s et Calaber Siculus mihi servit et Afer.

King Roger died in 1154, and bequeathed his kingdoms to his son
William, surnamed the Bad; who in his turn left them to a William,
called the Good, in 1166. The second William died in 1189,
transmitting his possessions by will to Constance, wife of the
Suabian emperor. These two Williams, the last of the Hauteville
monarchs of Sicily, were not altogether unworthy of their Norman
origin. William the Bad could rouse himself from the sloth of his
seraglio to head an army; William the Good, though feeble in foreign
policy, and no general, administered the state with clemency and
wisdom.

Sicily under the Normans offered the spectacle of a singularly
hybrid civilisation. Christians and Northmen, adopting the habits
and imbibing the culture of their Mussulman subjects, ruled a mixed
population of Greeks, Arabs, Berbers, and Italians. The language of
the princes was French; that of the Christians in their territory,
Greek and Latin; that of their Mahommedan subjects, Arabic. At the
same time the Scandinavian Sultans of Palermo did not cease to play
an active part in the affairs, both civil and ecclesiastical, of
Europe. The children of the Vikings, though they spent their leisure
in harems, exercised, as hereditary Legates of the Holy See, a
peculiar jurisdiction in the Church of Sicily. They dispensed
benefices to the clergy, and assumed the mitre and dalmatic,
together with the sceptre, and the crown, as symbols of their
authority in Church as well as State. As a consequence of this
confusion of nationalities in Sicily, we find French and English
ecclesiastics[1] mingling at court with Moorish freedmen and
Oriental odalisques, Apulian captains fraternising with Greek
corsairs, Jewish physicians in attendance on the person of the
prince, and Arabian poets eloquent in his praises. The very money
with which Roger subsidised his Italian allies was stamped with
Cuphic letters,[2] and there is reason to believe that the reproach
against Frederick of being a false coiner arose from his adopting
the Eastern device of plating copper pieces to pass for silver. The
commander of Roger's navies and his chief minister of state was
styled, according to Oriental usage, Emir or Ammiraglio. George of
Antioch, who swept the shores of Africa, the Morea, and the Black
Sea, in his service, was a Christian of the Greek Church, who had
previously held an office of finance under Temin Prince of Mehdia.