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Arabic Administration in Norman Sicily The Royal Diwan
Jeremy Johns’ book represents the first comprehensive account, in any language, of the Arabic administration of Norman Sicily. It argues that the Arabic bureau, established by Roger II and his successors, was closely modelled upon that of the Fatimid caliphs of Egypt, and was designed less as an efficient organ of administration, than as a medium for the projection of the royal image.
In the traditional literature, it has been assumed that the Norman rulers simply inherited the Arabic administration of the Kalbid emirs of the island. In fact, on the completion of the Norman conquest in 1092, Greek administrators were employed to adapt Arabic records and these formed the basis of the post-conquest distribution of the land and its population. With the passing of the first generation of administrators, however, new Arabic records ceased to be issued and Arabic disappeared as a language of central administration for the following twenty years. It was only after the coronation of Roger II in 1130, that a new and highly professional Arabic bureau — the royal diwdn — began to issue a series of Arabic and bilingual (Arabic-Greek and Arabic-Latin) documents. A close analysis of these, and of the diwdn that produced them, reveals that the main inspiration for the renaissance of the royal diwdn came from the contemporary Islamic Mediterranean and, in particular, from Fatimid Egypt. An examination of the competence and reach of the Norman diwdn suggests that its primary function was not administrative efficiency, but the projection of the Arabic facet of the Norman monarchy.
Jeremy Johns is University Lecturer in Islamic Archaeology in The Oriental Institute, University of Oxford, and Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford.
Preface
This book has taken a long time to reach its present form. It began as part of my doctoral thesis, “The Muslims of Norman Sicily, c.1060-c.1194’, in the Faculty of Modern History at Oxford in 1983. Six years later, while I was Lecturer in Early Islamic Archaeology in the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, I completed the first draft of what was then called ‘Duana Regis: Arabic administration and Norman kingship in Sicily’. A second, heavily revised draft, known as both Duana Regis IT and Duana Regia — and referred to as ‘forthcoming’, ‘imminent’ and even ‘in press’, by myself and over-trusting friends and colleagues — was produced in 1989, circulated in typescript, and then shelved. In 1990, Duana Regia returned with me from Newcastle to Oxford.
On three or four occasions thereafter, during long vacations or terms of sabbatical leave, individual chapters were revised, but the whole remained incomplete. In the end, only by persuading the University and Wolfson to grant me a full sabbatical year ‘in anticipation of the allowance’, and by ‘mortgaging’ myself to the University until well into what was then the next millennium, was I able to revise and to rewrite the whole book so swiftly that by the time I reached the end I was still content with the beginning. To all those who, for nearly twenty years, have kindly continued to express an interest in this tardy book, I offer sincere apologies, but no excuse except that it is better now than it would then have been.
Henry Mayr-Harting, then of St Peter’s College, Oxford, was my first supervisor, and he gave me two terms of excellent advice and boundless enthusiasm, while energetically seeking his successor. I believe that it was Peter Holt who gave him the name of Michael Brett, then Lecturer in African History at the School of Oriental and African Studies, at the University of London. Michael was a model supervisor: intellectually uncompromising; meticulous about the detail of argument and apparatus, with a clear vision of shape and structure; enthusiastic, loyal, supportive, and endlessly patient with my struggle to repaint myself as a trompe I’il Islamicist. I wish that I were half as good a supervisor as he. From 1976-9, I was a Postgraduate Scholar at Balliol College, and was supported by a Full Postgraduate Award from the Department of Education and Science. When that came to an end, I was lucky enough to be awarded a Study Abroad Scholarship by The Leverhulme Trust, which enabled me to spend more than two years in Palermo, under the benevolent wing of the late Monsignor Paolo Collura, Professor of Latin Paleography at the University of Palermo. I do not have words to express adequately my gratitude to The Leverhulme Trust for permitting me the luxury of the extended spell in the archives, libraries, and landscape of Sicily that was to be crucial not just to the formation of this book but also to my career and, indeed, much of my life. I am particularly grateful to Miss Joan Bennett, then Administrative Secretary to The Trust, for her wholly exceptional kindness and support. In 1982, I returned to Oxford as Junior Research Fellow in Medieval History at Wolfson College, Oxford. Wolfson gave me the opportunity to write up eight years of research in easy reach of one of the best libraries in the world, and within a true community of scholars.
