CHAPTER VI.
NORMAN TIMES—LEGEND OF KING ROBERT.
HOW KING ROBERT OF SICILY WAS DISPOSSESSED OF HIS THRONE; AND WHO SAT UPON IT.—HIS WRATH, SUFFERINGS, AND REPENTANCE.
In the glance at the ancient history of Sicily in our third chapter, we have seen that the Greek and Roman sway was succeeded by that of the Saracens. They were masters of the island for the space of two hundred years, but have left no memorials, with the exception of a building or two, and traces of Arabic in the Sicilian tongue. The island was then conquered by a handful of Norman gentlemen, who had obtained possession of Naples, and whose history would be romantic enough to be worth repeating, if it were anything but a succession of wars. Their wonderful ascendency, and no less extraordinary personal prowess, are supposed by some, not without reason, to have given rise to much of the gigantic fable of the Orlandos and other peers of Charlemagne, who were all Frenchmen.
As an old ruin, therefore, standing in some spot surrounded by architecture of different orders, will sometimes be found to be the sole representative of a former age, we shall make the good old legend of King Robert, in this our Sicilian and Pastoral Sketch-book, stand for the whole Norman portion of its chronology. It is not military, except in the brusque self-sufficiency with which the character of King Robert sets out; but it is emphatically what we understand by Gothic; which, in modern parlance, implies the character of the interval between ancient and modern times. The Greek Sicilian poets, could they have foreseen it, would have loved it; and their successors, the pastoral writers of modern times, of whom we have afterwards to speak, unquestionably did so, whenever they met with it among their old reading. Shakspeare would have made a divine play of it, for it is very dramatic. Fancy what he would have done with the angel, and the court fool, and the pathos! Oh, that we had had but time to try even to dramatize it ourselves.
Who King Robert of Sicily may have been, in common earthly history—whether intended to shadow forth one of the aforesaid Norman chieftains who obtained possession of that island, or one of the various dukes who contend for the honour of being called Robert the Devil, or whether he was Robert of Anjou, hight Robert the Wise, the friend of Petrarch and Boccaccio, and father of the calumniated Joanna—we must leave to antiquaries to determine. Suffice to say, that in history angelical, and in the depths of one of the very finest kinds of truth, he was King Robert of Sicily, brother of Pope Urban, and of the Emperor Valemond. A like story has been told of the Emperor Jovinian (whoever that prince may have been); and we shall not dispute that something of the kind may have occurred to him also; since very strange things happen to the most haughty of princes, if we did but know their whole lives; not excepting their being taken for fools by their people. We shall avail ourselves of any light which the histories of the king and the emperor may serve to throw on each other.
Writers, then, inform us, that King Robert of Sicily, brother of Pope Urban and of the Emperor Valemond, was a prince of great courage and renown, but of a temper so proud and impatient, that he did not choose to bend his knee to Heaven itself, but would sit twirling his beard, and looking with something worse than indifference round about him, during the gravest services of the church.
One day, while he was present at vespers on the eve of St. John, his attention was excited to some words in the Magnificat, in consequence of a sudden dropping of the choristers’ voices. The words were these. “Deposuit potentes de sede, et exaltavit humiles.” (“He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble.”) Being far too great and warlike a prince to know anything about Latin, he asked a chaplain near him the meaning of these words; and being told what it was, observed, that such expressions were no better than an old song, since men like himself were not so easily put down, much less supplanted by poor creatures whom people call “humble.”
The chaplain, doubtless out of pure astonishment and horror, made no reply; and his majesty, partly from the heat of the weather, and partly to relieve himself from the rest of the service, fell asleep.