English Historical Review Vol. CXXIV No. 509
© The Author [2009]. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
EHR, cxxiv. 509 (Aug. 2009)
Advance Access publication on July 7, 2009
doi:10.1093/ehr/cep182
The Chancery and Charters of the Kings of Sicily
(1130 – 1212)
*
T he loss of evidence is a problem with which most historians are all too
familiar. Sometimes this may be the result of cataclysm, as with the
destruction of the French Chambre des Comptes by fi re in 1737 or that of
almost all the contents of the Archivio di Stato in Naples as a reprisal by
a stray Wehrmacht unit in 1943.
1
More often such losses have been slow
and cumulative, the results of poor storage, carelessness and the inability
of those who had such records in their charge to recognise their
signifi cance. All too many curators have imitated Aubrey’s friend Parson
Stump and his sons, who used sheets of medieval manuscripts for
stopping the bungholes on ale barrels and scouring their fi rearms during
the Civil War,
2
or the nuns of Ciudad Rodrigo, who in the early 1900s
utilised medieval parchments as convenient material for sewing
patterns.
3
Inevitably, given the passage of time, medieval historians have
most cause to lament such losses, and at least for the period from c. 1100
onwards one might suggest that the major problem facing historians is
not so much the lack of evidence as its loss . The relatively high survival
rate of medieval documentation from the kingdom of England may
make Anglophone historians less sensitive to this issue than are others.
But, as the case-study discussed in this essay illustrates, those who study
other regions are all too aware of the scale of the problem.
Although modern historians are agreed that the twelfth-century kings
of Sicily possessed one of the most advanced administrative systems of
contemporary Christendom, remarkably little of the substantial amount
of parchment and paper that it generated now survives.
4
There are also
signifi cant diffi culties even with the relatively small number of royal
documents that remain. The present study fi rst of all surveys the materials
thus available for the study of Sicilian kingship, both in the twelfth
century and in the transitional period after 1194 when the rule of the
* I am grateful to Professors Vera von Falkenhausen and Horst Enzensberger for their assistance
in preparing this essay and to Alan Murray for his helpful comments on an earlier draft.
1 . These had earlier been taken to the Villa Montesano, near Nola, to escape the bombing of the
port of Naples, but were then deliberately destroyed there on 30 Sept. 1943.
2 . ‘ The Life and Times of John Aubrey ’ , in O.L. Dick, ed., Aubrey’s Brief Lives (3rd edn.,
London, 1958), xxvi, xxxii – iii.
3 . P. Linehan, ‘ A tale of two cities: capitular Burgos and mendicant Burgos in the thirteenth
century ’ , in D. Abulafi a, M. Franklin and M. Rubin, eds., Church and City 1000–1500. Essays in
Honour of Christopher Brooke , (Cambridge, 1992), 81.
4 . For modern views of the royal administration, see especially H. Takayama, The Administration
of the Norman Kingdom of Sicily (Leiden, 1993), 2 – 3, and the literature there cited. The most
extreme statement of this case has been A. Marongiu, ‘ A Model State in the Middle Ages: The
Norman and Swabian Kingdom of Sicily ’ , Comparative Studies in Society and History , vi (1963 – 4),
307 – 24, although few historians would now accept his argument in its entirety.
EHR, cxxiv. 509 (Aug. 2009)
780
THE CHANCERY AND CHARTERS OF THE KINGS OF SICILY (
1130 – 1212
)
Empress Constance, and then of her young son Frederick, was in terms
of the chancery, and indeed of the royal administration in general,
essentially a continuation of that of their Norman predecessors.
5
It then
attempts to examine some of the problems associated with these
documents. Why have so few royal charters survived, and is there
compelling evidence to suggest that a signifi cant number now lost did
once exist? We must not, after all, simply assume that this was the case.
The development, personnel and practices of the chancery require
examination, as does the issue of forgery, a practice that was all too
prevalent in the regno , especially in the thirteenth century. The paper
discusses the documents, both formal diplomas with their elaborate
formulae and (simplifi ed and shorter) mandates, issued by the royal
chancery in the period up to 1212, when Frederick set off for Germany to
claim the imperial crown. It does not, however, consider the (now also
very few) Arabic, or bilingual Greek – Arabic, documents issued by the
royal D ī w ā n al-Tahq ī q al-Ma’m ū r (the offi ce of land administration) in
Sicily — both because these were not, strictly speaking, products of the
chancery but of a separate department of government, and since the
present author is linguistically unqualifi ed to discuss them. One should
point out, however, that the surviving surveys of estate boundaries and
services owed ( daf ā tir ) and lists of serfs ( ğ ar ī da ), few as they are, are
testimony to the sophistication and complexity of the administration of
the island of Sicily, especially after the administrative reforms put in place
by King Roger’s chief minister, George of Antioch, in the mid-1140s.
6
Let us begin by briefl y surveying the surviving documents from the
royal chancery.
7
One should stress that when discussing the Sicilian
‘ chancery ’ , this institution, in the sense of an organised writing-offi ce,
manned by specialist and full-time personnel and with a clearly defi ned
style of documentary production, began only with Roger II. Although
some seventy-seven diplomata attributed to the conqueror of Sicily,
Count Roger I ( d. 1101) survive, almost all either in Greek or in later
Latin translations of Greek originals, their issuance was still an ad hoc
5 . See especially J.-M. Martin, ‘ L’administration du royaume entre Normands et Souabes ’ , in
T. Kölzer, ed. Die Staufer im Süden. Sizilien und das Reich (Sigmaringen, 1996), 113 – 40.
6 . J. Johns, Arabic Administration in Norman Sicily. The Royal D ī w ā n (Cambridge, 2002) is
fundamental for discussion of this aspect. For the reforms of the 1140s, see also Takayama,
Administration of the Norman Kingdom of Sicily , 81 – 93.
7 . The following editions and abbreviations are used throughout: C.-R. Brühl, ed., Rogerii II
Regis Diplomata Latina , (Codex Diplomaticus Regni siciliae, Ser. I.ii(1), Cologne, 1987) (henceforth
Roger II Diplomata ); H. Enzensberger, ed., Guillelmi I. Regis Diplomata , (Codex Diplomaticus
Regni Siciliae, Ser. I.iii, Cologne, 1996) (henceforth William I Diplomata ); H. Zielinski, ed.,
Tancredi et Willelmi III Regum Diplomata , (Codex Diplomaticus Regni siciliae, Ser. I.v, Cologne,
1982) (henceforth Tancred Diplomata ); T. Kölzer, ed., Constantiae Imperatricis et Reginae Siciliae
Diplomata (1195 – 1198) (Codex Diplomaticus Regni siciliae, Ser. II, 1(2), Cologne, 1983) (henceforth
Constance Diplomata ); W. Koch, ed., Friderici II Diplomata 1198 – 1212 , (MGH Diplomatum, xiv(i),
Hanover, 2002) (henceforth Frederick II Diplomata 1198 – 1212 ). Modern editions of the Greek
charters of King Roger, and those of William II, the latter by Horst Enzensberger, are in preparation,
but have not yet appeared.
781
EHR, cxxiv. 509 (Aug. 2009)
THE CHANCERY AND CHARTERS OF THE KINGS OF SICILY (
1130 – 1212
)
affair, albeit that they tended to be modelled on existing Byzantine
documents from Calabria.
8
Under Roger II, we can begin to speak of an
organised and professional chancery.
Roger II ruled, fi rst as Count of Sicily and then as king, for just over
forty-eight years (September 1105 until February 1154: he was crowned
as fi rst king of Sicily on Christmas Day 1130). Some 200 documents
issued in his name survive, of which eighty-six are written in Latin, and
114 were originally written in Greek, although quite a few of the latter
now survive only in later Latin translations. One should note that there
are in addition eleven surviving ğ ar ī da (lists of serfs) in Arabic, which
were drawn up the offi cials of the d ī w ā n . Only seventeen genuine Latin
charters, however, survive in the original, and a further fi ve in more-or-
less contemporary (pre-1200) copies. (Two more originals perished in
the destruction of the Archivio di Stato in Naples in 1943 and are now
known only from photographs.) Only sixteen genuine Greek documents
survive in the original. Moreover the core of our evidence is considerably
smaller even than these fi gures suggest, for of the eighty-six Latin
documents that are known, no fewer than thirty-seven are forgeries
(43%) (thirteen Latin and eight Greek ‘ pseudo-originals ’ , that is forg-
eries that purport to be original charters also survive, while another
Latin pseudo-original perished in 1943).
9
The problem of forgery is
therefore a serious and signifi cant one, to which we shall return later.
Furthermore, we may also note that some 60 per cent of the surviving
documents of King Roger were issued in favour of monastic houses (a
predictable, but surely misleading proportion) and that no less than
thirty of these documents (15% of the overall total) come from only
three monasteries on the island of Sicily: the Greek houses of St Philip,
Fragalà (effectively re-founded by Roger I in 1090), and the Holy
Saviour, Messina (founded by King Roger himself in 1131), and the
Benedictine double monastery of Lipari/Patti, founded by Roger I and
promoted by Anacletus II to be the seat of a bishopric in 1131.
10
The number of surviving documents issued in the name of the later
kings is similarly disappointingly few. There now survive only thirty-
fi ve documents of William I (thirty Latin and fi ve Greek or bilingual),
8 . J. Becker, ‘ Die griechischen und lateinischen Urkunden Graf Rogers I. von Sizilien ’ ,
Quellen und Forschungen aus italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken , lxxxiv (2004), 1 – 37, especially
6 – 7, 13.
9 . C.-R. Brühl, Urkunden und Kanzlei König Rogers II. von Sizilien (Cologne, 1978), 11 – 35, with
some modifi cation of his fi gures to take account of more recent discoveries. For the Greek
documents, V. von Falkenhausen, ‘ I Diplomi dei re normanni in lingua greca ’ , in G. de Gregorio
and O. Kresten, eds., Documenti medievali greci e latini. Studi comparativi (Atti del seminario di
Erice, 23 – 29, ottobre, 1995) (Spoleto, 1998), 253 – 308. Prof. von Falkenhausen has also furnished me
with some updated statistics on the Greek documents. The fi gures quoted ignore a small number
of post-medieval forgeries.
10 . Brühl, Urkunden und Kanzlei , 33 – 4. For the creation of the bishopric and the problems that
ensued, see now G. A. Loud, The Latin Church in Norman Italy (Cambridge, 2007), 159 – 60, 165.
For the foundation and endowment of Holy Saviour, Messina, M. Scaduto, Il Monachesimo
basiliano nella Sicilia medievale. Rinascita e decadenza, sec. XI – XIV (Rome, 1947), 180 – 92.
EHR, cxxiv. 509 (Aug. 2009)
782
THE CHANCERY AND CHARTERS OF THE KINGS OF SICILY (
1130 – 1212
)
of which seven are forgeries. Here the proportion of surviving originals
is somewhat larger: thirteen of the genuine documents, including two
bilingual Latin and Greek charters and three pseudo-originals. There
are, according to the editor of the forthcoming edition, 156 such
documents known from the reign of William II, but this still gives an
average of just under seven documents issued for each year of the reign,
while the proportion of forgeries remains remarkably high: these number
thirty-four (21.7% of the total).
11
Indeed, the fi gures for the reign of
William II should probably be revised downwards. Three of the forgeries
date from the fi fteenth century or later and were produced to provide
bogus historical antecedents for later noble families — they have really
no connection at all with the actual chancery of the late twelfth century.
12
The purportedly earliest charter of William II, dated November 1166,
for the abbey of St Maria, Nardo, is almost certainly a forgery by Pietro
Polidori, the historian of Nardo of the early eighteenth century.
13
Whether such very late confections should really be classed as documents
of a twelfth-century king is very dubious. Furthermore, it is a good
question whether a group of four mandates recorded only in summary
form in the late twelfth-century chartulary-chronicle of the monastery
of St Clement, Casauria, actually represents separate documents, or
whether in fact they may all be a series of complaints that form part of
one and the same document addressed to a local nobleman, Bartholomew
Gentile, and his brothers.
14
A strong case can therefore be made that the
number of surviving chancery documents from the reign of William II
should be reduced to 149. Only seven of these documents are in Greek,
most of which are in fact bilingual Greek – Latin ones.
For the reign of Tancred (1190 – 4), there are thirty-fi ve documents
known, only one of which is in Greek and of which eleven survive in the
original. There is, however, only one forgery attributed to Tancred. The
later Staufen rulers considered his rule to be illegitimate and his actions
therefore to be without legal force; Henry VI informed the pope in 1192
that he had ‘ treacherously and traitorously seized ’ the kingdom of
11 . H. Enzensberger, ‘ Il documento regio come strumento di potere ’ , in Potere, società e popolo
nell’età dei due Guglielmi (Atti delle quarte giornate normanno-sveve 1979) (Bari, 1981), 111 – 12. Prof.
