The Normans: From Normandy to Sicily and Antioch

A minor Norman lord near Coutances had twelve sons and almost nothing to leave them. Within three generations, their family held a duchy, a kingdom, and a principality on three different seas. This is the story of how a small, well governed duchy that produced more armed men than it could provide for became an exporter of soldiers, and how those soldiers became rulers in southern Italy, Sicily, and the crusader principality of Antioch.In Sicily, the family built something unlike anything else in medieval Europe: a kingdom that kept Greek and Arabic officials alongside Latin ones, minted coins in the Islamic style, and commissioned the geographer al-Idrisi to map the known world for a Christian king in Palermo. The book follows this Sicilian kingdom from the landing at Messina in 1061 through its Greek-Arabic-Latin court to the mosaics of the Cappella Palatina and the coronation of 1130.That mixed court is often read as a model of tolerance. This book sets that reading against the evidence: the capitulation treaties, the poll tax on Muslim subjects, the emigration of scholars, and the later removal of Sicily's Muslim population to the mainland colony of Lucera. Both the celebration and its opposite, a story of pure exploitation, are set aside in favor of what the surviving registers and chronicles actually show.Beyond Sicily, the same family reached further still: Bohemond of Taranto carved out the crusader principality of Antioch, and his line ruled the principality into the thirteenth century. Lucian Kentmere draws on Amatus of Montecassino, Geoffrey Malaterra, William of Apulia, Anna Komnene, and Arabic sources including Ibn al-Athir and Ibn Jubayr to tell this as the history of a people, not a single conquest.