Kingdom of Sicily

A crown from an antipope

Drafted from Matthew, Cambridge Medieval Textbooks (1992)formation

The Hautevilles were minor Norman gentry from the Cotentin. Several sons of one Tancred de Hauteville went south as mercenaries in the 1030s and 1040s, hired by whoever was fighting in southern Italy — Lombard princes, the papacy, the Byzantines — and by the end of the century their family held the whole of the south, having taken it from all three employers in turn.

Robert Guiscard took Bari, the last Byzantine city in Italy, in 1071. His brother Roger I took Palermo the same year and spent thirty more finishing the conquest of Muslim Sicily, an island that had been under Islamic rule since an Aghlabid army landed in 827.

Roger's son inherited a county in Sicily, acquired the mainland duchy when the Guiscard line failed, and in 1130 wanted a crown.

The grant

There were two popes in 1130. Anacletus II needed a protector in Italy and Roger needed a title, and the bargain was made in the obvious way: Anacletus issued a bull creating the kingdom of Sicily and Roger was crowned at Palermo on Christmas Day.

The other pope, Innocent II, had the support of most of Latin Europe and spent nine years refusing to recognise any of it. In 1139 he came south with an army to settle the matter, was ambushed at Galluccio, and was taken prisoner. Roger released him at Mignano in exchange for a bull confirming the royal title, the duchy of Apulia for his son, and the principality of Capua for another.

So the kingdom of Sicily was created by a pope most of Europe did not recognise, and confirmed nine years later by the pope who did, at swordpoint, as the price of his release. Roger's title rested throughout on a grant from an outside authority rather than on any claim of his own — which is the ordinary condition of a conquering house with no lineage worth invoking, and which the Hautevilles were unembarrassed about.

What they took care over was that somebody with the standing to confer it had conferred it. Whether he had wanted to was a separate question.

Why the papacy kept granting

Because the alternative was worse. The kingdom sat directly south of the papal territories, it was the only power that could threaten Rome quickly, and it was also the only one that could protect the papacy from the German emperors who periodically came over the Alps to deal with it.

For most of the following sixty years the arrangement held: the Sicilian kings were papal vassals in form, paid a token census, and were the papacy's military guarantee against the German emperors. It broke in 1194, when the two crowns ended up on one head.

Five horsemen and thirty foot

Drafted from Komnene, The Alexiad (1928)formation

The fullest surviving portrait of the man whose family took southern Italy was written by the daughter of the emperor he was trying to depose.

Anna Komnene wrote her father's life half a century after the events, and Robert Guiscard is the villain of its opening books, because in 1081 he crossed the Adriatic with an army and nearly took the Byzantine empire's western provinces off it. She hated him. She also could not stop admiring him, and the two impulses are visible in the same paragraph.

This Robert was Norman by descent, of insignificant origin, in temper tyrannical, in mind most cunning, brave in action, very clever in attacking the wealth and substance of magnates, most obstinate in achievement, for he did not allow any obstacle to prevent his executing his desire.

Then the physical description, which she says she had repeatedly from many who had seen him: taller than the tallest, ruddy, flaxen-haired, broad-shouldered, his eyes all but emitting sparks of fire, well-proportioned from tip to toe. And then Homer — Achilles shouted and his hearers thought a multitude was in an uproar, but this man's cry is said to have put thousands to flight. Powerful natures are ever like this, people say, even though they be of somewhat obscure descent.

How the family started

Anna's account of how Guiscard began is the reason to read her on this. She is not describing a conquering prince. She is describing a bandit.

He would not endure any control, she says, so he left Normandy with five followers on horseback and thirty on foot, all told. He then roamed the mountain ridges, caves and hills of Lombardy as the chief of a robber band, acquiring horses, weapons and other possessions by attacking travellers. Thus the prelude of this man's life was marked by much bloodshed and many murders.

He came to the notice of a regional lord named Gulielmus Mascabeles, who admired his strength and experience in war, attached him to his household, betrothed a daughter to him, and gave him a city as a wedding present — with a wonderful lack of foresight, Anna notes. Robert spent the next years quietly trebling his cavalry and doubling his infantry, then manufactured quarrels, and then, since his father-in-law far surpassed him in wealth and influence, decided against meeting him in open battle and arranged a conference instead.