Enzensberger has kindly supplied me with the fi gures quoted here and in the table below. For
discussion and a summary list of all the documents of William II, H. Enzensberger, ‘ Note di storia
amministrativa e giuridica e di propaganda politica nell’età di due Guglielmi ’ , Atti dell’accademia
di scienze, lettere e arti di Palermo , Ser. V.i (parte 2 lettere) (1981/2), 23 – 61. References below
to William II Diplomata refer to the documents as numbered on Enzensberger’s list, though
where possible an edition of the actual charter text will also be cited. Prof. Enzensberger has
made a number of edited texts available on his website:
http://web.uni-bamberg.de/ggeo/
hilfswissenschaften/WilhelmII/textliste.htm .
12 . William II Diplomata , nos. 40, 134, 146 in Enzensberger’s list; see K.A. Kehr, Die Urkunden
der normannisch-sizilischen Könige (Innsbruck, 1902), 387 – 94.
13 . F. Ughelli, Italia Sacra sive de Episcopis Italiae (2nd edn., by N. Colletti, 10 vols., Venice,
1717 – 21), x. 296.
14 . William II Diplomata , nos. 56 – 9, from Paris, BN MS. Lat. 5411, fo. 271r.
783
EHR, cxxiv. 509 (Aug. 2009)
THE CHANCERY AND CHARTERS OF THE KINGS OF SICILY (
1130 – 1212
)
Sicily.
15
Thus there was little reason to manufacture documents
attributed to him as precedents or title deeds, at least in the early to mid-
thirteenth century, which was the great age of south Italian documentary
forgery. There are only seven documents known from the brief and ill-fated
reign of Tancred’s son William (February – December 1194), of which only
one, for the Cistercian monastery of Sambucina in Calabria survives in the
original. For the Staufen rulers after December 1194 until Frederick’s arrival
in Genoa on his way north in 1212, the overall number of known chancery
documents is somewhat better, though still hardly a plethora (234
documents in eighteen years from Frederick and Constance to south Italian
recipients). One might add to these some eighty-fi ve surviving documents,
and thirty-six known
deperdita
issued by Constance’s husband (and
Frederick’s father) the Emperor Henry VI for south Italian recipients or
while resident in southern Italy after his coronation as king of Sicily in
December 1194, but these were almost all products of his imperial
scriptorium and written by German or north Italian notaries and thus
are not strictly germane to our discussion here.
16
Only one Sicilian
chancery notary can be identifi ed as writing documents for Henry VI,
and that for only for a handful of charters, all but one dating from the
spring of 1195, before the royal chancery had been properly reconstituted
for the Empress Constance.
17
The number of surviving royal documents is therefore disappointing and
not just in absolute terms but also in comparison with other contemporary
European kingdoms. There are, for example, only 139 documents surviving
from the twenty-three years and two months that Roger II ruled as king of
Sicily, an average of six documents a year. This ratio only marginally
increased under his two successors. Yet some 300 documents issued in the
name of the French King Louis VI (1108 – 37) survive, a ratio of 10.3 per
annum , and for the German rulers Lothar and Conrad III (who ruled
between them from 1125 to 1152), there are almost 400 documents, with a
combined ratio of about fourteen charters issued per year.
18
For Frederick
15 . L. Weiland, ed., MGH Constitutiones et Acta Publica , i (Hanover, 1893), 491 – 2 no. 344. Compare
the attitude of pro-Staufen chroniclers like Otto of Sankt Blasien: ‘ a man called Tancred, had with the
consent of all the barons and cities of Sicily tyrannously set up his own government in that land, which
has from antiquity been the mother of tyrants, seizing the name of king and violently resisting the
emperor ’ , A. Hofmeister, ed., Ottonis de Sancto Blasio Chronica (MGH SRG, Hanover, 1912), 56.
16 . The fi gures for Henry’s documents are derived from D.R. Clementi, ‘ Calendar of the
diplomas of the Hohenstaufen Emperor Henry VI concerning the kingdom of Sicily ’ , Quellen und
Forschungen aus Italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken , xxxv (1955), 86 – 225. I have deleted three
charters given to northern Italian recipients after Frederick left Rome in 1212 from the number
edited in Frederick II Diplomata 1198 – 1212 .
17 . Eugenius, a royal notary of both Tancred and Constance, wrote charters for Henry VI in
favour of the bishop of Penne on 4 Apr. 1195, for the bishop of Ascoli and the monastery of St John
in Venere on 1 May 1195 and for the archbishopric of Palermo on 16 Apr. 1197, Clementi, ‘ Calendar
of the diplomas of Henry VI ’ , nos. 69, 84, 86, and 106; T. Kölzer, Urkunden und Kanzlei der
Kaiserin Konstanze Königen von Sizilien (Cologne, 1983), 61. However, because notaries were not
named in imperial privileges, identifi cations must be made through paleography, and thus can
only be done where such documents survive in the original.
18 . Brühl, Urkunden und Kanzlei , 17 – 19.
EHR, cxxiv. 509 (Aug. 2009)
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THE CHANCERY AND CHARTERS OF THE KINGS OF SICILY (
1130 – 1212
)
Barbarossa (1152 – 90), we have 1080 surviving diplomas or 28.4 per year.
These fi gures are still not very high, but neither the French nor the
German rulers had a particularly active nor effective administration
during the twelfth century. Their administrative structures were far less
sophisticated than those developed in the kingdom of Sicily by the later
1140s, and they did not rule directly over the whole of their kingdoms
in the way that the kings of Sicily did. Yet more of their documents
survive than do those of the Sicilian kings.
The issue here is not so much the number of documents the royal
chanceries once issued, but rather the rate of survival — there are now,
for example, 119 original documents of Conrad III extant, as opposed
to thirty-three of King Roger — and the proportion of forgeries among
the French and German royal documents is also much smaller. Thus, of
the 1080 diplomas attributed to Frederick I, there only forty-eight
forgeries (and even if these are disregarded, we still have an average of
twenty-seven surviving diplomas a year issued by the imperial chancery).
Some 458 (40%) of these documents survive in the original.
19
By
contrast, while the proportion of surviving originals from the Sicilian
royal chancery under Constance and Frederick II is considerably better
than before, indeed comparable to that from the imperial chancery —
39% under Constance and 42% of Frederick’s documents up to 1212 —
the total number of surviving texts during these years still averages only
thirteen per annum . One should also note that for no less than ten of
Constance’s charters (15% of the total), there survives no manuscript at
all, the text being known only through a post-medieval printed edition.
20
For her immediate predecessor, the ill-fated William III, the situation is
even worse: apart from the one original, four charters survive in
seventeenth-century manuscript copies and the other two only in early
modern editions. Similarly, twelve of the thirteen Greek charters of
Roger II for the Holy Saviour, Messina, are preserved only through
copies in a seventeenth-century manuscript.
21
Retrospective mentions have also enabled scholars to identify a
considerable number of deperdita that once existed to which we have
clear reference in other documents (see the last column of the table
below). For King Roger and William II, the number of deperdita is
about half that of the surviving royal documents, while for William I it
is almost double the total of known texts. Even so, there can be little
19 . H. Appelt, ed., Friderici I Diplomata , (5 vols., MGH Diplomata Regum et Imperatorum
Germaniae, x, Hanover, 1975 – 90), v. 1 – 3. Fourteen originals from Barbarossa’s chancery were lost
in the Second World War.
20 . Frederick II Diplomata 1198 – 1212 , xix. Kölzer, Urkunden und Kanzlei der Kaiserin Konstanze ,
33 – 4. One might note that for Frederick’s reign as a whole (1198 – 1250) only some 30 per cent of his
Sicilian charters survive in the original, whereas almost 60 per cent of his surviving documents
issued in Germany survive as originals, W. Koch. ‘ Die Edition der Urkunden Friedrichs II ’ , in
Arnold Esch and Norbert Kamp, eds., Friedrich II. Tagung des Deutschen Historischen Instituts in
Rom im Gedenkjahr 1994 (Tübingen, 1996), 100 – 1.
21 . Brühl, Urkunden und Kanzlei , 31 – 2.
785
EHR, cxxiv. 509 (Aug. 2009)
THE CHANCERY AND CHARTERS OF THE KINGS OF SICILY (
1130 – 1212
)
doubt that the total of existing documents and known deperdita is still
only a relatively small proportion of the documents issued in the king’s
name that once existed. Indeed, it has been suggested that for the reign
of King Roger, the number of surviving documents may be no more
than 10% of the total of those issued.
23
The survival rate may well have
been even worse for, for example, the reigns of Tancred and William III,
given the damnatio memoriae that overtook them after 1194: the modern
editor of these rulers ’ documents suggests, not implausibly, that the
forty-two surviving documents from 1190 – 4 may imply a total of about
700 actually issued. If anything this fi gure is conservative, based as it is
on a calculation of three chancery notaries active at any one time, each
writing no more than fi ve documents a month.
24
Such calculations, however cautious they may be, remain speculative.
What other evidence might there be to suggest that what remains today
is but a fraction of the documentation that once existed? First, we have
occasional direct evidence that suggests that many more documents
once existed, not just issued by the kings but also by their Norman
predecessors as territorial rulers. In October 1144, during an enquiry
into earlier privileges conducted by King Roger’s government, the
bishop of Cassano, in northern Calabria, submitted nine previous
charters to the king for confi rmation while the latter was staying at
Messina. One was a Greek privilege of Duke Robert Guiscard, there
were three privileges of his son Roger Borsa (duke 1085 – 1111) and one
was from the king’s father Count Roger I. One of the other four charters
referred to a gift to the church by a nobleman of property previously
given to him by Duke Roger (which probably implies a further ducal
Table 1: Documents of the Kings of Sicily (to 1212)
Total
chancery
documents
Originals
(and pseudo-
originals)
Forgeries
Deperdita
Roger (as count
and
king
1105 – 54)
200
33 (21)
37 Latin,
? Greek
22
91
William I
35
13
7
60
William II
156
47 (8)
34
84
Tancred
35
11
1
37
William III
7
1
0
0
Constance
66
19 (2)
7
73
Frederick
(1198 – 1212)
168
71
9
?
22 . The number of Greek forgeries ascribed to Roger II has not yet been securely established
(information from Prof. von Falkenhausen).
23 . Brühl, Urkunden und Kanzlei , 34.
24 . Tancred Diplomata , xxii.
EHR, cxxiv. 509 (Aug. 2009)
786
THE CHANCERY AND CHARTERS OF THE KINGS OF SICILY (
1130 – 1212
)
charter once existed). Yet none of these documents from the king’s
predecessors as territorial rulers now survives. Indeed, the survival of this
particular diploma of Roger II has itself been fortuitous — previous late
medieval notarial copies that once existed having now disappeared, the
oldest manuscript today is that of a local historian c. 1900.
25
Similarly a
Greek charter (now extant only in a later Latin translation) issued in the
same month confi rms nineteen previous documents belonging to the
monastery of St Bartholomew of Trigona, including three of Roger
himself, one of his mother Adelaide and one of Duke Roger Borsa, all now
lost.
26
In addition, royal mandates (executive writs ordering action to be taken)
were probably more likely to be lost or discarded than formal privileges.
One of the earliest known privileges of William II is a privilege to the
Cistercian monastery of Sambucina granting it land from the royal demesne
in the Val di Crati. But while the privilege itself survives, the mandate
referred to therein, to the catepans (royal bailiffs) of Bisignano and Cassano,
instructing them to put the monastery into possession of this property, does
not. (Nor, it should be noted, does an earlier diploma of King Roger also
mentioned in this document).
27
References in surviving records of legal
cases also refer to royal mandates that no longer survive. A court at Sarno,
in the Terra di Lavoro in May 1183, heard a mandate from the royal
chamberlain of the district read out, instructing the local stratigotus to
respect the property of the abbey of Cava in his bailiwick. The text of
this brief document was recorded verbatim in the court record, but the
mandate from the royal curia to the chamberlain, expressly mentioned
by the latter, was not.
28
Secondly, one may point to obvious chronological gaps in the record.
There are only three surviving documents of William I after 1160, one
of which is a forgery, probably dating from the later thirteenth century.
29
Nor indeed do we have any undoubtedly genuine Latin documents
from the chancery of King Roger after February 1148.
30
Yet we surely
cannot assume that his notaries did not write any during the last six
25 . Roger II Diplomata , no. 64A, in C.-R. Brühl, ‘ Additamenta ad Diplomata Latina Rogerii II
Regis ’ , in William I Diplomata , 150 – 4.
26 . V. von Falkenhausen, ‘ S. Bartolomeo di Trigona: storia di un monastero Greco nella
Calabria normanno-sveva ’ , Rivista di studi bizantini e neoellenici
, n.s. xxxvi (1999), 96 – 102.
Presumably most of these were in Greek.
27 . A. Pratesi, ed., Carte latine di abbazie calabresi provenienti dall’archivio Aldobrandini (Studi
e Testi 197: Vatican City, 1958), 58 – 60 no. 22 ( William II Diplomata , no. 3). Pratesi considers this
to be a forgery masquerading as an original; Enzensberger, however, thinks it to be genuine.
28 . Cava dei Tirreni, Archivio della badia di S. Trinità (henceforth Cava), Arca , xxxix. 13: Notum
sit tibi quam nos in mandatis receperimus a sancta regia curia ut homines [et] tenimenta que cavensis
ecclesia tenet in camerariatu nostro eidem ecclesie quiete et pacifi ce tenere permittamus. The text of the
chamberlain’s mandate, but not the that of the whole case, was edited by C.H. Haskins, ‘ England
and Sicily in the twelfth century ’ , ante , xxvi (1911), 445 – 6.
