Marks of Opulence: The Why, When and Where of Western Art 1000–1914. Colin Platt
huge multiaisled and cupola’d Cathedral of St Sophia at Kiev, described by Bishop Hilarion as ‘adorned with every beauty, with gold and silver and precious stones and sacred vessels … wondrous and glorious to all adjacent countries … another like it will not be found in all the land of the North from east to west.’9 And whereas the bishop’s praise was surely generous, for Prince Yaroslav himself was in the audience, Hilarion had already built a cathedral of his own at Rostov east of Novgorod, knew Kiev’s many churches (said to number more than 200 before Yaroslav’s accession), and could recognize superior quality when he saw it.
Novgorod’s Cathedral of St Sophia, built in the mid-century by Yaroslav’s son, again had a Byzantine model. Yet there are borrowings here also from Western Romanesque. And it was the contemporary development of long-distance trading systems – to the Baltic (and the West) from Novgorod, to the Black Sea (and Constantinople) from Kiev – that chiefly funded the construction of these great churches. Beneficial to all, such silent revolutions are much more likely to survive than military conquests. ‘Blessed be the Lord my strength, which teacheth my hands to war, and my fingers to fight’ (Psalm 144) ran the legend on a Frankish sword-hilt found in Sweden.10 But it was Christian wealth rather than force of arms that defeated the Viking gods, and it was towns as much as churches that spread Christ’s message. Well before 1200, by which time Novgorod and Kiev were each as large as London, urban centres had multiplied across Russia. And although every new town of this period was market-based, none was just about money. Thus it would be said of Baltic Riga, founded in 1201, that ‘the city of Riga draws the faithful to settle there more because of its freedom than because of the fertility of its surroundings’.11 And while Riga’s situation as the crusading headquarters of the Livonian Knights of the Sword was necessarily unique, there was nothing exceptional about the liberties it shared with almost every market-town in Western Christendom. ‘Perhaps the greatest social achievement’, writes Susan Reynolds, ‘of towns in this period was that they offered a way of life that was attractive. People flocked into them and … went on coming.’12
It was the steady flow of immigrants, attracted by freedoms denied to them in rural hinterlands, which kept the towns intact through the famines and feuding of the late eleventh century. When Goslar’s silver ran out, as it had begun to do already in the 1050s, most towns survived the consequent recession. But aristocracies everywhere had learnt to love good living. And one result of the growing silver shortages of the second half of the eleventh century was to focus attention, both north and south of the Alps, on those regions which were still bullion-rich. It was not by chance alone that German interest in Italy revived sharply from the mid-eleventh century. And it was in Italy, south of Rome, that German knights first encountered Norman mercenaries. ‘Accustomed to war’, wrote William of Malmesbury (d.1143), half-Norman himself, the Normans ‘could hardly live without it’. They are ‘a warlike race … moved by fierce ambition … [and] always ready to make trouble’, was the verdict of another Anglo-Norman chronicler, Orderic Vitalis (d.1142), who, after spending most of his life among them at the abbey of Saint-Evroult, knew the Normans as ‘the most villainous’ of neighbours.13 Unable to tolerate another’s dominance and always spoiling for a fight, Norman adventurers carved up Southern Italy between them. They took Capua in 1058; drove the Byzantines out of Calabria by 1071; the Lombards out of Salerno by 1077; the Arabs out of Sicily by 1090. They became the masters of Malta and Corfu. Silver-rich England, always the North’s most tempting prize, made a kingdom for Duke William in 1066.14
Windfall fortunes, won and held by force, need legitimizing. And it was through the Church that the Normans laundered their new money. In the Conqueror’s England, there was hardly a major church which was not at once rebuilt by its first Norman abbot or reforming bishop. But whereas the scale of this new construction – as at Bishop Walkelin’s Winchester – was almost without precedent, and while some of these great churches – in particular, William of St Calais’s Durham – could readily bear comparison with the most advanced continental buildings of their day, it was not in England that Norman patronage was most productive. Southern Italy allowed its Norman appropriators to take everything they wanted from a long-established melting-pot of cultures: Latin, Byzantine, and Saracenic. It was in Norman Apulia and Capua, Calabria, Salerno and Sicily – not in Lombardy or in Germany, in England, France or Russia – that the ‘Renaissance of the Twelfth Century’ first originated.
