Page:The Normans in European History.djvu/240

 need of dealing wisely and effectively with the various peoples of the kingdom necessitated the employment of men familiar with each of them, and the maintenance of a secretarial bureau which issued documents in Greek and Arabic as well as in Latin.

It was in the central administration that Roger II faced his freshest problem, which was nothing less than the creation of a strong central government for a kingdom which had never before been united under a single resident ruler. His method was frankly eclectic. We are told that he made a point of inquiring carefully into the practices of other kings and countries and adopting anything in them which seemed to him valuable, and that he drew to his court from every land, regardless of speech and faith, men who were wise in counsel or distinguished in war, among whom the brilliant admiral George of Antioch is a conspicuous example. Nevertheless we should err if we thought of him as making a mere artificial composite. The Calabria of his youth had preserved a stiff tradition of Byzantine administration, and the Mohammedans of Sicily had an even stronger bureaucracy at work. Roger's capital was at Palermo, and it was natural that the Greek and Saracen institutions of Sicily and Calabria should prove the formative influences in his government as it was extended to the newly acquired and less centralized regions of the mainland. There was free adaptation and use of experience, but the loose feudal methods of the