caiazzo and Loritello, and their lands taken into the hands of the king. He confiscated the county of Manopello in the Abruzzi and re-granted it to a Calabrian baron, Bohemond of Tarsia. The counts of Aquino in the principality of Capua, a family of Lombard aristocrats who had survived the Norman conquest, were deprived of their comital title, as punishment for submitting to Emperor Lothar in 1137, although they were allowed to retain their lands.133 Somewhat later, but before 1144, Count Hugh of Boiano was restored to his former position, although his county was now known by his family name of Molise, and Robert’s son Richard transferred to a new county of Civitate.134 Other new counties were created at Avellino on the southern border of the principality of Capua, and Conza, Marsico and Policastro in the principality of Salerno, the latter two given to relatives of the king. A lordship which was later treated as a county was also established at Gravina in southern Apulia c.1141, and entrusted to a relative of Roger’s mother.135 About 1146 the county of Andria, confiscated from the rebel Count Godfrey in 1132, was given to a Norman called Richard of Lingèvres, apparently newly arrived from his homeland.136 Finally, at some stage before 1150 a part, though only a small part, of Count Rainulf of Caiazzo’s lands was used for a new county called Alife, given to a Count Mauger;137 and c.1152 another new county was created, with its caput at Montescaglioso in Lucania, and entrusted to a scion of an existing noble family from Lecce in the Terra d’Otranto with close connections to the Crown.138 In addition, several counts ruling over lordships already existing in 1130 were encouraged to marry women from the royal family, clearly as a means of fostering their loyalty to the king.139 Thus over some years there was a wholesale re-organisation of the most important lordships on the mainland, with the intention of creating a group of feudatories entirely loyal to the king, and none with quite such a consolidated powerbase as Rainulf of Caiazzo had once possessed.140 It should be stressed that these ‘counties’ were not all consolidated territorial units, nor were they necessarily intended as administrative jurisdictions. Counts might sometimes act as justiciars, but then they were specifically designated as justiciars in addition to their comital titles.141 Although the county of Molise, for example, comprised a substantial and coherent block of territory, the lands and fiefs of other counties were quite scattered. The county of Andria had two distinct foci, one on the coast of northern Apulia and the other 100 km to the south in the Val d’Agri in Lucania.142 It would seem the intention was to create a network of counts rather than of counties, and the purpose of this, apart from distinguishing the top rank of the nobility and enhancing the prestige of loyal supporters, was primarily military. These counts were the men who would lead the defence of the regno in case of invasion, a threat which, given the continued hostility of the German Empire and the intermittent threat from Byzantium, was always to be considered. The appointment of new counts and the creation of new counties was part of the creation of a consolidated system of military defence, which was recorded c.1150 in the Catalogus Baronum [for extracts from which, see pp. 329–54 below]. The Catalogue was a list of fief holders and the military obligations they owed from their fiefs, from Apulia, the principalities of Salerno and Capua, and the Abruzzi region which Roger and his sons had conquered in 1140. But it was not, or not simply, a record of existing military obligations, now made subject to the Crown.143 It was the creation, for the first time, of a unified system of military service owed to the king, and many of the military quotas were new – and quite possibly the subject of negotiation. Obviously they reflected the realities of the existing situation – there was no point in having quotas that fief holders could not fulfil, and no doubt they reflected the number of vassals who had actually been enfeoffed. There may have been some financial element in these obligations – fief holders were presumably liable to the payment of aids – but given how few obligations were recorded as fractions of a knights’ fee, the military system was not, as that in Anglo-Norman England was, primarily a means of raising money to hire troops. One of the peculiarities of the Catalogus Baronum was that it revealed two different quotas of service, a ‘normal’ quota and the augmentum – usually twice the knight service of the first quota, and sometimes adding the service of further soldiers, generally sergeants and occasionally crossbowmen. The most plausible explanation for this is that the first figure was the usual quota when military service was required from feudatories, and the augmentum was the emergency arrière ban to be demanded if the kingdom was invaded, when every armed man available would be needed.144 Whether all of these would be men directly dependent on the feudatory, or if they would