The Kingdom in the Sun

by John Julius Norwich

  Such, then, is the modern Martorana. The eastern extremity is lost, the western bays ought never to have occurred. Miraculously, however, between the two, George's old church has remained, preserving its traditional Byzantine cross-in-square ground-plan and looking still much as it did when it was first consecrated or when, forty-odd years later, it had so alarming an effect on Ibn Jubair:

  The walls within are gilded—or rather, they are made from one great piece of gold. There are slabs of coloured marble, the like of which we have never seen, picked out with golden mosaic and surmounted with, as it were, branches of trees in green mosaic. Great suns of gilded glass ranged along the top blaze with a light that dazzled our eyes and caused us such perturbation of the spirit that we implored Allah to preserve us. We learned that the founder, who gave his name to the Church, devoted many quintals of gold to its building, and that he was vizir to the grandfather of this polytheist King.1

  Like most of those at Cefalù and the best of those in the Palatine Chapel, the mosaics of the Martorana were all the work of a single team of superb artists and craftsmen imported by Roger II from Constantinople and working in Sicily between 1140 and 1155. Unlike either of the other groups, they contain no later additions. All three show a close interrelation; yet each, unbelievably, has a style of its own. Dr Otto Demus, the most eminent living expert on the mosaics of Norman Sicily, has compared them thus:

  The mosaicists of Cefalù, confronted with the task of decorating the high commanding apse of a large cathedral, achieved the quiet grandeur which was called for; the artists of the Palatina, who had to decorate a court chapel, expressed themselves in an elaborate and festive style, full of royal splendour, but lacking something of the classic beauty and simplicity of Cefalù. And the workmen who adorned the private foundation of the Admiral adapted themselves to the intimacy of the small church, condensing and simplifying their models and attaining the most perfect charm which can be found in any surviving mediaeval decoration on Italian soil. This quality was not impaired by the fact that they sometimes followed the work of their colleagues in the two royal churches. They gave as it were the quintessence of what was gentle and lovely and intimate in the great art of Comnenian mosaic decoration.2

  Only the mosaics in the cupola itself strike one as faintly dis­appointing. Enthroned and depicted at full length, the Pantocrator

  1 Ibn Jubair was writing in the reign of Roger's grandson, William the Good. To devout Muslims all Christians were polytheists. As believers in the Trinity, what else could they be ?

  2 The Mosaics of Norman Sicily.

  has lost much of the majesty that he shows in the Palatine Chapel, to say nothing of Cefalù; and the four archangels beneath him, bending forward in postures which, Dr Demus assures us, are 'without parallel in Byzantine, or indeed in mediaeval art', have bodies so fantastically distorted as to border on the ridiculous. But drop your eyes now to the supporting walls. Look east to the Annun­ciation, with Gabriel in a slanting swirl of movement, Mary serene with her spindle as the holy dove flutters towards her. Look west to the Presentation in the Temple, the outstretched arms of the infant Saviour on one side and those of St Simeon on the other bridging the entrance to the nave as perfectly as does the great arch they frame. Within its vault, Christ is born and, opposite, the Virgin dies—her soul, like another swaddled child, is carried reverently up by her Son. Lastly, settle in some comfortable corner and look at everything at once while the dark, glowing gold does its work, irradiating the spirit like a soft and gentle fire.

  Barely perceptible among that gold, running along the base of the dome beneath the feet of the adoring archangels, you may just discern a narrow wooden frieze. After centuries in darkness, it was only when the restoration work at the end of the last century let the light back into the dome that it was rediscovered and found to bear traces of an inscription—an old Byzantine hymn in honour of the Virgin. Since the Martorana is a Greek church there would be nothing extraordinary about that, but for one fact—the inscription is in Arabic. Why it was translated we shall never know. Perhaps the wooden surround was the work of Arab Christians —Arabs were always the best carpenters—and this was their con­tribution to the church. But there is another, more intriguing, possibility—that this hymn was the particular favourite of George of Antioch himself, and that he loved it best in the language in which he had heard it first, half a century before, in his Syrian boy­hood.

