by Will Durant
The King Roger’s Book of Idrisi suggests the prosperity of Norman Sicily. A hardy busy peasantry covered the rich soil with crops, and kept the cities fed. They lived in hovels, and suffered the usual exploitation of the useful by the clever, but their life was dignified with a colorful piety, and brightened with festivals and song. Every season of the agricultural year had its dances and chants; and vintage time brought bacchanalian feasts that bound ancient Saturnalia with modern Carnival. Even to the poorest there remained love, and folk songs ranging from license and satire to lyrics of purest tenderness. In the town of San Marco, said Idrisi, “the air is perfumed by the violets growing everywhere.” Messina, Catania, Syracuse flourished again as in Carthaginian, Greek, or Roman days. Palermo seemed to Idrisi the finest city in the world: “It turns the heads of all who see it… it has buildings of such beauty that travelers flock to it, drawn by the fame of the marvels of architecture, the exquisite workmanship, the admirable conceptions of art.” The central street was a panorama of “towering palaces, high and superb hostels, churches … baths, shops of great merchants…. All travelers say outright that there are nowhere buildings more marvelous than those of Palermo, nor any sight more exquisite than her pleasure gardens.” And the Moslem traveler Ibn Jubair, seeing Palermo in 1184, exclaimed; “A stupendous city! … The palaces of the king encircle it as a necklace clasps the throat of a maiden with well-filled bosom.”4 Visitors were struck by the variety of languages spoken in Palermo, the peaceful mingling of races and faiths, the neighborly confusion of churches, synagogues, and mosques, the elegantly dressed citizens, the busy streets, the quiet gardens, the comfortable homes.
In those homes and palaces the arts of the East served the conquerors from the West. The looms of Palermo wove gorgeous stuffs in silk and cloth of gold; the ivory workers made little caskets shaped and carved in delicate or whimsical designs; the mosaicists covered floors, walls, and ceilings with Oriental themes. Greek and Saracen architects and artisans raised churches, monasteries, and palaces whose plan and ornament, showing no trace of Norman styles, gathered up a thousand years of Byzantine or Arabic influence. In 1143 Greek artists built for Greek nuns, with funds provided by Roger’s Admiral George, a convent dedicated to Santa Maria dell’ Ammiraglio, but now known as the Martorana from its founder. It has been so often restored that little remains of its twelfth-century elements. Typically an Arabic inscription from a Greek Christian hymn runs round the inner dome. The floor is of gleaming varicolored marble; eight columns of dark porphyry frame three apses, their capitals are most gracefully carved; walls and spandrels and vaults glitter with golden mosaics, including a famous Christos Pantocrater—the Universal King—in the sanctuary cupola. Finer still is the Capella Palatina, the chapel of the palace begun by Roger II in 1132. Here everything is exquisite: the simple design of the marble pavement, the perfection of the slender columns and their diverse capitals, the 282 mosaics filling every tempting space, above the altar the solemn figure of Christ in one of the sovereign mosaics of the world, and, over all, a massive timber ceiling in honeycomb design, carved, gilded, or painted with Oriental figures of elephants, antelopes, gazelles, and “angels” that were probably houris from a Mohammedan’s dream of paradise. In all medieval or modern art there is no royal chapel that can compare with this jewel of Norman Sicily.
Roger died in 1154, aged fifty-nine. His son William I (1154–66) earned the title of “the Bad,” partly because his life was written by his enemies, partly because he let others govern while he lived amid eunuchs and concubines in Oriental ease. In his reign the Moslems of Tunisia rose against the Christians, and ended Norman power in Africa. William II (1166–89) lived much the same sort of life as “the Bad,” but was called “the Good” by amiable biographers if only to avoid a confusion of names. He asked pardon for his lax morals by financing in 1176 the monastery and cathedral of Monreale—a “mount royal” five miles outside of Palermo. The exterior is a disagreeable confusion of shafts and interlacing columns; the cloisters are a work of majestic strength and beauty; the mosaics of the interior are renowned but crude; the capitals, however, are richly carved with realistic life—Noah drunk and sleeping, a swineherd tending a pig, an acrobat standing on his head.