in some cases include other people whom he might pay, is impossible to say. Where the feudatory’s fief was very poor – as for example with John de Boctio, who had twenty commended men at Castiglione in the territory of Troia and who with the augmentum offered one knight – the presumption would be that the property owner would themselves provide the service. In one other similar instance this was explicitly stated.145 The Catalogue invariably says that someone ‘offered’ or ‘proffered’ (obtulit) so many knights and other men for the augmentum: this would suggest that there was some negotiation about the figure, and quite possibly – certainly when the augmentum service was a large figure – that it represented an approximation of the forces available. The ‘Catalogue of the Barons’ is a source of great importance for the study of the kingdom of Sicily in the mid-twelfth century, both for the military system and for the structure of landholding in the mainland provinces, but it is a problematic text. The only manuscript, which was destroyed in 1943, dated from more than a hundred years after the original compilation and was therefore a second- or third-hand copy of that original. There were omissions and inconsistencies, and one whole section was repeated,146 although these faults were more probably those of the scribes of the earlier archetype(s) than of those who copied the late thirteenth-century manuscript.147 Several churches were named without any contingents being listed for them; indeed, the significance of the Church in the new military system is especially hard to assess. The Casauria chronicle would certainly suggest that royal authorities were keen for churches to contribute to the defence of the kingdom. Bohemond, the new Count of Manopello, brusquely informed the abbot of Casauria: ‘the lord king has many people who pray in his kingdom, but he does not have many to defend it’.148 But why were some bishoprics and abbeys included in the Catalogue, but not others from the same region?149 In some cases men named were actually vassals of others, but the overlord was not named – this applied to a number of fiefs held from churches, as in the case of John de Boctio (mentioned above), who held his exiguous property from the abbey of Montecassino.150 And what in particular makes the Catalogue a pitfall for the unwary student is that it was revised in the minority of King William II, c.1167/8, probably during an overhaul of the provincial administration at that time,151 but revised partially and imperfectly, so that in some places the names of new feudatories have been inserted, but in many others not. (The footnotes draw attention to such problems in the entries translated in this book). If the compilation of the Catalogue was primarily intended to provide for the defence of the kingdom, the organisation of its military resources was also necessary to facilitate more aggressive activity, for after 1140 King Roger sought actively to expand his power. Admittedly, the conquest of the Abruzzi region might be seen as partly defensive, creating an extended northwards defensive zone to obstruct any potential imperial invasion and denying this province as a possible base from which political exiles might attack the kingdom,152 but Roger had already, even before becoming king, used Sicilian naval power to increase his dominions, launching an attack on Mahdia in North Africa in 1123, albeit unsuccessfully, and claiming the North African coast to be a sphere of Sicilian influence in his treaty with Savona in 1127.153 The continuing political and economic weakness of the coastal towns of Tunisia and Libya, with their hinterlands under pressure from Bedouin and Berber nomads, and their increasing dependence on Sicilian grain, encouraged further intervention.154 The island of Jerba was captured in 1135 (partly to eliminate a base for pirates), and that of Kerkenah in 1145. Sicilian expeditions took the ports of Tripoli in 1146, Mahdia, Sfax and Sousa in 1148, and finally Bône a few months before King Roger died. Other towns along this coast paid tribute to the Sicilian king. Attempts were made to conciliate the Muslim inhabitants of these towns, and to encourage the indigenous Christians who were still living there at that period, but no real effort was made at settlement. Some towns such as Bône were left in the hands of local governors, under a very loose suzerainity.155 One suspects that the primary motive for these conquests was economic, to levy dues and taxes from these ports and their inhabitants, to safeguard the lucrative trade between North Africa and Sicily, and if possible to control the aptly-named Narrows between Tunisia and Sicily.156 But whether even in the short term these economic gains were very significant is doubtful – certainly Idrîsî remarked that, while the trade of Mahdia had been immense, ‘in our times it has begun to diminish’.157 Unfortunately the Latin sources say little about these expeditions; most of what is known about them comes from later Arabic historians, notably the Mosul chronicler Ibn al-Athir (d.1233).
