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Roger II was King of Sicily and Africa, son of Roger I of Sicily and successor to his brother Simon. He began his rule as Count of Sicily in 1105, became Duke of Apulia and Calabria in 1127, then King of Sicily in 1130 and King of Africa in 1148. By the time of his death at the age of 58, Roger had succeeded in uniting all the Norman conquests in Italy into one kingdom with a strong centralized government.
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The Kingdom of Sicily was a state that existed in the south of the Italian peninsula and for a time the region of Ifriqiya from its founding by Roger II of Sicily in 1130 until 1816. It was a successor state of the County of Sicily, which had been founded in 1071 during the Norman conquest of the southern peninsula. The island was divided into three regions: Val di Mazara, Val Demone and Val di Noto; val being the apocopic form of the word vallo, derived from the Arabic word wilāya.
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The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was a kingdom located in Southern Italy from 1816 to 1860. The kingdom was the largest sovereign state by population and size in Italy prior to Italian unification, comprising Sicily and all of Peninsula Italy south of the Papal States, covering most of the area of today's Mezzogiorno.
The Battle of Montemaggiore was fought on 4 May 1041, on the river Ofanto near Cannae in Byzantine Italy, between Lombard-Norman rebel forces and the Byzantine Empire. The Norman William Iron Arm led the offence, which was part of a greater revolt, against Michael Dokeianos, the Byzantine Catepan of Italy. Suffering heavy losses in the battle, the Byzantines were eventually defeated, and the remaining forces retreated to Bari. Dokeianos was replaced and transferred to Sicily as a result of the battle. The victory provided the Normans with increasing amounts of resources, as well as a renewed surge of knights joining the rebellion.
Jean Dunbabin is an honorary fellow of St Anne's College, University of Oxford. Dunbabin specialises in medieval political communities in France c. 1000-c.1350, and in southern Italy and Sicily 1250-1310, and medieval political thought. She is a fellow of the British Academy.
References
- ↑ McKitterick, Rosamond; Luscombe, David; Fouracre, Paul; Reuter, Timothy; Riley-Smith, Jonathan; Abulafia, David; Allmand, C. T.; Jones, Michael (1995). The New Cambridge Medieval History. Cambridge University Press. p. 472. ISBN 9780521414111.
- ↑ Grierson, Philip; Travaini, Lucia (1986). Medieval European Coinage: Volume 14, South Italy, Sicily, Sardinia: With a Catalogue of the Coins in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. p. 137. ISBN 9780521582315.
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