38 A Short History of the Middle East
half-oriental, half-western, providing a shelter for Greek, Latin,
Moor, and Jew, and better organized . . . than any other European
government of that age. Among the orange-groves of Palermo
Roger, the descendant of the Vikings, sat upon his throne, robed in
the dalmatic of the apostolic legate and the imperial costume of
Byzantium, his ministers part Greek, part English, his army com-
posed as to half of Moors, his fleet officered by Greeks, himself a
Latin Christian but, in that balmy climate of the south, ruling in
half-Byzantine, half-oriental state ... a true representative of his
lovely island, shared then as ever between east and west.'1 Roger's
grandson Frederick II (1215-50), Holy Roman Emperor and King
of Sicily, still kept a semi-oriental court, and incurred the excom-
munication of the fierce Pope Innocent III by his reluctance to
undertake the Crusade; for he was in friendly political and com-
mercial relations with Muslim rulers, and eventually won back
Jerusalem temporarily for Christendom, not by the way of the
sword but by a treaty-compromise with the tolerant Sultan of
Egypt. In 1224 Frederick founded the University of Naples,2
and encouraged the translation into Latin of Arabic science and
philosophy. Here at Naples studied St. Thomas Aquinas (1226-
74), who made a profound study of the Arabic commentators on
the Greek philosophers, but had the originality to go beyond them
to the original Greek texts, which were now at last becoming
available to the Western world.
But the country of outstanding importance for the transmission
of Muslim learning to the West was Spain, whose level of civiliza-
tion at the time of the Muslim conquest had been almost as high as
that of Sicily. In particular, her cities contained many thousands of
literate and energetic Jews, endowed with that spirit of restless in-
quiry which characterizes their race. During the ninth century
Muslim Spain became one of the wealthiest and most thickly-
populated lands of Europe, sending abundant industrial and
agricultural exports both to Christian Europe and to the Muslim
East. Cordoba, the capital, was the most cultivated city in Europe,
the rival of Constantinople, Baghdad and Cairo. With its popula-
tion of half-a-mjllion, its three hundred public baths, its seventy
libraries, and its miles of paved streets lit at night, it was centuries in
1 History of Europe, one-vol. ed., 190 f.
2 For Muslim influence on the Medical School of Salerno in the eleventh
century or even before, see Mieli, op. cit., 219 f.