  And now, as you leave the original church, running the gauntlet of those simpering cherubs and marzipan madonnas that mark the real dark ages of European religious art, pause for a moment at a western-facing wall on the north side of the nave near the entrance; and there, in what was probably the narthex of George's building, you will find, glittering wanly in the half-light, his portrait.1 It is a dedication mosaic, with the admiral, looking old beyond his years and distinctly oriental, prostrating himself before the Virgin. His body has unfortunately been damaged at some period, and the damage compounded by a clumsy restoration which has given him the appearance of a tortoise; but the head is the original work— presumably done from the life—and almost the entire figure of the Virgin has come down to us unscathed. Her right hand is extended towards him, as if to raise him up; and in her left she holds a scroll on which there is written in Greek:

  Child, holy Word, do Thou ever preserve from all adversity George, first among the archons, who has raised this my house from its foundations; and grant him the forgiveness of his sins as Thou only, O God, hast power to do.

  Across the nave, in the corresponding space on the southern wall, is the Martorana's last and perhaps its greatest treasure—a mosaic portrait of King Roger himself, being symbolically crowned by Christ.2 There he stands, bending slightly forward, a purely Byzan­tine figure in his long dalmatic and stole, his crown with jewelled pendants in the manner of Constantinople; even his arms are raised from the elbows in the Greek attitude of prayer. Above his head, great black letters stride across the gold to proclaim him. POTEPIOC PHE, they read, Rogerios Rex. This uncompromis­ing use of Greek letters for a Latin word is less curious than it might seem; by Roger's time the normal Greek word for king, basileus, was so identified with the Byzantine Emperor that it would have been unthinkable in this context. And yet the simple fact of transliteration makes an impact of its own and— particularly after one has spotted the Arabic inscription on an adjacent pillar—seems to diffuse the whole spirit of Norman Sicily.

  This, too, is a portrait from the life; indeed, apart from coins and seals which are too small to give much information and are anyway

  1 Plate 9. 2 Plate 10.

  mainly symbolical, it is the only surviving likeness of the King which we can safely assume to be authentic.1 Without it we should have nothing to go on but the evidence of Archbishop Romuald of Salerno, a man with a genius for uninformative description. He writes merely that Roger was tall, corpulent, with a leonine face— whatever that may mean—and a voice that was subrauca; hoarse, perhaps or harsh, or just vaguely disagreeable. The mosaic tells us far more. It shows a dark, swarthy man on the brink of middle age, with a full beard and long thick hair flowing to his shoulders. The face itself might be Greek, or it might be Italian; it even has a faintly Semitic cast about it. Anything less like the traditional idea of a Norman knight could scarcely be imagined.

  It is always dangerous to read too much of a character into a portrait, particularly when the sitter is already familiar and the portraitist unknown. Dangerous, but irresistible. And even in some­thing so hieratic and formalised as the Martorana mosaic, there are certain inspired touches, certain infinitesimal adjustments and grada­tions of the tesserae, that bring King Roger to life again before us. Here, surely, is the southerner and the oriental, the ruler of subtle mind and Umitless flexibility whose life is spent playing one faction off against another; the statesman to whom diplomacy, however tortuous, is a more natural weapon than the sword, and gold, how­ever corrupting, a more effective currency than blood. Here
is the patron of the sciences, the lover of the arts who could stop in the middle of a desperate campaign to admire the beauty of Alife, stronghold of his arch-enemy. Here, finally, is the intellectual who has thought deeply about the science of government and rules with the head and not the heart; the idealist without delusions; the despot,

  1 The only other contemporary portrait to have come down to us—unless we include the figure on the Paschal candlestick in the Palatine Chapel—is on a curious enamel plaque in the church of St Nicholas at Bari. It depicts Roger's coronation by St Nicholas and was probably the origin of the church's one-time claim that he was crowned there and not in Palermo. (His reputed crown, an immense circle of iron and copper more suited to a barrel than a human head, is also displayed there with some pride.) This is not the place to enquire into the origins of the plaque, on which there is an interesting paper by Bertaux which I have listed in the bibliography. The portrait may be from the life, but was more likely copied from another, now lost. The essential physical features appear much the same as on the Martorana mosaic.

  by nature just and merciful, who has learned, sadly, that even mercy must sometimes be tempered in the interests of justice.