The scene she gives is a short story. Two hills of equal height facing each other across swampy ground; four picked men hidden in the scrub; Robert on the wrong hill with fifty-six foot and fifteen horse; a man detailed to hold his helmet, shield and sword ready. The two lords meet on the slope, embrace, and talk. Robert draws the conversation out, and then suggests that they are tiring themselves on horseback and might sit on the ground and speak freely. Mascabeles dismounts; his men, seeing the principals sitting, tie their horses to branches and lie down in the shade, because it is high summer and they are hungry and thirsty. Robert professes fealty for the future and calls his father-in-law his faithful benefactor and lord.

And then, in Anna's words, the sly fox throws himself on him.

The war

That is the method the family brought to Italy, and Anna gives an equally exact account of how it was used against her own.

Robert needed a pretext to invade the empire. He found a monk called Raictor and put it about that this was the emperor Michael VII, deposed, robbed of his wife and son, and dressed in a monk's habit instead of a crown by a usurper — and now come as a suppliant. Since a daughter of Robert's had actually been betrothed to Michael's son and was shut up in Constantinople, the kinship argument had a real foundation to stand on.

He then, in Anna's description, worked up the whole drama and put it in its proper stage-setting: the monk given the best place at table and a higher seat; the daily displays of respect; one day Robert lamenting his daughter's fate, another day too delicate to mention his kinsman's misfortunes, another day promising the ignorant masses heaps of gold out of the imperial treasury. Thus he led all by the nose, and dragged the whole of Lombardy out with him.

He took Dyrrachium. He was still in the field, with the empire's Balkan provinces open in front of him, when he died in 1085, in the twenty-fifth year of his rule as duke and at the age of seventy. His son had to take the oath of allegiance from the army on the spot, and the ship carrying the coffin back to Apulia was half wrecked in a summer storm; the crew only just saved it. Anna records what her father felt on hearing the news, which was relief at having such a burden lifted from his shoulders.

Why it belongs here

Because everything that came afterwards was built by these men.

The kingdom Roger II had crowned in 1130 was a state with three chanceries, a Greek admiral, an Arabic fiscal bureau and a world geography commissioned from a Muslim scholar, and it is easy to describe as a flowering of Mediterranean civilisation. Its founders were a robber band out of the Cotentin who arrived with thirty-five men and took southern Italy from the Lombards, the papacy and the Byzantines in turn, largely by ambushing the people who had hired them.

Anna Komnene is a hostile witness and the hostility is the use of her. She had no motive whatever to make Robert impressive, and she makes him impressive anyway, which is worth more than anything his own side wrote about him.

Amiratus amiratorum

Drafted from Curtis, Roger of Sicily and the Normans in Lower Italy, 1016-1154 (1912)expansion

The man who made Sicily a naval power was a Greek from Antioch who had spent his early career working for the enemy.

George of Antioch was the son of a Michael and a Theodula of Antioch. He and his father served Temim, the Zirid prince of Mahdia on the Tunisian coast, and the young George was put in charge of the finances — which meant that he learned Arabic, learned the ports of the whole North African coast, and learned exactly how weak the Muslim states along it were. Temim died in 1108. George was unsure of the new prince's favour and left, and in 1112 he turned up in Sicily, where he was well received.

Thirty-six years later he took Mahdia.

What the fleet did

Roger II's power rested on ships and on two Greeks who knew how to use them — George and Christodulus, whom the Arabic writers call Abd al-Rahman al-Nasrani, the Christian. Between them they made the king master of the African coast and, in Curtis's phrase, the dictator of the adjacent seas.

The African campaigns ran from the 1130s to 1148 and produced a string of tributary ports along what is now the Tunisian and Libyan coast, the last and largest of them Mahdia itself. It was not a settlement empire and was never meant to be one: the kings installed or confirmed local Muslim governors, took the customs and the grain, and left. It lasted about a decade before the Almohads came east and took the whole coast back.

The title George carried says as much about the kingdom as any document it produced. He was amiratus amiratorum — a Latin transliteration of the Arabic for commander of commanders — and protonobilissimus, which is a Byzantine court rank. A Greek serving a Norman king held an Arabic office under a Constantinopolitan honorific. The first of those words is where English gets admiral.

The Martorana

What George built with the proceeds is still standing in Palermo, and it is the best single object anybody has for understanding this kingdom.

Santa Maria dell'Ammiraglio, now called the Martorana, went up between 1139 and 1143. The plan is Byzantine: a square with a cupola and apses at the east end. The walls are covered in Greek mosaic. Running round the inside of the cupola is an inscription in Arabic, in Kufic characters. The deed of endowment survives in the archive of the palace chapel; in it the admiral, styling himself with both his titles, gives the church land and ten Saracen serfs attached to it.

