The workers in his silk factories were slaves from Thebes and
Corinth. The pages of his palace were Sicilian or African eunuchs.
His charters ran in Arabic as well as Greek and Latin. His jewellers
engraved the rough gems of the Orient with Christian mottoes in
Semitic characters.[3] His architects were Mussulmans who adapted
their native style to the requirements of Christian ritual, and
inscribed the walls of cathedrals with Catholic legends in the
Cuphic language. The predominant characteristic of Palermo was
Orientalism. Religious toleration was extended to the Mussulmans, so
that the two creeds, Christian and Mahommedan, flourished side by
side. The Saracens had their own quarters in the towns, their
mosques and schools, and Cadis for the administration of petty
justice. French and Italian women in Palermo adopted the Oriental
fashions of dress. The administration of law and government was
conducted on Eastern principles. In nothing had the Mussulmans shown
greater genius than in their system of internal statecraft. Count
Roger found a machinery of taxation in full working order, officers
acquainted with the resources of the country, books and schedules
constructed on the principles of strictest accuracy, a whole
bureaucracy, in fact, ready to his use. By applying this machinery
he became the richest potentate in Europe, at a time when the
northern monarchs were dependent upon feudal aids and precarious
revenues from crown lands. In the same way, the Saracens bequeathed
to the Normans the court system, which they in turn had derived from
the princes of Persia and the example of Constantinople. Roger found
it convenient to continue that organisation of pages, chamberlains,
ushers, secretaries, viziers, and masters of the wardrobe, invested
each with some authority of state according to his rank, which
confined the administration of an Eastern kingdom to the walls of
the palace.[4] At Palermo Europe saw the first instance of a court
not wholly unlike that which Versailles afterwards became. The
intrigues which endangered the throne and liberty of William the
Bad, and which perplexed the policy of William the Good, were
court-conspiracies of a kind common enough at Constantinople. In
this court life men of letters and erudition played a first part
three centuries before Petrarch taught the princes of Italy to
respect the pen of a poet.

[1] The English Gualterio Offamilio, or Walter of the
Mill, Archbishop o