Chapter 1THE ORIGINS OF
THE SICILIAN KINGDOM
THE LURE OF THE SOUTH
The Norman Kingdom of Sicily and southern Italy, founded
in 1130, is usually regarded as one of the strongest and as
probably the wealthiest of the monarchies of twelfth-century
Europe; as early as the thirteenth century, legislators and
insurgents in the south of Italy appealed to the good old
law of King William II (d. 1189) as the embodiment ofwise
government. The impression that the former Norman ter-
ritories were a source of enormous wealth and military
resources remained strong in the minds of late medieval
conquerors such as the French invaders Charles of Anjou,
who was crowned king of Sicily in 1266, and Charles VIII of
Valois, who added the Neapolitan crown to that of France in
1494-95. 'A land flowing with milk and honey' had attracted
the first Norman invaders in the eleventh century, to quote
their biblically-conscious chroniclers; these writers were only
the first to draw a comparison between the wealth of southern
Italy and that of the ancient land of Israel, for Frederick II
(d. 1250) is also supposed to have drawn a direct compar-
ison, saying that his Sicilian kingdom would have provided
a more luxurious home for the Children of Israel than had
the Promised Land of Canaan. Such persistence in the his-
torical sources that southern Italy was wealthy and flourishing
raises two important questions: how far the reputation of
southern Italy acted as a magnet for would-be conquerors;
and how far this reputation was based in solid reality.