  The Assizes of Ariano set the seal on the Peace. The years before 1140 were the years of storm, when the thunderclouds hung black over the mainland and when Sicily itself, for all its prosperity, was unable altogether to escape their shadow. Afterwards, the sky lightens. It is only in the last fourteen years of Roger's reign that the sun really shines on his Kingdom.

  And the Kingdom responds. We have seen how suddenly the art of Norman Sicily, like some rare subtropical orchid after long seasons of germination, at this moment bursts into glory. So, no less spectacularly, does the court of Palermo. Already at the dme of his coronation Roger had inherited from his father a civil service, based eclectically on Norman, Greek, Latin and Arab models, which compared favourably with that of any western nation. When he died, he left his successors a governmental machine that was the wonder and envy of Europe. Under the Emir of Emirs and the Curia, two separate land registries—known as divans1 after their Fatimid prototypes and staffed almost exclusively by Saracens— supervised the gathering of revenues from customs, monopolies and feudal holdings in Sicily and on the mainland. Another branch of the financial administration, the camera, was based on the old fiscus of the Roman Empire and administered by Greeks; a third followed the model of the Anglo-Norman Exchequer. Provincial government was in the hands of the Chancellors of the Kingdom, the camerarii, and below them the local governors—Latin bailiffs, Greek catapans, or Saracen amil, selected according to the race and language predominant in their district. To avoid corruption or peculation, the very lowest officials had direct access to the Curia or even, on occasion, to the King himself. Wandering justiciars, magistrates condemned to perpetual circuit, had responsibility for administering the criminal law, with the assistance of varying num­bers of boni homines—good men and true—both Christian and Muslim, often sitting together in what was in effect the forerunner

  1 From which comes the Italian word dogana and, through it, the French douane.

  of the modern jury. They too had the right to refer appeals to the King when necessary.

  The King: always, everywhere, his people were reminded of his presence, his power, his paradoxical combination of accessibility and remoteness. Himself half-way to Heaven, there was no abuse, no miscarriage of justice too insignificant for his attention, if it could not be settled by those empowered to act in his name. How­ever ubiquitous his representatives, however efficient his machine, neither they nor it were ever permitted to come between himself and the day-to-day work of administration, still less to detract from the mystique that surrounded him, that aura of divine majesty on which, he well knew, the cohesion of his Kingdom depended. It was not for nothing that he had been depicted, in the Martorana, as being crowned by Christ himself.

  Emirs, seneschals, archons, logothetes, protonotarii, protonobilissimi—even the titles of the high palace dignitaries seemed to add to the pervading splendour. Yet it takes more than civil servants, whatever their disguise, to give brilliance to a court; and Roger's

  court at Palermo was easily the most brilliant of twelfth-century Europe. The King himself was famous for his insatiable intellectual

  curiosity and his passion for facts. (When, in 1140, he had made his formal entry into Naples, he had astounded the Neapolitans by

  informing them of the exact length of their land walls—2,363 paces, a figure of which, not perhaps altogether surprisingly, none of

  them was aware.) With this curiosity went a profound respect for learning, unique among his fellow-princes.1 By the 1140s he had

  given a permanent home in Palermo to many of the foremost scholars and scientists, doctors and philosophers, geographers

  and mathematicians of Europe and the Arab world; and as the years went by he would spend more and more of his time in their

  company. Outside his immediate family—and he had been many years a widower—it was with them above all that he was able

  to cast off some of his regality; we are told that whenever any scholar entered the royal presence, Roger would rise from his chair

  1 Henry I of England was admittedly well-educated by the standards of the time—a fact which was considered remarkable enough to earn him the nickname of Beauclerk. But Henry made no effort to form a cultivated court around him, as Roger did.

  and move forward to meet him, then take him by the hand and sit him down at his side. During the learned discussions that followed, whether in French, Latin, Greek or Arabic, he seems to have been well able to hold his own.

