A Biographical Dictionary of the Celebrated Women of Every Age and Country/Constantia
CONSTANTIA, Daughter of Roger, King of Sicily and Naples. Born about 1147; died 1200;
On the death of William the Good, 1189, became heiress to these kingdoms; and her husband, Henry VI. at the same time became emperor; on which, after settling the affairs of Germany, he levied an army, and marched into Italy, in order to be crowned by the pope, and go with the empress Constantia to recover the succession of Sicily, which was usurped by Tancred, her natural brother, or rather, the grandson of her father. In 1191, he prepared for the conquest of Naples and Sicily, took almost all the towns of Campania, Apulia, and Calabria, invested the city of Naples, and sent for the Genoese fleet, which he had engaged to come and form the blockade by sea: but, before its arrival, he was obliged to raise the siege, in consequence of a dreadful mortality among the troops; and all future attempts proved ineffectual during the life of Tancred; after whose death the conquest of Sicily was effected by the aid of the Genoese.
The cruel and unworthy conduct of her husband, who, among his other mean acts, was the sordid jailor of Richard Cœur de Lion, seems not to have accorded with the spirit of Constantia. The widow of Tancred surrendered Salerno, and her right to the crown, on condition that her son William should possess the principality of Tarentum. But Henry joining the most atrocious cruelty to the basest of perfidy, no sooner was master of the place, than he ordered the infant king to have his eyes put out, and threw him into a dungeon; the royal treasure was transported to Germany, and the queen and princesses shut up in a convent.
In the mean time the empress was brought to bed of a son named Frederick, who, in his cradle, was declared king of the Romans. Henry returned into Germany, and, being solicited by the people to engage in a new crusade, consented, but took care to turn it to his own advantage. With the greatest hypocrisy he harangued a general diet, and with such solemnity, that multitudes from all the provinces of the empire enlisted, and he divided them into three large armies, one of which he conducted in person into Italy, in order to take vengeance upon the Romans of Naples and Sicily, who had risen against his government.
The rebels were humbled, and their chiefs condemned to perish by the most excruciating tortures. One Jornandi, of the house of the Roman princes, was tied naked to a chair of red-hot iron, and crowned with a circle of the same burning metal, which was nailed to his head. The empress shocked at such cruelty renounced her faith to her husband, and encouraged her countrymen to recover their liberties. Resolution sprang from despair. The inhabitants betook themselves to arms; the empress Constantia, at the age of fifty, headed them. Henry having dismissed his troops, no longer thought necessary for his bloody purposes, and sent them to pursue their expedition to the Holy Land, was obliged to submit to his wife, and to the conditions which she was pleased to impose on him in favour of the Sicilians. He died at Messina, soon after this treaty, 1197, and, as it was supposed, of poison administered by the empress, who saw the ruin of her country hatching in his perfidious and vindictive heart.
After his death, Constantia remained in Sicily, where all was peace, as regent and guardian to her infant son, Frederic II. who had been crowned king of that island, by the consent of pope Celestine III. But she also had her troubles. On the death of Celestine, another investiture being necessary, Innocent III. his successor, demanded that Constantia should renounce several ecclesiastical privileges the kings of Sicily had been accustomed to possess, in the name of her son, and do liege, pure and simple homage for Sicily. But before any thing relative to this affair was settled, the empress died, leaving the regency to the pope; so that he was enabled to prescribe what conditions he pleased to young Frederic. Perhaps thinking it better to leave those matters to him, than to deprive her son of his protection, and subject the island again to disunion and anarchy.