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Notes -
So, what are you reading?
Still on The Eternal Dissident. Reattempting Isaiah Berlin's The Roots of Romanticism.
Still "Die Staufer", on the house of Hohenstaufen. Now at Friedrich II's side-gig as a patron of science and a scientific researcher and writer himself. The book makes much of how arabicized he must have been - I wonder a little about how much of that is actually substantiated by evidence, and how much is wilful conjecture by the author, because he cites unusually few sources when it comes to the topic of Friedrich II's acculturation, but overall it's interesting enough either way.
My understanding is that while Sicilian culture was highly Arabicized compared to the rest of Christendom, Frederick II was not much more notably Arabicized (or Byzantinized) than his predecessors on the Sicilian throne. Roger II, for instance, Frederick's grandfather, spoke Arabic, employed Arab scholars, and even wore a coronation robe using Arabic writing and the Muslim calendar - but he also spoke Greek, employed Byzantine scholars, and adopted Byzantine customs he liked. By the time of Frederick's life, Sicily had been a melting pot for over a hundred years, and many Arabs had melted in there, but that doesn't mean they were the dominant element, just an unusual one (the Crusader States, of course, had many Arabs, but their leaders were generally far less cultured and intellectual than Sicily's). What Frederick really brought to Sicily that was new was his Latinizing, Classicizing impulse, the desire to restore the Roman law of the Roman Empire that he inherited from his other grandfather, Frederick Barbarossa, and while the intellectual life of his administration owed much to the Arabo-Byzantine influences on Sicily, his political program and specific policies would be much more in a Classicizing, proto-Renaissance mode. Essentially, he added the missing element to the melting pot to turn Sicily from a prosperous and uniquely cultured regional power to a base for truly imperial ambitions.
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