Iam keenly aware of how fortunate and privileged I was to be given eight years of funding, which not only covered all University and College fees, but also included more than generous allowances for living, research, and travel expenses. It is with dismay and foreboding that I compare my good fortune with the grim circumstances in which my own students must work: those without independent means must incur heavy debts in order to conduct research, and all are harried by the authorities to complete within three or at most four years. In the humanities, especially in inter-disciplinary fields and in those requiring competence in one or more languages that were not studied for a first degree, this short-sighted policy is already stifling intellectual curiosity and threatens to provoke a serious decline in academic standards.
I am deeply grateful to many other individuals and institutions, only some of whom I can name here. In addition to those mentioned elsewhere, I wish to thank the following for their intellectual and professional generosity: Henri Bresc, Diego Ciccarelli, Piero Corrao, Vincenzo D’ Alessandro, Franco D’ Angelo, Adalgisa De Simone, Gioacchino Falsone, Marisa Fama, Ernst Grube, Ernst Kitzinger, Donald Matthew, Ferdinando Maurici, Annliese Nef, Beatrice Pasciuta, Carlo Pastena, Donald Richards, Umberto Rizzitano, Benedetto Rocco, Emilie Savage-Smith, Marina Scarlatta, Lucia Travaini, Vincenzo Tusa, Roger Wilson, and Vladimir Zori¢; the directors and staff of the Archivio Diocesano (Catania), the Archivio Diocesano (Palermo), the Archivio Diocesano (Patti), the Archivio di Stato (Palermo), the Biblioteca Centrale della Regione Siciliana (Palermo), the Biblioteca Civica (Catania), the Biblioteca Comunale (Palermo), the Biblioteca della Societa Siciliana per Storia Patria (Palermo), the Bibliotheque Nationale (Paris), the Biblioteca Vaticana, the British Library, the Library of the Oriental Institute (Oxford), the Library of the School of Oriental and African Studies, the Library of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, and the Oriental Library of the University of Durham. For almost thirty years, I have regularly abused the unfailing courtesy, good-humour, kindness and patience of the staff of The Bodleian Library, and especially of the Oriental Reading Room: the late Eliahu Ashtor once described them to the incredulous guests at a Palermitan dinner party as gli angeli in un piccolo paradiso, and he was right.
I am especially grateful to the late Albrecht Noth for his encouragement, generosity and kindness. It is a great loss to scholarship that he was unable to complete the projected edition of the Arabic documents of the Norman rulers of Sicily. His preliminary study of the Arabic documents of Roger II included a list of those in the Archivo General de la Fundaci6n Casa Ducal de Medinaceli which, with one exception, remain unpublished. Despite Albrecht Noth’s best efforts on my behalf, I have not been able to gain access to these. However, I am extremely grateful to Aldo Sparti of the Soprintendenza Archivistica per la Sicilia (Palermo) for providing me with photocopies of prints of microfilms of them, and with a copy of the catalogue of the 1994 Messina exhibition in which they are reproduced as much reduced colour plates. With these, I have made the least bad readings possible in the circumstances.
Many friends and colleagues have sent me their own publications which I have found indispensable while preparing this study, but I wish to celebrate especially one act of singular generosity. Soon after I moved to Newcastle from Oxford, and beyond easy reach of any library with good holdings on medieval Sicily, Denis Mack Smith invited me to take all books that might be of use from his own collection. And so I came to have at my elbow scores of books which were not held, if anywhere in Britain, by any library between Edinburgh and Cambridge. When I reminded him of this, many years later, he pretended to have forgotten; but I suspect that he was anxious to forget the two bottles of cheap wine which, at the low ebb of my fortunes, was all that I could offer in thanks. But I remember them, and blush, every time that he pulls another venerable bottle from his cellar.
