The Normans in European History/Chapter 8

by Charles Homer Haskins

VIII

THE NORMAN KINGDOM OF SICILY

Of the widely separated lands which made up the greater Normandy of the Middle Ages, none have drifted farther apart than Norman England and Norman Sicily. Founded about the same time and not greatly different in area, these states have lost all common traditions, until the history of the southern Normans seems remote, in time as in space, from their kinsmen of the north. With the widening of the historical field, southern Italy and Sicily no longer occupy, as in Mediterranean days, the centre of the historic stage, and the splendor of their early history has been dimmed by earthquake and fever, by economic distress, and by the debasing traditions of centuries of misrule. Neither in language nor race nor political traditions does England recognize relationship between the country of the Black Hand and the 'mother of parliaments.' Yet if the English world has lost the feeling of kinship for the people of the south, it has not lost feeling for the land. It was no mere reminiscence of 'Vergilian headlands' and the thunders of the Odyssey that drew Shelley to the Bay of Naples, Browning to Sorrento, or, to take a parallel example elsewhere, Goethe to the glowing orange-groves of Palermo. And it is not alone the poet whose soul responds to

A castle, precipice-encurled,
In a gash of the wind-grieved Apennine;

or

A sea-side house to the farther South,
Where the baked cicala dies of drouth,
And one sharp tree—'t is a cypress—stands.

No land of the western Mediterranean has burnt itself so deeply into the imagination and sentiment of the English-speaking peoples. Twice has this vivid land of the south played a leading part in the world's life and thought, once under the Greeks, of "wind-swift thought and city-founding mind," as we may read in the marbles of Pæstum and Selinus and in the deathless pages of Thucydides; and a second time under the Norman princes and their Hohenstaufen successors, creators of an extraordinarily vigorous and precocious state and a brilliant cosmopolitan culture. If our interest in this brief period of Sicilian greatness be not Norman, it is at least human, as in one of the culminating points of Mediterranean civilization.

 

It must be emphasized at the outset that the history of this Norman kingdom was brief. It had two rulers of genius, Roger II, 1130–54, and his grandson Frederick II, 1198–1250, separated by the reigns of William the Bad and William the Good,—contemporaries of Henry II of England, and neither so bad nor so good as their names might lead us to suppose,—Tancred of Lecce and his son William III, and Constance, Roger's daughter and Frederick's mother, wife of the Hohenstaufen Emperor Henry VI. It is usual to consider the Norman period as closing with the deposition of William III in 1194 and to class Constance and Frederick II with the Hohenstaufen. In the case of Constance there seems to be no possible reason for this, for she was as Norman as any of her predecessors and issued documents in her own name throughout the remaining three years of her husband's life and during the few months of 1197–98 by which she survived him. With their son Frederick II, half Norman and half Hohenstaufen, the question is perhaps even, and the science of genetics has not yet advanced far enough to enable us to classify and trace to their source the dominant and the recessive elements in his inheritance. No one, however, can study him at close range without discovering marked affinities with his Norman predecessors, notably the second Roger, and the whole trend of recent investigation goes to show that, in the field of government as in that of culture, his policy is a continuation of the work of the Norman kings, from whom much of his legislation is directly derived. Half Norman by birth, Frederick was preponderantly Norman in his political heritage. It was in Sicily that he grew up and began to rule, and in Sicily that he did his really constructive work. To judge him as a Hohenstaufen is only less misleading than to judge him as a German king, for the centre and aim of his policy lay in the Mediterranean. In Frederick's sons, legitimate and illegitimate, the Norman strain is still further attenuated, and as they had no real opportunity to continue their father's work, it matters little whether we call them Normans or Hohenstaufen. The coming of Charles of Anjou ends this epoch, and his victory at Tagliacozzo in 1268 seals the fate of the dynasty. We may, if we choose, carry the Norman period to this point; for all real purposes it ends with the death of Frederick in 1250. The preceding one hundred and twenty years embrace the real life-history of the Norman kingdom. Brief as this is, it is too long for a single lecture, and we must limit ourselves to Roger and the two Williams, touching on the developments of the thirteenth century only in the most incidental fashion.

Throughout this period the territorial extent of the realm remained practically unchanged, comprising Sicily, with Malta, and the southern half of the Italian peninsula as far as Terracina on the western coast and the river Tronto on the eastern. There were of course times when the royal authority was disputed within and attacked from without,—feudal revolts, raids by the Pisans, expeditions of the German emperor, diplomatic contests with the Pope,—but it was not permanently limited or shorn of its territories. There were, on the other hand, moments of expansion, particularly by sea, for Sicily was of necessity a naval power and early saw the importance of creating a navy commensurate with its maritime position. The occupation of Tripoli and Tunis by Roger II seized the Mediterranean by the throat; the possession of Corfu threatened the freedom of the Adriatic; but neither conquest was permanent, and in the main the Greek empire and the powers of northern Africa succeeded in keeping the Sicilian kings within their natural boundaries.

