kingdom of sicily and kingdom of england

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HIST

History

0018-2648

October 2003

000

Original Article

The Kingdom of Sicily and the Kingdom of England,

G. A. Loud

The Kingdom of Sicily and the Kingdom of

England, 1066–1266

G. A. LOUD

University of Leeds

Abstract

This article looks back from the political crisis in England in the 1250s to examine Eng-
lish and Anglo-Norman perceptions of southern Italy and Sicily, and contacts between
the two regions, over the previous two centuries. Although some at least were conscious
of a common Norman heritage, commentators from England knew relatively little of the
southern kingdom; certainly less than the Norman chroniclers, Orderic Vitalis and Rob-
ert of Torigni, and even they were less well informed than has been suggested in the past.
There was a period of increased diplomatic contact for a generation or so after 1160, in
which the Becket dispute played a part, culminating in the visit of Richard I to Sicily dur-
ing the Third Crusade although that episode did nothing to increase the warmth of
Anglo-Sicilian relations. Thereafter there was relatively little contact for the next half-
century, in spite of Frederick II’s marriage to the sister of Henry III of England in 1235.
Furthermore, Sicily was always perceived as an exotic and alien region indicating that the
perceptions found in the 1250s had been anticipated at an earlier period.

he ill-fated attempt by King Henry III of England to secure the

crown of Sicily for his younger son Edmund was once seen as

the

principal cause of the political crisis that engulfed his govern-

ment in 1258. Historians would now be more cautious in giving such a
verdict. It is clear that there were other, and equally compelling, reasons
for the breakdown in relations between the king and important members
of the political elite, as well as within the wider community of the realm.
Factional dispute at court, resentment at royal favour to aliens, underly-
ing problems of royal finance that had been intensified by the restric-
tions imposed by Magna Carta, and indeed the personal ambitions and

This is an extensively revised and expanded version of an essay first published as ‘Il regno nor-
manno-svevo visto dal regno d’Inghilterra’, in

Il Mezzogiorno normanno-svevo visto dall’Europa e

dal mondo mediterraneo

(

Atti delle tredecesime giornate normanno-sveve, Bari, 21–24 ottobre 1997

)

(Bari, 1999), pp. 175 – 95. I would like to thank Prof. John Gillingham and Dr Elisabeth Van Houts
for commenting on succesive drafts. The following abbreviations are used throughout: FSI

Fonti

per la storia d’Italia, Roma; MGH SS/SRG

Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores / Scrip-

tores Rerum Germanicarum; MPL

Patrologia Latina

, ed. J. P. Migne (221 vols., Paris, 1844 – 64);

OMT

Oxford Medieval Texts; RS

Rolls Series (‘The Chronicles and Memorials of Great Britain

and Ireland during the Middle Ages published under the direction of the Master of the Rolls’).

G. A. LOUD

541

insecurities of the king’s brother-in-law, Simon de Montfort, all played
their part in generating the crisis.

Nevertheless, Henry’s acceptance of

the Sicilian throne on his son’s behalf, with all the political and financial
commitments that this entailed, was still a major factor in the break-
down of his rule in 1257–8, and his subjects greeted the project with a
resounding lack of enthusiasm:

First of all the magnates, and then the clerics, believing it to be all but
impossible, replied that they neither wanted, nor were able, to do what
they had been asked, especially because of [their] shortage of money, and
because of the distance of these places, and the number of enemies along
the road, and because of the power of Manfred who then held the king-
dom of Sicily and possessed infinite treasure.

The themes in this passage from the

Dunstable Annals

, and especially the

stress on the distance of Sicily from England, as well as on the former
kingdom’s wealth, were repeated by other contemporary commentators.
Indeed, to some twelfth- and thirteenth-century Englishmen the king-
dom of Sicily had an exotic, not to say dangerous, appearance. However,
the views expressed by those who criticized Henry III for his involvement
with Sicily in the 1250s should be put into context. There were after all
historic links between southern Italy and England, both of which had been
conquered by the Normans in the later eleventh century. Some observers
remained aware of this connection long after the event, and there were
continued contacts between the kingdom of England and the new king-
dom of Sicily, created in 1130, throughout the twelfth century – in fact
the diplomatic links intensified in the later part of that century. But how
much did contemporary Englishmen really know about the kingdom of
Sicily, both in the thirteenth century and indeed in the earlier period?

It should, of course, be stressed that although after the conquest of

almost all of the Angevin dynasty’s continental dominions by Philip
Augustus in 1202 – 4 the English elite became more self-consciously ‘Eng-
lish’, their interests more insular and their sense of identity stronger
– often strident – the kingdom of England still retained manifold connec-
tions, commercial, educational, religious and diplomatic, with the Conti-
nent. ‘Opting out of Europe after the loss of Normandy did not present
itself as an attractive proposition.’

However, while the links with France,

See, for example, J. R. Maddicott,

Simon de Montfort

(Cambridge, 1994), esp. pp. 128 – 9, 147 – 54;

H. Ridgeway, ‘The Lord Edward and the Provisions of Oxford (1258): A Study in Faction’,

Thirteenth-

Century England

, i:

Proceedings of the Newcastle Conference 1985

, ed. P. R. Coss and S. D. Lloyd

(Woodbridge, 1986) [hereafter Coss and Lloyd,

Thirteenth-Century England

], pp. 83–99, and H.

Ridgeway, ‘Foreign Favourites and Henry III’s Problems of Patronage’,

EHR

, civ (1989), 590 – 610,

compared with the classic older studies, R. F. Treharne,

The Baronial Plan of Reform, 1258 – 63

(Man-

chester, 1932), esp. pp. 50 – 2, and F. M. Powicke,

Henry III and the Lord Edward

(Oxford, 1947),

esp. pp. 370 – 9.

Annales de Dunstaplia

, in

Annales Monastici

, ed. H. R. Luard (5 vols., RS, 1864 – 9) [hereafter

Annales Monastici

], iii. 200.

D. Matthew,

The English and the Community of Europe

in the Thirteenth Century

The Stenton

Lecture 1996

(Reading, 1997) [hereafter Matthew,

The English and the Community of Europe

], p. 17.

542

THE KINGDOM OF SICILY AND THE KINGDOM OF ENGLAND

the Low Countries and even the German empire were close, and of imme-
diate moment to contemporary Englishmen, those with the distant kingdom
of Sicily would appear to have atrophied after 1200, and it was only with
Henry III’s papally sponsored Sicilian imbroglio after 1255 that the
southern kingdom became once more a subject of interest. The insignificance
of the kingdom of Sicily to English eyes before that date is evident in the
work of the foremost historical writer of the era, Matthew Paris.

In the year 1250 Matthew, the monk and historian of the abbey of St

Albans, was completing the first draft of his massive

Chronica Majora

He concluded the work by looking back over the history of the previous
half-century and summarizing what he considered to be the most
significant events in the history of Christendom in those years. However,
while elsewhere in his work Matthew devoted considerable attention to
the greatest European ruler of his day, the emperor Frederick II, it is
noteworthy that in this lengthy section (comprising in all five and a half
pages in the printed edition) he mentioned him only in a very few brief
passages. He recorded the capture at sea by his men (in 1241) of the
former legate to England and other senior clerics who were on their way
to Rome, Frederick’s renewed excommunication and deposition by Pope
Innocent IV at the Council of Lyons in 1245, and then, almost as an
afterthought at the end of the section, after discussing Louis IX’s disas-
trous Damietta crusade, he wrote that: ‘the whole of Christendom was
disturbed by the wars caused by the hatred between the pope and Frederick
and the universal Church was endangered’.

But nowhere in this lengthy and

wide-ranging passage, dealing with events from Spain to the Baltic,
Savoy to Norway, and England to the crusader states, did Matthew even
mention, let alone discuss, Frederick’s power base, the kingdom of Sicily.

Thus, before the destination of the Sicilian throne became an issue in

English politics in the mid-1250s, the most ambitious historical writer of
thirteenth-century England had shown little interest in (or knowledge of )
the Sicilian kingdom, even though he was both well-informed about and
interested in what was occurring in continental Europe as a whole, to
such an extent that one modern commentator has gone so far as to sug-
gest that ‘European history became in the

Chronica

a subject in its own

right’.

Nor did his English contemporaries show any more concern with

the south Italian kingdom. Thus, it was hardly surprising that when
King Henry III decided to accept Alexander IV’s offer of the Sicilian
kingdom his subjects were so reluctant to take part in the enterprise or
to pay for it. If Matthew Paris’s account is to be believed – fortunately he
decided not to conclude his history in 1250 after all – the English mag-
nates denounced the proposal as naive, and the king as one ‘who

Chronica Majora

, ed. H. R. Luard (7 vols., RS, 1872 – 4) [hereafter

Chronica Majora

], v. 191 – 7,

quotation from p. 196. On the original ending of the work, See R. Vaughan,

Matthew Paris

(Cam-

bridge, 1958) [hereafter Vaughan,

Matthew Paris

], pp. 52 – 61.

A. Gransden,

Historical Writing in England

500 – 1307

(1973) [hereafter Gransden,

Historical

Writing

], p. 361. Cf. Matthew,

The English and the Community of Europe

, pp. 9 – 10, on the wide

range of Matthew Paris’s interests.

G. A. LOUD

543

despised due consideration and prudence’, and who was deceived by the
craft of the pope. They described ‘Apulia’ as not only strongly defended
and far away from England, from which it was separated by seas, moun-
tains and ‘by many unknown kingdoms with different languages’, but
filled with treacherous people accustomed to poisoning their friends and
relatives. The king would have been far wiser to have followed the ex-
ample of his brother Richard of Cornwall, who had earlier been offered
this kingdom by Innocent IV and turned it down.

In the later part of the

Chronica Majora

, once the fate of the Sicilian

kingdom had become a political issue in England, Matthew did devote
some limited attention to events there. He described Prince Manfred’s
defeat of the papal army under Cardinal Ottaviano degli Ubaldini, and
the role played in this campaign by the Muslim troops from Lucera (who
according to him were 60,000 strong and fought with poisoned arrows,
Greek fire and other diabolic weapons). He also noted Manfred’s cor-
onation as king of Sicily, despite papal fulminations, in 1258.

But his

principal concern was the malign effects the king’s attempts to raise
money for the project had in England: the king claimed in letters to the
pope that England’s financial resources were inexhaustible, whereas in
reality Henry was massively in debt to foreign usurers and his country
close to ruin.

Sicily was therefore perceived by thirteenth-century Englishmen, and

in particular by the foremost historian of his time, in so far as he dis-
cussed it all, as distant, alien, and of interest only because it led King
Henry III into burdensome foreign entanglements. Yet, while Matthew
Paris was undoubtedly xenophobically patriotic, and in particular deeply
hostile to the growing exercise of papal authority and influence, his lack
of attention to the kingdom of Sicily is all the more notable given his
considerable interest in Frederick II himself, especially after the latter’s
marriage to Henry III’s sister in 1235. Some twenty of the emperor’s let-
ters were reproduced accurately and in full in his chronicle; some were
made available to him by Earl Richard of Cornwall while he made copies
of others from governmental records in the exchequer; it is even possible
that some may have been obtained directly from imperial envoys.

Fur-

thermore, the attention he gave to the crusade, the German empire and

Chronica Majora

, v. 680 – 1. The offer to Richard of Cornwall is recorded in ibid., v. 346 – 7, 457,

and also in the

Annales de Burton

, in

Annales Monastici

, i. 339.

Chronica Majora

, v. 473 – 5, 722. The use of poisoned arrows by the Sicilian Muslims was also

alleged by Bishop Conrad of Hildesheim, in a letter describing the kingdom of Sicily in 1196, con-
tained within the

Chronica Slavorum

of Arnold of Lübeck, ed. J. M. Lappenberg, MGH SS xxi.

196.

Chronica Majora

, v. 595. Matthew exaggerated here. But while Henry III was by no means bank-

rupt he still owed money for his expedition to Gascony in 1253 – 4, and his financial reserves were
limited and nowhere near sufficient for such an ambitious project as a military campaign against
Sicily. See D. A. Carpenter, ‘The Gold Treasure of Henry III’, Coss and Lloyd,

Thirteenth-Century

England

, i. 75 – 6.

