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 σέκρετον, 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,”[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.
* * * * *
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.”