Brilliant but ephemeral, precocious but lacking in permanent results--such are the judgments commonly passed upon the Sicilian kingdom and its civilization. At best the kingdom seems to reach no farther than Frederick II, and of him Freeman has said that, though qualified by genius to start some great movement or begin some new era, he seemed fated to stand at the end of everything which he touched--the mediæval empire, the Sicilian kingdom, the Norman-Hohenstaufen line.[72] In the field of government these statements are in the main true: the rapid changes of dynasties and the deep political decline into which the south ultimately fell destroyed the unity of its political development and nullified the work of Norman state-building, so that the enduring results of Norman statesmanship and Norman law must be sought in the north and not in Italy. That, however, is not the whole of the story, and in the field of culture influences less palpable, but none the less real, flowed from the Norman stream into the general currents of European civilization. So long as the Renaissance of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was looked upon as simply the negation of the Middle Ages by a return to classical antiquity, figures such as King Roger and Frederick II were merely ‘sports,’ isolated flashes of genius and modernity without any relation to their own times or to the greater movement which followed. Since, however, we have come to view the Renaissance in its larger aspects as far more than a classical revival, its relations to the Middle Ages are seen to have been much more intimate and important than was once supposed. The evolution is at times rapid, but the _Trecento_ grows out of the centuries which preceded as naturally as it grew into the _Quattrocento_ which followed. The place of Italy in this process is universally recognized; the place of southern Italy is sometimes overlooked. We are too prone to forget that Niccola Pisano was also called Nicholas of Apulia; that Petrarch owed much to his sojourn at the Neapolitan court; that Boccaccio learned his Greek from a Calabrian; that the first notes of a new Italian literature were sounded at the court of Frederick II. Many phases of the relation between south and north in this transitional period are still obscure, but of the significance of the southern contribution there is now reasonable assurance. Moreover, the continuity between the intellectual movement under Roger and William I and that under Frederick II and later can be followed in some detail in the history of individual manuscripts and authors. When humanists like Petrarch and Salutati read Plato’s _Phædo_ or Ptolemy’s _Almagest_, their libraries show that they used the Latin versions of the Sicilian translators of the twelfth century. The learning of the southern kingdom may have been a faint light, but it was handed on, not extinguished.