The Kingdom in the Sun Read Free Page B

bishops with ring and crozier, lost to the Empire nine years previously, were now restored to himself and his successors.
    He had reckoned without the Abbot of Clairvaux. Bernard had accompanied Innocent to Liege; this was just the sort of crisis in which he excelled. Leaping from his seat, he subjected the King to a merciless castigation before the entire assembly, calling upon him then and there to renounce his pretensions and pay unconditional homage to his rightful Pope. As always, his words—or, more probably, the force of his personality behind them—had their effect. This was Lothair's first encounter with Bernard; it is unlikely that he had ever been spoken to in such a way before. He was not lacking in moral fibre, but this time he seems instinctively to have realised that his position was no longer tenable. He gave in. Before the Council broke up he had made his formal submission to Innocent, and had reinforced it with an undertaking that the Pope probably found even more valuable—to lead him, at the head of an imperial German army, to Rome.
     
    Already at the time of his coronation Roger must have been aware of the pressures that were building up against Anacletus and—since he had now irrevocably thrown in his lot with the anti-Pope— against himself. He had taken a gamble and he knew it. His crown might indeed have been a political necessity, but he had paid for it by bringing down upon himself the wrath of half a continent. To some extent this was unavoidable; the appearance of a new power, strong and ambitious, is rarely welcome on the international scene, and Roger had after all set himself up over a land still claimed by both the Western and the Byzantine Empires. It was unfortunate, nevertheless, that at this of all moments he should have had to antagonise not just the temporal forces of Europe but the spiritual as well— particularly when they were represented by such men as Bernard of Clairvaux and Abbot Peter of Cluny. In those first months after the election he would surely have been able to strike a similar bargain with either of the two papal pretenders; how much brighter the future would have looked if it had been Innocent, rather than Anacletus, who had appealed to him for help. As matters stood, Roger must have had an uncomfortable feeling that he had backed the wrong horse.
    But Empire and Church, threatening as they might appear, were not the only enemies of the new king. Others, just as dangerous, were considerably nearer to hand. There were the barons, who had already constituted the principal obstacle to order and unity in the peninsula for over a hundred years—since before the Hautevilles were even thought of—and there were the towns. Only in Calabria, where no urban conglomerations of any size or importance existed, were the townsfolk content to accept royal domination. In Campania, the main centres may have been politically less evolved than their northern counterparts where the revival of trade, the loosening of the imperial grip and the beginnings of organised industry had already led to the establishment of those independent mercantile city-states, democratically governed, that were to be so characteristic a feature of later mediaeval Italy; but they too had been ruffled by the breeze of communal self-government, and the variety of forms which this had taken was a significant reflection of the prevailing disunity. In Apulia it was much the same. Bari had become a 'signory', ruled by the nobles of the city under a constitutional prince; Troia had a similar system under its bishop; Molfetta and Trani were communes. None had any wish, if they could avoid it, to be swept up into a disciplined and highly centralised monarchy. It was not long before they were able to make their attitude clear. During his whirlwind progress through the mainland duchies three years before, Roger had occasionally allowed the towns through which he passed, in return for their quick submission, to retain