The Kingdom in the Sun (20 page)

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 divans
¹
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