and important than was once supposed. The evolution is at times rapid, but the Trecento grows out of the centuries which preceded as naturally as it grew into the Quattrocento which followed. The place of Italy in this process is universally recognized; the place of southern Italy is sometimes overlooked. We are too prone to forget that Niccola Pisano was also called Nicholas of Apulia; that Petrarch owed much to his sojourn at the Neapolitan court; that Boccaccio learned his Greek from a Calabrian; that the first notes of a new Italian literature were sounded at the court of Frederick II. Many phases of the relation between south and north in this transitional period are still obscure, but of the significance of the southern contribution there is now reasonable assurance. Moreover, the continuity between the intellectual movement under Roger and William I and that under Frederick II and later can be followed in some detail in the history of individual manuscripts and authors. When humanists like Petrarch and Salutati read Plato's Phædo or Ptolemy's Almagest, their libraries show that they used the Latin versions of the Sicilian translators of the twelfth century. The learning of the southern kingdom may have been a faint light, but it was handed on, not extinguished.
For our general understanding of the Normans and their work, it is well that we should trace them in the lands where their direct influence grows faint and dim,