In area about four-fifths the size of England, the southern kingdom showed far greater diversity, both in the land and in its inhabitants. Stretching from the sub-tropical gardens of Sicily into the heart of the highest Apennines, it was divided by mountain and sea into distinct natural regions between which communication continues difficult even to-day—the isolated valleys of the Abruzzi, the great plain of Apulia, the 'granite citadel' of Calabria, the rich fields of Campania, the commercial cities of the Bay of Naples and Gulf of Salerno, the contrasted mountains and shore-lands of Sicily itself. The difficulties of geography were increased by differences of race, religion, and political traditions. The mass of the continental population was, of course, of Italian origin, going back in part to the Samnite shepherds of primitive Italy, and while it had been modified in many places by the Lombard conquest, it retained its Latin speech and was subject to the authority of the Latin church. Calabria, however, was now Greek, in religion as in language, and the Greek element was considerable in the cities of Apulia and flowed over into Sicily, where the chief foreign constituent was African and Mohammedan. Politically, there was a mixed inheritance of Lombard and Roman law, of Greek and Saracen bureaucracy, of municipal independence, and of Norman feudalism, entrenched in the mountain-fortresses of upper Apulia and the Abruzzi; while the diverse origins of the composite state were expressed in the sovereign's official title, "king of Sicily, of the duchy of Apulia, and of the principality of Capua." The union of these conflicting elements into a single strong state was the test and the triumph of Norman statesmanship.

 

Plainly the terms of this political problem were quite different from that set the Norman rulers of England. Whatever local divergences careful study of Anglo-Saxon England may still reveal, there were no differences of religion or of general political tradition, while the rapidity of the conquest at the hands of a single ruler made possible a uniform policy throughout the whole country. The convenient formula of forfeiture and regrant of all the land, for example, created at once uniformity of tenure and of social organization. Moreover, as we have already seen, back of the Norman conquest of England lay Normandy itself, firmly organized under a strong duke, who took with him across the Channel his household officers and his lay and spiritual counsellors to form the nucleus of his new central government, which was in many respects one with the central government of Normandy. In the south none of these favoring conditions prevailed. A country composed of many diverse elements was conquered by different leaders and at different times, so that there could be no question of uniformity of system. Indeed there could be no system at all, for the Normans came as individual adventurers, with no governmental organization behind them, and the instruments of government which they used had to be created as they went along. Whatever of Norman tradition reached the south could come only in the subdivided and attenuated form of individual influences. Furthermore, the Norman ingredient in the population continued relatively small. The scattered bands of early days were of course reënforced as time went on, but there was never any general migration or any movement that affected the mass of the population in town and country. If we had any statistics, we should doubtless find that some hundreds or at most a few thousands would cover the entire Norman population of Italy and Sicily. These brought with them their speech, their feudal tenures, probably some elements of Norman customary law; but, given their small numbers, they could not hope to Normanize a vast country, where their language soon disappeared and their identity was ultimately lost in the general mass. Under such conditions there could be no general transplantation of Norman institutions. The rulers were Norman, as were the holders of the great fiefs, but, to speak paradoxically, the most Norman thing about their government was its non-Norman character, that is to say, its quick assimilation of alien elements and its statesmanlike treatment of native customs and institutions. The Norman leaders were too wise to attempt an impossible Normanization.

The policy of toleration in political and religious matters had its beginnings in the early days of the Norman occupation, but it received a broad application only in the course of the conquest of Sicily by the Great Count, and was first fully and systematically carried out by his son Roger II. In religion this meant the fullest liberty for Greeks, Jews, and Mohammedans, and even the maintenance of the hierarchy of the Greek Church and the encouragement and enrichment of Basilian monasteries along with the Benedictine foundations which were marked objects of Norman generosity. In law it meant the preservation of local rights and customs and of the usages of the several distinct elements in the population, Latin and Greek, Hebrew and Saracen. In local administration it involved the retention of the local dignitaries of the cities and the Byzantine offices of the strategos and the catepan, as well as the fiscal arrangements established by the Saracens in Sicily. And finally in the central government itself, the need of dealing wisely and effectively with the various peoples of the kingdom necessitated the employment of men familiar with each of them, and the maintenance of a secretarial bureau which issued documents in Greek and Arabic as well as in Latin.