Perhaps the Oriental morals of the Norman Sicilian kings weakened their constitutions and shortened their line. Forty years after the death of Roger II his dynasty ingloriously died. William II left no children, and Tancred, illegitimate son of a son of Roger II, was chosen king (1189). Meanwhile the German emperor Henry VI had married Constance, an aunt of William II; eager to unite all Italy under the imperial crown, he claimed the throne of the Sicilies; he secured the active alliance of Pisa and Genoa, whose commerce was irked by Norman control of the central Mediterranean; in 1194 he appeared before Palermo with irresistible force, persuaded it to open its gates to him, and was there crowned King of Sicily. When he died (1197) he left his thrones to his three-year-old son Frederick, who was to become the most powerful and enlightened monarch of a thirteenth century rich in puissant kings.
II. THE PAPAL STATES
North of Norman Italy lay the city-state of Benevento, ruled by dukes of Lombard origin. Beyond this were the lands under the immediate temporal power of the popes—the “Patrimony of Peter”—including Anagni, Tivoli, Rome, and thence to Perugia.
Rome was the center, but hardly the model, of Latin Christianity. No city in Christendom had less respect for religion, except as a vested interest. Italy took only a modest part in the Crusades; Venice shared in the Fourth only to capture Constantinople; the Italian cities thought of them chiefly as opportunities to establish ports, markets, and trade in the Near East; Frederick II postponed his crusade as long as he could, and embarked upon it with a minimum of religious belief. There were religious souls in Rome, gentle spirits who aided pilgrims to maintain the shrines; but their voices were seldom heard above the din of politics.
Aside from the papacy, Rome was in this period a poor city. The Norman sack of 1084 had capped six centuries of destruction and neglect. The population had shrunk to some 40,000 from its ancient million. It was not a hub of commerce or industry. While cities of northern Italy led the economic revolution, the Papal States tarried in a simple agrarian regime. Market gardens, vineyards, and cattle paddocks mingled with homes and ruins within the walls of Aurelia. The lower classes of the capital lived half by handicraft, half by ecclesiastical charity; the middle classes were a medley of merchants, lawyers, teachers, bankers, students, and resident or visiting priests; the upper classes were the higher clergy and the landed nobility. The old Roman custom of owning in the country and living in the city still prevailed. Long since shorn of any general patriotism that would have united them for national defense, the Roman nobles divided into factions led by rich and powerful families—Frangipani, Orsini, Colonna, Pierleoni, Caetani, Savelli, Corsi, Conti, Annibaldi…. Each family made its Roman residence a castle-fortress, armed its members and retainers, and frequently indulged in street brawls, occasionally in civil wars. The popes, having only spiritual weapons little feared in Rome, struggled in vain to keep order in the city; they were repeatedly subjected to insult there, sometimes to violence; and many of them, for peace or safety, fled to Anagni, Viterbo, or Perugia, even to Lyons, at last to Avignon.
The popes had dreamed of a theocracy in which the Word of God, interpreted by the Church, would suffice as law; they found themselves crushed amid the autocracy of the emperors, the oligarchy of the nobles, and the democracy of the citizens. The relics of the Forum and the Capitol kept alive, among the Romans, the memory of their ancient republic; and periodically an effort was made to restore the old autonomy and forms. The leading nobles were still called senators, though the Senate had disappeared; consuls were chosen or appointed, though they wielded no power; and some old manuscripts preserved the half-forgotten edicts of Roman law. Inspired by the rise of free cities in northern Italy, the people of Rome, in the twelfth century, began to demand a
return to secular self-government. In 1143 they elected a Senate of fifty-six members, and for some years thereafter elected new senators annually.
