Roger II of Sicily
Roger II of Sicily inherited an island his father had taken from the Arabs, added the Norman lands of southern Italy that his cousins could not hold, got a crown for the whole from an antipope and kept it against a pope, an emperor and two republics, and ran the result in three languages from a palace in Palermo where the chancery wrote in Arabic, Greek and Latin. He was born in 1095, the son of Count Roger I, who had spent thirty years conquering the island, and of Adelaide of Savona, who governed it for him until 1112. He took Calabria and Apulia by inheritance and siege between 1127 and 1129 when the last duke died childless, and when the papal election of 1130 produced two popes he backed Anacletus II, who made him king in September. He was crowned in Palermo cathedral on Christmas Day. The other pope, Innocent II, the Emperor Lothair, Pisa, Genoa and the barons of Apulia spent the next nine years trying to undo it, and in 1139 Roger's son caught Innocent at Galluccio and the pope confirmed him. What he governed was the richest kingdom in the west: grain, silk, the customs of Palermo and Messina, and a fleet under George of Antioch, a Greek who had served the Zirids, that took the coast of Africa from Tripoli to Tunis in the 1140s and sacked Corinth and Thebes for their silk-workers in 1147. His court had the geographer al-Idrisi, whose book of the world was written for him, Greek monks, Arab poets and Latin clerks. The mantle made for him in the palace workshop, with a lion pulling down a camel and an Arabic inscription dated 1133, was the coronation robe of the Holy Roman Emperors and is in Vienna. The Assizes of Ariano in 1140 gave the kingdom one law over three peoples. He died in Palermo in February 1154 and was buried in a porphyry tomb of his own choosing, and the kingdom he made passed by his daughter's son to the Hohenstaufen and by the Hohenstaufen to everyone who fought over it until 1860.
- Lived: 1095 CE – 1154 CE
- Nationality: Norman
- Roles: king, monarch