29 . William I Diplomata , 82 – 3 no. † 31.
30 . The last clearly authentic Latin document from King Roger’s chancery is Roger II Diplomata ,
214 – 16 no. 75, the resolution of a long-standing legal dispute between the sees of Messina and Lipari.
787
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THE CHANCERY AND CHARTERS OF THE KINGS OF SICILY (
1130 – 1212
)
years of his reign or that so few were produced by those of King William
in the last fi ve years of his rule.
Thirdly, there is what we know of the activities of individual royal
notaries. Sicilian practice, unlike that of the German imperial chancery, was
that the notary writing the document recorded his name in diplomata ,
although not when writing mandates, and so the career of particular notaries
can be followed. Admittedly, tracing such careers is still problematic, since
where documents have been transmitted only in late copies the fi nal clauses,
including the
corroboratio
naming the scribe, are sometimes omitted.
Furthermore, in the second half of the twelfth century the proportion of
mandates, where the notary’s name was not recorded, increases, and, with
so few originals surviving, palaeographical evidence cannot compensate for
this. For the thirty-fi ve documents of William I, we know the notary’s
identity for only twenty-three.
31
But, for all the defects of the evidence,
what we can discover about the royal notaries has obvious implications.
The most prominent fi gure in the royal chancery in the second half
of the twelfth century was Matthew of Salerno, who according to the
history of pseudo-Falcandus was the confi dant and principal assistant of
William I’s chief minister, Maio of Bari, and ‘ had had an extremely long
period of court service as a notary ’ .
32
He went on to a career of great
distinction as a royal minister ( familiaris ), vice chancellor and head of
the chancery under William II and chancellor and principal minister
under King Tancred until his death in 1193. From 1166 onwards he was
an almost invariable presence in the dating clauses of royal documents.
Indeed, from his restoration to favour in 1162 after a brief period of
disgrace, he was at the heart of the Sicilian government for more than
thirty years. Our concern at this point, however, is with his role as a
royal notary in the earlier part of his career. Matthew’s signifi cance in
the royal writing-offi ce is undoubted and supports what ‘ Falcandus ’
said about him. He was the notary who wrote the text of the Treaty of
Benevento between William I and the papacy in June 1156, that of the
treaty between the king and Genoa in November of the same year and
a special privilege for the archbishopric of Palermo, ‘ the principal church
of our kingdom ’ in December 1157, investing it with a substantial
military fi ef (an unusual grant to a church). The special status of all
three of these documents was shown by the golden seals attached to
them; a mark of particular distinction used only for unusually important
documents.
33
Matthew would appear therefore to have been the
senior Latin notary of the royal court who was entrusted with the
31 . Enzensberger, ‘ Note di storia amministrativa ’ , 30.
32 . G.B. Siragusa, ed., La Historia o Liber de Regno Sicilie e la Epistola ad Petrum Panormitanae
Ecclesie Thesaurium di Ugo Falcando , ed. (Fonti per la storia d’Italia 22, Rome, 1897) (henceforth
Falcandus ), 45, 69: The History of the Tyrants of Sicily by ‘ Hugo Falcandus ’ 1154 – 69 , translated G.A.
Loud and T.E.J. Wiedemann (Manchester, 1999) (henceforth Tyrants ), 99, 121.
33 . William I Diplomata , 32 – 6 no. 12; 47 – 8 no. 17; 60 – 4 no. 22.
EHR, cxxiv. 509 (Aug. 2009)
788
THE CHANCERY AND CHARTERS OF THE KINGS OF SICILY (
1130 – 1212
)
writing of documents of unusual importance. Yet only three other
genuine documents can be attributed to his pen, along with two mid-
thirteenth-century forgeries ascribed to him as notary (but for which
the model was probably a genuine document by another royal notary).
34
Are we really to believe that this was the sum of his scriptorial activity
over ‘ an extremely long period ’ ?
A similar argument can be made with regard to two other royal notaries
from the same period. Robert of S. Giovanni was a canon of the royal
chapel and a prominent fi gure at court whom William I at one point
intended to appoint as chancellor, but who, according to ‘ Falcandus ’ , fell
foul of the jealousy of the king’s minister Maio and was lucky to escape
with his life. Robert was also one of the few curiales of whom the bitterly
critical author of the Liber de Regno Sicilie actually approved: he described
him as ‘ a man of high reputation and proven faithfulness ’ .
35
Robert was
active as a royal notary for more than twenty years, from 1147, when he
wrote the record of a court case heard before King Roger at Salerno, until
the early months of 1169, when he wrote three diplomata for the minority
government of William II. But in total from these twenty-two years, we
possess only eight royal documents written by Robert.
36
A further, albeit
more obscure, fi gure is Sanctorus, a notary who wrote two diplomas in
the early years of William I and a further one in December 1166, seven
months after William II became king. Sanctorus too was a person of some
consequence, since some years later, in 1185, he can be found as one of the
Master Justices of the Royal Court, the senior legal offi cers of the royal
administration.
37
Over a period as a royal notary of at least a decade, and
quite possibly considerably longer, he must have written many more than
just three charters.
All of this suggests that those documents that now survive form
the tip of a much larger iceberg. But how extensive have these losses
34 . He is named as the notary of William I Diplomata , nos. 16 and 27, and ibid., no. 3, where the
notary is not named, can be ascribed to him on palaeographical grounds. The two forgeries are
ibid., nos. † 28 and † 30, both for the burgesses of Messina, are, so the editor suggests, based on a
genuine diploma by the royal notary Robert (of whom more below).
35 . Falcandus , 66 – 8 ( Tyrants , 118 – 19).
36 . Roger II Diplomata , no. 73; William I Diplomata , nos. 6, 15, 24 – 5; William II Diplomata ,
nos. 25 – 7 (these last edited Carte Latine di Abbazie Calabresi , 60 – 2 no. 23; and C.A. Garufi , ed., I
Documenti inediti dell’epoca normanna in Sicilia , (Documenti per servire alla storia di Sicilia, Ser.
I.13, Palermo, 1899) 109 – 12 nos. 47 – 8). Five of these documents survive in the original; they are in
the same hand as a private charter written by Robert of S. Giovanni in 1182, Garufi , Documenti
inediti , 173 – 4 no. 72. See C.A. Garufi , ‘ Roberto di Sam Giovanni, maestro notaio e il “ Liber de
Regno Sicilie ” ’ , Archivio storico per la Sicilia , viii (1942), 121 – 2. However, Garufi ’s identifi cation of
Robert as ‘ Falcandus ’ , the author of the Liber de Regno Sicilie , has little to commend it.
37 . C.A. Garufi , ‘ Per la storia dei sec. XI e XII. Miscellanea diplomatica IV: I de Parisio e i de
Ocra nei contadi di Paternò e di Butera ’ , Archivio storico per la Sicilia orientale , x (1913), 358 – 60
no. 1. Sanctorus was the notary of William I Diplomata , nos. 7 and 18, and William II Diplomata , no
3 (ed. Carte Latine di Abbazie Calabresi , 58 – 60 no. 22). For the Master Justices, E.M. Jamison, ‘ Judex
Tarantinus. The career of Judex Tarantinus magne curie magister iustitiarius and the emergence of
the Sicilian regalis magna curia under William I and the regency of Margaret of Navarre, 1156 – 1172 ’ ,
Proceedings of the British Academy , liii (1967), 289 – 344.
789
EHR, cxxiv. 509 (Aug. 2009)
THE CHANCERY AND CHARTERS OF THE KINGS OF SICILY (
1130 – 1212
)
been? There are three, or perhaps four, particular sets of surviving
documents that suggest that the losses really have been numerous. First,
there is the enquiry into privileges ordered by King Roger in 1144,
already mentioned. This would appear to have been a general enquiry,
not one limited to particular institutions or persons, although all the
evidence we possess pertaining to it comes from Calabria and Sicily.
38
According to a privilege issued to the Calabrian priory of the monastery
of St Mary of Josaphat, outside Jerusalem, the king ‘ has ordered that the
privileges of the churches and subjects of his kingdom be inspected and
confi rmed ’ .
39
For once, we have abundant evidence of the workings of
the royal government, for some thirty-three documents survive relating
to this inquest, dated between October 1144 and June 1145. It was, so
Jeremy Johns suggests, ‘ by far and away the busiest period in the history
of Roger’s chancery, if not of the entire Norman kingdom ’ .
40
It might,
therefore, seem perverse to argue that what survives from this inquest is
much less than what has been lost. Yet of these thirty-three documents
resulting from this inquest (most from southern Calabria and north-
east Sicily), two-thirds are in Greek, six more in a combination of Arabic
and Greek and only fi ve in Latin. Of these Latin documents, the
privilege for St Mary of Josaphat, that to the bishopric of Cassano
already discussed and another for the bishopric of Malvito were all three
issued within a week of each other in mid-October 1144. Two further
similar ones, for the abbeys of St Maria Maccla in the diocese of Cosenza
and the Carthusian house of St Maria della Torre in that of Squillace,
were issued in the fi rst week of November.
41
Yet a general enquiry, even
if confi ned to Calabria and Sicily — and the phraseology quoted above
does not necessarily suggest this — would surely have entailed dozens of
such confi rmation documents, and many of them would have been to
Latin-rite recipients. There were after all some twenty-three bishoprics
in Calabria in the twelfth century, more than half of which had Latin
bishops, and the religious houses included several Latin-rite ones
founded by the king’s father (as was St Maria della Torre) or by his uncle
Duke Robert Guiscard. These last would surely have possessed multiple
privileges from earlier rulers that would have been relevant to the royal
inquest.
42
There is also the matter of lay recipients — as Johns has
pointed out, only two of the surviving documents from the enquiry
were issued for laymen (both later found their way into ecclesiastical
archives), yet the wording of those confi rmations that we have makes
clear that the enquiry into privileges applied both to churches and to lay
38 . Brühl, Urkunden und Kanzlei , 54, suggested that its scope was confi ned to Calabria, but this
ignores the extant Sicilian evidence.
39 . Roger II Diplomata , 183 – 6 no. 64, at 185.
40 . Johns, Arabic Administration , 115 – 16.
41 . Roger II Diplomata , 183 – 97 nos. 64 – 7, and no. 64A (as above n. 25).
42 . For these, see now Loud, Latin Church , 85 – 90, and for the (admittedly slow) installation of
Latin-rite bishops in Greek sees in Calabria, ibid., 496 – 500.
EHR, cxxiv. 509 (Aug. 2009)
790
THE CHANCERY AND CHARTERS OF THE KINGS OF SICILY (
1130 – 1212
)
landholders. While documents on the island of Sicily might well have
been issued only in Greek and/or Arabic, and especially where these
were renewals of ğ ar ī da that were originally written in Arabic, those
issued in favour of aristocratic landowners in Calabria are far more likely
to have been written in Latin. Thus what survives from the renewal into
privileges from 1144 – 5 is still only a relatively small part of the whole.
43
A second such group of documents comes from the early years of
William II. We have six very similar mandates in which the king informs
his offi cials that in a particular bishopric, or in one case in the lands of
the exempt abbey of Casauria, cases of adultery and the trial of clerics
should be reserved for ecclesiastical courts. The phraseology, which is all
but identical in all six documents, was later reproduced, as (two distinct)
laws of King William, which are known from the Liber Augustalis , the
law code issued by Frederick II in 1231.
44
Whether these provisions were
actually formally promulgated as legislation under William II is unclear:
but the relevant mandates appear in each case to be a response to
complaints by the prelates concerned that their rights were being
ignored by the local royal offi cers, and they were produced over the
space of several years. The fi rst of these mandates was issued in favour
of Archbishop Bertrandus of Trani in March 1170, the last of them in
response to complaints by the bishop of Minori in March 1175.
45
It
would appear therefore that the royal court was publicising and enforcing
its surrender of judicial rights to the Church in a piecemeal fashion,
diocese by diocese. But while we have six such documents surviving,
there were during the twelfth century no fewer than 145 dioceses in the
kingdom of Sicily, and while we cannot necessarily conclude that similar
mandates were issued for every bishop in the kingdom, it would seem
probable that they were for a majority of those prelates, and for at least
some of those abbots who like the abbot of Casauria enjoyed immunity
from episcopal jurisdiction and possessed their own courts.
A third, and even clearer, example comes with the appointment of
bishops and abbots. The procedure for this (and the privileged position
of the king with regard to higher appointments in the Church) was laid
down in the Treaty of Benevento in 1156. When a church was vacant, its
clergy were to confer and to agree on a suitable candidate, whose name
was then to be conveyed to the king, but to remain secret until the latter
43 . Johns, Arabic Administration , 115 – 43, though this is primarily a discussion of the Arabic
documents.
44 . Liber Augustalis , I.45, III. 83, in G.M. Monti, Lo Stato normanno-svevo (Trani, 1945), 165,
183 – 4, and W. Stürner, ed., Die Konstitution Friedrichs II. für das Königreich Sizilien (MGH
Constitutiones et Acta Publica, II Supplementum, Hanover, 1996), 204, 444 – 5.
