After the brief appearance of Abū l-Ḍawv in the 1120s, both the documentary and the literary sources fall more or less silent about the Arab staff of the royal dīwān until the 1140s. From then until the end of the kingdom, although almost no trace has survived of the internal records of the dīwān, and although its organisation and precise duties remain tantalisingly obscure, we are surprisingly well-informed about its Arab directors. This embarras de richesse should put us on our guard, and encourage us to ask why both Latin observers, such as ‘Hugo Falcandus’ and the interpolator of Romuald of Salerno, and Arab visitors to Sicily, such as Ibn Qalāqis and Ibn Jubayr, were so interested in, and so well-informed about, the Arab servants of the Norman kings. Such general questions must remain unanswered, until they are finally addressed in the conclusion of this chapter. It opens with the account of the palace servants in 1184–5 given by Ibn Jubayr, and then returns to the reign of King Roger for the first of six prosopographical sections on the Arab servants of the palace and the dīwān.

Ibn Jubayr and the eunuchs

During his enforced stay in Sicily, in the winter of 1184–5, the Spanish pilgrim Ibn Jubayr met leading Arab servants of King William II on several occasions in Messina and Palermo, and enjoyed the hospitality of Abū l-Qamacr;sim ibn Ḥammūd in Palermo and Trapani. His account of the Arab servants provides a colourful and surprisingly detailed background to this chapter, and I shall return repeatedly to it.