  In mathematics, as in the political sphere, the extent of his learning cannot be described. Nor is there any limit to his knowledge of the sciences, so deeply and wisely has he studied them in every particu­lar. He is responsible for singular innovations and for marvellous inventions, such as no prince has ever before realised.

  Those words were written by Abu Abdullah Mohammed al-Edrisi, Roger's close friend and, of all the palace scholars, the one whom he most admired. Edrisi had arrived in Palermo in 1139; he was to remain there during much of his life, for fifteen years heading a commission set up by order of the King to gather geographical information from all quarters, correlate it, record it in orderly form, and so ultimately to produce one compendious work which would contain the sum total of all contemporary knowledge of the physical world. Sicily, standing at the crossroads of three continents, her ports as busy and as cosmopolitan as any in Europe, made an ideal centre from which such a work could be undertaken, and for all those fifteen years scarcely a ship put in at Palermo or Messina, Catania or Syracuse, without those on board being examined as to every place they had ever visited, its climate and its people. Their interrogators in the first instance were most likely to be official agents of the commission; but any traveller who had outstandingly valuable information to impart was liable to find himself conducted forthwith to the royal palace, there to be further cross-questioned by Edrisi or even, on occasion, by Roger himself.

  The results of this work, which was completed in January 1154, barely a month before the King's death, were twofold. The first was a huge planisphere of purest silver, weighing no less than four hundred and fifty Roman pounds, on which was engraved the configuration of the seven climates with that of the regions, coun­tries, sea-coasts both near and distant, gulfs, seas and watercourses; the location of deserts and of cultivated lands, and their respective distances by normal routes in miles or other known measures; and the designation of ports.' One would give much for this magnificent object to have been preserved; alas, it was to be destroyed during the riots of the following reign, within a few years of its completion.

  But the second, and perhaps ultimately the more valuable fruit of Edrisi's labours has come down to us in its entirety. It is a book, properly entitled The Avocation of a Man Desirous of a Full Knowledge of the Different Countries of
the World but more generally known as The Book of Roger; and it is the greatest geographical work of the Middle Ages. On the very first page we read the words:

  The earth is round like a sphere, and the waters adhere to it and are maintained on it through natural equilibrium which suffers no varia­tion.

  As might be expected, The Book of Roger emerges as a combination of hard topographical facts—many of them astonishingly accurate for a work produced three and a half centuries before Columbus— and travellers' tales; but even the latter suggest that they have been subjected to stern critical appraisal. This is, after all, a scientific work, and we are never allowed to forget it; there is no room for tall stories unless they have at least some claim to veracity. But the author, on his side, never loses his sense of wonder, and the book makes fascinating reading.1 We learn, for example, about the queen of Merida in Spain, who had all her meals floated to her by water, or about the Chahria fish of the Black Sea and the unfortunate effect which it has on the local fisherman who catches it in his net.2 We are told how during the Russian winter the days are so short that there is hardly time to perform all the five obligatory prayers, and how the Norwegians—some of whom are born totally without necks—harvest their corn when it is still green, drying it at their hearths 'since the sun shines very rarely upon them'. Of England we read:

  England is set in the Ocean of Darkness. It is a considerable island, whose shape is that of the head of an ostrich, and where there are

  1 There is, so far as I know, no English translation. A French one exists and is listed in the bibliography.