The Kingdom in the Sun (21 page)

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 11
39
; 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
11
54, 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.

²
As the French translation puts it,
Il
entre aussitot en erection d'une maniere inaccoutume
—whatever that may mean.

flourishing towns, high mountains, great rivers and plains. This country is most fertile; its inhabitants are brave, active and enterprising, but all is in the grip of perpetual winter.

Though Roger's court circle was by no means entirely composed of Arabs like Edrisi, they probably constituted the largest single group; while among the Europeans there were many who had been attracted to Palermo by very reason of its predominantly Arab flavour. There was nothing new in this. Unlike Christianity, Islam had never drawn a distinction between sacred and profane knowledge. During the Dark Ages, when the Church of Rome—following the dire example of Gregory the Great—feared and even actively discouraged secular studies, good Muslims remembered how the Prophet himself had enjoined his Faithful to pursue knowledge all their lives, 'even if the quest led them to China', for 'he who travels in search of learning travels along Allah's path to Paradise'. Muslim civilisation had thus for years been recognised in the West as superior to anything that Christian Europe could boast, especially in the field of mathematics and the physical sciences. Arabic had become the international scientific language
par excellence.
Moreover there were a number of classical works of learning, both Greek and Latin, which had been lost to Christendom through the barbarian invasions or the engulfing tide of Islam and survived only in Arabic translation. By the twelfth century, owing largely to the work of the Sephardic Jews of Spain, some of these were beginning to reappear in western languages; but this did not appreciably diminish the need for any serious student of science to master Arabic for himself.

Yet it was a diabolically difficult language to learn and, in northern Europe at any rate, competent teachers were few. Thus, for half a century and more, men had been travelling to Spain and Sicily, there to unlock, as they hoped, the secrets of the Muslim world—poor clerks, seeking knowledge that would single them out from their fellows and so clear their path to advancement; dreaming alchemists, combing volumes of oriental lore for formulas of the elixir of life or the philosophers' stone; or true scholars like Adelard of Bath, pioneer of Arab studies in England and the greatest name in English science before Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon, who came to Sicily in the first years of the century and was later to restore Euclid's
Elements,
retranslated by him from the Arabic, to the cultural heritage of Europe.

For certain more specialised fields of enquiry these early Arabists continued to gravitate towards Muslim Spain and in particular to the school of Toledo, which had long been the spearhead of the international scientific renaissance. For others, however, Sicily possessed one overwhelming advantage: while culturally still very much part of the Arab world, it also remained in perpetual contact with the Greek East. In the libraries of Palermo, to say nothing of all the Basilian monasteries in the island and in Calabria, scholars could find the Greek originals of works known in Spain only in extracts, or in translations of doubtful accuracy. Nowadays we tend to forget that, until this twelfth-century revival of interest in ancient learning, western Europe was virtually ignorant of Greek: and Roger's Sicily now became the foremost centre of Hellenic studies outside Byzantium itself. But in Byzantium Arabic culture was unknown and mistrusted. Only in Sicily could both civilisations be studied at first hand and employed to explain, complement and cross-fertilise each other. Small wonder, then, that seekers after truth should flock in such numbers to Palermo and that the island should have established itself by mid-century as not only the commercial but also the cultural clearing-house of three continents.

Once again, all this activity was centred on the person of the King. Roger has been accused of being himself uncreative, in contrast to his grandson Frederick II for example, or even to Richard Cceur de Lion, a troubadour poet of considerable ability. It is true that he left no literary compositions of his own; it would have been remarkable if he had, since that marvellous flowering of European vernacular literature that had already begun in Provence had not yet spread further afield. Such poets as flourished in Palermo in his day—and there were many—were nearly all Arabs. Besides, the King's personal preference was for the sciences. Beauty he loved, but splendour too; and one suspects that he did not find
it
easy in every case to distinguish one from the other. Anyway, he loved knowledge more.

Yet to say that he was not creative is to ignore the fact that without him the unique cultural phenomenon that was twelfth-century Sicily could never have occurred. So diversified a nation needed a guiding hand to give it purpose, to weld its various elements into one. Intellectually as well as politically, Roger provided that hand. In a very real sense, he
was
Sicily. His was the conception, his the incentive; he and only he could have created the favourable climate that was a precondition of all the rest. Enlightened yet always discriminating, he was the first royal patron, focusing the efforts and energies of those around him, never once losing sight of his eternal objective—the greatness and glory of the Kingdom.

We have captured the fortifications, that is the towers and palaces of the mighty of the City who, together with the Sicilian and the Pope, were preparing to offer resistance to your authority. . . . We pray you therefore to come without delay. . . . The Pope has entrusted his staff and ring, his dalmatic, mitre and sandals to the Sicilian . . . and the Sicilian has given him much money for your hurt and to injure the Roman Empire, which by God's grace is yours.

Letter from Conrad of Hohenstaufen to the Emperor John
II
Comnenus
¹

On
24 September
1143
Pope Innocent II died in Rome. He was buried in the Lateran, in that same porphyry sarcophagus that had once held the remains of the Emperor Hadrian; but after a disastrous fire in the early fourteenth century his remains were moved to the church of S. Maria in Trastevere which he himself had rebuilt just before his death. There, self-immortalised in the great apse mosaic, he stares down at us from the conch, his church clutched in his hands, a strangely wistful expression in his sad, tired eyes.