Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 129.djvu/323

 for the discharge of his ecclesiastical functions. The toleration which the Greeks enjoyed under the Mussulman domination they enjoyed no less under their new masters. Though their form of Christianity was not re-established in the land on the overthrow of the infidel, there were ecclesiastical foundations in both parts of the kingdom which, although no longer retaining the orthodox ritual, were Greek in character and filled by Greeks. The Greek documents from the monastery of La Cava, on the mainland, and from that of Fragalà, in Sicily, occupy the greater part of the two great collections of Trinchera and Spata. In the course of the twelfth century Latin attestations appear here and there amongst the Greek signatures to the Greek documents; they are generally those of royal officers, men of Norman or Italian origin. At Fragalà Greek attestations are found as late as 1409. The fact that Frederic published his constitutions both in the Greek and Latin languages is a sufficient evidence of the importance of the Greek population during his reign, if it were not already demonstrated by the prosperity of Messina and that end of Sicily which was mainly inhabited by Greeks. Nevertheless although so retentive of their national life and language that at the present day there are communities of Greeks in the Terra di Otranto and Calabria considered by competent authority to be quite distinct from the Albanian and other colonists of the last and preceding centuries, speaking a Grecian dialect, and still possessing a ballad literature in that dialect, they never appear to have taken an active part in the politics of the kingdom. The story of the priest Scholarios (Amari, iii., pp. 257-9) is worth referring to as an illustration of this.

Greek influence is most visible in the sphere of art, but of that we cannot speak at present. Not only was mosaic a Greek art, but the sacred language in which the legends and scrolls were written was Greek. The etiquette and costumes of the Norman court were closely modelled on those of Constantinople. In the fourteenth century the instructors of Petrarch and Boccaccio were Greeks from Calabria; and a patriotic Neapolitan (Trinchera) laments, and perhaps with some justice, that the classicists of the Renaissance paid so little regard to the surviving Hellenism of southern Italy. The Greeks may perhaps have taught the Normans the importance of naval strength in the Mediterranean — at any rate the administration of the navy was Greek, as were its best admirals; and strangely enough it was over the Greek empire that it obtained its most signal victories. In ecclesiastical affairs also there can be little doubt that the early Norman kings were strengthened in their opposition to papal encroachments, and in their arrogating to themselves authority in things ecclesiastical as well as civil, by their knowledge of the power of the emperor in the orthodox Church. It may be worth while once more to point out the baselessness of the tradition that the manufacture of silk was introduced into the West from Greece after the sack of Athens, Thebes, and Corinth in 1149. Greek operatives may for the first time have been employed after that event, but the tiraz, or silk-manufacture, was an appendage of the palaces of all Mussulman princes, at Cordova, at Kairoan, and at Palermo. The Arabic inscription on the imperial mantle at Nuremberg furnishes itself conclusive proof, for it tells us that the mantle was made for King Roger at Palermo in 1133, in the royal manufactory, "the dwelling-place of happiness, of light, of glory, of perfection," etc. A representation of the mantle and a translation of the inscription is to be found in Bock's "Kielnodien des Helligen Römischen Reichs."

If toleration of Greeks was remarkable at this period, toleration of Mussulmans was still more so. The condition of the Mussulman subjects of the Norman kingdom, and their relation to and influence upon their rulers, constitute one of the most interesting studies in mediæval history. As the conquest of Sicily was gradual and diverse, so the treatment of the vanquished was various. At Messina the Saracen inhabitants were massacred with the connivance and probably at the instigation of the Greek populace. Greek fanaticism was always sanguinary, and Messina retained its bad name throughout the Norman epoch, and not without reason, for the "treachery of Greece and the fickleness of pirates" (Falcandus). A fugitive Mussulman puts his own sister to death with his own hand that she may not have to forswear her religion and fall into the hands of Christian ravishers. In the north-eastern part of Sicily, the Val Demone, the Saracens were 