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 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.