Download PDF | The Norman Kingdom of Sicily' by Donald Matthew, Cambridge University Press, 1992.
400 Pages
NOTE ON COINAGE
A considerable number of different coins were struck and used in various parts of the Norman kingdom, and valuations were assessed in several monies of account. In the twelfth century, the kings struck gold coins called tari, which had international circulation and therefore standard equivalents, such that there were four tari to the Arabic dinar, and six tari to the gold solidus of Constantinople. The tari, which weighed about one gram, was considered to comprise twenty grana, and there were thirty tari to the uncia. Under Frederick II, a new coin, the augustalis, was struck such that there were four augustales to the uncia.
Schifati were actual gold coins struck at Constantinople and said to be worth eight tari. Silver coins in the twelfth-century kingdom included the provenesini, struck outside the kingdom and valued at four provenesini to the ducalis, where ten ducales were worth one solidus. There were twelve miliarenses to the solidus as used in those parts of Italy formerly subject to Constantinople. The copper coin romesina was not struck after 1140, but replaced by a smaller coin, follaris, such that twenty-four follari were worth one miliarensis. The values of these coins fluctuated over time and local variations also occurred. This note is designed to help the reader understand the scale of values, not to calculate actual sums
INTRODUCTION
The Norman kingdom of Sicily has an assured place in the teaching of medieval European history in this country. All teachers of it are, nevertheless, unhappy about the limited amount of reading they can recommend to students who cannot understand books in foreign languages. This has very unfortunate consequences. Since few of the original sources in Latin, let alone Greek or Arabic, have been translated, the student cannot form an impression of them at first hand. Moreover, the main preoccupations of the ample scholarly literature in Italian, French and German, as well as some other languages, cannot be grasped from what writing is available only in English. The problems of modern British students are compounded in other ways too. They inevitably approach the subject with established convictions about the Norman monarchy in England.
These shape their expectations of what to expect and how to interpret what they find in southern Italy. The Norman monarchy in England may now be made to acknowledge what it owes to its Anglo-Saxon predecessor, but no one doubts that under the Normans the monarchy was powerful, authoritative and exceptionally centralised for its date. In addition, the development of political authority in the modern English state is assumed to have been continuous since at least the Norman Conquest. The southern Italian monarchy is quite another matter. No Italian looks back on it as playing an important part in the development of the modern Italian state. On the contrary, the continuing existence of its descendant, the Bourbon kingdom, deferred the realisation of unification in the nineteenth century, and far from being in the forefront of 'progress', the 'South (mezzogiorno) as a whole has been identified with forces of stagnation and backwardness. In the context of Italian history, the Norman creation of the monarchy is not therefore respected as a valuable stage in the development of the whole modern nation. If the Norman monarchy is viewed as an arbitrary creation, it also becomes clearer what a great difference there is between it and the Norman conquest of England.
In the latter, a united kingdom changed hands as a result of one major battle. In southern Italy, it took over a century for Norman power to infiltrate to the point where a monarchy could be devised to integrate all the Norman elements into one entity. British students have to adjust their expectations in ways that obviously have no parallels for students on the continent. It is especially important for them not to be led astray by superficial similarities between monarchies more often compared than contrasted. There are other snags lying in wait for students who live some considerable distance from southern Italy. I am not thinking so much of simple ignorance of place-names or geography, for this may be fairly quickly corrected by careful study of maps. More difficult to overcome is a common feeling, even amongst English Italophiles, that Italy south of Rome is 'different', a region more backward and alien, a world of its own. North Italians are themselves not immune to the prejudice that the 'Mezzogiorno' has its own personality. In the South itself, however, the differences between the various peoples and regions loom larger than any perception of their common features. Sicily, Calabria, Apulia, Campania, Abruzzi, to name only the most obvious, have their own distinctiveness. Even today they view the kingdom, of which they were once all part, from different angles. In Britain, the local loyalties which must have formerly prevailed over 'national' ones withered away so long ago that their importance can only be recovered by historical imagination: even in the Norman kingdom, they are assumed to have been already vestigial. In southern Italy this was not so. When the Normans came, the South was deeply divided, not just by political authority, but by speech, culture and religion. If the monarchy had any success in diminishing the force of local loyalty, it certainly never stifled it altogether. Instead of thinking about 'the South' as though it were a natural unit, students need rather to perceive how different its constituent parts were, and remained, even after the kingdom was set up.
The character of historical writing in English about the southern Italian monarchy suggests that this subject presents particular difficulties for English historians to get to grips with; but there are other, quite different problems that beset historians writing in any language. In particular, it would currently be very exceptional for any one scholar (more so now perhaps than in the twelfth century) to be sufficient master of Latin, Greek and Arabic to be able to read the sources in all three of the major languages in which they were written. Very obviously in the case of Arabic, this means that historians are likely to depend upon the research of scholars whose primary interests are linguistic or literary rather than historical. To an extent greater than with other topics of twelfth-century European history, the kingdom of Sicily has therefore to be studied, not only through a greater number of languages, but with the help of several different scholarly disciplines.