David Abulafia, Michael Brett, Vera von Falkenhausen, Geert Jan van Gelder, Alex Metcalfe, Michael Prestwich, and John Wansbrough all read various drafts of this book, and made many valuable comments. I am grateful to Marigold Acland and Paul Watt of Cambridge University Press for overseeing the process of production, and especially to Valina and Tony Rainer, respectively my copyeditor and proofreader.
Because I have relied so heavily upon the mastery — especially the linguistic mastery — of others, and should otherwise have been Jack of all trades and master of none, I have mastered the art of sticking to my own mistakes against the best advice.
James and Lisa Fentress have been the best of friends, the most generous of hosts, and the most challenging and stimulating of colleagues and critics, in Oxford, Rome, Sicily, and Tuscany. Dr Filippo Cucinella made a generous gift of his professional services on the sole condition that I wrote ‘good things about Sicily’. The late Maria Stella De Simone Wirz, her son Gustavo Wirz, and Sylvia Wirz, were the most gracious, kind, and hospitable landlords in the Villa De Simone at Partanna in 1980-82. For nearly twenty years, Paolo and Costanza Sallier de la Tour, their elder son Filiberto and his wife Domitilla, their daughter Ariane, and many other members of their family and household, have shown me and mine the sort of boundless and unconditional generosity, hospitality, and love that lesser mortals restrict to family. Renata Pucci dei Benisichi Zanca has been a fascinating, generous, and loyal friend, who introduced me not only to the Wirz and the Sallier de la Tour, but also to Sicily itself.
My research on Sicily could never have been undertaken without the love and support of Leslie and Violet Johns, Sarah Johns, and Doris and Fred Blau. I can repay my debt to none of them.
Nadia Jamil was always there to help throughout the writing of the final version of this book and has suggested innumerable clarifications, corrections, and improvements. Were it not for her faith in the book, and in me, it would never have been finished, but I might well have been.
Note on measurements
In the Arabic-Latin estate register of Santa Maria di Monreale (Diwani 44), the Arabic mudd is translated into Latin as salma, a measure of area equivalent to 1.75 hectares (4.3 acres). In the absence of evidence to the contrary, I have assumed that this was the area of the mudd throughout western Sicily in the Norman period, and that the Greek modion, whence the Arabic mudd (and the Latin modius) were derived, had the same area. The Arabic zawja (Greek boidion or zeugarion, Latin pariclum) comprised thirty mudds of land (52.5 hectares, 130 acres): in all three languages, the term refers to a yoke of oxen, and is here translated by the English “plough-land’.
The terms modion, modius, mudd and salma were also used for dry measures, on the principle that one mudd of grain was required to seed one mudd of land. In medieval and early modern Sicily, there was considerable local variation in the dry salma, presumably because the sowing rate varied according to both the crop and the quality of the land. The salma used for wheat in the region of Palermo was therefore adopted as a general measure for the whole island, and was equivalent to 2.75 hectolitres (7.5 bushels). Again in the absence of evidence to the contrary, I have assumed this to be the size of the dry modion, modius, mudd and salma in western Sicily during the Norman period.
Introduction
This book is written with a particular audience in mind, and seeks to introduce western medievalists, who have been trained to observe Norman kingship through predominantly Latin eyes and in the environment of north-western Europe, to what may for many be a new and disturbingly unfamiliar perspective. I have therefore chosen to set out from a much frequented point of departure, and to progress at a leisurely pace towards the Mediterranean.
But, should historians of medieval Islam happen to open this book, they will find the administrative culture that it describes so familiar that they may well wonder that anyone should think so peripheral a subject worthy of such detailed attention. The following paragraphs are therefore also intended to introduce them to one of the western medieval historiographical questions underlying this book: the nature — indeed, the very existence — of what, whether it is observed in Normandy, England, Sicily or Antioch, may be recognised as an administrative policy peculiar to Norman rule. In 1969, David C. Douglas stated the case as follows:
Before the twelfth century was far advanced, monarchies established by the Normans controlled the best organized kingdoms of Europe, and a Norman prince ruled the strongest of the Crusading states. This success was however not due merely to the facts of conquest or even to the establishment of notable rulers supported by strong feudal aristocracies. It derived also from a particular administrative policy which was everywhere adopted by the Normans. In all the states they governed, the Normans at this time were concerned to give fresh vitality to the administrative institutions which they found in the conquered lands, and to develop these constructively to their own advantage.!