This Renaissance was not limited to the arts. However, it was in church-building, in particular, that scholar-priests and princes found common ground. And one of their earliest cooperative ventures was at Monte Cassino, in Norman Capua, the sixth-century birthplace of Benedictine monachism in the West. It was there, after Richard of Aversa drove the Lombards from Capua in 1058, that Abbot Desiderius, with Richard’s help, made Monte Cassino a busy hive of the arts, drawing on every culture of the region. And it was from Desiderius’s new church that Abbot Hugh of Cluny (a visitor there in 1083) took some of the ideas – the Byzantine vault and the Saracenic pointed arch – which he would re-use almost immediately in his comprehensive rebuilding of Cluny III. Another eminent Monte Cassino scholar, the Latin poet Alfanus, was raised to Archbishop of Salerno in 1058. And when, two decades later, the Norman Robert Guiscard took Salerno as well, it was Duke Robert’s sudden riches which built Archbishop Alfanus a fine new cathedral, equipped with costly mosaics in the best Greek tradition and with great bronze doors (as at Monte Cassino) from Constantinople.15
The dedication of Salerno Cathedral in 1084 was one of Gregory VII’s last public acts as pope-in-exile. Following his death in 1085, Abbot Desiderius, against his better judgement, accepted office as Victor III. And Desiderius, in turn, was succeeded by Urban II (1088–99), a former prior of Cluny. Each had Norman support. Gregory VII (1073–85) had first enlisted Normans as his principal allies against the Germans; Desiderius, when pope as much as abbot, remained dependent on the support of Norman princes; and Urban II’s great Crusade, preached so charismatically at Clermont on 27 November 1095, would probably never have reached Jerusalem without their leadership.
Only five years before, the successful expulsion of Sicily’s Arab rulers by Roger ‘the Great Count’, younger brother of Robert Guiscard, Duke of Apulia, had established a model for Christian renewal in the Mediterranean. And Sicily’s enormous wealth, fuelling Crusader hopes of similar booty in the East, was in truth far more real than the legendary golden pavements of Jerusalem. Significantly for the arts, that wealth was almost entirely Mediterranean-based, combining seaborne commerce – the Arab, Byzantine, and (increasingly) North Italian trades – with the export of Sicily’s high-quality grains. And the island’s new rulers soon found it more convenient to forget – or ignore – their Norman origins. Roger II, crowned King of Sicily and Apulia on 25 December 1130, had been Count of Sicily since 1105 and Duke of Apulia from 1122. At Roger’s cosmopolitan court – over which he presided with Byzantine pomp – French and Latin, Greek and Arabic were all in common use. And although, from Roger’s death in 1154, the Latinization of Norman Sicily appreciably gathered pace, it would be a long time yet before incoming Latin settlers outnumbered the indigenous Greeks, and almost as long before the last Arab merchant left Palermo.16 Roger II’s two outstanding buildings – the new cathedral at Cefalù and his Palatine Chapel at Palermo – were both begun soon after he was crowned king. And in this exceptional context of cross-fertilizing cultures, whereas each church is of Latin (or Romanesque) plan, the expensive high-quality mosaics which ornament both buildings are unmistakably Greek, while the pointed arches of Roger’s palace chapel, and its rich stalactite-style ceiling, are just as obviously of Arab inspiration. That identical mix of Latin, Greek and Arab, on an even grander scale, again characterized the new cathedral at Monreale, west of Palermo, built by William II (1165–89). King William, Ibn Jubayr relates, spoke Arabic. And the pointed arches of Monreale’s nave arcades and cloister, completed in the 1180s, are at least as Saracenic as those