Page:The Normans in European History.djvu/252

 of the twelfth century, found a Latin bishop of Syracuse skilled in all the mathematical arts, a Greek philosopher of Magna Græcia who discoursed on natural philosophy, and the greatest medical school of Europe in the old Lombard capital at Salerno, early famed as the city of Hippocrates and the seat of the oldest university in the West. A generation later, another Englishman, the humanist John of Salisbury, studies philosophy with a Greek interpreter in Apulia and drinks the heavy wines of the Sicilian chancellor; while still others profit by translations of Greek philosophical and mathematical works from the Italian libraries. The distinctive element in southern learning lay, however, not on the Latin side, but in its immediate contact with Greek and Arabic scholarship, and the chief meeting-point of these various currents of culture was the royal court at Palermo, direct heir to the civilization of Saracen Sicily.

The Sicilian court, like the kingdom, was many-tongued and cosmopolitan, its praises being sung alike by Arabic travellers and poets, by grave Byzantine ecclesiastics, and by Latin scholars of Italy and the north. A Greek archimandrite, Neilos Doxopatrios, produced at King Roger's request a History of the Five Patriarchates directed against the supremacy of the Pope of Rome; a Saracen, Edrisi, prepared under his direction the greatest treatise of Arabic geography,