H.-E. Hilpert,

Kaiser- und Papstbriefe in den Chronica Majora des Matthews Paris

(Stuttgart,

1981) [hereafter Hilpert,

Kaiser- und Papstbriefe in den Chronica Majora

], chs. 3 – 6.

544

THE KINGDOM OF SICILY AND THE KINGDOM OF ENGLAND

even affairs in northern Italy (about which he was well informed), does
indeed show that Matthew viewed the history of his native land within a
wide-ranging European context.

The contrast between his knowledge

of much of Europe and his relative ignorance about the kingdom of Sic-
ily is perhaps made most explicit in the maps that Matthew included in
the four manuscript volumes of his master copy of the

Chronica Majora

These gave detailed and for the most part accurate itineraries for the
journey between England and Rome, but displayed only the sketchiest
knowledge of the geography of southern Italy. The island of Sicily was,
for example, placed almost next to Naples.

It was evident that he pos-

sessed much greater knowledge of the geography of the Holy Land than
of the kingdom of Sicily.

The distance separating the kingdom of Sicily and the British Isles

and the lengthy time which it took to travel between the two regions were
of course always a barrier to close and informed contact. In an earlier
age the physical division may have seemed even greater than in the thir-
teenth century. When the exiled Archbishop Anselm of Canterbury
arrived in Rome in 1098, Pope Urban II greeted him ‘as almost our
equal . . . the apostolic patriarch of that other world’.

Yet for church-

men that world shrank after the Gregorian reform. The developing
authority of the papacy within the Church, the growing centralization of
the Church, and the incurable litigiousness of medieval ecclesiastics,
meant that the road to Rome became an increasingly travelled one for
churchmen, from England as elsewhere in Christendom, from the early
twelfth century onwards.

William of Malmesbury, who displayed a

considerable interest in affairs at Rome, writing in the early 1120s, con-
trasted the dangers of the road to Rome and its disorders in a past age
with the enhanced peace and order there in his own time.

In the late

1150s John of Salisbury claimed to have already crossed the Alps ten
times, while Roger of Howden, a royal chaplain and justice, made six or

Vaughan,

Matthew Paris

, pp. 133 – 4, 147 – 8. For his interest in Frederick himself and in north-

ern Italy, see for example

Chronica Majora

, iii. 324 (the marriage), iv. 63 (the burning of heretics at

Milan in 1240), iv. 354 – 6 (Innocent IV’s flight to Genoa 1244), iv. 648 – 9, v. 13 – 15 (Frederick’s
defeat at Parma in 1248), v. 78 (the capture of his son King Enzio in 1249).

Vaughan,

Matthew Paris

, pp. 247 – 50.

P. D. A. Harvey, ‘Matthew Paris’s Maps of Palestine’,

Thirteenth-Century England

, viii:

Proceed-

ings of the Durham Conference 1999

, ed. M. Prestwich, R. Britnell and R. Frame (Woodbridge,

2001), 165 – 77.

The Life of St Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, by Eadmer

, ed. R. W. Southern (1962), p. 105.

Cf. William of Malmesbury,

Gesta Pontificum Anglorum

, ed. N. E. S. Hamilton (RS, 1870), p. 100,

where Urban was credited with a very similar remark to Anselm at the council of Bari, later in the
same year.

G. B. Parks,

The English Traveller to Italy

, i:

The Middle Ages (to 1525)

(Rome, 1954) [hereafter

Parkes,

English Traveller to Italy

], pp. 101 – 32. Cf. M. Brett,

The English Church in the Reign of

Henry I

(Oxford, 1975), pp. 50 – 62.

Gesta Regum Anglorum. The History of the English Kings

, ed. R. A. B. Mynors, R. M. Thomson

and M. Winterbottom (OMT, 1998) [hereafter

Gesta Regum Anglorum

], i. 364 – 8, c. 201, ii. 778 –

80, c. 435. William, for example, gave a detailed account of the Lateran Council of 1112 (ibid., ii.
772 – 4, c. 429).

G. A. LOUD

545

seven visits to the papal court between 1171 and 1198.

Both men were

well informed about Roman affairs, and provide information on events
there unavailable from other sources, even local ones. John gave the most
detailed known account of the retreat from Rome of Frederick Bar-
barossa’s stricken army in 1167.

Howden’s chronicle is an important

source for events in Rome towards the end of the twelfth century, for
example the Romans’ destruction of Tusculano in 1191, and the papal
election of 1198, which took place when he himself was present in the
city.

There was, by the end of the twelfth century, ‘a constant traffic and

exchange of ideas between England and Rome’. Thus the archbishop of
Canterbury and eight English, as well as two Welsh and three Scottish,
bishops attended the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215.

Matthew Paris’s

maps demonstrate English familiarity with the route to Rome. But, as
they also show, knowledge of Italy south of Rome was much less, or
more unusual, at least in the thirteenth century.

By that time the historic connection between southern Italy and Eng-

land had faded into obscurity. Yet southern Italy and Sicily, like Eng-
land, had been conquered by the Normans in the eleventh century, even
if the Norman /French influence in southern Italy was already waning by
1130, when the various provinces of the south were united together in the
new kingdom of Sicily.

There is some evidence to show that this Nor-

man heritage was still recognized, and some sense of common identity
was felt in England up to the middle of the twelfth century. According to
William of Malmesbury, William the Conqueror used to stimulate his
own courage by reflecting on the career of Robert Guiscard – how could
he show himself any less daring than a man who was by birth so much
his social inferior?

Henry of Huntingdon reflected on the evil charac-

teristics (as he saw them) of the Normans, as ‘is increasingly apparent in
the best lands subject to them, that is in Normandy and England,
Apulia, Calabria, Sicily and Antioch’. Both Henry and Aelred of Riev-
aulx claimed that at the Battle of the Standard against the Scots in 1138
a speech was made to raise the morale of the Anglo-Norman troops in

John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, ed. C. C. J. Webb (Oxford, 1929), p. 117. J. Gillingham, ‘The

Travels of Roger of Howden and his Views of the Irish, Scots and Welsh’, Anglo-Norman Studies,
xx: Proceedings of the Battle Conference 1997, ed. C. Harper-Bill (Woodbridge, 1998) [hereafter
Gillingham, ‘Travels of Roger of Howden’], pp. 165 – 6.

The Letters of John of Salisbury, ii: The Later Letters (1163 – 80), ed. W. J. Millor and C. N. L.

Brooke (Oxford, 1979) [hereafter Letters of John of Salisbury, ii], 552 – 61 no. 272; T. Reuter, ‘John
of Salisbury and the Germans’, The World of John of Salisbury, ed. M. Wilks (Oxford, 1984),
p. 422.

Roger of Howden, Chronica, ed. W. Stubbs (4 vols., RS, 1868–71) [hereafter Howden, Chronica],

iii. 103 – 4; iv. 32 – 3, 41 – 2, 174 – 5; H. Hoffmann, ‘Petrus Diaconus, die Herren von Tusculum und
der Sturz Oderisius’ II von Montecassino’, Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters, xxvii
(1971), 55 – 9; J. Sayers, Innocent III. Leader of Europe 1198 – 1216 (Harlow, 1994), pp. 8, 25.

C. R. Cheney, Pope Innocent III and England (Stuttgart, 1976), pp. 25 – 37 (quote from p. 34), 388.

For the scale of Norman influence on south Italian society, see G. A. Loud, ‘How “Norman”

was the Norman Conquest of Southern Italy?’, Nottingham Medieval Studies, xxv (1981), 3 – 34
(reprinted in G. A. Loud, Conquerors and Churchmen in Norman Italy (Aldershot, 1999)).

Gesta Regum Anglorum, i. 482, c. 262.

546

THE KINGDOM OF SICILY AND THE KINGDOM OF ENGLAND

which they were reminded of their ancestors’ conquests, including that of
southern Italy: ‘wealthy Apulia, gaining you, renewed herself’, and ‘who
subdued Apulia, Calabria and Sicily if not your Norman?’

However, the most significant exposition of this theme came in the

work of Orderic Vitalis who, though born in England and the child of
an English mother, was actually writing in Normandy. Orderic’s work
is a reminder of one of the most important factors linking the Anglo-
Norman kingdom with southern Italy: the family ties that were seem-
ingly still significant in the years when he wrote his Ecclesiastical History
(c.1115 – 41). Much of Orderic’s information about southern Italy con-
cerned members of the Giroie and Grandmesnil families, the founders of
his monastery of St Evroul; for example, William of Montreuil, one of
the most important figures in the principality of Capua in the 1060s, and
Abbot Robert de Grandmesnil of S. Eufemia, the former Abbot of St
Evroul. The latter’s career led Orderic to observe complacently that in
the three south Italian monasteries reformed by him (Venosa, S. Eufemia
and Mileto) ‘the liturgy of St Evroul is chanted, and the monastic rule
has been observed to the present day’. He also recorded Abbot Robert’s
death (in 1082), allegedly poisoned by a baker who had been born a
Saracen.

Orderic knew of the existence of Geoffrey Malaterra’s Deeds

of Count Roger of Sicily, although it is unlikely that he had actually read
it, for he said very little about the count. However, he devoted at least
some attention to the career of Robert Guiscard, Count Roger’s elder
brother, the most prominent and successful leader of the Normans in the
south, whom he considered had ‘performed many prodigies in magnificent
style, abounded in wealth, and continually enlarged his territories, over-
shadowing all his neighbours’.

In particular Orderic gave a quite

detailed and lengthy account of his attacks on Byzantium in 1081 and 1085,
and correctly linked his return to Italy after the first campaign with
Gregory VII’s appeals for help in the face of Henry IV’s attack on
Rome.

Admittedly, not everything Orderic wrote about southern Italy was

entirely reliable or necessarily based on first-hand information. His brief
discussion of the early history of the Normans in southern Italy is

Historia Anglorum, ed. D. E. Greenway (OMT, 1996) [hereafter Historia Anglorum], pp. 402 – 3,

714 – 15; Aelred, Relatio de Standardo, in Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II and Richard
I, ed. R. Howlett (4 vols., RS, 1884 – 90) [hereafter Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II and
Richard I ], iii. 186. For much of what follows, see E. M. Jamison, ‘The Sicilian Norman Kingdom
in the Mind of Anglo-Norman Contemporaries’, Proceedings of the British Academy, xxiv (1938),
237 – 85 [hereafter Jamison, ‘The Sicilian Norman Kingdom’].

The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis, ed. M. Chibnall (6 vols., OMT, 1969 – 81) [hereafter

Orderic], ii. 102 – 3, iv. 22 – 3.

Ibid. iii. 160 – 1. Orderic does mention Malaterra’s history, ibid. ii. 100 – 1, but Dr Chibnall

doubts whether he had actually read it. Had he done so, one would surely have expected consider-
able borrowing therefrom, although one should note that Robert of Torigni knew, but made only
limited use of, another key eleventh-century south Italian text, the Gesta Roberti Wiscardi of Wil-
liam of Apulia.

Orderic, iv. 10 – 39.

G. A. LOUD

547

muddled, although he clearly had access to some sort of (oral?) tradition
of the names of key figures. Hence he claimed that Robert Guiscard had
received Apulia in grants from the Lombard Arduin and his ‘nephew’
Melus, and then from Pope Leo IX.

His account of Guiscard’s capture

of Rome in 1084, and later his death, saw him exercising to the full his
talent for composing rhetorical speeches in the classical manner (and
attributing to Robert Guiscard a remarkable scholarly knowledge of the
history of the early papacy). His method here may be compared with the
(much lengthier) deathbed speech he attributed to William the Con-
queror.

In particular Orderic attributed Guiscard’s death to poison

administered by his ‘shifty and cunning’ Lombard wife Sichelgaita. He
explained this by her machinations on behalf of her son Roger Borsa, to
the detriment of her stepson Bohemond. William of Malmesbury also
accused Sichelgaita of poisoning her husband, but omitted the family
dispute, attributing her action rather to the intrigues of the emperor
Alexius.