45 . A. Prologo, Le Carte che si conservano nello archivio dello capitolo metropolitano della città di
Trani (dal IX secolo fi no al 1266) , (Barletta, 1877), 134 – 5 no. 61; Ughelli, Italia Sacra , vii. 300 – 1
( William II Diplomata , nos. 35 and 79). The other examples are William II Diplomata , nos. 41 (for
the bishop of Penne), 47 (the archbishop of Palermo), 51 (the bishop of Valva) and 53 (the abbot of
Casauria).
791
EHR, cxxiv. 509 (Aug. 2009)
THE CHANCERY AND CHARTERS OF THE KINGS OF SICILY (
1130 – 1212
)
gave his assent — the treaty expressly reserving to the monarch the right
of veto.
46
Just enough evidence survives to show that this procedure was
obeyed, up until the renegotiation of the concordat with the Church at
Gravina in 1192, which signifi cantly limited the king’s right to veto the
chapter or convent’s choice. This shows that any episcopal or abbatial
election would normally generate at least two royal documents; a
mandate granting permission to make the nomination — the surviving
documents make clear that this was not, at least in the eyes of the
government, an ‘ election ’ , and then another announcing to the chapter
or convent the king’s approval of the person designated, who would
then be formally elected. (That assumes that there was no problem or
dispute that impeded such a process.) Yet the sum total of direct evidence
we have for this procedure is four documents: two mandates granting
permission for a nomination to be made, for the abbeys of Montecassino
in 1174 and St Bartholomew of Carpineto in 1180, and two further
mandates signifying consent to the electors ’ choice, for the bishopric of
Cefalù in Sicily in 1175 and for Carpineto in January 1181, both approving
the choice made in response to the king’s previous communication.
47
Yet with 145 sees in the kingdom, and a considerable number of
signifi cant monastic houses as well, with the choice of whose abbots the
king was undoubtedly concerned, these four mandates must represent
what is left from some hundreds of similar documents once issued.
There may indeed have been a fourth type of document that was
issued on a large scale, but the surviving evidence for this is even more
exiguous that discussed above. In another court case held at Sarno, this
time in April 1185, and presided over by the chamberlain of the region,
the judges recorded that:
48
We have heard a sacred royal letter sent to this same lord chamberlain by the
royal majesty, that all the business of the chamberlainship of the principality
of Salerno and the legal cases that come before him should be decided in a
fair and rational manner, so that on account of defect of justice this mighty
court should not be exhausted by diffi cult and weighty business.
This might be interpreted as the royal court’s instructions to the
chamberlain in this particular case. This would, in itself, suggest that
46 . William I Diplomata , 35 no. 12, clause 11 (English translation in Tyrants , 250). For how this
worked in practice, Loud, Latin Church , 259 – 78.
47 . F. Chalandon, La Domination normande en Italie et en Sicile (2 vols., Paris, 1907), ii. 591 – 2;
R. Pirro, Sicilia Sacra (3rd edn., 2 vols., Palermo, 1733), ii. 802 – 3; B. Pio, ed., Chronicon Liber
Monasterii S. Bartholomei de Carpineto , (Fonti per la storia d’Italia, Rome, 2001), 291 – 2 no. 140, 296
no. 144 (= William II Diplomata , nos. 75, 83, 111, 112).
48 . Audivimus sacras Regias litteras ipsi domino camerario trasmissas a Regia maiestate ut omnia
negotia de camerariatu principatus Salerni et cause que ante eum venirent iuste et rationabiliter
determinarentur. ut pro defectu iuris ipsa magnifi ca curia que arduis et magnis negotiis intenta esset non
defatigaretur , Haskins, ‘ England and Sicily ’ , 646, from Cava, Arca , xl. 34 (which is now very faded
and hard to decipher).
EHR, cxxiv. 509 (Aug. 2009)
792
THE CHANCERY AND CHARTERS OF THE KINGS OF SICILY (
1130 – 1212
)
many more such documents were issued, for in the relatively small
numbers of legal cases heard by the local justiciars and chamberlains on
the mainland there are enough instances to suggest that these were often
held in response to royal instructions, and the cases that are known
must be only a few of those that took place, for otherwise what did
these royal offi cials, whose tenure of offi ce is known from only a handful
of references, actually do? But there is another possibility suggested by
the phraseology quoted above. Rather than being an instruction to do
justice in one single case, this sounds much more as if the court heard
the chamberlain’s formal letter of appointment read out. Presumably
therefore such a letter was issued every time such offi cials were appointed.
There were eight or nine administrative districts in the duchy of Apulia,
the principality of Capua and the Abruzzi (that is the mainland provinces
apart from Calabria, which was administered separately), and while
some justiciars held offi ce for long periods, the turnover of chamberlains
could be quite rapid.
49
The number of letters of appointment issued,
none of which now survive, must have been considerable.
Apart from the meagre overall number of surviving texts, the other
obvious feature of the Sicilian royal documents during the twelfth
century to which attention must be drawn was the change in the
proportion of Latin to Greek documents. The Christian population of
the lands ruled by the counts of Sicily immediately after the Norman
conquest (the island of Sicily and southern Calabria) was overwhelmingly
Greek. Hence the counts issued almost all their charters, even to Latin
Christian churches, in Greek, until Roger II’s takeover of the duchy of
Apulia in 1127/8. Even on the rare occasions where documents were
issued in Latin, these might be accompanied by a Greek text. Since the
language of the central administration was Greek, details such as the
boundaries of land donated or confi rmed, or the number of serfs
included, needed to be recorded in Greek (for western and south-eastern
Sicily, where the majority of the population remained Muslim, such
information was sometimes in Arabic, but here the main document
would invariably be in Greek, not Latin or Arabic).
50
Nor do the handful
of surviving documents written in Latin show any consistency or
common style — the scribes were often not identifi ed, but the ad hoc
nature of these documents suggests that those who wrote them were
sometimes recruited locally rather than being regularly employed by the
count. Where scribes were identifi ed, they were, as one might expect,
comital chaplains, but it does not appear that at this stage the court
49 . Thus in the principality of Salerno, some eight chamberlains are attested during the twenty-
three years of William II’s reign, E.M. Jamison, ‘ The Norman Administration of Apulia and
Capua, More Especially Under Roger II and William I, 1127 – 66 ’ , Papers of the British School at
Rome , vi (1913), 393 – 5 (reprinted as a separate volume, Aalen, 1987). Despite its age, Jamison’s work
has still not been superseded.
50 . von Falkenhausen, ‘ Diplomi in lingua greca ’ , 254 – 9; Becker,
‘
Die griechischen und
lateinischen Urkunden Graf Rogers I ’ , 9 – 10.
793
EHR, cxxiv. 509 (Aug. 2009)
THE CHANCERY AND CHARTERS OF THE KINGS OF SICILY (
1130 – 1212
)
chapel regularly functioned as a de facto Latin writing offi ce.
51
The
surviving Latin documents are too few and too varied for that.
The creation of the new kingdom of Sicily in the years 1127 – 30 led,
however, to the takeover by Roger II of the duchy of Apulia and the
principality of Capua. These were areas of an overwhelmingly Latin
culture, and, apart from in Lucania and the Salento peninsula of southern
Apulia, there were very few Greek inhabitants. The creation of the kingdom
therefore necessitated the development of a Latin section of the chancery.
This remained for a time still the subordinate section of the scriptorium —
throughout the 1130s there was only one main notary writing Latin
documents for the king at any one time, although very occasionally
assistants might be used if that notary was not available. (From 1132 – 6 this
Latin notary was a man called Wido, recorded in twelve genuine charters,
and also in nine forgeries. He accompanied the king on his mainland
campaigns.)
52
This situation changed dramatically from the 1140s, a
consequence of the growing importance of the mainland dominions,
control of which had by now been consolidated in the king’s hands, not
without a bitter struggle. All documents for recipients in these regions
had to be issued in Latin. An increase in the number of Latin documents,
and probably therefore of the notaries who wrote them, may also have
resulted from King Roger’s revocation of privileges in 1144, even though
(as shown above) the surviving documentation for this enquiry in Latin is
very limited. There appear to have been at least three royal notaries writing
in Latin by this time.
53
Furthermore, the development of the Latin
chancery also refl ected the Romance-speaking immigration that was
beginning to change the demographic balance in Sicily, and also the
increasingly signifi cant role of Latin Christians from the mainland in the
central royal administration, above all that of Maio of Bari.
Maio was attested as scrinarius (archivist, and perhaps also senior
notary), dating and formally attesting documents in the absence of the
chancellor, from October 1144.
54
He was probably promoted to the post
of the vice chancellor in 1149: though this is attested in a forgery (which
will be discussed in more detail below), it is one that seems to have been
carefully modelled on a genuine original, and the dating clause,
containing Maio’s name is probably authentic.
55
He may well have
51 . Roger II Diplomata , 4 no. 1 (1107), was written by John the Tuscan, chaplain of Countess
Adelaide. Ibid, 15 no. 5 (1116), was recorded as written by Dominic chaplain and cancellarius of the
count, but this is preserved only in an eighteenth-century copy, and cancellarius should be
understood only in the sense of ‘ writer ’ , Brühl, Urkunden und Kanzlei , 37 – 8.
52 . Brühl, Urkunden und Kanzlei , 38 – 42.
53 . Ibid., 51.
54 . Roger II Diplomata , 183 – 97 nos. 64 – 7. In a legal case of 1148, it was recorded that a cancelled
privilege of bishop Robert of Messina, from 1104, was kept in regiis scriniis , Roger II Diplomata , 216
no. 75. In William I’s treaty with Genoa in 1156, it was recorded that one of the two copies of the
document was to be given to the Genoese, and the other in nostriis scriniis remansit , William I
Diplomata , 52 no. 18.
55 . Roger II Diplomata , 224 – 8 no. † 78.
EHR, cxxiv. 509 (Aug. 2009)
794
THE CHANCERY AND CHARTERS OF THE KINGS OF SICILY (
1130 – 1212
)
succeeded to the post of chancellor after the death of the previous
known incumbent, the Englishman Robert of Selby, in 1151: he signed
an Arabic document as chancellor in 1152/3, and pseudo-Falcandus
makes clear that he was chancellor at the accession of William I.
56
Subsequently as ‘ Emir of emirs ’ he was that king’s all-powerful, and
consequently extremely unpopular, chief minister until his murder in
November 1160. But since Robert of Selby, for all his title as chancellor,
was mainly employed as a governor of the mainland dominions, Maio
was probably the de facto director of the royal writing-offi ce from the
mid-1140s onwards. While relatively few royal documents in Latin
survive from the last decade of King Roger’s reign, the survival of only
four in Greek from the years 1145 – 54, all for recipients on the island of
Sicily, compared with the considerably larger number from before 1145,
tells its own story.
57
It may be therefore that the extraordinary activity
of the Greek notaries during the renewal of privileges in 1144 – 5 was in
the nature of a last great fl ourish rather than a sign of vigorous life.
While Greek – Arabic ğ ar ī da continued to be produced until at least the
1180s, for diplomata and mandates the situation was by then very
different. It may also be signifi cant that in 1182 a hitherto-unprecedented
Latin – Arabic ğ ar ī da was drawn up, in which the Latin part was written
by one of the regular chancery notaries.
58
Certainly by the late twelfth
century the royal chancery was an overwhelmingly Latinate institution,
operating on a considerably greater scale than before. There were seven
royal notaries active during the fi rst two years of the reign of King
Tancred (1190 – 1), albeit not all at once, and six royal notaries writing
documents in concert during the brief rule of the Empress Constance,
as well as a further auxiliary writer (a local tabellarius rather than a
chancery notary) who wrote two diplomata of the empress for the
archbishopric of Messina in April 1198. The growing proportion of
executive mandates among the surviving documentation (and seemingly
in the deperdita too) also suggests a more developed administrative
process and a more active administration of justice.
59
One of the other notable features of the royal chancery was its
continuity, both in employment and in chancery practice. Individual
notaries were employed over long periods. In addition to the examples
already cited above, we may note in particular Alexander, the most
frequently employed royal notary under William II, whose fi rst
document for that king was a privilege for the archbishopric of
Palermo in April 1172, and who then wrote a further twenty-nine
surviving diplomata, the last of which was a confi rmation of the
56 . Falcandus , 8 ( Tyrants , 60); Brühl, Urkunden und Kanzlei , 231; Johns, Arabic Administration ,
309.
57 . von Falkenhausen, ‘ Diplomi in lingua greca ’ , 264 – 5.
58 . S. Cusa, I Diplomi greci ed arabi di Sicilia (Palermo, 1868 – 82), 179 – 244, discussed by Johns,
Arabic Administration , 186 – 92.
59 . Enzensberger, ‘ Il documento regio ’ , 112 – 14.
795
EHR, cxxiv. 509 (Aug. 2009)
THE CHANCERY AND CHARTERS OF THE KINGS OF SICILY (
1130 – 1212
)
property of the new Cistercian monastery of St Maria de Ligno in
Calabria in December 1188.
60
Such continuity was also marked from
reign to reign. Three of the six regular chancery notaries under Constance
had previously written documents for King Tancred, and one of them,
Thomas of Gaeta, was still active in the early years of Frederick II as
king of Sicily.