Similarly the renewal of hostilities with Byzantium in the late 1140s was directed not at conquest of the empire proper – far stronger under the Komnenan emperors than when Robert Guiscard attacked it at the nadir of Byzantine fortunes in 1081 – but at the capture of strategic bases, control of the mouth of the Adriatic, and plundering raids on coastal cities. Corfu and Cephalonia were taken in 1147, but this in turn led the Venetians to intervene on the Byzantine side, and to the eventual recovery of these islands by the eastern empire. To what extent the Sicilians hoped for long-term strategic and territorial gains, or whether the intention was to force the Byzantine emperor to make peace and recognise the validity of the new kingdom, which Manuel Komnenos eventually did in 1158, is a good question. Certainly these naval campaigns, and the North African conquests carried out during the same few years, show the considerable strength of the Sicilian fleet; and, though we know nothing of where the military contingents to capture and garrison these conquests came from, they suggest that the kingdom’s military recruitment was working effectively. These ambitious operations were also possible because the German ruler Conrad III was absent during1147–9 on the Second Crusade, ensuring that the kingdom of Sicily would not face an attack from the north. Once the crusade was over, Roger took pains to entertain one of the most powerful German princes, Duke Welf VI of Spoleto, on his way home from Palestine, and bribed him lavishly to rebel against Conrad.159 But the compilation of the Catalogus Baronum at precisely this time suggests that the potential threat from the north was still a major concern.
The king’s legacy King Roger died on 27 February 1154, at the age of (probably) 58. ‘Falcandus’ attributed his end to exhaustion after his immense efforts, and over-indulgence in sexual activity, although whether the king was any more prone to the latter than most medieval rulers is impossible to know.160 Contemporary observers, even those who disliked him, were unanimous in praising his great talents as a ruler and his unremitting endeavour in building his new kingdom. Even Falco, who hated him, so far forgot himself as at one point to describe Roger as ‘sagacious of mind and far-seeing in counsel’.161 In retrospect, his role as the ruler who brought peace and unity to southern Italy was greatly appreciated by his subjects – for example John Berard, the chronicler of Casauria, who contrasted the era of peace in the Abruzzi after 1140 with the time of chaos and violence that preceded Roger’s takeover.162 The creation of a new and powerful kingdom, despite so many obstacles, was no mean achievement. Nonetheless, a dispassionate view of King Roger’s legacy might suggest that the kingdom which he bequeathed to his only surviving son in 1154 still faced considerable problems, and, impressive as Roger’s state-building had been, his work had been left incomplete. Apart from good relations with the king of France, Sicily was diplomatically isolated, facing the hostility of both eastern and western empires, and the papacy, and uncertain relations with the maritime cities of northern Italy.163 Exiled noblemen posed another significant threat, and in 1155–6 this combination of enemies came close to toppling William I from his throne. The newly conquered North African coastal towns were restive under Christian rule, and their Sicilian garrisons were soon to be swept away by the Almohads of Morocco. There were also internal tensions in the kingdom, among the aristocracy and on the island of Sicily, where immigration from the mainland was changing the demographic and religious balance. It may be, too, depending how one interprets the hints in ‘Falcandus’ and ‘Romuald’, that the king in his last years was either becoming less tolerant towards his Muslim subjects or was relaxing his grip and allowing court factions to flourish. Either explanation might explain the downfall and execution of Philip of Mahdia about three months before the king himself died.164 In fact, despite the snide and unfair criticism of ‘Falcandus’, who loathed them, the survival of the kingdom of Sicily owed much to the military and diplomatic successes of King William I and his minister Maio of Bari, who were able to overcome the crisis of 1155–6 and within a very few years negotiate long-term peace agreements with the papacy, Byzantium and the Italian maritime cities.165
