THE V\'ESTERN MEDITERRANEAN Kll\iGDOMS 1~00-1500The great Italian liberal historian, Benedetto Croce, tried
in 1924 to disentangle some of the contradictions presented
by the history of southern Italy. Here was a region whose
princes, lawyers and philosophers were held in the highest
esteem by earlier writers; a kingdom which was seen as the
precocious instigator of the ideal of an 'absolute secular
and enlightened monarchy'.^1 Croce recalled the words of
the Swiss historian of the Renaissance, Jacob Burckhardt: at
the court of Frederick II, in thirteenth-century Naples, first
appears the notion of the state and its government as 'a
work of art'.~ Yet Croce was keenly conscious that southern
Italy had fallen far from this peak of glory, even suppos-
ing such past achievements were not mythical. What had
been praised by Venetian merchants of the twelfth century as
the realm of peace, free of brigands, in later centuries had
an almost opposite reputation; and the efficient, impartial
administrators of Norman and Hohenstaufen days gave way
to venal, wayward government by the fifteenth century. Croce
pointed to the lack of national unity in the south of Italy;
there existed indeed one political entity, ruled from a capital
at Naples, but under its control a great variety of regional
interests - towns aspiring to autonomy, warlords trying to
build great estates, and also geographical and ethnic diversity.
Perhaps in the twelfth century there were some rulers who
maintained a benign interest in the good government of the
many peoples in their domain, but by the fourteenth century
the princes and their bureaucracy stood much further from
the population, separated to some degree by the powerful ter-
ritorial and governmental claims of a large feudal baronage:
no people, no nation came to birth; there was not even a name
which fitted all the various stocks, for Sicilians, Apulians, Longo-
bards, Neapolitans were all appellations of a purely local char-
acter; the burghers and the common people did not impose
their will, and the feudal lords did so only in a highly anarch-
istic manner which did not further the good of the state ... The
parliaments, called together at long intervals, served only for
the proclamation of laws or the levy of moneys to meet some- B. Croce, History of thP Kingdom ol NaplPs, ed. H.S. Hughes (Chicago,
1970), p. 11. - ]. Burckhardt, The Civilisation of the Renaissance in ltalv, ed. P. Burke
(Harmondsworth, 1990), p. 12.