It was in the central administration that Roger II faced his freshest problem, which was nothing less than the creation of a strong central government for a kingdom which had never before been united under a single resident ruler. His method was frankly eclectic. We are told that he made a point of inquiring carefully into the practices of other kings and countries and adopting anything in them which seemed to him valuable, and that he drew to his court from every land, regardless of speech and faith, men who were wise in counsel or distinguished in war, among whom the brilliant admiral George of Antioch is a conspicuous example. Nevertheless we should err if we thought of him as making a mere artificial composite. The Calabria of his youth had preserved a stiff tradition of Byzantine administration, and the Mohammedans of Sicily had an even stronger bureaucracy at work. Roger's capital was at Palermo, and it was natural that the Greek and Saracen institutions of Sicily and Calabria should prove the formative influences in his government as it was extended to the newly acquired and less centralized regions of the mainland. There was free adaptation and use of experience, but the loose feudal methods of the Normans were profoundly modified by the bureaucratic traditions of the East.

The central point in the government lay, as in the states beyond the Alps, in the curia of feudal vassals and particularly in its more permanent nucleus of household officials and immediate advisers of the king. But whereas in the other parts of western Europe the feudal baronage still prevailed exclusively and gave way but slowly before the growth of specialized training and competence, the professional element was present in the Sicilian curia from an early period in the logothetes and emirs which Roger II had taken over from the earlier organization. The chancery, with its Latin, Greek, and Arabic branches, was inevitably a more complicated institution than in the other western kingdoms, and its documents imitated Byzantine and papal usage, even in externals. At one point, however, it shows close parallelisms with the Anglo-Norman chancery, namely in the free use of those mandata or administrative writs which are still rare in the secular states of the twelfth century; and if we remember that their employment constitutes the surest index of the efficiency of a mediæval administrative system, we must conclude, what is evident in other ways, that the most vigorous governments of the period were the two Norman kingdoms. In judicial matters the parallel is also instructive. Here a professional class had existed in the south from the outset as an inheritance from the Byzantine period, and it early makes its appearance in the curia in the person of a group of justices who in time seem completely to absorb the judicial functions of the larger body. At the same time the Norman barons were utilized for the royal justiciars which King Roger established throughout all parts of his kingdom. Parallel to these provincial justices ran provincial chamberlains, and over them there were later established master justices and master chamberlains for the great districts of Apulia and Capua, all subject to the central curia.

The fiscal system was especially characteristic. Roger's biographer tells us that the king spent his spare time in close supervision of the receipts and expenditures of his government, and that everything relating to the accounts was carefully kept in writing. Beginning with his reign we have documentary evidence of a branch of the curia, called in Arabic diwan, in Greek σέκρετου, and in Latin either duana or secretum, and acting as a central financial body for the whole kingdom. It kept voluminous registers, called in Arabic defêtir, and as its officers and clerks were largely Saracens, it seems plainly to go back to Saracenic antecedents. There are, however, some traces on the mainland of careful descriptions of lands and serfs like those which it extracted from its records in Sicily under the name of plateæ, so that Byzantine survivals should also be taken into account in studying the origin of the institution. Indeed this whole system presupposes elaborate surveys and registers of the land and its inhabitants such as were made in the Egypt of the Ptolemies and, less completely, in the Roman empire, and such as meet us, in a ruder and simpler form, in that unique northern record, the Domesday survey of 1086, itself perhaps suggested by some knowledge of the older system in Italy. No one can fail to note the striking analogies between the Sicilian duana and the Anglo-Norman exchequer, but the disappearance of all records of the southern bureau precludes any comparison of their actual organization and procedure. The only parallel records which have reached us are the registers of feudal holdings, which exhibit noteworthy similarities in the tenures of the two kingdoms.

Such feudal institutions were evidently a matter of common inheritance, but any connections indicated by similar administrative arrangements were doubtless due to later imitation from one side or the other. Roger II in Sicily and Henry I and Henry II in England were at work upon much the same sort of governmental problem, and Roger was not alone in looking to other lands for suggestions. Among the foreigners whom Roger drew into his service we find Englishmen such as his chancellor, Robert of Selby, and one of his chaplains and fiscal officers, Thomas Brown, who later returned to his native land to fill an honored place in the exchequer of Henry II. There was constant intercourse between the two kingdoms in the twelfth century, and abundant opportunity to keep one government informed of the administrative experiments of the other.

In general, however, the Sicilian monarchy was of a far more absolute and Oriental type than is found among the northern Normans or anywhere else in western Europe. The king's court, with its harem and eunuchs, resembled that of the Fatimite caliphs; his ideas of royal power were modelled upon the empire of Constantinople. The only contemporary portrait of King Roger which has reached us, the mosaic of the church of the Martorana at Palermo, represents him clothed in the dalmatic of the apostolic legate and the imperial costume of Byzantium, and receiving the crown directly from the hands of Christ; and a similar portrayal of the coronation of King William II shows that the scene was meant to be typical of the divine right of the king, responsible to no earthly authority. Theocratic in principle, the Sicilian monarchy drew its inspiration from the law-books of Justinian as well as from the living example on the eastern throne. The series of laws or assizes issued by King Roger naturally reflects the composite character of the Norman state. The mass of local custom is not superseded, the feudal obligations of the vassals are clearly recognized, influences of canon law and Teutonic custom are clearly traceable, indeed the northern conception of the king's peace may have been their starting-point; but the great body of these decrees flows directly from the Roman law, as preserved and modified by the Byzantine emperors. The royal power is everywhere exalted, often in phrases where the king is substituted for the emperor of the Roman original, and the law of treason is applied in detail to the protection of royal documents, royal coins, and royal officers. Even to question the king's ordinances or decisions is on a par with sacrilege.

