Roger I of Sicily
Roger I of Sicily was the youngest of the twelve sons of Tancred de Hauteville, a knight of the Cotentin with too many children and too little land, and the one who took Sicily from its Arab emirs in a thirty-year war that began with a raid across the Strait of Messina in 1061 with a few hundred knights and ended with the surrender of Noto in 1091. He governed the island as Great Count with Arab ministers, Greek clerks, a Muslim army and a Latin church, and his son Roger II made it a kingdom. He came to Italy about 1057 to join his brother Robert Guiscard, who had made himself master of Calabria, and the two quarrelled over the division of it and fought each other before they fought anyone else. Sicily had been Muslim since the ninth century and was in 1060 split among three emirs at war; one of them, Ibn al-Thumna of Catania, asked the Normans in against the others. Roger took Messina in 1061 by landing at night on the wrong beach, won a field battle at Cerami in 1063 with a few hundred men against an army the chroniclers made tens of thousands, and after that the conquest was a matter of sieges. Palermo fell to the two brothers together in January 1072 after a five-month blockade, and Guiscard kept half the city and the title and gave Roger the island to finish. Trapani, Taormina, Syracuse in 1086, Agrigento and Castrogiovanni followed. Noto came last. He let the Muslims keep their religion, their courts and their taxes, took their soldiers into his army, which alarmed his Norman vassals and served him well against them, and restored the Latin bishoprics with Norman and Breton monks. Urban II in 1098 gave him and his heirs the powers of a papal legate in the island, which the kings of Sicily used against every pope who came after. He married three times, took Malta in 1091, and died at Mileto in Calabria in June 1101, leaving a widow to govern for two sons of whom the second would be king.
- Lived: 1031 CE – 1101 CE
- Nationality: Norman
- Roles: count, ruler, conqueror
