We must look in Palermo for the noblest monuments of Norman days, and beside the churches and palaces, for the tombs of the kings and archbishops in San Rosario Cathedral. There lies Roger himself, "mighty Duke and firstKing of Sicily." Mr. Symonds says[4]: "Very sombre and stately are these porphyry resting-places of princes born in the purple, assembled here from lands so distant, from the craggy heights of Hohenstauffen, from the green orchards of Côtentin, from the dry hills of Aragon. They sleep and the centuries pass by. Rude hands break open the granite lids of their sepulchres to find tresses of yellow hair, and fragments of imperial mantles embroidered with the hawks and stags the royal hunter loved. The church in which they lie changes with the change of taste in architecture and the manners of successive ages. But the huge stone arks remain unmoved, guarding their freight of mouldering dust beneath gloomy canopies of stone, that tempers the sunlight as it streams from the chapel windows."
[4] "Studies in Southern Italy."
And again at Venosa, the little town where the poet Horace was born, and where William de Hauteville with his brothers Drogo, Humphrey, and [Pg147] Robert Guiscard are buried, we cannot do better than quote the same charming writer:
"No chapter of history more resembles a romance than that which records the sudden rise and brief splendor of the house of Hauteville. In one generation the sons of Tancred de Hauteville passed from the condition of squires in the Norman vale of Côtentin to Kinghood in the richest island of the Southern Sea. The Norse adventurers became sultans of an Oriental capital. The sea-robbers assumed, together with the sceptre, the culture of an Arabian court ... lived to mate their daughters with princes and to sway the politics of Europe with gold.... What they wrought, whether wisely or not, for the ultimate advantage of Italy, endures to this day, while the work of so many emperors, republics, and princes, has passed and shifted like the scenes in a pantomime. Through them the Greeks, the Lombards, and the Moors were extinguished in the South. The Papacy was checked in its attempt to found a province of St. Peter below the Tiber. The republics of Naples, Caëta, Amalfi, which might have rivalled perchance with Milan, Genoa, and Florence, were subdued to a master's hand. In short, to the Norman, Italy owed that kingdom of the two Sicilies, which formed one third of her political balance; and which proved the cause of all her most serious revolutions."
Much has been lost of the detailed history of the Norman-Italian states, and lost especially to English literature. If the development of Southern Italy [Pg148] had gone steadily forward to this time, with the eagerness and gathering force that might have been expected from that vigorous impulse of the eleventh century, no doubt there would have been a permanent factor in history rather than a limited episode. The danger of the climate, to those born and reared in Northern or Western Europe, was undoubtedly in the way of any long-continued progress. To-day the Norman buildings look strangely different from their surroundings, and are almost the only evidence of the once brilliant and prosperous government of the Normans in the South. One enthusiastic historian, who wrote before the glories of the de Hautevilles had faded, would have us believe that "there was more security in the thickets of Sicily than in the cities of other kingdoms."