Inside, on the left-hand wall, George himself kneels at the feet of the Virgin — aquiline, white-bearded, and, Curtis notes, unmistakably Semitic in feature, the head and hands being the original mosaic. Opposite him, on the right, King Roger is being crowned by Christ.

He installed Orthodox clergy and the services were held in Greek. It went on being a Greek church until the pontificate of Honorius III, and has been a Latin one ever since.

The shape of the thing

Curtis's summary of George is worth having whole, because the career is the kingdom in one life: an obscure Greek Levantine who began as a finance official for a Muslim prince, spent his life as the associate or the enemy of Muslims, and ended as the right hand of a Norman king.

He died in 1152. Two years later Roger died too, and the man who had replaced George as admiral had already been burned alive in front of the palace.

Three chanceries

Drafted from Matthew, Cambridge Medieval Textbooks (1992)peak

The kingdom issued documents in Latin, Greek and Arabic, and the three were not translations of each other. They were the working languages of three different parts of the administration, inherited from three different states.

The Arabic came from the emirate. The dīwān — the fiscal bureau — kept the land registers, the defetari, listing estates and the villeins on them, in Arabic, using a Fatimid administrative apparatus that had been running in Sicily for two centuries and that the Normans took over intact rather than replacing. Roger II's own name appears on his coins in Arabic and on his mantle in Kufic embroidery, and the mantle was later used at the coronations of Holy Roman emperors.

The Greek came from Byzantium and from the Greek-speaking population of Calabria and eastern Sicily, which was substantial. The chancery's Greek notaries drafted for that population, the admirals of the fleet were Greeks, and the title admiral reaches English from the Sicilian chancery's Arabic amīr al-baḥr by way of Greek and Latin transliteration.

The Latin came with the Normans, and by the end of the century it was winning.

Al-Idrisi

Roger II commissioned a geography. Muhammad al-Idrisi, a scholar from Ceuta, spent fifteen years at Palermo interviewing travellers, collating what was known, and produced in 1154 a description of the world with seventy sectional maps and a silver planisphere, dedicated to the king and known as the Book of Roger.

It is the most accurate world geography produced anywhere for the following three centuries, and it was made in Arabic by a Muslim scholar for a Christian king, in the middle of the crusading century, while armies from the same Latin Europe were fighting in Syria.

What kind of thing this was

It is worth being precise about what the trilingualism was and was not.

It was not a doctrine. Nobody in Palermo argued that three languages were better than one, and there is no Sicilian treatise on toleration. It was not equality either: the Muslims of the island were taxed as Muslims and the Greek population was gradually subordinated to a Latin church. And it was not stable, which the following century proved conclusively.

What it was is a working practice. A dynasty of Norman adventurers took over three functioning administrations, in Arabic, Greek and Latin, and kept all three running because all three worked and replacing them would have cost money. Everything admirable about Norman Sicily follows from a decision that was, in origin, an economy.

How long it lasted

Not very. The trilingual arrangement was already narrowing under William II, and the anti-Muslim riots at Palermo in 1161 killed a great many of the palace eunuchs and officials who had staffed the Arabic bureau. Under the Hohenstaufen the Muslim population of the interior revolted and was eventually deported wholesale to Lucera on the mainland. By 1300 there were no Muslims in Sicily.

Sixty-four years of a state that did not require its subjects to be the same thing, followed by a century of one that did.

The ashes in the harbour

Drafted from Curtis, Roger of Sicily and the Normans in Lower Italy, 1016-1154 (1912)contraction

In 1153 the kingdom's chief minister and admiral was tried for being a Muslim and burned to ashes in front of the royal palace at Palermo, and his ashes were thrown into the harbour where the fleet could see it.

He had won a campaign three months earlier.

Philip of Mahdia

Philip was a eunuch, a Muslim by birth, a Christian in outward conformity, and the king had raised him from childhood to be master of the whole royal household. When George of Antioch died and the Almohads began pushing east along the African coast, Philip was given the fleet.

He did the job. He reached Bona before the Almohads did and took it with the help of Arab tribesmen from the interior, against the resistance of the inhabitants themselves, who did not want Christian rule. Then he proclaimed the peace and installed a governor who may well have been the man he had just displaced. He collected a great deal of booty. And he went one step further than his predecessor would have: he let the leading citizens leave the city with their families and all their property.

