Page:The Normans in European History.djvu/249

 The culture of the Norman kingdom was even more strikingly composite than its government. Both historically and geographically Sicily was the natural meeting-point of Greek, Arabic, and Latin civilization, and a natural avenue for the transmission of eastern art and learning to the West. Moreover, in the intellectual field the splendor of the Sicilian kingdom coincides with that movement which is often called the renaissance of the twelfth century and which consisted in considerable measure in the acquisition of new knowledge from the Greeks of the East and the Saracens of Sicily and Spain. Sicily was not the only channel through which the wisdom of the East flowed westward, for there were scholars from northern Italy who visited Constantinople and there was a steady diffusion of Saracen learning through the schools of Spain. Nowhere else, however, did Latin, Greek, and Arabic civilization live side by side in peace and toleration, and nowhere else was the spirit of the renaissance more clearly expressed in the policy of the rulers.

The older Latin culture of the southern kingdom had its centre and in large measure its source at Monte Cassino, mother of the Benedictine monasteries throughout the length and breadth of western Christendom. Founded by St. Benedict in 529, this establishment still maintains the unique record of fourteen centuries of monastic history and of more than forty generations of followers of the Benedictine rule, keeping age after age