This seems to have been a purely Anglo-Norman legend,

something not even hinted at in the south Italian sources, but interest-
ingly still current in the late twelfth century when William of Malmes-
bury’s brief anecdote was developed by Roger of Howden into a longer
and instructive cautionary tale, in which Sichelgaita’s treachery was
exposed and punished by the emperor himself.

Yet whether or not such

tales were true is beside the point. That legends about the Normans of
southern Italy should have been present in the Anglo-Norman world
attests to links with and interest in that region. Other examples of such
legendary material might also be cited. Thus the St Evroul version of the
‘Deeds of the Norman Dukes’ by William of Jumièges, quite probably
also by Orderic, ascribed the death of Thurstan Scitellus in Apulia to a
fire-breathing dragon, to whose lair he was lured by envious Lombards –
a story with obvious links to Norse legends.

There appear also to have

been south Italian origins for some of the stories contained within the
now-lost chanson de geste concerning William the Conqueror’s father

Ibid. iii. 86 – 8. Arduin was the Normans’ leader in their attack on Apulia in 1041, Melus a local

rebel who led the Normans in their first attack on that province in 1017 – 18. (Guiscard only arrived
in southern Italy in 1046 – 7.) The reference to Leo IX may suggest knowledge of Malaterra, who
claimed that Leo did invest the Normans with their lands in 1053, but even if this were true (and
there is no corroborative evidence), their principal leader at this stage was Guiscard’s elder half-
brother Humphrey. Cf. De Rebus Gestis Rogerii Calabriae et Siciliae Comitis et Roberti Guiscardi
Ducis Fratris eius, auctore Gaufredo Malaterra, ed. E. Pontieri (Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, Bol-
ogna, 1927 – 8) [hereafter Malaterra], lib. I.14, p. 15.

Orderic, iv. 24 – 7, 32 – 5, cf. ibid. iv. 80 – 95.

Ibid. iv. 30; Gesta Regum Anglorum, i. 484.

Gesta Regis Ricardi, in Gesta Regis Henrici Secundi Benedicti Abbatis, ed. W. Stubbs (2 vols., RS,

1867) [hereafter Gesta Henrici II Regis], ii. 200 – 1. That Roger of Howden was indeed the author
of these works has been conclusively proved by D. Corner, ‘The Gesta Regis Henrici Secundi and
the Chronica of Roger, Parson of Howden’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, lvi
(1983), 126 – 44.

The Gesta Normannorum Ducum of William of Jumièges, Orderic Vitalis and Robert of Torigni,

ed. E. M. C. Van Houts (2 vols., OMT, 1992 – 5), ii. 156 – 7; I. M. Boberg, Motif Index of Early Ice-
landic Literature (Copenhagen, 1966), 38.

548

THE KINGDOM OF SICILY AND THE KINGDOM OF ENGLAND

Duke Robert of Normandy, parts of which are preserved in the later
versions of the Gesta Normannorum Ducum.

Such links, however, date from the period of conquest, when contacts

between Normandy and southern Italy were still strong, and there were men
from southern Italy who had returned to Normandy, such as William
Pantulf, who came home to be accused of complicity in the murder of
Mabel of Bellême in 1077, the knight Ansold who took part in Guiscard’s
expedition against Byzantium in 1081, and Robert Giroie, who returned
to Normandy c.1088 and was given the castle of St Ceneri by Duke Robert
II.

Such people were directly or indirectly Orderic’s informants about

south Italian matters. There is though a very marked contrast in the Ecclesi-
astical History between what Orderic said about southern Italy in the age
of Robert Guiscard – which was quite a lot – and the exiguous information
that he conveyed about southern Italy in his own day. Apart from a very
brief (and quite possibly legendary) anecdote about Roger I’s widow Adelaide,
and cursory mention of her melancholy second marriage to Baldwin I of
Jerusalem,

there are only very rare references to Roger II. Orderic did allude

to his defiance of Pope Honorius II, his imprisonment of his (correctly
named) Apulian enemies and his recognition as king by Pope Anacletus
II, though he wrongly accused him of marrying the latter’s sister.

But

only the briefest attention was devoted to this: a great deal more space
was, for example, devoted to affairs in Spain in the last three books of his
History. Orderic appears to have been less interested in, or perhaps he knew
less about, contemporary southern Italy than he was about the earlier
period when there had been much more direct contact with Normandy.

Furthermore, while there were still indications that there was some

sense of identity between the Normans in England and those in southern
Italy, the early twelfth-century writers who lived in England (as opposed
to Orderic in Normandy) actually knew very little about affairs in Nor-
man Italy. William of Malmesbury briefly discussed Guiscard’s attack on
Byzantium and his death (recording the inscription on his tomb at Ven-
osa), the career of his son Bohemond, and Robert of Normandy’s mar-
riage to a sister (unnamed) of the count of Conversano. However, his
discussion of Bohemond was largely in the context of the First Crusade,
and apart from his role in attacking Byzantium virtually nothing was
said about southern Italy itself. Nor was William always very accurate
about details: thus he claimed that Bohemond died ‘a few days’ after his
return to Apulia from his expedition against Byzantium in 1108,
although this was actually two and a half years.

And apart from the

R. Louis, ‘Les Ducs de Normandie dans les chansons de gestes’, Byzantion, xxviii (1958), 391 –

402; G. A. Loud, ‘The Gens Normannorum. Myth or Reality?’, Papers of the Fourth Battle Conference
on Anglo-Norman Studies, 1981, ed. R. A. Brown (Woodbridge, 1982), pp. 104 – 16, at 107
(reprinted in Loud, Conquerors and Churchmen in Norman Italy).

Orderic, iii. 160 – 1, 180 – 1, iv. 154 – 7.

Ibid. vi. 428 – 33.

Ibid. 366 – 7, 433 – 5.

Gesta Regum Anglorum, i. 482 – 4 , 594, 690 – 4, 704.

G. A. LOUD

549

two fleeting allusions mentioned above, there is nothing at all about
southern Italy in the massive History of Henry of Huntingdon, nor
indeed anything in the other principal English historical work of the
period before 1150, that by John of Worcester. This is partly explicable,
especially in the case of the latter, by their dependence on the framework
and geographic limitations of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. But although
Henry’s account of the First Crusade mentioned Bohemond, he said
nothing about him being a Norman, nor about any kinship with the
Normans from the duchy.

The only exception to this neglect of affairs

in southern Italy was Eadmer’s account of Archbishop Anselm’s visit to
the region in 1098: the significant factor here being that Eadmer was an
eye-witness. But this episode played no more than an incidental role in
his depiction of Anselm, and to Eadmer (an Anglo-Saxon) there could
anyway be no question of identification with the conquerors of southern
Italy, but rather with the former monk of Bec who was Anselm’s host.
The principal, indeed almost the only, subject of secular interest
recorded was Roger I of Sicily’s use of Muslim troops at the siege of
Capua.

The relative lack of interest shown by Anglo-Norman contemporaries

in the kingdom of Sicily in the years immediately after 1130 may be in
part explicable because of the dubious status of the new kingdom, which
was for some years after its creation something of an international
pariah.

Both the circumstances of its creation during the papal schism

of 1130 and the continued hostility of the German and Byzantine em-
perors to what they saw as a usurpation of their rightful lordship over
southern Italy led to the legitimacy of Roger II’s kingship being con-
tested. Orderic certainly disapproved of its link with the ‘anti-pope’ An-
acletus (as, quite unfairly, the latter became). However, he never
descended to the invective heaped upon King Roger’s head by another
Norman, Archdeacon Arnulf of Seés, a fierce partisan of the rival and
ultimately successful party in the papal schism, who denounced him, in
terms that were to become almost a cliché among classically minded en-
emies of the new ruler, as ‘that tyrant whom Sicily, the nurse of tyrants,
has sustained, the successor of Dionysius, the heir of his hall and fate,
the purchaser of the empty name of king’.

On the other hand, the

Historia Anglorum, pp. 422 – 43.

The Life of St Anselm, pp. 106 – 13. This was certainly not the first occasion on which such

troops had been employed. They had been used by Count Roger as early as the siege of Salerno in
1076, and in his campaigns in Calabria in the early 1090s. See Storia dei normanni dei Amato di
Montecassino, ed. V. de Bartholomeis (FSI, 1935), lib. VIII.14, p. 354; Malaterra, lib. IV.17, 22,
pp. 96, 100 (the sieges of Cosenza in 1091 and Castrovillari in 1094).

T. Reuter, ‘Vom Parvenu zum Bündispartner: das Königreich Sizilien in der abendländischen

Politik des 12. Jahrhunderts’, Die Staufer in Süden. Sizilien und das Reich, ed. T. Kölzer (Sigmarin-
gen, 1996), pp. 43 – 56, esp. pp. 53 – 4, where contemporary views of King Roger are compared
somewhat fancifully to modern attitudes towards Saddam Hussein.

‘In Girardum Engolismensium Invectiva’, MGH Libelli de Lite, iii (Hanover 1897), 107. See

more generally, H. Wieruszowski, ‘Roger II of Sicily, Rex-Tyrannus in Twelfth-Century Political
Thought’, Speculum, xxxviii (1963), 46 – 78.

550

THE KINGDOM OF SICILY AND THE KINGDOM OF ENGLAND

decline of links with Normandy and the diminution of any sense of nor-
manitas in southern Italy may have been as much, if not more, significant
than the repercussions of the schism. One obvious symptom of this
change was the increasing rarity of persons identifying themselves as ‘so-
and-so the Norman’, or even as the son of a Norman, in south Italian
charters after c.1120.

Another was the replacement of the money of

Rouen, still in use in parts of southern Italy in the 1130s, by King
Roger’s own silver coinage in 1140.

However, the conferment of inter-

national respectability (to non-German eyes) upon the kingdom by its
definitive peace with the papacy in 1156, and the rearrangement of Euro-
pean diplomacy caused by the renewed papal schism of 1159, created
new top-level contacts as Sicily became a full part of the twelfth-century
‘concert of Europe’. But even before then personal links had never
entirely disappeared. As John of Salisbury noted, King Roger welcomed
foreigners to his dominions: Pseudo-Falcandus indeed suggested that he
retained an affection for those from the race from which he had
sprung.

The successful career of Richard of Lingèvres, a Norman from

Bayeux, who arrived in the south shortly before 1146 and eventually
became count of Andria, in Apulia, shows that there was some truth in
this.

Two ‘Englishmen’, or perhaps more properly Anglo-Normans,

Robert of Selby and Master Thomas Brown, held senior positions in the
royal court, Robert as chancellor from 1140 until his death in 1151; and
two further Englishmen were to be appointed as prelates in Sicily after
King Roger’s death in 1154 – Richard ‘Palmer’ to Syracuse in 1157 and
Herbert of Middlesex to Conza in 1169.

At a less exalted level, an Eng-

lish monk was the vestiarius of Montecassino in the 1130s.

Robert of

Selby’s friendship with John of Salisbury and Archbishop William of
York (both of whom visited the south Italian kingdom), Thomas Brown’s
return to England after 1154, and the mysterious English friend to whom
Henry Aristippus, archdeacon of Catania, dedicated his translation of the

G. A. Loud, The Age of Robert Guiscard. Southern Italy and the Norman Conquest (Harlow,

2000), pp. 287 – 8.

L. Travaini, La monetazione nell’Italia normanna (Rome, 1995), pp. 295 – 9.

The Historia Pontificalis of John of Salisbury, ed. M. Chibnall (London, 1956) [hereafter His-

toria Pontificalis], p. 66; La Historia o Liber de Regno Sicilie e la Epistola ad Petrum Panormitane
Ecclesie Thesaurium di Ugo Falcando, ed. G. B. Siragusa (FSI, 1897), p. 6 [hereafter Falcandus]

The History of the Tyrants of Sicily by ‘Hugo Falcandus’ 1154 – 69, trans. G. A. Loud and T. E. J.
Wiedemann (Manchester, 1998) [hereafter Tyrants], p. 58.