61
Maximinianus of Brindisi, who to judge by the
(admittedly relatively few) surviving documents from his pen, was the
principal chancery notary under Tancred and William III continued to
serve in the chancery of Constance until 1197, when he retired to his
home town, where a year later he was in dispute with the cathedral
chapter.
62
Eugenius, who wrote three documents for Constance between
November 1195 and June 1196, had earlier written a diploma of Tancred
for the cathedral of Rossano in May 1193 and has also been identifi ed as
the scribe of four of the Sicilian diplomata of Henry VI (as noted
above).
63
Interestingly, only two of the notaries known during Tancred’s
reign, Ademarius and Gosfridus (Godfrey) of Foggia, had been employed
in the chancery under William II, and the former, active under William
II from 1172, wrote only two of the surviving documents of Tancred in
1192. Was he perhaps recalled from retirement as business became more
intense?
64
Gosfridus wrote the two earliest extant documents of Tancred:
we have no surviving William II documents from his pen, but he
recorded that he was a royal notary in a charter he wrote for Archbishop
Thomas of Reggio, in favour of the abbey of Monreale, in November
1182.
65
The lack of royal documents from his pen before and after 1190
would seem therefore to be further proof that the surviving charters are
but a small survival from a much larger number of deperdita , although
it is possible that he ceased to be employed by Tancred. Gosfridus, who
seems to have been a specialist in writing documents for Greek recipients,
also went on to work for Constance, while Matthew of Palermo, who
was employed in the chancery both under Constance and in the early
years of Frederick II, had written one document for William II in 1183,
although we have no record of him as a chancery notary under
Tancred.
66
Similarly Leo of Matera, who wrote one diploma for William
60 . William II Diplomata , nos. 47 (Pirro, Sicula Sacra , i. 109, wrongly dated there to 1177) and
150 (Garufi , Documenti inediti , 229 – 30 no. 95). The ‘ Aug. 1189 ’ forgery for Montevergine, discussed
below, was also ascribed to him.
61 . Tancred Diplomata , xix; T. Kölzer, ‘ Kanzlei und Kultur in Königreich Sizilien ’ , Quellen und
Forschungen aus Italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken , lxvi (1986), 25; Kölzer, Urkunden und
Kanzlei der Kaiserin Konstanze , 67.
62 . Kölzer, Urkunden und Kanzlei der Kaiserin Konstanze , 58 – 9.
63 . Tancred Diplomata , 80 – 1 no. 33; Constance Diplomata , 27 – 9 no. 7, 83 – 8 no. 23, 115 – 19 no. 32
(the fi rst and last of which are clearly identifi able on palaeographical grounds, despite the writer
not being named). No. 7 survives in the original, no. 32 was destroyed in 1943, but had previously
been carefully examined both by K.A. Kehr and Wilhelm Wiederhold, the latter’s description and
copy of which remains in the Deutsches Historisches Institut in Rome, cf. Kehr, Urkunden , 18.
64 . William II Diplomata , nos. 61, † 74, 95, 138; Tancred Diplomata , nos. 24, 27.
65 . Garufi , Documenti inediti , 183 – 6 no. 74.
66 . Kölzer, Urkunden und Kanzlei der Kaiserin Konstanze , 56 – 7, 64 – 7.
EHR, cxxiv. 509 (Aug. 2009)
796
THE CHANCERY AND CHARTERS OF THE KINGS OF SICILY (
1130 – 1212
)
II in 1186, was later employed in the chancery during the minority of
Frederick II, and later still, in 1220, was a justiciar in Calabria. His brother
Philip wrote one document of Constance, went with Frederick to Germany
in 1212 and was scrinarius in Sicily in 1219.
67
It was hardly surprising that
there was considerable continuity before and after 1198, despite the
problems of Frederick’s minority. But fi ve of the royal notaries active in his
early years had also worked in the chancery before 1194, and the infl uence
of chancery personnel and practice from these years remained powerful
until the king’s departure to seek the German throne. Where the chancery
did begin to change after the early thirteenth century was in the employment
of clerical notaries, whereas after the early years of King Roger almost all
the notaries were laymen. One of the most active of these clerics was
Aldoynus, a chancery notary from 1205, who became bishop of Cefalù in
1217. Another was Bonushomo of Gaeta, subsequently dean of Messina.
This clerical element only became predominant after 1212, when several of
the most experienced lay notaries accompanied King Frederick to
Germany.
68
The continuity in personnel was refl ected by continuity in chancery
practice. The basic form of royal privileges in Latin was established
during the reign of Roger II and varied thereafter only in relatively
minor details. While there was some evolution of the formulae during
the 1130s — the king’s offi cial title was, for example, stabilised only after
the takeover of the principality of Capua in 1135 — from c. 1140 onwards
Latin diplomata followed a standard pattern: invocatio , salutatio (or
address to the recipient), arenga (formal introduction, written in the
rhyming prose of the cursus ), the main text, the sanctio (penalty clause),
corroboratio (where the notary was named) and a concluding dating
clause
—
this last feature taken from German imperial practice.
69
Documents were then often authenticated with the rota or sign manual,
invariably placed between the document proper and the dating clause at
the end, although only a minority of King Roger’s documents appear
to have used this feature.
70
The use of the rota imitated the practice of
the papal chancery (and a number of south Italian archbishops also
employed this device for formal privileges), although its ultimate forbear
may have been the monogram employed by the scriptoria of the pre-
Norman south Italian princes (and imitated by the Norman princes of
67 . H. Enzensberger, Beiträge zum Kanzlei- und Urkundenwesen der normannischen Herrscher
Unteritaliens und Siziliens (Kallmunz, 1971), 68; Kölzer, Urkunden und Kanzlei der Kaiserin
Konstanze , 71 – 2.
68 . H.M. Schaller, ‘ Die Kanzlei Kaiser Friedrichs II. Ihr Personal und ihr Sprachstil ’ , Archiv für
Diplomatik , iii (1957), 213 – 15, 220 – 2. For Aldoynus, N. Kamp, Kirche und Monarchie im staufi schen
Königreich Sizilien (4 vols., Munich, 1973 – 82), iii. 1055 – 61, especially 1056.
69 . See especially Brühl, Urkunden und Kanzlei , 78 – 93.
70 . Brühl, Urkunden und Kanzlei , 69 – 70, points out that the rota is present on only six out of
sixteen surviving Latin originals, whereas 12 out of 13 pseudo-originals possess it, testimony to the
fact that its use later became standardised. The fi rst privilege to have a rota was that of Roger to
Montecassino in Dec. 1129, Roger II Diplomata , 40 – 2 no. 14.
797
EHR, cxxiv. 509 (Aug. 2009)
THE CHANCERY AND CHARTERS OF THE KINGS OF SICILY (
1130 – 1212
)
Capua after 1058). It was, it should be noted, only ever employed in
Latin documents.
71
The use of metal seals ( bulla ), usually lead, may also
have been copied from the papal chancery, although it imitated
Byzantine practice too.
72
Documents of particular importance had gold
seals attached to them, following western imperial precedent: three
instances have been noted under Roger I and no less than ten under
Roger II. Two such examples are also known of such use by the Norman
dukes of Apulia.
73
Here therefore the royal chancery was also drawing
on existing local precedents. And two especially signifi cant diplomata of
King Roger, that for the Pierleone family (that of Anacletus II) in 1134
and the foundation charter for his palatine chapel of St Peter in 1140,
were written on purple vellum, another undoubted imitation of western
imperial practice, and a refl ection of the consciousness by the new king
and his advisers of his royal status (every bit as marked as the celebrated
depiction of the king in the Martorana mosaic of the 1140s dressed in
the ceremonial regalia of a Byzantine emperor).
74
Wax seals were only
rarely employed, either by Roger I or Roger II as count, although after
1130 their use became the norm on mandates. Only one example of a
wax seal of Roger II survives, and that (while apparently genuine) is
attached to a blatent forgery of the early thirteenth century.
75
The
mandate form, lacking the arenga and most of the other formulae, and
with a simplifi ed dating clause, was also developed under Roger, even
though genuine surviving examples from the reign are few.
76
71 . Kehr, Urkunden , 164 – 6; Enzensberger, Beiträge , 77 – 85.
72 . H. Enzensberger, ‘ Chanceries, charters and administration in Norman Italy ’ , in G.A. Loud and
A. Metcalfe, eds., The Society of Norman Italy (Leiden, 2002), 147 – 8. Becker, ‘ Die griechischen und
lateinischen Urkunden Graf Rogers I ’ , 26, stresses the infl uence of Byzantine b o u l l w t h ¢ r i a here.
73 . Enzensberger, Beiträge zum Kanzlei- und Urkundenwesen , 89 – 92. Becker, ‘ Die griechischen
und lateinischen Urkunden Graf Rogers I
’
, 26 – 7. The two ducal diplomas were both to
Montecassino, in 1090 and 1114, T. Leccisotti, ed., Le Colonie Cassinesi in Capitanata iv Troia
(Miscelleanea Cassinese 29, Monte Cassino, 1957), 69 – 71 no. 15; 85 – 8 no. 23. No less than eighty-six
documents of Frederick Barbarossa are known to have been issued with gold bulls, Friderici I
Diplomata , v. 93 – 4.
74 . Roger II Diplomata , 98 – 101 no. 35; 133 – 7 no. 48. Brühl, Urkunden und Kanzlei , 58 – 9. In
another study, the same author suggests that the Ottonians copied this usage from Byzantium,
although the Byzantines used purple documents almost exclusively for diplomatic letters, C.-R.
Brühl, ‘ Purpururkunden ’ , in K.-U. Jäschke and R. Wenskus, eds., Festschrift für Helmut Beumann
zum 65. Geburtstag (Sigmaringen, 1977), 3 – 21. Cf. also J. W. Bernhardt, ‘ Concepts and practices of
empire in Ottonian Germany (950 – 1024) ’ , in B. Weiler and S. MacLean, eds., Representations of
Power in Medieval Germany 800 – 1500 (Turnhout, 2006), 162. By the twelfth century, such ‘ purple ’
imperial diplomata were rare, only one survives from each of the reigns of Lothar III and Conrad
III. Both of these were issued in favour of the abbeys ruled by Guibald of Stavelot, and interestingly
the fi rst of these was written during Lothar’s expedition to southern Italy in 1137, E. von Ottenthal
and H. Hirsch, eds., Lotharii Diplomata (MGH Diplomata Regum et Imperatorum Germaniae
viii, Berlin 1927), 190 – 3 no. 119; F. Hausmann, ed., Conradi III et Filii eius Henrici Diplomata
(MGH Diplomata Regum et Imperatorum Germaniae, ix, Vienna, 1969), 426 – 30 no. 245.
75 . Roger II Diplomata , 211 – 14 no. † 74 (for Monte Cassino ‘ Dec. 1147 ’ ). Brühl, Urkunden und
Kanzlei , 75 – 6. Enzensberger, ‘ Chanceries, charters and administration ’ , 148.
76 . See, for example, Roger II Diplomata , 209 – 11 no. 73 (Nov. 1147), record of a decision of a legal
case between the bishops and clergy of Ravello and Melfi , embodied in a mandate format, and
surviving in the original, with traces of the red wax of the seal still adhering to the parchment.
EHR, cxxiv. 509 (Aug. 2009)
798
THE CHANCERY AND CHARTERS OF THE KINGS OF SICILY (
1130 – 1212
)
Subsequently, mandates become much more common, even though (as
was suggested above) losses of this type of document have probably
been proportionately even higher than those of diplomata . Use of the
gold seal continued for especially signifi cant documents: three examples
from the reign of William I have been noted above, and there are at least
nine mentions of this practice among the diplomata of William II.
77
Given the standardised nature of the diplomatic of royal documents,
the most obvious place to look for individual infl uence is in the arengae
of the formal diplomata . Yet even here there was continuity. In a diploma
for the archbishopric of Palermo in June 1198, the notary Gosfridus
used an arenga ( Ex innate nobis mansuetudinis gratia ) formerly employed
by his erstwhile colleague Sanso in a diploma of King Tancred for the
Praemonstratensian priory of St George, Gratteri, in May 1191, and this
was in turn later used in a diploma of Frederick II for the archbishopric
of Bari in July 1210.
78
Similarly the
arenga
of another diploma of
Constance, for the Hospitallers, issued in the last months of 1197, copied
a number of phrases used by the author of a diploma of Tancred issued
four years earlier; once again the notaries were different, although the
writer of the earlier document was the notary Eugenius, whom (as was
noted above) also served in the chancery of Constance.
79
Indeed,
sometimes such imitations might go back a great deal further. Thus in an
early diploma of Constance from November 1195, written by a notary
(Eugenius) also employed under Tancred, we fi nd the arenga beginning Si
iuste postulatio that was a favourite in King Roger’s chancery, and especially
of Wido, his principal Latin notary of the 1130s.
80
Yet one should note
that the origins of this clause go back even further — it was fi rst employed
in a document of Roger written in November 1129, while he was still duke
of Apulia, written by Guarnerius, dean of Mazara, and, like the rota , it
was ultimately derived from the papal chancery.