The test of such phrases was the possession of adequate military and financial resources. Of the strength of King Roger's army his long and successful wars offer sufficient evidence; the great register of his military fiefs, the so-called Catalogue of the Barons, indicates that the feudal service could be increased when necessity demanded, while contingents of Saracen troops were as valuable to him as they had been to his father. Much the same can be said of his navy, for the safety of the Sicilian kingdom and its position in Mediterranean politics depended in large measure upon sea power, and Roger's fleet has a distinguished record in his Italian and African campaigns. Army and navy and civil service, however, rested ultimately upon the royal treasury, and among its contemporaries the Sicilian kingdom enjoyed a deserved reputation for great wealth. Its resources consisted partly in the products of the soil, such as the grain and cotton and peltry which were exported from Sicily itself; partly in manufactures, as in the case of the silk industry which King Roger developed in Palermo; and partly in the unrivalled facilities for trade which were presented by its many harbors and its advantageous location with respect to the great sea routes. Under the Norman kings the commerce of the southern kingdom was passive, rather than active, that is to say, it was carried on, not mainly by its own cities, such as Bari and Amalfi, which had enjoyed great prosperity in the Byzantine period and lost their local independence under the Normans, but by commercial powers from without—Pisa, Genoa, and Venice. The relative importance of each of these varied with the vicissitudes of Italian politics, but among them they shared the external trade of the kingdom. We find the Venetians on the eastern coast, the Genoese and Pisans at Salerno and the chief ports of Sicily, where they had special warehouses and often considerable colonies; and the earliest commercial records of Genoa and Pisa, notably the register of the Genoese notary, John the Scribe, enable us to follow their business from merchant to merchant and from port to port. Sicily served not only as a place for the exchange of exports for foreign products, the cloth of northern Italy and France and the spices and fabrics of the East, but also as a stage in the trade with the Orient by the great highway of the Straits of Messina or with Africa and Spain by way of Palermo and the ports of the western and southern coast. From all this the king took his toll. Without foregoing any of their feudal or domanial revenues or extensive monopolies, Roger and his successors tapped this growing commerce by port dues and by tariffs on exports and imports, thus securing their ready money from that merchant class upon which the future monarchies of western Europe were to build. The income from Palermo alone was said to be greater than that which the king of England derived from his whole kingdom.

It is evident, even from this brief outline, that the Sicilian state was not only a skilful blending of political elements of diverse origin, but also that it stood well in advance of its contemporaries in all that goes to make a modern type of government. Its kings legislated at a time when lawmaking was rare; they had a large income in money when other sovereigns lived from feudal dues and the produce of their domains; they had a well established bureaucracy when elsewhere both central and local government had been completely feudalized; they had a splendid capital when other courts were still ambulatory. Its only rival in these respects, the Anglo-Norman kingdom of the north, was inferior in financial resources and had made far less advance in the development of the class of trained officials through whom the progress of European administration was to be realized. Judged by these tests, it is not too much to call the kingdom of Roger and his successors the first modern state, just as Roger's non-feudal policy, far-sightedness, and diplomatic skill have sometimes won for him the title of the first modern king. This designation, I am well aware, has more commonly been reserved for the younger of Sicily's "two baptized sultans,"^[1] Frederick II—stupor mundi et immutator mirabilis, "the wonder of the world and a marvellous innovator." No one can follow the career of this most gifted and fascinating figure without feeling the modern elements in his character and in his administration of the Sicilian state. His government stands ahead of its contemporaries in the thirteenth century as does that of Roger in the twelfth, and the more recent naturally seems the more modern. It is not, however, clear that the relative superiority was greater, and recent studies have made plain, what was not at first realized, that considerable portions of Frederick's legislation and of his administrative system go back to his Norman predecessors, some of them to Roger himself. After all it is not the historian's business to award prizes for being modern, especially when it is not always plain in what modernity consists. The main point is to recognize the striking individuality of the Sicilian state in directions which other states were in time to follow, and to remember that this individuality was a continuous thing and not a creation of the second Frederick. Moreover, as we shall shortly see, what is true in the field of government is also true in the field of civilization: the brilliant cosmopolitan culture of the thirteenth century is a direct development from similar conditions under King Roger.