Robert of Torigni, Chronicon, in Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II and Richard I, iv.

153; Jamison, ‘The Sicilian Norman Kingdom’, pp. 252 – 3.

Jamison, ‘The Sicilian Norman Kingdom’, pp. 249 – 50. Robert was first attested as chancellor in

the foundation charter for the palace chapel of St Peter on 28 April 1140, Rogerii II. Regis Diplo-
mata Latina, ed. C.-R. Brühl (Codex Diplomaticus Regni Siciliae, Ser. I.ii (1), Cologne 1987), 133 –
8, no. 48. For the bishops, See N. Kamp, Kirche und Monarchie im staufischen Königreich Sizilien
(4 vols., Munich, 1973 – 82) [hereafter Kamp, Kirche und Monarchie], ii. 743, iii. 1013 – 18. However,
it should be noted that Archbishop Walter of Palermo (1169 – 90) and his brother Bartholomew,
bishop of Agrigento (1171 – 90) and archbishop of Palermo (1191 – 9), were not, as was once
thought, Englishmen, L. J. A. Loewenthal, ‘For the Biography of Walter Ophamil, Archbishop of
Palermo’, EHR, lxxxvii (1972), 75 – 82.

Chronica Monasterii Casinensis, ed. H. Hoffmann (MGH SS xxxiv, Hanover, 1980), IV.108, p. 573.

G. A. LOUD

551

Phaedo in 1156, demonstrate that there was still some contact back and
forth, not simply a one-way traffic of a handful of ambitious clerics seek-
ing preferment in Sicily.

Another Englishman, Adelard of Bath, spent

some years studying medicine and philosophy in southern Italy and de-
dicated one of his tracts to the bishop of Syracuse.

In addition, there

were undoubtedly Anglo-Norman pilgrims who went from the ports of
Apulia to the Holy Land. An Englishman called Saewulf departed from
Brindisi to Jerusalem as early as 1102, but unfortunately evidence for the
scale of twelfth-century pilgrimage is sketchy in the extreme.

Nor is it

known how the newly fashionable hero of Anglo-Norman romance,
King Arthur, came to be represented on the mosaic pavement of Otranto
cathedral, which was installed in the years 1163 – 6, or how the legend
developed, as it had by the late twelfth century, that Arthur was still alive
on the island of Sicily, living hidden away in the depths of Mount Etna.

However, from 1160 onwards contacts between the two kingdoms

developed on a more official level. There were four principal reasons for
such links over the next thirty years. First, there was the arrival of
Stephen, a younger son of the Count of Perche, at the Sicilian court and
his brief but spectacular career as chancellor and chief minister during
the minority of King William II in 1167 – 8. Secondly, there was the
intensification of European diplomacy created by the papal schism and
(more particularly in this context) by the dispute between Henry II and
Archbishop Thomas Becket. Then there was the marriage of Henry II’s
daughter Joanna to William II of Sicily in February 1177, and finally
Richard I’s stay in Sicily over the winter of 1190 on his way to the Third
Crusade.

Stephen’s journey to Sicily was the consequence both of the factional

dispute that afflicted the Sicilian court after the death of William I in
May 1166 and of the familial links between his widow, Margaret of Nav-
arre, and the Norman aristocracy – Stephen’s father, Count Rotrou of
Perche, and her grandmother had been brother and sister. The queen
had written to her cousin, Archbishop Rotrou of Rouen, asking that he
send one of his clerical relatives to serve her as an independent adviser
and minister, over and above, or so it was hoped, the mutual dislike and

The Letters of John of Salisbury, i: The Early Letters (1153 – 61), ed. H. E. Butler and W. J. Millor

(1955), 57 – 8, no. 33; John of Hexham, in Symeon of Durham, Opera Omnia, ed. T. Arnold (2 vols.,
RS, 1882–5), ii. 318 – 19; Dialogus de Scaccario, ed. C. Johnson, rev. F. E. L. Carter and D. E. Greenway
(OMT, 1983), pp. 35 – 6; Phaedo interprete Henrico Aristippo, ed. L. Mineo-Paluelo (1950), pp. 89 – 90.

C. Burnett, The Introduction of Arabic Learning into England (1997) [hereafter Burnett, Introduc-

tion of Arabic Learning], pp. 22 – 5.

Saewulf, with an English translation by the Bishop of Clifton (Palestine Pilgrim Texts Society,

1896), pp. 1 – 2, 31; Parks, English Traveller to Italy, p. 151.

C. A. Willemsen, Das Rätsel von Otranto. Das Fu

βbodenmosaik in der Kathedrale (Sigmaringen,

1992), pp. 36 – 7, 50 – 2, and pl. XXVIII. The image as now preserved has been heavily restored:
Gervase of Tilbury, Otia Imperialia. Recreation for an Emperor, ed. S. E. Banks and J. W. Binns
(OMT, 2002) [henceforth Otia Imperialia], lib. II c. 12, pp. 334 – 7. For a (somewhat inconclusive)
discussion, see C. Settis Frugoni, ‘Per una lettura del mosaico pavimentale della cattedrale di
Otranto’, Bullettino dell’istituto storico italiano per il medio evo, lxxx (1968), 237 – 41.

552

THE KINGDOM OF SICILY AND THE KINGDOM OF ENGLAND

vicious competition for advancement that beset the familiares of the
Sicilian court.

But here the connection with Normandy was an indirect

one, through the Spanish queen rather than from Sicily itself, and
Stephen’s French and Norman followers very rapidly became unpopular.
Within less than a year they were expelled by a popular revolt, encour-
aged by Stephen’s enemies at court.

At almost exactly the same time, both sides in the Becket dispute

sought to enlist the Sicilian court on their behalf. Given the alliance
between Sicily and the papacy, and the dependence of Alexander III
upon Sicilian support, especially once he had taken up residence in Ben-
evento from the summer of 1167 onwards, this was hardly surprising.
Thomas and his partisans perhaps naturally looked to their fellow Eng-
lishman, Richard, the bishop-elect of Syracuse, to assist them, and may
also have hoped that the good relations between their protector, Louis
VII, and the Sicilian royal family would work to their advantage. How-
ever, they were not well informed on the tensions within the Sicilian
court (so complex were these that quite possibly no outsiders were), and
as a result their approaches proved to be maladroit. In the autumn of
1167 Becket dispatched his nephew Gilbert to Sicily with letters to
Stephen of Perche, asking him ‘to promote God’s cause and ours with
the Roman Church’, and to Richard thanking him for using his influence
with his ‘friend’ Cardinal William of Pavia, who had recently visited Sic-
ily before going to France to act as legate and mediator in the dispute
between Henry I and his archbishop. William, as the letter made clear,
had hitherto been no ally to Becket.

But since Richard was one of the

curiales whom Stephen had displaced, and in addition King Henry’s
other principal supporter in the papal Curia, and William’s close associ-
ate, John of Naples, had recently assisted Richard’s enemies in their
attempts to have him expelled from the royal court, the letter to him was
less tactful than it may have seemed to its sender, nor was it very likely to
achieve much.

A further effort was if anything even less realistic.

Nearly two years later Becket wrote once more to Richard of Syracuse,
asking him to persuade the king of Sicily and his mother to recall their
former minister Stephen of Perche from exile. Becket also wrote to
Queen Margaret, in support of a similar request from the king of France.
Not only was this quite impracticable, given the general rising which had
led to Stephen’s expulsion, but Richard had been one the principal

Falcandus, p. 109

= Tyrants, p. 159. ‘Falcandus’ mistakenly called the archbishop her maternal

uncle (avunculus), and suggests that her first choice was Rotrou’s nephew, Robert of Neubourg,
dean of Evreux, rather than Stephen (who was Rotrou’s first cousin).

The Correspondence of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury 1162 – 70, ed. A. J. Duggan (2

vols., OMT, 2000) [hereafter Correspondence of Thomas Becket], i. 734 – 9, nos. 158 – 9 [

= Materials

for the History of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, ed. J. C. Robertson (7 vols., RS, 1875 –
85) [hereafter, Materials for Becket], vi. 396 – 7, no. 405: there misdated to 1168]. Cardinal William
visited Sicily before his arrival in France in August 1167 (Falcandus, p. 111

= Tyrants, pp. 161–2;

F. Barlow, Thomas Becket (1986), p. 170).

Falcandus, pp. 95, 102

= Tyrants, pp. 143–4, 150–1. Becket’s associates intensely disliked John

of Naples, e.g. Letters of John of Salisbury, ii. 602 – 9, no. 279, at pp. 606 – 9 (July 1168).

G. A. LOUD

553

beneficiaries of his exile, regaining his former position as a royal famil-
iaris.

In the circumstances it was hardly surprising that very soon after-

wards John of Salisbury alleged that both the bishop of Syracuse and the
count of Loritello, an important nobleman who had been recalled from
exile in the wake of Stephen’s fall, had been assisting Henry II’s cause.
Becket himself claimed that Richard had been seduced by the promise of
the see of Lincoln.

This last allegation may have been unlikely; rather

Becket’s own diplomacy may have helped to alienate his fellow country-
man. However, Henry II had been by no means idle with regard to the
southern kingdom. John of Salisbury was complaining in the spring of
1168 that Henry had sent envoys and letters to the Sicilian court, and a
few months later wrote of the ‘specious and subtle lies’ being spread as
far as Sicily.

Nor indeed did Becket’s supporters have a high opinion of

the Sicilian kings’ behaviour towards their own churchmen. In the His-
toria Pontificalis, written probably in the early stages of his exile, John of
Salisbury claimed that ‘the king [of Sicily], after the fashion of tyrants,
had reduced the church in his kingdom to slavery’, and writing to Pope
Alexander soon after the latter had taken up residence in Benevento he
exclaimed against ‘the evil practices of the Sicilians and Hungarians’
being taken as a model in church–state relations.

One of Becket’s bio-

graphers, probably from the circle of Prior Odo of Canterbury, as one of
a series of exempla of the wrath of kings, later recounted a story of how
King Roger, ‘the invader and violent usurper of Sicily, which by right
belongs to the lord pope’, had (allegedly) prevented some south Italian
bishops making an appeal to the Apostolic See by confiscating their horses,
and telling them that if they wished to go to Rome then they should go
on foot.

The friendly relations between the English and Sicilian royal families

are evident from William II’s letter congratulating his fellow monarch on

Correspondence of Thomas Becket, ii. 966 – 73, nos. 221 – 2 [

= Materials for Becket, vii. 141–4, nos.

595 – 6]; cf. Falcandus, p. 161

= Tyrants, p. 214. The letter from King Louis is Materials for Becket,

vii. 140 – 1, no. 594, which called Stephen ‘one of the most distinguished peers of the French king-
dom’ and said that his expulsion resounded ‘to the ignominy of his family and race’. Although the
counts of Perche had traditionally been vassals of the duke of Normandy, Count Rotrou III had
become closely linked with the French king during the 1160s, see K. Thompson, Power and Border
Lordship in Medieval France. The County of Perche 1000 – 1226 (Woodbridge, 2002), pp. 94 – 5.

Letters of John of Salisbury, ii. 660 – 1 no. 290, Correspondence of Thomas Becket, ii. 938 – 51

no. 216 [

= Materials for Becket, vii. 26–9 no. 538], to Hubald, cardinal bishop of Ostia, despite the

order in the new edition to my mind probably to be dated after no. 222. In fact the see of Lincoln
remained vacant for seventeen years after the death of Bishop Robert de Chesney in December
1166, cf. William of Newburgh, Historia Rerum Anglicarum, lib. II c. 22, in Chronicles of the Reigns
of Stephen, Henry II and Richard I [hereafter Newburgh, Historia], i. 154.

Letters of John of Salisbury, ii. 560 – 3 no. 272 (to Archdeacon Baldwin of Totnes, the later arch-

bishop of Canterbury), 600 – 1 no. 278.