The claims made by Douglas and his predecessors have since been challenged, most strongly for England. James Campbell and Wilfred Lewis Warren have suggested that the evidence for Anglo-Norman administration is open to afundamentally different interpretation.” Warren attacked ‘the myth of Norman administrative efficiency’ as follows:
Until the end of the eleventh century Anglo-Norman England was largely managed by Englishmen. A crisis in continuity emerges not at the Conquest but as the generation personally familiar with pre-Conquest practice died off and the Normans had to cope for themselves. The critical questions are how far they were able to master the Anglo-Saxon inheritance, and how far they understood it. The innovations in administrative practices are ... at least in part a response to problems which the Normans themselves had inadvertently created, and an attempt not so much to improve upon the Anglo-Saxon system as to shore it up and stop it collapsing. And the lines of development in the government of England which the Normans helped to set were determined as much if not more by their administrative failures as by their successes.*
Warren concluded on a still more provocative note.
I find myself unable to accept the view that the Normans were ‘constructive builders on solid Anglo-Saxon achievements’.* Under the Normans the Anglo-Saxon system became ramshackle. Norman government was a matter of shifts and contrivances. Nor can I see Norman administrative methods as the precursor in an evolutionary sense, of effective royal government; they had to be rethought. Nevertheless, there is a break in continuity, not at the Conquest itself, not on the morrow of it, but within fifty years of it. The break occurred not because the Normans did not wish to preserve the Anglo-Saxon inheritance but because they did not know how to do so. It may have been an involuntary breach, but it was nonetheless fundamental because the consequence was transition from a sophisticated form of non-modern state managed through social mechanisms to a crude form of modern state organized through administrative institutions.>
Such re-evaluation of Anglo-Norman administration has provided a considerable stimulus to this study. Recent historians of Norman Sicily have been content to claim that there was ‘no interruption of Moslem administrative practice’ and that ‘the Normans took from their Arab predecessors the centralized financial bureau of the diwan’ . In Sicily, as in England, they have implied, the Norman rulers chose the best practices and institutions from the pre-conquest administration and incorporated them into the Norman system which their “genius for adaptation’ then developed into one that was more efficient and more successful than its predecessor.° And yet, there has been no re-examination of the sparse evidence for the administrative system of Muslim Sicily since Michele Amari wrote in the mid to late 19th century. Nor has a systematic study of the Arabic component of the Norman administration, throughout its history, ever been attempted by a historian familiar not just with the evidence from Sicily, but also with contemporary Islamic administrative practice.
In part, this explains why extraordinary claims have been made that analogous instances of the Norman ‘genius for adaptation’ may found in England and Sicily: the De Hautevilles’ use of the Muslim iglim or administrative district has been compared to Henry I’s use of the English hundred;’ the Sicilian jara@’id or taxregisters have been compared to Domesday Book; and scholars continue to debate the relationship between the Sicilian diwdn and the English exchequer.’ But it is not overstating the case to object that such claims would not have been made had their authors been familiar with the history of Islamic administration outside Sicily, and with the detailed history of the Norman diwan.
This book has not been written with one eye on the Anglo-Norman world; from my blinkered perspective, it seems that those analogies that may meaningfully be made between the administrative history of England and Sicily are of a different order. In Sicily, as in England, in the immediate post-conquest period, the Norman rulers sought to adapt indigenous administrative practices to their own needs. In Sicily, as in England, a generation after the conquest, there was a break in continuity caused by the failure of the conquerors to preserve the administrative system inherited from the previous rulers of the island. And in Sicily, as in England, Norman rulers subsequently introduced administrative innovations to repair the damage done to the pre-conquest system; innovations which underwent rigorous selection through a process of trial and error, and rapidly developed in new directions.