He returned to Sicily by way of Mahdia, in triumph, in the autumn of 1153.

The charge

Romuald of Salerno tells it with, as Curtis says, full Christian bias.

The accusation was not about Bona. It was that Philip was in heart and mind a Saracen; that he was in the habit of visiting the mosques; that he sent offerings to the tomb of Muhammad; and that he ate meat in Lent. Summoned before the royal court, he tried to save himself by promising complete Catholic orthodoxy in future.

Roger, according to Romuald, burst into tears. He told the assembled court how it grieved him that a servant he had brought up from childhood as a Catholic had practised the works of the infidel under cover of the faith, and then he said the part that mattered:

If he had wronged me I would have forgiven him, but he has sinned against God, for which I dare not forgive my own son. Now, that all the world may know I love the Christian faith with all my heart and do not cease to avenge her wrongs even on my servants, let the laws be evoked … let them be armed with the sword of justice … to strike terror into the infidels.

The court of justiciars, counts and barons convicted him of being christiani nominis delusor, a mockery of the Christian name. He was dragged to the place of execution at the heels of a vicious horse, burned at the stake before the palace, and his ashes thrown into the harbour in sight of the fleet.

Why

Nobody knows, and Curtis lists the attempts without choosing between them.

Romuald says Roger sacrificed him to demonstrate his own orthodoxy. The Arabic writers think it was for exceeding his orders at Bona — Ibn al-Athir adds the sentence that probably explains everything, which is that the people of Sicily were murmuring that their own king was a Muslim. Modern authorities have suggested a king prematurely old and failing, embittered by the deaths of his wife and his three eldest sons and frightened by the two empires conspiring against him, clearing an old scandal off his court. Or a king fallen under clerical influence at the end. Or that Roger had nothing to do with it and his son William, by then associated in the kingship, allowed it — Philip being the first victim of a nobility that hated palace officials.

What is not in dispute is the shape. A state whose whole method was to employ whoever was competent, in whatever language they worked, discovered that this was a thing its own subjects could hold against it — and answered by burning its most senior Muslim-born servant in public, three months after he had won it a city.

The reign of toleration

Curtis's own verdict is that the toleration had forty years left in it, and that it is unlikely Roger meant to end it.

That is right as far as it goes. The Arabic bureau kept working, the chancery kept issuing in three languages, and the next two kings were served by men out of all three traditions. Nothing about the machinery changed in 1153.

What changed is that it had been demonstrated. Until then the kingdom's arrangement could be described as simply the way things were done in Palermo. Afterwards it was a thing a king could be accused of, and a thing he could prove he was not guilty of by killing somebody — and the man he chose was the one who had just handed him a province.

Mategriffon

Drafted from Devizes, Chronicles of the Crusades (1848)contraction

In September 1190 the armies of the Third Crusade stopped at Messina to winter, and one of them sacked the city. The kingdom of Sicily was not at war with either of them.

Richard of Devizes, a monk of Winchester writing within a few years, is entirely on the English side and reports the king's speeches as though he had been in the room. What makes him useful is that he thinks the story reflects credit on his subject, so he includes everything.

The arrival

The French had come seven days earlier and King Philip had been received into Tancred's palace inside the walls. Richard arrived by galley with the great ships behind him.

So great was the splendour of the approaching armament, such the clashing and brilliancy of their arms, so noble the sound of the trumpets and clarions, that the city quaked and was greatly astounded.

He camped outside the city and on the next day put up gibbets outside his camp to hang thieves and robbers on, and his judges spared neither sex nor age, holding strangers and natives to the same law. The French king, Devizes says, took no notice of what his people did or what was done to them. Wherefore the one was called a Lamb by the Griffones, the other obtained the name of a Lion.

Griffones is what the crusaders called the Greeks of the kingdom, and it is the word that runs through the whole episode.

The claim

Richard's sister Joanna had been William II's queen. Richard sent to Tancred demanding her back with her dowry, and with the legacy William had left to Henry II: a golden table twelve feet long, a silk tent, a hundred of the best galleys fully found for two years, sixty thousand measures each of wheat, barley and wine, twenty-four golden cups and twenty-four golden dishes.

Tancred sent back the sister with the ordinary furniture of her bed and a million terrini for her expenses, and ignored the rest. Richard crossed the strait, took a fortified town in Calabria and installed her in it, took a castle called the Griffons' Monastery, and had the Greeks who resisted put to death by various tortures and displayed to their friends.