Historia Pontificalis, p. 65; Letters of John of Salisbury, ii. 376 – 7 no. 219. The kingdoms of Sicily

and Hungary were also linked by the contemporary German theologian Gerhoh of Reichersberg in
not allowing appeals to Rome and limiting access for papal legates, De Investigatione Antechristi,
I.68, in MGH Libelli de Lite, iii. 385.

Excerpta e codice manuscripto Lansdowniano 398, in Materials for Becket, iv. 149; H. Houben,

Roger II of Sicily. A Ruler between East and West (Cambridge, 2001), p. 57.

554

THE KINGDOM OF SICILY AND THE KINGDOM OF ENGLAND

the defeat of the rebellion against him in 1173.

Furthermore, the Sicil-

ian king and his mother had also, in the previous year, interceded with
the pope for Jocelyn of Salisbury, one of the English bishops excommun-
icated in the wake of Becket’s murder. This in turn would explain the
subsequent gift by Jocelyn’s son, Bishop Reginald of Bath, of a reliquary
containing relics of Becket’s passion to Queen Margaret.

Some years

later, early in 1188, Henry II once again tried to exploit the close rela-
tions of William II of Sicily, by then his son-in-law, with the papal court
by enlisting his assistance on the side of Archbishop Baldwin of Canter-
bury in the latter’s dispute with the monks of his cathedral priory over
his proposed foundation of a college of canons at Hackington. William
duly wrote to Clement III on the archbishop’s behalf.

The project of a

marriage alliance between the two dynasties seems first to have been
raised as early as 1169, although nothing resulted immediately – not
least because Henry’s only available daughter was still very young.

The

links between the two courts became inevitably that much closer with the
marriage between Joanna and William II in 1177, and the diplomatic
interchanges that took place to conclude that marriage. And whereas the
involvement of Sicily in the diplomacy of the Becket dispute can be dis-
covered only from the letter collections, that of the marriage came to the
attention of the English chroniclers, though the very detailed and docu-
mented account of Roger of Howden can be contrasted with the much
more summary one of Ralph of Diceto, most of which was devoted to
the sufferings of the bishop of Norwich on the long journey to Sicily.

The latter account of course served to emphasize how distant, and
indeed different, the southern kingdom was. None of these accounts
really explain why the marriage took place, except that the king of Sicily
has sent envoys requesting it, and there is no hint in any of them of a
sense of kindred or identity between the two courts, or peoples – although
Howden did note that Archbishop Rotrou of Rouen was a blood-relation

Gesta Henrici II Regis, i. 55. For much of what follows, see E. M. Jamison, ‘Alliance of England

and Sicily in the Second Half of the Twelfth Century’, England and the Mediterranean Tradition.
Studies in Art, History and Literature, ed. Warburg and Courtauld Institutes (1945), pp. 20 – 32. A
more recent essay, W. Fröhlich, ‘The Marriage of Henry VI and Constance of Sicily: Prelude and
Consequences’, Anglo-Norman Studies, xv: Proceedings of the Battle Conference 1992, ed. M.
Chibnall (Woodbridge, 1993), 99 – 115, over-stresses the diplomatic significance of the English con-
nection, and should be used with care.

Materials for Becket, vii. 509 – 10 no. 768; English Romanesque Art 1066 – 1200. Catalogue of the

Exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, London 1984, ed. G. Zarnecki, J. Holt and T. Holland (1984), p. 283.

‘Epistolae Cantuarienses’ no. 183, in Chronicles and Memorials of the Reign of Richard I, ed. W.

Stubbs (2 vols., RS, 1864), ii. 162.

Correspondence of Thomas Becket, ii. 944 – 5, where the daughter is unnamed. Joanna was then

only 3. The proposal must, however, almost certainly have concerned her from the first; for Henry’s
eldest daughter Matilda was already married, and negotiations for the betrothal of his second
daughter Eleanor to the king of Castile were probably already under way (W. L. Warren, Henry II
(1973), p. 117).

Gesta Henrici II Regis, i. 115 – 17, 157 – 8, 169 – 72; Ralph of Diceto, Ymagines Historiarum, ed.

W. Stubbs (2 vols., RS, 1876) [hereafter Ymagines Historiarum], i. 414 – 18, esp. 416 – 17. Cf., for the
expenses involved, Pipe Roll 22 Henry II (Pipe Roll Society, vol. xxv: London 1904), pp. 47, 152,
198 – 9.

G. A. LOUD

555

of the Sicilian queen-dowager.

The marriage was simply another aspect

of the ordinary course of diplomacy in late twelfth-century Europe.

Roger of Howden was almost certainly present at the English royal

court in 1176 – 7, and thus his particular interest in the Sicilian marriage
was that of an eye-witness, at least to the earlier stages of the negoti-
ations.

As a royal official Howden had access to the text of the marriage

treaty; in the manuscript of his later Chronicle he even drew the rota of
William II inscribed on the treaty, and indeed the text of the treaty is
only known through its preservation by Anglo-Norman chroniclers – no
south Italian copy has survived.

That the marriage settlement was

recorded in detail both by Roger of Howden and by Gervase of Canter-
bury may also reflect the disputes concerning Queen Joanna’s dower
after her husband’s death, when her brother King Richard visited Sicily
on his way to the crusade in 1190 – 1.

English writers did record the valuable assistance given by the Sicilian

fleet to the Holy Land in 1188; in fact William of Newburgh viewed the
death of William II of Sicily as having very serious consequences for the
beleagured Holy Land.

But the accounts of Richard’s crusade showed

little sympathy or liking for the Sicilians, and certainly no sense of
identification with them. The authors considered that Tancred of Lecce
had ‘usurped’ the crown, and though English commentators had little
reason to love the emperor Henry VI after his treacherous behaviour
towards King Richard – indeed, William of Newburgh described him as
‘another Saladin’ – they none the less considered him the designated and
legitimate successor to William II of Sicily.

Indeed Ralph of Coggeshall

suggested that Richard’s alliance with King Tancred had been the prin-
cipal reason why Henry had imprisoned him.

The Norman poet Am-

broise admitted that Tancred was ‘wise’, and both he and Howden
contrasted his behaviour in the later stages of Richard’s visit favourably
with the duplicity of Philip Augustus,

but none of the Anglo-Norman

Gesta Henrici II Regis, i. 115. They were both descended from Geoffrey II, count of Mortagne,

Archbishop Rotrou’s grandfather and Queen Margaret’s great-grandfather on her mother’s side (cf.
above, n. 50).

Gillingham, ‘Travels of Roger of Howden’, pp. 158 – 9, 167 – 8.

Gransden, Historical Writing, pp. 224, 364 – 5; Jamison, ‘The Sicilian Norman Kingdom’,

pp. 255 – 6.

The Historical Works of Gervase of Canterbury, ed. W. Stubbs (2 vols., RS, 1879 – 80), i. 263 – 5.

Newburgh, Historia, lib. III c. 28, pp. 285 – 6; cf. Gesta Henrici II Regis, ii. 54; H. E. Mayer, Das

Itinerarium Perigrinorum. Ein zeitgenössiche englische Chronik zum dritten Kreuzzug in ursprünglicher
Gestalt (Stuttgart, 1962) [hereafter Mayer, Itinerarium Perigrinorum], pp. 271 – 2.

Gesta Regis Ricardi, in Gesta Henrici II Regis, ii. 102, 203, Howden, Chronica, iii. 164. Ralph of

Diceto never quite said that outright, but regarded Henry VI as the legitimate heir of the kingdom
(Ymagines Historiarum, ii. 123; Newburgh, Historia, lib. V.7, pp. 429 – 30). ‘Another Saladin’ became
something of a cliché: it was, for example, used by Innocent III and papalist writers about Mark-
ward of Anweiler (B. Bolton, ‘ Too Important to Neglect: The Gesta Innocentii PP. III ’, Church and
Chronicle in the Middle Ages. Essays Presented to John Taylor, ed. G. A. Loud and I. N. Wood
(1991), p. 93).

Chronicon, ed. J. Stevenson (RS, 1865) [hereafter Ralph of Coggeshall, Chronicon], p. 58.

Ambroise. The Crusade of Richard the Lionheart, trans. J. La Monte and M. J. Hubert (Columbia,

1940) [hereafter Ambroise], p. 62, l. 891; Gesta Regis Ricardi, in Gesta Henrici II Regis, pp. 159 – 60.

556

THE KINGDOM OF SICILY AND THE KINGDOM OF ENGLAND

writers who had themselves witnessed the events in or around Messina in
1190 – 1, or were basing their reports on eye-witness testimony, had a
good opinion of the Sicilians. The Greek inhabitants – probably still in
the majority at Messina in 1190 – were denounced as ‘vile and effem-
inate’, and ‘perfidious’; but ‘their arrogance was subdued because they
realized that they were inferior in courage and glory [to the English]’.

Both Ambroise’s poem and the related prose work of Richard of Holy
Trinity alleged that many of these ‘bastard Greeks’ were descended from
converted Muslims: they may well have been correct in this supposition,
but their observation was intended as abuse, not ethnography.

How-

ever, the Lombards – the Latin-race Sicilians – were also perceived to be
sly and cowardly. Hence they promised not to molest the crusaders but
promptly broke their word.

They also resented the crusaders’ attentions

towards their womenfolk, even though their wives were only being flirt-
atious to annoy their husbands, not because they intended actually to
commit adultery.

Nor were the Sicilian Lombards any more valiant

than the Greeks: they fled as soon as Richard himself joined in the fight-
ing. Later on Ambroise remarked that, ‘had the Lombards been brave
and loyal, ill would have fared the soldiers royal’.

Perhaps most inter-

esting was the poet’s view that the native Sicilians had always hated ‘our
race’ (i.e. the Normans) because their ancestors had been conquered by
them;

Roger of Howden’s more factual account, which was certainly

that of an eye-witness, claimed that the Greeks hated all men from north
of the Alps, and thought nothing of killing them. If Howden was in error
to claim that ‘before the arrival of the king of England, the Greeks were
more powerful than all [the others] who were in the land of Sicily’, the
fate of Odo Quarrel and the other Frenchmen murdered at Messina in
the uprising against Stephen of Perche’s regime in 1168 suggests that there

This last quotation from the Itinerarium Regis Ricardi, lib. II c. 14, in Chronicles and Memorials

of the Reign of Richard I, ed. W. Stubbs (2 vols., RS, 1864) [hereafter Itinerarium Regis Ricardi], i.
157. Cf. The Chronicle of Richard of Devizes, ed. J. T. Appleby (1963) [hereafter Richard of Devizes],
p. 20; Ambroise, p. 57, l. 740. For the Greeks of Messina, see V. von Falkenhausen, ‘The Greek
Presence in Norman Sicily: The Contribution of Archival Material in Greek’, The Society of Nor-
man Italy, ed. G. A. Loud and A. Metcalfe (Leiden, 2002) [hereafter Loud and Metcalfe, Society
of Norman Italy], pp. 276, 279 – 81.

The relationship between the poem attributed to Ambroise and the Itinerarium Regis Ricardi, and the

possibility of their both being based on a now lost French prose source, has been much debated.
Ambroise’s poem certainly purports to be an eye-witness source, although it was actually written in
1203 – 7. Richard of Holy Trinity, London, wrote the Itinerarium, based upon, but not identical to,
the ‘Itinerary of the Pilgrims’ and Ambroise’s poem c.1216 – 22 (Mayer, Itinerarium Perigrinorum,
pp. 104 – 6, 151).

Ambroise, p. 50, ll. 550 – 1; Itinerarium Regis Ricardi, II.12, pp. 154 – 5; J. Johns, ‘The Greek

Church and the Conversion of Muslims in Norman Sicily’, Byzantinische Forschungen, xxi (1995),
133 – 57; A. Metcalfe, ‘The Muslims of Sicily under Christian Rule’ in Loud and Metcalfe, Society
of Norman Italy, pp. 289 – 317, esp. pp. 309 – 16.

Ambroise, pp. 54 – 5, ll. 667 – 82; Itinerarium Regis Ricardi, II.14, p. 157; Richard of Devizes, p. 23.

Ambroise, p. 52, ll. 611 – 15; Itinerarium Regis Ricardi, II.14, p. 158.

