Roger II Crowned King of Sicily
On Christmas Day 1130 a Norman adventurer's son was crowned king in Palermo, of a state that was Latin, Greek and Arabic at once and worked better than any of its neighbours. The Normans had taken Sicily from its Muslim rulers over thirty years from 1061, and southern Italy from the Byzantines and the Lombards before that. Roger II inherited the island as count, acquired the mainland duchies by inheritance and force, and then needed a crown to hold them together. A disputed papal election supplied one: he backed the losing claimant, who made him king in exchange. The kingdom he built was the most centralised in twelfth-century Europe and the least uniform. Its charters were issued in Latin, Greek and Arabic. Its treasury was run on Fatimid lines by Arabic-speaking officials, its fleet by a Greek admiral, its law by a code that assumed different communities would live under different rules. Palermo had a cathedral, a synagogue and functioning mosques. That mixture produced the Cappella Palatina, with Byzantine mosaics under an Islamic honeycomb ceiling painted with scenes of court life, and it produced al-Idrisi's world map, made for Roger over fifteen years and accompanied by a geography the Latin west had no equal to. It did not last long. Roger's grandson William II died childless in 1189, the succession passed by marriage to the Hohenstaufen, and the German conquest of 1194 ended the Norman line. The Muslim community was deported to the mainland within two generations and the trilingual chancery closed.
- Year: 1130 CE
- Category: Political
