ROBERT THE WISE OF NAPLES, 1309-43provides a lively image of fourteenth-century Naples: nobles,
bandits, merchants, and the destitute). Among lesser figures
more permanently at court must be mentioned Barlaam,
a Greek-speaking Calabrian, from whom Boccaccio learned
some Greek; the Angevin court was the only European court
where steadily sustained study of Greek texts could be found.~"
Scientific and medical study was also active, with the help
of Jewish translators whom the Angevins protected, more
it seems for their knowledge than out of tolerance. In^1308
loans from Florentine bankers were used to pay a fee for the
translation of Arabic books into Latin and a stipend for the
distinguished Roman painter Cavallini.
There was a further area of intellectual activity which
helped the Angevin dynasty politically. It has been seen that
the king's lawyers willingly demonstrated the independence
of the kings of Naples from all superior control, in the wake
of the conflict with Henry VII. The jurists Marino da Cara-
manico and Andrea of Isernia, under Charles II and Robert,
used the historic legatine status of the rulers of southern Italy,
the monarchia sicula, as evidence for the freedom of kings
from day-to-day interference in royal affairs. They stressed
that the king was not subject to imperial or other authority:
he was emperor in his own kingdom. In his commentary on
Frederick Il's lawbook of 1231, Andrea of Isernia insisted
that the king's decrees must be accepted as law and that his
power consisted in determining the law; he was not bound
by the law. This gloss on a law-book which itself stressed that
the ruler's word was law helped the Angevin dynasty to claim
the exalted authority of their Hohenstaufen predecessors.
Though Robert was more scrupulous than Charles I and II
in paying the tribute due to the pope, in other respects he
was a prolific legislator, insistent on the supreme authority
which his legal advisers instructed him to employ. Emile
Leonard has provided a list of the vivid and varied pre-
ambles to royal decrees, rich in the insistence on the need
for careful exercise of justice and in warnings against human
tendencies to pervert the course of justice.:lti Robert was fond
- R. Weiss, Mediroal and Humanist Greek (Padua, 1977), pp. 13-43.
- A. Trifone, La legislazione angioina (Naples, 1921); Pennington, Prince
and the law, pp. 165-201; W. Ullmann, The mediroal idea of law as
represented by I~ucas de Penna (London, 1946); Leonard, Angioini,
pp. 339-66.