Page:The Normans in European History.djvu/259

 than Frederick II, and of him Freeman has said that, though qualified by genius to start some great movement or begin some new era, he seemed fated to stand at the end of everything which he touched the mediæval empire, the Sicilian kingdom, the Norman-Hohenstaufen line. In the field of government these statements are in the main true: the rapid changes of dynasties and the deep political decline into which the south ultimately fell destroyed the unity of its political development and nullified the work of Norman state-building, so that the enduring results of Norman statesmanship and Norman law must be sought in the north and not in Italy. That, however, is not the whole of the story, and in the field of culture influences less palpable, but none the less real, flowed from the Norman stream into the general currents of European civilization. So long as the Renaissance of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was looked upon as simply the negation of the Middle Ages by a return to classical antiquity, figures such as King Roger and Frederick II were merely 'sports,' isolated flashes of genius and modernity without any relation to their own times or to the greater movement which followed. Since, however, we have come to view the Renaissance in its larger aspects as far more than a classical revival, its relations to the Middle Ages are seen to have been much more intimate