But, in the two islands, the Norman conquerors were heirs to indigenous administrative systems that were fundamentally different. The progress described by Warren — ‘from a sophisticated form of non-modern state managed through social mechanisms to a crude form of modern state organized through administrative institutions’ — is peculiar to England. Muslim Sicily, like most of the Islamic world, was governed through administrative institutions before the Norman conquest, and the De Hautevilles were to struggle hard, not least against themselves and their closest supporters, to prevent the erosion of administrative government by immigrant Latin society.
Again, the manner in which the Norman rulers of the two islands sought to adapt indigenous administrative practices to their own needs was fundamentally different. In England, the Norman kings sought to perpetuate the Anglo-Saxon inheritance by employing indigenous administrators.’ Until 1071, a significant group of English earls and great thegns had retained power and status in the postconquest settlement;'! and thereafter, at the level of the shire, a small but vital community of Englishmen survived — ‘by commending themselves to the incoming continental magnates, by undertaking ministerial duties, and by taking land at farm’ — and ensured ‘the continuance of English customs and traditions’.!* After the conquest of Sicily was complete, there were no Muslim barons in Roger’s comitatus, and no Muslim lords held land in fief.
Although Sicilian Arabs must have been employed within the early Norman administration, we know the name of only one before 1130, while we can reconstruct the prosopography of an entire class of Greek Christian administrators who were imported from east Sicily and Calabria to manage and to adapt the Arabic and Islamic institutions through which the island had been administered. The immigrant Latin and indigenous Arab communities of Sicily were separated from each other by a cultural barrier which, if anything, grew less permeable with time; and the manner in which the Greek community acted as an intermediary between the Latin and the Arab may even have increased their distance from each other.
This is a convenient point to emphasise that the linguistic history of postconquest England and Sicily was fundamentally different. Both islands have been called ‘trilingual’ as a result of Norman conquest. But it is as well to remember that such a concentration upon the big three languages oversimplifies the intricate linguistic puzzle that challenges the historian of both islands, and ignores, in particular, the linguistic diversity of north and west Britain, and the wide variation of Romance vernaculars in the Sicilian kingdom. It also neglects the Scandinavian communities of Britain, and the presence in southern Italy and Sicily of more than a handful of Normans who still bore Norse personal names.'? Moreover, in both islands, Jews used Hebrew, Judaeo-Arabic, and occasional Aramaic words and phrases." In Sicily, there are also traces of Berber.
Nonetheless, it is to the big three that I must now return. In England, although English (“Standard Old English’) was the administrative language before the conquest, Latin was already the dominant literary language, and soon after the conquest rapidly replaced English as the language of record, although English continued to be used as the unwritten language of local administration. French (‘Anglo-Norman’) was introduced at the conquest as the language of the victorious élite, but, except in the king’s court, French-speakers were soon assimilated into English-speaking society; although French was soon established as a literary language, it was not until the mid-13th century that it was widely used as a language of record.
In pre-conquest Sicily, Arabic was the dominant language of administration at all levels, of literary culture, and of religion. Greek was confined to monastic communities and to the Greek urban societies of eastern Sicily. Even the non-Muslim minorities, Jews and Greek Christians, seem to have been predominantly Arabic-speaking. After the Norman conquest, Arabic continued to be used in some written documents for a generation, but was then dropped, and for more than fifteen years ceased to be used in documents issued by the central administration. Greek was established during the conquest as the language through which the Normans were to rule, and rapidly became the dominant language of administration throughout the whole island. By 1110-15, the almost total replacement of Arabic by Greek, and of Arab Muslims by Greek Christians, in the central administration hastened the collapse of the pre-conquest administrative system, far more than did the as yet insignificant introduction of Latin.
Although the new Greek structure incorporated spolia salvaged from pre-conquest Muslim administration, it was essentially foreign and new. At the local level, Latin lords and their Arab ‘villeins’ used, respectively, Latin (or a Romance vernacular) and Arabic, while Greek Christians acted as intermediaries between the two communities.'® In post-conquest England, an educated person might read and write English, French, and Latin, but in Sicily such trilingualism was exceedingly rare and, I suspect, effectively confined to the Greek Christian community. In the long term, the language of the Norman conquerors enriched English but was replaced by it, as English became the dominant language, in all registers, not just in England but throughout Britain. In Sicily, the Romance vernaculars of the conquerors had almost completely ousted Arabic by the end of the 13th century, after which date it was used only by Jews and slaves of North African origin. Medieval Sicilian contains only some three hundred words of Arabic derivation.!”
