NOT A HOLY WAR
RELIGION IN THE NORMAN CONQUEST OF SICILY
The fall of Sicily and the First Crusade could seem linked: in the ongoing debate on the antecedents of Christian war, the difficult conquest of a land that had been under Muslim control since the ninth century could be easily construed as the first blow struck against the Muslims in the creation of the idea of warring ‘Christendom’. After all, Southern Norman chroniclers themselves could be shown to embrace the idea. In a poem dedicated to Duke Roger Borsa of Apulia and Pope Urban II, William of Apulia praised Count Roger of Sicily for having dedicated his life to conquering Sicily from the “enemies of God” and described Palermo as a “city of demons”. Geoffrey Malaterra, Count Roger’s own chronicler, showed St George appearing to lead the Norman troops against the Muslims in the Battle of Cerami in 1063, and the pope granted Roger a papal banner in blessing for his enterprise. But a closer look reveals a more complicated reality.
William of Apulia did call Palermo ‘a city of demons’: he also acknowledged that its defenders fought desperately for themselves and their families. Moreover, his praise of Roger’s enterprise takes a few lines in a work dedicated to celebrating Robert Guiscard, whose wars of expansion against the Byzantine
Empire never could claim the mantle of holy war. Malaterra mentions St George and the papal banner on the oc casion of a battle that took place two years after Roger’s first arrival in Sicily,