Ambroise, pp. 56, 58, ll. 724 – 6, 769 – 70.

Ibid., p. 52, ll. 615 – 19.

G. A. LOUD

557

was indeed little love lost between the local inhabitants and arrogant and
insensitive foreigners.

Ambroise and the Itinerarium Regis Ricardi even

described the rude gestures with which the locals displayed their dislike.

No doubt the presence and demands of a large foreign army, however
well-disciplined it was – and the severity of Richard’s justice was stressed
by contemporaries – surely made tension and at least minor clashes inev-
itable. Ambroise claimed that the first outbreaks of violence stemmed
from attempts to buy food – an obvious potential flashpoint.

The

German troops who passed through southern Italy on the crusade of
1197, and returned after the truce in the Holy Land two years later, also
faced local hostility (in their case presumably intensified by the conquest
of 1194, relatively bloodless as this had been).

But the visitors inevit-

ably attributed such problems to the malitia of the natives, and the over-
whelming impression from the Anglo-Norman sources for the Third
Crusade is that Richard’s army disliked and despised their reluctant
Sicilian hosts.

The diplomatic contacts between Sicily and England in the second

half of the twelfth century did therefore lead to greater English know-
ledge about, and some interest in, the southern kingdom, even if close
contact in 1190 – 1 led to disenchantment. There were also other sorts of
contact. For example, the fame of the medical school at Salerno had
spread to England, and some Englishmen had apparently studied there.

The monasteries of Bury St Edmunds and Walden possessed manu-
scripts of the famous south Italian medical scholars Constantine ‘the
African’ and Archbishop Alfanus (I) of Salerno which are contemporary
with, or perhaps even earlier than, the earliest surviving south Italian
copies of their work.

One cleric from southern Italy even made a highly

successful career in the English Church at the end of the twelfth century.
Simon ‘of Apulia’ was successively chancellor of York in 1189 – 93; then,
after a bitter dispute over his appointment, dean of York until 1214, and
finally, after another contentious appointment – he was foisted on the
chapter by King John and the papal legate – bishop of Exeter from 1214
to 1223.

Another English bishop of the time came from a region with

Gesta Regis Ricardi, in Gesta Henrici II Regis, ii. 138. For his eye-witness status, see J. Gilling-

ham, ‘Roger of Howden on Crusade’, Medieval Historical Writing in the Christian and Islamic
Worlds, ed. D. O. Morgan (1992), pp. 60 – 75, esp. pp. 65 – 6. Cf. Falcandus, pp. 150 – 3, and notice
also ibid., p. 93, with its reference to ‘the pride of the men from across the Alps, which had up till
now done much harm to the Lombards’ [

= Tyrants, pp. 202–6, 141].

Ambroise, p. 50, ll. 552 – 5; Itinerarium, II.12, p. 155.

Richard of Devizes, pp. 16 – 17; Ambroise, p. 53, ll. 627 – 36.

Arnold of Lübeck, Chronica Slavorum, MGH SS xxi. 203; Annales Stadenses, MGH SS xvi. 353.

Gesta Abbatum Monasterii Sancti Albani, ed. H. T. Riley (2 vols., RS, 1867 – 9), i. 194; Parkes,

English Traveller to Italy, pp. 132 – 3, 143.

Burnett, Introduction of Arabic Learning, pp. 25, 28 – 9. Alfanus I was archbishop from 1058 to

1085.

English Episcopal Acta, xi: Exeter 1046 – 1184, ed. F. Barlow (Oxford, 1996), pp. xlvi–xlvii; Fasti

Ecclesiae Anglicanae 1066 – 1300, vi: York, ed. D. E. Greenway (1999), pp. 9, 18 – 19. For the dispute
at York in 1193 – 4, See Howden, Chronica, iii. 221 – 3, 272.

558

THE KINGDOM OF SICILY AND THE KINGDOM OF ENGLAND

close links to southern Italy, Bernard of Ragusa, appointed as bishop of
Carlisle by Richard I although only formally provided in 1203.

A fur-

ther and illustrious, if temporary, south Italian visitor was John of
Salerno, cardinal priest of S. Stefano in Celiomonte and a former monk
of Montecassino, who travelled through England in 1201 on his way to
serve as legate in Scotland and Ireland. As he paused in his journey, he
attempted, unsuccessfully, to mediate in the dispute at York between
Archbishop Geoffrey and his canons, the latter headed by Simon of
Apulia.

Contemporary English chroniclers considered Sicilian news,

such as William II’s attack on the Byzantine empire, worthy of notice,
even if this did not directly concern England.

Some writers remem-

bered that the origins of the kingdom and its ruling dynasty went back
to the conquests of a Norman, Robert Guiscard – although Roger of
Howden thought erroneously that Robert was a contemporary of Henry
I.

Indeed, a brief, not to say sketchy (and entirely derivative), life of

Guiscard was written at the court of Henry II in the years after 1172.

Ambroise ascribed the wealth of the Sicilian kings to the great store of
gold that had been accumulated from the time of Robert Guiscard
onwards.

Yet despite this knowledge, there was no longer any sense of

fellow-feeling, of a common origin being significant. This reflected the
declining sense of Normanitas in England, and the growth by the end of
the century of a specifically English identity.

Furthermore, none of the English chroniclers of the late twelfth cen-

tury were as well informed about Sicily as the Norman Robert of
Torigni, who alone among writers from the Anglo-Norman realm knew
about (or bothered to mention) the Sicilian conquests in north Africa in
the 1140s, the revolts against William I, and the Sicilian agreement with
the Almohads of Tunisia in 1180. Robert also claimed that William II
and Joanna had a son called Bohemond – who presumably died young

C. R. Cheney, From Becket to Langton. English Church Government 1170 – 1213 (Manchester,

1956), p. 148. The close cultural contact between the two sides of the Adriatic is shown by the use
of the south Italian cursive ‘Beneventan’ script at Ragusa and other Dalmation towns, E. A. Lowe,
The Beneventan Script (2nd edn. by V. Brown, 2 vols., Rome, 1980), i. 60–5, ii. 37 – 8. For other con-
nections, see J.-M. Martin, La Pouille du VI au XII siècle (Rome, 1993), pp. 504 – 9.

Howden, Chronica, iv. 174 – 5, who considered him ascetic, but avaricious. For John’s career, See

W. Malaczek, Papst und Kardinalskolleg von 1191 bis 1216 (Vienna, 1984), pp. 107 – 9.

Ymagines Historiarum, ii. 37 – 8.

Gesta Regis Ricardi, in Gesta Henrici II Regis, ii. 200 – 2; Newburgh, Historia, lib. IV.7, pp. 428 –

9; Gervase of Tilbury, Otia Imperialia, lib. II.19, pp. 464 – 5.

J.-M. Martin, ‘Une “Histoire” peu connue de Robert Guiscard’, Archivio storico pugliese, xxxi

(1978), 47 – 66. This erroneously praised Robert for his participation in the First Crusade.

Ambroise, p. 49, ll. 519 – 22.

For example, the hostility to William Longchamp (a Norman) as a foreigner, in the letter quoted

by the Gesta Regis Ricardi, in Gesta Henrici II Regis, ii. 216. See the important studies by D.
Crouch, ‘Normans and Anglo-Normans: A Divided Aristocracy?’, England and Normandy in the
Middle Ages, ed. D. R. Bates and A. Curry (1994), pp. 51 – 67, and J. Gillingham, ‘Henry of
Huntingdon and the Twelfth-Century Revival of the English Nation’, Concepts of National Identity
in the Middle Ages, ed. S. Forde, L. Johnson and A. V. Murray (Leeds, 1995), pp. 75 – 101.

G. A. LOUD

559

– something not mentioned by any other source.

He was in addition

quite knowledgeable about the earlier period when the Normans had
conquered southern Italy, and much of his knowledge was probably
derived from The Deeds of Robert Guiscard by William of Apulia. There
was a manuscript of this poem at Bec, where Robert had been a monk,
and he was almost certainly responsible for the copying of what is now
the only surviving manuscript of this work at Mont St Michel, where he
became abbot in 1154. Yet even so, while Robert provided accurate genea-
logical information about the families of both Robert Guiscard and
Prince Richard of Capua, and also correctly noted the creation of the
kingdom of Sicily during the papal schism of 1130, he provided little
other information about southern Italy. If he had read William of
Apulia’s poem, he made relatively limited use of it.

Robert of Torigni

apart (and he was based in Normandy, not England), there was a
significant contrast between authors such as William of Newburgh and
Ralph of Diceto, who had never visited the kingdom of Sicily, and the
few Englishmen who did have first-hand knowledge of south Italy, such
as Roger of Howden. He had been with Richard at Messina in 1190, and
a year later travelled back from the crusade with King Philip, travelling
north from Otranto to Barletta, and then via Troia, Benevento and the
Via Appia into papal territory.

Here was one Englishman who was

quite conversant with south Italian geography, and not surprisingly he
devoted considerable attention to Henry VI’s conquest, the latter’s brutal
treatment of the family and adherents of King Tancred, and the subse-
quent Sicilian revolts against him. Roger’s information was not always
accurate – for example, he thought that King Louis VII of France had
granted King Roger his royal crown, not the papacy. His report that
Henry VI died excommunicate because of his capture of King Richard
was surely wishful thinking, and similarly he suggested that the empress
Constance was a party to the revolt against her husband because of the evils
of his rule – although one should note that this was clearly a widespread
rumour, believed also by a number of contemporary German chroniclers.

Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II and Richard I, iv. 153, 176, 185 (where he was in

error in suggesting that Richard of Lingèvres was a party to the revolt of Count Robert of
Loritello), 191, 213 – 14, 285, 303. For the 1180 agreement, see D. Abulafia, ‘The Norman King-
dom of Africa’, Anglo-Norman Studies vii: Proceedings of the Battle Conference 1984, ed. R. Allen
Brown (Woodbridge, 1985), pp. 43 – 4.

Guillaume de Pouille, La Geste de Robert Guiscard, ed. M. Mathieu (Palermo, 1961), pp. 73 – 5;

Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II and Richard I, iv. 115 – 16.

Gesta Regis Ricardi, in Gesta Henrici II Regis, ii. 227 – 8. Jamison, ‘The Sicilian Norman King-

dom’, 262 – 3, followed Stubbs in believing that a French source, perhaps a geographical guide, lay
behind this section. But this was before it was realized that Howden was the author of the Gesta.

Gesta Henrici II Regis, ii. 202; Howden, Chronica, iii. 268 – 70, iv. 27, 31. Cf. Annales Marba-

censes, ed. H. Bloch (MGH SRG, Hanover, 1907), pp. 69 – 70; Annales Stadenses, MGH SS xvi.
352 – 3; Chronica Regia Coloniensis, ed. G. Waitz (MGH SRG, Hanover 1880), p. 159. Among
modern commentators, P. Csendes, Heinrich VI. (Darmstadt 1993), pp. 191–2, believes that
Constance’s involvement in the 1197 rebellion was unlikely, if not absolutely impossible, while by con-
trast G. Baaken, ‘Die Verhandlungen zwischen Kaiser Heinrich VI. und Papst Coelestin III. in den

560

THE KINGDOM OF SICILY AND THE KINGDOM OF ENGLAND

He was therefore interested in and (relatively) well informed about the
kingdom of Sicily. However, even he had no great liking for its inhabitants.

