San Giovanni degli Eremiti. Image from Volipindarici.it.

Mosaic Jungles of Siqilliya
Reminiscences of Moorish Palermo

Sicilian history is the Tour de France of raping, pillaging and looting. All the great world-class threats to law, order and expensive crockery have taken a crack at the island at one point or other, Carthaginians and Saracens, Garibaldi and Don Corleone. The curious thing is that more often than not, these erstwhile terrors, finding the Sicilian sun turning them either into romantics or Boy Scout campers, have often left the island much prettier than when they found it.

The whole place is littered with their glorious and alien remains, and after a while it becomes difficult to deduce who left what. This distinctly Italian cultural confusion is never more apparent than in the Saracenic and Norman churches of old Palermo’s narrow twisting streets.

Palermo was founded by the Phonicians as a settlement with the curious name of Ziz. Centuries later, as the Roman Empire crumbled, it was reduced to a Byzantine backwater after a period of Gothic occupation. Saracen armies conquered it in the ninth century and established the city as capital of an independent emirate that covered the whole of the island. The Normans under Robert de Hauteville extinguished the Arabic presence there, officially speaking, in 1072. However, Arab culture continued to reign supreme under a diaphanous and gilded veneer of Germano-Byzantine suzerainty.

One image, called to mind by H.V. Morton in the dog-eared copy of A Traveler in Southern Italy that I had devoured on the train down, illustrated this surreal world perfectly. Frederick II the Hohenstaufen Holy Roman Emperor and King of Sicily, the stupor mundi, had a trained elephant in his entourage. The thought of such a creature lumbering through the barren scrub of Apulia seems a perfect symbol for the Ali Baba-meets-Chaucer world that these monarchs inhabited.

I remember as a child being fascinated by one of the most bizarre remnants of this glittering and faintly heterodox era. One scorchingly hot summer in Vienna, another polyglot capital who banks on her picturesquely decadent past, I spent one afternoon lingering in the darkened chambers and glass cases of the old crown jewel rooms of the Hofburg. The Imperial family’s regalia were divided into two treasuries, the Secular and Ecclesiastical, though the dividing line between the two was not so sharp as it might have seen. One of the two most prized treasures in the Secular Treasury, the so-called Inalienable Heirlooms of the House of Austria, was a large agate platter with faintly Chinese scroll-handles thought somewhat fancifully to be the Holy Grail. The other, even more peculiar, was a unicorn’s horn.

However, the object of my curiosity was another example of this odd mingling of secular and sacred, Muslim and Christian. It was the alba of one of Frederick’s forbearers, Wilhelm II of Sicily, a broad, Byzantine vestment in gleaming white silk, edges and yoke weighed down with heavy barbarian orphreys of gold-embroidered scarlet worked with an intricate and surprisingly subtle net of pearls, amethysts, spinels and emeralds. Around the hems were inscriptions in Latin and in Arabic Tulut script. The Arabic reads thus: [This belongs] to that which was commissioned by the magnificent King Gulyalm [Wilhelm] the Second, he who is highly esteemed by God, who is supported for his power, who is victorious through his strength, the ruler of Italy, Anukuburda [Apulia], Qalauria [Calabria], and of Siqilliya [Sicily], the mainstay of the Imam of Rumiya [the Pope of Rome!], the protector of the Christian faith, in his flourishing, eternally flowering chamber, at the time of Ulian [possibly July] the fourteenth, in the year one thousand, one hundred and eighty-one in the year of Our Lord Jesus the Messiah.

Considering other recently-discovered Tulut inscriptions sewn into the cuffs of the robe attribute the garment to three Arabs named Marzuq, Ali of Malta and Muhsin (working under two Christians named Damyan and Thomas), it seems a beguiling and strange snapshot of the mongrel politics of the Sicilian state at the time.

I would later see Wilhelm receiving his crown from the Messiah on the wall of Monreale Cathedral in Sicily: Christ’s face bore a diffident and guarded expression, like Pius VII, a later Imam of Rumiya (!), dragged to officiate at Napoleon’s coronation centuries later. Given the Hohenstaufen propensity for trying the patience of the Papacy, such a comparison seems singularly appropriate.

Palermo is now a baroque city, its German-Moorish maze overlaid by the razor-sharp grid of the Four Quarters or Quattro Canti that converge at a round and regal piazza that has since been turned into an overgrown traffic roundabout. Nonetheless, as our class’s tour bus pulled in from Cefalú, the first building we saw was an ex-mosque, and en route we walked passed a grand edifice that, for all the geopolitical shifts of the last millennium, is still called the Norman Palace.

San Giovanni degli Eremiti, the ex-mosque, is now an ex-church, a puzzlingly gutted ruin standing in a lush tropical garden. It proves that even before the cultural muddle of the Hohenstaufens, the weird alchemy of Sicily was at work: it was a church even before it was a mosque, but, like the tunic that clothed the boastful mainstay of the Imam of Rumiya, it had been raised by Muslim engineers.

