the settlement and, eventually, conquest of southern Italy by the Normans during the eleventh century had greatly altered both its society and its political structures, above all by the conquest of Muslim Sicily. What it had not done was to unite the region. Indeed by c. 1100 the new principalities which the conquerors had created were already fragmenting, and the maintenance of authority, and law and order, was becoming increasingly difficult. This fragmentation was to be abruptly reversed by the unification of southern Italy and Sicily under the rule of Count Roger II of Sicily in the years 1127–30, and the creation of the new kingdom of Sicily in the latter year. This process was by no means painless; indeed the coronation of 1130 was to usher in nearly a decade of civil war on the south Italian mainland, but it did in the end lead to the unification of the whole area for the first time since the age of Justinian. The kingdom created in 1130 was to last, albeit with many vicissitudes, until 1860. The imposition of strong central government, and the challenges that this government faced, form the central theme of south Italian history in the twelfth century.

AUTHORITY AND CHALLENGE BEFORE 1127

Roger II’s contemporary biographer, Abbot Alexander of Telese, claimed that, in 1127, ‘If God had not preserved a scion of the Guiscard’s lineage through whom the ducal power might quickly be revived, almost the whole country … would have rushed headlong to destruction.’ Given that Alexander was writing a work of propaganda, justifying Roger’s takeover of the mainland and the often drastic methods which his hero used to reduce his new dominions to obedience, such an opinion on his part was hardly surprising.