The test of such phrases was the possession of adequate military and financial resources. Of the strength of King Roger’s army his long and successful wars offer sufficient evidence; the great register of his military fiefs, the so-called _Catalogue of the Barons_, indicates that the feudal service could be increased when necessity demanded, while contingents of Saracen troops were as valuable to him as they had been to his father. Much the same can be said of his navy, for the safety of the Sicilian kingdom and its position in Mediterranean politics depended in large measure upon sea power, and Roger’s fleet has a distinguished record in his Italian and African campaigns. Army and navy and civil service, however, rested ultimately upon the royal treasury, and among its contemporaries the Sicilian kingdom enjoyed a deserved reputation for great wealth. Its resources consisted partly in the products of the soil, such as the grain and cotton and peltry which were exported from Sicily itself; partly in manufactures, as in the case of the silk industry which King Roger developed in Palermo; and partly in the unrivalled facilities for trade which were presented by its many harbors and its advantageous location with respect to the great sea routes. Under the Norman kings the commerce of the southern kingdom was passive, rather than active, that is to say, it was carried on, not mainly by its own cities, such as Bari and Amalfi, which had enjoyed great prosperity in the Byzantine period and lost their local independence under the Normans, but by commercial powers from without--Pisa, Genoa, and Venice. The relative importance of each of these varied with the vicissitudes of Italian politics, but among them they shared the external trade of the kingdom. We find the Venetians on the eastern coast, the Genoese and Pisans at Salerno and the chief ports of Sicily, where they had special warehouses and often considerable colonies; and the earliest commercial records of Genoa and Pisa, notably the register of the Genoese notary, John the Scribe, enable us to follow their business from merchant to merchant and from port to port. Sicily served not only as a place for the exchange of exports for foreign products, the cloth of northern Italy and France and the spices and fabrics of the East, but also as a stage in the trade with the Orient by the great highway of the Straits of Messina or with Africa and Spain by way of Palermo and the ports of the western and southern coast. From all this the king took his toll. Without foregoing any of their feudal or domanial revenues or extensive monopolies, Roger and his successors tapped this growing commerce by port dues and by tariffs on exports and imports, thus securing their ready money from that merchant class upon which the future monarchies of western Europe were to build. The income from Palermo alone was said to be greater than that which the king of England derived from his whole kingdom.