Posthumous daughter of Roger II of Sicily who married the heir of Frederick I Barbarossa, gained the Sicilian crown after five years of war against her nephew Tancred, bore Frederick II at forty and ruled Sicily for him until her death in 1198.
Constance of Sicily was the daughter of Roger II, the first Norman king of Sicily, born after his death. When her nephew William II of Sicily died childless in 1189 she was the lawful heir to one of the richest kingdoms in Europe, and her marriage in 1186 to Henry, son of Frederick I Barbarossa, meant that the crown would pass to the Hohenstaufen emperors. The Sicilian barons chose her illegitimate nephew Tancred of Lecce instead, and it took five years of war, including her own capture, before Henry VI, Holy Roman Emperor, won the kingdom in 1194.
Constance gave birth to her only child, the future Frederick II, at the age of forty, the day after Henry was crowned at Palermo. She governed Sicily in Henry's absences and after his death in 1197, when she dismissed his German captains, had Frederick crowned king of Sicily and placed him under the protection of Pope Innocent III.
Constance was born on 2 November 1154, some months after Roger II died, to his third wife, Beatrice of Rethel. Her half-brother King William, known as the Bad, reigned until 1166 and his son William II of Sicily until 1189, and for most of those years Constance, unusually for a royal daughter, remained unmarried. Later legends that she had been shut in a convent have no reliable support.
As William II's marriage to Joan, sister of Richard the Lionheart, produced no children, Constance became his likely heir. In 1184 a marriage was agreed between her and Henry, king of the Romans and son of Frederick I Barbarossa, a match meant to end the long enmity between the Norman kings and the emperors. At Troia in 1185 William had the leading men of the kingdom swear to accept her succession, and on 27 January 1186 she married Henry in the basilica of Sant'Ambrogio in Milan, where he was crowned king of Italy.
Almost everything written about Constance served a side. Peter of Eboli's Liber ad honorem Augusti, a verse history presented to Henry around 1196, shows her as a dignified and pious empress who faced the rebellious people of Salerno from a balcony, answered Tancred proudly to his face that she had come only to recover what was hers. Sicilian writers hostile to the Germans, such as the author of the letter on the Sicilian tragedy often attributed to Hugo Falcandus, saw her instead as the princess who would hand her homeland to barbarians.
German chroniclers later accused her of joining the Sicilian conspiracy against Henry in 1197, and some suspected her of poisoning him. The evidence for active plotting is weak, though the marriage was clearly strained by then and the rebels may have hoped to use her name. Her conduct as a widow suggests a determined ruler with her own priorities: she sent Henry's German captains away from court, surrounded herself with Sicilian advisers and bargained hard with the pope to secure her son. The later legend of an aged nun forced to marry, which Dante followed when he placed the great Constance in Paradise, is a literary image rather than evidence of her character.
When William II of Sicily died in November 1189, the vice-chancellor Matthew of Ajello and much of the court backed Tancred of Lecce, who was crowned at Palermo early in 1190. Henry, held in Germany by his father's crusade and death, was crowned emperor in Rome with Constance in April 1191 and marched south. The northern towns of the kingdom opened their gates, and Constance was lodged in her father's old palace at Salerno while Henry besieged Naples. Disease destroyed his army that summer and he withdrew, leaving her with a small garrison.
The Salernitans, hoping to win Tancred's favour, turned on her. Constance was handed over and taken by sea to Tancred at Messina, then held at Palermo and later in the Castel dell'Ovo at Naples. Tancred treated her with respect but kept her as a bargaining counter. In 1192, under pressure from Pope Celestine III, he released her into papal custody, but on the road to Rome she was met near Ceprano by imperial troops and escorted back to Germany.
Tancred died in February 1194, leaving his young son William III as king under his mother's regency. Paid for in part by the ransom of Richard the Lionheart, Henry invaded again and Palermo surrendered without a fight; he was crowned king of Sicily there on Christmas Day 1194. Constance, pregnant and travelling more slowly, gave birth on 26 December at Jesi in the March of Ancona. The boy was later baptised Frederick Roger after his two grandfathers.
At an assembly at Bari at Easter 1195 Henry arranged for Constance to govern the kingdom when he returned to Germany. She issued charters in her own name from Palermo with the old royal notaries, though real power lay with German commanders such as Markward of Anweiler. Henry's punishment of Tancred's family and supporters, and a revolt in 1197 after which he had the pretender Jordan Lupin executed, reportedly in her presence, left the kingdom seething. When Henry died of fever at Messina on 28 September 1197, Constance took charge: she drove Markward and other German lords from the court and on 17 May 1198 had Frederick crowned in Palermo Cathedral.
In her last months Constance bargained with Pope Innocent III, who demanded that she give up the special rights over the Sicilian Church that the Norman kings had won from earlier popes. She conceded most of them in return for his recognition of Frederick as king. Already ill, she died at Palermo on 27 November 1198, aged forty-four, before the agreement was formally sealed. Her will named Innocent as guardian of her four-year-old son and set up a council of leading churchmen to govern for him. She was buried in Palermo Cathedral, near her father, her husband and, later, her son.