But, if the Anglo-Saxon and Muslim Sicilian inheritances were fundamentally different one from the other, and if the Norman conquerors of the two islands sought to adapt those diverse inheritances in strikingly different ways, the contrast is greater still between the manner in which Henry I and Roger II each sought to make good the damage done to the pre-conquest system in his respective island. Whereas in England, Henry I replaced Anglo-Saxon social mechanisms with a series of innovations amounting to the rapid expansion of the early state and the administrative machinery through which it was thenceforth to be governed, Roger II and his officers sought to preserve and to restore the ruined edifice inherited from Muslim Sicily by importing administrative practices, institutions, and personnel wholesale from the contemporary Islamic world, so that the Arabic administration of Sicily in the mid-12th century more closely approached the classical Islamic system, as exemplified in contemporary Fatimid Egypt, than had the administration of the Kalbid emirs before the Norman conquest.
In England, the Normans had inherited the entire Anglo-Saxon system and when, a generation after the conquest, Norman rule had brought it close to collapse, Henry I had no choice but innovation. In Sicily, the De Hautevilles had conquered a province on the periphery of the Fatimid empire and when, a generation after their neglect had caused the collapse of the indigenous system, Roger II sought to repair it, he turned to the imperial centre for the men and machinery with which to do so. Roger thus gave a new lease of life to previously moribund Arabic and Islamic administrative institutions and practices, restoring them to such health that they outlasted his dynasty.
At the same time, however, Roger II and his successors also presided over a series of far-reaching innovations in the Greek and, especially, in the Latin branches of the administration. In this book, both because I am exclusively concerned with the island of Sicily and do not examine even Calabria let alone the other mainland provinces of the Norman kingdom, and because my main subject is the Arabic administration and the Arabic facet of Norman kingship, I have neglected such innovations in the Greek and Latin administration. They must not be forgotten, however, lest the overall effect of my argument be to exaggerate the importance of the reformed Arabic administration for the history of Norman Sicily as a whole.
I am especially conscious of this danger because I am so keenly aware that historians of Norman institutions remain almost completely uninformed about the nature of the Arabic administration of Norman Sicily. The brief review of King Roger’s fiscal administration which Haskins gave in 1915 was still thought acceptable when Douglas returned to the theme in 1969 and when R.H.C. Davis began the work of deconstruction in 1976.'* To this day, both the great pioneers — Erich Caspar, Ferdinand Chalandon, Haskins, and Evelyn Jamison — and such lesser figures as Carlo-Alberto Garufi, Karl Andreas Kehr, Ernst Mayer and Hans Niese, all of whom wrote before the First World War, still remain indispensable to the subject.
Indeed, there are few topics for which one does not first open with profit the Considerazioni of Rosario Gregorio, published nearly two centuries ago. Theirs is the lead followed by the few modern scholars to have attempted original work, including Mario Caravale, Enrico Mazzarese Fardella and Hiroshi Takayama. And yet all of these scholars show themselves to be unfamiliar with the Islamic tradition to which the Arabic administration of Kalbid and Norman Sicily belonged. It is difficult to convey the consequences of this unfamiliarity, but a rough idea may be had by imagining what would be the result were four or five generations of Arab historians, with no knowledge of Latin, to have debated amongst themselves the nature of Anglo-Norman administration taking as their yardstick of contemporary administrative practice the Ahkam al-sultaniya (‘The ordinances of government’) by the 1 1th-century Iraqi jurist al-Mawardi.
A few Arabists have struggled against the tide, and have sought to introduce their Latin medievalist colleagues to the essentially Islamic context in which alone the Arabic administration of Norman Sicily can be understood. Michele Amari had the misfortune to write with imperfect knowledge of the documentary evidence from Sicily, and at a date when knowledge of medieval Islamic institutions was still in its infancy, but his 1878 study was a model for its time.