We wandered through the thick panoply of green, trees and silvery padded cacti, that crowded round the crumbling stone walls of the old cloister, and I had the feeling of having stepped into some odd mix of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom and Raiders of the Lost Ark. There was a veritable little palm jungle surrounding the little church and its roofless monastery, deliciously cool and fresh in the shade. The church was a homely, cubical pile in pale dappled stone topped by a surprising number of swollen, copper-red stucco domes, looking like a forest of strange Ottoman turbans. Age had stained their crowns and faded their rims, forming a patina that seemed to dribble down the sides like a glazed Chinese pot.

The inside was equally stark, yet luminous and light for all the solid masonry and heavy pointed arches. Rather than a true nave, the church was divided into two cubical compartments, and a presbytery terminating in an apse, each crowned with an airy cupola raised on lancet-like squinches. All traces of its checkered past life as church and mosque had been stripped from its walls, and the lean apse window, Gothic before there was Gothic, shed light onto a bare sanctuary. The altar had gone the way of the mihrab before it.

Outside, a roofless cloister ringed a little garden, its age-eaten walls creeping with scarlet flowers enfolded in a thick garland of vines. Delicate doubled colonnettes supported bulky pointed arches. A palm tree with plumelike fronds rose against an intense blue sky. A turbaned church-tower rose like a stumpy minaret. We might as well have been in Morocco.

And we might as well have been in Constantinople or Venice at our next stop, at a church that had never been a mosque, and, from the sign with mass times for Holy Week affixed to the elaborate ironwork gate of the Norman Palace, had not yet been turned into an ex-church. It was the Palatine Chapel of the old, polyglot, weirdly cosmopolitan Sicilian kingdom of the Hohenstaufens.

At first glance, it’s difficult to see what makes the Norman Palace merit the name. A high, rambling façade wraps around a compact but confused tangle of courtyards, re-faced in the nineteenth century with crumbling sand-brown stucco in an idiosyncratic style that resembles nothing so much as the Alhambra built by New York slumlords. Inside, one finds cortiles ringed with spindly early-Renaissance columns and ranks of drainpipes like the mouths of cannon, ballrooms upholstered with yellow silk and full of end tables filled with branching gilt dingbats and the site of a former astronomical observatory where Padre Giorgio Piazza discovered the asteroid Ceres in 1801.

Further exploration only increases the chronological and cultural confusion. The Hall of Hercules is full of second-rate grisalles and a grubby ceiling fresco showing the apotheothized hero as a sort of nineteenth-century crossbreed of the Farnese Hercules and Arnold Schwarzenagger, looking soulfully up into the eyes of an approachable, pleasantly plain Artemis. Then, there is the White Room (closer to ecru), and the Hall of the Viceroys, where gold-laced Bourbon officials and ermine cardinals loom down from dark canvases. Some peculiar belle-epoque tromp-l’oeil ceiling decorations suggest Byzantine mosaic work, but nowhere is there any glimpse of the Germanic stupor mundi

And then there is the Hall of Roger. It’s a dead end on the tour, but it seems the gateway into another world. We could only look in across the velvet rope two-by-two and see a peculiar little nineteenth-century table with bronze goat legs and a slice of petrified wood as the top. However, it’s not this peculiar oversized bibelot which is the reason we crowded close, but the mosaics which span the vault overhead. An elaborate maze of geometric knots enclose a half-Moorish, half-Romanesque bestiary of lions, gryphons and eagles, while on the walls below, against the golden sky, sagittarii gallop at full tilt at one another amid curious Byzantine trees with boughs like wings.

The Hall of Roger is named after Roger II of Sicily, who cobbled together the feuding Norman conquests of southern Italy, survived having a crusade called down on his head by St. Bernard of Clairvaux, and had the somewhat dubious honor of having his title of King of Sicily confirmed by both a pope and his antipope, Innocent II and Anacletus II. Branded as “half-heathen,” he surrounded himself with cultured aliens such as the Muslim geographer Idrisi, the Englishman Thomas Brun, and the seagoing Antiochene amir George.

While keeping heathen company, Roger nonetheless ornamented his capital with one of the most splendid court chapels ever raised. It was built on the site of the mosque of Adelcamo, according to Gaspar Palermo’s Guida Istruttiva of 1816, beginning in 1129, the year of Roger’s antipapal coronation as King of a united Sicily. On the courtyard wall is a trilingual inscription in Latin, Greek and Arabic praising him, not for his warlike abilities, but for the construction of a water clock.

