THE PERSONALITY OF ROGER II

In attempting to discover the causes of legal development, one is aware that individual personalities may play a significant role, especially in times of rapid legal change, and yet it is usually very difficult to assess that role with any high degree of assurance.

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man, or the man the times? Roger II was clearly the right man at the right time. Born in December 1095, Roger was nine years old when his father, the Great Count Roger I, died in 1105. His mother, Adelaide, a north Italian, the Great Count's third wife, ruled as regent, relying principally on Sicilian ministers of Greek or Arab extraction. In 1112 Roger, at sixteen and a half, was thought to be mature enough to rule in his own name. Brought up in the predominantly Arab city of Palermo, surrounded by Moslem and Greek tutors, secretaries, and officials, he had been educated in the most advanced geography, mathematics, and science of his time, in Byzantine as well as Norman art and music, and in the poetry and philosophy of both the East and the West.

Both during the regency and in the first decades of his own reign there were frequent baronial revolts. Roger was a determined and successful but unenthusiastic warrior. He had not been trained in feudal virtues and values. He had been trained, rather, for absolute power of the kind wielded formerly by the Roman emperors of Byzantium and contemporaneously by the Sultan of Egypt. According to the chroniclers of his time, Roger craved power and glory, but preferred to gain and maintain them less by war than by diplomacy and intrigue. He is described as intelligent, devious, patient, sometimes ferocious, sometimes generous, combining enlightened tolerance with terrible cruelty. In avenging himself against rebellious barons he did not hesitate to raze cities and destroy every man, woman, and child left in them.

Was there something in Roger's personality that drew him to law? One may speculate that he saw in law both a key to power and glory and a peaceful means of controlling his polyglot kingdom. No doubt also his ambition to be like the Eastern Roman emperors led him to emulate them in lawmaking as well. In addition, he had other examples before him -- the example of the papacy, which was at that very time promoting the rapid development of a new body of canon law, and the much earlier example of the Lombard kingdom, which before its disintegration had had a written "code" of customary law, the Liber Papiensis. 15_Some features of Roman law and of Lombard law survived in Roger's kingdom, and of course canon law was applicable there -- at least theoretically -- as it was throughout Europe. Moreover, the very weakness of canon law, Lombard law, Roman law, and the other kinds of law in southern Italy -- above all, the very absence of a strong tradition of folklaw -- added to the challenge to create a new system of royal law.

These reasons for creating such a system existed apart from Roger II's personality. It required, to be sure, a ruler of intelligence, ambition, power, and similar virtues, to respond to the need. Yet Roger contributed something more than the carrying out of a preexisting historical

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mission. He added a new element, which is easier to recount than to characterize. He carved out of the legal universe a separate jurisdiction, that of the King of Sicily in matters of high justice, and then he defined that jurisdiction by a set of interlocking principles and rules that created a unified and developing body of law. He set forth a series of interrelated principles establishing and justifying royal jurisdiction of a certain type. No one had ever done that before.

Roger's achievement, which was embodied in the Assizes of Ariano ( 1140), was closely related to his personality and character, and especially to the combination of his Norman, Byzantine, and possibly Arab qualities.