Amari’s friend and correspondent, Otto Hartwig, had asked him a series of penetrating questions designed to lay bare what he clearly believed to be the close relationship between the English exchequer and the Sicilian diwan.’? Amari replied by comparing at some length Sicilian institutions with medieval Islamic administrations described by Arab authors, including al-Mawardi, Ibn Khaldin, al-Ya‘qutbi, al-Maqrizi, al-Nabulusi and others. His principal conclusion was that the Sicilian diwdn in the mid-12th century was essentially Arabic and Islamic in character, and more closely resembled the diwdn of Fatimid Egypt than the English exchequer. I am not aware of Hartwig’s response, but the reaction of most of Amari’s contemporaries was to reject his conclusion out of hand.
For example, Carlo-Alberto Garufi, a figure of insular stature with none of Amari’s breadth and depth of scholarship, pretended to disprove Amari’s argument by means of a detailed philological discussion, regardless that he knew no Arabic.”° And yet it is no exaggeration to claim that Garufi and his followers have been left in possession of the field to this day. With a handful of notable exceptions, the administration of Norman Sicily has continued to be studied from an Anglo-Norman perspective, and the essentially Arabic and Islamic character of the Norman diw@n is simply ignored. Why this should be so is in large part explained by the fate of the Arabic documents of Norman Sicily.
In the interval between the first publication of Amari’s Storia dei Musulmani di Sicilia in 1854—72 and Nallino’s revised second edition in 1933-9, Salvatore Cusa published J Diplomi greci ed arabi di Sicilia.”! This transcription of most of the Arabic and bilingual (Arabic-Greek and Arabic-Latin) documents issued by the Norman rulers should have greatly facilitated the study of the Arabic administration, but the work was not without problems. In the first place, only Part One was published, in two volumes, and the second part, which was to contain critical apparatus and translations of the Greek and Arabic texts, never appeared.
The Arabic documents thus remained inaccessible to those scholars most interested in the administrative history of Norman Sicily, none of whom were Arabists.” In the second place, it now seems clear that Cusa was not himself primarily responsible for the transcription of either the Arabic or the Greek documents, and that this was entrusted to his pupils, respectively Carlo Crispo Moncada and Isidoro Carini.” In fact, the detailed examination of the Arabic texts published under Cusa’s name reveals so great a number of inconsistencies and such extreme linguistic unevenness as to suggest that at least two individuals were responsible for the edition. And yet, although Cusa’s edition is incomplete, contains a substantial number of errors in all three languages, and lacks all critical apparatus, it is nonetheless an extraordinary achievement for its time, and no one should confront the original Arabic documents with Cusa’s published texts without feeling admiration and gratitude towards whoever was actually responsible for the transcription.** The sad fact remains, however, that any serious study of the Norman diwdn must be based upon the original documents, and not on the texts published in Cusa’s name.
In the year of the eight-hundredth anniversary of King Roger’s death Paolo Collura first proposed a new and complete critical edition of the documents of the Norman rulers of Sicily in all three administrative languages: Arabic, Greek and Latin. Work upon the Codex diplomaticus regni Siciliae (CDRS) did not actually get underway until the early 1970s, and only four volumes of edited documents have so far appeared — the Latin documents of Roger II, what purports to be all the documents of William I, the documents of Tancred and William III, and the documents of Constance.” Only two of the forty-five Arabic and bilingual documents issued by the Norman administration have yet been edited, both issued by William I. Unfortunately, the Greek text of the one original bilingual document was so badly mangled by the printers as to render it unusable, and the Arabic text contains several minor errors.*7
The second document is a Latin transumpt of a bilingual original, which was already published in a fuller version, and which also contains several minor errors.7® One Arabic and one Greek-Arabic document, also issued by the Arabic administration of William I, were not included in the volume because of the rigidly Eurocentric definition of what does or does not constitute a public document: a definition adopted by the editors against the express advice of the late Albrecht Noth, who was responsible for the edition of the Arabic texts.” What was taken to be an Arabic deperditum, but is nothing of the kind, is also included amongst the documents of William I.*°
Although this is not an auspicious start to the edition of the Arabic documents, the CDRS has made one important contribution to the study of the Arabic administration of Norman Sicily — the late Albrecht Noth’s brief review of the Arabic documents of Roger II.*! In this preliminary study, made prior to his projected edition of the documents themselves, Noth made almost the first attempt since Michele Amari to examine the Arabic documents of Norman Sicily within the context of contemporary Islamic administrative practice.*? This important and perceptive study has been an inspiration to me.
