Page:The Normans in European History.djvu/254

 There were lacking in the twelfth century the poetic and imaginative elements which flourished at the court of Frederick II, but on the scientific and philosophical sides there is clear continuity in the intellectual history of the south from Roger II and William to Frederick II and Manfred. At one point it is even probable that an actual material connection can be traced, for the collection of Greek manuscripts upon which Manfred set great store seems to have had its origin in codices brought from Constantinople to Palermo under the first Norman kings; and as Manfred's library probably passed into the possession of the Popes, it became the basis of the oldest collection of Greek manuscripts in the Europe of the humanists. Within its limits the intellectual movement at the court of King Roger and his son had many of the elements of a renaissance, and like the great revival of the fourteenth century, it owed much to princely favor. It was at the kings' request that translations were undertaken and the works of Neilos and Edrisi written, and it was no accident that two such scholars as Aristippus and Eugene of Palermo occupied high places in the royal administration. In their patronage of learning, as well as in the enlightened and anti-feudal character of their government, the Sicilian sovereigns, from Roger to Frederick II, belong to the age of the new statecraft and the humanistic revival.

The art of the Sicilian kingdom, like its learning and