The culture of the Norman kingdom was even more strikingly composite than its government. Both historically and geographically Sicily was the natural meeting-point of Greek, Arabic, and Latin civilization, and a natural avenue for the transmission of eastern art and learning to the West. Moreover, in the intellectual field the splendor of the Sicilian kingdom coincides with that movement which is often called the renaissance of the twelfth century and which consisted in considerable measure in the acquisition of new knowledge from the Greeks of the East and the Saracens of Sicily and Spain. Sicily was not the only channel through which the wisdom of the East flowed westward, for there were scholars from northern Italy who visited Constantinople and there was a steady diffusion of Saracen learning through the schools of Spain. Nowhere else, however, did Latin, Greek, and Arabic civilization live side by side in peace and toleration, and nowhere else was the spirit of the renaissance more clearly expressed in the policy of the rulers. The older Latin culture of the southern kingdom had its centre and in large measure its source at Monte Cassino, mother of the Benedictine monasteries throughout the length and breadth of western Christendom. Founded by St. Benedict in 529, this establishment still maintains the unique record of fourteen centuries of monastic history and of more than forty generations of followers of the Benedictine rule, keeping age after age their vigils of labor, prayer, and fasting, but feasting their uncloistered eyes--_per gl’ occhi almeno non v’ è clausura!_--upon the massive ranges of the central Apennines and the placid valley of the Garigliano, “the Land of Labor and the Land of Rest.” Its golden age was the eleventh and early twelfth centuries, when its relations with the Normans and the Papacy kept it in the forefront of Italian politics, when two of its abbots sat upon the throne of St. Peter, and when the greatest of them, Desiderius--as Pope known as Victor III--built a great basilica which was adorned by workmen from Constantinople with mosaics and with the great bronze doors which are the chief surviving evidence of its early splendor. Men of learning were drawn to the monastery, like the monk Constantine the African, skilled in the science of the Greek and Arabic physicians, whose works he translated into Latin. Manuscripts of every sort were copied in the characteristic south-Italian hand, the Beneventan script, which serves as a sure index of the intellectual activity throughout the southern half of the peninsula in this period--sermons and service-books, theological commentaries and lives of the saints, but also the law-books of Justinian and the writings of the Latin poets and historians with their commentators. Indeed without the scribes of Monte Cassino the world would have lost some of its most precious monuments of antiquity and the early Middle Ages, including on the mediæval