The tailed English

The Sicilians answered in the way a commercial city answers an occupying army. All dealing with the English was forbidden by proclamation; unarmed Englishmen were killed in the streets by forties and fifties, day and night. Devizes records the insult too, and admits he does not know where it came from: the Greeks and Sicilians followed the king about calling his men the tailed English.

Then he gives the king's speech to his court, which he did not hear and probably invented, and which is worth having anyway because of what he thought a king would say:

Shall we vanquish Turks and Arabs? shall we be a terror to nations the most invincible? shall our right hand make us a way even to the ends of the world for the cross of Christ? … Shall we, subdued here in the confines of our own country, proceed further, that the sloth of the English may become a by-word to the ends of the earth?

The barons promise to penetrate mountains and walls of brass at a nod. Richard then sets out the plan: Messina to be taken first, the Griffones to ransom themselves or be sold, everything belonging to the inhabitants to be a prey for anyone it falls to — only with my lord the king of the French, who lodges in the city, and with all his followers, shall perfect peace be preserved.

Five hours

The assault worked exactly as described. The walls were left unguarded because nobody could look out of doors without taking an arrow in the eye; the gates went down to a battering ram; the army took every hold in the city including Tancred's own palace, sparing only the French quarters. Standards went up on the towers all round the circuit. He took the sons of the nobility of the city and the surrounding country as hostages against payment.

He began to attack the city about the fifth hour of the day, and took it the tenth hour.

Tancred, terrified at the news, sent twenty thousand ounces of gold for the dowry and twenty thousand more for the legacy and a perpetual peace. Devizes calls it a small sum and says the hostages were kept anyway.

Then, having little confidence in the natives, Richard built a wooden fort of great height by the walls of Messina and named it, to the reproach of the Griffones, Mategriffon — Kill-Greek. The king's valour was greatly extolled, Devizes says, and the land kept silence in his presence.

What the winter shows

This was the kingdom that had employed Greeks, Arabs and Latins in three chanceries and given its admiral an Arabic title under a Byzantine court rank. Thirty-seven years after the man who held that office was burned in front of the palace, a passing crusade took the kingdom's second city in five hours, executed the Greek population of two towns across the strait, extorted forty thousand ounces of gold from its king, and put up a tower next to the walls with an insult for a name.

None of it had anything to do with the crusade. The armies were en route to Acre and stopped for the winter. What they found was a state that could not make a succession work, whose king had been elected against the heir, and whose population the crusaders had a word for.

Four years later the Germans arrived, and nobody had to besiege anything.

1194

Drafted from Matthew, Cambridge Medieval Textbooks (1992)end

William II died in 1189 at thirty-six, childless, having made his barons swear to accept his aunt Constance as his heir. Constance was Roger II's posthumous daughter, thirty-five years old, and married to Henry, king of Germany and heir to the empire.

The barons and the chancellor elected Tancred of Lecce instead — an illegitimate grandson of Roger II, competent, and not German.

The one succession that mattered

The kingdom had a rule and it worked until the only occasion on which it mattered.

Roger II to William I to William II is descent in the male line, three times, no argument. 1189 is the first succession without a son, and the men who had to decide chose the claimant they preferred over the claimant the rule produced — which is what an inheritance rule is for, and is exactly the moment it stopped being obeyed.

They were not obviously wrong to. The alternative was a German king in Palermo, which is what they got five years later.

What Henry did with it

Tancred died in 1194. Henry VI, by then emperor, came south with an army financed by the ransom of Richard I of England — who had been captured on his way back from the Third Crusade — took Palermo without much fighting, and was crowned on Christmas Day.

He had Tancred's widow and children sent to Germany, had the surviving Norman claimants blinded or mutilated, and by some accounts had Tancred's son castrated and blinded. The Hauteville line ended there.

Constance, forty and pregnant, gave birth the following day in the market square at Jesi in the Marche, reportedly in a tent open to the town so that nobody could say the child was substituted. The child is Frederick II, who was raised in Palermo, became Holy Roman emperor, and ruled Sicily and Germany together for thirty years — a Sicilian by upbringing and self-description, governing the empire whose army had killed his mother's family.

A change of family

The kingdom was not dismantled, and the distinction matters. The chancery went on issuing in three languages for a while yet, the registers went on being kept, the administrative structure Roger II had built went on running, and Frederick II — who was born a Sicilian and thought of himself as one — governed it from Palermo. What changed was the family.

