THE ORIGINS OF THE SICILIAN KINGDOMvaluable to the warring parties in southern Italy-Byzantine
and Lombard-that they inserted themselves into the com-
mand structure as territorial lords rewarded for their sterling
services. In time, under the leadership of Robert Guiscard
(d. 1085) they acquired control of the Byzantine province of
Apulia, and began to consolidate their hold on southern Italy;
by the 1 060s they felt able to respond to appeals from Sicily
to help sort out factional strife on the island, seizing control
of the island for themselves under the vigorou~ leadership
of Robert Guiscard's brother Roger I, Great Count of Sicily.
Guiscard, for his part, concentrated heavily on the defence of
his interests in Apulia against the Byzantine emperor, whose
rights in the area he had usurped; Guiscard led vigorous
campaigns into the Balkans, attacking Durazzo (Dyrrachium)
in what is now Albania and the Greek island of Corfu.^10
At the start of the twelfth century there existed, in fact,
three major Norman political units in the Italian south:
Apulia and contiguous lands under the rule of Guiscard's
heirs; Sicily and Calabria, notionally dependent on Apulia
but flourishing under the rule of Roger I and his heirs; and
a third statelet, the Principality of Capua, which lay under
the rule of another group of Normans entirely. Having failed
to secure the recognition of either the Byzantine emperor
(not surprisingly) or the German emperor (who had his own
powerful ambitions in Italy), Guiscard and Roger I built close
ties to the third of the claimants to universal authority, the
pope, who was glad to accept the vassalage of Robert Guiscard
in 1059. The Normans proved unruly vassals, but they also
provided valuable protection to the papacy at dangerous
moments, such as Gregory VII's bitter quarrel with the Ger-
man king Henry IV (though their hospitality to Gregory in
1084 was cruelly marred by the sacking of Rome at the same
time). Later, without compromising the formal dependence
of the count of Sicily on the Norman duke of Apulia, Pope
Urban II in 1098 appears to have conferred special status
on Roger I of Sicily, allowing him effective day-to-day control
of the Church on the island, in the hope that the Normans
would organise the first Latin Church structure on the island,
- H. Taviani-Carozzi, La terreur du monde. Robert Guiscard et la conquhe
normande en Italie (Paris, 1996); see for the sources K.B. Wolf, Making
History. The Normans and their Historians in eleventh-century Italy (Phila-
delphia, 1995).