Kingdom of Sicily

The Kingdom of Sicily was the Norman state of Sicily and the Italian south, founded by Roger the Second in 1130 upon the county won in 1071, and lasting until 1816. From Palermo, the most glittering court of the twelfth century, it governed Latins, Greeks and Arabs through a trilingual administration and left a mosaic culture of cathedrals, poetry and law. The Hauteville line failed, and Constance carried the crown to the Hohenstaufen: her son Frederick the Second, wonder of the world, ruled an empire of scholars from the island. Charles of Anjou seized the kingdom in 1266, but the Vespers rising of 1282 tore it in two: the island passed to Aragon while the mainland hardened into the Kingdom of Naples, both houses still styling themselves Sicily. Thereafter the Sicilian crown hung as an appendage of greater dynasties, Aragonese, Habsburg and Bourbon in turn. In 1816 the island kingdom merged with Naples into the Two Sicilies, which itself entered the new Italy in 1861.