What the barons were afraid of

They were right, and it did not help them.

The thing the Sicilian magnates would not accept in 1189 was a German king in Palermo, and their remedy produced one five years later with an army behind him and a grievance. Tancred, elected to keep the Hohenstaufen out, spent his whole reign fighting them, died in the middle of it, and left a child who was mutilated. Constance, who would have inherited peacefully, entered as a conqueror's wife.

Whether a quiet accession in 1189 would have gone better for Sicily is unknowable, and the barons had a real argument. What is certain is that the kingdom's most consequential political decision was taken by men choosing the outcome they preferred, and that it cost them everything they had chosen it to protect.

So long as the sea

Drafted from Curtis, Roger of Sicily and the Normans in Lower Italy, 1016-1154 (1912)afterlife

The dynasty lasted sixty-four years and the buildings are still there, which is the ordinary way round for a state this short-lived — except that in this case the buildings preserve the thing the state was actually for.

Palm Sunday, 1140

The Cappella Palatina was consecrated on Palm Sunday 1140, and the sermon preached in front of the king was given by Theophanes Cerameus, a Greek, the court preacher, in terms Curtis notes were more adulatory than any western court chaplain would have used:

A joy day is this feast because of the numerous assembly of illustrious men, but its greatest adornment is the presence of the King who sits before us not in the glory of the Crown alone but also in the glory of high deeds … so long as the sea is bounded by the dry land, they will praise thy deeds to the end.

The building he was standing in was itself the argument. At Cefalù, at Monreale and in the palace chapel the general plan is Norman and the decoration is not: Arab and Greek craftsmen were called in to paint the roofs and cover the walls, and what in the north would have stayed stately and austere was filled with colour. At San Giovanni degli Eremiti in Palermo the plan is a Latin cross and the domes above it are Oriental, because Muslim architects were given a free hand with part of the building. In the cloister at Monreale two hundred columns carry two hundred different capitals, and a Moorish fountain plays between Byzantine arches as it might in Seville or Granada.

The kings did the same with their own houses. The emirs had built pleasure villas in the open country outside Palermo without any apprehension about doing so; their Norman successors imitated them, and Roger's Favara and William I's La Zisa and William II's La Cuba are the result — open courts, Saracen columns, honeycomb work on the ceilings. Curtis's phrase for them is vaulted pavilions of half-Moslem princes.

The mantle

The king's own coronation garments survive, and the principal one could be an emir's.

It was woven at Palermo in the 1130s. Red silk, half-circular to sit round the shoulders, embroidered in gold and pearl with floral work, and carrying an inscription in Arabic in naskhi characters. On one side two great cats are pulling down camels; the design is repeated on the other. There is nothing Christian on it at all.

Roger's seal, meanwhile, would serve for any Byzantine emperor — the long adorned tunic, the mantle, the globe surmounted by a cross, the staff, a Greek inscription to either side — and his coins carry his name in Arabic. The mantle, the seal and the coinage are three different self-presentations by the same man in the same decade, each addressed to a different set of his own subjects, and none of them pretending to be the others.

What was lost and what was not

Both halves of that need saying.

The kingdom's Greek was going before the dynasty ended and its Arabic went afterwards, and the Muslim population of Sicily was destroyed inside a century and a half of Roger's death. The Martorana, founded as a Greek church by a Greek admiral with an Arabic inscription round its dome, was celebrating in Greek only until the pontificate of Honorius III. Nothing about the arrangement was permanent, and nobody who wants to admire it should pretend the ending was gentle.

What survived is the evidence that it existed. A Norman king's mantle with a Muslim inscription, a Greek admiral's church with Kufic in the cupola, a Fatimid ceiling over a Latin chapel, a world geography written in Arabic for a Christian king by a man of the Prophet's kin, born at Ceuta and educated at Cordoba, whose commission took its facts from Arab merchants on Africa and India, from Greeks at court on the eastern empire, from returning crusaders, from the king's own pardoned rebel barons on Apulia, and from the king's uncle on Piedmont, and set down fact and fable together. And, at the far end of it, a word. The office George of Antioch held was amir al-bahr, commander of the sea; it went into the Sicilian chancery's Latin as amiratus, and out of the Sicilian chancery into every language in Europe.

The kingdom that could not keep its own arrangement alive for a century nevertheless gave the western navies the word for the man who commands them.