The Kingdom in the Sun (19 page)

And yet, from the time of the Sicilian conquest up to the point we have now reached in this story, the Greeks had played a vital part in the building of the new nation. First, they had kept the balance between Christian and Muslim on which the whole future of Norman Sicily depended. Roger's father the Great Count had encouraged Latin immigration, both ecclesiastical and secular, as far as he dared, but he could not allow too much too quickly for fear of frightening the Greek and Arab communities and turning them against him. Besides, such immigration brought its own dangers. If it had not been kept under rigid control there would have been nothing to stop swarms of swaggering Norman barons from the mainland pouring into Sicily, demanding to be given fiefs in keeping with their rank and station and gradually reducing the island to that chaos which always seemed to follow in their wake.

Without the Greeks, then, the Christian element during those early days might have been swamped altogether. But they also performed another invaluable function. They neatly counterbalanced the claims of the Latin Church, and provided both Count Roger and his son with a powerful bargaining—if not actually blackmailing —counter in their dealings with Rome. It seems in the highest degree improbable that there was any foundation for the rumours, current at the end of the 1090s, that the Great Count was seriously contemplating a conversion to Orthodoxy; but it is a good deal likelier that Roger II, at various moments in his long quarrel with Pope Innocent, may have considered renouncing the pontifical authority altogether in favour of some kind of loose caesaropapism on the Byzantine model. What is certain is that in
1143
the Greek Archimandrite Nilus Doxopatrius of Palermo dedicated to Roger—with the King's full consent—a 'Treatise on the Patriarchal Thrones', arguing that with the transfer of the imperial capital in
a.d.
330
and the recognition of Constantinople as the 'New Rome' by the Council of Chalcedon in
451,
the Pope had lost his ecclesiastical primacy, which now properly belonged to the Byzantine Patriarch.

But now, as the twelfth century nears its half-way mark, the situation can be seen to have changed. Sicily, first of all, has grown steadily richer; and as her prosperity has increased, so too has her political stability. In contrast to the endemic confusion of the Italian peninsula, the island has become a paragon of just and enlightened government, peaceable and law-abiding, an amalgam of races and languages which seems to give strength rather than weakness ; and,
a6
its reputation grows, more and more churchmen and administrators, scholars and merchants and unashamed adventurers are drawn across the sea from England, France and Italy to settle in what must have seemed to many of them a veritable Eldorado, a Kingdom in the sun. Meanwhile the importance of the Greek community has begun to decline. It is inevitable that it should. With no comparable immigration from abroad to sustain it, it is increasingly outnumbered by the Latin. In the prevailing atmosphere of religious toleration and easy coexistence, its value as a bulwark against Islam is negligible. Finally, Roger has now established so firm a control over his Latin Church that he has no longer any need for a counterbalance.

Not that there was any discrimination against the Greeks. In view of the mixed feelings with which the Hautevilles had always regarded the Byzantine Empire—admiration for its institutions and its art, distrust laced with more than a tinge of jealousy in every other field—they might have been excused for treating as second-class citizens a foreign minority whose political and confessional loyalties were openly divided. But they never did so. Roger and his successors continued to support their Greek subjects whenever their support was necessary; they never lost their concern for the welfare of the Greeks, or of their Church. The great and distinguished line of Greek admirals continued throughout the century; at least until the end of Roger's reign the whole fiscal system of Norman Sicily remained in Greek and Arab hands.
¹
It was just that the emphasis had shifted. Though from the outset subordinated to the Latin hierarchy, large numbers of Basilian monasteries had sprung up over the past fifty years, notably
S.
Maria del Patirion near Rossano in Calabria
²
—founded by the Regent Adelaide at the beginning of the century—and its daughter-house, the monastery of the Saviour at Messina, established some thirty years later. But the Saviour, soon to be the chief of all the Greek monasteries in Sicily, was also the last. Henceforth the royal favours would be lavished on the new Latin houses—S. Giovanni degli Eremiti and, later, Maniace and Monreale.

