Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 22.djvu/40

 26 SICILY [HISTORY. 1090-1197. Thus at Messina, where we hear nothing of Saracens, we hear much of the disputes between Greeks and Lombards. The Lombards had hardly a distinct language to bring with them. At the time of the conquest, it was already found out that French had become a distinct speech from Latin ; Italian hardly was such. The Lombard element, during the Norman reign, shows itself, not in whole documents or inscriptions, but in occasional words and forms, as in some of the mosaics at Monreale. And, if any element, Latin or akin to Latin, had lingered on through Byzantine and Saracen rule, it would of course be attracted to the new Latin element, and would help to strengthen it. It was this Lombard element that had the future before it. Greek and Arabic were antiquated, or at least isolated, in a land which Norman conquest had made part of Western Europe and Latin Christendom. They could grow only within the island ; they could gain no strength from out- side. Even the French element was in some sort isolated, and later events made it more so. But the Lombard element was constantly strengthened by settlement from outside. In the older Latin conquest, the Latin carried Greek with him, and the Greek element absorbed the Latin. Latin now held in western Europe the place which Greek had held there. Thus, in the face of Italian, both Greek and Arabic died out. Step by step, Christian Sicily became Latin in speech and in worship. But this was not till the Norman reigns were over. Till the end of the 12th century Sicily was the one land where men of divers creeds and tongues could live side by side, each in his own way. Hence came both the short-lived brilliancy of Sicily and its later decay. In Sicily there were many nations all protected by the Sicilian king ; but there was no Sicilian nation. Greek, Saracen, Norman, Lombard, and Jew could not be fused into one people ; it was the boast of Sicily that each kept his laws and tongue undisturbed. Such a state of things could live on only under an en- lightened despotism ; the discordant elements could not join to work out really free and national institutions. Sicily had parliaments, and some constitutional principles were well understood. But they were assemblies of barons, or at most of barons and citizens ; they could only have represented the Latin elements, Norman and Lombard, in the island. The elder races, Greek and Saracen, stand outside the relations between the Latin king and his Latin subjects. Still, as long as Greek and Saracen were pro- tected and favoured, so long was Sicily the most brilliant of European kingdoms. But its greatness had no ground- work of national life ; for lack of it the most brilliant of kingdoms presently sank below the level of other lands. Four generations only span the time from the birth of Count Roger, about 1030, to the death of the emperor Frederick the Second in 1250. Roger, great count of Sicily, was, at his death in 1 101, succeeded by his young son Simon, Roger I. and he in 1105 by the second Roger, the first king. He inherited all Sicily, save half Palermo the other half had been given up and part of Calabria. The rest of Palermo was soon granted ; the Semitic capital became the abiding head of Sicily. On the death of Duke William of Apulia, Roger gradually founded (1127-40) a great Italian domi- nion. To the Apulian duchy he added (1136) the Norman principality of Capua, Naples (1138), the last dependency of the Eastern empire in Italy, and (1140) the Abruzzi, an undoubted land of the Western empire. He thus formed a dominion which has been divided, united, and handed over from one prince to another, oftener than any other state in Europe, but whose frontier has hardly changed at all. In 1 1 30 Roger was crowned at Palermo, by authority of the antipope Anacletus, taking the strange title of " king of Sicily and Italy." This, on his recon- cilation with Pope Innocent the Second, he exchanged for " king of Sicily and of the duchy of Apulia and of the prin- cipality of Capua." By virtue of the old relations between the popes and the Normans of Apulia, he held his kingdom in fief of the Holy See, a position which on the whole strengthened the royal power. But his power, like that of Dionysios and Agathokles, was felt in more distant regions. His admiral George of Antioch, Greek by birth and creed, warred against the Eastern empire, won Corfu (Korypho ; the name of Korkyra is forgotten) for a season, and carried off the silk -workers from Thebes and Peloponnesos to Sicily. But Mamiel Komnenos (Comnenus) ruled in the East, and, if Roger threatened Constantinople, Manuel threatened Sicily. In Africa the work of Agathokles was more than renewed ; Mahadia and other points were won and kept as long as Roger lived. These exploits won him the name of the terror of Greeks and Saracens. To the Greeks, and still more to the Saracens, of his own island he was a protector and something more. Roger's son William, surnamed the Bad, was crowned William in his father's lifetime in 1151. Roger died in 1154, and I- and II. William's sole reign lasted till 1166. It was a time of domestic rebellions, chiefly against the king's unpopular ministers, and it is further marked by the loss of Roger's African conquests. After William the Bad came (1166- 1189) his son William the Good. Unlike as were the two men in themselves, in their foreign policy they are hardly to be distinguished. The Bad William has a short quarrel with the pope ; otherwise Bad and Good alike appear as zealous supporters of Alexander the Third, and as enemies of both empires. The Eastern warfare of the Good is stained by the frightful sack of Thessalonica ; it is marked also by the formation of an Eastern state under Sicilian supremacy (1186). Corfu, the possession of Agathokles and Roger, with Durazzo, Cephalonia, and Zante, was granted by William to his admiral Margarito with the strange title of king of the Epeirots. He founded a dynasty, though not of kings, in Cephalonia and Zante. Corfu and Durazzo were to be more closely connected with the Sicilian crown. The brightest days of Sicily ended with William the Good. His marriage with Joanna, daughter of Henry of Anjou and England, was childless, and William tried to procure the succession of his aunt Constance and her husband, King Henry the Sixth of Germany, son of the emperor Frederick the First. But the prospect of German rule was unpopular, and on William's death the crown passed to Tancred, an illegitimate grandson of King Roger, Tancred. who figures in English histories in the story of Richard's crusade. In 1191 Henry, now emperor, asserted his claims ; but, while Tancred lived, he did little, in Sicily nothing, to enforce them. On the death of Tancred (1194) and the accession of his young son William the Third, the William emperor came and conquered Sicily and the Italian posses- m - sions, with an amount of cruelty which outdid any earlier war or revolution. First of four Western emperors who wore the Sicilian crown, Henry died in 1197, leaving the kingdom to his young son Frederick, heir of the Norman kings through his mother. The great days of the Norman conquest and the Norman reigns have been worthily recorded by contemporary his- torians. For few times have we richer materials. The oldest is Aime" or Amato of Monte Cassino, who exists only in an Old-French translation. We have also for the Norman conquest the halting hexameters of William of Apulia, and for the German conquest the lively and par- tial verses of Peter of Eboli. Of prose writers we have Geoffrey Malaterra, Alexander abbot of Telesia, Romuald archbishop of Salerno, Falco of Benevento, above all Hugo Falcandus, one of the very foremost of mediaeval writers.