The mood of the time called for a voice, and found it in Arnold of Brescia. Tradition reports that he had studied under Abélard in France. He returned to Brescia as a monk, practicing such austerities that Bernard described him as a man who “neither eats nor drinks.” He was substantially orthodox in doctrine, but denied the validity of sacraments administered by priests in a state of sin. He held it immoral for a priest to own property, demanded a return of the clergy to apostolic poverty, and advised the Church to surrender all her material possessions and political power to the state. At the Council of the Lateran in 1139 Innocent II condemned him and commanded him to silence; but Pope Eugenius III absolved him on condition of a pilgrimage to various churches in Rome. It was a kindly error; the sight of the old republican landmarks fired the imagination of Arnold; standing amid the ruins, he called upon the Romans to reject clerical rule, and to restore the Roman Republic (1145). Fascinated by his fervor, the people chose consuls and tribunes to be actual governors, and established an equestrian order to serve as leaders in a new militia of defense. Intoxicated with the ease of this glorious revolution, the followers of Arnold renounced not only the temporal power of the popes, but the authority, in Italy, of the German emperors of the Holy Roman Empire; indeed, they argued, it was the Roman Republic that should rule not Italy alone, but, as of old, the “world.”5 They rebuilt and fortified the Capitol, seized St. Peter’s, turned it into a castle, took possession of the Vatican, and levied taxes upon pilgrims. Eugenius III fled to Viterbo and Pisa (1146), while St. Bernard, from Clairvaux, hurled denunciations against the people of Rome, and reminded them that their subsistence depended on the presence of the papacy. For ten years the Comune di Roma ruled the city of the Caesars and the popes.
Plucking up his courage, Eugenius III returned to Rome in 1148. He confined himself for a time to spiritual functions, distributed charity, and won the affection of the populace. His second successor, Hadrian IV, shocked by the killing of a cardinal in a public tumult, laid an interdict upon the capital (115 5). Fearful of a profounder revolution than the aristocracy could digest, the Senate abrogated the Republic and surrendered to the Pope. Arnold, excommunicated, hid himself in the Campagna. When Frederick Barbarossa approached Rome Hadrian asked him to arrest the rebel. Arnold was found and apprehended; he was turned over by the Emperor to the papal prefect of Rome, and was by him hanged (1155). The corpse was burned, and the ashes were thrown into the Tiber “for fear,” said a contemporary, “that the people would gather them up and honor them as the ashes of a martyr.”6 His ideas outlived him, and reappeared in the Paterine and Waldensian heretics of Lombardy, in the Albigensians of France, in Marsilius of Padua, and in the leaders of the Reformation. The Senate continued to exist till 1216, when Innocent III succeeded in replacing it with one or two senators congenial to the papal cause. The temporal power of the popes survived till 1870.
At different times the Papal States included Umbria, with Spoleto and Perugia; the “March,” or frontier land, of Ancona on the Adriatic; and the Romagna, or Rome-ruled region, with the cities of Rimini, Imola, Ravenna, Bologna, and Ferrara. Ravenna continued to decline in this period, while Ferrara rose to prominence under the wise leadership of the house of Este. Under the lead of the great lawyers produced by its university, Bologna developed a virile communal life. It was among the first cities to choose a podesta to govern the internal affairs of the commune, and a capitano to lead it in its external relations. Peculiar requirements ruled the choice of the podesta or man of power: he must be a noble, a foreigner to the city, and over thirty-six years of age; he must own no property within the commune, and must have no relative among the electors; he must not be kin to, or come from the same place as, the preceding podesta. These strange rules, adopted to secure impartial administration, prevailed in many Italian communes. The “captain of the people” was chosen not by the communal council but by the popular party, dominated by the merchant guilds; he represented not the poor but the business class. In later centuries he would extend his power at the expense of the podesta, as the bourgeoisie would come to surpass the nobility in wealth and influence.
III. VENICE TRIUMPHANT: 1096–1311
North of Ferrara and the Po lay the district of Veneto, proud of the cities of Venice, Treviso, Padua, Vicenza, and Verona.
