Part 16

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,”[68] 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.

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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 _Phædo_ 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.”[69]

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.[70] 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,[71] “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.

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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.[72] 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.