THE NORMAN STATE

If the Norman Kingdom of Sicily, which was the leading kingdom of Europe in the twelfth century, had had a future comparable to that of the Norman Kingdom of England, the political and legal institutions that were created in twelfth-century Sicily would be as much studied and as widely known today as those of twelfth-century England.

The Normans of Sicily showed the same administrative genius as that shown by their fellow countrymen in Normandy and England. Characteristically, they did not attempt to abolish the preexisting political and legal institutions of the conquered peoples but rather sought to exploit those institutions to the maximum extent possible within the framework of a new political-administrative- legal structure that was both more centralized and more decentralized.

A similar willingness to preserve the old and adapt it to the new had characterized those Norsemen who, in 911, first settled permanently in the Frankish empire, in what came to be called Normandy: they respected and assimilated and adapted to new conditions the more advanced customs of the vanquished Franks. Their descendants who occupied England a century and a half later were also concerned to preserve, where feasible, the political and legal institutions of the AngloSaxons. So in southern Italy the Norman rulers adapted to their own use various features of the preexisting political and legal culture, while at the same time transforming that culture into a new type of state and a new type of law.

In southern Italy the Normans found an advanced, though decaying, polity, itself a mixture of many elements. It was organized partly under a Moslem governor at Palermo, called an "emir," who ruled autocratically through a number of governmental departments.

-414

amiratus (from which the modern naval title "admiral" is derived); moreover, most of the persons who held this office in the first century of Norman rule were of Greek or Arab origin. The amiratus, like his predecessors, ruled through governmental departments, and these, too, were staffed with officials trained in the earlier administrative theory and practice______________ chiefly Byzantine in Apulia,

chiefly Arab in Sicily. The Normans added, however, a system of civil service examinations, open to persons of various classes; this innovation may have been inspired by the Chinese example as reported by Arab or Jewish travelers. 11

In addition to exploiting existing institutions, the Normans created new central offices connected closely with the royal court. One was the chancery, probably modeled after the papal chancery. Its head, at first called protonotary and later chancellor, had the power of the royal seal and was responsible for issuing, in the name of the king, mandates, diplomas, decrees, and writs of various kinds. Roger II's chancellor, Guarin, was the king's alter ego, who ruled the kingdom when the king was away fighting wars.

Another new central office was the treasury, at first called the dogana, which handled royal accounts and administered a sophisticated system of taxation. The treasury owed something of its character to the preexisting Arab financial office of the diwan and to the Arabic system of reckoning. It probably also owed much to the highly developed structure of financial administration and taxation created in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries in the papal curia.

Still another new official body created by the Normans was a professional royal court, with jurisdiction over the most serious crimes as well as over civil disputes between freemen involving breach of the peace and property rights in freehold land.

The Normans in twelfth-century Sicily also created the institution of royal bailiffs, called baiuli, who were similar both in name and in function to the bailiffs (ballivi) of the Duchy of Normandy. They were, at first, executive officers of the crown, delegated to carry out royal orders. Later they acquired broader administrative and quasi-judicial powers. They had tenure of office. In the thirteenth century, under Frederick II, they became salaried, removable officials.

-415-

Through such sophisticated governmental institutions, the Norman kings of Sicily strengthened their links with the people as a whole and thus their control over the feudal and urban aristocracy. The king was not merely overlord of his tenants_in_chief; he ruled all the people in his territory directly__________________________________________________________

though not in all respects. If his vassals sought to exercise their feudal right of resistance against him, he could call on the entire population to support him militarily and could invoke not merely feudal but royal penal sanctions, including destruction of castles, money fines, incarceration, and outlawry. 12_

The centralized control of the Sicilian monarchy over the feudal nobility is reflected in the system of military service, and particularly in the issuance of a written register of fixed duties of knight's service.

Another example of central control by the Sicilian monarchy over the feudal aristocracy was the practice of reserving liege loyalty to the king in every mutual oath of fealty sworn by a vassal and his lord. Still another example was the maintenance of the royal power of consent to the marriage of a vassal or subvassal -- a power which for the most part was exercised indirectly as a tax measure but which on occasion could be exercised directly as a political measure. Both these examples have parallels in twelfth-century England, where a similar royal control was also exercised over the feudal aristocracy through a chancery, an exchequer, itinerant royal justices, sheriffs, knight's service, and the reserve power of a military conscription of the whole people (fyrd).

In sharp contrast to England, however, as well as to the other countries of Europe, the Norman kings of southern Italy were not considered to be subject to law (and in that sense prototypes, at least, of constitutional monarchs), but on the contrary were considered to be autocrats and even tyrants. Here Byzantine and Arabic models may also have made a contribution. Ruling the church, like the Byzantine emperors, the Norman kings were the chief priests of their kingdom. A mosaic in the twelfth-century church of the Martorana in Palermo shows King Roger II receiving his crown directly from Christ, without mediation by pope or archbishop, and a similar mosaic in the cathedral at Monreale shows his son William II also receiving his crown directly from Christ.

-416-

there were urban privileges they were always subordinate to the royal will. Finally, the king was not chief baron in the feudal hierarchy but directly lord of all subvassals and, indeed, of all inhabitants of his territory. In all these respects he was an autocrat (a "self-ruler"), with no limitations on his jurisdiction.

He was, in addition, a tyrant, in the sense that there was no legal restraint, in theory or in practice, upon his power to act arbitrarily and despotically. His authority was absolute, in the technical sense of that term; that is, he was "absolved" from the law. The Norman kings of southern Italy generally preferred to rule by law, and to a considerable extent they were compelled to rule by law in order to control their subjects, but they themselves were considered to be above the law. In fact, they did not' hesitate to engage in barbaric cruelties not only against those who opposed them but also against those who did not oppose them. They were pleased to inspire even in their supporters not only awe but also terror.

The experience of the Norman Kingdom of Sicily challenges the conventional view that modern Western concepts of legality originated in compromises between the needs and policies of strong monarchies, on the one hand, and the traditions and interests of preexisting feudal and local political communities, on the other. The history of Sicily shows, on the contrary, that it was possible for a highly developed system of royal law, which penetrated the country from top to bottom, to coexist with the despotic power of the ruler. There are striking similarities between the systems of royal law in England and in Sicily in the twelfth century: in both, the monarchy established links with the nation as a whole, and, by constructing a central legal system that reached down to all the people, succeeded in confining the special interests of the feudal aristocracy. Yet in England, as Mitteis has said, "the royal law always found its limit in the legal sense of the community." ¹⁴In southern Italy there had never been a strong tradition of tribal (clan) and regional customary law such as had existed in Germanic and Frankish Europe. Perhaps the weakness of the legal sense of the community led its rulers to excesses; perhaps their claim of unlimited authority weakened still further that legal sense. A simpler though not unrelated explanation is that in England, as in all other countries of the West except Sicily, the Church of Rome was strong enough to limit substantially both the power and the authority of the monarchy.