An analysis of the contemporary historians The major south Italian narrative texts of the twelfth century present significant contrasts, not just (as has already been made clear) in their attitude to the king, but also in their authorship, purpose, mode of composition and subsequent transmission. The work of Alexander, Abbot of the monastery of Holy Saviour near Telese, fits the medieval definition of a history, in being a coherent historical work written apparently at one time, with a clear theme, the inevitability and divinely-approved rightness of the king’s triumph. (The work of Falco of Benevento is, by contrast, a chronicle, written as a series of year-by-year entries.)166 Alexander wrote probably in late 1135/early 1136, before Emperor Lothar’s invasion of the regno, to which it makes no reference. We know nothing of the author apart from what we can glean from his work, though he was either dead or had resigned by November 1143, when his successor Stephen, presumably the man whom Alexander mentions as prior in 1135, was in office.167 The first record of his abbey comes in 1075, when its abbot attended a synod of Archbishop Milo of Benevento;168 it has been plausibly suggested that the house was founded shortly before this date, probably by Rainulf, younger brother of the first Norman Prince of Capua, Richard I, grandfather of the Count Rainulf who so plagued Roger II. The ruins of the abbey church appear to date from c.1100 or slightly earlier; the French-inspired Romanesque design is not altogether surprising since the abbot at this time, John, was a former monk of Bec, but it also supports the theory that this house was a Norman foundation.169 Alexander was a man of some learning, within conventional monastic parameters. His reading included familiar monastic texts like the Libri Miraculorum of Gregory of Tours, the works of John Cassian and probably works of Christian history such as those by Eusebius and Orosius, but although his Latin included some classical syntax and usages, probably derived from standard schoolbooks, the only classical texts to which he seems directly to refer are the Aeneid, the Georgics and perhaps Seneca’s Naturales Quaestiones; and it is quite possible that his occasional quotations from these works may have come from a florilegium. 170 As with most monastic authors his principal citations were Biblical. His work ends with a series of dreams foretelling Roger’s inevitable victory, but it is not clear that he directly knew the standard text on this, the commentary of Macrobius on Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis. 171 Alexander saw Roger as divinely appointed to bring peace and order to southern Italy. His motives may have been in part dictated by the interests of his monastery, for he contrasted King Roger’s generosity and favour towards that house – to whose confraternity he and his son Anfusus, now Prince of Capua, were admitted – with the depredations of Count Rainulf, who had taken even the ornaments from the high altar in his desperation to pay his troops.172 But by his own account he was also writing at the request of Roger’s sister, and Rainulf ’s estranged wife, Matilda. This may explain why Alexander’s attitude to the count remained equivocal, treating his repeated revolts with discretion and without outright condemnation until quite late in his account, when finally – describing the aftermath of the renewed revolt in 1135 – he attributed a bitter speech to the king, stigmatising Rainulf for his repeated breaches of faith: ‘how can his good faith be trusted any more after he has violated his oath?’173 Here Alexander repeated one of his principal themes. Not only was Roger doing God’s work in bringing peace to southern Italy, but those who opposed him were guilty of perjury, since they had all sworn fealty to him, in some cases several times. Hence they merited God’s punishment, just as in the Old Testament King Zedekiah had merited the retribution inflicted upon him by Nebuchadnezzar; and, where Falco criticised the king’s cruel treatment of rebel nobles or towns, Alexander adopted a didactic tone: ‘So let the wise reader now reflect how great a crime it is to commit the sin of perjury’.174