The culture of the Norman kingdom was even more strikingly composite than its government. Both historically and geographically Sicily was the natural meeting-point of Greek, Arabic, and Latin civilization, and a natural avenue for the transmission of eastern art and learning to the West. Moreover, in the intellectual field the splendor of the Sicilian kingdom coincides with that movement which is often called the renaissance of the twelfth century and which consisted in considerable measure in the acquisition of new knowledge from the Greeks of the East and the Saracens of Sicily and Spain. Sicily was not the only channel through which the wisdom of the East flowed westward, for there were scholars from northern Italy who visited Constantinople and there was a steady diffusion of Saracen learning through the schools of Spain. Nowhere else, however, did Latin, Greek, and Arabic civilization live side by side in peace and toleration, and nowhere else was the spirit of the renaissance more clearly expressed in the policy of the rulers.

The older Latin culture of the southern kingdom had its centre and in large measure its source at Monte Cassino, mother of the Benedictine monasteries throughout the length and breadth of western Christendom. Founded by St. Benedict in 529, this establishment still maintains the unique record of fourteen centuries of monastic history and of more than forty generations of followers of the Benedictine rule, keeping age after age their vigils of labor, prayer, and fasting, but feasting their uncloistered eyes—per gl' occhi almeno non v' è clausura!—upon the massive ranges of the central Apennines and the placid valley of the Garigliano, "the Land of Labor and the Land of Rest." Its golden age was the eleventh and early twelfth centuries, when its relations with the Normans and the Papacy kept it in the forefront of Italian politics, when two of its abbots sat upon the throne of St. Peter, and when the greatest of them, Desiderius—as Pope known as Victor III—built a great basilica which was adorned by workmen from Constantinople with mosaics and with the great bronze doors which are the chief surviving evidence of its early splendor. Men of learning were drawn to the monastery, like the monk Constantine the African, skilled in the science of the Greek and Arabic physicians, whose works he translated into Latin. Manuscripts of every sort were copied in the characteristic south-Italian hand, the Beneventan script, which serves as a sure index of the intellectual activity throughout the southern half of the peninsula in this period—sermons and service-books, theological commentaries and lives of the saints, but also the law-books of Justinian and the writings of the Latin poets and historians with their commentators. Indeed without the scribes of Monte Cassino the world would have lost some of its most precious monuments of antiquity and the early Middle Ages, including on the mediæval side the oldest of the papal registers, that of John VIII, and on the classical, Varro, Apuleius, and the greater part of the works of Tacitus. Nowhere else is the work of the monasteries as the preservers of ancient learning more manifest.

The home of Greek learning in Italy was likewise to be found in monasteries, in those Basilian foundations which had spread over Calabria and the Basilicata in the ninth and tenth centuries and now under Norman protection sent out new colonies like the abbey of San Salvatore at Messina. Enriched with lands and rents and feudal holdings, they also set themselves to the building up of libraries by copies and by manuscripts brought from the East; but so far as we can judge from the ancient catalogues and from the scattered fragments which survive their dispersion, these collections were almost entirely biblical and theological in character, including however splendid examples of calligraphy such as the text of the Gospels, written in silver letters on purple vellum and adorned with beautiful miniatures, which is still preserved in the cathedral of Rossano.

Meanwhile, and largely as a result of the constant relations between southern Italy and the Greek East, learning had spread beyond monastery walls and ecclesiastical subjects, and had begun to attract the attention of men from the north. An English scholar, Adelard of Bath, who visited the south at the beginning of the twelfth century, found a Latin bishop of Syracuse skilled in all the mathematical arts, a Greek philosopher of Magna Græcia who discoursed on natural philosophy, and the greatest medical school of Europe in the old Lombard capital at Salerno, early famed as the city of Hippocrates and the seat of the oldest university in the West. A generation later, another Englishman, the humanist John of Salisbury, studies philosophy with a Greek interpreter in Apulia and drinks the heavy wines of the Sicilian chancellor; while still others profit by translations of Greek philosophical and mathematical works from the Italian libraries. The distinctive element in southern learning lay, however, not on the Latin side, but in its immediate contact with Greek and Arabic scholarship, and the chief meeting-point of these various currents of culture was the royal court at Palermo, direct heir to the civilization of Saracen Sicily.

 

