Page:The Normans in European History.djvu/250

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 side