Although medieval archaeology has until now made rather a modest contribution to modern understanding, the pre-eminent role of art history serves to illustrate this point. And because the kingdom has to be studied from many angles, the difficulty of defining its central focus is accentuated. The monarchy, here as elsewhere, is usually placed centre-stage, but mainly to solve what is basically an aesthetic problem of presentation. Actually, when the light is turned too brightly on the kings themselves, they cannot withstand the glare. The contrast with Norman England is obvious, even when allowance is made for modern myth-making. In England, we have Domesday Book and Magna Carta as evidence of royal authority at the heart of the system. Westminster Abbey and Windsor Castle still symbolise important aspects of royal power. In the southern Italian kingdom, there are no comparable surviving monuments of either kind.
It can only be taken on faith that the monarchy is central to study of the kingdom, and political historians have not been as successful as in England in presenting their preoccupations as fundamental to modern understanding. The history of the kingdom cannot be written in terms of the monarchy alone. The lack of any strong political 'message' in the kingdom's history probably helps to explain another striking feature of historical scholarship on Sicily: its international character. This is found even in English writing, though there is nothing like the quantity or variety of work in English that there is in German or French. German scholarship has been fostered in various ways, but is probably explained basically in terms of German involvement in the history of the medieval empire, which was linked to the kingdom most strikingly under Frederick II. Similarly, French interest originally grew from a desire to follow up the successes of the eleventh-century colonists who left Normandy to make themselves masters in southern Italy. Since the French have not, however, been so notably concerned with the history of the Normans in England, the main stimulus for modern scholarship there cannot in fact be attributed to chauvinistic sentiments. Although the history of the kingdom of Sicily has, of course, been closely studied in the South itself, it has been characteristically seen in excessively local terms and has not been generally accepted in Italy as part of the national history, unlike the history of the city republics, for example.
The fact that there has been no Italian concern to monopolise study of the subject for Italian nationals, coupled with the fact that cultural history has been of equal importance as political history for the kingdom as a whole, has probably helped to swell the numbers of scholars from all over Europe who have been able to make outstanding contributions to its modern scholarly study. As a result of such divergent tendencies, the most important advances in our appreciation of the kingdom have recently tended to be published either as the proceedings of great conferences addressed by scholars from all over Europe, or in the publications of the many local historical societies. These facts also help explain how difficult it is to keep the subject clearly in focus. I have called attention to the difficulties facing any writer when dealing with the kingdom, not only to plead extenuating circumstances for this book's defects, but also to indicate what sort of decisions have to be taken by the author at the outset. A book of this size, written in English, for the benefit of beginners in the study rather than for scholars, does not set out to resolve knotty problems of the kingdom's history. Its main purpose is to help students grasp the basic elements of interest, and it will be successful if it encourages its readers to pursue the matter further. To do this, they will need adequate linguistic competence to tackle the many substantial works in other languages. Only then can they penetrate deeper into the subject. Scholars already familiar with these books will not find this one very helpful. When deciding how to write the book, I drew on my experience that one of the principal attractions of medieval history for students is the possibility it gives them to make direct contact with original documents of the past. I have therefore tried to make the most of the contemporary evidence. It is in my view highly desirable for students to realise not only the character of the evidence, but also its quantity, if they are to assess the strength of the base on which all conclusions must be founded. Because of the nature of the evidence, and its often limited quantity, there is bound to be controversy about how to interpret almost every piece of it.
I am aware that by not pegging down every sentence with footnotes, I must appear to be presumptuously offering my own somewhat inexpert opinions. I have, all the same, done my best to make full use of all the scholarship known to me, so that the contemporary evidence should have maximum effect. Each of the topics discussed here deserves a big book to itself, in which the issues could be set out and the arguments assessed in detail. This book has been written to meet a different kind of need. I have worked on the assumption that many students are in fact much more interested in making contact with the twelfth-century kingdom than with the scholarly arguments about it, however engrossing they may be. In my view, English readers also have special problems of their own, which are not those of the Italians, Germans or French, where the southern kingdom is concerned. This book inevitably reflects not only what I have read, but also what I have learned about teaching the topic for many years. In preparing this study, I have gathered many references and visited many libraries at home and abroad and have still not been able to find all the books and articles I have looked for. I am sorry that my reading has been incomplete, but I recognise that this must always be the case. Even as I have been writing, more work has been published, in abundance and of high quality. It seems impossible to work quickly enough to master this new material, and delays in publication mean that being up to date with the literature must be an unattainable goal. From my own efforts to locate books and periodicals in England, I have also come to see how difficult it will necessarily be for students to follow up references both to primary sources and to secondary works, even if they understand the languages in which they are written. There are a few privileged libraries in England, but even these do not always have all the books of fundamental importance. In some cases I have not found evidence that the book I needed could be read in any library in this country.
I have had this in mind when preparing a guide to further reading. I had intended to list all the useful work written in English, but realised that I could not leave out certain basic books in other languages. Even if they cannot read them, students need to know what they are. To make anything like a comprehensive bibliography would itself require another book. I have therefore made a selection, giving references both to particularly useful works, or to recent ones on important topics, as well as to other publications likely to be obtainable which are worth reading —not necessarily because I regard these references as definitive, but so that interested students can get from them further guidance on bibliography. My purpose has been to show the southern kingdom of Italy as the sources I have read seem to present it.
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