#joan of england

February 13th 1177. Joan of England marries William II de Hauteville and is crowned Queen of Sicily in Palermo Cathedral.

In May 1176 an embassy from Sicily visited Henry II’s court in London. King William II wanted Joan as his bride. As the largest island in the Mediterranean, situated more or less in the middle of that great watery corridor connecting Europe, Asia and Africa, Sicily’s strategic importance had been obvious since pre-classical times. Its climate and its volcanically enriched soil also made it fertile and productive: the island’s abundance of grain meant that it was one of the richest places in Europe, but it also produced oranges, lemons, tomatoes, cheese, olives and wine. The Spanish Muslim, Ibn Jubayr, visited Sicily over the Christmas and New Year of 1184–5. Although, according to him, the prosperity of the island ‘surpasses description’, he still tried to describe it: it is ‘a daughter of Spain in the extent of its cultivation, in the luxuriance of its harvests, and in its well-being, having an abundance of varied produce, and fruits of every kind and species’. Sicily was therefore a tempting, even a necessary target for those seeking to dominate the Mediterranean, and for centuries the island had been fought over, won and lost by a variety of occupiers. The Greeks had been replaced by the Romans; the Germanic invaders who threw out the Romans in the fifth century were themselves removed by the Byzantines in the sixth; they in turn lost out to Muslim invaders from north Africa. By the middle of the eleventh century, Sicily was still largely Muslim-controlled. However, it was also cosmopolitan and culturally diverse. Christians from western Europe and Constantinople, Jews and Muslims, coexisted largely peacefully.

So languages and beliefs were already and uniquely mixed together when adventurers from Normandy fixed their greedy stare on the riches of Sicily in the decades either side of 1100. These men originally came to southern Italy as pilgrims en route to and from the Holy Land. Having become mercenaries in the pay of the aspiring native rulers of southern Italy, they soon decided to take power into their own hands. The most spectacularly successful of them all were two of the many sons of the Norman lord Tancred de Hauteville: Robert ‘Guiscard’ (the nickname means ‘crafty’ or ‘cunning’) and Roger.

By the time he died in 1085, Robert Guiscard had carved out a territory for himself that stretched across most of southern Italy. In 1059 he had been formally recognised as duke of Apulia and Calabria by the papacy, and in 1061 he had invaded Sicily with his brother Roger, so beginning a prolonged but inexorable takeover of the island. After they had captured Palermo in 1072, Robert made Roger count of Sicily, but it was not until the early 1090s that the Norman conquest of the island was completed. In 1105, Roger’s second son, also called Roger, became count of Sicily, and in 1112, at the age of sixteen, Roger II started to rule the island in his own right. Then, when Roger’s cousin, William II of Apulia, died in 1127, Roger claimed all the Hauteville family possessions in southern Italy and, during the 1130s, when there were two claimants to the papal throne, he managed to have himself recognised as king of Sicily by both of them. Roger had to face internal revolts and foreign invasions during his reign, but he dealt with every challenge and he was able to harness and increase Sicily’s economic strength to complete a remarkable piece of statebuilding and become one of the greatest rulers in Europe. At the time of his death in 1154 the kingdom of Sicily comprised the island itself as well as most of mainland Italy south of Rome. It was Roger’s grandson William, who became king of Sicily in 1166 at the age of eleven, who asked for the hand of Princess Joan in 1176. If the marriage went ahead, Joan would become queen of one of the most dynamic, successful and wealthy kingdoms of the Middle Ages.

After meeting his councillors to discuss the marriage proposal, Henry II agreed to allow the Sicilian envoys to visit Joan, who was at Winchester. At great cost to the city authorities and to the bishop of Winchester personally, the embassy was entertained lavishly when it reached the city. But this was not just a courtesy call; it would have been quite normal for the prospective groom’s officials to have a formal ‘view’ of the nominated bride so that they could make a report on her appearance, her voice, her manners and her conduct to their master. The visitors were delighted with what they found and impressed by Joan’s beauty; and after discussing matters with King Henry, the latter gave his consent to the match.

After the Sicilian deputation returned home, Joan was prepared for her long and arduous trip, and for the rest of her life. Money had to be raised for the journey and her wedding. The king imposed a tax ‘for the marriage of his daughter’, and the royal records of the later 1170s are full of entries setting out the contributions of the English shire communities to the collection. Joan’s wedding dress alone, it seems, cost well over £100, an enormous sum at the time. She eventually left England in August 1176, sailing from Southampton to the Angevin territories in northern France. She was received there by her eldest brother Henry, the Young King, and he escorted her on the next part of her journey to Poitou, where she was met and taken through his territories by another brother, Duke Richard of Aquitaine. Then, the final leg of the trip took her to St Gilles in Toulouse, where in November the marriage party found twenty-five Sicilian galleys awaiting them. The voyage to Sicily was rough and unpleasant. Winter storms in the Mediterranean made Joan so ill that her ships had to stop at Naples for Christmas so as to continue the journey by land, and she finally arrived in Palermo late in January 1177. Night had already fallen when she landed, but the city’s inhabitants were still waiting to meet her. The streets were dazzlingly illuminated by torchlight. So many and so large were the lights, one account claimed, that the city almost seemed to be on fire, ‘and the rays of the stars could in no way compare with the brilliance of such a light’. Mounted on one of King William’s horses, Joan processed to her new apartments through the cheering crowds that filled the Palermo streets. A few days later, on 13 February 1177, she and William were married in the Palatine Chapel at Palermo, and Joan was crowned queen and given a golden chair for her own use.

Richard Huscroft,Tales from the Long Twelth Century. The Rise and Fall of the Angevin Empire, 157-159