Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/595

Rh NORMANS than the king held his ; he was deemed to step into the exact position of his English predecessor, whatever that might be. This legal theory worked together with other causes to wipe out all practical distinction between the conquerors and the conquered in a wonderfully short time. By the end of the 12th century the Normans in England might fairly pass as Englishmen, and they had largely adopted the use .of the English language. The fashion able use of French for nearly two centuries longer was far more a French fashion than a Norman tradition. When the tradition of speaking French had all but died out, the practice was revived by fashion. Still the tradition had its effect. The fashion could hardly have taken root except in a land where the tradition had gone before it. The Normans in England therefore became Englishmen, because there was an English nation into which they could be absorbed. The Normans in Sicily could hardly be said to become Sicilians, for there assuredly was no Sicilian nation for them to be absorbed into. While the Normans in England were lost among the people of the land, the Normans in Sicily were lost among their fellow-settlers in the land. The Normans who came into Sicily must have been much less purely Norman than the Normans who came into England. The army of Duke William was un doubtedly very far from being wholly made up of Normans, but it was a Norman army ; the element Avhich was not Norman, though considerable, was exceptional. But we may doubt whether the Norman invaders of Sicily were Norman in much more than being commanded by Norman leaders. They were almost as little entitled to be called pure Scandinavians as the Saracens whom they found in the island were entitled to be called pure Arabs. The conquest of England was made directly from Normandy, by the reign ing duke, in a comparatively short time, while the conquest of Sicily grew out of the earlier and far more gradual con quest of Apulia and Calabria by private men. The Norman settlements at Aversa and Capua were the work of adven turers, making their own fortunes, and gathering round them followers from all quarters. They fought simply for their own hands, and took what they could by the right of the stronger. They started with no such claim as Duke William put forth to justify his invasion of England ; their only show of legal right was the papal grant of conquests that were already made. The conquest of Apulia, won bit by bit in many years of what Ave can only call free- booting, was not a national Norman enterprise like the conquest of England, and the settlement to which it led could not be a national Norman settlement in the same sense. The Sicilian enterprise had in some respects another character. By the time it began the freebooters had grown into princes. Sicily was won by a duke of Apulia and a count of Sicily. Still there was a wide dif ference between the duke of the Normans and the duke of Apulia, between an hereditary prince of a hundred and fifty years standing and an adventurer who had carved out his duchy for himself. And, besides this, warfare in Sicily brought in higher motives and objects. Though crusades had not yet been preached, the strife with the Mussulman at once brought in the crusading element; to the Christian people of the island they were in many cases real deliverers; still, the actual process by which Sicily was won was not so very different from that by which Apulia had been won. Duke William was undisputed master of England at the end of five years ; it took Count Roger thirty years to make himself undisputed master of Sicily. The one claimed an existing kingdom, and obtained full possession of it in a comparatively short time ; the other formed for himself a dominion bit by bit, which rose to the rank of a kingdom in the next generation. When Count Roger at last found himself lord of the whole island, he found himself lord of men of various creeds and tongues, of whom his own Nor man followers were but one class out of several. And the circumstances of his conquest were such that the true Nor mans among his following could not possibly lose them selves among the existing inhabitants of the island, while everything tended to make them lose themselves among their fellow -ad venturers of other races, among whom, by the time the conquest was ended, they could hardly have been even a dominant element. As far then as concerned the lands in which the settle ments were made, the difference lay in this, that, as has been already said, while there was an English nation, there was no Sicilian nation. The characteristic point of Norman rule Elements in Sicily is that it is the rule of princes who were foreign of to all the inhabitants of the island, but who were not more Sicilian foreign to the inhabitants of the island than different t ^ classes of them were to one another. The Norman con queror found in Sicily a Christian and Greek -speaking people and a Mussulman and Arabic-speaking people. The relations between the two differed widely in different parts of the island, according to the way in which the Saracens had become possessed of different towns and districts. In one place the Christians were in utter bondage, in another they were simply tributary ; still, everywhere the Mussul man Saracen formed the ruling class, the Christian Greek formed the subject class. We speak of the Saracen very much as we speak of the Norman ; for of the Mussulman masters of Sicily very many must have been only artificial Arabs, Africans who had adopted the creed, language, and manners of Arabia. In each case the Arab or the Norman was the kernel, the centre round which all other elements gathered and which gave its character to the whole. Besides these two main races, Greek and Saracen, others came in through the Norman invasion itself. There were the conquerors themselves ; there were the Italians, in Sicily known as Lombards, who followed in their wake ; there were also the Jews, whom they may have found in the island, or who may have followed the Norman into Sicily, as they certainly followed him into England. The special character of Norman rule in Sicily was that all these various races flourished, each in its own fashion, each keeping its own creed, tongue, and manners, under the protection of a common sovereign, who belonged to none of them, but who did impartial justice to all. Such a state of things might seem degradation to the Mussulman, but it was deliver ance to the native Christian, while to settlers of every kind from outside it was an opening such as they could hardly find elsewhere. But the growth of a united Sicilian nation was impossible ; the usual style to express the inhabitants of the island is &quot;omnes&quot; or &quot;universi Sicilia) populi.&quot; In the end something like a Sicilian nation did arise ; but it arose rather by the dying out of several of the elements in the country, the Norman element among them, than by any such fusion as took place in England. That is, as has been already said, the Norman as such has vanished in two different ways. In England the Nor man duke came in as a foreign intruder, without a native supporter to establish his rule over a single nation in its own land. He could not profess to be, as the count of Sicily could honestly profess to be, a deliverer to a large part of the people of the land. But, coming in by a title which professed to be founded on English law, establish ing his followers by grants which professed no less to be founded on English law, he planted a dynasty, and estab lished a dominant order, which could not fail to become English. The Normans in England did not die out ; they were merged in the existing nation. The Normans in Sicily, so far as they did not die out, were merged, not in a Sicilian nation, for that did not exist, but in the common mass of settlers of Latin speech and rite, as dis-