Page:The Normans in European History.djvu/233

 Goethe to the glowing orange-groves of Palermo. And it is not alone the poet whose soul responds to

or

No land of the western Mediterranean has burnt itself so deeply into the imagination and sentiment of the English-speaking peoples. Twice has this vivid land of the south played a leading part in the world's life and thought, once under the Greeks, of "wind-swift thought and city-founding mind," as we may read in the marbles of Pæstum and Selinus and in the deathless pages of Thucydides; and a second time under the Norman princes and their Hohenstaufen successors, creators of an extraordinarily vigorous and precocious state and a brilliant cosmopolitan culture. If our interest in this brief period of Sicilian greatness be not Norman, it is at least human, as in one of the culminating points of Mediterranean civilization.

It must be emphasized at the outset that the history of this Norman kingdom was brief. It had two rulers of genius, Roger II, 1130–54, and his grandson Frederick II, 1198–1250, separated by the reigns of William the Bad and William the Good,—contemporaries of Henry II of England, and neither so bad nor so good