Apart from the position of Count Rainulf, and the involvement of Pope Anacletus (which Alexander solved by omission), the other main problem facing the abbot was the reverses that Roger suffered, especially his defeat at Nocera in 1132. How could these be explained if the king’s victory was part of the divine plan? The answer, the abbot said, was to teach the king humility and so make him a better Christian ruler, rendering him worthier to receive God’s help, a theme to which he returned in his alloquium to the king that ended the History.175 The prophetic dreams recounted in Book IV, presaging the triumph of the king and showing the folly, as well as sin, in opposing him, were thus an integral part of, and a fitting conclusion to, the account. They were, however, omitted from the first published edition of Alexander’s History, in 1578, by Jeronimo Zurita y Castro (1512–80, otherwise notable as the historian of the medieval kingdom of Aragon), and from the five subsequent editions, all entirely derivative from the editio princeps, until published for the first time in the 1960s.176 And it was only with the modern edition by Ludovica de Nava (1991) that the alloquium addressed to the king was placed in its correct position, as the conclusion to the work, rather than at the front, as (apparently) a second preface, as it had been in the earlier editions.177 The restoration of the full text of the History reveals it to be a much more coherent, and complete, work than was thought when historians only had access to the incomplete and misleading earlier editions. Yet while it also shows the History to be even more propagandist than was earlier believed, it certainly did not serve as such. Only one manuscript survives, Barcelona, Biblioteca Central, ms. 996–8-III, fols. 97–140, dating from the later fourteenth century, part of a composite manuscript containing several other historical works, including the Deeds of Count Roger by Geoffrey Malaterra. This manuscript may have come from the library of S. Nicolò d’Arena, Catania, which Zurita appears to have plundered when he visited Sicily in 1550.178 How this may have been copied, we do not know – but the work can never have had much distribution. Massimo Oldoni has suggested that it was intended to be read aloud in public, but if so it is possible that the monks of Telese were the only audience.179 The transmission of the Chronicle of Falco of Benevento was somewhat different, but equally tenuous. No medieval manuscript survives: there are four manuscripts (one of which is a copy of another, and a third is only a part), but the earliest of these dates from c.1600, while the editio princeps of 1626 appears to have been taken from a separate manuscript, not from any of those now surviving. All these different versions may well have been derived from a single archetype, since by the time they were copied the work was already incomplete, missing both beginning and end.180 This is clear, not just because of the abruptness of the beginning and end, both in the middle of a sentence, but because another work, the thirteenth-century chronicle of the Cistercian monastery of S. Maria di Ferraria, in the diocese of Teano, which utilised (albeit rather carelessly) Falco’s Chronicle, contains further material relating to Benevento [translated below, pp. 130, 247–9]. This extra matter suggests that Falco began his work with the papal siege of the city in 1101, and probably concluded it in 1144 with an entry on Benevento during the pontificate of Celestine II, who died in March of that year. (The Ferraria monks may have obtained a copy of Falco’s chronicle from the monastery of St Maria in Gualdo, near Benevento, an eremitic house reformed by the Cistercians in 1220).181 This date of 1144 also fits with what is known from charter evidence of Falco’s career. The chronicle reveals that its author was a notary, who in 1133 was promoted to be one of the city’s judges by Innocent II’s rector of Benevento, Cardinal Gerard (later Pope Lucius II). Ten charters written between November 1107 and January 1128 by a notary Falco can be identified, and a further six witnessed by him as judge between July 1137 and September 1143. The practice at Benevento of notaries and judges authenticating their documents with their sign manual shows that these were all written or witnessed by the same man, and the dates clearly fit the career revealed by the author of the chronicle. Furthermore, in September 1161 a notary called Trasemundus, son of the late judge Falco, made two separate donations to the abbey of St Sophia in the city: since this Trasemundus was the notary who wrote all six of the charters witnessed by Falco as judge, it appears that he was the son of the chronicler.