The most extreme example of this phenomenon: someone who knew

the kingdom well but had no love for it, was an adopted Englishman,
Peter of Blois, archdeacon of Bath from 1182 to 1191 and subsequently
archdeacon of London until his death in 1212. Peter had been one of the
followers of Stephen of Perche, and the violent revolt which had over-
thrown Stephen had left him with a cordial dislike for the island of Sicily,
even though he remained in correspondence with, among others, Bishop
Richard of Syracuse. In a letter to Richard written c.1170 – 1 – perhaps
linked with the offer of the see of Lincoln mentioned by Archbishop
Becket, if such an offer was ever made, although it was ostensibly written
in response to an invitation by the bishop for him to return to Sicily –
Peter gave full vent to his loathing for the island. He disliked the
unhealthy climate (‘the distempers of the air’), which he contrasted with
‘the sweetness of your native English air’. He loathed the food, especially
the predominance of celery and fennel in the Sicilian diet – contrasting it
with ‘the safe and pleasant’ food of England – but above all he too dis-
liked the malitia of the inhabitants. ‘It is written that all people who live on
islands are generally unfaithful’ (the irony of writing this to an Englishman
seems to have escaped him); ‘the inhabitants of Sicily are treacherous
friends and secret and most abandoned traitors’. He pointed to the dan-
gers of Mount Etna, and to the horrors of the Catania earthquake of
1169, although in another letter he suggested that this disaster was a
fitting punishment for the expulsion of his master Stephen. He con-
cluded: ‘You should leave that mountainous and monstrous land and
return to the sweetness of your native air . . . Fly, my father, from these
mountains which vomit forth fire, do not trust the vicinity of Etna, nor
should you dwell there, so it seems in the infernal kingdom.’

Despite

the rhetoric, there was real feeling underlying the flowery prose. Nor was
Peter of Blois an admirer of the Sicilian church, not least because the
bishop of Catania killed in 1169 had displaced his own brother William from
that see – according to Peter by bribery – hence his death in the earth-
quake was clearly divine judgement. But while Peter undoubtedly resented
his brother’s failure to secure episcopal preferment, he also wrote to him,
c.1170, to congratulate him on his wise decision to abandon the abbacy
which he had been granted in Calabria and to return home:

For as long as you have been in Sicily you have been in the cauldron of the
lost. For that infernal place, which devours its inhabitants, was making
your return to be despaired of; [but] now through the grace of God you
drink in your native air, and the wines of Blois! For if Sicily had held on to
you any longer it would have laid you out, as is customary with its poisonous

Jahren 1195 – 7’, Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters, xxvii (1971), 506, suggests that
the report of the Marburg Annals is credible. There is a judicious discussion of the problem by
E. M. Jamison, Admiral Eugenius of Sicily. His Life and Work (1957), pp. 156 – 60.

Letter 46, MPL 207, cols. 133 – 4.

G. A. LOUD

561

wines . . . Men are living in Sicily who foster treason and poison to official
adulation, and who caress the ears of the great with the wind of vainglory,
and make them itch with poisonous flattery.

A year or so later, between March and December 1171, Peter denounced the
attempts of the Sicilian court to intrude a brother of the count of Loritello
into the vacant see of Agrigento, and criticized the young king of Sicily who
‘has on the advice of sinners laid greedy hands on the treasures of the
Church’.

And in a later letter, written in the name of Archbishop Richard

of Canterbury (c.1179), he was very critical of the Sicilian bishops, espe-
cially of their habit of neglecting their dioceses while they frequented the
royal court, often for years on end (or so he claimed). Here he may well have
been thinking of his erstwhile friend the bishop of Syracuse, who only even-
tually received consecration some twelve years after his election to that
see in 1157.

These letters denouncing the kingdom of Sicily were, of course, suf-

fused with literary artifice. Yet they reveal a coruscating dislike for the
southern kingdom, explicable above all by the fate of those who had
accompanied Peter to Sicily in the household of Stephen of Perche. In
his letter to Richard of Syracuse, Peter claimed that of the thirty-seven
people who had accompanied Stephen to Sicily, only he and one other
were still alive. Furthermore, Peter’s letters, first issued as a collection in
1184, were widely distributed, and to judge by the number of extant cop-
ies continued to be read for a long time. None the less, despite his dislike
of Sicily, he continued to correspond with his contacts there; a lengthy
letter to Archbishop Walter of Palermo c.1174 – 5 may have been a semi-
official one, linked with the negotiations for the royal marriage, and he
once again visited the kingdom, on his way back from the Third Cru-
sade.

Nor can we assume that his low opinion of the Sicilian episcopate

was shared by, for example, his ruler. Certainly Richard I indicated his
wish in 1191 to appoint Archbishop William of Monreale, one of the
familiares of the Sicilian king, to the vacant archbishopric of Canterbury;
although whether this was a serious proposal, or an attempt to make the
contentious Canterbury convent more tractable, is a moot point.

100

Letter 93, MPL 207, cols. 291 – 3.

Letter 10, MPL 207, cols. 27 – 30. Bishop Gentile of Agrigento (1154 – 71) was still alive in

March 1171; his successor Bartholomew is attested in December, Le Più antiche carte dell’archivio
capitolare di Agrigento (1092 – 1282), ed. P. Collura (Documenti per servire alla storia di Sicilia,
Ser I. xxv; Palermo, 1960), pp. 54 – 6 no. 22; Kamp, Kirche und Monarchie, iii. 1147.

MPL 200, cols. 1459 – 62, no. 96, especially col. 1461; Kamp, Kirche und Monarchie, iii. 1016,

1234. Cf. here Falcandus, p. 102 [= Tyrants, p. 150].

Letter 66, MPL 207, cols. 195 – 210, which appears to have been in response to a letter from the

archbishop seeking information about Henry II, and especially as to his involvement in Becket’s
murder; R. W. Southern, Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe, ii: The Heroic Age
(Oxford, 2001), pp. 192 – 3, 203, 217.

100

‘Epistolae Cantuarienses’ no. 348, Chronicles and Memorials of the Reign of Richard I, ii. 330.

The Sicilian familiares were not simply ‘courtiers’ but the king’s chief ministers; Archbishop William
had been one of four such ministers from 1184 onwards, H. Takayama, The Administration of the
Norman Kingdom of Sicily (Leiden, 1993), pp. 121 – 2. He died in the Holy Land in October 1191,
Kamp, Kirche und Monarchie, iii. 1189.

562

THE KINGDOM OF SICILY AND THE KINGDOM OF ENGLAND

Peter of Blois was the most eloquent but not the only observer from

the Anglo-Norman kingdom to disapprove of the kingdom of Sicily.
Furthermore, where English writers did mention the southern regno they
tended to emphasize its (to them) unusual features: the climate, the mix-
ture of peoples, the Muslims who lived under Christian rule, and the
strange eschatological prophecies of Joachim of Fiore which clearly
interested Roger of Howden and also Ralph of Coggeshall, but which
equally clearly did not impress King Richard, for whose entertainment
or edification the holy abbot had been produced.

101

When Matthew Paris

described the journey through the kingdom of Sicily by Richard of
Cornwall in 1241, on his way home from the Holy Land (one of the few
times he gave any attention to the region before 1250), the aspect of this
visit which seems to have been most noteworthy to Matthew was the
behaviour of the Saracen dancing girls at Frederick II’s court – he even
drew a picture of them in the margin of his manuscript. Since the earl
himself was his informant, this quite possibly reflected the latter’s own
astonishment.

102

Sicily was also the setting for the literary romances of

Hugh of Rhuddlan, Ipomedon and its sequel Protheselaus, written
between 1174 and 1190, although the locale was chosen simply because
it was a long way away and suitably exotic, not because the author knew
very much about it.

103

But the exoticism of the Sicilian kingdom might

also be perceived in a more sinister light. The barons in 1258 were not
the only Englishmen to accuse the Sicilians of a fondness for murder.
Gervase of Tilbury, who had lived in Sicily, thought that Henry VI (who
died at Messina in September 1197) had been poisoned by one of his
own household.

104

Matthew Paris said that Frederick II had sought the

murder of the relatives of Pope Innocent IV, and in 1257 Richard of
Cornwall wrote from Germany to his brother to warn him that Prince
Manfred had sent assassins to kill the king and his sons. Such charges
were also made against Manfred by the papal curia and reported by con-
tinental writers, and they may have reflected the diplomatic contacts that

101

Gesta Regis Ricardi, in Gesta Henrici II Regis, ii. 151 – 5. Jamison, ‘The Sicilian Norman King-

dom’, 263 – 6, stressed the significance of this account for the evolution of Joachim’s views on the
Apocalypse. There has more recently been some debate as to the genuineness of the conversa-
tion and views reported by Howden, but the value of his account is accepted by M. Reeves and B.
Hirsch-Reich, The Figurae of Joachim of Fiore (Oxford 1972), pp. 85 – 8 . Cf. Ralph of Coggeshall,
Chronicon, pp. 67 – 9.

102

Chronica Majora, iv. 145 – 8; Vaughan, Matthew Paris, pp. 13, 135 – 6.

103

Ipomedon. Poème de Hue de Rotelande (fin du XIIe siècle), ed. A. J. Holden (Paris 1979), Pro-

theselaus, by Hue de Rotelande, ed. A. J. Holden (3 vols., Anglo-Norman Text Society, 1991 – 3);
discussion by M. D. Legge, Anglo-Norman Literature and its Background (Oxford, 1963), pp. 85 – 96.
The author thought that Apulia and Sicily were two separate kingdoms, and Calabria an independ-
ent duchy, with its capital at the mythical city of Candre, even if Calabria and Apulia were eventu-
ally united by the marriage of the hero and heroine, at Barletta, at the end of Ipomedon. He had
earlier defended her from the unwanted advances of an ‘Indian’ prince.

104

Otia Imperialia, lib. II.19, pp. 466 – 7. Although Gervase was an Englishman, and interesting as

his views about Sicily are, his book was written in Germany for the emperor Otto IV, and so is
somewhat marginal to this inquiry.

G. A. LOUD

563

both Frederick and Manfred had with the Syrian Assassins sect.

105

Not

surprisingly, the Muslims of Lucera were used by Henry III as a jus-
tification for his attempts to place his son on the Sicilian throne: here of
course he was drawing on the papal propaganda which had been directed
against the Staufen since Frederick’s excommunication in 1239, and which
was in particular used to justify the attempts to replace Manfred with a
papal client as king.

106

This aspect of English views of Sicily should not be given too much

emphasis, and especially not in the thirteenth century. For after the
Staufen conquest of Sicily in 1194, and with the kings of England firm
allies of their Welf opponents in Germany, there was once again little
contact between the two kingdoms, and thus little interest in the south-
ern kingdom among English authors. If Matthew Paris was intrigued by
Richard of Cornwall’s description of the dancing girls, other contempor-
ies recorded the earl’s return from the Holy Land without even men-
tioning his visit to Sicily.

107

And after his uncle Richard I’s crusade, so

few other Englishmen went there that such relative ignorance is hardly
surprising.

There were two factors that, at first sight, might well have worked

against this trend. The first and most obvious was the continued English
participation in the crusade during the early thirteenth century, for Sicily
was an obvious staging post for the long journey to and from the Levant.
Secondly, there was the marriage of Frederick II to Henry III’s daughter
Isabella in 1235. Yet neither of these factors led to a renewal of contacts
on the scale of the later twelfth century.

Among the English crusaders who visited the regno were men of high

rank such as bishops Peter des Roches of Winchester and William
Brewer of Exeter who left for the Holy Land via Brindisi in the summer
of 1227, and on their return journey were involved in the negotiations
between the emperor and the papal Curia at S. Germano, near the bor-
der with the papal states, in the autumn of 1229. Yet the English com-
mentators who mentioned their journey to the Holy Land displayed little
interest in their visit to the kingdom of Sicily. Roger of Wendover dis-
cussed their time in Syria in some detail, but failed even to mention Sic-
ily, while the Waverley annalist noted that the two bishops had gone to
the Holy Land, and included in his account a letter by Bishop Peter justifying

105

Chronica Majora, iv. 613; H. M. Schaller, ‘König Manfred und die Assassinen’, Deutsches

Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters, xxi (1965), 173 – 93, esp. 187 – 8. Alexander IV also warned
Henry III about this threat in 1257, Annales de Burton, in Annales Monastici, i. 395, and warned
Charles of Anjou in 1264 that a renegade member of the Order of Santiago had been sent to mur-
der him, A. Potthast, Registrum Pontificum Romanorum ab 1198 ad 1305 (2 vols., Berlin, 1875), no.
18,993. It was also alleged that Manfred sent assassins to kill Charles of Anjou at Rome in 1265,
Annales S. Iustini Patavini, MGH SS xix. 187.

