William II of Sicily

William II ruled the Norman kingdom of Sicily through its last quiet generation and is called the Good largely by contrast with his father. He succeeded in 1166 at twelve, under the regency of his mother Margaret of Navarre, and the minority was the usual Sicilian mixture of baronial revolt and factional murder; his tutor Walter of the Mill became archbishop of Palermo and effectively ran the government for years. What the reign is remembered for is the character of the kingdom itself. Sicily under the Normans was governed in three languages, its chancery issuing documents in Latin, Greek and Arabic; its army and fleet were substantially Muslim; its court supported Arab poets and geographers; and the king was raised in part by Arab tutors and kept Muslim officials and physicians. Ibn Jubayr, a Muslim traveller from Granada who was shipwrecked at Messina in 1184, left an account of a Christian king whose palace ran on Muslim servants, who read and wrote Arabic, and whose Christian women dressed in the Muslim fashion - alongside a clear-eyed note that his Muslim subjects lived under increasing pressure and paid for the privilege. William built the cathedral at Monreale, whose mosaics are the high point of Norman Sicilian art, and married Joan of England, daughter of Henry II. He campaigned against Byzantium and Egypt without much result. He died in 1189 at thirty-six with no children, and the succession dispute that followed brought in the Hohenstaufen, ended Norman rule within a decade, and destroyed the trilingual settlement within two generations. Dante placed him in the sphere of Jupiter among the just rulers. His marriage to Joan of England made Richard the Lionheart his brother-in-law, which is why Richard wintered in Sicily on crusade and quarrelled there over her dowry. The cathedral at Monreale was consciously built to rival the archbishop's own church in Palermo and remains the largest surviving cycle of Byzantine mosaic in Italy.

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