The Sicilian court, like the kingdom, was many-tongued and cosmopolitan, its praises being sung alike by Arabic travellers and poets, by grave Byzantine ecclesiastics, and by Latin scholars of Italy and the north. A Greek archimandrite, Neilos Doxopatrios, produced at King Roger's request a History of the Five Patriarchates directed against the supremacy of the Pope of Rome; a Saracen, Edrisi, prepared under his direction the greatest treatise of Arabic geography, celebrated long afterward as "King Roger's Book." Under William I the chief literary figures are likewise connected with the court: Eugene the Emir, a Greek poet thoroughly conversant with Arabic and deeply versed in the mathematics and astronomy of the ancients; and Henricus Aristippus, archdeacon of Catania and for a time chief minister of the king, a collector of manuscripts, a translator of Plato, Aristotle, and Diogenes Laertius, and an investigator of the phenomena connected with the eruption of Etna in a spirit which reminds us less of the age of the schoolmen than of the death of the younger Pliny. Such a literary atmosphere was peculiarly favorable to the production of translations from the Greek and Arabic into Latin, and we can definitely connect with Sicily the versions which made known to western Europe the Meno and Phaedo of Plato, portions of the Meteorology and of certain other works of Aristotle, the more advanced writings of Euclid, and the Almagest of Ptolemy, the greatest of ancient and mediæval treatises on astronomy. In a very different field we have from Roger's reign a Greco-Arabic psalter and an important group of New Testament manuscripts. "While we Germans were in many respects barbarians," says Springer, "the ruling classes in Sicily enjoyed the almost over-ripe fruits of an ancient culture and combined Norman vigor of youth with Oriental refinement of life."^[2]

There were lacking in the twelfth century the poetic and imaginative elements which flourished at the court of Frederick II, but on the scientific and philosophical sides there is clear continuity in the intellectual history of the south from Roger II and William to Frederick II and Manfred. At one point it is even probable that an actual material connection can be traced, for the collection of Greek manuscripts upon which Manfred set great store seems to have had its origin in codices brought from Constantinople to Palermo under the first Norman kings; and as Manfred's library probably passed into the possession of the Popes, it became the basis of the oldest collection of Greek manuscripts in the Europe of the humanists. Within its limits the intellectual movement at the court of King Roger and his son had many of the elements of a renaissance, and like the great revival of the fourteenth century, it owed much to princely favor. It was at the kings' request that translations were undertaken and the works of Neilos and Edrisi written, and it was no accident that two such scholars as Aristippus and Eugene of Palermo occupied high places in the royal administration. In their patronage of learning, as well as in the enlightened and anti-feudal character of their government, the Sicilian sovereigns, from Roger to Frederick II, belong to the age of the new statecraft and the humanistic revival.

The art of the Sicilian kingdom, like its learning and its government, was the product of many diverse elements, developing on the mainland into a variety of local and provincial types, but in Sicily combined and harmonized under the guiding will of the royal court. Traces of direct Norman influence occur, as in the towers and exterior decoration of the cathedral of Cefalù or in the plan of that great resort of Norman pilgrims, the church of St. Nicholas at Bari; but in the main the Normans, in Bertaux's phrase, contributed little more than the cement which bound together the artistic materials furnished by others.^[3] These materials were abundant and various, the Roman basilica and the Greek cupola, the bronze doors and the brilliant mosaics of Byzantine craftsmen, the domes, the graceful arches and ceilings, and the intricate arabesques of Saracen art; yet in the churches and palaces of Sicily they were fused into a beautiful and harmonious whole which still dazzles us with its splendor. The chief examples of this 'Norman' style are to be found at Cefalù, King Roger's cherished foundation, where he prepared his last resting-place in the great porphyry sarcophagus later transported to Palermo, and where Byzantine artists worked in blue and gold wonderful pictures of Christ and the Virgin and stately figures of archangels and saints of the Eastern Church; at Monreale, the royal mount of William II, commanding the inexhaustible wealth of Palermo's Golden Shell and serving as the incomparable site of a great cathedral, with storied mosaics of every color covering its walls and vaulted ceiling like an illuminated missal, and with cloisters of rare and piercing beauty; and between them, in space and time, the palaces and churches of Palermo—the church of the Martorana, built in the Byzantine style and endowed with a Greek library by Roger's admiral George of Antioch, the Saracenic edifices of San Cataldo and San Giovanni degli Eremiti, and the unsurpassed glories of the Cappella Palatina—all set against the brilliant background of the Sicilian capital, which owes to the Norman kings its unique place in the history of art.

Welcoming merchants and strangers of every land and race, containing within itself organized communities of Greeks, Mohammedans, and Jews, each with its own churches, mosques, or synagogues, the Palermo of the twelfth century was a great cosmopolitan city and the natural centre of a Mediterranean art. Midway between Cordova and Constantinople, between Africa and Italy, it laid them all under contribution. Travellers celebrated the luxuriant gardens of the city and its surrounding plain, with the vast fields of sugar cane and groves of orange, fig, and lemon, olive and palm and pomegranate, its commodious harbor and its spacious and busy streets, its gorgeous fabrics and abundance of foreign wares, its walls and palaces and places of worship. "A stupendous city," says the Spanish traveller, Ibn Giobair,^[4] "elegant, graceful, and splendid, rising before one like a temptress". . . and offering its king—"may Allah take them from him! every pleasure in the world." An artist's city, too, distinguished by the qualities which Goethe saw in it, "the purity of its light, the delicacy of its lines and tones, the harmony of earth and sea and sky."

