The subject of this essay has received scant attention in past volumes of Anglo- Norman Studies. It is my aim nevertheless to show that the history of the crusading movement is important not only for the history of the expansion of Europe, a topic brilliantly debated some years ago by Robert Bartlett in The Making of Europe, but also in that it is able to highlight the internal dynamics and features of a medieval polity, namely the Norman kingdom of Southern Italy, one of the most coveted targets of the Norman diaspora, which recently David Bates explored with great attention. The reasons for this essay are quickly explained: in a noteworthy paper presented in the early 1980s, James Powell highlighted the uniqueness of the kingdom of Sicily in its relations with the crusading movement with words that represent an excellent starting point for my discussion:

Although there is evidence of governmental involvement in the planning and recruiting for the crusade elsewhere, in Italy this involvement was more extensive and, at least for the kingdom of Sicily, more exclusive … In the kingdom of Sicily, the monarchy seems to have exercised an all but exclusive control over participation in the crusade.

Basically thus we may note, after all, a limited engagement of the Norman kingdom of Sicily in the Holy Land. This situation is reflected in the modern historiography, which has shown little interest in the issue, as can be seen from the substantial lack of attention shown by Joshua Prawer in an essay published forty years ago expressly dedicated to the Italian contribution to the Holy Land in which there is no evidence of the Normans coming from Southern Italy. ‘Why did southern Italy and Sicily contribute so little to the Holy Land in the twelfth century?’ The question articulated twenty years ago by Graham Loud, in a fundamental essay dedicated to the contribution of the Normans of Southern Italy to the Holy Land, remains relevant in that he opened up new research areas, raising new issues rather than giving conclusive answers to the problem. After this summary of the most fundamental historiography to date, we can now turn to the issue that we are going to debate and ask if the twelfth-century Norman kings of Southern Italy were really ‘bad crusaders’.