81
That relatively few charters can be attributed to any individual notary
reminds us how small a proportion of the documents once issued is now
available to us. Why therefore have so few products of the royal chancery
survived? Primarily one would point to the signifi cant loss of archives at
the end of the middle ages and in the early modern period, through a
77 . William II Diplomata , nos. 7 (for the archbishopric of Salerno, Aug. 1167), 8 (the bishopric
of Anglona, Oct. 1167), 17 (Holy Saviour, Messina, Mar. 1168), 30 (the archbishopric of Palermo,
Sept. 1169), 77 (treaty with Genoa, Nov. 1174), 84 (treaty with Venice, Sept. 1175), 89 (the foundation
charter of Monreale, Aug. 1176), 91 (the treaty recording the king’s marriage with Joanna of
England, Feb. 1177) and 92 (the archbishopric of Palermo, Mar. 1177).
78 . Constance Diplomata , 208 – 10 no. 58: Tancred Diplomata , 34 – 6 no. 14: Frederick II Diplomata
1998 – 1212 , 247 – 9 no. 127. A further document ascribed to Frederick, dated July 1209, for the
archbishopric of Bari, also used this arenga , however, this is a forgery, almost certainly based on the
genuine diploma of 1210, confected shortly before it was copied in a notarial transcript of 1286,
Frederick II Diplomata 1198 – 1212 , 192 – 3 no. 98.
79 . Constance Diplomata , 149 – 53 no. 42; Tancred Diplomata , 80 – 1 no. 33.
80 . Constance Diplomata , no. 7; cf. Roger II Diplomata , nos. 24, 29, 31, 37, and ibid., nos. 31A
and 31B, the texts of which are in the appendix to William I Diplomata , 141 – 3. Kölzer, Urkunden
und Kanzlei der Kaiserin Konstanze , 103.
81 . Roger II Diplomata , 41 no. 14. Brühl, Urkunden und Kanzlei , 89.
799
EHR, cxxiv. 509 (Aug. 2009)
THE CHANCERY AND CHARTERS OF THE KINGS OF SICILY (
1130 – 1212
)
variety of causes: the suppression of bishoprics that began in Apulia in
the fi fteenth century, Turkish raids on coastal towns, such as Otranto
(sacked in 1480), and the perennial threat of earthquake, especially in
Calabria.
82
Such losses have continued into the modern era, not least
through the agency of the French in 1799, Garibaldi’s troops in 1860
(who, for example, burned the archives of Isernia cathedral) and above
all the destruction of the contents of the Archivio di Stato of Naples in
1943. Among the thousands of medieval documents lost in this last
disaster were, as said, two original Latin charters of King Roger, and no
fewer than six originals issued by the chancery of Frederick II during the
early part of his reign (up to his departure for Germany in 1212).
83
One should, however, note that while the greatest losses almost
certainly took place after 1400, some documents disappeared not very long
after they were written. In many cases, this might be the consequence of
normal wear and tear, quite possibly exacerbated by careless storage, damp
or mice. In April 1222 the abbess of the nunnery of St Gregory in Naples
requested the imperial court to copy, confi rm and renew four mandates
of William II in favour of that house, three from October 1168 and one
from March 1172 that were apparently already ‘ perished through age ’
( quia erant vetustate consunte ).
84
Many early documents from Sicily, and
some from Calabria, were written on paper, which is much more fragile
and prone to disintegration than parchment, another factor which
explains the proportionately higher rate of loss from these regions than
the more northerly mainland provinces. In May 1115, for example, Roger
II had a document of his father, issued for the Calabrian monastery of
St Maria de Terreto in 1090, copied ‘ because it was originally on papyrus
paper ’ ( eo quod primum fuit in charta papyri ).
85
In a number of other
cases, documents of the south Italian rulers were mislaid or completely
destroyed relatively soon after their original issue. The abbot of a Greek
monastery in the Val Demone, in north-east Sicily, petitioned the
young Roger II in 1109 asking that the bounds of his church’s lands be
re-surveyed since the document previously recording this information
had been lost in the troubles that had recently affl icted Sicily (a reference
which suggests that Roger’s minority had not been problem free).
86
A
82 . Thus the abbey of Torremaggiore in the Capitanata was destroyed by earthquake in 1627,
Malvito cathedral in 1638, and Mileto, site of both a cathedral and an important Benedictine
abbey, in 1783.
83 . Frederick II Diplomata 1198 – 1212, xix.
84 . C. Vetere, ed., Le Pergamene di San Gregorio Armeno , ii (1168-1265) (Salerno, 2000), 111 no. 43
(also published by E. Winkelmann, Acta Imperii Inedita saeculi XIII et XIV (2 vols., Innsbruck,
1880 – 5), i. 218 no. 235).
85 . Ironically, this renewal is itself only known from a later confi rmation by Frederick II in 1224,
J.L.A. Huillard-Breholles,
Historia Diplomatica Friderici Secundi (6 vols. in 12 parts, Paris,
1852 – 61), ii(1). 440 – 1. More generally, Becker, ‘ Die griechischen und lateinischen Urkunden Graf
Rogers I ’ , 2 – 3, and V. von Falkenhausen, ‘ The Greek Presence in Norman Sicily: The Contribution
of Archival Material in Greek ’ , in G.A. Loud and A. Metcalfe, eds., The Society of Norman Italy ,
(above n. 72), 278 – 9.
86 . Cusa, Diplomi greci ed arabi , 403 – 5.
EHR, cxxiv. 509 (Aug. 2009)
800
THE CHANCERY AND CHARTERS OF THE KINGS OF SICILY (
1130 – 1212
)
privilege of Roger concerning the Sicilian possessions of St Mary of the
Latins at Jerusalem was destroyed in a fi re at its daughter house of St
Philip at Agira during his lifetime, while some of the privileges of Bari
cathedral were recorded as having been stolen in 1152.
87
A privilege of
King Roger for another Palestinian monastery, St Mary in the valley
of Josaphat outside Jerusalem, was lost in the Calabrian earthquake of
1183.
88
In 1233 Bishop Ursus of Agrigento appealed to Frederick II to
renew a lost privilege of King William II that allowed his see to import
a certain quantity of wheat free of duty — a renewal that was granted
after the sworn testimony of witness that such a privilege had indeed
once existed.
89
Some of the central government’s daf ā tir were deliberately
destroyed during the attempted coup of 1161. The royal notary Matthew
of Salerno owed his return to favour, after a period of disgrace and
imprisonment following the death of his mentor Maio, to his unrivalled
knowledge of these archives, so that at least some of what had been lost
could be reconstituted.
90
Some recipients could also be remarkably careless, as well as unlucky,
in safeguarding such valuable documents. One such case is revealed in a
later inquest, held on the orders of King Manfred in 1260, into the
affairs of the bishopric of Agrigento, the loss of one royal document
from which has already been noted. According to one very elderly
witness, who claimed to have heard the story directly from Bishop
Bartholomew (1171 – 91), a prominent royal offi cial, the castellan
Ansaldus, had given the church of St Mary at Rifesi to the bishopric
(probably not long before his death c. 1171/2). Ansaldus had no direct
heirs, and hence on his death his property escheated to the crown.
William II subsequently gave this church, still clearly considered to be
part of his estate, to the court monastery of St John of the Hermits in
Palermo. The bishop could do nothing about this, for in the meantime
the privilege recording the original donation by Ansaldus to Agrigento
had been mislaid. Subsequently, however, the document was discovered
and presented for inspection to the king, who then cancelled his gift to
the monastery and gave the church to the bishopric. But, during the
chaos that overcame western Sicily after 1189, with widespread revolt
among the Muslim inhabitants of the region, the bishopric of Agrigento
was severely affected, and Bishop Ursus was several times driven from
his see. Both the original donation charter of Ansaldus and the
subsequent royal privilege were lost, this time for good, and as a result
87 . Kehr, Urkunden , 430 – 4 no. 14; Codice diplomatico barese i Le Pergamene del duomo di Bari
(952 – 1264) , ed. G. B. Nitto di Rossi and F. Nitti de Vito (Bari, 1897), i. 94 – 5 no. 49.
88 . Garufi , Documenti inediti , 200 – 2 no. 83.
89 . P. Collura, ed., Le Più antiche carte dell’archivio capitolare di Agrigento (1092 – 1282)
(Documenti per servire alla storia di Sicilia, Ser. I.25, Palermo, 1960), 109 – 11 no. 56.
90 . Falcandus , 69 ( Tyrants , 120-1). For discussion of these records, Alex Metcalfe, Muslims and
Christians in Norman Sicily. Arabic Speakers and the End of Islam (London, 2003), 115 – 18.
801
EHR, cxxiv. 509 (Aug. 2009)
THE CHANCERY AND CHARTERS OF THE KINGS OF SICILY (
1130 – 1212
)
the ownership of the church was thrown into doubt once again.
91
There
does, in fact, now survive a privilege of William II granting this church to the
see of Agrigento, but this document, of ‘ December 1171 ’ (a date that would
seem to be too early to fi t the tale told at the enquiry of 1260) appears to be
a forgery. It is known only from a transcript made in 1252 and was confected
shortly before that date.
92
Nor indeed was this the only such forgery of a
royal document produced by the clerics of Agrigento at this period: a
purported diploma of Frederick II of 1233 granting the see two villages
( casalia ) in return for fi nancial assistance to the crown, also seems to be a
forgery, again from the pontifi cate of Rainaldo of Aquaviva (1240 – 64).
93
The tale of mishap told in the inquest of 1260 illustrates both why so
many royal documents have been lost, and also why there is such a high
proportion of forgeries among the extant royal charters. Even in archives
that have fared much better than did that of Agrigento, there have been
some surprising losses. In 1186 the bishop of Cefalù charged the countess
of Collesano with infringement of his church’s hunting and pasture
rights, as previously established by King Roger. The relevant charter of
the king was publicly read out and ‘ many times ’ reread by the royal
justiciar entrusted with the case. This privilege must therefore have
once existed; yet no such document now survives among the (quite
numerous) extant Cefalù charters, or in the church’s chartulary, the
Libro Rosso of 1329, even though several other documents of King Roger
do.
94
Similarly a charter of May 1172 from St Sophia, Benevento, referred
to the privileges of King Roger in favour of the monastery (in the plural),
yet we now possess only one such document, although a large number
of other charters from this particular abbey (which was only fi nally
dissolved in 1806) have survived, most of them in the original.
95
As at Agrigento, the loss of documents, or the absence of title if such
documents had never actually existed, leads us to the question of forgery.
The term
‘
forgery
’
, of course, covers a considerable spectrum of
deception, from a genuine document that contains some alterations or
interpolations, through the replacement of lost, damaged or inadequate
documents that had once existed, to outright invention.
96
The one
91 . Più antiche carte di Agrigento , 155 – 71 no. 78, especially 158 – 60. For Ansaldus, Falcandus , 84 – 5,
155 – 6 ( Tyrants , 134 – 5, 208 – 9). He was last attested in Apr. 1171, when he gave his house in Messina
to the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, G. Bresc-Bautier, ed., Le Cartulaire du chapitre de Saint
Sépulchre (Paris, 1984), 306 – 7 no. 57.
92 . Più antiche carte di Agrigento , 56 – 60 no. 23, 151 – 2, no. 75.
93 . Più antiche carte di Agrigento , 113 – 15, no. 57.
94 . G. Battaglia, ed., I Diplomi inediti relativi all’ordinamento della proprietà fondiaria in Sicilia
sotto i normanni e gli svevi (Documenti per servire alla storia di Sicilia, Ser. I.16, Palermo, 1895),
120 – 1 no. 40.
95 . Pergamene Aldobrandini, Cartolario II, no. 25 (which I examined in 1990 when these
charters were on deposit in the Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana, they have since been returned to
the home of the Aldobrandini family at Frascati); Roger II Diplomata , 106 – 8 no. 38 (21 July 1134).
96 . The literature on this subject is vast, but for a particularly clear and helpful discussion see
G. Constable, ‘ Forgery and Plagiarism in the Middle Ages ’ , Archiv für Diplomatik , xxix (1983),
1 – 41, especially 10 – 14.
EHR, cxxiv. 509 (Aug. 2009)
802
THE CHANCERY AND CHARTERS OF THE KINGS OF SICILY (
1130 – 1212
)
forgery ascribed to King Tancred, a diploma issued in favour of the city
of Naples in June 1190, provides an excellent example of the former type.
This appears to be a genuine diploma, most of the contents of which are
authentic, but with a couple of sentences interpolated, probably in the
later thirteenth century, granting the citizens the right of free promotion
to knighthood and the right to mint coins.
97
Similarly the ‘ forged ’
element of a charter of the Empress Constance for the bishopric of
Cefalù, dated 10 March 1196, which in its present form probably dates
from the early 1220s, was simply the alteration, in the bishopric’s favour,
of the clause delineating the boundaries of the lands in question, which
had been the subject of a number of legal disputes, in what was otherwise
a genuine document. The occasion for this ‘ improvement ’ may well
have been the disgrace and exile of Bishop Aldoynus of Cefalù in 1222,
a crisis that left the canons of his church and their property rights in a
potentially vulnerable position, although since the bishop himself was a
former royal notary, it is quite possible that he himself was the culprit.
