During the Norman reigns Palermo was the main centre of Sicilian history, especially during the disturbances in the reign of William the Bad (1154–1166). The emperor Henry VI. entered Palermo in 1194, and it was the chief scene of his cruelties. In 1198 his son Frederick, afterwards emperor, was crowned there. After his death Palermo was for a moment a commonwealth. It passed under the dominion of Charles of Anjou in 1266. In the next year, when the greater part of Sicily revolted on behalf of Conradin, Palermo was one of the few towns which was held for Charles; but the famous Vespers of 1282 put an end to the Angevin dominion.
From that time Palermo shared in the many changes of the Sicilian kingdom. In 1535 Charles V. landed there on his return from Tunis. The last kings crowned at Palermo were Victor Amadeus of Savoy, in 1713, and Charles III. of Bourbon, in 1735. The loss of Naples by the Bourbons in 1798, and again in 1806, made Palermo once more the seat of a separate Sicilian kingdom. The city rose against Bourbon rule in 1820 and in 1848. In 1860 came the final deliverance, at the hands of Garibaldi; but with it came also the yet fuller loss of the position of Palermo as the capital of a kingdom of Sicily.
Site.—The original city was built on a tongue of land between two inlets of the sea. There is no doubt that the present main street, the Cassaro (Roman castrum, Arabic Kasr), Via Marmorea or Via Toledo (Via Vittorio Emmanuele), represents the line of the ancient town, with water on each side of it. Another peninsula with one side to the open sea, meeting as it were the main city at right angles, formed in Polybius’s time the Neapolis, or new town, in Saracen times Khalesa, a name which still survives in that of Calsa. But the two ancient harbours have been dried up; the two peninsulas have met; the long street has been extended to the present coast-line; a small inlet, called the Cala, alone represents the old haven. The city kept its ancient shape till after the time of the Norman kings. The old state of things fully explains the name Πάνορμος.
There are not many early remains in Palermo. The Phoenician and Greek antiquities in the museum do not belong to the city itself. The earliest existing buildings date from the time of the Norman kings, whose palaces and churches were built in the Saracenic and Byzantine styles prevalent in the island. Of Saracen works actually belonging to the time of Saracen occupation there are no whole buildings remaining, but many inscriptions and a good many columns, often inscribed with passages from the Koran, which have been used up again in later buildings, specially in the porch of the metropolitan church. This last was built by Archbishop Walter (fl. 1170)—an Englishman sent by Henry II. of England as tutor to William II. of Sicily—and consecrated in 1185, on the site of an ancient basilica, which on the Saracen conquest became a mosque, and on the Norman conquest became a church again, first of the Greek and then of the Latin rite. What remains of Walter’s building is a rich example of the Christian-Saracen style, disfigured, unfortunately, by the addition of a totally unsuitable dome by Ferinando Fuga in 1781–1801. This church contains the tombs of the emperor Frederick II. and his parents—massive sarcophagi of red porphyry with canopies above them—and also the royal throne, higher than that of the archbishop: for the king of Sicily, as hereditary legate of the see of Rome, was the higher ecclesiastical officer of the two. But far the best example of the style is the chapel of the king’s palace (cappella palatina), at the west end of the city. This is earlier than Walter’s church, being the work of King Roger in 1143. The wonderful mosaics, the wooden roof, elaborately fretted and painted, and the marble incrustation of the lower part of the walls and the floor are very fine. Of the palace itself the greater part was rebuilt and added in Spanish times, but there are some other parts of Roger’s work left, specially the hall called Sala Normanna.
Alongside of the churches of this Christian-Saracen type, there is another class which follows the Byzantine type. Of these the most perfect is the very small church of San Cataldo. But the best, much altered, but now largely restored to its former state, is the adjoining church of La Martorana, the work of George of Antioch, King Roger’s admiral. This is rich with mosaics, among them the portraits of the king and the founder. Both these and the royal chapel have several small cupolas, and there is a still greater display in that way in the church of San Giovanni degli Eremiti, which it is hard to believe never was a mosque. It is the only church in Palermo with a bell-tower, itself crowned with a cupola.
Most of these buildings are witnesses in different ways to the peculiar position of Palermo in the 12th century as the “city of the threefold tongue,” Greek, Arabic, and Latin. King Roger’s sun dial in the palace is commemorated in all three, and it is to be noticed that the three inscriptions do not translate one another. In private inscriptions a fourth tongue, the Hebrew, is also often found. For in Palermo under the Norman kings Christians of both rites, Mahommedans and Jews were all allowed to flourish after their several fashions. In Saracen times there was a Slavonic quarter on the southern side of the city, and there is still a colony of United Greeks, or more strictly Albanians.
The series of Christian-Saracen buildings is continued in the country houses of the kings which surround the city, La Favara and Mimnerno, the works of Roger, and the better known Ziza and Cuba, the works severally of William the Bad and William the Good. The Saracenic architecture and Arabic inscriptions of these buildings have often caused them to be taken for works of the ancient ameers; but the inscriptions of