The historiographical imbalance which this book seeks to redress is thus a particularly heavy one. If I am thought to have over-compensated, I have done my best to make this unfamiliar, and often troublesome, material as accessible as possible to readers who have no Arabic, Greek, and Latin, and no knowledge of medieval Islamic administration, so that they can retrace my steps and follow my argument at every stage. All words and phrases in Arabic have been transliterated and translated at their first occurrence, and often elsewhere in the text. Greek words and phrases are always given in transliteration when they occur in the text, and are translated on at least their first occurrence. There is no glossary, but the first occurrence in the index of an Arabic, Greek or Sicilian term will lead the reader to a definition or translation.
Only in the notes and tables, and in specialist and technical discussion, have I occasionally left Arabic or Greek words in the original. Sicilian place-names are standardised as far as possible; where no standard exists, the reader is referred to an explanatory note. In the index, all place-names in Sicily and southern Italy are followed by the standard abbreviation for the modern province in which they are located (see Abbreviations), and are crossreferenced to any alternative place-names used in this book. Where dates are given according to the Islamic or Byzantine calendar, Julian equivalents are given.
Arabists may care to note that, so far as possible and with the exceptions given below, I have used a system of transliteration based on that now standard in the English-speaking world. Names and short phrases, titles, efc. are given without case endings (i‘rab) — e.g. sahib diwan al-tahqiq al-ma‘mir, not sahibu diwani l-tahqiqi l-ma‘miiri.** But I have generally given as full as possible a vocalisation for longer passages of text in order to account in detail for the reading proposed. I have occasionally suspended this practice where the text quoted is too far removed from the grammatical and syntactical conventions standard in the written language — e.g. in quotations from the 1182 Monreale estate register (jaridat al-hudiid — Diwani 44) given in the notes to Chapter 7.
Whereas I have always referred back to the original in quoting from Arabic documents, this has not always been possible for the far more numerous Greek and Latin documents. Greek quotations are transliterated by a rigid system of letterfor-letter equivalents, ignoring accents and breathings; this inevitably leads to such infelicities as kapriliggas for kaprilingas but, as with Arabic, I have preferred to reproduce orthography and not pronunciation. So far as possible, when quoting from the original, the orthography of quotations from Greek documents has been reproduced, and not made to correspond to a classical model, but abbreviations and contractions have been supplied. Quotations from edited Greek documents, however, are likely to reproduce the editor’s classicising corrections.
Throughout the text, references to the catalogue of diwani documents, i.e. of the Arabic and bilingual documents issued by the Norman administration, presented as Appendix 1, are given in the form Diwani 1, Diwani 2, etc. A dagger symbol preceding a number — e.g. Diwani +9 — indicates that the document is a forgery. A new and critical edition of all the Arabic and bilingual documents from Norman Sicily is now in preparation by myself, Nadia Jamil, and Alex Metcalfe.
The first volume, publishing the private — i.e. the non-diwani documents — will appear in the near future. (Appendix 2, below, is a provisional catalogue of the private Arabic documents: references to it are in the form Private 1, Private 2, etc.) The third volume, dedicated to the three great Monreale jara’id (Diwani 43-5), will be largely the responsibility of Alex Metcalfe, whom the Arts and Humanities Research Board has granted a three-year Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the University of Leeds to undertake the task. The second volume, in which the other diwdGni documents will be edited, will complete the series. An analytical study is also planned, which will compare the private and the diwani documents, not only to each other, but also to other corpora of medieval Arabic documents, in terms of diplomatic form, language, and script.
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