Fortunately the way was still wide open for private patronage; and it is fitting that the sublimest legacy of the Greek Church in all Sicily, the only one that still possesses a beauty comparable to that of the Palatine Chapel and the cathedral of Cefalù, should have been

¹
It is noteworthy that, as Miss Evelyn Jamison points out
(Admiral Eugenius of Sicily,
p. 40), 'No men of Latin culture seem up to this time to have been employed in positions high or low by the central offices of finance'.

²
Visitors to Rossano are usually content to inspect the Byzantine church of S. Marco and the Archbishop's Palace, home of the justly-famed sixth-century purple codex. They would be well advised to make the short detour to S. Maria, lying up in the hills on the way to the neighbouring town of Corigliano. The monastery buildings are in ruins, but the church itself is still there, with a superb mosaic pavement which alone is worth the visit.

founded, built and endowed by the most brilliant of all the Greeks in the Kingdom's history.

Though the original and rightful name of his church, S. Maria del Ammiraglio, stands as a perpetual monument to its founder, George of Antioch had no need of such memorials to ensure himself a place in history. We first meet him as the gifted young Levantine who, after early service with the Zirid Sultans of Mahdia, transferred his loyalties to Sicily and in
1123
used his perfect Arabic and unrivalled knowledge of the Tunisian coast to score the only victory in Roger's first, ill-fated African expedition.
¹
Since then, as commander of the Sicilian navy, he had served his King with distinction on both land and sea, becoming in
113
2 the first holder of the proudest title his adopted country had to offer—Emir of Emirs, the high admiral and chief minister of the realm.
²
Despite so distinguished a career, however, his work on the church must not be thought of as the occupation of his declining years, still less of his retirement. In
1143,
the year it was endowed, he must have been in his early fifties; within weeks of the endowment he and his fleet were off on another North African adventure, more successful this time; while before he died he was to carry the Sicilian flag to the banks of the Bosphorus itself, returning to Palermo with all the secrets—and many of the leading craftsmen—of the Byzantine silk industry.

But however secure the great admiral may be in his immortality, it still seems a little unfair that the shorter and more usual name for his church should commemorate not him but an infinitely dimmer figure—one Geoffrey de Marturanu, the founder in 1146 of a nearby Benedictine nunnery with which, some three centuries later, George's church was amalgamated. Nor, alas, have the changes been confined to its name. The Martorana—for so, under protest, it must be called from now on—no longer displays any outward sign of its origins. Once, its exterior too was beautiful. On Christmas Day,

¹
The Normans in the South,
pp. 299-302.

²
It is perhaps worth recalling in this second volume a point already made in the first, namely that the word
Admiral,
current with minor variations in so many European languages, is derived through Norman Sicily from the Arabic
word
Emir;
and in particular from its compound
Emir-al-Bahr,
Ruler of the Sea.

1
184,
it was visited by the Arab traveller Ibn Jubair on his way back from a pilgrimage to Mecca. He wrote:

We noted a most remarkable facade, which we could not possibly describe and on which we would fain keep silent, since it is the most beautiful work in the world.
...
It has a bell-tower supported on columns of marble, surmounted by a dome resting on further columns. It is one of the most marvellous constructions ever to be seen. May Allah in his mercy and goodness soon honour this building with the sound of the muezzin's call!

Looking at the outside of the Martorana today, one almost wishes that Ibn Jubair's pious supplication had been granted. His coreligionists could hardly have done worse with it than the Christians. The facade itself he would no longer recognise; in sad contrast to that of the adjoining church of
S.
Cataldo, whose three heavy cupolas unmistakably if somewhat congestedly proclaim it as a Norman building of the mid-twelfth century, this jewel of all Sicilian churches—as opposed to cathedrals or chapels—has been decked out in lugubrious baroque. Only the romanesque bell-tower, domeless since an earthquake in
1726
but still beautifully proportioned, remains to beckon the traveller within.

There, too, all is not as it was. To accommodate the increasing numbers of nuns, a programme of reconstruction and enlargement was undertaken towards the end of the sixteenth century, and all through the seventeenth the grim work went on. The west wall was knocked down, the former atrium and narthex incorporated into the main body of the church. More unforgivable still, the main apse was demolished in
1683
with all its mosaics, to be replaced by a frescoed
capellone,
the hideousness of which all the efforts of nineteenth-century restorers have been powerless to diminish.

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
11
55. 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