The last mention of Falco the judge in September 1143 fits with the apparent conclusion of his chronicle in 1143/4, and it is probable that he died soon afterwards. But, in contrast to the History of Alexander, it is unlikely that his chronicle was written as a single continuous work around that time – it would, indeed, appear to have been written in several stages, probably beginning during the early 1120s, and continued on and off (though not necessarily always contemporaneously, or in individual entries for each year) until 1143/4. This seems clear from the variations in coverage of individual years, from changes in the author’s attitude to various protagonists and from occasional interjections which suggest either that Falco was writing soon after the events he was discussing, or alternatively in other passages that he was writing some time after the events in question. Thus when he described the double papal election of February 1130 he went on to mention immediately afterwards the council which Innocent II celebrated at Rheims, which took place in October 1131. This entry must therefore have been written some time later. On the other hand, in 1133 he mentioned the Prince of Capua’s journey to Pisa to seek help against the king, and added: ‘how he dealt with the Pisans has not yet come in any detail to our notice’, which suggests that he was writing this passage soon after that time.183 The early parts of the chronicle, up to c.1119, appear to be a compilation from several sources, not all of which were necessarily written by Falco. The sketchy annals up to 1112 would seem to be a variant of the independently surviving annals from the abbey of St Sophia, two other versions of which are known.184 The description of events at Benevento in 1113–14 and the pope’s dealings with Archbishop Landulf II, which culminated in the latter’s deposition in October 1114, may also have originated as an independent account, while the brief notice at the end of the 1114 entry to the archbishop’s deposition (which had already been described in detail) would appear to come from a separate annal. Falco also seems to have had access to an account of events at Rome and the papal court from 1116–19. It was probably about 1122 that Falco combined all this material, adding some of his own comments and memories. Thereafter he continued the chronicle in stages. The first of these was probably completed in 1125 – hence the relatively full entries for this year and those immediately preceding, in contrast to the one sentence on the death of the Emperor Henry V for the next year, which appears to be an afterthought. (One should note, incidentally, that Falco began the year on 1 March, which was probably general practice at Benevento).185 Until 1125 the focus of Falco’s chronicle was the city of Benevento and events there, even though he also included material about the papacy, the overlord of the city (perhaps originally by another hand). But from 1127 onwards, while Benevento was still the centre of his account, the arrival of Roger of Sicily on the mainland led Falco increasingly to broaden his narrative to discuss the latter’s campaigns and to spread his geographical focus to take in what took place in Apulia and the Terra di Lavoro, as well as the immediate environs of his native city. But he was still writing in stages, rather than either year by year or in one go in the early 1140s. Although some entries may have been written contemporaneously, that for 1130 seems to be somewhat later, whereas the section for 1133 would appear once more to be more or less contemporaneous. The brief entries for 1135–6, which contain nothing about Benevento, were probably written in 1137, after Falco returned from exile – to which he refers, in studiously impersonal terms, when describing Benevento’s surrender to Pope Innocent and Henry of Bavaria in May 1137.186 However, the long section for 1137 (the longest yearly entry in the whole chronicle) may have been written in two stages, the majority of this immediately after the event in the autumn of 1137, and the last part, describing the conference at Salerno to solve the papal schism, somewhat later. Certainly the hostile attitude to King Roger in the main part of this entry seems at variance with the more measured comments during the account of the Salerno conference. The sections thereafter may have been written relatively contemporaneously.187 Falco’s style is not quite as artless as it might seem at first reading, despite such banalities as his repeated ‘What more?’, or ‘O reader, if you had been there’, and even the latter does remind us that he was an eyewitness to much of what he described. His writing was generally unadorned, although he occasionally employed alliteration to emphasise particularly dramatic moments in the narrative, such as the earthquake at Benevento in 1125 and the speech of Honorius II against Count Roger at Capua in December 1127. As a notary, he had mastered the rhythmic clauses of the cursus, which he often varied quite artfully in his chronicle, employing not just the