106

Annales Monastici, i. 399 – 400. Cf., for example, Clement IV’s instructions to preach a crusade

against Manfred in 1264, MGH Epistolae Saeculi XIII e registris pontificum Romanorum Selectae,
ed. C. Rodenburg (3 vols., Berlin, 1883 – 94), iii. 599 – 601, no. 606.

107

e.g. Annales de Theokesberia [ Tewkesbury], in Annales Monastici, i. 120; Annales de Dunstaplia,

in Annales Monastici, iii. 151 – 2 .

564

THE KINGDOM OF SICILY AND THE KINGDOM OF ENGLAND

Frederick’s treaty with the sultan al-Kamil, but he too said nothing at
all about Sicily.

108

It was the Flemish chronicler William of Ardres who

claimed how important Peter des Roches was as Frederick’s counsellor,
and the Sicilian notary and royal official Richard of S. Germano who
highlighted the bishops’ role in the negotiations of October 1229.

109

Simon de Montfort, Henry III’s brother-in-law, went to the Holy Land
via Apulia in 1240, and left his wife near Brindisi when he set sail for the
east, while Richard of Cornwall similarly returned via mainland south-
ern Italy in 1241, although his outward journey had been made by sea
directly from Marseilles to the Holy Land.

110

But here again, apart from

Matthew Paris, contemporary commentators ignored the role of Sicily in
these crusading expeditions. Furthermore, perhaps influenced by papal
propaganda, where English writers did discuss the involvement of the
emperor Frederick with English crusaders they tended to be critical.
Wendover recounted the charges made by Gregory IX against the
emperor in 1228, and alleged that the latter had even laid siege to the
house where the English bishops were staying in Acre. The Waverley
annalist claimed that Frederick did all he could to hinder the crusade,
while his counterpart at Dunstable recounted the sufferings of the Eng-
lish and French crusaders when they were delayed at the ports of Apulia
by the emperor and alleged that after the death of the empress Yolanda,
Frederick made the sultan’s daughter his mistress.

111

Furthermore, neither of the two major crusading expeditions to

Egypt, in 1218 and 1248, in both of which there was a substantial Eng-
lish involvement, used the kingdom of Sicily as a staging post, sailing
instead directly from the ports of southern France or northern Italy to
the Levant. After 1239 Frederick’s excommunication and his continued
and increasingly bitter dispute with the papacy made such contact
increasingly problematic. The emperor did offer St Louis supplies, horses
and other equipment, and freedom of passage through his lands for his
crusade in 1248, but St Louis did not take him up on this offer and was
careful to ensure that his expedition avoided the Sicilian kingdom.

112

The marriage of the emperor to Henry III’s sister at Cologne in July

1235 inevitably led to a renewal and intensification of diplomatic con-
tacts between the imperial court and England. However, this marriage
took place during the one, relatively brief, period that Frederick spent in
Germany during the last thirty years of his reign after his departure for

108

Annales Monastici, ii. 305 – 6; Roger of Wendover, Flores Historiarum, ed. H. G. Hewlett (3

vols., RS, 1886 – 9) [hereafter Roger, Flores ], ii. 324, 351 – 2, 374. For an exhaustive modern account
of this expedition, See N. Vincent, Peter des Roches. An Alien in English Politics, 1205 – 38 (Cam-
bridge, 1996), pp. 229 – 58.

109

Willelmi Chronica Andrensis, MGH SS xxiv. 769; Ryccardi de Sancto Germano Notarii Chronica,

ed. C. A. Garufi (Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, Bologna, 1938), p. 163.

110

Chronica Majora, iv. 44, 47.

111

Roger, Flores, ii. 373 – 4; Annales Monastici, ii. 303, iii. 107, 112.

112

Historia Diplomatica Friderici II, ed. J. A. Huillard-Bréholles (6 vols. in 12 parts, Paris, 1852 –

61) [hereafter Huillard-Bréholles, Historia Diplomatica], vi(2). 710 – 13, 745 – 50; W. C. Jordan,
Louis IX and the Challenge of the Crusade (Princeton, 1978), pp. 27 – 8.

G. A. LOUD

565

Italy and his imperial coronation in the autumn of 1220. And while the
negotiations which preceded the marriage did lead to Sicilians visiting
England, beginning with a clerical nephew of the archbishop of Messina
early in 1233, and later including important officials from Frederick’s
entourage like Piero della Vigna and Gualterio (Walter) de Ocra, the
major figures in the embassy which preceded the marriage were in fact
German: the archbishop of Cologne and the dukes of Lotharingia and
Limburg.

113

Some contacts continued thereafter. Piero della Vigna

received a pension from Henry III after 1235, but he never visited Eng-
land again.

114

Diplomatic presents continued, like the emperor’s gift of

war horses to King Henry in 1236, and the payment of Isabella’s dowry
was only completed in the summer of 1237.

115

Some English troops

under William of Valence and Henry Trubleville joined the emperor’s
army in northern Italy in 1238 and took part in his unsuccessful sieges of
Milan and Brescia.

116

Frederick wrote to his brother-in-law on a number

of occasions, notably in a letter sent from Foggia in April 1240 concern-
ing the serious defeat that the Christians, led by the counts of Cham-
pagne and Bar, had recently suffered in the Holy Land.

117

As late as 1248

he wrote to Henry lamenting the failure of the latest attempt to secure
peace between him and the papacy.

118

Indeed, the influence of the high-

flown rhetorical style of the imperial court, displayed in particular in the
letters of Piero della Vigna, has been detected in the productions of the
English chancery during the negotiations over the ‘Sicilian business’ in
1256 – 7.

119

In 1244 Henry gave the gold seal from one of Frederick’s let-

ters as a contribution towards the costs of the shrine of Edward the Con-
fessor at Westminster.

120

A key agent in this contact was Walter de Ocra,

the nuntius consuetus according to Matthew Paris, who made some seven
visits to England in the decade between 1236 and 1246. Walter, scion of
a comital family from the Abruzzi, was an important figure – he was also
Frederick’s envoy to the council of Lyons in 1245 – who went on to a
career of great distinction at the Sicilian court, being chancellor of the
kingdom from 1251 until his death in 1253, and was a candidate for high
ecclesiastical office in the late 1240s, albeit in the end unsuccessfully. But
his last visit to England was in May–June 1246, and thereafter diplomatic

113

Chronica Majora, iv. 319 – 21; Calendar of Close Rolls 1231 – 4 (1905), p. 303; Calendar of Close

Rolls 1234 – 7 (1908), p. 167; Calendar of Patent Rolls 1232 – 47 (1906), p. 146.

114

Hilpert, Kaiser- und Papstbriefe in den Chronica Majora, pp. 134 – 6.

115

Calendar of Close Rolls 1234 – 7, p. 309; Calendar of Patent Rolls 1232 – 47, p. 188.

116

Chronica Majora, iii. 485 – 6, 491 – 2.

117

Ibid. iv. 26 – 9, where it is copied verbatim.

118

Huillard-Bréholles, Historia Diplomatica, vi(2). 644 – 6.

119

E. H. Kantorowicz, ‘Petrus de Vinea in England’, Mitteilungen des österreichischen Institut für

Geschichtsforschung, li (1937), 69 – 74. However, one should also note that the use of a text by Piero
della Vigna as a model for the prologue to the legal tract Fleta c.1290 was due rather to contacts
with Rome in the reign of Edward I, E. H. Kantorowicz, ‘The Prologue to Fleta and the School of
Petrus de Vinea’, Speculum, xxxiii (1957), 231 – 49.

120

Calendar of Close Rolls 1242 – 7 (1916), p. 156.

566

THE KINGDOM OF SICILY AND THE KINGDOM OF ENGLAND

contacts lessened.

121

The dynastic link was anyway short-lived since the

empress Isabella had died in December 1241. Furthermore, while this
diplomacy led to some, albeit restricted, Sicilian contact with England, it
did not mean that Englishmen visited the kingdom of Sicily.

Only when Sicily became a significant issue in English politics, as it

did with Henry III’s ill-advised schemes in the 1250s, was attention once
more directed towards it, and even then comments upon Sicily were per-
functory and hostile. This does not mean that there was a great dislike in
England for the Sicilian kingdom. The opposition to Henry III’s project
arose far more because the scheme was patently unworkable, because
both clergy and laity refused to shoulder the financial burden, and
because attempts to portray the Sicilian expedition as a crusade were
seen as a betrayal of the true crusade to Jerusalem, to which English
opinion remained obstinately attached.

122

The English clergy had long

since made clear their opposition towards papal attempts to raise money
for a crusade against Frederick II.

123

Above all, Sicily was simply too distant to be of interest to English-

men. Only for a very brief period, between the mid-1160s and the 1190s,
had there been much contact between the two kingdoms, and conse-
quently some English attention towards Sicily. Before then knowledge of
Sicily in England, as opposed to Normandy where Orderic and Robert
of Torigni wrote, was limited, even though a few individuals from the
Anglo-Norman kingdom had made careers in Sicily. Even Orderic was
not that knowledgeable about southern Italy in his own time, compared
with the earlier era of conquest. And when contact increased, distance
remained a problem. When William II of Sicily wrote to sympathize with
Henry II’s difficulties during the revolt against him in 1173, he offered
his prayers but added that ‘the inconvenience of distance does not permit
our power to afford any assistance’. Similarly, when the English clergy
denounced Henry III’s Sicilian adventure in 1256, distance was the first
of the reasons against it that the clerical convocation put to the pope’s
envoy, the archbishop of Messina: indeed the clergy considered Sicily to
be ‘impregnable and almost inaccessible with an army of our men’.

124

Charles of Anjou was later to use this distance from home as a theme to

121

Matthew, Historia Anglorum, ed. F. Maddern (3 vols., RS, 1866 – 9), ii. 492; Hilpert, Kaiser- und

Papstbriefe in den Chronica Majora, pp. 134 – 52. For a safe conduct to Walter in May 1236, see
Calendar of Patent Rolls 1232 – 47, p. 146. For his career in Sicily, see H. M. Schaller, ‘Die staufische
Hofkapelle im Königreich Sizilien’, Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters, xi (1954 – 5),
497 – 8; Kamp, Kirche und Monarchie, i. 70 – 1, 128 – 32. He was elected successively to the sees of
Valva and Capua, but neither of these elections was ultimately confirmed.

122

R. C. Stacey, ‘Crusades, Crusaders and the Baronial Gravamina of 1263 – 4’, Thirteenth-Century

England, iii: Proceedings of the Newcastle Conference 1989, ed. P. R. Coss and S. D. Lloyd (Wood-
bridge, 1991), pp. 137 – 50, esp. pp. 143 – 5. Cf. C. Tyerman, England and the Crusades 1095 – 1588
(Chicago, 1988), pp. 89 – 95. Thus in 1255 the clergy of the diocese of Lichfield had protested at the
diversion of a tax destined for the Holy Land to the Sicilian expedition, Annales de Burton, in
Annales Monastici, i. 362.

123

Annales de Burton, 265 – 7 (1244).

124

Gesta Henrici II Regis, i. 155; Annales de Burton, 386 – 7, 391 (quote).

G. A. LOUD

567

encourage his troops as they invaded the regno, it seems to have been
more than enough to discourage English participation in Henry III’s
ambitions.

125

When an Anglo-Norman army had gone to Sicily in 1190,

they had certainly not liked it. But for the most part Englishmen knew
little about that country, and cared less. As we know all too well from
more recent history, Englishmen have often been indifferent to ‘a far
away country, [and] people of whom we know little’.

126

125

At the battle of Benevento in February 1266, Charles allegedly told his men: ‘You should know

for certain . . . that it is a long way from this place to France and [it will take] a long time to flee
. . . If we are defeated by our enemies, we shall die without hope of mercy’ (Die Chronik von Saba
Malaspina, ed. W. Koller and A. Nitschke (MGH SS xxxv; Hanover, 1999), III.7, p. 165).

126

K. Feiling, The Life of Neville Chamberlain (1946), p. 372.

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