From the highest point in the capital rose the royal palace, which still retains, in spite of the transformations of eight centuries, something of the massiveness and the splendor of its Norman original, of which it preserves the great Pisan tower,—once the repository of the royal treasure,—the royal chapel, and one of the state apartments of King Roger's time. Its terraces and gardens have long since disappeared, with their marble lions and plashing fountains which resembled the Alhambra or the great pleasure-grounds of the Mohammedan East; but we can easily call them to life with the aid of the Saracen poets and of the remains of the other royal residences which surrounded the city "like a necklace of pearls." Here, amid his harem and his eunuchs, the officers of his court and his retinue of Mohammedan servants, the king lived much after the manner of an Oriental potentate. On state occasions he donned the purple and gold of the Greek emperors or the sumptuous vestments of red samite, embroidered with golden tigers and camels and Arabic invocations to the Christian Redeemer, which are still preserved among the treasures of the Holy Roman Empire at Vienna. And when, on festivals, he entered the palace chapel, Latin in its ground-plan, Greek and Arabic in its ornamentation, the atmosphere was likewise Oriental. As described at its dedication in 1140, with the starry heavens of its ceiling and the flowery meadows of its pavement, the chapel preserves its fundamental features to-day. Dome and choir are dominated by great Byzantine figures of Christ, accompanied by Byzantine saints and scenes with Greek inscriptions, all executed with the fullest brilliancy of which mosaics are capable, while the stalactite ceiling, "dripping with all the elaborate richness of Saracen art," seems "to re-create some forgotten vision of the Arabian Nights." Harmonious in design yet infinitely varied in detail, rich beyond belief in color and in line, reflecting alike the dim rays of its pendent lamps or the full light of the southern sun, the Cappella Palatina is the fullest and most adequate expression of the many-sided art of the Norman kingdom and the unifying force of the Norman kings.

 

Brilliant but ephemeral, precocious but lacking in permanent results—such are the judgments commonly passed upon the Sicilian kingdom and its civilization. At best the kingdom seems to reach no farther than Frederick II, and of him Freeman has said that, though qualified by genius to start some great movement or begin some new era, he seemed fated to stand at the end of everything which he touched the mediæval empire, the Sicilian kingdom, the Norman-Hohenstaufen line.^[5] In the field of government these statements are in the main true: the rapid changes of dynasties and the deep political decline into which the south ultimately fell destroyed the unity of its political development and nullified the work of Norman state-building, so that the enduring results of Norman statesmanship and Norman law must be sought in the north and not in Italy. That, however, is not the whole of the story, and in the field of culture influences less palpable, but none the less real, flowed from the Norman stream into the general currents of European civilization. So long as the Renaissance of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was looked upon as simply the negation of the Middle Ages by a return to classical antiquity, figures such as King Roger and Frederick II were merely 'sports,' isolated flashes of genius and modernity without any relation to their own times or to the greater movement which followed. Since, however, we have come to view the Renaissance in its larger aspects as far more than a classical revival, its relations to the Middle Ages are seen to have been much more intimate 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, as well as in those where their descendants still rule. Only a formal and mechanical view of history seeks to ticket off particular races against particular regions as the sole sources of population and power; only false national pride conceives of any people as continually in the vanguard of civilization. Races are mixed things, institutions and civilization are still more complex, and no people can claim to be a unique and permanent source of light and strength. Outside of Normandy the Normans were but a small folk, and sooner or later they inevitably lost their identity. They did their work preeminently not as a people apart, but as a group of leaders and energizers, the little leaven that leaveneth the whole lump. Wherever they went, they showed a marvellous power of initiative and of assimilation; if the initiative is more evident in England, the assimilation is more manifest in Sicily. The penalty for such activity is rapid loss of identity; the reward is a large share in the general development of civilization. If the Normans paid the penalty, they also reaped the reward, and they were never more Norman than in adopting the statesmanlike policy of toleration and assimilation which led to their ultimate extinction. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose!

 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

 

The best general account of the Norman kingdom is that of Chalandon, who carries its history to 1194 and gives also a provisional description of its institutions and an unsatisfactory chapter on its civilization. E. Caspar, Roger II (Innsbruck, 1904), is the best book on the reign; Curtis, Roger of Sicily, is convenient. G. B. Siragusa, Il regno di Guglielmo I (Palermo, 1885–86), and I. La Lumia, Storia della Sicilia sotto Guglielmo il Buono (Florence, 1867), need revision. For Constance, T. Toeche, Kaiser Heinrich VI (Leipzig, 1867), is still useful.

