Kingdom of Sicily

A kingdom founded by Norman mercenaries that governed Arabs, Greeks and Latins together and produced the most interesting court in twelfth-century Europe. The sons of Tancred de Hauteville arrived in southern Italy as hired swords in the 1040s and ended up ruling it; Roger I took Sicily from its Muslim emirs over thirty years, and Roger II was crowned king in 1130 over an island where Arabic, Greek and Latin were all administrative languages. The chancery issued documents in three scripts. Roger commissioned al-Idrisi, a Muslim geographer, to produce a world map and book of routes that was the most accurate available for three centuries, and built churches in Palermo where Byzantine mosaic, Islamic muqarnas ceilings and Norman architecture appear in one building. The kingdom was wealthy, centrally administered on a partly Arab bureaucratic model, and the strongest state in Italy. It passed by marriage to the Hohenstaufen and then to Frederick II, who ruled from Palermo and continued the tradition before deporting the remaining Muslim population to Lucera. The Sicilian Vespers of 1282 split the kingdom. Palermo's Arab-Norman buildings are a World Heritage site. Palermo was the capital and was among the largest cities in Europe. The kingdom covered Sicily and southern Italy from 1130. Its Assizes of Ariano codified law for a mixed population. The Cappella Palatina's ceiling is Islamic woodwork in a Christian chapel with Greek mosaics. Frederick II was known to contemporaries as the wonder of the world. He kept a menagerie and wrote a treatise on falconry that is still read.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history