We stepped down into the darkness of a side-aisle, and, like in the Hall of Roger, entered a world of imagination, this time equal parts Omar Khayyam and The Golden Legend. Rows of spoliated columns, some smooth dark granite, others fluted and pale, line the side-aisles, topped with vigorously crude Romanesque Corinthian capitals. The Easter candle-stand is richly carved with semi-Cluniac grotesques, looking faintly like a Chinese chess-piece.

The chapel is dim, and summer light lazily penetrates the murky interior through the gilded clerestory. Mosaic bishops, some in pointed western mitres, others bareheaded and yoked about the shoulders with the broad pallium of Byzantium, stand between high pointed arches. Dozens of yards of golden tessera cover every inch of the church’s walls. Medallions of saints and angels with stiff upraised hands line the undersides of arches amid curling vegetal knotwork that looks more Persian than Greek, while elsewhere, a youthful God divides waters that resemble writhing masses of aquamarine-green sphaghetti. Nearby, life is breathed into a naked Adam with curious anatomy by means of a laser-like ray shooting from the lips of the Creator. Overhead, in the main dome, Christ looks down with an unassuming, almost amused gaze, surrounded by flat angels garbed like Byzantine procurators, including Uriel, who has a delightful, wry angelic smirk on his face.

However, it is the ceiling and the floor, and the wondrous marble inlay that curls around and below the mosaic Bible that is truly unique. The wooden false vaults drip with Moorish stalactites and eight-pointed coffers as fine as anything in the Alhambra, and decorated with equally appropriate Kufic script, disjointed words like “prosperity,” “affability,” “safety,” “protection;” more concerned with the wellbeing of Roger than the worship of God. The marble that runs around the walls is equally remarkable, resembling nothing so much as the Cosmati family on steroids.

The Cosmatesque style of marble inlay is spectacularly familiar in Rome; it’s a rare church that does not at least boast a pulpit or Paschal candlestick decorated with their handiwork. It’s hypnotically Romanesque, full of undulating serpentine symmetries swirling around a dizzying multiplicity of fat porphyry disks, sliced up like sausage from a hijacked classical column. The exotic Saracenic hothouse of Sicily produced an even more amazing variation, an intricate fractal marriage of Celtic knotwork and Arabic carpets. Stars enclose stars enclose stars, their points woven together with inlays of white marble and gold foil and every hue of semi-precious stone from malachite to lapis lazuli, looking all the world like an American country quilt re-imagined by Shaharazade. The gorgeous geometric inlay runs across the treads of steps, around the frames of the semi-precious rail of the inner sanctuary, around the Greek crosses that mark the porphyry-paneled ambo.

Like the court that Roger produced and Frederick, the chapel is truly a wonder of the world, and at a time of international strife, seems a pointed reminder of Sicily’s peculiar tolerance. Yet, as I left, walking southward under the hot Palermitan sun towards the old town’s massive Mannerist Porta Nuova, I suddenly raised my guard and wondered if perhaps I had missed another, more unsettling theme in this wondrous fable.

Sicily, the crossroads of rape that turned into a kingdom of tolerance, seems a model lesson to us today. Yet, the moral of the story is as muddled as the fragmentary Kufic tangle decorating the chapel ceiling. Sometimes compromise is not the glittering prize it seems.

There is blood spilled in that mosaic jungle. Frederick II’s fragile dream world of colored silks and trained elephants collapsed within a century or two into a tangle of internecine strife and anti-papal politics. Roger’s benevolence was born of an almost amoral pragmatism, and came at the price of selling his soul to a usurper in the papal chair, while the docile Muslims of his court could easily remember tales of days when their great-grandfathers had purged a Christian city by the sword. Within two hundred years, the Ottomans would sweep over the Bosphorus and swiftly devour Europe up to the Danube, leaving slavery and confusion in their wake.

There is, as a consequence, something faintly unsettled in the expression of the Christ they depict in so many of their chapels, yoked in unwillingly to set the crown on the head of some scented and boastful double-dealing monarch.

The Porta Nuova stands as a memory of this tumultuous epilogue. Built to commemorate Charles V’s conquest of Tunis, it is playfully rusticated with the wildest Sicilian innovation, looking more like the scales of some unknown seagoing beast than simple rough stone. However, on either side stand two pairs of exotic herms, half-length figures sprouting from banded inverted pilasters, supporting the cornice overhead with their turbaned heads. One of them, gruesomely, has had his arms sliced off, stumps of bone grotesquely visible.

They’re Moors, the former conquerors of Sicily and courtiers of Wilhelm, Frederick and Roger, now reduced to prisoners of war. Meanwhile, their masters in Constantinople, in turn, had equaled and surpassed the West in cruelty, their glittering civilization supported on the backs of an institutionalized helotry of kidnapped Christian boys, the infamous Janissary Corps.

The Norman and Moorish heritage still remains in Sicily, a splendid petrified flower of pophyry and gold, but one whose tumultuous and dubious beginning—and ending—hint that perhaps its smell might not have been quite as sweet as it seemed.