 

The treatment of Sicilian institutions by E. Mayer, Italienische Verfassungsgeschichte (Leipzig, 1909), is too juristic. There is an excellent book on the chancery by K. A. Kehr, Die Urkunden der normannisch-sicilischen Könige (Innsbruck, 1902); and on the duana there are important monographs by Amari, in the Memorie dei Lincei, third series, II, pp. 409–38 (1878); and by C. A. Garufi, in Archivio storico italiano, fifth series, XXVII, pp. 225–63 (1901). For local administration see the valuable study of Miss E. Jamison, The Norman Administration of Apulia and Capua, in Papers of the British School at Rome, VI, pp. 211–481 (1913). See also H. Niese, Die Gesetzgebung der normannischen Dynastie im Regnum Siciliae (Halle, 1910); Haskins, "England and Sicily in the Twelfth Century," in English Historical Review, XXVI, pp. 433–47, 641–65 (1911); W. Cohn, Die Geschichte der normannisch-sicilischen Flotte (Breslau, 1910); R. Straus, Die Juden im Königreich Sizilien (Heidelberg, 1910); F. Zechbauer, Das mittelalterliche Strafrecht Siziliens (Berlin, 1908); and various studies in the Miscellanea Salinas (Palermo, 1907) and the Centenario Michele Amari (Palermo, 1910). The commerce of the Sicilian kingdom is described by A. Schaube, Handelsgeschichte der romanischen Völker (Munich, 1906).

 

For Monte Cassino in this period see E. A. Loew, The Beneventan Script (Oxford, 1914), with the works there cited; R. Palmarocchi, L'abbazia di Montecassino e la conquista normanna (Rome, 1913). On the Greek monasteries, see Gay, L'Italie méridionale; P. Batiffol, L'abbaye de Rossano (Paris, 1891); K. Lake, "The Greek Monasteries in South Italy," in Journal of Theological Studies, IV, V (1903–04); and F. LoParco, Scolario-Saba, in Atti of the Naples Academy, new series, I (1910). The best account of Saracen culture in Sicily is still that of Amari. On the south-Italian and Sicilian translators, see O. Hartwig, "Die Uebersetzungsliteratur Unteritaliens in der norman- nisch-staufischen Epoche," in Centralblatt für Bibliothekswesen, III, pp. 161–90, 223–25, 505 (1886); Haskins and Lockwood, The Sicilian Translators of the Twelfth Century and the First Latin Version of Ptolemy's Almagest, in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, XXI, pp. 75–102 (1910); Haskins, ibid., XXIII, pp. 155–166; XXV, pp. 87–105. On the Sicilian origin of the Greek MSS. of the papal library, see J. L. Heiberg, in Oversigt of the Danish Academy, 1891, pp. 305–18; F. Ehrle, in Festgabe Anton de Waal (Rome, 1913), pp. 348–51. The connection of the intellectual movement of the twelfth century with the renaissance under Frederick II is well brought out by Niese, "Zur Geschichte des geistigen Lebens am Hofe Kaiser Friedrichs II," in Historische Zeitschrift, CVIII, pp. 473–540 (1912). In general see F. Novati, Le origini, in course of publication in the Storia letteraria d' Italia (Milan, since 1897).

 

The development of art in the south in this period is treated by A. Venturi, Storia dell' arte italiana (Rome, 1901 ff.), II, ch. 3; III, ch. 2. See also C. Diehl, L'art byzantin dans l'Italie méridionale (Paris, 1894). For the continental territories there is an excellent account in E. Bertaux, L'art dans l'Italie méridionale (Paris, 1904). There is nothing so good for Sicily, although there are monographs on particular edifices. Diehl, Palerme et Syracuse (Paris, 1907), is a good sketch with illustrations; Miss C. Waern, Mediæval Sicily (London, 1910), is more popular. Freeman has a readable essay on "The Normans at Palermo," in his Historical Essays, third series, pp. 437–76. See also A. Springer, "Die mittelalterliche Kunst in Palermo," in his Bilder aus der neueren Kunstgeschichte (Bonn, 1886), I, pp. 157–208; and A. Goldschmidt, "Die normannischen Königspalaste in Palermo," in Zeitschrift für Bauwesen, XLVIII, coll. 541–90 (1898). Interesting aspects of twelfth-century Palermo are depicted in the Bern codex of Peter of Eboli, reproduced by Siragusa for the Istituto Storico Italiano (1905) and by Rota for the new edition of Muratori (1904–10). Surviving portions of the royal costume are reproduced by F. Bock, Die Kleinodien des heil.-römischen Reiches (Vienna, 1864).

 

THE END

1. The phrase is Amari's: Storia dei Musulmani di Sicilia, III, p. 365.
2. Bilder aus der neueren Kunstgeschichte, I, p. 159.
3. L'art dans l'Italie méridionale, p. 344.
4. His description is translated by Amari, Biblioteca arabo-sicula (Turin, 1888), I, pp. 155 ff.; and by Schiaparelli, Ibn Gubayr (Rome, 1906), pp. 328 ff. Cf. Waern, Mediæval Sicily, pp. 64 ff.
5. "The Emperor Frederick the Second," in Historical Essays, first series, p. 291.