98
But by contrast, a diploma of ‘ King ’ Roger in favour of the city of
Messina, dated 15 May 1129, was only confected in the early fi fteenth
century and the contents are entirely fi ctional, not least as regards the
era in which the document was supposedly promulgated: it describes
Roger as king eighteen months before his coronation.
99
If the forger was suffi ciently skilled, he might well draw on genuine
documents for the diplomatic models and palaeography, the latter
where an attempt was made to create a supposed ‘ original ’ . This was of
course the classic technique of the medieval forger. A diploma purporting
to be issued by William II in March 1170 to the monastery of St
Modestus, Benevento, granting this house exemption from a number of
dues, which now survives in a copy of 1235, was in fact based upon a
genuine diploma of King Roger for the neighbouring abbey of St Sophia
in Benevento from 1134. The forgery was probably confected shortly
before 1223, for a mandate of Frederick II in this latter year refers to this
grant. At the same time, the forger also used this same model to draw
up an extensive privilege for St Sophia, again alleging to be from
William II, not only granting that abbey the same exemption but also
a wide-ranging confi rmation of its extensive property.
100
Sometimes, admittedly, such imitation of earlier models was done
very clumsily, at least to the eye of the modern Urkundenlehrer . Thus
97 . Tancred Diplomata , 15 – 19 no. 6.
98 . Constance Diplomata , no. † 19. Kölzer, Urkunden und Kanzlei der Kaiserin Konstanze , 109 –
13. The casale in question had originally been given to Cefalù in 1140 by King Roger’s niece
Adelicia, Garufi , Documenti Inediti , 152 – 4 no. 72. Aldoynus eventually died, still in exile, in 1248.
99 . Roger II Diplomata , 29 – 35 no. † 11.
100 . Roger II Diplomata , 106 – 8 no. 38; Le Più antiche carte dell’abbazia di San Modesto in
Benevento (secoli viii-xiii) ed. F. Bartoloni (Rome, 1950), 33 – 7 no. 12 (the 1223 document is ibid.,
86 – 9 no. 33). The St Sophia forgery is transcribed in Bulletino dell’archivio paleografi co italiano , n.s.
i (1955), 176-8 ( William II Diplomata , nos. † 33, † 34).
803
EHR, cxxiv. 509 (Aug. 2009)
THE CHANCERY AND CHARTERS OF THE KINGS OF SICILY (
1130 – 1212
)
the forger
c. 1300 of a supposed diploma of King Roger for the
archbishopric of Palermo took as his model a genuine diploma of
William I of 1159. He adapted the arenga of this document from a Latin
translation, done in 1282, of a Greek privilege attributed to Roger of
‘ 1144 ’ , itself spurious. But he clumsily altered the date to read 4 June
1155, sixteen months after the king’s death.
101
Similarly the author of a
very late forgery for the archbishopric of Salerno, purporting to be a
diploma of King Frederick from August 1200 but actually dating from
the early fi fteenth century, took the arenga , not from a royal charter but
from earlier diplomas for this see from the Ottonian emperors.
102
One
of the many later thirteenth-century forgeries from the congregation of
the abbey of St Mary in the valley of Josaphat, outside Jerusalem, which
had extensive possessions in both Calabria and Sicily, purporting to be
a diploma of William II of January 1188, repeated verbatim the account
in a genuine diploma of this same monarch from 1185 of how two monks
had come to the royal court to seek a renewal of its customs concessions
in the port of Messina. Since the original of the genuine diploma
survived, there was little point to the forgery, and it is easily detected.
103
By contrast, more contemporary forgers might take great pains to
conceal their work: the writer of the interpolated 1196 diploma for
Cefalù (discussed above) produced a very skilful imitation of the hand
of the chancery notary Maximianus of Brindisi, who was presumably
the real author of the original used as a model.
104
Some later scribes
were indeed so skilful in confecting such documents that the authenticity
of a number of Sicilian royal documents has in the past misled even the
most careful of scholars, and in a few cases remains in some doubt even
today.
105
A case in point that illustrates how diffi cult such issues are comes
with a small group of documents from the monastery of St Maria at
Elce, near Conza in the principality of Salerno. One undoubted forgery
from this abbey appears to have been a replacement for a genuine
original. The alleged privilege of King Roger confi rming the property of
this monastery from ‘ 1149 ’ , which purports to be an original charter of
the king (and names Maio as vice chancellor), was actually forged
101 . Roger II Diplomata , 233 – 4 no. † 80. For the Greek document of ‘ Mar. 1144 ’ , E. Caspar, Roger
II (1101 – 1154) und die Gründung der normannisch-sicilischen Monarchie (Innsbruck, 1904), 552 – 3
no. 164.
102 . Frederick II Diplomata 1198 – 1212 , 37 – 8 no. 18.
103 . L. von Heinemann, Normannische Herzogs- und Königsurkunden aus Unteritalien und
Sizilien (Tübingen, 1899), 46 – 8 no. 26; cf. Garufi , Documenti inediti , 200 – 2 no. 82 ( William II
Diplomata , nos. 136 and † 148).
104 . Kölzer, Urkunden und Kanzlei der Kaiserin Konstanze , 58.
105 . Karl Andreas Kehr, the author of the fi rst signifi cant study of the royal chancery, considered
three of the forgeries discussed below, the two alleged diplomas of King Roger to Montevergine
and his ‘ 1147 ’ privilege to Monte Cassino all to be genuine. Indeed Kehr considered this last
document to be a model for how the Rogerian chancery drew up documents, Kehr, Urkunden , 21,
49, 75, 100, 167; cf. Brühl, Urkunden und Kanzlei , 169 – 70, 179.
EHR, cxxiv. 509 (Aug. 2009)
804
THE CHANCERY AND CHARTERS OF THE KINGS OF SICILY (
1130 – 1212
)
c. 1240. But both a genuine diploma of William II from November 1183
and an earlier document of his father from May 1157, known only from
a later transcript from the chancery of Frederick II in 1227, refer to a
privilege of King Roger that they are renewing.
106
So it would appear
that Roger II did issue a privilege for this abbey, and the forgery has
been carefully modelled on the diplomatic of a genuine privilege (though
not necessarily for this recipient). Either the original privilege had
somehow been lost or damaged (and the 1227 confi rmation does refer to
such damage) or the thirteenth-century monks could not resist the
temptation to improve its terms. The problem, however, is potentially
more complex. The editor who fi rst published these documents
considered the 1227 imperial transcript, and the two earlier royal
documents that it reproduced, also to be thirteenth-century forgeries.
On the other hand, the more recent editor of William I’s diplomata has
no doubt that the 1157 diploma, despite the omission of the king’s regnal
years and the presence of an otherwise unattested abbot (whose rule, if
he existed, must have been short lived), is genuine.
107
Similarly he
considers the other royal document copied in the ‘ 1227 ’ charter, a
mandate of William II, dated January 1183, also to be genuine.
108
The
implication is surely that the 1227 document that confi rms these two
texts is also genuine.
The problem of forgery is especially marked for several of the great
mainland abbeys whose archives are otherwise among our most
important sources of contemporary documentation for this period. It
should be stressed that these forgeries of royal documents from the late
twelfth century onwards were by no means the only, nor the earliest,
such confections produced in the monastic scriptoria of the Mezzogiorno,
where what one might call a ‘ culture of forgery ’ was already well
established by the early years of that century. The activities of Peter the
Deacon, archivist and historian of Montecassino in the 1130s, as a forger
both of charters and of literary texts, spring instantly to mind.
109
But
the practice was by no means confi ned to Montecassino, and the
Registrum Petri Diaconi is not the only early twelfth-century monastic
106 . Roger II Diplomata , 224 – 8 no. † 78; R. Volpini, ‘ Diplomi sconosciuti dei principi longobardi
di Salerno e dei re normanni di Sicilia ’ , in Contributi dell’istituto di storia medioevale i Raccolta di
studi in memoria di Giovanni Soranzo (Milan, 1968), 529 – 31 no. 10, 539 – 42 no. II. Both of these
documents are now in the Archivio Segreto Vaticano, Archivio Boncompagni-Ludovisi, respectively,
Prot. 270 no. 10 and Prot. 271 no. 15.
107 . William I Diplomata , 53 – 5 no. 19. The abbot here is named Roger; an abbot Placidus
is attested in a papal bull of Mar. 1156, and an Abbot John in Apr. 1160, Ughelli, Italia Sacra ,
vii. 405 – 6.
108 . William II Diplomata , no. 124.
109 . There is a convenient summary of his career by H. Bloch, The Atina Dossier of Peter the
Deacon of Monte Cassino. A Hagiographical Romance of the Twelfth Century (Studi et Testi 346:
Vatican City, 1998), 15 – 28, but for serious study E. Caspar, Petrus Diaconus und die Montecassino
Fälschungen. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des italienischen Geisteslebens im Mittelalter (Berlin, 1909), is
still invaluable. For his charter forgeries, see also G.A. Loud, Church and Society in the Norman
Principality of Capua 1058 – 1197 (Oxford, 1985), 172 – 81.
805
EHR, cxxiv. 509 (Aug. 2009)
THE CHANCERY AND CHARTERS OF THE KINGS OF SICILY (
1130 – 1212
)
chartulary from southern Italy to incorporate a signifi cant element of
forgery.
110
The production of supposed royal documents was, however,
in several respects different from this earlier activity, not least in that it
involved the creation of allegedly original charters from a relatively
recent era and not merely copies of those of often long-dead ‘ benefactors ’
(which for the most part is what Peter the Deacon’s forgeries were).
Brief discussion of the forged royal documents from three of the most
important abbeys on the mainland will illustrate some of the more
general problems concerning the authenticity of products of the royal
chancery. All four of the pre-1194 royal privileges for Montevergine (two
purporting to come from King Roger and two from William II) are in
fact forgeries, which were probably created soon after 1220. Three of
these depend, to a greater or lesser extent, upon the model of a privilege
of Henry VI of March 1195; it is possible, however, that the earlier of the
two diplomata of ‘ Roger ’ , dated 1137, and one of the ‘ William II ’
documents may also have drawn upon genuine originals of those kings,
although not necessarily ones drawn up in favour of Montevergine.
Enzensberger indeed suggests that these documents may have been
written in an atelier at Benevento rather than at Montevergine itself.
111
The second of the two William II documents, dated August 1189, also
draws upon a genuine privilege of Frederick II of October 1209.
112
The
primary motive for these forgeries was to safeguard the abbey’s claim to
properties and jurisdictions that were at risk because of the efforts of
Frederick II to reclaim royal rights and investigate titles after his return
to the regno in 1220. In his assizes issued at Capua in December of that
year, Frederick had decreed that existing privileges must be scrutinised
by royal offi cials and had cancelled all those issued by his parents until
their validity could be checked, while confi rming those issued by the
pre-1189 kings.
113
Thus churches which lacked such Norman royal
privileges had a very strong reason to acquire them. An additional
motive in this case was the attempt by the Montevergine monks to
assert their rights over the monastery of St Maria Incoronata, near
Foggia, which had long-standing links with Montevergine and its sister-
house of Goleto, also founded by William of Vercelli, but which in 1218
110 . For these, J.-A. Vickers, ‘ Monastic Forgery in Southern Italy during the Central Middle
Ages ( c. 900 – 1150) ’ (Univ. of Cambridge, Ph.D. thesis, 2009).
111 . H. Enzensberger, ‘ I Privilegi normanno-svevi a favore della <<congregazione>> verginiana ’ ,
in
La Società meridionale nelle pergamene di Montevergine. I Normanni chiamano gli svevi
(Montevergine, 1989), 71 – 89. Clementi, ‘ Calendar of Henry VI ’ (above n. 16), 152 – 3 no. 65.
However, I would be more sceptical than Enzensberger that the reference to men of the abbey sub
protectione et defensione gloriosissimi regis Wilhelmi in a charter of Abbot John of Jan. 1178, P.M.
Tropeano, ed., Codice diplomatico verginiano (13 vols., Montevergine, 1977 – 2001), vii. 80 – 6 no.
621, suggests an earlier royal privilege.
112 . Frederick II Diplomata 1198 – 1212 , 209 – 12 no. 108.
113 . C.A. Garufi , ed.,
Ryccardi de Sancto Germano Notarii Chronica
(Rerum Italicarum
Scriptores, 2nd edn., Bologna, 1938), 83 – 93, especially 91. Frederick had been especially worried by
supposed charters of his parents issued by Markward of Anweiler, who had had possession of their
seal molds, after 1198.
EHR, cxxiv. 509 (Aug. 2009)
806
THE CHANCERY AND CHARTERS OF THE KINGS OF SICILY (
1130 – 1212
)
had joined the Cistercians. This was named as a possession of
Montevergine in both the purported privileges of King Roger.
114
Of the four ‘ Roger II ’ privileges for Montecassino, only the fi rst,
issued on 30 December 1129, is genuine, and it was this document that
was in turn confi rmed by William I in 1158.
115
Two of the other three
were forged probably towards the end of the twelfth century, the other
perhaps a generation later. The modern editor suggested that a genuine,
now-lost original may lie behind one of these forgeries, purporting to
date from 1132 and confi rming to Montecassino, a dependent house in
Molise, although most of the diplomatic formulae appear to have been
adapted from an earlier charter of Duke Roger Borsa.