It was in this period that Venice matured her power. Her alliance with Byzantium gave her entry to Aegean and Black Sea ports. At Constantinople, in the twelfth century, her nationals are said to have numbered over 100,000, and to have held a section of the city in terror by their insolence and their brawls. Suddenly the Greek Emperor Manuel, prodded by the jealous Genoese, turned against the Venetians in his capital, arrested a great number of them, and ordered a wholesale confiscation of their goods (1171). Venice declared war; her people labored night and day to build a fleet; and in 1171 the Doge Vitale Michieli II led 130 ships against Euboea as a first goal of strategy against the Straits. But on Euboea’s shores his troops fell sick with a disease said to have been caused by Greeks poisoning the water supply; so many thousands died that the ships could not be manned for war; the Doge led his armada back to Venice, where the plague infected and decimated the inhabitants; and at a meeting of the assembly the Doge, blamed for these misfortunes, was stabbed to death (1172).7 It is against the background of these events that we must view the Fourth Crusade, and the oligarchic revolution that transformed the constitution of Venice.
The great merchants, fearing the collapse of their commercial empire if such defeats continued, resolved to take the election of the doge, and the determination of public policy, from the general assembly, and establish a more select council, which should be better fitted to consider and transact affairs of state, and might serve as a check upon both the passions of the people and the autocracy of the doge. The three highest judges of the Republic were persuaded to appoint a commission to draw up a new constitution. Its report recommended that each of the six wards of the city-state should choose two leading men, each of whom should choose forty able men; the 480 deputies so chosen were to form the Maggior Consiglio, or Greater Council, as the general legislature of the nation. The Greater Council in turn was to choose sixty of its members as a Senate to govern commerce, finance, and foreign relations. The arrengo or popular assembly was to meet only to ratify or reject proposals of war or peace. A Privy Council of six men, elected severally from the six wards, was to govern the state in any interregnum, and its sanction was to be required to legalize any governmental action of a doge. The first Greater Council elected by this procedure chose thirty-four of its members, who chose eleven of their number, who then, in public deliberation in the cathedral of San Marco, chose the doge (1173). A cry of protest arose from-the people at losing their right of naming the head of the state; but the new doge diverted the disturbance by scattering coin among the crowd.8 In 1192, on the election of Enrico Dandolo, the Greater Council required the Doge to swear, in his coronation oath, to obey all the laws of the state. The mercantile oligarchy was now supreme.
Dandolo, already eighty-four, proved to be one of the strongest leaders in Venetian history. Through his Machiavellian diplomacy and personal heroism Venice avenged the disaster of 1171 by capturing and despoiling Constantinople in 1204; thereby Venice became the dominant power in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea, and the commercial leadership of Europe passed from Byzantium to Italy. In 1261 the Genoese aided the Greeks to regain Constantinople, and were rewarded with commercial preference there; but three years later the Venetian fleet defeated the Genoese near Sicily, and the Greek emperor was forced to restore the favored position of Venice in his capital.
The triumphant oligarchy capped these external victories with another constitutional stroke. In 1297 the Doge Pietro Gradenigo pushed through the Council a proposal that only those citizens—and their male posteri
ty-should be eligible to the Council who had sat in it since 1293.9 The great majority of the people were excluded from office by this “Closing of the Council.” A closed caste was created; a Libro d’oro, or Golden Book, of marriages and births within this patrician caste was kept to ensure purity of blood and monopoly of power; the mercantile oligarchy decreed itself an aristocracy of birth. When the people planned a revolt against the new constitution their leaders were admitted into the hall of the Council, and were immediately hanged (1300).
It must be admitted that this frank and ruthless oligarchy governed well. Public order was better maintained, public policy more shrewdly guided, laws more stable and effective, than in the other communities of medieval Italy. Venetian laws for the regulation of physicians and apothecaries preceded similar statutes of Florence by half a century. In 1301 laws forbade unhealthy industries in residential quarters, and excluded from Venice industries that poured injurious fumes into the air. Navigation laws were rigorous and detailed. All imports and exports were subject to state supervision and control. Diplomatic reports covered trade more than politics, and economic statistics were here for the first time made a part of government.10
