THE KINGDOM IN THE SUN 1130-1194

2-61900

Norman conquest of Sicily 1016-1130. Maps, biblio, index, b/w illust, and a listing of every Norman building still extant on the island.

When on Christmas Day 1130, Roger de Hauteville had himself crowned first King of Sicily, the island entered a golden age. Norman and Italian, Greek and Arab, Lombard, Englishman, and Jew all contributed to a culture that was as brilliant as it was cosmopolitan; to an intellectual climate that attracted the artists the artists and scholars of three continents; and to an atmosphere of racial and religious toleration unparalleled in Europe. Sixty-four years later to the day, the sun set on the Sicilian Kingdom; but its glory lives on in such dazzling monuments as the Palatine Chapel in Palermo or the cathedrals of Monreale and Cefalu.

In this second volume, John Julius Norwich tells the story of the Kingdom in all its splendor, through the reigns of the grotesquely misnamed William the Bad and the Good to the bastard Tancred desperately struggling to preserve his country's independence. We read too of St. Bernard -- magnetic but insufferable -- and of Adrian IV, the only English Pope. Also, a surprising number of other compatriots included Richard the Lionheart (behaving abominably in Messina), his sister Queen Joanna of Sicily, and the sinister Walter of the Mill, the only man in history regularly to sign himself Emir and Archbishop.