three ‘standard’ elements of the cursus (velox, tardus and planus), but also the trispondiacus rhythm.188 But although clearly familiar with the Bible, for example comparing the king’s opponents with the Maccabees, his reading otherwise probably did not extend beyond local annals and hagiography.189 Nevertheless, the chronicle is not only a most valuable and informative source for the reign of King Roger, but also significant as more or less contemporary with the work of Caffaro of Genoa as the first civic chronicle written by a layman in medieval Italy. Two further contemporary, or near-contemporary, chronicles are also of considerable value for this subject, although neither is without its problems. These may be dealt with fairly briefly. The chronicle attributed to Romuald Guarna, Archbishop of Salerno 1153–81, is a ‘world chronicle’, from the Creation until 1178, concluding with a very detailed account of the peace conference at Venice that concluded the conflict between Pope Alexander III and the emperor, Frederick Barbarossa, and also finally ended the hostility between the German empire and the kingdom of Sicily; at this conference, Archbishop Romuald was head of the Sicilian delegation. As with other works of this type, the early parts of the chronicle are simply a compilation of existing authorities such as Orosius, Bede’s Chronica Minora and Paul the Deacon’s Historia Romana, as well as several Frankish sources.190 The eleventhand early twelfth-century sections are also a compilation, from local annals, notably from a version of the surviving Amalfi chronicle, and the section from 1080–1125 appears to have been primarily derived from a lost set of Apulian annals, perhaps from Troia. The question remains how much if any of this chronicle was actually written or compiled by Archbishop Romuald, who was after all a busy metropolitan and a political figure of considerable importance in the kingdom. It has been suggested that the only section of this work that Romuald himself wrote was the account of the Venice peace conference, where he did expressly acknowledge his authorship.191 However, the three surviving manuscripts of this chronicle do preserve an otherwise original account of King Roger’s reign, whoever the author may have been, which, although brief, is particularly useful in that it extends beyond 1140 when the chronicle of Falco in its present incomplete form ceases, until the end of the reign, as well as covering the reigns of Roger’s son and (up to 1178) grandson.192 The section of the ‘Romuald’ Chronicle after 1125 contrasts with what came before in at least three respects. First, while some dates are still given, the structure is less rigidly annalistic than in the previous part of the chronicle. Secondly, the geographical focus within the regno is on Salerno, not as hitherto Apulia, and finally the brief account of events after 1140 is as much concerned with external affairs as with those within the kingdom. Hence, while it discusses the Sicilian acquisition of the North African littoral, it also gives a brief account of the Second Crusade, and displays considerable interest in the papacy. These were matters that concerned the kingdom, but the focus is somewhat diffuse. Donald Matthew suggests that this section of the chronicle was therefore written at Salerno, probably after King Roger’s death – since it involves some ex post facto justification of his policy, especially with regard to the papacy – and perhaps as late as 1177. This was grafted on to an earlier world chronicle, which may have been compiled in Apulia about 1125.193 The chronicle of ‘Romuald’ is also interesting in that two of the three manuscripts contain significant marginal additions concerning Roger’s reign. The more contemporary is a group of entries on Roger’s campaigns on the mainland in the years 1127–31, which appear to be derived from a separate (and quite possibly contemporary) set of annals, which seem to show a particular interest in the Bradano valley in the border region between Lucania and southern Apulia, and may be derived from that area. These are of considerable value in fleshing out the accounts of Alexander and Falco for this early period.194 The other addition is an account of the trial and execution for apostasy of Philip of Mahdia, one of the king’s Arabic Christian officials, shortly before the king’s death, which may date from the early thirteenth century. Matthew dismisses this addition as ‘a highly improbable story’, though we know from Arabic sources that Philip was indeed tried and executed in November/December 1153. Others have given this version much greater credence, suggesting that even if it was written later it was based upon a contemporary report.195 A purely contemporary south Italian witness to the reign of King Roger comes in the closing pages of the Montecassino abbey chronicle, as contained in the one and only manuscript of the full text of that work, Cod. Cas. 202. The authorship of the later parts of this chronicle, begun by Leo Marsicanus, later Cardinal Bishop of Ostia (d.1115), is a