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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.
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 pre-eminently 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!