116
Similarly, a
confi rmation of the boundaries of the Terra Sancti Benedicti and of the
lands of Montecassino’s Abruzzi dependency of the Holy Liberator on
Monte Majella, dated 27 July 1133, drew most of its formulae and some
of its content from earlier diplomas of the Ottonian emperors.
117
The
last of these three forgeries, confi rming the property of the Cassinese
hospital, purports to be an original of December 1147, but can be clearly
identifi ed as a forgery, on both palaeographic and diplomatic grounds,
dating from the 1220s. Much of the content was in fact copied from a
privilege of the Emperor Conrad II of 1038. This is the document to
which the forger attached a (probably genuine) red wax seal of the king,
presumably taken from a mandate, despite the text saying that a lead seal
had been used.
118
Since Montecassino fell out of favour with the king
after the German invasion of 1137, to such an extent that he confi scated
some of the fortresses of the Terra Sancti Benedicti in 1140 and removed
much of the abbey’s treasure in 1143, the absence of genuine diplomas
issued to it in the later part of his reign is hardly surprising.
119
It was only
with the accession of his son that Montecassino returned to royal favour,
and even then the extent of that favour was limited and there were no
new grants. Of the two privileges of William I for Montecassino, the
fi rst was issued in March 1155 in response to complaints about the misuse
114 . Brühl, Urkunden und Kanzlei , 185. For the relations between Montevergine and St Maria
Incoronata, J.-M. Martin, ‘ Le Goleto et Montevergine en Pouille et en Basilicate ’ , in La Società
meridionale nelle pergamene di Montevergine (as above), 110 – 12. Martin is at pains to stress, contra
Brühl, that St Maria Incoronata had never actually been subject to Montevergine, though its
monks had close spiritual links with the nuns of Goleto.
115 . Roger II Diplomata , 40 – 2 no. 14; William I Diplomata , 66 – 7 no. 24.
116 . Brühl, Urkunden und Kanzlei , 164 – 72. Roger II Diplomata , 57 – 9 no. † 21, drawing upon
Colonie cassinesi in Capitanata iv Troia (above n. 73), 69 – 71 no. 16 (Dec. 1104).
117 . Roger II Diplomata , 69 – 72 no. † 25, drawing especially upon H. Bresslau and H. Bloch, eds.,
Diplomata Heinrici II , (MGH Diplomata Regum et Imperatorum Germaniae, iii, Hanover,
1900 – 3), 614 – 17 no. 482 (4 Jan. 1023), and also T. Sickel, ed., Diplomata Ottonis II (MGH
Diplomata Regum et Imperatorum Germaniae ii(1), Hanover 1888), 288 – 95 no. 254 (6 Aug. 981).
118 . Roger II Diplomata , 211 – 14 no. † 74; H. Bresslau, ed., Diplomata Conradi II (MGH Diplomata
Regum et Imperatorum Germaniae iv, Hanover, 1909), 372 – 6 no. 270. Brühl, Urkunden und
Kanzlei , 169 – 72.
119 . Annales Casinenses , MGH SS xix. 309 – 10.
807
EHR, cxxiv. 509 (Aug. 2009)
THE CHANCERY AND CHARTERS OF THE KINGS OF SICILY (
1130 – 1212
)
of his authority at the abbey’s expense by a royal justiciar, and the second
was simply the reconfi rmation of Roger’s privilege of 1129.
120
Similarly, while Roger did concede two genuine diplomas to Holy
Trinity, Cava, one giving the abbey a church in Sicily in 1131 and the
other a more general confi rmation of its property and rights in October
1133, two other royal documents for this abbey, one (undated) attributed
to Roger and the other to William I in April 1154, are both undoubted
forgeries. The purported 1154 charter granted the abbots of Cava the
right to appoint judges and notaries on its lands and to raise abbatial
vassals to knighthood and exempted various categories of men on its
lands from both direct taxation and various tolls and levies such as the
aquaticum for the use of other landowners ’ water. It reveals itself as a
later confection by employment of terms not otherwise used before the
thirteenth century, notably the references to the adoamentum , a tax not
found before the time of Frederick II, and to the royal penitenciarius .
121
The
‘
William I
’
forgery was one of a large number of falsifi ed
documents produced under Abbot Leo II in 1285 – 6. By this time the
abbot of Cava was deemed to be a baronial lord, and this forgery was
essentially a summary of what such ‘ baronial ’ rights embodied and an
attempt to validate them through the establishment of an historical
tradition.
122
But it was only one small part of a much wider campaign
of claiming and consolidating the abbey’s property and rights through
the manufacture of ancient title. Subsequently, indeed, the activities of
the abbey’s forgers became so blatant that they led Boniface VIII to
depose Abbot Rainaldo in 1300. The activities of the late thirteenth-
century forgers, who were also responding to various threats to the
abbey’s property and rights during the early Angevin period, have
created numerous problems for the study of the history of this important
abbey that are far from resolved, even today.
123
But, while two of the
supposed twelfth-century royal charters for Cava are certainly forgeries,
another, presumably genuine, royal diploma, produced as evidence in a
court case in 1151, has now been lost.
124
Furthermore, while the later thirteenth century was the great age of
Cavense forgery, in fact the forged Roger document may have been
manufactured surprisingly early, for both it and the charter of Count
120 . William I Diplomata , 16 – 19 no. 6; 66 – 7 no. 24.
121 . Roger II Diplomata , 45 – 8 no. 16; 87 – 9 no. 31; 123 – 4 no. † 44; William I Diplomata , 3 – 6 no. 1.
The one feature of the ‘ William I ’ privilege that does refl ect the policy of the Norman kings is the
reservation of criminal justice to the crown, for which Loud, Latin Church , 323 – 4.
122 . Cf. R. Filangieri di Candida et al ., eds., I Registri della cancellaria angioina riconstruiti (36
vols., Naples, 1950 to date), ii. 268 (1271/2), and for claims of exemption for the adoamentum , ibid.,
xviii, 258 – 9. For other similar references, G. Vitolo, Insediamenti Cavensi in Puglia (Galatina,
1984), 69 – 70.
123 . Brühl, Urkunden und Kanzlei , 143 – 5; C. Carlone, Falsifi cazioni e falsari cavensi e verginiani
del secolo XIII (Altavilla Silentina, 1984), especially 41 – 2, 45 – 51.
124 . Jamison, ‘ Norman administration of Apulia and Capua ’ , 463 – 4, appendix no. 8 ( Roger II
Diplomata, deperdita no. 25).
EHR, cxxiv. 509 (Aug. 2009)
808
THE CHANCERY AND CHARTERS OF THE KINGS OF SICILY (
1130 – 1212
)
Nicholas of the Principate that it purported to confi rm (itself a forgery)
were copied in a transcript of February 1167. The problem is whether
that transcript may not also be a forgery.
125
If it is genuine, then this
Cava charter was perhaps the earliest forgery of a document of the kings
of Sicily, but a number of other extant forgeries, in addition to those
from Montecassino noted above, probably also date from before
1200.
126
As a convenient guide, the table below lists all the royal privileges and
mandates for these three monasteries dated before the death of William
II in November 1189 ( Table 2 ).
These three monasteries were by no means the only active forgery
centres, both of royal documents and of others, from the late twelfth
century onwards. Several other Benedictine monasteries were notable:
for example Banzi and Montescaglioso in Lucania and S. Maria, Elce,
in the principality of Salerno (this last discussed previously), while the
Sicilian monks of the congregation of St Mary Josaphat of Jerusalem are
notorious for the diffi culties they have created for modern scholars.
127
Several Greek monasteries were by no means averse to forgery either:
notably those at Gerace in Calabria and Fragalà and Mazara in Sicily.
128
Allusion has already several times been made to an atelier of forgery at
Benevento that may not have been above providing false documents to
order. The particular interest of the three abbeys discussed above is both
that these were probably the most signifi cant and infl uential monastic
houses of the regno (late medieval sources suggest that they were certainly
the wealthiest) and much of their documentation survives in the
original, or pseudo-original, parchments. And, as the examples above
demonstrate, forgeries may in themselves be important sources for the
preoccupations of their benefi ciaries at the time when they were
compiled.
The problem of forgery is one of the factors that makes the study of
the chancery of the Sicilian kings and of the documents that it generated,
far from easy. That the edition of the royal charters is still incomplete
makes matters more problematic. The situation with regard to the
Arabic documents will certainly be improved by the imminent
publication by Jeremy Johns and Alex Metcalfe of the ğ ar ī da from the
reign of William II concerning Monreale. But neither the Greek
documents of Roger II nor the charters of William II are yet available,
125 . Cava, Arca , xxxii. 64. The charter of Count Nicholas, recording the sale of a mill in the
territory of Eboli, also survives in a pseudo-original, dated May 1137, Cava, Arm. Mag . G.26. The
full text remains unpublished, but for an abstract and discussion, C. Carlone, Documenti per la
storia di Eboli i (799-1264) (Salerno, 1998), 69 no. 42.
126 . For example, Roger II Diplomata , nos. † 8, † 13 and † 18.
127 . Brühl, Urkunden und Kanzlei , 95 – 101, 118 – 24, 172 – 7. H.E. Mayer, Bistümer, Klöster und
Stifte im Königreich Jerusalem (Stuttgart, 1977), 287 – 311; T. Kölzer, ‘ Neues zum Fälschungskomplex
S. Maria de Valle Josaphat ’ , Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters , xxxviii (1981),
140 – 61.
128 . Brühl, Urkunden und Kanzlei , 124 – 36, 150 – 6.
809
EHR, cxxiv. 509 (Aug. 2009)
THE CHANCERY AND CHARTERS OF THE KINGS OF SICILY (
1130 – 1212
)
T
able
2:
R
oyal D
ocuments for
Thr
ee M
ainland A
bbeys (pr
e-N
ov
ember
1189
)
M
onte C
assino
30
D
ecember
1129
R
oger II Diplomata
,
no
.
14
G
enuine
O
riginal
27
J
uly
1132
R
oger II Diplomata
, no
.
† 21
F
orged
P
seudo-original
27
J
uly
1133
R
oger II Diplomata
, no
.
† 25
F
orged
P
seudo-original
12
D
ecember
1147
R
oger II Diplomata
, no
.
† 74
F
orged
P
seudo-original
M
ar
ch
1155
W
illiam I Diplomata
,
no
.
6
G
enuine
O
riginal
1158
(
Januar
y – A
ugust)
W
illiam I Diplomata
,
no
.
24
G
enuine
O
riginal
30
M
ay
1174
(M
andate)
W
illiam II Diplomata
,
no
.
75
G
enuine
Char
tular
y copy
8 N
ov
ember
1174
(M
andate)
W
illiam II Diplomata
,
no
.
78
G
enuine
O
riginal
26
M
ar
ch
1175
(M
andate)
W
illiam II Diplomata
,
no
.
80
G
enuine
Contemporar
y copy
Januar
y
1176
W
illiam II Diplomata
,
no
.
86
G
enuine
O
riginal
Ca
va
F
ebr
uar
y
1131
R
oger II Diplomata
,
no
.
16
G
enuine
O
riginal
16
O
ctober
1133
R
oger II Diplomata
,
no
.
31
G
enuine
N
otarial copy
,
1277
(U
ndated:
after
M
ay
1137
)
R
oger II Diplomata
, no
.
† 44
F
orger
y
N
otarial copy
,
1167
A
pril
1154
W
illiam I Diplomata
, no
.
† 1
F
orger
y
P
seudo-original
N
ov
ember
1178
W
illiam II Diplomata
,
no
.
103
G
enuine?
N
otarial copy
,
1190
15
M
ar
ch
1182
(M
andate)
W
illiam II Diplomata
,
no
.
114
G
enuine
Contemporar
y copy
M
ontev
ergine
25
A
ugust
1137
R
oger II Diplomata
, no
.
† 45
F
orger
y
P
seudo-original
24
N
ov
ember
1140
R
oger II Diplomata
, no
.
† 52
F
orger
y
P
seudo-original
8 M
ar
ch
1170
W
illiam II Diplomata
, no
.
† 34
F
orger
y
P
seudo-original
A
ugust
1189
W
illiam II Diplomata
, no
.
† 155
F
orger
y
P
seudo-original
EHR, cxxiv. 509 (Aug. 2009)
810
nor does it seem that they will be in the near future.
129
Yet without these
key resources, understanding of the Norman kingdom of Sicily will
always be severely hampered. Furthermore, the greatest problem that
historians of Sicilian kingship face is insoluble: what survives from the
chancery of the Norman rulers is undoubtedly but a small proportion
of what was once written. Nevertheless study of the evolution of the
Sicilian chancery and of its products reveals a great deal about the
administrative development of that monarchy, the concerns of the rulers
and the changing face of the nascent Sicilian state.
University of Leeds
G.A. LOUD
129 . The same problem applies to the documents of the Norman rulers of southern Italy before
1130 When Léon-Robert Ménager died in 1993 his edition of the charters of the dukes of Apulia
was unfi nished, and his proposed edition of those of Roger I had never appeared. This work has
now been entrusted to others, respectively, Jean-Marie Martin and Julia Becker, but again may not
be published for some years.