complex and much-discussed issue, but is of little direct relevance here.196 There can be no doubt that this final section of the chronicle, a lengthy discussion of the abbey’s affairs in the years 1136–8, was written by Peter the Deacon, who was at that time the librarian and archivist of the abbey. Peter’s account of these years was tacked rather uneasily on to the earlier continuation of the abbey chronicle, much of which was probably written by a monk called Guido, who was Peter’s teacher and mentor, but whose authorship Peter ungratefully tried to conceal, mendaciously claiming in his prologue to Book IV of the chronicle to have himself written the entire continuation from the point in the account (in 1072) where Leo laid down his pen.197 In fact, the break between the different parts of the chronicle continuation is very obvious, since the period between 1127 and 1136 is covered in two brief chapters (Bk IV, cc. 96–7), before Peter began his detailed account of the problems the abbey faced in 1136–7, first with the officials of King Roger, anxious to ensure Montecassino’s loyalty and incorporate it in their defensive measures against the impending invasion by Emperor Lothar, and then with Pope Innocent II, angry at the monks’ earlier support for his rival Anacletus.198 Much of this section was taken up with a lengthy, at times verbatim, account of a stormy meeting between Abbot Rainald and a delegation of Cassinese monks and Innocent and his Curia, in the presence of Lothar III, at Lagopesole in Lucania over ten days in July 1137 [not translated here]. Peter based his description of this meeting (written in the early 1140s) on an earlier propaganda tract, ‘The case on behalf of the Monastery of Montecassino’, which he had written very soon after the event. In this account, he himself was the principal spokesman and defender of the abbey against the charges brought against it by Cardinal Gerard of S. Croce (the future Lucius II) and ‘a certain Cistercian abbot’ – almost certainly Bernard of Clairvaux, who was in the papal entourage at this time. But how much, or indeed whether any of this, was true is another matter. Claims that, for example, the emperor had specifically requested Peter to be included in the Cassinese delegation, or that Peter had somehow got the better of St Bernard in a debate about monastic customs, seem singularly implausible.199 Peter the Deacon’s role as the alleged champion of his abbey is on a par with his notorious career as perhaps the most inventive and outrageous forger of the twelfth century, but that is hardly our concern here.200 However, what the narrative in the chronicle of events before and after the Lagopesole conference does provide is a vivid account of the dilemma with which the abbey was faced in 1137 when the arrival of the imperial army threatened to overturn the recently established royal government in the south, and of the problems that the schism had left for south Italian churchmen. If the German sources, especially the so-called ‘Saxon Annalist’, show the expedition of 1137 from the viewpoint of the invaders, and Falco from that of their local allies, the Montecassino chronicle depicts it from that of the recipients, trying to safeguard their own interests in the face of conflicting pressures on them. Emperor Lothar, at least by Peter’s account, proved surprisingly sympathetic to Montecassino: Pope Innocent did not, and the abbot elected with the connivance of the royal officials and the approval of Anacletus was the sacrificial victim. But the monks’ choice of a German abbot to replace him (or perhaps Lothar’s imposition of him) brought them the wrath of King Roger when the Germans withdrew, something which the abbey never quite lived down.201 While the view from Montecassino may have been parochial, it does nonetheless provide an extra viewpoint of the crisis of King Roger’s reign, albeit one in which the king himself is no more than a distant, largely offstage figure.
Finally, one later monastic chronicle, from the Abruzzi abbey of St Clement, Casauria, which was completed about 1182, gives a brief but vivid account of the king’s takeover of that region in 1140 as it affected the abbey. Here the view of King Roger was much more favourable. The Abruzzi in the early twelfth century was a disturbed and lawless region, and the abbey of St Clement, an ancient and wealthy house founded by Emperor Louis II in the 870s, tended to be a victim of the acquisitive instincts of competing local nobles.202
The king restored order, and at least up to a point favoured the abbey, even if his agents, the chancellor Robert of Selby and Count Bohemond of Manopello were keen to make the abbey contribute to the defence of the kingdom. According to the chronicler, the king intervened to protect the abbey from their demands. Here, almost a generation after the king’s death, he was commemorated as a strong but pious ruler, who brought peace and favoured churchmen. Alexander of Telese would have doubtless concurred in this verdict.
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