All the calamities which the prophetic orator had deplored, were surpassed by the cruelty and avarice of the German conqueror. He violated the royal sepulchres, and explored the secret treasures of the palace, Palermo, and the whole kingdom; the pearls and jewels, however precious, might be easily removed; but one hundred and sixty horses were laden with the gold and silver of Sicily. The young king, his mother and sisters, and the nobles of both sexes, were separately confined in the fortresses of the Alps; and on the slightest rumour of rebellion the captives were deprived of life, of their eyes, or of the hope of posterity. Constanza herself was touched with sympathy for the miseries of her country; and the heiress of the Norman line might struggle to check her despotic husband, and to save the patrimony of her newborn son, of an emperor so famous in the next age under the name of Frederick II.
Ten years after this revolution, the French monarchs annexed to their crown the duchy of Normandy; the sceptre of her ancient dukes had been transmitted, by a granddaughter of William the Conqueror, to the house of Plantagenet; and the adventurous Normans, who had raised so many trophies in France, England, and Ireland, in Apulia, Sicily, and the East, were lost either in victory or servitude, among the vanquished nations.[l]
In Sicily the circumstances of the conquest led the Norman settlers to remain far more distinct from the older races of the land than they did in England, and in the end not to lose themselves in those older races of the land but in the settlers of other races who accompanied them and followed them. So far as there ever was a Sicilian nation at all it might be said to be called into being by the emperor-king Frederick II. In his day a Latin element finally triumphed; but it was not a Norman French-speaking element of any kind. The speech of the Lombards at last got the better of the Greek, Arabic, and French; how far its ascendency can have been built on any survival of an earlier Latin speech which had lived alongside of Greek and Arabic, this is not the place to inquire.
NORMAN INFLUENCE
[1130-1194 A.D.]
Of all the points to be insisted on, that which it is most necessary to bear in mind is the Norman power of adaptation to circumstances, the gift which in the end destroyed the race as a separate race. English history is utterly misconceived if it is thought that an acknowledged distinction between Normans and English went on, perhaps into the fourteenth century, perhaps into the seventeenth. Long before the earlier of those dates the Norman in England had done his work; he had unwittingly done much to preserve and strengthen the national life of a really kindred people, and, that work done, he had lost himself in the greater mass of that kindred people. In Sicily his work, far more brilliant, far more beneficent at the time, could not be so lasting. The Norman princes made Sicily a kingdom; they ruled it for a season better than any other kingdom was ruled; but they could not make it a Norman kingdom, nor could they themselves become national Sicilian kings. The kingdom that they founded has now vanished from among the kingdoms of the earth, because it was only a kingdom and not a nation. In every other way the Norman has vanished from Sicily as though he had never been. His very works of building are hardly witnesses to his presence, because, without external evidence, we should never have taken them to be his. In Sicily, in short, he gave a few generations of unusual peace and prosperity to several nations living side by side, and then he, so to speak, went his way from a land in which he had a work to do, but in which he never was really at home. In England he made himself, though by rougher means, more truly at home among unacknowledged kinsmen. When in outward show he seemed to work the unmaking of a nation, he was in truth giving no small help towards its second making.[c]
FOOTNOTES
[9] [Some historic doubt has been thrown on this anecdote by St. Marc.[h]]
[10] The Norman writers and editors most conversant with their own idiom interpret Guiscard or Wiscard, by Callidus, a cunning man. The root “wise” is familiar to our ear; and in the old word “wiseacre” we can discern something of a similar sense and termination.
