The Kingdom in the Sun by John Julius Norwich

Author:John Julius Norwich
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Non Fiction, History
ISBN: 9780582127357
Publisher: [Harlow] Longmans, [1970]
Published: 1992-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

The bagarre at Besancon, as anyone could have seen, was merely a symptom of a far deeper rift between Pope and Emperor—one which no amount of diplomatic drafting could ever hope to bridge. The days when it had been realistic to speak of the two swords of Christendom were gone—gone since Gregory VII and Henry IV had hurled depositions and anathemas at each other nearly a hundred years before. Never since that time had their respective successors been able to look upon themselves as two different sides of the same coin. Each must now claim the supremacy, and defend it as necessary against the other. When this involved the confrontation of charac­ters as strong as those of Adrian and Frederick, flash-point could never be far off. Yet the root of the trouble lay less in their personali­ties than in the institutions they represented. While the two of them lived, relations between them—exacerbated by a host of petty slights both real and imagined—became even more strained; but it was only after their deaths that the conflict was to emerge into open war.

If, however, Frederick had put the doctrine of the two swords behind him, there was another eleventh-century concept of Empire which he still stubbornly refused to outgrow. During his first passage through North Italy on the way to his coronation he had been appalled by the spirit of independence and freedom among the Lombard towns, their blatant republicanism and their lack of any respect for his authority. Pressed for time and impatient for the imperial crown, he had delayed there only long enough to make his presence felt and to leave the smoking ruins of Tortona as a mark of his displeasure. Since then he had had plenty of opportunities, notably in Rome itself, to gauge the strength of Italian communal feeling; but he still could not—or would not—understand. For him the Lombards were insubordinate; that was all there was to it. In July 1158, accompanied by the King of Bohemia and a huge army, he crossed the Alps to teach them a lesson.

There is, fortunately, no need for us to follow in any detail the fortunes of Frederick Barbarossa in Lombardy. A few of the towns had remained loyal to him and showed it; a few seized the oppor­tunity offered by the presence of the imperial forces to turn them against their enemies or commercial rivals; others bowed, reed-like, before the storm with every intention of springing up again the moment it was past; one or two even fought magnificently back. But for us the interest of the campaign lies not in the conduct of the individual towns so much as in its effect on that latest and most unexpected newcomer to the Italian scene—the Sicilian-Papal entente.

The Treaty of Benevento proved to be of immeasurably greater significance than either William or Adrian could have known at the time. For the Papacy it inaugurated a new political approach to European problems—one which it was to follow to its own con­siderable advantage for the next twenty years.

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